This Old Blog

This past Thanksgiving has been ... unique. I've spent a lot less time doing what I planned because of its uniqueness. Regardless, I managed to tinker a bit with some of the latest offerings. NetBeans 6 RC2 RC2 was released right before Thanksgiving. I've got it installed on Windows XP 2 (algol) and Ubuntu 7.10 (europa, shown below). On algol, with its 2GHz Core Duo processor, RC2 runs smooth as silk. It should considering the processing horsepower. On europa, with its single-core 2GHz Athlon XP, it runs a little rougher, especially at startup. To make the NetBeaners feel a little better, Eclipse 3.3.1.1 has the same problem on europa (see below). It takes about 20 seconds after the main window has appeared for responsiveness to be useful. And this only occurs the first time you start it up. Of course, for many people such as myself, you start it and leave it running for long periods lasting days at a time. Regardless of the initial startup lethargy, RC2 shows considerable poli...

When I first tried FF3B1 I'd posted that it's memory consumption went through the roof. After less than 24 hours and an apparent fix on the server side , and using the exact same binary, I can now start up and use FF3B1 without the same issue that caused it to crash yesterday. My experiences so far while limited have proven to be pretty positive. I've had it up and running over the night (well, since past midnight local Orlando time), and it didn't crash or run up memory. I can't accurately determine if memory usage is less, since right before I stopped it and re-started it it had a memory footprint of 140 MB. Right now, with 11 tabs open, it's at a little over 90MB. I do know that every time I visit Google Mail that the first time that page is opened it immediately jumps a good 20 MB. Page rendering is the most notable feature of FF3B1. Pages just seem to snap into existence, and the simpler, the snappier. I don't see pages half-render while the busy icon...

Unable to leave well enough alone, I found out that ATI released new versions of its drivers today for all platforms including Linux. The latest version for Linux is ati-driver-installer-7-11-x86.x86_64.run , or 8.433. I followed the standard --buildpkg procedure and then installed the deb files. The performance appears to be a tad better (a tad being about 5% faster, with smoother operation overall). I can enable more Compiz Fusion eye candy, but I can't run OpenGL applications or movies if Compiz Fusion (Appearance Preferences | Visual Effects) are enabled. I have noticed that playing movies, without Compiz enabled and using VLC as the player has cut CPU loading nearly in half compared to using 8.42.3. And with Visual Effects enabled, the desktop is really beginning to look nice. Now, if it would just all start magically working together without one feature trampling on another. I still have the hard choice between desktop effects (Compiz) or OpenGL and smooth video playback, bu...

Always a patsy for the New and Shiny, today I decided to believe what I read about Firefox 3 in the press . I downloaded the tarball, unpacked it, and ran Firefox 3 Beta 1 on my Ubuntu 7.10 system. Loads of fun! One of Firefox 3's touted 'features' is its supposed cutback of memory usage. I use Firefox on every OS I touch, and over the course of many days it can consume quite a bit of memory, especially if you have loads of tabs open like I do. Well, after shutting down Firefox 2 and starting Firefox 3, I noticed that its memory footprint was around 60 MB, and this was after loading with all my open tabs. Then, in a blink of an eye, Firefox 3 Beta started consuming memory like a Santa Ana fanned wildfire consumes a California forest. As you'll note above Gnome's System Monitor is clocking the increase of physical and virtual memory at a rapid clip, with physical memory being pegged pretty quickly. It wound up consuming over 900MB of physical memory. I'd also l...

If only they were this silly and harmless in real life...

I had to go into Blogger settings (Settings | Comments) and disable (Hide) back links. I got up this morning and went to check certain articles in my blog, and as I scrolled down to the bottom I noticed odd back links to stories that had no contextual link to the posts. Turned out that all of them pointed to a 'blog' somewhere in China that looked to be built from ripped-off content from other blogs. I started to remove them, one by one, until I hit one of my posts that had over a dozen of them. That's when I went into Settings and just disabled the feature. It's a real shame, too, because there are actually some good back links worth preserving. But the overwhelming majority seemed to be spam links to other bogus sites, so I just disabled the entire feature. And as usual, Google shows I'm not the only one: Another Layer of Blog Spam: Backlinks . There are others, you can find them all yourself. But this guys comment at the end of his post gets to the point: retain ...

Well, I took the Mandriva "challenge", downloaded the "One" Easy Linux CD ISO, burned it, and booted into the latest release of Mandriva 2008.0. It came up cleaner and faster than just about any other version I've every tried to date. During boot Mandriva allowed me to select between Compiz and Metisse. Not knowing what Metisse is I selected Compiz. Within a very short time Mandriva booted into its graphical desktop with Compiz up and running. It turns out that this version of Mandriva automatically choose to use the ATI driver that came bundled with it (8.40.4). This is the first major distribution I have booted that provided this feature. The screen shot below shows off the signature Compiz Fusion 3D cube supported by the ATI driver. Quick and Dirty Itty Bitty Review I've avoided Mandriva in the past because it simply would not boot on europa. That problem appears to be long gone. There are, however, other issues. Mandriva uses KDE, and I still like KDE ...