I installed it and pointed an Apache2 instance to it.

Logging in for the first time… well I want to change the admin password. Wait, I can’t do that? Maybe it’s under Users. Oh, I can’t delete users either?

rpm -e splunk

Never mind.

So a friend of mine pesters me and I try out Chrome again. My, how things have changed. The first time I looked at Chrome, there were no repository packages for Chrome on Linux and I did not feel like compiling a beta copy myself. I just don’t have that much time to waste on something of a necessity that may not be fully functional. In addition, there were no extensions, no userscripts… it really didn’t have much of anything.

So without further ado, my opinion of Chrome. I started with Beta 4 and now I am running 5.0.

Things I like about Chrome:

• Speed:
  In Firefox I relied heavily on the ability to cache inside 8GB of RAM for the performance of the browser. Chrome performs better, even on 2GB of RAM. I cannot quantify how much, but the browser is decisively more responsive all around. For instance, viewing Craigslist with a GreaseMonkey script to preview images was a 30-second freeze on Firefox. It is almost instantaneous on Chrome with the same script.
• Memory usage:
  Chrome uses significantly less memory than Firefox in the long run. Firefox was such a memory hog that I couldn’t even leave it running overnight. I would return in the morning and find that my system was swapping to disk. I even set up a cron job to pkill firefox every night at midnight in case I forgot and left it running. Chrome tends to eat about 50MB per tab, still a bit high, but far from what FF started off with, and it doesn’t leak memory like mad.
• Speed:
  I cannot emphasize how much faster Chrome has been.
• Extensions:
  The ability to add extensions to Chrome was a big draw for me. Many of the same extensions that are available in FF are now available in Chrome, which is a big plus. I use Flashblock, Adblock, and lots of things from userscripts.org. If Chrome had not been available with these features, I would have stopped my evaluation right then and there. This is very important to me.
• Browser sync:
  I used Google Browser Sync when it was available for Firefox and found it invaluable. When Browser Sync went away I was stuck using Google’s Toolbar to sync bookmarks, which was fine for me. I like that the Browser Sync is integrated into Chrome and I can have a pretty consistent user experience across machines. At this time I have not done much testing of the feature
• IE compatibility is sometimes strong:
  I have to use some sites in my workplace that require IE. In Firefox there is simply no way to make these work, the JS engines are too dissimilar. In Chrome I am at least able to view and make some changes. While the full functionality is not present, it’s nice that I do not need to fire up IE6 just to view the pages.

Now for the fun part… what I don’t like.

How did I come to this conclusion? In my quest to fly a finger to Rhapsody’s support team, I installed VMs of Ubuntu 32 and 64-bit for Hardy, Karmic, and Lucid, for a total of six. I then installed flashplugin-installer and tested them all on Rhapsody.com. Talk about a time sink. Good god. Every single one of them worked except for Karmic. I ran `file` on /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/lib*.so and it informed me that the library was ELF 64-bit… the only significant difference between this non-working system and the other perfectly-working systems.

Anyway, Rhapsody works now and all I have to worry about are the grey screens again. Grey screens being why I got rid of the ridiculous nspluginwrapper crap in the first place.

Ugh.
-LightningCrash

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install curl xclip
Code:
#!/bin/bash

curl -H Expect: --cookie "myimages=imageshackregistrationcode;" -F fileupload="@$1" -F xml=yes -# "http://www.imageshack.us/index.php"|awk -F"[<|>]" '$2=="image_link" {print $3}'|tee >(xclip -i)
EOF

You won’t have error reporting, so be careful.

So some of the claws-mail rules that I use, I wanted to move to folder rules. Some others I wanted to stay in filtering to run automatically. Ultimately it meant I was going to have to copy a crapload of rules into vim and paste them back and forth.

Fortunately, claws-mail stores all of its rules crap in ~/.claws-mail/matcherrc

So I shut down claws, edit the file and move everything where it needs to go. Firing claws back up showed that I had everything exactly how I wanted it.

I’m pretty new to claws but this was just a godsend. I had a lot of rules that needed to  move.

Still running…

Might have to newfs this one and say screw it.

-Lightningcrash

Now if they only made baby clothes with Quake logos…

-LightningCrash

So I get everything in the board. I use a spring-screw heatsink mounting system that I bought. It works great.

Now I lay my computer down and just set the board on top of the chassis, supported by the motherboard box. I move the power cables over. I move the GT 220 over and plug the HDMI in. I use some RAM of mine I had extra (part of the 8GB DDR2-800 I got for $90 back in the day)

I hit the power button with a screwdriver…. Fans spin up, C&Q is bumping the CPU fan, but….      nothing.

So at this point I’m guessing the E7200 is the problem.

I have made arrangements with a [H]ard|Forum member to purchase his E6750, I will soon try that and report back. I have taken some Ibuprofen for the headache.  

Until next time!

-LightningCrash

I place the chip in my D975XBX, and the system doesn’t boot.

I put my old processor back in, and two pushpins on my heatsink break.

So I bundle up the wife and kids and run out to buy a new heatsink at Bestbuy. The heatsink does not make contact with the chip when attached. I don’t know what the crap was wrong with it, I tried it several different times, different directions until I finally realized it uses the same pin setup as my old heatsink.

So I pull two pushpins from the new heatsink to replace the broken ones on the old heatsink. One more pushpin is on its way to breaking, so I replace it too. I plop down on my laptop and look up my board revision’s C2D support. Well, I’m at revision 302 and I need 303 or 304 to be C2D-compatible at all. Even then, only the E6xxx series seem to work (and some E4xxx series). Definitely no E7200.

So I put the old CPU (a Pentium D 950) back into the unit and get it all seated. System boots up and I’m back up.

At least I’m right back where I started, and it only cost me $60 to not go anywhere.

-LightningCrash

Many people just forget that xargs can fork processes, to multithread an otherwise slow operation.

If you have a directory full of WAV files you want to encode and a quad core, fork that.

ls *.wav|xargs -n1 -P4 -i lame -h {} {}.mp3

rename ‘s/\.wav//g’ *.mp3

The -P option is for the maximum number of processes. The -n option is to limit to 1 argument per xargs call.  The -i option gives us the {} substitution. Xargs will substitute the filename for {}. This means we get an output file called blah.wav.mp3, so I added the Perl utils rename step.

xargs has many uses with forking, and you could probably even use a VAAPI-enabled mencoder to transcode a whole directory of files this way.

Just don’t fork yourself or you’ll go blind.

Until next time!

-LightningCrash