..: schmeeve / a blog :..

Old Dog, New Tricks

With Apple dragging their feet on G5 upgrades (where's my "3 GHz in a year?"), I shoved some old life into my dusty 4-year-old Mac via a processor upgrade.

Out came the G4 500MHz Dual Processors, and in went a 1.2 GHz DP card from PowerLogix. Surprisingly, the upgrade wasn't as hard as I thought, although getting the screws in through the heatsink proved a bit of a challenge. For all you PC weenies, these are RISC chips so 1.2 is more than enough for now. (RISC being "reduced instruction set," meaning less instructions per cycle -- thus faster.)

PowerLogix has had some rough patches lately, many of these upgrades suffered from bad chips, or just didn't work at all, and apparently PowerLogix's return policy is long and tedious. So caveat emptor.

Overall, I'm quite thrilled though. It's been humming along for days now with no glitches.

For all you geeks out there, I've about gone as far as I can with this machine: 1.5 GB memory, 500 GB disk space, Radeon 9800.

Next step will be a G5, when they're finally upgraded. Then this machine will enter the world of serverdom, replacing my creeky Blue & White G3.

Mac JS

Alex King did some Javascript performance tests on a variety of Mac browsers: Apple's Safari, the Gecko-based Camino and Firefox, and the now-defunct Microsoft Internet Explorer. 24fun's Javascript Speed Tests were used.

Camino came out on top. I'm not terribly surprised by this, as it's Gecko wrapped in Cocoa for Mac OS X. Firefox was a bit behind, presumably XUL getting in the way, but more surprising was the performance of Safari: just plain dismal. (Safari is based on KHTML, not Gecko.)

Totals are as follows:

Firebird vs. Safari

It may seem basic, but I'm seriously thinking about switching to Firebird from Safari for browsing. Mute issue in many circles, but it's a damn fine browser... aside from it's blazing speed, it's feature packed, including configurable pop-up blocking. It uses XUL ("Zool") for Theming, a previous liability, which seems to have come of age. It's not slowing down Firebird one bit.

Before Safari, I extensively used Camino (previously Chimera), the Cocoa wrapped Gecko engine from the Mozilla Project. It was a great browser, and still is... but Safari won out when Apple finally flushed the sucker out and got it up to speed. Camino is lagging behind, and well, Mike Pinkerton et. al. talks more than he produces. No one man can conquer the world. C'est la vie. (But yes, I should contribute.)

Now, Firebird, even in it's pre-1.0 stage, is significantly faster. Oh, yes, significant I tell you. Furthermore, it's support of XHTML and XML/XSL stylesheets is mostly complete where as Safari's is not. There's some discussion around that on Surfin' Safari and XBL vs. XSL, and it's only somewhat valid saying XSL stylesheets are before-the-fact, when in fact they don't need to be. But whatever. Moreover, we need to be honest about standards: most aren't adopted for years despite their viability and ease, so the more the better. Elitist implementation policies have little effect in real world usability.

At any rate, Mozilla Firebird is worth a significant look, be you Windows or be you Mac. And trust me, this isn't coming from some biased point of view, as I'm now an ex-employee of AOL. (Well, so are all the Mozilla folks, kinda.) If you want Mail & News, there's Mozilla 1.7 which offers everything in one package (still in beta, 1.6 here), and Thunderbird the Mail & News companion to Firebird. (Mozilla is moving towards the Firebird, Thunderbird model where functions such as browsing and mail exist as separate applications. And rightly so.)

Microsoft has effectively stopped development on MSIE and has said the next version will only be available as part of Longhorn -- a pay-for upgrade. The Mac version of MSIE is completely dead, for understandable reasons. The modern features of Firebird have been available for years (in Mozilla, Camino, Safari, etc.) but here's you real chance to kick MSIE to the curb knowing it's sitting stagnant and undeveloped. Oh, and that you're getting something much better, and faster, and more feature complete, and more configurable...

Safari's a damn fine browser for the Mac. It's probably right for your Mom and for your untechnical brother, but if you're a bit more savvy than the norm, check out Firebird.

"Economy" USB Hub Kills Baby Steve?

So I bought this Belkin 7-port USB hub today at CompUSA, as it seemed to be a steal at $39.99 with a $10 mail-in rebate.

At the register, it rings up as "BELKIN ECONOMY HUB" which causes me some concern -- I don't remember what was "economical" (read: hobbled functionality) about it, other than it's cheap price.

I get home, install it and plug everything in. All's well.

But then I notice this wee-little warning sticker attached to the back of the package: "WARNING! This product contains chemicals, including lead, known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling."

I race for the bathroom at lightning speed... wash and repeat. Wash and repeat. Huge sigh of relief. Then I remember that I'm not pregnant! But anyway...

What gives? Is this some third-world edition hub they couldn't move in Uruguay, so they're unloading it on Americans bargain shopping in Mexican-owned big-box computer retailers?

So there it is... taunting me to touch it, rub it, and let it enlarge my colon... but no, not gonna do it!

Perhaps Belkin were the original makers of the Happy Fun Ball?