Dark Pegasus

Two must-have firefox plugins for netbooks

Alek — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:09:58 +0000

I just got a netbook and I have to say it’s pretty sweet. However, firefox takes up a lot of screen estate with the tool bars, and how often do you really need them? Sure you can get rid of the bookmarks toolbar but the nav bar and the menu bar are annoying.

Enter the hide extensions — specifically Hide Menubar and Hide Navigation Bar. These two extensions reclaim a lot of real estate. Once they’re installed, hit F2 to toggle the nav bar and alt to toggle the menu bar. Awesome.

Look Ma, no menus!

Google Appengine Notes

Alek — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:19:39 +0000

I’ve been using appengine for a side project lately and it’s pretty sweet! However performance isn’t guaranteed, especially with a naive model. Some learned points:

Avoid accessing the datastore. Especially writes. GAE is highly optimized for frequent reads and infrequent writes.
Related to that, favor fewer large objects over many small objects in the datastore. It’s much better to load and deserialize an object tree than to make a query for each object type. This will reduce your round trips to the datastore. Also there is no way to bulk delete rows but if you have your objects as a pickled collection in a db.Blob, you can delete many elements from the collection in a single access. Pretty nice actually.
Avoid writing to the same objects concurrently. This needs to be balanced with the previous point. The contention will kill your performance as you get more users. However if writes really are rare in your model this is fine.

McCain: Spain? That’s a country in Latin America, right?

Alek — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:35:46 +0000

So it seems that McCain doesn’t know who the Spanish Prime Minister is. But that’s okay because he’s so knowledgable and experienced with foreign policy.

From TPM:

We wanted to give you an update on the post below where we described Sen. McCain’s latest gaffe in which he seemed to suggest that he might not be willing to meet with Spanish Prime Minster Zapatero because he is among those world leaders who want to harm America.

The story is already getting picked up pretty quickly in the Spanish press. And the way it’s being interpreted in the Spanish press is that McCain got confused about the fact that Spain is a country in Europe, rather than a rogue state in Latin America.

Sigh.

Even if he didn’t know you’d think he might look this up before meeting with someone from the Spanish press. This from a man who may become president.

Audio and translated text of the interview here

Translated version of another Spanish Article

Translated version of a Spanish Article describing the gaffe

Google Audio Indexing – Gaudi

Alek — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:09:38 +0000

Awesome. Google is now doing audio indexing on videos. So far it seems they’ve just started with political videos and not general youtube videos but still. Damn! Very cool stuff. I wish I was that cool…

http://labs.google.com/gaudi

The Daily Show makes it look easy…

Alek — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 15:43:40 +0000

At this point, much of their material writes itself. A few jokes inserted to keep it flowing between clips and the people they mock do the rest.

Covering McCain’s Acceptance Speech

McCain’s transformation from the McCain of 2000 to the McCain of today.

Republican comments on Palin vs Democratic candidates

PUMAs

Chrome makes javascript go REALLY fast

Alek — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 02:04:23 +0000

There are a lot of benchmarks about how fast Chrome is at running Javascript. While true there is still a good amount of bias in them. Obviously Google optimizes for their benchark suite, mozilla for their’s, IE for who knows what. But numbers don’t do it justice. Download Chrome and try out these sites to see what a difference it makes. Okay, so some of these sites are optimized heavily to run on today’s browsers so try running them on a slower machine if you can. Trust me, you’ll notice the difference.

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/mariokart/ Rendering bug on my machine, I filed a bug report through the browser.

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/chess/ Rotate the board

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/wolf/

http://www.jsdesk.com/

http://www.meebo.com/

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/examples/dd/portal-drag_source.html#

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pHAgbiDvfxHEUsrD0NhujRA (Copy this to a new spreadsheet, change the data)

http://maze.sitepoint.com

Jon Stewart on Sarah Palin

Alek — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:48:24 +0000

The Daily Show at it’s best.

Proximity to Russia means Foreign Policy experience?

Alek — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:42:46 +0000

You have to be kidding me. They’re seriously trying to claim that being geographically close to Russia means you have foreign policy experience. Wow. That’s like saying you can learn math by putting the textbook under your pillow at night. She didn’t even have a passport until last year.

Ms. Palin appears to have traveled very little outside the United States. In July 2007, she had to get a passport before she visited members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait, according to her deputy communications director, Sharon Leighow. She also visited wounded troops in Germany during that trip. (NY Times)

And she’s supposed to take over for McCain if he becomes incapacitated? I can only hope that people are paying attention to see this crap as it really is.

Protesting == Terrorism??

Alek — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:57:22 +0000

It seems some protestors at the RNC are being charged with terrorism charges… This is frightening stuff.

http://cliffschecter.firedoglake.com/2008/09/03/eight-rnc-protesters-face-state-terrorism-charges/

This is even more frightening considering the FBI wants to investigate people without basis for suspicion, the St. Paul police beat a protestor (photos), arresting journalists and photographers under charges of conspiracy to riot, using pepper spray, tear gas and flash bangs to break up protests… And most of that is just this week. Combine that with the FBI planning to spy on peaceful protest groups and it all paints a very scary picture.

Crap like this isn’t supposed to happen in our country…

After the reformat…

Alek — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 03:38:47 +0000

You have that just formatted feel. You just installed all the required drivers, Windows is running fast and smooth because there is nothing on it.

Now what?

