Douglas' Blog

Firefox 1.5 Problems

I ran into a link today reporting that Firefox 1.5 has memory issues; at least when running it on Windows. Ever the skeptic, I did some more research and came across other blogs and forums where users had documented high memory use by Firefox. But I also found a fair number of follow-up posts by people with no issues on their Windows machines. How is it that the same program runs fine on one machine but not another?

It would seem to me that there might be a memory leak of sorts with respect to Firefox. But perhaps the leak could be a result of a plugin? Or perhaps it happens when a certain website is visited? Or perhaps it’s most common when you’ve let Firefox run for 7 days straight. I don’t know. But the point is that neither do any of the users reporting this problem. And most of them seem happy to complain about it and recommend that you not try Firefox 1.5.

Yes, you say, but that is what users do. They expect software to work and when it doesn’t, those users complain. I agree; they should expect it to work. But if you are a writer for a publication (either in print or on the net, such as the person who wrote the linked article above), this no longer applies. If you are going to write that Firefox 1.5 uses up a lot of memory and that you should hold off, then I highly recommend that you do yourself and, more importantly, your readers a favour and do some research before you write your complaints for all to see. I spent 10 minutes cruising around and came up with a link to a reported bug on the Mozilla bug site. Within that page are several helpful things to try as none of the firefox developers seemed to be able to replicate the bug (at least as of December 5th). That not to say that it’s not happening, just that it’s not easily replicable on another machine.

And for those who care, Firefox 1.5 on my Linux laptop uses up about the same amount of memory as it always has. Just another reason to go with Linux on the desktop.

Dell C840 vs Gentoo vs GCC 3.4.4

Gentoo recently stablized GCC 3.4.4 within Portage. Since the GCC 3.4.x binaries are incompatible with 3.3.x, an upgrade of sorts is required. There are two methods to accomplish this upgrade: method one is to rebuild everything and method two is to rebuild only those libraries that the “revdep-rebuild” command thinks you really need to rebuild. Since I have a three year old laptop, I opted initially for the second method, only to find that the end result still left my machine with many, many packages that required GCC 3.3.

So I switched to method one, and finally, after close to a week of compiling, my laptop is 99% GCC 3.3.x free. It was actually more like a five day time span, of which, perhaps two full days was spent compiling. The remaining time was spent either idle (due to a failed compile) or not comiling at all since I was working (or playing games). Long story short; if you plan to rebuild a fully functional Gentoo-based desktop system on a 2GHz Pentium 4, expect to spend about two days compiling stuff.

Beaten To The Punch

Back in October, Ali and I hopped on an Air Canada flight to NYC and stayed with Marcos for the better part of a week. I’ve written entries about our trip for days 1, 1b, 2, 3, 4 and 5 but have yet to write about our last two days. And I still have to finish an entry specifically about the plane rental on Saturday. But Marcos has beaten me to the punch and posted some pictures from the flight. He also briefly describes the route but in a non-pilot way so there’s still lots for me to write about. That said, I was flying for the entire flight and Marcos is the superior photographer of the three of us, so the best pics of the flight will undoubtably come from him.

Astaro 6.1x on Dell PowerEdge 850

Our new firewall server arrived today; a shiny, new Dell PowerEdge 850. Astaro’s Hardware Compatibility List doesn’t have the PE850 on it, but it does have a PE750 so I took a chance. I really like Dell’s servers and for a company that out grows things faster than a 6-year-old playing hockey, it’s hard to beat Dell’s pricing.

In any case, I set up the drives in a RAID-1 configuration and booted the server with the latest Astaro Security Gateway CD. The Astaro software picked up all the servers and had absolutely no problems installing version 6.102 onto the machine. Then I simply restored the backup from the old fireware machine and the new server was ready to use.

I already fired off an email to Astaro with details about our server so they could add the machine to their HCL. But since I suspect that updating that document will take forever, here are the details for anyone wanting to set up Astaro Security Gateway Software on a Dell PowerEdge 850:

Dell PowerEdge 850
2.8 GHz
512 MB RAM
CERC/PERC 1.5 6 Channel PCI SATA RAID Card (BIOS v4.1-0, build 7417)
2 x 73 GB SATA HDD
RAID-1 configuration

I can’t see why other similar PE850 setups wouldn’t work, but as per normal, I make no guarantees that they will. This server worked for us; others may experience varying results.

Catching Up

I’m just about caught up again with work related things now, so I expect to have some time this week to catch up on my blog postings (which should get Marcos off my back).

As a teaser, here’s what’s in the works for ‘new’ blog postings. The remaining NYC Trip postings (there’s three) are coming. I started my IFR training back in mid-October and have six postings so far dealing with that. I flew out to Dauphin, MB and back for Thanksgiving and have a couple of interesting blogs about that. And along the way, I’ll be trying to keep my blog up to date with other daily entries.

ndiswrapper 1.6

I installed the latest version of ndiswrapper (version 1.6) this afternoon to make sure that it still works with the D-Link DWL-G122 Wireless USB Adapter. I’m pleased to report that I am currently writing this entry over a wireless network using ndiswrapper 1.6 and the DWL-G122. The process hasn’t changed since I last wrote about using ndiswrapper.

