Monthly Archives: October 2006

Overlorde on MySpace – How’d I miss that?

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My favorite in-your-face Metal band that I listen too when I just want to shake all the mirrors in my car after a bad day has a MySpace page. Not sure how I missed that, but glad to see the band still alive and kicking. Now if they would add RSS to their site, or bring up a Blog to keep their fans up to date the circle would be complete. (Sidebar: is it me or does MySpace have some of the ugliest sites on the Internet?)

Go check out some of the audio and video at the Overlorde site and take a listen to not only a great Metal band, but probably the greatest drummer you’ve never heard of. The guy’s got skills. Crazy, insane, you’re-never-going-to-be-that-good skills. Check out his site here.

Yep, definitely Camino

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If you own anything that runs OS X, do yourself a favor and head over to the Camino site and download the latest nightly build. For me, it just blows the doors off of Safari and I can finally use Google Reader without my CPU going crazy and the fan in my 15″ Aluminum PowerBook running.

Screaming fast browsing, OS X look and feel, and a bunch of new features. I have no idea what the future holds with OS X Leopard, but Safari has a lot of catching up to do. I’m starting to wonder if Apple picked the right horse to ride when they went looking for an open source browser to build upon. Safari’s good, but for my usage, Camino is better.

I made one more change today to try to reduce the lag that happens when browsing the web on OS X, regardless of browser choice. Even though I am setup to not use IPv6 in System Preferences, I found that it was still enabled in the /etc/hostconfig file. I changed the YES to NO in the hostconfig file and things definitely seem faster so far. I won’t get in to the specifics of changing that file since you can find that yourself via Google.

Anything for more speed.

Don’t forget about the Shared Items Page.

Firefox 2.0 RC3 released

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So far it looks very good.  All the issues I had with it in Google Reader appear to be gone.  Full screen is really full screen again.  Performance is excellent, but I’m not sure it is as fast as Camino though.

My Internet browsing lag has returned, so my initial excitement over the OS X 10.4.8 release and the statement about better performance for some Comcast customers is gone.  I’ll have to get off my butt and do some packet captures to see if I can find out what is really going on, but the amount of time that all the browsers I try need to look up the site address I am trying to go to seems too long, like 3-5 seconds.  Very frustrating.

…And Right Back To Camino

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Wow, the Safari thing was short lived, huh?  OK, here’s the deal with that.  Remember how I said I was going to try the Google Reader for a week to see if it could replace NetNewsWire?  Well Google Reader is pretty good once you learn all the hotkeys that matter to you.

For me I need the view all look, only updated subscriptions, sometimes full screen, and learn to use j and k to cycle forward and back.  It works really well until Safari starts consuming 100% CPU for 5-10 seconds every 10 time you hit the j key.  I’ve been searching everywhere for the solution to Safari getting slower like that, but I haven’t found the solution yet.  Cleared the cache, no favicons, etc.  I have my suspicions that it has something to do with Java or javascript, but I can’t prove it.  While this may not be a big deal to some, I am doing everything on a PowerBook so when the CPU hits 100% for extended periods of time the fan kicks in and the thing gets hot.

So I downloaded the latest nightly build of Camino and it is way faster than I remembered.  I guess I’ll stick with it for a while and see how it does.  One thing I noticed this week since I now use Google Reader for my feeds I can keep up at lunch from work.  At work I run Windows (Windows2003 via Citrix actually) and Google Reader via Firefox on Windows is way smoother than my Safari or Firefox on OS X experience.  No lag, very smooth, no runaway processor, etc.

Anyone else ever see anything like this?  Should I wait and see if Safari gets any better with Leopard?  Should I just stick with Camino?  Will there ever be 1 browser for OS X that meets all of my needs?

Back to Safari

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For months I have been running Firefox for OS X instead of Safari for my web browsing because Firefox seemed so much faster. Today I decided to try to do all of my feed reading with the new Google Reader and found that I had a lot of problems with screen refreshing and some of the commands like going to full screen mode did not work as expected. I assumed it was an issue with Google Reader.

