noel alanguilan

firefox 3.5 just came out. and from the reviews of the release candidates, 3.5’s javascripts’s performance is twice as fast as the previous release (3.0.11). its also a good chance for me to play with html5–the up and coming web standard.

ubuntu checks the file system every 38th boot (at least in my system) using fsck. it cannot perform this checking while the drive is in use (or mounted). to force ubuntu to check the file system the next time it boots up, at the terminal, issue:

sudo touch /forcefsck

grand mother vendor in quiapo

i use sshfs (secure shell filesystem) to connect to a remote drive or directory over the internet. what’s so cool about this program is that it presents to the user the remote drive or directory as a folder in the local computer–like it was just another folder in the user’s computer. all communication between the local and remote computer is encrypted.

to mount a remote directory to the local computer:

sshfs user@host:remotedir mountpoint

example, to mount the root directory (/) of the remote host computer with an ip address of 192.168.20.25 as the user root issue the following command on the console:

sshfs root@192.168.20.25:/ /home/noel/localmountpoint

where:
localmountpoint: is an empty subdirectory under noel’s home folder in the local computer

you’d then see a folder named localmountpoint on your desktop containing the files and folders of the remote computer. expect access to be slow if your internet connection is slow.

to unmount the remote directory

fusermount -u localmountpoint

if you don’t have sshfs installed, you can easily (apt-)get it from the repositories:

sudo apt-get install sshfs

links:
secure shell (ssh)
fuse homepage

note: this post is an expansion of my previous post about sshfs

burke
corner escolta

i recently read that there is a a fairly serious attack against the sha-1 digest algorithm, which is used in many cryptosystems, including openpgp and that its time to ditch sha-1 for a more secure digest algorithm. because of this, i have created a new key and phasing out my old one.

you can download my new key here. they’re also in the ubuntu and mit key servers already. the new key id is 177DDDC0

if you want to know more of what i’m blabbing about you can visit the gnupg website. i use these keys to electronically sign my e-mails and, optionally, encrypt them.

firefox 3.0.10 did not solve facebook-eating-memory issue for me

i woke up with an update waiting for me. it was apparently firefox 3.0.10. the first thing that came to mind was install the update and visit facebook to see if there were any improvements from the last version. ufortunately, as sh0wn by the screenshots, there were none or very little improvements. it still doesn’t release memory properly unless you close firefox altogether.

i used the same test as the last time.

and this is the usresponsive script which has been giving me problems

silyang plastik
(plastic chair)

one afternoon in an old, old house.

i noticed a couple of things that changed when i ugraded to ubuntu 9.04

• the menu entry of grsync was moved from applications – internet to applications – system tools
• opera disappeared. i don’t exactly know how but the .opera subdiretory with my previous settings was still there. i just had to download the latest .deb package directly from the opera website. it wasn’t in the add/remove applications program and there’s one dubious looking entry in synaptic so i decided to do a direct download.
• skype disappeared too (there’s a pattern here). so i had to download the .deb package directly from skype. because of the relative newness of ubuntu 9.04, the available versions are for ubuntu 8.10 but these should work as before.
• after ugrading to firefox 3.0.9 flash videos became choppy. i remember uninstalling the flash plugins–all of them–via synaptic. then downloading and installing the latest .deb from the adobe website. i also noticed that firefox’s memory footprint became quite a bit larger–a little over 500 megabytes in my case–especially after spending a good amount of time in javscript and ajax-heavy sites i.e. facebook.
• the booting, shutdown and login screens are new.
• when shutting down the computer there’s a new confirmation dialog box with a 60-second countdown timer confirming if you really want to shutdown or not. this also applies when you want to restart the computer.
• booting seems faster–around 20 seconds on one workstation.
• there’s a new theme called new wave which i switched to.

i’m just wondering how it performs with older computers (pentium 4, 256 meg ram). if you know, please leave a note.

it was just a hunch that i’ve been meaning to dive into for a couple of days now. when i’m on facebook, the memory footprint of firefox gets larger and larger until i reach that point where i am forced to close firefox (or kill the process). i do have several tabs open at the same time–besides facebook i am also accessing my mail, this blog, slashdot, a news site, a bike forum, flickr and ubuntu forums, just to name a handful. so it was hard to pin down the culprit to just one site.

this morning i decided to experiment. from a fresh boot:

• start firefox
• log on to facebook only (defaults to my profile)
• click on home
• click on a friend’s profile
• click on home
• click on another friend’s profile
• click on home
• click on a third friend’s profile
• click on home

in the memory and swap history section, each step corresponds to each visit to my 'home' page in facebook

i waited for the browser to finish loading each page before moving on and clicking on the next. by the fourth visit to my home page the browser started to get sluggish and it popped a warning (second image) saying that there is an unresponsive script on the page and it is offering either to let the script continue or to stop it. i opted to stop the script and close the browser. the first image shows an increase in memory usage each time the home page in facebook is revisited. by the fourth visit the swap memory has started to increase as well.

i also found out that closing the browser tab where facebook is assigned does not free the memory it used. that can only be accomlished by closing the browser itself.

this may be the script that's allocating all that memory.

i’m not sure which is really the culprit but i’m leaning more on firefox’s memory handling. i do not remember the previous versions being this  bad at handling memory. but then again facebook may be using a new script for the user’s home page.

i’m just hoping it gets fixed. soon.