Blag

*yawn*

Yet another post with no discernible topic – perhaps it’s like a mini twitter? Ginormic pile of random comments, tid bits and news…

Begin early morning 1:37AM ramble:

(Actually, am testing something at the moment, but decided I may as well make an effort to fill this post with something remotely amusing… better than all the RSS readers getting a bunch of white space).

I hate being throttled. -.-

Especially midway through working on a website update, and the back end is so packed with AJAX and PHP it’s not funny.  I think he who pays the internet bill would be very annoyed if I purchased a 2GB data block (2GB being the lowest denomination available for $5) at 1AM, given the rollover time is 2AM…

I must say, I am disgusted yet curiously attracted to the movie Bruno… can’t wait for the DVD to come out. Did I say DVD? I meant torrent. Not that I would do something as dastardly as pirate a movie.

And yes, I’ll finish off the finding the perfect browser series soon. Opera and Google seem to be pushing out updates for their browsers on a bi-weekly basis now. That’s a good thing I suppose, but annoying as I constantly have to re-evaluate each browser in light of the updates.

End ramble.

Random news:

The International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg has announced that they’ve discovered two previously unknown compositions by Mozart. Yay! I can’t wait to hear more classical music… http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25827706-401,00.html

MSN Messenger turns 10! Now in its latest re-incarnation as Windows Live Messenger, latest stats have active users at 330 million, and 10 billion messages sent per day. 10 years on, and MSN still has 80% market share, followed by Skype and Yahoo! (NB: Stats are buoyed up somewhat, as MSN and Yahoo signed an agreement back in 2005 to consolidate their chat networks).

Windows 7 is RTM. Can’t wait for the official launch on October 22nd – no more crappy 32-bit limitations of XP (namely max 4GB of RAM, and 2GB RAM allocated max to each application). Anyone wanna buy 4GB of DDR2 4-4-4-12 overclocking ram incidentally?

Aside: WOO! Unthrottled right at this very moment, as I’m typing this now

Queensland cops plan to go war driving around the state, looking for people with unsecured wireless networks, handing out informational leaflets and holding demonstrations to teach people how to secure their home networks. Props to them I suppose…

Yet another aside: Why do I keep running out of hard disk capacity? I’ve already got 3x 250GB, 1x 750GB and 2x 1TB in my main computer.

Bleurgh. Bored and hungry. Would be asleep now, if I wasn’t staying awake to take a final dose of meds.

Hmm, so I overhauled the main website, fixed the 101 bugs and it’s now reasonably professional looking. Now to integrate this blog into the main website, instead of having it as a separate mini-site. Don’t want to think of the damage it would to to my existing SEO efforts or Google Page Rank.

*yawn #2*

Off to play flash games.

Ta.

There are only a few browsers even worthy of consideration at the moment – due to lack of support, infrequent updates, security holes, performance issues etc, I’ve decided to ignore all other browsers except for the main five. Legacy browsers (e.g. Firefox 2.0, IE7, Safari 3, Netscape were excluded), and the latest versions and betas available at time of testing were used.The versions I tested were:

• Google Chrome 2.0.172.33
• Google Chrome Beta 3.0.193.0
• Opera 9.64
• Opera 10 Beta Build 1631
• Safari 4.0.2
• Firefox 3.0.11
• Firefox 3.5
• Internet Explorer 8

Aside:  FYI, I’ve long since lost all traces of browser loyalty – they’ve already wasted enough of my time and sanity for me to even bother blowing the X browser horn.

I don’t really believe in browser benchmarks – the only real way to test browsers out is to use them for a few days and monitor their performance and system resource usage.  The SunSpider and V8 “industry standard” benchmarks are utter crap – every tech blog, journal and media portal seem to toss their figures around willy nilly, yet fail to realise that both benchmarks are BIASED and UNFAIR when used to compare competing browsers. They were designed to test performance of different builds, updates, improvements and so on, not the performance of a completely different competitors product. SunSpider was developed by WebKit (the basis of Safari) as an internal benchmark, as was V8 for Google Chrome. The only “un-biased” benchmark currently available is ACID 3, but even that doesn’t really simulate real world usage.