I thought I would see how it looked using Safari and found that all of the refresh issues were gone and the full screen command actually went full screen as expected. No idea how long I will stay this way. I was using Firefox 2.0 RC2, which was released yesterday or the day before, so some bugs are expected. I will try it again with the next release, but for now I am switching back to Safari since everything seems to work as expected.

So why not use Camino, a browser that I have already said I like and is extremely fast? Go to the USAToday.com web site and watch the Flash based section that shows 5 headlines. Notice how it just tells you to install the Flash player? Now go to the same site with Safari or Firefox and the Flash actually plays as expected. I was using Camitools to force Camino to spoof its identity as Firefox for Mac or Safari so that the Flash would work, but I decided I don’t like the spoofing angle as I want an open web experience where all browsers and web sites use full open standards so that spoofing is no longer needed. Web site developers need to write for the standards so I can use whatever browser I want. The minute I can use Camino for all the sites I visit without spoofing what browser I am running I will run back to it as it is really, really fast.

Rant of the day – partial RSS/Atom feeds

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Today’s rant is the way that many web sites provide RSS/Atom feeds but do not place the entire post/article in the feed itself. They just present a “teaser” so that you will follow the link to their web site to read more. Is there really any other reason for doing this other than to try to get me to see all the ads on your web site in the hopes that I might click on one?

Man, that drives me nuts. Make the entire article available via the feed!

Can Google Reader replace NetNewsWire?

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I saw a few posts about the latest version of the Google Reader and thought I would take it for a spin. The first thing I did was export all of my RSS feeds from NetNewsWire(NNW) to an OPML file. I then imported that file into Google Reader. All 77 of my feeds imported correctly, but I did lose the groupings that I had setup in NNW. Once I went in and categorized everything in to folders to match what I had in NNW I was set.

Google Reader is an excellent feed reader, no doubt about it. If I wasn’t already using such an excellent product as NNW I am sure this would be my new reader, hands down. But I am spoiled by NNW and looking down to my Dock to see if there are any new items to read. For now I am going to try to just live with the Google Reader for a week or so and see how it does.

I really like how Google has been creating all of these products and offering them to us for free. I think they are excellent and each one reduces my reliance on a single computer. But I have not stayed with Google for all applications. I did move away from Blogger to WordPress because I think it is a better blogging service, and it remains to be seen if Google Reader can replace NNW for me. I also won’t pretend to understand why Google is purchasing YouTube since they already had their own video service, but maybe it was not as much about bringing YouTube in to Google as it was to keep it away from others. Time will tell.

Almost final update on the new aquarium

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We tried Bob in the aquarium for a couple hours today, but he just won’t stop chasing the other fish around.  So, Bob will stay in a new 2 gallon tank that we picked up for him today.  By himself.  Alone.  With the only friend he can get along with – himself.

In the 6 gallon tank we added 2 more fish, another Tetra and a Molly, that immediately seemed right at home.  We added 1 more live plant and the tank looks great.  There are a couple more fish that I would like to pick up, but I need to be careful home many fish I put in this small of an aquarium.

Note to self: don’t put the Beta in with the other fish

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Today was the day we moved Bob, our Beta, over to the new aquarium with the other 3 fish.  When I put Bob in the tank he immediately headed to the bottom and a corner.  Then a minute passed and he decided to take a swim around and check out his new surroundings.  The 3 other fish just followed behind him and watched their new friend.  Then Bob turned around and started ramming the other fish.  He was beating the heck out of them.  When he hit the other fish, which are half his size, they would fly back about 3 inches.  After waiting for a couple minutes to see if this would settle down I pulled Bob back out of the new aquarium and put him back in his own home.

Not sure if I’ll try again or just leave Bob on his own forever.  His face puffed out just before he started pounding on the other fish, which is something I’d never seen him do before.  He’s a mean little sucker.  It’s a shame because we originally bought the new tank to give Bob more room and add some friends to his world.  Looks like Bob is a loner.  A rebel.