Firefox3 Gone!

I have been using firefox since early in version 1 and could honestly never have seen myself changing. How wrong I was, after installing FF3 on my gentoo desktop, boom! Several incidents of firefox becoming unresponsive and winding up being unable to kill it (known as uninterruptible sleep) has caused me to look elsewhere.

I was sure that I didn't want to leave the great firefox behind completely so I began by looking at web browsers that were based on the engine (known as Gecko). First up was Kazehakase it is a really nice lightweight browser. I found it to be quick and responsive on everything as well. Off to a good start I wondered if I'd even bother trying something else! The next one I tried was Galeon which was a really nice browser but I think that the lightweight kazehakase had a minor edge on it still. The final one I tried was Epiphany and in short, its the one! It basically provided me with 90% of what I was looking for in a browser, a quick install of the extensions package gave me an ad-blocker. Another quick copy of the firefox plug-in directory gave me flash and my stored password. The only thing that its missing is a NoScript style tool. With the amount of trash that is out on the web its nice to have the option not to run javascript on some sites.

Hooray again for open source, providing me an alternative to firefox. Epiphany is well worth a try to anyone currently looking for a mozilla-based browser.

Graphviz

Recently I have just completed making a relationship graph for VoidNet. It was a task that I didn't think would be that easy. However I was delighted to discover that there is a tool capable of drawing relationship graphs automagically. Just when you thought that opensource didn't have an answer for everything, along comes yet another fantasic tool.

Graphviz is extremely simple to use, I was able to cobble together the graph that I wanted with nothing more than a few lines of input. Let me give you a quick example of a really simple graph.

 echo 'graph G { a -- b; }' | dot -Tpng -o graphviz01.png

This produces a simple graph linking a and b.

You can do much more linkages than just two of course, for instance:

Take a look at my VoidNet Map and why not look at the GeoMap I did at the same time. I will be producing a howto soon!

Crank 2?

I have just read that they are making a sequel to the brilliant fun and punchy action flick called Crank. At first I thought that it would be a truely terrible idea. However looking a little deeper apparently it is going to be a true sequel. The last shot of the first film will be the opening shot of the second. For those of you that have seen the first you will be asking the same question that I am: How can he survive that fall?

A quick look on IMDB reveals a taster of the plot:

Chelios faces a Chinese mobster who has stolen his nearly indestructible heart and replaced it with a battery-powered ticker that requires regular jolts of electricity to keep working.

Haha, brilliantly strange! Let's hope that it is in keeping with the fun and tongue in cheek of the first film.