Firefox Lightweights

Yeah, been a while since last post. That'll be fixed soon.
Anyway, Firefox 3 officially came out as the final stable release a couple weeks ago. I had been waiting MADLY for it for a long time. Seriously! My Firefox 2 would consistently, after being open for a couple days use up approaching 850 MB of memory. Almost a gig. That was a year ago or so. I got fed up and instead of reinstalling my system (come on, next to moving, I rate reinstalling my systems up there as the worst activities) I bought more ram. I jumped the lappy from 1GB to 2GB. I figured that would help. It sorta did, but frankly, it just gave the old FF2 extra headroom to pillage. Eventually, by late may, it would be eating up 1.2GB or memory.

In all this time, if I wanted to play a game (mainly Lord of the Rings Online - I'm usually Torband [Hobbit Burlgar] on the Elendilmir server, I have great screenshots to post) I'd shut down Firefox altogether to free up resources.

Blah blah blah. So FF3 came out and I was excited. I had already downlaoded beta 5 or so, but installed it seperately so I could maintain FF2 and just test. First, FF3 didn't seem to have a working version of the Session Manager etxtension. Errp. Game over. I live by that extension. You'll understand when I get to my point. The truth is that I believe it did at the time work, but I didn't dig deep enough or look properly. So I waited. I practically live in my web browser, so putting a beta in place is not my way any longer. I did back in the days. I would happily install the latest Netscape and Mozilla versions and jumped on Firefox as soon as it was publicly available. Anything to not us Internet Exploder.

Now I've had Firefox 3 installed for a couple weeks and have to say I like it and I'm happy. My system does run better now and my memory use is back down to something I'd consider acceptible. I just read a review on FF3 that isn't a bad one, but doesn't glow. I don't care about that. To each his/her own, really. What cought my eyes for real though was that he was commenting on running 4 tabs. Um... what's that? 4 Tabs???? What kind of web user is that? Am I really just way the hell out there? Let me explain. I currently have 37 Firefox windows open and a total count of 144 tabs. Yes, you read that right. 144 tabs. I believe the most I've had Firefox 3 take up memory-wise has been in the 550MB range. That's still a lot, but I'm also not a moron. I expect it will take a lot, but that's less than half of previous, and frankly, previously, I'd try to stay under 34 windows and about 130 tabs. I have noticed that CPU use is a bigger bottleneck, but my system still runs better with Firefox 3 than previously.

What's the real problem? All the jackasses who design web sites with unimportant java and flash content. All the tools who have to embed multiple youtube videos into the pages. I have some of those things on sites I make, but frankly, I'm just not like all the idiots on MySpace who actually think that using every tool at your disposal on your page makes you look cooler or like you know what the hell you're doing - because ... wait for it, you don't have a friggin clue. Just because there is more bandwidth doesn't mean every visitor wants your lame-ass example of design or layout. Ahem - I'm getting off topic.

I suppose the point of this was to point out that in my opinion, if your idea of surfing the web is having a couple windows open and a few tabs, you are in no position to really talk about the efficiency of th software. The original overhead of the software is always getting higher and higher. My first PC - an IBM PS/2 Model 55 - has (I still have it) a 40 megabyte drive. That's one long mp3 song and certainly couldn't fit most operating systems - barely even any modern linux distros. The fact that his 4 tab Firefox 3 experience chokes up 150MB of ram or so when my 37 window/144 tab instance is currently using **485,292KB (485MB) shows that is scales up well and has certainly solved the memory leak issue, and frankly, that's almost good enough a reason to upgrade.

In case you're still one of those people who are still using Internet Explorer, get over it and just get Firefox 3. I gain nothing from it other than one more person not being lazy and sticking with the default browser or M$ fanboy (only a little better than an Apple fanboy) who always claims "Microsoft just makes software that works" (hahavistahahaha). Of course, I also highly advocate to those Windows (and even OSX posers) out there with an extra machine or older laptop to install linux on it and give it a serious try. Try to not put it on an already broken system, because then you'll just blame linux and that's stupid.

**the memory useage will go up, and possibly down from time to time, but I've fun it for 5 day without a restart and it didn't go above 550MB or so.