Well, you install apps to make it useful of course! The real question is what to install? That’s where this post comes in. It’s as much of a checklist for myself as a guide for everyone else, what to install right away without spending any money.

Web Browsing

Firefox [Open Source] – Tabbed browsing owns. Pro-tip, middle mouse click on a link to open it in a new tab, middle mouse click on the tab itself to close it. No more searching for the X icon. It certainly whoops Internet explorer. Oh, and make sure to install the AdBlock plugin. The internet is a much nicer place after that.
Chrome [Open Source] – The Google web browser. Chrome is fast. Like… really fast. That’s really its killer feature. It has other nice features but is too new to have a community built around it. That means no adblock. Oops. Heh. Um yeah, anyway it’s way faster, doesn’t crash as often as Firefox and is prettier too! Just no extension mechanism yet and no adblock.

Instant Messaging

Pidgin [Open Source] – If you have accounts on multiple services like AIM, MSN, Yahoo or Google Talk, you should definitely get Pidgin or something like it. It has support for _everything_. Okay, maybe not everything but I sure can’t think of any services it doesn’t support. It’s not as pretty as Adium for the Mac, but it’s pretty good. Now if they would just add support for skinning…
Trillian [Free / Pay] – Trillian isn’t open source like Pidgin and so isn’t updated as often but it’s still quite good. I use Trillian Basic (free) but it doesn’t support Jabber connections like Google Talk so I have to use Google Talk on the side as well. For more features you can pay for Trillian Pro but at that point I’d just use Pidgin.
Skype [Free] – I don’t use this very often but it has come in handy several times. This would be replaced with Google Talk if it only supposed video chat and calling landlines. Oh well, this will stay until the day Google Talk can do those things too.

Media

Media Player Classic [Open Source] – Open source media player that looks like the old version of Windows Media Player (back when I liked it) but works better.
Combined Community Codec Pack [Free] – You need this if you’re going to play videos from the internet. This has every codec you’ll ever need except for Apple’s. If you want to play a video file that requests downloading a codec after you’ve installed this don’t bother. It’s probably going to do something not good to your machine.
iTunes [Free] – Okay, so I really like iTunes for its library management and connectivity to the ipod. And it makes it really easy to download songs and shows legally.
Picasa [Free] – Image utility from Google. Very handy if you’re just a casual photographer like me and wants to touch up the color and lighting on your images. I have a small confession to make – I’ve never done anything but hit the I’m feeling lucky button, uploaded to web albums and organized my pictures. All the same it does a really good job at it and I haven’t seen anything as well suited for the casual photographer like me.
Paint.NET [Open Source] – For when I need to create simple images or do real touch ups I turn to Paint.NET. I can only hope that Microsoft one day bundles this with Windows and shows mspaint the door. I can’t compare it vs any commercial image editors since I haven’t tried them.
Foxit [Free] – View PDFs quickly and easily with this. Much less bloat than Adobe Reader and renders almost everything I throw at it properly.

Games

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory [Free] – I’ve wasted many hours playing this game. Addictive, fun and well balanced. The graphics are a little dated but that doesn’t affect the gameplay.
Savage [Free] – Fun game, Savage 2 is out but you have to pay for it – if you get it, buy it on Steam, see below.
Steam [Free... kind of... in some sense] – Steam is the only thing on this list that really requires paying for something to get some functionality out of it. It’s worth it. I have to hand it to Valve, when Steam first came out with HL2 I thought it was the dumbest thing ever. Why should I have to be able to connect to the internet to play my game? That wasn’t an issue but it was the principle of it that bothered me. Okay, I take it all back. Being able to buy and play Portal, Orange Box, Max Payne, and having the download and install managed so seamlessly, I am in awe. Hats off to you Valve. It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.

Utilities

InfraRecorder [Open Source] – Need to burn or rip CDs or DVDs? Get this. I originally found this on the Ubuntu download page and haven’t bothered with Nero or Roxio since. Simple interface, open source and does everything I need.
μTorrent [Free] – This is the nicest and quickest bittorrent client I’ve used for windows. Azureus/Vuse is open source and good too but uses more resources. All I want is a nice list of my downloads in a low overhead client. μTorrent delivers.
7-Zip [Open Source] – I used to use WinZip. Then I moved to WinRar because it had better windowing abilities and supported rar (of course). Now I’m on 7-Zip because it handles opening .rar files and doesn’t nag me to buy it.
AVG [Free] – There are two versions of AVG, one free one not. I use the free one and it seems to do a good job. Scans take a long time but they run in the background.
Daemon Tools [Free] – This goes really well with InfraRecorder. I have more hard drive space than I know what to do with so I rip my DVDs onto my hard drive then play them using Daemon Tools. With it I can mount the DVD without having to look through my collection. I just look in the folder on my computer.

Geek

I’d suggest the above for anyone, the below is a little more specialized. If you’re interested in downloading these I assume you know enough about them.

Eclipse [Open Source] – Java IDE. Works quite well, not as nice as Intellij but much better than Visual Studio.
Notepad++ [Open Source] – High quality text editor. Everyone needs one of these. Textpad is actually my preferred editor, JEdit is also pretty good but I don’t like the interface as much.
SQuirreL [Open Source] – Universal SQL Client
Cygwin [Open Source] – Unix shell for windows
Python [Open Source] – Programming Language
TortoiseSVN [Open Source] – Awesome shell integration for Subversion and it comes with a cool diff tool as well!
Putty [Open Source] – Telnet/SSH client