EGOPOLY

For future reference, in case my wife’s Macbook ever throws a disk: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2119528,00.asp

This is a good link:

http://blog.lxpages.com/2007/04/24/ubuntu-performance-guides/

FireFox startup performance has been bugging for a long time. FireFox is such a great browser, and the add-ons are so useful, I really can’t use anything else for browsing. But sometimes, if I’m in a hurry, I start Safari or (horrors) IE, because I know they will pop open much faster, sometimes 15-20 seconds faster than FireFox.

What bothered me even more was that FF was still slow starting on my super fast new quad-xeon workstation. I mean, what the hell is it doing?

Duh!

It dawned on me the other day: it was checking for updates for FF and plugins on every startup! Safari and IE don’t pay that penalty, since the OS does the checking for them.

So I went into the options, advanced, updates, and turned off all auto checking for updates. Now FireFox starts up in 1 second.

sudo kill -1 `cat /var/run/mountd.pid`

I was using the excellent FireBug add-on on my own site here. It really shows the crap you can quickly build up. I noticed that the meebo widget and MyBlogLog tracking were both eating up over 80% of page load time. Since I hardly ever use that stuff, I turned them off.

Quantcast and Google analytics were allowed to stay, since they use a very modest amount of load time.

Microsoft is already dead, according to pg. He makes his points brilliantly, as usual. Of course I’ll have to agree, because I freed myself from the unholy crappiness that is Windows when I left my last job. The company I work for now, which we started in early 2004, has no dependence on Windows, except that we have to test our web site to make sure it works in IE as well as FireFox. (IE is still 80%+ of the market.) That was by design. I had been screwing around with Mac OS X at home for a while, and when we were choosing technology platforms for the new company, I pushed pretty hard for Mac as the programming platform. “Wouldn’t it be great to have Unix workstations again, where your home directory had everything you need. Just like back in the day (1986-1995 or so),” was one of my arguments.

I’d been mulling over the whole Microsoft vs Mac/Linux thing for the past fews weeks. I was reading some blog post somewhere about somebody’s experience “switching.” You know, changing their computer from a Windows PC to a Mac. The commentary on the post was the typical thing you see: the Windows lovers claiming that Mac OS X sucks just as much as Windows, has just as many viruses, etc. And the Mac people talking about how much more usable the UI is on Mac. Both of which are complete hogwash. Macs really are less prone to malware, and the Mac UI isn’t really that much better than Windows. What struck me was how quaint that whole debate now is. Anybody who knows anything about operating systems, software development and the software industry, and has actually used Macs and Windows computers in depth knows that the OS war is over. Purely in terms of technical capability, Linux and Mac OS X are vastly superior to Windows. It’s like Tiger Woods vs. Me in golf.

I’ve never known anyone who has spent significant time in both Unix variants of operating systems and Windows who likes Windows better. No one. Everyone smart that I know who likes Windows better just hasn’t used Linux/Mac much. I assume they’ll be Mac/Linux nuts like me when they get around to it.

What really sealed it for me recently was installing a virtual machine on my Intel Mac, so I could run Windows and test IE7 at work. This puts Windows in the position of being the old crufty OS that you put in a box, run in an emulator, whatever. A system that runs in such a position is a curiosity, the subject of tests and investigation, but not anything you use for actual work. The real OS, where you live and work is the OS that supervises the virtual machine. In my case, Mac OS X is the supervisor OS. Other folks run Ubuntu and Windows in a VM there. We have no anti-virus software, and if a Windows VM gets infected, we just delete the whole thing and restore from a backup. In other words, our Windows “machines” have become completely disposable: all data that matters is kept outside that box.

Once your operating system is relegated to running in an emulator for a few key applications, it’s one step away from total irrelevance. Look at that cute little OS running in that cage! In the olden times, people actually trusted their work and data with it. Imagine that.

If you are a web programmer, you must get the FireBug Firefox extension. It’s like Web Developer, Tamper Data, Dom Inspector and some others rolled into one. Yet, even though it combines all the functionality, it actually makes it more accessible and easier to use. It’s a brilliant UI design.

Google has finally released Google Desktop for Mac

Yay!

Update: if you have a lot of files (more than 200,000; I have an average of about 500,000 on my machines), it’s a good idea to disable spotlight after you install google desktop. “mds” which is the spotlight index process, starts to go nuts, eating up all your memory. It got up to 750MB RSS on one of my machines before I killed it, and up to 450MB on this machine I am working on now. Spotlight is useless in any case if you have a reasonably large number of files, maybe more than 50,000 or so. It’s like they tested it for the “average” mac user who has some email and pictures, but not for the nerd programmer who has collected 20 years of email, code and random stuff in their home directory.

My hypothesis is that Spotlight is trying to index the Google Desktop index, but that’s a wild hunch.