Hurgh’s Blog

Ok, so I am a long time user of Mozilla Firefox, and I must say, I really like it as a browser. Sure there is some things that it doesn’t do, that IE does (mainly ActiveX stuff), but it does all the stuff that I need it to do.
There is one problem that I find is really annoying. Firefox 1.5 (the version that I use) has a bad memory leak. If I leave Firefox open overnight or over the weekend (which I do all the time), normally with only 5-6 tabs open, when I come back the next day, Firefox is using up ~200-300mb of RAM and the same VM.

A couple of days ago, i stumbled across this post: Firefox 3.0 Improves Memory Management and finally I thought that this was the answers to the memory problem in Firefox 1.5!! The article states that he had never had Firefox 3 consume more than 70mb of memory with 10 tabs open. I thought this was great news, so I quickly downloaded the alpha release, and installed it.

My first thoughts were great, the interface had changed a little, it had a few extra little features, one of which is automatic spell checking in text boxes (which is very useful for me), and after using it for a day, I was beginning to agree with the other blog poster. I had not seen the memory usage for Firefox 3 go above about 56mb!!

I then went home for the night…. When I got to work this morning, the computer was extremely slow, so I opened up Task Manager… Guess what I found….

Firefox was using up 380mb of RAM and about 1gig of VM!!!

Now, I did not get a screen cap of Firefox open with TaskManager to prove that it is Firefox 3, but trust me it is. I only had 8 tabs open in Firefox and had left it open over night, no more than 14 hours.

I will probably still continue to use Firefox 3, as I really like the improvements in the interface etc, and I do realise that it is only alpha software, but I really hope that the next version fixes this annoying memory leak.

-Hurgh-

It has been confirmed. The blog post i wrote about yesterday has now been confirmed to work.

You can download a file from here.
Here are some other handy links too:

Forum: http://forum.onmac.net/
Website: http://onmac.net/
Wiki: http://wiki.onmac.net/

There is an area to post for help on the forum, and also some other info on the wiki.

-Hurgh-

There has been a contest running over at http://onmac.net/, to get Windows XP running on one of the new Intel based Mac’s.

Well news is that narf2006 has got it working. Here is a link to a copy of the movie that he released, (nice and fast connection for Aussies), and there is some pictures that you can look at here if you are interested in them too.

I am not a Mac user, but this captured my interest, as I like the mac hardware, but need windows for most of my work, and dont want to install a virtual windows session on a mac.

Will be interesting to see if it all works.

The forum posts can be read here and here

-Hurgh-

I have been wanting to make a PC for my car for a long time, but never came across a case that I thought would be realy cool in the car.
At the recent CeBIT show, there was both new mini itx cases and via mini itx main boards released. Over at www.mini-itx.com they have a few new cases and combo’s like this Vehicle PC. Looks like I wont need to make one up myself after all.
All I need after that is a nice LCD display, a new sound system, GPS nav software and a GPS unit…..

Well looks like there will probably be better things around by the time i have all the parts to make it worth while .

-Hurgh-

Came across an interesting use for a RAID array today.

Some guy has build a RAID array out of 5 USB Floppy Disk Drives.

Here is the full article.

I dont see this technology taking off any time soon. Imagine what the would would have been like about 15 years ago if someone had developed FDD RAID. We would have been able to boot our PC’s off the 5.25″ FDD’s that little bit quicker .

-Hurgh-

Have you ever wanted to grab an old laptop and make one of thoes digital picture frames that you see around the net? Well now it looks like you dont need to. Samsung are releasing a 7inch Digital Picture Frame.

You can read more about it at engadget. You might also want to check it out on the Samsung site.

I have always wanted to make a digital picture frame, and probably will end up making one myself, with an old laptop. Chances are that this will be too expensive to justify buying just to hang on the wall

-Hurgh-