Kindlicious

So, yeah, I know, sometimes I could be like an marketing whore. Actually, that's not really the case. If I talk about a product, I must have a strong feeling about it. Usually it's games I think I even wrote some about books (and likely will plenty often later on). This time I'm just writing a little about my Kindle. If you've been under a rock for a while, or for some reason never go to Amazon's web site, you might not know what the Kindle is. The Kindle is an ebook reader. It's a new school one though. It uses e-ink, which is actually microcapsules of black particles that get rearranged to produce a sharp grayscale display. Its extremely low power requirement makes is great for displaying content that you could be staring at for hours on end, like a book.
Meh, you might know about other ebook readers, Cybook and the Sony Reader are other examples. I actually checked out the Sony Reader one night at Borders, which is what set it back into my mind to look into options. My luck usually sucks majorly, but sometimes serendipity just kicks in. The Kindle pretty much hit all the blogs and engadget type places where people drool over new technology and geek toys. I read up on it but wasn't sure. I put it out of my mind. Frankly, these devices are too damned expensive for most people to take seriously.
That said, I somehow, a few weeks ago, decided to do some more research on the Kindle. Reviews were all over the place, but because Amazon sold out pretty quickly from it's first batch in like January or February, very few people had actually touched them. In fact, I read a lot of very scathing reviews from people who never set a finger on one. I could understand the constant dissing of DRM - it makes me sick too - but dissing the usability of the device!?!? Come one people, get some lives. But when I research, I mostly read the 5 star reviews and the 1 star reviews. I like the polar opposites. I found I needed to concentrate on the 4 star reviews because there are some certain flaws with the device that kept a lot of people from giving a full 5 star rating. The 1 star reviews were mostly useful for laughs and cries.
So, the point. Yep, it's for reading books, but it also connects to the Sprint EVDO network (they call it the Whispernet). This allows for purchasing books directly from the unit, but also allows for basic web surfing. I can read my gmail, but some sites don't work right (such as Meebo.com for trying to do IM on it). This feature uses a lot more battery life, but it can be turned off with a hard switch on the back, next to the power switch.
It also play mp3 files. I think it's a cool feature, but I have an mp3 player for that. I used to want mega-multi-use gear, but have some to realize that unless you want to spend a lot of money, you get mediocre versions of each thing compiled into one device when you do that. The web on the Kindle is a little better than mediocre, but it's not the main focus - Whispernet as a content delivery method is though. Anyway, I might throw a long mp3 piece on there for background reading music, but I'm not really worried about it.

The look. It just looks good - reading the screen that is. The white shell is nothing to sing about, but it's plainness is akin to the tragedy that is Mac design. Boring. (Though Mac fanboys always claim it as a pinnacle of design - whatever, white, beige, silver-blue, whoop-de-doo.) Wherever you look for reviews, you'll see the same thing, likely, reading e-ink is easy. Just like a book it can be held at any angle and still be seen (obviously within reason). The text size can also be adjusted. I have perfect vision, so I'll be leaving it at the smallest size most of the time, but the largest size could make for coke bottle bottoms wearing people to read easily.
It remembers where you left off. I have been relatively randomly switching for book to book reading a bit here and there. When I got back to a book, It goes right back to where I left off. That is key for me. You can set up bookmarks as well. I haven't done that. You can annotate too. I haven't done that either, but I'm sue when I used more educationally inclined books, I'll mark it up some.
The device itself is almost exactly the same size as a standard DVD movie case - all dimensions. The reading screen is almost as wide and about 2/3 the height of a typical form factor paperback book. When you change font sizes, it repaginates the document. It sort of makes traditional page numbers useless, but has it's own "locations" system, which I have read is plenty fine for citation use.
If you let it sit, it'll go into a "screensaver" mode, which just shows some grayscale images. No page turnes happening, so battery life stays super low. Supposedly we should able to get a week or more from a single charge, without using Whispernet. I don't know, haven't tried to test the limits. When I take it to the White Mountains this summer, I'm hoping to have my solar USB charger fixed to being along. It will trickle charge from usb, I believe at about 1/4 the speed (says 2 hours to full charge on wall wart). You can turn the "screensaver" on and off at will, which is nice for acting like a lock screen mode so that the cats or someone else poking around doesn't accidentally activate one of the biggest complaints from users: the sensitive location of the page turn buttons. Yep, it IS relatively easy to changes pages forward by accident. Depending on how you hold it, you might need to intentionally adjust how you place your fingers or thumb in order to not hit either of the two next buttons of the single prev button, or the "back" button, which isn't "back a page" but "back a level", like back to the menu or something like that.

