Small Things

I'd like to take a moment to celebrate the little things.
Little things enrich our lives in ways most of us rarely consider. A good book, a satisfying argument on an online forum, Webster. You know, small things.
While nowhere near as adorable as Emmanuel Lewis, Sunday was one of those little things.
The rain prevented yard work, we discussed religion over lunch (pros and cons) and the rest of the day was burned watching DVD's and playing games on the laptop.
Days get more productive and they get more active, but days where a person can legitimately stay in sleep pants all day should be treated with reverence and respect. And napping.
More things should be celebrated with napping, anyway.
Three pots of coffee with two people drinking it, folks. That is a good day.
Friday was less good. I spent seven hours on the phone with HP support trying to get a part (under warranty) shipped to us. The best I could do by the time we had tried everything possible was having the part for Monday. This resulted in a three-day outage. Of something. I don't really know what it was supposed to be doing before it broke, but I know it won't be doing it again until we get the busted part switched out.
Saturday we attended a festival of some kind. I know there were goats and video games. I know Gwynyth had a good time. I know kids hog a video game controller with an attitude that suggests they aren't being selfish -- They just assume an "adult" has no interest in playing Lego Star Wars Original Trilogy. Kids have no idea. Also, they all need hair cuts. Little hippies.
Multiple simultaneous cancellations prevented an actual game of D&D Saturday night, but I'm still marking the weekend an official success.
I also managed to learn something about Firefox and the supposed memory leak "bug". As a side note, if I drove a VW bug, I would pay the extra $40 a year to TXDOT for the custom license plate "FEATURE".
Anyway, I've been playing with the "about:config" page and have discovered a few settings to make this "memory leak" disappear.
The source of the confusion is the way Firefox is coded to handle cached pages, given the way most refreshes are from pages within the last 10 accessed and generally navigated to through the "Back" button. Here are the changes to make that go away and limit the amount of system RAM eaten:

Kill the amount of RAM Firefox uses for it'’s cache feature
Here i’s how to fix it:
1. type "about:config"” (no quotes) in the browser.
2. Find browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer
2. set it’s value to "0"

Increase the Speed in Which Firefox loads pages
1.Type "about:config"” into the address bar and hit return.
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set "“network.http.pipelining"” to "“true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "“true"
Set "“network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30.

This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay"” and set its value to "0".

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you a’re using a broadband connection you wi’ll load pages faster now
More options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these entries by Right Click –> New– > Interger or String

network.dns.disableIPv6: set "“false"”
"“content.notify.backoffcount"”: set "“5"
"“plugin.expose_full_path"”: set "true".
"ui.submenuDelay"”: set "0" (zero)

Kill RAM usage to 10mb when FF is minimized
This little "about:config" hack will drop Firefox'’s RAM usage down to 10 Mb when minimized

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.


Plans for this week include completing the rough draft of the Disaster Recovery (sorry, "Business Continuity Planning") diagrams, spinning up a new virtual environment, and putting out user-generated fires as they develop.
Last week I published minesweeper to the production Citrix Farm . . . For testing purposes, you know.