Time is an illusion

Mozilla’s Firefox browser has become heavier and heavier with recent builds. Well, it is either that, or maybe there are issues with some of the plugins I use with Firefox - but the end result is that startup load times have gone up dramatically, and performance with 8-9 tabbed panes open is very sluggish. So, I have been looking for ways to improve performance. And..

Came across Swiftfox - an optimized build of Mozilla Firefox. You can install Swiftfox by downloading the bzipped binaries for your processor directly, or by using the new Installer that they have come up with. It is a simple shell script that the user runs, selects the client processor version, and the script then wgets the appropriate build.

I have not really been a proponent of optimized “built for processor” binaries, but Swiftfox is an exception. It seems to really work well, and the loading time is noticeable, even on my relatively powerful laptop.

Finally, Ubuntu 5.10 is released.

To download Ubuntu, head over here, and to download Kubuntu, go here.

Will download and do a fresh install on the laptop. Speaking of laptops, I am back to using the old Dell Inspiron 1100, which IMO sucks. Am on the lookout for a new laptop, so if you have recommendations, would be glad to check them out.

I hate spambots. One of the reasons I went with a popular CMS like Wordpress is because there are bound to be spam block tools integrated with it, or other nice people will create good blockers And so far, most of the blocking by Wordpress and plugins has relied on IP blocks, captchas, etc. The scourge of the Texas-Holdem-Online-Poker nonsense has been contained very effectively - especially with SpamKarma and ReferrerKarma.

However, one problem that existed earlier, and has worsened are spambot-spiders. Seems a lot of the user-agent strings that crawl the websites these days are random bots. If you look at the logs, the way they behave makes you feel they are trying to get around the throttling checks, etc. And the way they land up right in the middle of the website, without following links or from a web-search makes you wonder where they got the link database from..

So, after looking around a bit, I got this nice link  Stopping Spambots: A Spambot Trap. Most of the stuff there is easy to setup, so will implement. Makes sense too. No point giving bandwidth to unknown crawlers that dont follow robots.txt.

New Linux Kernel Release, 2.4.24

New Opera Version - http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/7.50-Preview-1/intel-linux/en/