Firefox to Chrome Switch

I spent time on firefox irc channels this week, reachable via http://irc.mozilla.org/, only to become disgusted. They were completely clueless about using html5 to access sqlite databases. Not only clueless but hostile to the idea of ever using a browser as an application’s front-end. Then there was the lack of documentation on their development sites. Lots of stubs to be completed at future dates does not count as documentation. Because their servers are so incredibly slow it takes time to navigate through their pages to discover the details are merely placeholders. Plus the fact their irc channels were not reachable via common irc networks gave me an overall feeling Firefox has slipped. Badly. So since Firefox has lost its way I installed Chrome. Chrome comes with support for accessing local sqlite files which Firefox developers don’t even want to.

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-chromium-google-chrome-in-ubuntu-using-deb-package.html is where I started. The instructions were remarkably good. Chrome seems to run fine on Ubuntu and Vista. I’m writing this post from Chrome. I’ll give myself a few weeks of getting familiar with Chrome…

Google Chrome adds additional JavaScript functionality through Gears. Gears is bundled with every Chrome install, adding new features to the web browser faster than previous plugins. The Gears libraries include support for new local cache structures, local databases, location data, background tasks, and file handling. Chrome boosts the available Gears footprint for web developers, including Google’s own apps such as Google Reader and Google Docs (and my blog). The current Gears code included in Chrome replicates V8 and sqlite code already present in the browser, a bolt-on that will hopefully be integrated in the near future.

So Gears is built in to Chrome like I had heard. Unlike Firefox the documentation looks good and exists here.

This all seems very Microsoft like. Taking over a market by buying out the best programmers and throwing lots of money around. Unfortunately the free alternative, Firefox, is in need of direction. Maybe Firefox will rise from the dead again but I suspect they will take years to regroup.

Experiences:

1. Chrome has imported all my passwords successfully. It’s truly amazing how well it has done this.
2. Chrome is magnitudes faster than Firefox. I had thought some sites were just slow but apparently it’s the javascript or rendering engine in Firefox that makes them so slow. With Google’s Chrome these sites are almost rendered in real time.

Why Ubuntu Sucks

Perhaps the question “Where Ubuntu Does Not Suck” should be discussed. It is free which is very good. It has standard Unix commands which is very good. It has the best geek tools available. Very few viruses. That’s pretty much it.

On the negative side.

1. Anything graphical sucks on Ubuntu. Ubuntu uses an ancient set of bad programs to handle the screen. We aren’t talking about something from 2001. Or even 1995. It goes back to the early 1970s. Can you say “clunky and slow”? It’s worse than that. Some say it’s beyond bad because the drivers for graphic cards are proprietary. This means that instead of using the CPUs on the graphical cards hardware to drive the pixels every pixel is calculated by the CPU instead. And remember the CPU is using programs from the 1970s. Hence you’ll often see processes like “gs” using 100% of the first CPU and “socket” taking 100% of the second CPU. What does this mean to you the user? It means it can take 10 seconds to update a simple click of a box in firefox. It can take 30 seconds or more to alt-tab to another window. And this is on machines with 4GBs and 2000+ MHz dual CPUs.
2. Almost all peripheral hardware is not supported. Sure you can find the hardware you want on the officially “supported hardware lists” but it’s not really supported. Take my printers. All of them are supposedly fully supported. None of them work worth a crap unless driven by M$. Sure the laser printer will print off a single color page or two. Give it a 6 page color PDF and it may or may not get around to printing it during the next few hours. Print it from M$ and it’s done within seconds.  Same thing with FAXing, scanning, etc.. So very pathetic. Ubuntu is so bad you must have a separate M$ machine to handle the peripherals.
3. The best new software, whatever the topic, rarely gets ported from M$ and the Mac to Ubuntu. If you need this software then you’ll need a token M$ machine.
4. Generally horrible support. There’s practically no documentation on anything. Either you are good with computers and can find enough hints by googling to fix your problems or you should not use Ubuntu. It is that simple. However it is funny in a bad way to watch the various fly-lords in IRC and such tell others with about the same experience to RTFM.

 

 

Speeding Up Ubuntu

I’m getting tired of Synaptic taking a minute or more to add a new package. I complained briefly on the Ubuntu IRC channel about this but nobody was interested. It seems like whoever programmed the application to check dependencies must have used a O(N2) algorithm. In other words the first few applications you add are done quickly. For example if this is the 2nd addition it might take only 2*2 seconds*.1 or .4 seconds. If you add 100 packages then it takes 100*100*.1 or 1000 seconds. That a bit of an exageration. It’s only taking about two minutes to have it check dependencies. Still this should be a split second task.

