Good to see India beat Australia with a complete team effort!

One of the best team jobs till date, it was a pleasure to see bowlers, batsmen and fielders all pitch in and win so comprehensively against Australia, of all teams! Australia, of course, is bound to come back very strongly in the remaining matches. As Dhoni rightly said, this was probably close to the best position to be in and it will be tough to stay at this level. Consistency is what counts, and one hopes the Indian team will be able to maintain this tempo through the rest of the series and beyond.

Intrepid Ibex Alpha 6

I decided to take the plunge and upgraded my regular laptop to Intrepid's Alpha 6 release. I must say I am not in the least disappointed, nor do I have any regrets so far. Apart from a few quirks and the odd random crash (usually in some obscure service that doesn't directly affect my work), it has been a pleasure to work with.

The upgrade was smooth and neat. Since I had already customized my session with Hardy, there was no noticeable difference on the desktop after the upgrade - all my Compiz, Emerald and other settings had been retained. Most packages had been cleanly upgraded, too. VirtualBox gave me a little trouble, with the kernel module refusing to build. However, a day later all was well - apparently one of the packages had not been updated from the repos.

The suspend and hibernate work pretty well out of the box. I use a Dell Vostro 1500 with an Nvidia 8400M GS card (with the -177 driver). I was pleasantly surprised to see that the sleep function worked without a hitch on the first attempt when I closed the lid - with absolutely no tweaking of any configuration anywhere. Ditto for the hibernate function.

The other thing I really liked in this version is the network manager applet. Switching between office and home networks has been an issue for me (I generally don't use DHCP). I had a couple of scripts on Hardy and earlier to help me switch quickly, but it was still an exercise. Intrepid has made this much easier, and the switchover is really fast.

While there was some talk on the forums about improved startup speed, I must say I can't see all that much difference from earlier versions. The shutdown, though, certainly seems faster.

Overall, Intrepid is looking good. If Alpha 6 is this usable, I'm sure the final release should be a hit with most users.

Google Chrome - first impressions

Google Chrome is out, and my first impressions are pretty positive!

In a nutshell, and from the relatively little time I've had to play with it, it seems to deliver on at least some of the promises. I did a little test driving to compare it with Firefox 3 (and IE8 for that matter), and here's what I found.

The install went through without a hitch - it downloads a small installer which then gets the rest of the stuff and installs it all. The whole thing went through in under 5 minutes on a moderate DSL connection. 

Chrome launches pretty fast - a shade faster than Firefox, and about as fast as IE8. Many of the shortcuts are similar to those in Firefox and/or IE, so getting started is a breeze. The rendering seems a trifle slower than Firefox. But what I really wanted to test was the memory footprint and the claims of running each tab as a separate process so that memory could be fully reclaimed when tabs are closed - and on that, Chrome seems to deliver the goods!

I opened several tabs in both FF 3.0.1 and Chrome (0.2.149.27) - slashdot, freshmeat, MySpace, Facebook, Google Maps, and a few other random pages. FF holds up pretty well while the tabs are being added - with about 8 tabs open, FF was at around 100 MB, while Chrome was touching 190 MB. Both were pretty responsive, however. Closing about half the tabs brought Chrome down to around 97 MB, while FF came down to 90 MB. Not bad at all, FF! But back down to just one tab, and Chrome was at 52 MB, while FF was still hovering around 73 MB. This bears out almost exactly what the Chrome comic book  talks about - a slightly higher memory usage because of the individual processes, but ability to reclaim all memory from tabs that are closed.

The other really nice feature is the start page that shows the 9 most often opened URLs. It's a pretty neat way of getting started, without having to start typing in FUUs (frequently used URLs).

Chrome also registered all available plugins including Flash, Java and multimedia, so there was absolutely no setting up anything else to get going with media rich sites.

All in all, a pretty good first run with the Beta release. I can't wait to have the same thing on Linux!