ipsidixit.net

Chrome really is nearly there!

Yesterday I realised Chrome is going to be successful.

Chrome is Google’s web browser. It first appeared just over a year ago. For much of that period I’ve been pretty lukewarm about it. Thought it was more of a symbolic gesture than a serious attempt at muscling in on the browser market.

To a technical person, Chrome had been positioned as nothing so special. The items that stick in my mind are very fast Javascript and better memory utilisation. Also more granular at the process level: one process per tab, or some such concept. Nice sounding. But with Firefox boasting of the new TraceMonikey Javascript engine, and Microsoft doing reasonable work on IE8, I reckoned it was not sounding like anything too unusual.

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Racist Microsoft?

The BBC has a story running about a Microsoft ad on their Polish web-site which has been Photoshopped to change one aspect of the original from the US site. Apart from the translation of the words to Polish, of the three people in the original photo (Asian man, black man, white woman – very PC – and no, I don’t mean personal computer) the black man has now become white – a different head has been used.

As an aside, the article points out that the Photoshopping has not even been done very well – the original man’s hands remain. But that’s just an amusing side issue. The much more interesting aspect is the apparent reaction to it. We have this:

The “gaffe”. What gaffe would that be then? The gaffe of having done a poor job with Photoshop? Of course not. The gaffe is that a black man was replaced by a white man.

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Spark of madness

This week’s Economist has an article about the possible emergence of a market in house-price hedging derivatives. It’s at Housing Derivatives: Spark of Invention and appalls me. Appalls not least because the writer seems to genuinely believe that it’s a great idea. Still hungover and bleary eyed from the last economic piss-up, we’re already planning the next one.

The article starts off by comparing house fire insurance with the idea of house-price hedging. That’s very unreasonable. The business model behind insurance is not a zero-sum game. The execution of that model by many insurance companies in recent times (AIG to mention just the best known offender) may be ridiculous, but the basic model is sound: based upon actuarial risk, a large group pool resources to pay out to the few when something happens. If the actuaries are good at their job everyone is happy: the many who required no payout, the few who did and the insurance company who retain a profit. Maybe difficult to achieve, but sound in principle.

What is being describe in this article, however, is a different beast altogether.

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lighttpd

This site now runs on lighttpd! Apache2 was used previously. It’ a fine web-server, but lighttpd is so much, er, lighter. About 30% lower memory consumption for the same performance. Also, as a side benefit, the config is simpler too.

It does, for me at least, everything Apache2 can do:

• • • Multiple virtual hosts
    • HTTPS
    • WebDav (both unencrypted and SSL encrypted)
    • PHP (and fast too!)

The only limitation I have is the very same one I also had with Apache2: HTTPS only fully works for one on the virtual hosts. If you host a.com, b.com and c.com then you can only have a certificate active for one of them with the correct identify. Say you have a certificate for a.com: if you visit https:/b.com you’ll get a warning that the certificate is only valid for a.com. Of course you can choose to override this and still encrypt the session, but it’s a nuisance. Must be something very fundamental to SSL, given that both Apache and lighttpd have this issue.

So, lighttpd comes highly recommended!

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Google versus… anyone

Recently Microsoft launched another attempt to dethrone Google as the search-engine kings of the Internet. Welcome to Bing. Go on, give it a try. You know, it’s actually not bad. In fact it’s quite good. Or at least not too far off as good as a search engine can be. Hooray! The king is dead, long live the king?

There are articles appearing out there which would appear to agree. cnet are very excited about it, for example. Am I? Well, no. But not for the obvious reasons. I am a bit of a Google fan – I like their services and I suppose I like their “image” (aka marketing) And Microsoft? The opposite. I have little use for their services or software, and I really do not like their image. However a lot of that is, of course, very subjective.

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Old fogies reunited

Friends Reunited, a web-site I joined a while ago and which I’ve rarely accessed, emails me to try and get me to log back in. They’ve started some sort of “Groups” thing and reckon that based upon my demographic and goodness-knows-what-else I might be interested in some of these:

- Over Forties
Thanks a bunch Friends Reunited. Accurate, but do you have to put it FIRST in the list?

- Pink Floyd
I haven’t touched illegal drugs for about 20 years, so I think Pink Floyd and I would have less intense relationship than previously. But not too far wrong.

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QuadKonsole on KDE4

Under KDE 3 I’ve made major use of the wonderful quadkonsole, from Simon Perreault. It’s a lovely thing, allowing you to embed 4 (by default, other permutations possible) konsoles in a single window, with them all resizing together. Kinda hard to explain, but very useful in some situations.

KDE 4 comes along and, finally, is about ready for day to day use. Many improvements, some drawbacks, but on balance I’m now ready to use it in anger for real work. The KDE 4 konsole is quite nice. And it even pretends that it can do something similar to quadkonsole. Which it can only very very slightly.

So us KDE 3 quadkonsolers demand that quadkonsole run under KDE 4! And so it does…. read on.

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VIA – Hot stuff!

A while back I wrote a few notes on building a small home server box. Specifically that I had chosen this neat Morex case and this VIA EK Corefusion motherboard.

Here in southern Europe the summer has been in full swing, and it got hotter by the day. A few weekends back I thought I’d do a quick check on temperatures on this system to make sure it wasn’t about to burst into flames.

Logged in and ran ’sensors’. Yikes! CPU at 77 degrees C, and the chassis temp only a couple of degrees lower.

Went over to the box and touched it. Very warm. Listened. No sound of a fan. Now the motherboard is fanless (in the 800MHz version I chose for this very reason) but the Morex case has a single internal fan which I was pretty sure I had wired in to the system/case fan header on the board. Peering in the side with a torch I confirmed that it most definitely wasn’t turning.

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The usual suspects? Or the usual bullshit?

In a book review of three books (The Economist) each attempting to explore the cause of 2008’s global “credit crunch” we are told that it’s simply not fair to lay the blame at the door banks. In a telling section we are sternly lectured that “It was the Basel accords on bank capital ratios………that helped push the banks into securitising sub-prime mortgages.”

This is an outrageous statement.

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KDE 4 revisited

Back in January I wrote about the newly-released KDE 4.0, and what a disappointment it was.

Since then, and particularly in recent weeks, the FOSS community has been raging with discussions about the perceived issues with KDE4.
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