Firefox 9 has survived a second week and, more wonderfully, another totally quiescent weekend without crashing. Will wonders never cease?
[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Name: Nathan Myers
Member since: 2005-01-20 04:49:42
Last Login: 2012-02-02 18:23:49
Homepage: http://cantrip.org/
Notes:
Currently employed by Aspera, Inc., where I work on secure, reliable fast file-transfer software, uniquely tolerant of high loss and high latency connections, using UDP for transport, and a user-space flow-control algorithm that doesn't confuse packet loss with congestion. Amazingly enough, file transfer isn't a solved problem, and there's no Free Software that does anything like it. :-(
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Firefox 9 has survived a second week and, more wonderfully, another totally quiescent weekend without crashing. Will wonders never cease?
Firefox 9, astonishingly enough, survived the weekend sitting totally quiescent on my office machine. Release 8 achieved this very rarely, and crashed shortly after anyway. Congratulations to somebody. Its VSZ is almost 2G, and its RSS is 1.5G, but I don't care -- I have 16G here! But I do wonder what it needs all that RSS for. On my laptop running the amd64 build, it blows right past 2G (at VSZ 2.8G, RSS 1G atm) and thrashes abominably.
You know what they say, though: "If you're not experiencing abominations, are you sure you're alive?"
My great achievement in the final days of 2011 was to replace the motherboard in my son's craigslist-$80 simulator box for $60 plus $11 for a quieter fan, enabling upgrade from a P4 to an old Core2.
I rented a DVD of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and tried to watch it with libdvdread etc. Totem failed, VLC failed, Mplayer failed, but Smplayer succeeded -- for a while. At some point after an hour in, it went a bit crazy and gave up. Apparently many people have been having this problem with certain new movies, lately. I'm guessing SONY has hired somebody to find bugs and too-strict interpretations in Free DVD player software, and provoke them in new movie releases. Anyway, if you want Midnight in Paris, you may get better results by downloading the XVid than buying the disc. To SONY, paying customers are scum.
My wife had outpatient surgery recently, which involved a nerve block in one shoulder, deadening her arm for the rest of the day. Surprisingly (to me) that was plenty of time to develop phantom limb syndrome, where it feels like there's an invisible arm in place of the real one, that you can't control, and that gets agonizingly knotted and cramped. Vilayanur Ramachandran invented the "mirror box" treatment, where a mirror is held vertically in front of you, perpendicular to your body and between your resting hands. Your good hand is visible only in the mirror, so its image looks like it is the other hand, and that is enough to allow you to control the phantom limb. It worked.
32-bit Firefox 8 running under 64-bit Linux still crashes when left unattended for a couple of days. Running it under gdb, it usually segfaults in an out-of-memory handler while chasing cycles in the Javascript garbage collector.
Running firefox under gdb takes a few steps. You will need the debug symbols, e.g "apt-get install iceweasel-dbg". In gdb,
(gdb) file /usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox-bin
(gdb) handle SIGPIPE noprint nostop
(gdb) maint info sections
(gdb) add-symbol-file /usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/iceweasel/components/libbrowsercomps.so 0x8049480
(gdb) run
The number 0x8049480 above is the first number in the line of output from "main info sections" that contains ".text", and varies from one build to the next.
Neal Stephenson's newish book REAMDE is classic romp in the Cryptonomicon vein: unpredictable, stuffed with authentic local detail and engaging, slightly larger-than-life characters, and (almost) deadpan send-ups of practically everything, not limited to: jihadists, a junior MI6 agent, Russian mafiosi, Hungarian and Seattlite hackers, Chinese gold farmers, overprolific fantasy authors both trashy and donnish, a palletload of bricks of RMB, leased business jets, an aging Iowan former smuggler and MMO startup founder, a proto-Pak Chechnya veteran, US spooks competent and not, and north Idaho anarchists, among others. The central theme of the book, though, appears to be the adjective "backseat" used as a noun in place of "back seat". He seems to be needling somebody who criticized the usage. "Cooling their heels" figures prominently, too, but it's less obviously deliberate.
I have finally caught Iceweasel in the act of crashing over the weekend when it's unused. Probably Mozilla don't get many reports of this particular failure because I'm running a 32-bit build on a 64-bit kernel. Apparently it runs out of address space during a GC cycle-detection pass. On a regular 32-bit host it would get OOMed long before that point. The 64-bit version happily blows past such arbitrary limits until it takes to thrashing.
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New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
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