So, I gathered 301 different websites – each laced with images, Javascript, Java applets, Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight, pop-ups and AJAX and loaded them in each browser to check for memory leaks, abnormal CPU usage and disk I/O. I then tried using each browser with 30 tabs open for a day or two each, to see how they performed over time. As a test of each browsers tagging, history and bookmark searching capabilities, I also imported my 8MB bookmarks.html (where possible).

Each browser was setup to a “usable” state – i.e. pop-up and adblocking enabled if available, dangerous javascript options disabled. All other options were left at default, as settings shouldn’t need tweaking out of the box for a browser to be usable.

Test system specs were:

• Overclocked  Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4ghz @ 2.95Ghz
• 4GB 4-4-4-12 DDR2
• 3x 250GB WD2500KS SATA Hard Disks in a RAID0 Array (used as system disk)
• Nvidia GeForce 7600GT
• Windows XP Professional SP3 32-Bit with latest patches as of 13/7/09 applied
• Norton Internet Security 2008 16.5

So by no means a slouch. Keep in mind the average PC will NOT be anywhere near as powerful.

More to come in following posts…

I am a whore for the internets. If I had the money, I’d have interwebs pipes as extensive as Paris’s sewer system connected to my house so I could stream HD videos and torrent all day, at 40Gbps via multiple redundant upstream backbone networks. Unfortunately, bandwidth costs about ~$250 per Mbit unmetered delivered via fibre, so that’s an $12,000,000 internet bill per month. Then add on installation costs of laying fibre from the nearest access point to my doorstep, priced at ~$200 per metre in suburban areas (of which 98% of that costs is for the trenchworks and council approvals), a Cisco ONS 15454 SONET backplane to terminate the Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexed fibres, with a price heading into the 6 figure range and my plan doesn’t look quite so rosy anymore…

Regardless, the web browser is still the weapon of choice when it comes to surfing the web. Interestingly enough, picking the right web browser has been a long and gruelling process for me (no really!). I have rather peculiar web browsing habits, some of which entail -

• Bookmarking and tagging any website that is remotely interesting, or possibly useful in the future – my bookmarks.html is so large that some browsers can not import it, and scrolling to the bottom of the list takes ~ 5-6 minutes.
• Looks interesting? *click* *open in new tab* – after only about 20-30 minutes, I’ll typically have 25-30 tabs open. After a day of browsing, it’s usually around the 120-140 mark. Just wait until I start opening new windows as well…
• Constantly opening and closing browsers, so the ability to “save all” tabs and “open all tabs” is VERY important
• And as a consequence of the above reason – a high performance core that can search through 8MB of bookmarks and tags, 180 days of history and handle a 800MB cache

I mentioned long and gruelling – up until now, not a single browser available was suitable, each having their own crippling flaws and perclivites. But now, with the latest wave of browser updates/releases/betas, that’s all beginning to change. Hooray, no more:

• Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) – yup, a *certain* browser forced me to reboot my PC constantly
• Massive memory leaks that would make windows page its own kernel to disk in an effort to free up RAM
• Disk thrashing as browsers try to re-open 120 tabs from the cache
• Constant tri-daily browser crashes
• Awful laggy performance worthy of sandpapering your face

Well, I compiled a list of 301 tabs of pages packed with images, Javascript, Java applets, Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight, pop-ups and AJAX and unleashed them on all the browsers I could get my hands on. The results may surprise you…

More to come in the following posts.

(By the way, I do realise my web browser usage is NOT in anyway representative of most users, but the debilitating flaws in some browsers would still affect the average granny, logging into her ISP e-mail once a week to check for messages from the kids).

Om nom nom!

Yay! First blog post ever

Hmm… blogs are overrated. Lets rename them blags.