So, the price. Yup, $399!!! That's a lot of money. If you're the type who buys a lot of books though, it could pay for itself pretty quickly, as many books can be bought for about $9.99. However, if you like paperback novels, that's likely not much of a deal.
The good news is that you can download and convert books of all types (well... we'll see about that).
If you want to download some ebooks for free, here are some sites I've found:

1. eSnips- Pretty good searching but messy. It appears to link outside for some content, but does also seem to provide content/books that are NOT likely legal - as in, copyright violations. Frankly, I don't care. Paying for a paper book and then having to pay for the electronic version of it again annoys me. And yes, I think I should have access to mp3 versions of all the old hip hop cassettes I have.
2. wowio - I haven't spent much time, but they appear to have a cool collection of all free books and a good philosophy.
3. Manybooks - more free books
4. Project Guttenberg - a project for electronification of old texts and such by a large community of transcribers.
5. Baen Free Library - a for profit publisher that realizes that offering some free and complete content will build faith in, fans of and support for writers and their publishers. Read the introduction on the main library page (the link) - it's a lot like how I feel about the music business, though I feel it should go even farther.
6. ... eh, you can do a search from here on. That list alone will net you serious results. Bit Torrent land has some stuff too, but beware, there's a LOT of PDFs, and converting PDFs to a format the Kindle will read is a craps shoot - the other serious flaw: no native PDF reading ability. They need to add that as a firmware upgrade.

So, you have content or downloaded a book that you want on the Kindle but it's not already in the PRC for AZW ebook format... now what? You can create a compatible file using Mobipocket Creator, which I believe is actually supported or something by Amazon. It's free. It's not the most incredible interface and doesn't allow easy customization (such as a simplified way to make a table of contents). Of course, you could also email your documents to "yourkindlename"@kindle.com and for ten cents per document to be sent right to your Kindle or @free.kindle.com for a free conversion that will be send back to your email address (as registered at Amazon. I tried to convert a document and it came back ok, but the equations and images in it kinda got in the way. Again, they need to work on the "experimental"-ness of that feature.

So, there ya go. A long review of the Amazon Kindle . I tried to say what matters, but I'm sure I left some thoughts out. I'm sure I can only keep your attention for so long anyway. As for the link to buy it above, hey, yeah, I'll make some change on it, but if I helped convince you to buy it, why not? :)

Of Mice and Money

Strangest thing today. I went out to take the back wheel off the bike to remove the tire and check for defects and erosion on the rim. I had moved the bike to the back of the driveway, next to the garage that I have no access to. Moving around and dawdling, I look down and see a dead mouse and a dollar bill, right next to each other.

The rear tire has been leaking slowly for quite some time, a little bit before I put it to rest in December (2007). I decided I didn't want to keep checking it and pumping more air in it, especially since I'd be mostly using it starting at about 6:45am to head to school, after which it would likely have fallen from the 41 psi or so to about 25 psi. Not so good. Not so safe, and certainly not fuel efficient. So I was going to follow the advice of fellow VF500F owners and check to see if there was erosion on the rim where the bead seats. Well, as almost always is the case, working on the bike rarely goes smoothly and timely. So much for going for the bike ride I wanted to go on.
For crying out loud!

It took me about two hours to get the tire OFF the rim. What a pain in the ass that was. Nothing new, but I think I always forget how much a PITA is will be - "oh, it'll only take a few minutes". Stupid.

I get it off finally and sand around the bead area clean up the rim and check the tire for holes or cracks. After some more struggle, I get the tire back on the rim. If you've never changed a tire (not wheel) you might not know that it's not easy to do by hand - using tire irons - versus what an equipped shop would have for this very job.
I crank on the compressor and ready for the seating. It NEVER goes easy. I usually have to bounce the wheel around like a basketball to get the beads to at least move close enough to the seat area such that when I pump in the air, it actually pumps up the tire and doesn't just blow air out the openings.
Well, it didn't go well. It's only a 125 psi compressor, which would be more than fine if the bead set quicker, but noooooooo, never.
As I'm sitting there in the tiny little space at our front entry which doubles as a workshop, yelling and swearing at my wheel and my bad luck, I see something shiny.
WTF!?!
There it is. There was some metal thing sticking into my tire. I had to pry it out and all of about 12-13 mm of it were embedded into the tire.
Fuck!
Yeah, that figures. So, I sat there then laid back, angry, steaming quietly, wondering about how I'm gonna deal with this. I try to be self sufficient, but there are times I'm not equipped, and this appears to be one of them.

The tire can likely be repaired (as temporary as that's supposed to be), but for all intent and purposes, it's dead, like that mouse, and it's gonna cost me some money I didn't expect to have to spend, like that dollar bill.

I don't believe in "fate" or "omens" - they are as silly as religion/faith. But sometimes, the irony that life gives is a serious punch in the face.

Ready to Roll

OK, only 3 more days will spring break. Man, I've been counting down the days for a little while, but not all that seriously. This week comes and for crying out loud, as expected, the kids are (some) worse than normal... some MUCH worse. Yeah, I know, that's what happens the week before spring break, but honestly, TRUST ME, if you saw how some of the kids were behaving today, you'd give me a shoulder massage. Well, not ACTUAL violence, but I felt like some was potentially gonna happen. One kid will be staying home tomorrow for (one) telling another student "why don't you kill yourself". That's screwed up.