Anyways things are so poorly coded on Ubuntu, though better than M$, that I don’t trust things. So my next question was how fast are the CPUs running? Well a

cat /proc/cpuinfo

showed me the CPUs were running at about 1/3 speed. Look for the lines starting with cpu MHz:. Apparently the CPUs are suppose to react and increase their CPU speed if needed. I don’t trust anything, given how badly everything else is coded, so I did the following:

sudo cpufreq-selector -c 0 -g performance

sudo cpufreq-selector -c 1 -g performance

Now both CPUs are running at the max speed all of the time. Whether needed or not.

It’s probably possible to put these commands as the default in /etc/rc.local but I don’t know how. Instead edit the file /etc/default/cpufrequtils and add the following lines:

ENABLED=”true”

GOVERNOR=”performance”

MAX_SPEED=”0″

MIN_SPEED=”0″

Now the CPUs will be running at maximum speed across reboots. I’ve tried this and it does work.

It’s amazing people pay lots of money for fast computers yet the developers cut your performance by two thirds and don’t even tell you.

UPDATE 2009.10.26: Seems as if it was not that easy. Apparently it will reset itself to lower speeds if it gets hot. Or confused. Or the defective circuitry DELL stuffs inside batteries and battery charges is not working correctly as in my case. To get around this I’ve had to edit the file sudo gvim /usr/sbin/laptop_mode and make some obvious changes. I’ll see if this does work over the period of a few days. So far so good.

UPDATE 2009.10.28: When booted from battery the CPU speed lowers itself despite the above settings. So for now I’ve manually put the commands into the bashrc script. Since I always work from a shell this works for me. Maybe someday I’ll figure out a better solution.

HTML/CSS Helper

The best resource by far I’ve seen on this topic can be found at: http://www.somacon.com/p141.php

It’s good because you can click on buttons to see the effect it has on a demo table. The CSS code is also modified so you can simply cut and paste where needed.

They have two other pages for lists and text.

I wish somebody would come out with website layout done in a similar manner.

Synthesizing Voice From The Command Line

Today’s RSS feed from the Linux Journal, Synthesizing Voice FromThe Command Line was fun. Sort of reminds me of the robot.

sudo apt-get install saytime libsox-fmt-oss festival
saytime
echo Danger, Will Robinson! Destroy, Damage, Death. | text2wave | aplay

Largest Offshore Wind Parks

From Denmark showcases world-biggest offshore wind park

The “Horns Rev 2″ by DONG Energy, Danish owned energy company, produces 209 megawatts from 91 Turbines 30km off the west shore of central Denmark, in the north sea, costing $694 million. Consisting of 13 parallel rows of seven turbines in a fan-like shape. Siemen 2.3MW turbines are used. Blade diameter is 93 meters centered on a shaft 114.5 meters above sea level that drops down an additional 30-40 meters. It is the first platform to house up to 24 workers year-round. This platform connects to the turbines via buried cables which centralizes and conditions the power before sending it ashore via another subsea cable. It took the number one title away from DONG Energy’s Nysted wind farm that produces 166MWs. Denmark gets 20% of it’s electricity from wind. The number one title will pass on to a 630MW London array wind park in the Thames Estuary before the London Olympics starts in 2012.

From Rule Britannia: UK is Now World’s #1 Offshore Wind Power Producer

194 MW wind farm off the coast of Skegness Lincolnshire has just been completed. Another 938 MWs of power will be added in the next three months. And 1000 MW more by the end of 2012. If I’m adding right this is a total of 4,938 MWs. Probably more if land based wind is added to the mix.

From Wind Energy Could Power All of Britain’s Homes by 2020

This article claims 2 GWs are produced offshore currently, written in 2007, and that by 2020 there may be 33 GWs of energy produced by wind. Since the numbers seem bogus I’ll discount the whole article.

Largest Offshore Wind Power Producers By Country

1. 590 MW: United Kingdom (UK gets 3GWs of power from wind. So 20% of it’s wind power is from offshore.)
2. 423 MW: Denmark (20% of the total power, ==> Denmark must need 2115 MWs of power.)

Replacing Unison With Git

Unison works across M$, Macs, and *nix machines. Unison synchronizes files between two machines. Git is not made for synchronizing files between two machines but it can be made to do so. It supposedly works on multiple platforms just like Unison does. In addition it does version control and keeps track of file and directory name changes along with files you delete. More importantly you can keep multiple machines in sync, not just two. I use the following two scripts, run from cron, on the machines I want kept in sync:
A script to pull in the changes somebody has made followed by a script to push out the changes. I should make a master script to do one right after the other. Perhaps also some monitor program that can pop-up to tell me when I need to do a three way merge.  (I haven’t needed these additions yet.)
The script to pull in the changes:

