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Yet Another Nonsensical Javascript Benchmarking of Mostly Unreleased Browsers

After a couple of too-close-together performance-competition-between-browsers thingies, I decided to make my very own quick & dirty benchmark of current browsers. Webkit-based at least, although soon I'd like to at least try again Firefox; it's been months since I abandoned it for Webkit itself, due to a multitude of small problems, some of them caused by myself (much more than a hundred tabs always open, lots of extensions to lessen the load) but magnified by Firefox itself (extensions failing, slowness even when with much more reasonable numbers of tabs, sluggish Flash performance, problematic Java)... In fact it's a great moment to make this kind of test, since Safari 4.0.2 has just appeared, Stainless 0.6.5 too, and ... well, WebKit has a recent nightly (r45641). Chrome is the available one right now: 3.0.192 (developer release) A surprise has been to learn that Opera seems to have abandoned the race some time ago (ten times slower, javascript-wise, than any of th

Smart Crash Reports, Input Managers y otras alimañas

Smart Crash Reporter es un Input Manager creado por Unsanity (creadores de los "haxies"). La historia completa está en http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/smart_crash_reports . El resumen de la historia en español es que los Input Managers son en teoría una forma de añadir al sistema formas de entrada de texto. Pero en la práctica, los Input Managers pueden hacer muchas más cosas. Se cargan automáticamente en cualquier programa y pueden alterarlo (en memoria, al ejecutarse; los programas no son alterados en disco). Un Input Manager conocido es (era?) Pith Helmet, que añade capacidades anti-anuncios a Safari. Así que los Input Managers son muy potentes, y también pueden ser muy peligrosos. Hay quien dice que son el sueño de cualquier programador de malware, y de hecho Leopard trajo como mejora de seguridad serias restricciones al uso de Input Managers. Smart Crash Reporter es otro Input Manager típico, y mosqueante porque suele ser instalado por varias aplicaciones sin avisar

Tchibo Cafissimo

I bought recently a Tchibo Cafissimo espresso machine. I had been pondering about Nespresso, Zespresso and some other, but this one finally convinced me. There was preciously little information online about this particular machine, so I thought I could help someone. These are the things I would have liked to know before buying it and/or which helped me decide. My requirements were coffee capsules and milk frothing. I would have liked to have the option to use non-capsule coffee, but looks like there is no such machine. Also, I preferred having a steam wand for frothing the milk myself instead of the frothing unit of other machines (since I wanted to be as close as possible to "the real thing"). Frothing devices seem to be good-but-not-the-same, from the opinions I have been reading online. Also, they seem to have a tendency to stop working. Coffee from capsules of course is also "not-the-same", but everyone seems to accept that it is pretty good, and I since I

Semi-automating piece-wise translating texts through Google Translate

I am having to translate a horribly old program (1992?, DOS' Turbo Pascal)… and in german, to make it funnier… to an only-slightly-less-horribly-old environment (Delphi 4, circa 1999). To think that I was complaining about how outdated Borland's C++ Builder 5 felt… oh my. I guess/hope/fear that later there will be a more modern target. But that will be easy, given that by then I should understand everything and the program itself is not complicated.

Quotes

I remembered something like "the eyes still looked like asking if, whatever it was the universe was doing to him, would it please stop doing it". Douglas Adams, but ... where, what exactly? Some googling shows that the correct fragment was from "So long, and thanks for all the fish": "Only the eyes still said that whatever it was the Universe thought it was doing to him, he would still like it please to stop."  I can't remember why I thought the best book was "Hitch Hiker´s Guide to the Galaxy"; simply thumbing through SLATFATF has made me want to read it again. Perhaps it was the most... humane of the lot. The love story was so touching. The descriptions of the fish bowl, of how Arthur sensed the strangeness of the new Earth. And Fenchurch's disappearance was so… suddenly cruel.  I love so much Adams' style. Just recenty finished (finally!) "Thief of time" by Pratchett, and tried to stop comparing him to Adams and let

stream of consciousness

Finally one day I force myself to get almost 8 solid hours of sleep. Too many things to do, big and small; to many cracks for them to slip through. Enough times of wanting to stop and... think... and... feel. In the morning I find Mail.app crashing. WTF? I remember about haxies, inputmanagers, the works. Should be clean, but recently found and deleted an unwelcome Smart Crash Reporter. Check. There it is again. Trash it. Google for it; how to avoid them in the future? Nothing definite (will try folder actions for alerts + file named "smart crash reporter" so it can't be created; if that trick worked for a trojan, should work for something less evil). But meanwhile I found that in the list of programs using Smart Crash Reporter is Quicksilver, which I am perennialy running. (too easy / out-of-the-blue to be reliable, but Mail is not crashing any more...) Quicksilver. So much time w/o updating, and it never seems to do automatically. (still didn't finish watching the

Toshiba G450 en OS X - funcionando sin reiniciar

Por fin me he dedicado a jugar un poco con el driver oficial. El resultado esperado, como Nexus había comentado antes en otro post, era que el G450 sólo funcionase si estaba enchufado desde el arranque. Pero en mi caso era peor: ni siquiera así funcionaba. Además he visto por la red más gente con el mismo problema. El "Toshiba PC Tool.app" que se instala junto al driver simplemente dice que no encuentra el modem, y ni siquiera aparece montado el disco USB que debería aparecer al conectar el G450. El Perfil del Sistema muestra sin embargo que en el bus USB está conectado un disco de Toshiba, y la Consola muestra que diskarbitrationd no ha podido crear un disco ("unable to create /dev/disk2"). Esto se mantuvo así aunque reseteé el G450 y reformateé el disco con el propio menú del teléfono/modem/bicho. Pero he encontrado una solución, que aunque no es ideal, tampoco cuesta mucho. Cuando el G450 está apagado y es enchufado al ordenador, la pantalla muestra una a

Toshiba G450 working in OS X - whitout a reset!

Finally I have had the chance to play a bit with the official driver. Remember, the expected result was that it would only work if plugged since the booting of the Mac. That would be unfunny, but in my case it was even worse: as a lot of other people has reported, it didn´t seem work at all. The "Toshiba PC tool.app" reported that no modem was found, and no USB disk appeared, even though I tried resetting and reformating the G450 internal disk (through its own configuration menu). But finally I have found a solution. Not ideal, but not too painful, and it works. The problem was that the modem would remain in the disk mode - which in my Mac at least doesn´t even work properly, since it doesn´t get mounted as a disk. The only way I can see that it is supposed to behave like a disk is because it appears in System Profiler.app, in the USB devices list. And Console.app shows something about diskarbitrationd "unable to create /dev/disk2". When the G450 is turned off