The good, however, was that I got the pole vaulters in the air a little bit yesterday. They are sorely missing access to a proper pit, and therefore missing the opportunity to ACTUALLY vault. This is a screwed up situation. I'm waiting to hear back on some used mats and access to the UVM pit over spring break. First meet of the year tomorrow and supposedly the coach at the home school will let us use the pit to practice after the PV event is done. That would be cool... assuming my vaulters remember to bring some poles. Heh!

I got the bike ready a week and a half ago for the spring release and today I finally took it out. Re-riveted the right can first. Believe it or not, the bike started first try with only about a second of turnover... amazing!! I'd take it to work starting tomorrow, but I made an appointment to get a chip in the Civic's windshield fixed, then Thursday I need to pick Karen up fro work... so grrr... looks like Friday will be the first chance to take the bike to work. It better be a fucking nice day out... hehe, but I'm also guessing there will be more heating over the next two days so the ambient temperature might be up in the morning, which would be nice. It's still chilly in the morning.

So, I'm ready to roll - roll on into spring break, roll on over the crossbar, roll onto the streets and roll away from 12 stress inducing sperm byproducts for a week.

Aim for the sky

Wanted to post a quickie I'll need to add to later when I have time... Westborough MA, Patriot Pole Vault Club coaches... young vaulters and eager coaches, together in the windy cold learning about vaulting, coaching vaulting and camaraderie. Well worth a 240 mile (each way) drive.

I think I'm back in the game... now to find some new pole vault mats to make the kit at school legal.

... again, more later.

Oh, and I got some LAAAAAAAME video footage. If I can get anything useful out of it, I'll see about posting it.

Look ma, no hands.

So lately while playing DDR on the Wii I've been getting access to new "challengers" after scoring A's on certain songs. I looked into it and found info saying what amounted to it being too early for me to be getting them, having not completed more than ONE songs with an A in the difficult level - forget about expert. The tracks are "Super Samurai" and "tokyoEvolved" (I think, they could be "artist" names.. doesn't really matter to me at this point). They are pretty cool. Samurai is a neo hip hop thing... tokyo is a hyper pseudo-industrial-hardcore techno track. Both challenges are hard as hell, and frankly, I'm not ready for them.
So, I went to youtube to see if anyone posted some tips on how to get better at doing the complicated steps and such. I found people who aces these songs, yet interestingly, they all turn the hand motions off.
Say what!?!
Yeah, one main point of the Wii DDR is the use of hand motions, turning it off is lame and well, in my opinion, cheating. So, I'm certainly impressed with the scores, but they are leaving out an important part... I guess I'll have to reserve some judgment on their merits. Hey, I doubt I could score well yet without the hands anyway.

On that note, I can't condone when people post their amazing scores when the camera is pointing only at the TV or.... you can hear them hitting buttons on their controller instead of stomping on the DDR pad. For real... what are you bragging about?

I'll set up a cam one of these days to capture me my attempts at DDR superstardom. They'll be real and honest... and hopefully I don't have to censor my rage attacks when stuff doesn't work.

If we put you there, don't screw us!

In less than 14 hours I'll be going to vote, primarily in the Democratic primary, but also for local stuff - school board, councilors, permission to explore a re purposing of a dilapidated local landmark.

Over the last few years, I've been looking forward to this election cycle in a massive way. Brattleboro (I believe) Vermont is putting on their ballot a vote for whether to indict W if he sets foot in their jurisdiction. I wish Burlington had the same thing. I think back 3 year and then 7 years and I have to believe that more and more of those people who voted for that scumbag realize they royally screwed up and royally hosed America in the act. The least patriotic people I could imagine - those who unquestionably supported this criminal over and over.

So, now I'm expecting the tide to turn and a democrat to take over the White House - and coupled with the Democratic majority in the House and Senate a reclaiming of what's important for the success of the country, and not just rich people, oil men, libertarians and poor people who actually believe that making their bosses wealthy will trickle down. Um, watch the movie "Idiocracy". The only thing that appears to be trickling down is brain damage resembling lack of foresight and common sense.

That said, if/when a Democrat recovers the White House, s(he) better not fuck it up. I swear, unlike Repugs, we need to hold our elected officials accountable. No more bullshit like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Obviously, as recently stated, I'm voting for Barack Obama. I have a feeling he's representing more of what he'll actually do an less of what we just want to hear. I hate people who are happy to have politicians say what "we want to hear" and forget that "show and prove" is more important.