Tag Archives: IT

Firefox Memory Hog

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Now, for almost as long as I can remember (yes, I have a short memory), I have been a big fan of Firefox. I work on web applications so I have quite a few browsers installed, but generally I stick to Firefox for most browsing, with IE as a “backup” for those odd little sites which are cabbaged in other browsers. Opera is installed, but it doesn’t get used as often as the “big two” and the Seamonkey / Mozila etc browsers are hardly touched (anyone use Amaya for browsing?).

Recently, Firefox informed me that it had been updated and needed a restart. I dutifully complied and everything seemed to run fine.

As the hours and days passed, I noticed that my system was becoming slower and slower – web pages were taking an eternity to open and when I was running Photoshop or other system intensive applications everything really was starting to slow down. For reference, my system is an Athlon 64 x2 3800+ (Dual processor) with 1gb of ram. You would hope, that it would be fast at web browsing and basic office applications. It was, until recently…

Some initial research revealed that crap-shop-crap-ISP Pipex was providing me with a fraction of the broadband service they claimed, which explains the slow web pages (somewhat), but the problem remains in locally hosted pages. Despite my disgust with Pipex, they can’t really be blamed for everything else slowing down either.

Eventually, I cracked and bothered myself to look into this. Opening task manager reveals a possible cause of the problems. Firefox is a massive memory hog. I mean massive.

An example I had Firefox open with nothing other than this blog displayed. IE was running with this blog, Flickr, eBay and gmail tabs open.

Firefox was using 164mb of RAM vs IE which was using 98mb. IE had more tabs open and the tabs had more data-heavy pages.

What on Earth has the world come to. I tried opera with the blog page and flickr open and it hardly registered a byte. Blimey.

It seems that firefox, at least with this current “Upgrade” has become a worse memory hog than IE. Opera is like lightning in comparison to Firefox, but it always has been – seeing IE more responsive and less memory intensive is pretty shocking. I am going to look into this a bit more, but I would be interesting in hearing any other experiences on this subject.

[tags]Firefox, Mozilla,Internet Explorer, Opera, IE, Technology, Web Browsers, RAM, Memory, System Resources, Computers, Computing, Software, Problems, IT, Upgrade, Pipex, ISP, Amaya, Internet[/tags]

Security Madness

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We at WhyDontYou would never consider suggesting people had insecure computers when it comes to dealing with their work, or personal data, but there comes a point at which madness takes over.

For example, today I was give access to an IT system by my employer. Being very zealous at the thought of evil people from the internet getting access, they have instituted quite strong policies when it comes to people being able to access data. Amazingly, some IT guru has convinced them of the need for all users to have very strong passwords. This has translated into a policy which requires all passwords to be 14 characters long, have a mix of upper/lower case letters and numbers, not include your user name or common words (whatever that means) and not be the same (or a variation of) any of the last 36 passwords. Passwords must also be changed every 30 days.

Blimey.

At first I thought it was just me, but upon asking around my workplace there is no one who claims to be able to remember their random string of gibberish password. Almost every one eventually admits to writing the password down and either carrying it with them or leaving it by the terminal.

Now, it strikes me that this pretty much undermines the point of having the password in the first place… In the quest for Fort Knox style security, my employer (or at least the BOFH IT team) have largely undermined everything. Isn’t technology great?

[tags]Computers, Technology, Security, IT, Hacking, Corporate Culture, Culture, Logic[/tags]

Atheist Programmers

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Can anyone tell me why so many programmers, software engineers, web designers and the like are devout theists? I spend a fair amount of my time searching the web for things like plugins, new themes and web design inspiration. Oddly, during these searches much more than half of the sites I come across are overt, campaigning theists. I dont mean they belong to people who “believe” but they are sites with blatant “I love God” type statements all over them. This also leads me to wonder what the other 40% of sites are run by — are Atheists such a minority in IT?

As a recent example, I found an interesting looking plugin (Post Information) which was a good few months old, so I thought I would go to the main blog to see if it was still in use (it doesn’t seem to be) or there was any info on it (there doesn’t seem to be).

However, on the main blog is a vast array of pages with text like:

Jesus Christ has a special place in the unfolding of history. History has a special place for Jesus. In fact, all of history is for Him (Colossians 1:16). He is not just a man nor is He just another religious leader.

Now, I am not going to turn this blog post into a simple anti-Theist post with loads of snide remarks. The person who made this blog did not force me to visit, they did not trick me into visiting, and they are not trying (as far as I saw) to pass of nonsensical woo as science. However, I am curious.

This is certainly not the first time it has happened, in fact it is almost the norm now to visit the home page for a plugin or similar and find lots of “I love Jesus” type messages. I have yet to come across a page which says “I am an atheist.” Is this a sign that designers (programmers etc) are more inclined to be theists? Is this a sign that theists make better programmers? Is this a sign that Atheists are simply more relaxed about their lack of beliefs?

Personally I think it is more the case that Atheists have no need to harp on about their imaginary friends and as a result, they simply don’t. Even if every site I come across which doesn’t have a “I heart Jesus” type thing is an Atheist, there are still a LOT of theists out there…