Advogato: Personal info for ncm

24 Apr 2012 (updated 24 Apr 2012 at 10:18 UTC) »

I have been running Gnome since 1998. In response to a need for a current version of Libreoffice, of all things, I finally "upgraded" to Gnome 3, and immediately switched over to Xfce. The result has not been entirely satisfactory. Loss of emacs edit key bindings turned out to be fixable with a cheesy bash command. I'm not yet certain that middle-button emulation will be as easy to restore -- I'll have to restart X to find out. The Gnome battery-condition indicator was better than Xfce's, and I miss Gnome 2's performance-graph panel applet. I'm half-tempted to give Gnome "fallback mode" a try, but then I remind myself Gnome can only get worse, while Xfce might actually get better. And who knows? I have yet to try Lxde, E17, and KDE. This feels a lot like the old days.

Firefox still crashes weekly when quiescent, most typically in GC cycle detection. I tried running with ulimit 2G, and it crashed immediately. With 3G it runs for a day or two. It's hard for me to contemplate how absurd this is.

The first functional language that does not depend on GC might well take over the world

8 Feb 2012 (updated 8 Feb 2012 at 11:54 UTC) »

I thought the potentially very interesting Clay language was dead when its web site and mailing list disappeared, but in fact it just moved. It turns out, in the meantime, that they have just released a version 0.1 compiler, a front end for llvm.

When Magellan got to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America, the people he found there wore no clothes, and would lie down on a snowbank to sleep. If they could do it, why can't we? The answer, as usual, is practice. I determined to raise my base metabolic rate, initially by sleeping with one arm out on top of the blankets. In an astonishingly short time -- a couple of months -- I was finding any sort of blanket too hot, and now a sheet is plenty cozy at 60°F/15°C/298K. I still have a way to go before sleeping in a snowbank, but I have not needed a coat this winter.

Upgraded to firefox 10. Now it crashes unattended, again. 8 and before usually crashed in GC cycle detection. 9 didn't crash unattended, but crashed in regular use, somewhat less often. Now, the 10 crashes seem to have something to do with timer expiration. (Recall this is 32-bit ff running on 64-bit linux.) Maybe now it's just not fooling around for as long after it's gone corrupt. I count this as progress. [I spoke too soon. It crashes attended, too, and in the cycle collector; this time after barely 16 hours running; VSZ 3359988, RSS 2457468.]

11 Jan 2012 »

Firefox 9 has survived a second week and, more wonderfully, another totally quiescent weekend without crashing. Will wonders never cease?

4 Jan 2012 (updated 4 Jan 2012 at 04:13 UTC) »

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.

2 Jan 2012 (updated 4 Jan 2012 at 04:17 UTC) »

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.

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