Devolio

Friday, February 29. 2008

Firefox 2 and 3 on Ubuntu - Night and day

I've been running Firefox 2 with Gutsy since it's release, and using it daily I've only been bothered by a handful of quirks.

1) First and foremost, Flash. Now, the system I do my day to day stuff on isn't exactly a powerhouse - A 3.2 GHz Celeron with 2GB of RAM - but (for me) more than enough. Nonetheless, a single instance of Flash can wreak havoc on my little celery, instantly pegging the CPU to 100% and bloating Firefox up like a balloon. I've tried Gnash as well, without much luck.

2) Occasionally sites with heavy JavaScript will do the same thing, grinding Firefox to a halt with one click. There's not many sites that do it, but a few specific cases perform a lot worse than others.

3) And of course, the glaring memory leaks. Even with zero plugins, opening a few tabs and leaving them open all night would leave me with a 400MB instance of Firefox running. Not good.

Finally fed up with the performance in Firefox 2, I installed the latest beta last night and...

I'm beyond impressed. The difference is like night and day. It opens quicker, and feels much more responsive (even after being left open all night.) Flash no longer constantly eats away at my CPU and RAM and pages don't hang up while loading. Heavy JavaScript and Ajax issues are completely alleviated. And best of all, Firefox's memory usage hasn't gone over 100MB at all - even with 25 tabs open.

So if you're running Ubuntu Gutsy and still haven't checked out Firefox 3, you're in for a real treat.

A Guide to Web Typography

Typography for the Web has come a long way since Tim Berners-Lee flipped the switch in 1991. Back in the days of IE 1.0, good web typography was something of an oxymoron. Today things are different. Not only do we have browsers that support images (gasp!), but we have the opportunity to make our web pages come to life through great typography.

Thursday, February 28. 2008

Ubuntu Brainstorm Launched!

Today a new feedback site is launched at brainstorm.ubuntu.com that will make it easier for users of Ubuntu to suggests ideas for improvements. Voting makes it clear which ideas have the most support in the user community and should be given priority. We have of course been inspired by the IdeaStorm site from our good friends at Dell but modified the concept to fit our needs.

Practical (and impractical) PHP Optimizations

I've been seeing a lot of articles popping up lately about PHP Optimizations, particularly within the code (rather than the configuration, server, caching, etc) that I have some nitpicks with.

My position remains the same: Unless your code is running incredibly slow, you've found every single bug you can possibly find without having nightmares about unit tests, or an optimization that makes more than a 10% improvement in speed (factoring in your margin of error,) don't bother. That said, let's down to brass tacks.
Continue reading "Practical (and impractical) PHP Optimizations"

Wednesday, February 27. 2008

PHP Performance Series: Caching Techniques

This first edition, caching techniques, focuses on ways to cache data to optimize your current sites. Some of the concepts here are fairly easy to implement while others may take strategic design in the architecture of your application. Whether you are working on a high profile web application or simply a web development farm these concepts apply to the masses.

Tuesday, February 26. 2008

Ubuntu Mobile

Ubuntu Mobile, a fully open source project, gives full Internet, with no compromise. Custom options may include licensed codecs and popular third-party applications. Full Web 2.0/AJAX fidelity, with custom options of Adobe Flash®, Java, and more, Outstanding media playback so you can enjoy videos, music and photos with superior quality and easy navigation and other neat stuff.

Sunday, February 24. 2008

How to create Ctrl+Key shortcuts in Javascript

Everybody loves shortcuts, so why should you deny your users of this guilty pleasure when it comes to your javascript-driven web application? Giving your users the ability to execute commands with simple shortcuts can make all the difference in the usability of your application.

Saturday, February 23. 2008

Ubuntu Hardy Heron Alpha 5

The Ubuntu developers are moving very quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. Hardy Heron Alpha 5 is the fifth alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features.

Thursday, February 21. 2008

37+ Great Ajax, CSS Tab-Based Interfaces

Over the last few years web-developers have developed many AJAX and CSS Tab-based interfaces which became one of the most interesting techniques giving us an easy way to get information without the need to open and close multiple windows at the same time.

Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding

Sometimes being a web-developer is just damn hard. Particularly coding is often responsible for slowing down our workflow, reducing the quality of our work and resulting in sleepless nights with pizza and coffee laying around the laptop. Reason: with a number of incompatibility issues and quite creative rendering engines it sometimes takes too much time to find a workaround for some problem without addressing browsers with quirky hacks. And that’s where ready-to-use solutions developed by other designers come in handy.