Archive for March 2008
Firefox 3 is impressive
I have this age old machine in my hostel room. It is a 800MHz Celeron with 256M RAM. That is a good combination for CLI guys like me. It runs debian sid. Its primary purpose is documenting work over night, practicing a couple of scripts, occasional programming and movies. I use the gui only when browsing shares over dc, internet and movies. For movies I use no window manager. Default WM shifts between icewm and fluxbox.
I have installed iceweasel and dillo from the repository. Using iceweasel used to kill my machine. I can’t open a second tab and the machine resource monitor graph is mostly clamped to the top 98%. So, you know what time I spend on the internet after I get to my room.
Anyway, last weekend I downloaded firefox 3. Believe it or not, I am able to run firefox 3 along side django test server and emacs without saturating the machine resources. And even otherwise, I am able to have at least 3-4 tabs simultaneously open on my machine. I almost can’t believe this. Now I am really wondering if I ll update my firefox 3. I am just scared it might become memory hungry when they finally release it.
Mind Maps
I am trying to learn and use this technique for problem solving for some time now. I’ve heard quite a few people say that it works great and all that. Maybe it does. I don’t have enough data to substantiate either way. Today I stumbled upon this useful web tool that can create a mind map for you online. They call it bubbl.us. Maybe you’ve heard of it or maybe you are already using this, but this is entirely new to me. I just created my first mind map of things that I need to complete this month. I am not posting it here, because it is as chaotic as my thought process. Good, that gives me confidence that I have mapped my mind (mindlessly).
My First Web Design
After many futile and failed attempts to create a decent looking page, I decided I am not the right guy to do css. So, all my pages are taken from opendesigns.org or oswd.org. They are doing a good job and why kill myself with an unknown devil?
But the small itch to do my own work remained, until yesterday. I was so jobless that I went and created my own template. Extremely simple looking, uses images (:-( ), css. I think it is standards compliant. I haven’t yet checked it. I don’t even know what it looks like on IE. I ll get a uniform look between IE and firefox and then perhaps test for compliance.
You can take a look at the design here. I am not sure if I have seen it earlier. If you know another page that is fairly similar, do let me know. I’d be a good boy and provide a link back!
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Tags: web, new_design, css
tar
I often use tar command for my backups. Its a little crazy, but I checkin my code into my svn, tar the repository to my usb disk and my gmail/eemail! You see, it is very tough to get back all that code I’ve written now as part of my MS, from scratch. In spite of using tar for so long, I made a simple mistake last week that left us wondering if we forgot the command.
The scenario is this : We needed a script that will backup all the “dot rc” files in the home directory onto a mounted usb disk. We did not want to backup any mozilla/firefox/iceweasel preferences. It was simple and I came up with a script and built it into the live CD we have customized for our labs. It seemed to work until someone closely noticed that it was not only backing up .mozilla and .netscape, but also ../knoppix and ./.mozilla . Get what I mean? The command is this
tar -czvf ${LOCATION}/dotrcs.tgz ${HOME}/.* --exclude=".mozilla" --exclude=".." --exclude=".netscape"
tar -czvf ${LOCATION}/dotrcs.tgz --exclude=".mozilla" --exclude=".." --exclude=".netscape" ${HOME}/.*
Simple ain’t it? Actually, in retrospect, I feel stupid. The error all the time been “–exclude=”.mozilla” : no such file or directory”. A very vital clue there and yet wasted quite a bit of time checking nowhere!
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Image/Pattern Recognition
I was trying to search for a reference in IEEE. Out of laziness, I just copied the text from acroread and pasted in the google search box on my flock. Here is the reference I tried to copy.
This is the text that got copied is “Proving and applying program Transfonnations Expressed with second-order patterns”. See anything interesting?? Yes, Transformations was mis interpreted!! It reminded me of the fact that scanned text is an image and never the text itself… Image recognition research still has a looong way to go.
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