Author: Ashley Bischoff

Mozilla Hangs with HTTP Pipelining

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

If you’ve recently been gettings hangs with Mozilla, you may be running into bug 146884 — in a nutshell, if you turn on HTTP Pipelining (Preferences -> Advanced -> HTTP Networking), Mozilla will likely hang, sucking upwards of 100% CPU within a few minutes.

It’s been suggested that the bug could be added as a dependency of the “make mozilla 1.1beta not suck” and “make mozilla 1.1 not suck” bugs. But, those requests have fallen on deaf ears.

So, in the meantime, just be sure to turn off HTTP Pipelining.

PS For the Mozilla nuts in the audience, I see that Sspitzer has all kinds of cool pre-made Bugzilla queries on his homepage, such as “smoketest blocker bugs”.

SpamSlayer

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

I just ran across SpamSlayer, which is a set of mail-filters for Mozilla that can apparently eliminate 80%-100% of Spam from your Inbox.

SpamSlayer is technically a “filter package”. It filters your email transparently and most spam never even reaches your inbox. Anything that looks like spam is directed into a separate “Possible Spam” folder for later review.

It looks interesting but, of course, I use SpamCop for my e-mail anyway. For just $30/year, SpamCop provides an account accessible via IMAP, POP3, or even webmail. And, through an extensive set of regular expressions, hardly any Spam gets into my Inbox. To top it off, SpamCop runs on Open Source software including as Apache, Perl, and MySQL — I highly recommend the service.

“We’ll leave groundbreaking to someone else”

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

ABC: “We’ll leave groundbreaking to someone else”, as spoken by ABC Entertainment President Susan Lyne at the twice annual TV Critics Association tour.

What?? That’s like Avis saying “We’ll let other people try harder, for a change”. I mean, really, are they surprised that I don’t watch their network anymore? (well, except for The Mole)

From time to time — if I’m on the elliptical machine at the gym or I otherwise have some time to ponder life — I sometimes think about what I might select if I were only allowed 5 television channels. If I had to choose today, it’d probably be: Comedy Central (for BattleBots and South Park), TLC (for Junkyard Wars, Trading Spaces, and Robotica), Discovery Channel (for Monster Garage), CBS (for Survivor and Big Brother) and TNN (for Car & Driver TV and TNG).

(Link from MediaBistro)

Crimson Editor – 3.45 beta

Ashley Bischoff7 Comments

Cool, I was pleased to discover that Crimson Editor v3.45 beta has been released today. For those not aware, Crimson Editor is a freeware source-code/text editor for Windows.

It may not quite be at the level of (say) TextPad, but TextPad isn’t free either. While I don’t believe that shareware is immorral, I do consider free software to better imbody the hacker ethos. I regard Crimson Editor as the current champ of source-code/text editors for Windows. Some features:

  • Multi-level Undo/Redo
  • Change-detection. That is, if a file changes on disk “out from under the feet” of the editor, the editor prompts the user whether he/she would like to reload the file.
  • Syntax Highlighting: HTML, CSS, C/C++, JavaScript, and so many other languages (even Python and LaTeX).
  • Auto-indent
  • Matching-parens highlighting. This is extremely handy for multi-level if-statements, for instance.

As far as what’s new in the 3.45 beta, I found this list of features to be included in 3.45 Final on the messageboard, and presumably the items that are listed as “done” are included in the beta.