#!/bin/bash

# GLOBALS
sGitLogFile=~/common-git.log
sPathToLocalDir=~/common
sPathToRemoteGit=…

function doGitPull {
cd $sPathToLocalDir >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1
#pwd >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1
#whoami >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1
#printenv >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1
git pull –verbose $sPathToRemoteGit HEAD >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1
}

echo “{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{” >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1 # Time stamp the end of processing
echo $(date +%F[%T]) ” = STARTING TIME of pull” >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1 # Time stamp the start of processing
doGitPull
echo $(date +%F[%T]) ” = ENDING TIME of pull” >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1 # Time stamp the end of processing
echo “}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}” >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1 # Time stamp the end of processing
echo “” >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1 # Time stamp the end of processing

A script to push the changes out:

#!/bin/bash

# GLOBALS
sGitLogFile=~/common-git.log
sPathToLocalDir=~/common
sPathToRemoteGit=….

function doGitPush {
cd $sPathToLocalDir >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1
git add –verbose -A >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1
git commit –verbose -m”bkup” >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1
git push –verbose $sPathToRemoteGit master –receive-pack=’git receive-pack’ >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1
}

echo “{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{” >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1
echo $(date +%F[%T]) ” = STARTING TIME of common-push ” >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1 # Time stamp the start of processing
doGitPush >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1
echo $(date +%F[%T]) ” = ENDING TIME of common-push\n\n\n” >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1 # Time stamp the end of processing
echo “}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}” >> $sGitLogFile 2>&1

Git’s Post Receive Hook

I’ve been using git for everything in the World lately. To be honest I’ve not been understanding much of anything I read. I basically read something and then hack around until I get it working. The hack around part is a pain. It consists of writing little scripts and then testing how I think it works and finding it doesn’t really work that way. So then I run the setup script again which erases all the work and initializes everything all over to the point where I failed. So I can try over. And over. And over about 20x.

Anyways, today I read this excellent post http://debuggable.com/posts/git-tip-auto-update-working-tree-via-post-receive-hook:49551efe-6414-4e86-aec6-544f4834cda3 and implemented it. It allows me to simply push the changes out to the webserver without ftp or rsync. It’s quite nice. Just make an executable file at .git/hooks/post-receive and stick in it:

#!/bin/sh
cd ..
env -i /usr/local/bin/git reset –hard

I need to make the .git directory off limits to prying eyes. I will do that in the future. For now though it doesn’t have anything in it that is not already viewable so it’s not important. Later though.

US Open Debacle

My take? Serena Williams should sue the US Open for all they are worth. And then some. She should set an example that causes the other tournament organizers to sit up and be honest.

Here’s the problem. A lines judge makes a horribly bad call. What’s more this judge does so at a very crucial moment. The immediate replays all show that Serena did not have a foot fault. Rather than fix the bad call this judge sticks with it. It’s like she has an agenda.

You have to wonder why a judge would ever give a foot fault call at that moment even if it were a foot fault. There is a courtesy that is normally extended to professionals. You don’t call foot faults at crucial moments unless the you are absolutely 100% sure, have multiple judges corroborating it, have video to back it up, and have been warning the player in question beforehand. Repeatedly.

What should be in the press this morning is a background check on the lines judge. What motives she could have had. Is she getting paid for this. Who all might be involved. Basically a full background check on this lady calling the foot fault and the people running the US Open.

Then there was a dispute about what Serena actually said. This lines lady said Serena threatened to kill her. Serena emphatically denies this. Were there any tapings? This lines ladies reputation had already proven to be faulty. Relying on her word is utter stupidity. Yet with no witnesses or tapes this lady caused Serena to lose the match. You’d think the US Open would have recording devices on all judges. They are suppose to be honest. A taping device would help prove their honesty. The fact they don’t only means they are dishonest.

Serena needs to take legal action.

To add insult to injury all the news channels including NPR focus on Serena. Somehow it is her fault. In today’s world justice is never served. Instead things are always twisted so the officials are never in the focus.

Bush’s Doing?

I have not seen any clear space pictures of 9/11. It was such a clear beautiful day I would have thought there would be some crystal clear much higher resolution pictures. Yet this does show the dust plume. My kids and I walked through the dust, going from the dusty side to the docks that morning. It was cold on the docks but we were able to get past all the closed off areas and watch up close from there. We had gotten a light sprinkling of dust. We had managed to thread our way through the wild crowds. Obviously we were not able to talk with the school officials that morning about going to a better HS as was scheduled. (NYC High Schools suck. Something about not having the money to spend on anything but the rent of the building and the metal detectors with security guards.) Instead we moved to Summit NJ days later so we would not have to put up with lousy schools.

To this day I wonder why we have not looked into all the evidence that points toward Bush and cohorts. It’s probably because Obama is controlled by the same companies and their lobbyists that Bush was.