JOSHUAJENKINSis unremarkable

I hadn't even been to London yet.

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I'm not sure if I've been living under a rock lately or what, but I was completely oblivious to the fact that MFNW was going on until last night, which happened to be the last day of the fest. My lameness caused me to miss Ratatat which makes me sad inside, and outside.

However I did make it to the Hawthorne last night around 9:15 and caught a couple awesome acts. Dykeritz was already going when we finally waltzed in, but I think we caught most of the show. I'd never heard them before, but they were great. There are eight people in the band, three of which played the keyboards, one "played" a gymboree, and the rest had normal musical instruments. For how many people were in the band they still seemed to play pretty tight and it was just a generally fun set. I will definitely be picking up their album and hope to see them again some time soon.

After that Copy came on and played his music off his computer and occasionally involved his keytar. All of his songs seemed to follow an identical formula, but they were fun and finally got the crowd moving. Good, fairly predictable, but completely awesome at the same time. His stuff reminded me a little bit of Ratatat.

Finally, Dan Deacon came on and annoyed the shit out of everybody with some instructed pointing, a bit of preaching about compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and his opinion on the Georgia/Russia conflict. He decided not to test the levels before his set which turned out pretty much exactly like you'd expect. We stayed for two songs, but couldn't take any more horribly mixed painful screeching sounds. The second song he played I barely recognized as the song that I've heard on KNRK a few times, but the sound was so bad it wasn't even worth it.

All in all it was a great time, aside from the segregated bar in the back of the room. I'll definitely make an effort to get out and see more of the shows. I recommend everyone retroactively make it to the shows.

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Google hasn't officially announced it yet, to the best of my knowledge, but it looks like they're very far along with the development of a new Web Browser based on the Webkit rendering engine. They call it Google Chrome.

The interesting part isn't the rendering though. The underlying architecture is what makes this very exciting news. As everyone nerd knows, websites and web applications are becoming more and more reliant on Javascript to get things done. Most bottlenecks in modern web browsers seem to come from Javascript-intensive sites choking up.

As such, Google has been hard at work on their own Javascript virtual machine for Chrome (and anyone else who wants it) called V8. I don't understand all of it, but the part that seems interesting to me is that all code is instantly interpreted into machine code, allowing it to fly at about one million miles per hour. There's also neat bits about the ease of finding pointers and garbage collection that are going to make V8 the next generation Javascript engine.

The other killer feature, which is the bane of all modern browsers to incorporate tabbed browsing, is individual processes per tab. Say you load up twenty tabs in Firefox right now and one of those tabs loads a site that goes apeshit. In today's browser-world^TM you would most likely either have to restart Firefox entirely, or Firefox would just crash. Chrome aims to fix that by putting all tabs into their own processes, so if one tab freaks out, you simply close it and the process is gone. Everything goes back to normal.

All of this (unconfirmed) information is coming from a thirty-eight page comic that was shipped to Philipp Lenssen. I see this as huge for Google, and huge for end users. Faster web apps for us, amazing open source software for developers, and the world being one step closer to using the Internet as an OS for Google.

There's been a lot of talk about a Google OS for a long time, and I think this might be it.

Update: Looks like it'll be out tomorrow (September 2nd) for Windows.

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