Archive for February, 2010
Posted by jamba on February 27, 2010
I wrote a little something about browsers not too long ago, but this is in quite a bit more details and compares several different browsers:
Review: Linux browsers, Part 1 – Arora, Chromium, Dillo, Epiphany, Firefox and Galeon. In part 2, we’ll look at HV3, Kazehakaze, Midori, and Opera
Review: Linux browsers, Part 2 – HV3, Kazehakaze, Midori, Opera and compare test results.
I think he has inspired me to try out some of these other browsers(on my laptop, Firefox actually runs fine on my desktop, and I do prefer it…for now)–I am especially interested in Epiphany, Midori and Opera. Firefox just seems like it is running slower and slower, and Chromium (although awesome) just really doesn’t get the whole privacy thing.
Another browser project that is interesting is Iron –it is essentially Google Chromium with all of the privacy tracking features stripped away.
And in ‘other news’, the US government reneges on ‘leave Internet alone’ policy.
Posted in linux, news | Tagged: browser, chromium, firefox, internet, linux | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jamba on February 25, 2010
Posted in linux | Tagged: backups, google, linux | 1 Comment »
Posted by jamba on February 22, 2010
Backups can be very important, no one wants to lose any of their data–especially if it has happened to you before.
I have previously setup my x64 desktop PC with softRAID, so everything I have in my /home folder is mirrored across 2 drives. However, I am not sure if I am overly paranoid, or maybe I just like to be extra secure because now I have implemented an additional backup measure.
It started when I read some of this stuff about backups and solutions, so I decided I should probably do something similar. The one from distrowatch really pushed me a long though, as the Q&A thing really made sense.
To start off, I began by reading the ArchWiki backup tools page: wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Programs. I chose to try a few of them, I didn’t like arch-backup, backerupper didn’t really work the way I liked. A few more just didn’t work for me. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in linux | Tagged: arch, backup, data, linux, raid, rdup, rsync | 2 Comments »
Posted by jamba on February 20, 2010
I had used firefox for a long time, and then recently started using chrome / chromium. It is nice in that it is faster, and load times are good. however, it seems that it cannot properly render some sites (they are few, but they are important!). I guess I need to say that IE is just terrible (although it is the best one ever), but really isn’t even an option in my opinion.
With the release of Firefox 3.6, I have moved back to using it… and it is faster than it was before. Not a huge difference, not chrome fast, but faster. Not having a lot of add-ons helps, too. I use AdBlock Plus and NoScript, which are just awesome.
So in my opinion, chrome is nice, but firefox can edge it out with some of these add-ons, even though chrome has the speed advantage.
ANOTHER problem I have, which happens to be the biggest problem I have, is that Google is becoming too big-brotherish. They have google docs, gmail, and a host of other services, while being stupendous also pretty much have the ability to track all of our personal information and browsing/emailing habits. This makes them a powerful marketing/ad-sales company, but who knows what they will do with that information in the future? That may sound a little paranoid, but too much power in a few hands is never a good idea.
So I am going to be sticking to firefox for now.
…Except on my wife’s netbook, it uses chrome because it needs a lighter-weight browser to run effectively. but generally speaking, I am sticking to firefox!
Posted in Random, tech | Tagged: browser, chrome, chromium, firefox, google, IE | 1 Comment »
Posted by jamba on February 19, 2010
Posted in linux | Tagged: bash, bsd, gpl, jolicloud, linux, windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jamba on February 15, 2010
As I mentioned in the last post, I re-installed Arch onto my laptop. This went very well, and quickly–everything really fell into place. I was going by the beginner’s guide, as detailed previously, but it was not really needed this time.
Where I left off last time, Xorg was installed and I was about to install Gnome. That went well enough, although I had to re-rank my mirrors and put the most updated first as there was some kind of discrepancy with some that had not been sync’ed in a few days.
I then started having problems with…wireless, of all things. It would work manually:
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 essid x key xxxx
dhcpcd wlan0
On boot, however it would not work. Oddly enough, I had done all of the updating and everything to this point on a wired connection…all of a sudden, the wired connection won’t work, either.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in linux | Tagged: arch, intel, linux, wireless | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jamba on February 12, 2010
So, I’ve been rolling along find with my Arch Linux installs. Well, almost. When I installed the system on my laptop, I had somehow forgotten the root password, but was still able to do everything with sudo.
However, I could not run rankmirrors with sudo, so I figured “hey, I can run rankmirrors on my desktop, and then copy that mirrorlist file over to the laptop”–good idea, right? Yeah…if your laptop and desktop are both the same architecture. My laptop is 32 bit, and my desktop is 64 bit. That did not work out so well, and I realized exactly what I had done as soon as I hit ‘enter’ after typing “powerpill -Syu’. Okay, after the installation started, if I had realized sooner I could have hit ctrl+C to stop it.
Anyway, this gave me an excuse to do a fresh install. I thought about just doing Ubuntu or something easier like that, but I really think I like Arch too much. This time actually went really smooth. X worked without a hitch, all of the other setup was a no-brainer. I have still made use of the beginner’s guide document, though. Now I am just installing gnome, and I am more or less done, just a few small things left to set up.
At least this time I remember my root password!
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in linux | Tagged: arch, linux, mirrorlist | 1 Comment »
Posted by jamba on February 6, 2010
Where I work, I am a software engineer–so I do a lot of coding. In the (almost) 4 years I have been there, we (another se, and me) have used mostly VB6 for just about everything…and we have several programs that we have written in-house that range in function. Mostly data handling/analyzation/stuff.
Anyway, as Win7 and Vista started spreading around and VB6 does not even run the IDE on those OS’s, we started searching for coding alternatives over a year ago.
The primary choices were:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in code | Tagged: .net, c, powerbasic, purebasic, vb6 | 1 Comment »
Posted by jamba on February 6, 2010
I do.
he used to make these cheesy videos (that were hilarious at the time). Later, he started drawing some things and doing who knows what else. This search turns up quite a lot.
I remember one thing he did that I wonder what happened to sometimes…he made a video game about killing zombies. The last time I saw it, it was several years ago, but it was 2D and pretty simply laid out as far as levels go–I remember it wasn’t too far into the development. However it was a blast to play. I played it a lot when I didn’t have much time, or didn’t want to get into a larger game. It was fun.
I couldn’t find anything about it, though. I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on that source code, though! :-)
Posted in Random | Tagged: fox, fredryk, game, zombies | Leave a Comment »
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