Chrome Browser is Fast

The Google Chrome browser for Linux (Ubuntu) is incredibly fast.

Google Chrome OS

Wow, Google's announcement of Google Chrome OS, a Linux-based operating system for netbooks on up, has certainly sparked a lot attention.

A few of my thoughts in no particular order:

• I have yet to see an software that runs "in the browser" that is anywhere near as good as my IDE for development
  
• I love Ubuntu, but I would consider using a Google OS, but only if its better
• Apple doesn't care much
  
• Add this to the long list of things that is chipping away at Microsoft, but it is no nuclear bomb

One terrible article I read said "this is the beginning of an era of Google dominance, the likes of which we’ve never seen before." By "the likes of which we've never seen," he really means "since Microsoft was so dominant less than a decade ago." And he thinks "Apple is shaking in their boots." Wrong, wrong, wrong. I think Apple absolutely loves it when Microsoft and Google pick on each other.

Whatever... it's exciting to wonder and imagine, but we'll have to wait six to twelve months to see how exciting this announcement really is.

ImageMagick Conversion

One great thing about Linux is that you can find efficient command line tools for just about anything. Currently I've been using ImageMagick's convert command line tool to convert all the pages in a PDF to separate images of just about any format. It's great and takes almost no time.

convert -quality 90 -resize 800x600 -density 300x300 Fxad_DragDrop.pdf Fxad_DragDrop.png

Note, the density parameter is important. Adding "-density 300x300" significantly improved image quality, while adding "-density 600x600" consumed my machine's processor until I killed the process.