Sometimes it Browses as Well

Like most people apt to be reading this right now, I do a lot of web browsing. On any given day, I’m apt to have a dozen windows and over a hundred tabs open. Firefox does not like this (luckily, it looks like there’s some definite progress on memory leaks). Suffice to say, without SessionSaver, I’d be a very (as opposed to mildly) unhappy camper.

The past few months, this has taken a decidely worse turn as I’ve discovered and installed more and more useful development extensions and GM scripts. The kicker here is that most of these are invaluable. I can’t even being to count the amount of time they’ve saved in hunting down otherwise downright nasty problems. But, alas, having all these plugins installed just means that opening new tabs gets to beachballing that much quicker. (dev quality inverse w/ browsing quality?)

Hmm, this really wasn’t meant to be a complaint post at all, but actually one highlighting some of the cool things I’ve discovered. So here’s my extension list, courtesy of InfoLister:

Slightly Obscure Discoveries

I’ve still been digesting a lot of the stuff that came out from last year, but hopefully, if one good thing comes out of my iPod dying, it’s that I’ll finally have space/opportunity to load new music more regularly. In between that, a couple of tracks worth mentioning:

Happy Birthday Darwin!

Their Own Version of a Big Bang:

Emily Maynard, 12, was also delighted with Ham’s presentation. Home-schooled and voraciously curious, she had recently read an encyclopedia for fun — and caught herself almost believing the entry on evolution. “They were explaining about apes standing up, evolving to man, and I could kind of see that’s how it could happen,” she said.

Ham convinced her otherwise. As her mother beamed, Emily repeated Ham’s mantra: “The Bible is the history book of the universe.”

More discussion on mefi.

Bashing Through Tedium

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but now that I’m working on lots of identical systems, I finally have checked my bashrc into source control. Over the past couple years, I’ve accrued some useful tricks. My number one useful alias is virc, which I’ve now adapted to scm form:

alias virc='svn update; vi ~/.bashrc; source ~/.bashrc; svn ci ~/.bashrc -m "virc bashrc auto-update"'

This is, I think the secret to being sure that you put that tricky 20 command pipe, or the path that you type over and over again. With the virc, I’m 4-letters away from pasting that and having it immediately available at the prompt. The scm calls make sure that I’m editing the latest version and that I check it right in.

A couple bits of laziness philosophy:

  • single letters – I used to have things like cdwww, but my laziness has progressed to new levels, so now I alias single letters to changing folders. Typically they go like this:

    export w='/var/www'
    alias u="cdd $u"

    The cdd is an alias I have to pushd. I also have some things bound to relative paths. For example, I have h bound to htdocs, so I can type w to get to my web folder, and either h to get to the htdocs or l to get to the lib folder.

  • hostnames – Same premise as above but for SSHing. I used to have things like sshrf, but now I do whatever’s shorter (ssh[shortcut] or [hostname])

  • tl – Simple shortcuts, like in this case for tailing logs, are great for chaining together. If you’re doing a lot of tl | grep ‘foo’, you’ll probably save as much time over the years as that mega-command you create that you don’t use all that often
  • multiple hosts – here’s what I use to create host specific branches (I probalby will need to change to globbing or regex matching)

    if [ `hostname` == "muffins" ]; then
    export svn='file:///var/svn'

    fi

  • multiple files – for stuff that I don’t want check in, I have a separate file now:

    if [ -f ~/.mybashrc ]; then
    source ~/.mybashrc
    fi

    The multi-file loading can be nested in the multi-host conditionals for loading files for specific hosts.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any good shell-tip sharing sites, but it would be interesting. — I got sidetracked here, and it’s late, so maybe to be continued.

Audioscrobbler, Getting Better!

Having used it since inception, I’ve been unsatisfied with how it actually records and presents my listening habits, but I have to admit that the journaling/community features have improved tremendously. I followed a recommended posting and was intrigued by the musical connection term extraction for the post, so I posted my Belated Best of 2005 list to try it out.

The connections require manual linking with UBB-style tags (there’s an AJAX lookup on the right) so it requires a certain amount of dedication to type the songs in (smart autocompletion is no doubt the obivous next step), but I have to say, that it’s definitely on the right (and similar…) track. Now, the test, is will like-minded people be able to find, and comment on my post and get me roped into participating more in the Last.fm community? 🙂

Ahh, PCs, How I’ve Forgotten

Yes, my Mozilla leaks memory like a sieve on my Powerbook, but I’ve really been pretty spoiled by using Macs. I just put together a new gaming rig, which yes, is quite zippy, but also seems to have weird funky things, like oh, network data corruption. Apparently, using Nvidia’s network and IDE drivers are bad news for system stability and uncorrupt data (oops!).

Source MD5
Mac (uncorrupt) 9c0b53c07f2e02fbfcbf46a1264a402a
Firefox on Nvidia 2bd3033e581d816e22011e26d5bffa1a
IE on Nvidia c801b2b558209fb1197318c90eed0f6a
wget on Nvidia 3358c3f7b06f06e287eade0bf26639fd
Firefox on Marvell 9c0b53c07f2e02fbfcbf46a1264a402a

The Marvell LAN port appears unaffected since it doesn’t use the Nvidia firewall (which corrupts downloads even when turned off. Also, the Nvidia tools load a local version of Apache, which wastes around 15MB of memory…)