The Deep End | Paul Venezia » June 2006

June 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)

So long, FireFox

TAGS: Life, the Universe and Everything, Systems

I've had a bit of a crisis recently. Although I use FireFox almost exclusively on all platforms, I find that I just can't take it on OS X any more. With the release of 1.5, I've found that FireFox is simply too much of a resource hog on my 1.67Ghz PowerBook G4 with 1.5GB RAM to be usable. Although I never reboot the laptop, I have to quit and restart FireFox every day or so. When the CPU is consistently at 80% utilization, the memory footprint is more than 400MB with about a dozen windows open (no video, no flash), and text field input is delayed by several seconds on a consistent basis, I get agita. The Linux builds don't seem to exhibit this behavior, even under far greater stress.

So, au revoir, FireFox. The promises of a truly integrated OS X build in the 2.0 release may bring me back, but for now, it's Camino all the way.

Posted by Paul Venezia on June 29, 2006 03:29 PM

June 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Homegrown Ultra40 update

TAGS: Gear, Systems

After a few weeks of using this box, Corsair sent in 8GB of DDR400 ECC Registered RAM in 2GB DIMMs -- ah, the good stuff. When I dropped it in, I played a bit with BIOS settings to eliminate the 4GB memory hole. On the Tyan Thunder K8WE, the BIOS pulls nearly 1.3GB of RAM out of play to account for PCI device address space. Obviously this needed to be addressed. Flipping the memory hole remapping bit in the BIOS to "Hardware" allowed the 2.6.16 kernel to address all the RAM without issue. Using "Software" I found that the box became unstable.

While I was doing this I considered updating the BIOS on the mainboard. Since time immemorial, this process has required one or more floppies and a floppy drive. Since I didn't bother with a floppy drive in the workstation build, I had to find an old one -- and find a working 3.5" floppy disk, Win98 boot disk, etc, etc. What a pain. It's not terribly difficult to write an on-line BIOS flashing utility, or provide a bootable ISO image containing the appropriate BIOS update, or even a USB flash drive image. Why must I be digging around in the closet for 3.5" floppies to update the BIOS on an ultra-modern mainboard?

Of course, after going through several elderly floppy disks and finding sector and I/O errors in abundance, I punted and forewent the BIOS upgrade since it wasn't that pressing an issue. Sigh.

Posted by Paul Venezia on June 15, 2006 11:30 AM

June 03, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Where is that code anyway?

TAGS: ./configure && make && make install, Networks

More than a few readers sent me notes asking about the availability of the code that I mentioned in last week's Enterprise Hacks feature. I wrote two pieces in that article, the first one regarding timezone settings for thin clients, and the second on using Perl, PHP, and MySQL to map Windows shares and permissions across an enterprise network. The code for the first is easy, since I posted the code back on my blog back in 2003.

The share mapping code will be trickier. For one, it's fairly involved, including Win32 and Linux-based perl scripts, PHP scripts, and a database schema. Also, I'll have to ensure that the code is distributable. If I can get all these pieces together for that app, I'll post it here, but be forewarned -- it was written for one specific purpose, and for one specific network. It should be easily portable to other networks, but it'll have to be screened for security information and probably dressed up a bit. Stay tuned -- I can't promise anything, but I'll try.

Posted by Paul Venezia on June 3, 2006 09:54 AM