Back in March (3/31 to be exact), I took a screenshot of the Flickr popular tags image map. Today I took another screenshot of this image map. I’ve included them below.

Obviously Flickr has grown a lot between March and December of 2005. To get a sense as to how much Flickr has grown, I generated some charts over at Amazon’s Alexa.

So what does all this traffic growth mean? To get a “feel” for how large Flickr has become, I then charted Flickr’s traffic vs. CNN.com’s — one of the most popular and “mainstream” sites (at least in the US).

Pretty impressive growth. I can’t say that Flickr is is anywhere near as “mainstream” as CNN, but clearly Flickr is very well know on the net — at least by the geeks. Here’s some random observations comparing March’s popular tags to December’s.

• The tags “moblog” and “cameraphone” have apparently lost some relative popularity (ie, size) from March to December.
• “geotagged” is not one of the popular tags in March, but is in December.
• “vancouver” (former home of Flickr) is now smaller in December.
• The months March, April, May, June and July are the only months I could find in December (I guess folks shoot more shots in these months?).

That’s just some quick observations. I’ll try to gin up some more later.

It rained hard last night and into today with the wind raging (58 and 71 MPH gusts were reported from the Golden Gate Bridge and Angel Island respectively) as a cold front moved over California. Rain totals in the Bay Area of California were well over an inch.

Of interest for the middle of the week is a strong storm developing today off the coast of California. NOAA’s Ocean Prediction Center charts label this storm as “rapidly intensifying” and “developing hurricane force winds” with pressure dropping down around 970 mb (a fairly strong low-pressure reading). Although it looks like the center of this storm will be ridged to the north of the Bay Area, the swell this storm will generate will hit the central California coast head on. Being so close to shore, the swell will have little chance to decay (swells get smaller the further they have to travel), so on Tuesday and Wednesday a west-south-west swell of around 20 feet will arrive on the coast. The weather might not be the best on those days, but the Pacific Ocean will show some of it’s legendary winter power.

Here’s the storm as it’s currently forecast from the Ocean Prediction Center’s charts.

Here’s the jetstream prediction for 10 pm PST Monday showing a classic fully-developed, sub-tropical cyclone.

Here’s the Wave Watch III model for signficant sea height.

As I wrote about earlier, I finally managed to get Firefox 1.5 running on my computer. In fact, I’ve got it pretty much up-to-date including installing and customizing five or six extensions; extensions like Tabbrowser Extensions (the best Firefox extension btw) that require a lot of customization. I’ve also done a lot of munging to the user interface.

High-Speed Firefox User Interface

…and I’ve tweaked my userchrome.css file, blah, blah, blah. So the thought of painfully updating my old computer to this new Firefox 1.5 build didn’t sound all that appealing.

Fortunately, I remember hearing about Foldershare from a post on Scoble’s blog… that Foldershare was some sort of personal P2P networking utility or some such thing. Well, as it turns out one of the primary uses of Foldershare is to synchronize folders on two different computers — perfect for Firefox cloning.

After booting up both computers, downloading and installing Foldershare, I stumbled through the interface a bit — and after I almost did something really bad — I got an exact copy of my “master” Firefox build running on my old computer.

Zoinger says, Foldershare is right on.

P.S. I found the Foldershare instructions to be a bit lacking, so I somehow managed to copy my Firefox profile folder to the old computer, but I also deleted the “master” profile folder (the files weren’t really deleted, just moved to a Foldershare/Trash directory). Make sure you back up your folders before playing around with Foldershare if you are an idiot like me.

It’s been cold in Northern California lately… relatively cold at any rate… and pretty much only at night and in the early morning, but whatever. This is quite a dramatic change to most of November when the West Coast of the U.S. enjoyed some unseasonably warm and at times record-setting weather.

Looking at the jetstream’s flow is instructive in visualizing now the earth’s high-level winds (aka, the jetstream) can greatly affect surface-level weather. Here’s an image of the jetstream over western North American on November 22nd.

Classic jetstream pattern for great NorCal weather

The jetstream is shunting over the west coast of North America due the presence of a very strong high pressure system center over the Great Basin. Here’s a satellite image that better shows the Great Basin high pressure over northern Idaho (in addition to a high pressure area off the West Coast).

High pressure over northern Idaho

The presence of the Great Basin high powers strong north east/east anticyclonic (clockwise in the northern hemisphere) winds that howl through Northern California. Winds at this time can gust well past hurricane force especially on exposed places like Mount Diablo. In fact, these winds are know as Diablo winds, the less famous of California’s warm, dry föhn winds (the more famous one being Southern California’s Santa Ana wind).

Today’s (2005-12-05) jetstream image tells a different story.

Jetstream directing cold air down from Alaska

With no high pressure in the Great Basin, high-level winds funnel cold air down the west coast of North America from the arctic.

Zoinger says, stay warm!

P.S. Props to Flickr user gin_able for making photos available using the Creative Common attribution-noncommercial 2.0 license (the opening frost-tagged picture).

As part of upgrading to Firefox 1.5, I ended up downloading and reinstalling all of my Firefox extensions. I’m glad that I did, because the new version of Tabbrowser Extension (the best tab option extension… something that should be built into Firefox) has been substantially upgraded.

One of the biggest improvements to Tabbrowser is the addition of a “Tree Mode” for displaying tabs. Here’s a view of what it looks like:

View of tabs in tree mode
(Note tabs are displayed vertically, not the default Firefox horizontal)

Notice how some of the tabs are indented? An indent signifies that the tab is a daughter tab — that is, it is a page that was opened in a new tab from a link on the parent page. If you open a link in a new tab from a daughter page, the new page is indented twice and so on (the default maximum number of indents is three, but you can change this if you like).

This visual display really helps you keep track of your tabs and their origins. Great when you’ve got dozens of tabs open at once. Note that I’ve modified my userchrome.css file to change the background color of the active tab to yellow. I discuss this further in this post.

To setup your tabs to display in tree mode, select “Tree Mode” from Tabbrowser’s options category. This will display this option set:

Options page for tab modes

Tabbrowser Extension is one of the most powerful (and complicated) extensions for Firefox. To get a feel for all of its options, I recommend playing around with it for a half hour or so. You’ll really be surprised at the things that you can do with it.