What happened Billy? Ashes Divide is the horrible elevator music cousin of A Perfect Circle; the notes and chords and riffs are all there but it's close to making my head explode with its asinine poppiness. The Stone has its moments, as does Denial Awaits, but compared to their A Perfect Circle counterparts - take The Outsider and Weak and Powerless as examples (both from Thirteenth Step) they're.. well, weak and powerless indeed.

Pardon that pun, Billy, but I know you can do better. Mer De Noms and Thirteenth Step is right up there with the best of them, fantastic sound and production, some incredible songwriting and performances. It feels as if all the band members are there, pulling in their own direction and yet making a perfect whole, the way a good band album should sound. Ashes Divide feels like it's pulling nowhere.

Ashes Divide reminds me of another Billy's recent solo efforts and.. I'm not sure I dare mention the name.. Zwan. I feel dirty now.

Speaking of The Outsider, whoa, what an incredibly worked-through song - the drums and syncopations, yummy layered guitars that never get muddy, a band that works in amazing sync with the vocals when that extra power is needed and a great ending: no repeats or fadeouts, just a kick ass bridge and build-up before one last round and out with a bang!

Get back on your horse, Billy, get the guys back together, set those amps to 11 and go for it.

Seeing this by itself isn't particularily interesting. It looks suspiciously like vanilla Objective-C:

> [label setStringValue:@"Hello World!"];

More interesting however, is the fact that it is taken from Cappucino's code examples. Cappucino is a port of the Cocoa frameworks to Javascript. That means that not only do you have access to a lot of NS-classes from Javascript (in Cappucino named CP), you actually write code that looks like Objective-C. I can't wait to try it out.

I imagine this will have a hard time making its way into a lot of projects, though. Choosing a Javascript framework is a discussion of religious proportions already, and that's without having to also choose a relatively little used language. Objective-C and the Cocoa frameworks is a tremendously rewarding platform to write code on, but how do you tell people the Javascript you'll write from now on, and the Javascript they might have to maintain, is actually Objective-C?

Good thing someone actually reads those lengthy EULA's most of us just click quickly by. ''Djlosch'' at TapTheHive has the scoop, which can be summed up as:

> In other words, by posting anything (via Chrome) to your blog(s), any forum, video site, myspace, itunes, or any other site that might happen to be supporting you, Google can use your work without paying you a dime.

(Dear Google, this post was written in Opera)

The new browser from Google came out yesterday. Seeing as the news was out that it used Apple's WebKit as its rendering engine I was hoping for beautiful Mac OS font rendering on Windows but sadly that's not the case. I understand why they did it, there have been enough Windows users complaining about the fonts in the Windows versions of Safari and iTunes, but it would have been good to have a solid Windows browser with gorgeous presentation-ready fonts.

Aside from that first impressions are good. Apparently fast (the only kind of fast that matters), simple (in a good way), takes up minimal screen space for its own elements, and a very cool "about:memory" page that even reveal the memory usage of other browsers. Cheeky feature!

SunSpider reports a total test run time of its Javascript performance tests of 2246.2ms. On my machine that's 1.64 times faster than a nightly WebKit build, 1.9 time as fast as Firefox 3.0.1 and 2.8 times as fast as Opera 9.51. That pretty incredible improvement seems to give real world results too; Google Reader, unsurprisingly, is very responsive indeed.