Gmail Down Time Again…
So Gmail is down again and has been for at least thiry minutes, attempts to access the webpage results in a 502 error. I disallowed IMAP and POP forwarding on my account so I have no way of knowing if IMAP and POP are still accessible, but I am inclined to assume that they're not. Gmail outages while rare, are not unheard of, and I have always ridden out the down times without too much complaining. But Google's mail software is now officially out of beta, and it is not acceptable for a production-ready product to be having these kinds of outages. I may just have to create a 42gems.com e-mail and use that instead of my gmail account as my primary e-mail address.
Three Weeks of Biking
Because I've had these numbers on a post-it-note for almost a month now...
Distance Traveled: 16.529 miles
Elapsed Time: 1 hour and 17 minutes
Average Speed: 12.9 MPH
Max Speed: 30.4 MPH
Distance Traveled: 10.18 miles
Elapsed Time: 44 minutes and 39 seconds
Average Speed: 13.7 MPH
Max Speed: 29 MPH
Distance Traveled: 10.692 miles
Elapsed Time: 49 minutes and 51 seconds
Average Speed: 13.2 MPH
Max Speed: 29.7 MPH
Goo on Linux
Several weeks ago, I saw an article on digg about World of Goo being ported to Linux. My roommate happened to see it too, and knowing that I was a Linux user, told me that I should download it and give it a try since it apparently gained a good reputation on the Wii. I have to admit, I was a little excited to give it a try, especially because the Linux world isn't exactly overflowing with a wealth of good games (seriously, Sudoku and Mahjong don't really count).
I'm not exactly sure why 2D Boy, the makers of World of Goo, decided to port their funky game to Linux, but I'm not complaining. One thing that people should note however, is that although Goo is DRM free (yeah!!) it is not totally free, getting it legally will cost $20 (US). I know that there are a few Linux users that turned to Linux specifically because it is free, and they expect that all their software should be totally free and open source. Unfortunately, the two guys at 2D Boy have to make a living, and since they've managed to make a good product I have no qualms forking over a small fee to play the whole game.
If you're not quite ready to put some money down (like me), you can of course download the trial version (like I did), which will allow you to play through the first level (which I did). The Linux version comes available as debs, RPMs, or just good-old tarballs (and Arch user that I am, I went with the tarballs). I was expecting that Goo wouldn't work right out of the box and would require some tweaking to get it to work, but surprisingly all I had to do was untar and run the binary inside, and Goo was up in an instant. So props to the developers and testers for a job well done. And of course, the game was actually surprisingly fun, despite the fact that on first impressions it looks like a cheesy, kiddy game. I'd highly advise that Linux users give World of Goo a shot.
Lightbox Effects
So unless you've spent the last few years never clicking on an image on a web page, you're quite familiar with Lightbox-like effects (and if not with the name then at least with the effect itself). Here's an example of Lightbox2 for those unfamiliar with it.
When I say "Lightbox-like," I am referring to any kind of "effect" that allows for embedded pop-ups of images and other forms of media (i.e. flash videos, etc). The benefit of Lightbox, aside from the aesthetics, is that it doesn't result in an actual pop-up (which are often blocked by a pop-up blocker on a modern browser), or require the user to navigate to another page and then hit the browser's "back" button to navigate back to the main content. The basic idea is that Lightbox makes a visitor's life easier, supposedly.
I have two problems with Lightbox-like effects. Firstly, the Javascript files required for the effects tend to fatties. The Lightbox2 Javascript files take up 18Kb, but Lightbox2 also requires the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries which take up 172Kb. Its not a big deal if you're site is already heavily AJAX-ified and already uses Prototype and Scriptaculous, but not everyone's site does. Quite frankly, I find it to be highly annoying that I spend so much time slimming down my images and making sure that people without lightening fast Internet connections can easily access my sites, only to have Lightbox, which is supposed to improve the visitor's experience, bog my site down by requiring 190Kb of Javascript files. There are of course, many alternatives to Lokesh Dhakar's original Lightbox and Lightbox2, many of them which are much lighter in memory. I stumbled across this helpful "Lightbox Clones Matrix" a month or so back, and it usefully lists memory sizes for each "Lightbox clone."
