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.

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.

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