Under the Linux 2.6.14.2 kernel, ndiswrapper 1.6 seems to handle unplugging of the device better than previous versions, though I get the following message in the system log:

ndiswrapper (miniport_pnp_event:318): Windows driver prisma02 doesn't support MiniportPnpEventNotify for safe unplugging
ndiswrapper: device wlan0 removed

I’m not entirely sure if that’s good or bad, so I still suggest being careful and removing the ndiswrapper kernel module whenever possible before unplugging the device. Doing otherwise, you do so at your own risk, given ndiswrapper’s past record. Plus, you may or may not experience the same results under a different kernel.

Quebec Separation: An Irrational Choice

With the Canadian election in full swing now and the recent election of a new BQ party leader, there has been a lot of talk of Quebec separating from the rest of Canada. I’m a traditionalist so I’m in favour of keeping Quebec as part of Canada. In fact at one time I would have considered fighting to keep the country together; not so anymore. Now I’m just tired of hearing the separatists whine about how special they are and as a result.

The thing that gets me is that I don’t understand why it is that the separatists think that their ‘specialness’ is any different than that of any other province? Yes, Quebec has a different culture than the rest of Canada but I can say the same thing about Alberta. And the maritimes can say the same thing about their culture. But you don’t see us running around whining about wanting to separate. Why not? Well, because we’ve thought the idea through and come to the realization that separating would be stupid.

Stupid? Yes, stupid. Anyone that wants to separate from Canada is thinking with their emotions rather than their brains. Thoughts of separation simply aren’t rational. At all. I’m not an economist but I can’t see separation leading to anything other than a week long party followed by years and years of Quebec depression followed by Quebec begging to be part of Canada again. Don’t believe me? Read on.

A big push is for taxes paid by Quebecers will stay in Quebec. Guess what? They already do. And not only that, the rest of Canada (actually Alberta and Ontario) pays Quebec $4.5 billion in equalization payments. A separate Quebec is going to either have to raise taxes or deal with a huge budget shortfall.

There is a lot of overhead required when running a country. Quebec is going to want a military of some form. That’s not a cheap venture by any stretch. So they are either going to have to ‘lease’ the Canadian Forces or create a separate Quebec military. They could try to do without but that isn’t going to go over well in all the cities and towns that currently rely on the Canadian Forces for a large chunk of their economy. And what will Quebec do for money? Will they continue to use the Canadian dollar? Switch to the US dollar (perhaps an unwise choice given the lack of strength the USD has right now)? Create their own? Regardless of the choice, there’s some more overhead costs. What about borders? They’re gonna need customs agents, passports and other such border related things. And what about all the federal government buildings and other such infrastructures taken care of at the federal level? Quebec is going to need to pay for that. Things like air traffic control, airports, postal services, central bank, etc? And what about the stock exchange? Will Quebec create it’s own exchange?

Quebec will also have to be prepared to offer some heavy financial incentives to keep companies from leaving Quebec. If I was a business owner in Quebec and wanted to remain Canadian, I’d be moving. Even if I had an office or plant in Quebec, I’d consider closing it given the unstability that is sure to follow.

There are many other things that this movement centres around, but in today’s money-centric world it’s incredibly hard to be happy without money. If that sounds sad, it’s because it is. We need money to live, to provide a roof and food for our families, to take holidays, etc. If you look at marriage statistics I think that you’ll find a lot of marriages break down because of causes that stem from financial problems. If you are financially stable, things are so much easier. So while the separatists might be ‘free’ in a Quebec that’s not part of Canada, I can’t see things improving financially. And that’s going to make life tough. It might work, but I suspect it’s going to be a tough slog for the better part of decade.

KDE 3.5.0

I finished building KDE 3.5.0 overnight last night and have now been using it all morning. There are lots of changes (this is a great article on KDE.org explaining all the new stuff), but the most critical change for me is the speed increases in Akregator and Kopete. It’s also nice that Konqueror is now ACID2 compliant and of course Konqueror’s integration with things like a video player is incredibly nice (and is one of the things that Konq has over Firefox).

I’ll keep you posted on how things go with KDE 3.5 on Gentoo but I suspect (given my past experiences with KDE on Gentoo) that I won’t run into much in the way of issues.

Exciting Day For New Releases

The KDE and Mozilla Firefox groups have both released new version of their software today. From KDE we get KDE 3.5, the last of the 3.x releases on the way to 4.0. And from Mozilla we get the long awaited Firefox 1.5, which is the halfway mark on the way to Firefox 2.0. I have already started building KDE and expect to build Firefox at some point tomorrow (once KDE is finished building). Of course it’ll likely be next week and beyond before the packages are marked as stable within Gentoo portage. Sigh.