Javascript Performance
I've noticed that Javascript runs amazingly slowly in Firefox 3 on my computer. I'm running Debian Lenny with an i686 kernel and I have the i686 version of FF3 downloaded straight from the firefox website. Under Opera, Konqueror, and Epiphany, on my computer, Javascript effects like Lokesh Dhakar's Lightbox, (which I'm using on my blog to display image) tend to be a little sluggish, but in Firefox 3, performance is horrendous. In Lightbox, when you click an image the entire page darkens, which normally takes next to no time, even on my Mom's old Celeron loaded down with tons of malware. But in FF3 on my computer, it takes a noticeable amount of time for Lightbox to darken the screen, at least a second or two. I tried running other Javascript intensive websites, built with various libraries including JQuery, Prototype, and Mootools, but the results were the same. Javascript performance continued to be absymal. Indeed, in some cases I clicked an image, went to the bathroom, came back and found my computer was still trying the zoom the image out.
I haven't conducted any kind of indepth, exhaustive testing of FF3's Javascript performance, but from cursory usage, I have determined that its pretty bad. Aside from complaining, I have no idea what else to do.
Enlightened Love
I've mentioned a few times in my previous posts, how much I liked Enlightenment 17, the desktop shell. Although E17 is technically still in alpha, it is surprisingly stable. Suffice to say, E17's alpha is about as stable as the final release candidate of Windows Vista. E17 has been in development for an ungodly amount of time, making the development phase for Debian seem lightning fast. But as I said, even now, E17 is still quite useable.
I had some problems with E17 a while back when I was running Ubuntu. I was using a third-party repository and one of the packages was unstable and ended up wreaking havoc with my Enlightenment installation. I eventually ended up removing all of the Enlightenment libraries and packages from my computer, and since I was too lazy to grab a stable snapshot from the Enlightenment servers and rebuild everything from source, I was left without Enlightenment for quite some time. I built E17 from source a year or so ago, back when I tried out Vector Linux, but it took a bloody long time, especially since I had to resolve all the dependencies manually.
Just a few weeks ago, I installed Debian (Lenny), having decided it was time for me get started on a more serious Linux distro. I'll write about my experiences with Debian at a later time. I decided to install E17 again, but this time, I decided to be a little more research first. In the Enlightenment user manual, there is a section on installation. The manual also provides some links to scripts that automate the installation process, which was really nice for me, because one of the reasons I like Debian is because I hate having to build everything from source and resolve dependencies. I tried using the "Easy 17" shell script to install E17, and it worked great. Easy 17 not only automates installation, but if you call the script with a "-u" argument, it will update your installation. You still have to resolve dependencies yourself, but that is to be expected.
Control + s in Xterm
If you happen to be a noob like me, and are used to using a fancy graphical IDE like eclipse, NetBeans, or (God forbid) Visual Studio, then you're probably used to hitting <control>+<s> to save something (I think emacs uses "control + s" for saving too). If this is the case, then you've no doubt hit "control+s" by reflex when you wanted to save something in vim or vi. If you're using GNOME's Terminal or KDE's Konsole this shouldn't be a problem, although nothing will actually be saved.
But in xterm, "control + s" makes it so that you can no longer see terminal output. Basically, whatever you type is still processed by the shell, but you just don't see anything (I can't figure why anyone would actually want to do this). So for the uneducated, it looks like xterm has locked up and you've lost all your precious code. Fear not my friend! You can exit out of this funky mode by hitting "control + q."
In summation, if you ever hit "control + s" while using xterm, and everything appears to lock up, hit "control + q" to return to normal.
SSH Saved My Life
SSH saved my life, its true. Allow me to elaborate.
I don't have a laptop, just an old Pentium 4 desktop. So when I came home from school for spring break I couldn't bring my computer home with me. (Imagine trying to carry a bloody huge computer through airport security.) So I did the next best thing, I left my computer on and connected to the internet in my dorm room so that when I got home I could use PUTTY, which I installed on my mom's clunky old Celeron, to SSH into my desktop back at school. If I wanted to, I could use X11 port forwarding to get a GUI. It was, to say the least, pretty spiffy. All my music and movies were just a few key hits away, and my code was easily accessible. But it wasn't just data, I had access to other things like my lovely Enlightenment desktop manager, Netbeans, and even Tux Racer.
Mind you, this isn't the first time I've used SSH. I've been SSHing into my desktop ever since I started college, but I've never loved it so much until now.
(OK, so to be truthful, SSH didn't really save my life, but I'm still happy.)
Thank you, developers of SSH and PUTTY, I love you all!
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