New blog

Well, I’ve reached the point were I would rather a working website than one I’ve written myself, thus project-2501.net has become yet another WordPress blog.

I will attempt to get the OCAU rss feed up soon.

Posted on 12. February 2007

Ubuntu on my laptop

This (almost) marks the end of my running Linux (Ubuntu 6.10) on my laptop. I run Ubuntu at work, so this is more about compatibility than Ubuntu as a distro.

Laptop:

  • HP Compaq Presario v6000-something-or-other (the Core2Duo one with the 100GB HDD)

Good things:

  • Installed without any problems
  • Audio and video acceleration worked out of the box
  • Fast and responsive (well it is a Core2Duo)
  • Only taking 10 minutes to install and play with Beryl

Livable things:

  • Wide screen support. It was only a 5 minute fix, but there are a lot of laptops and desktops with wide screen displays.

The not-so-good things:

  • smbfs (and cifs) suck. Corruption is not acceptable.
  • Wireless support was flaky. I was able to get it too connect, but the speed was low (2.5MB/s over 802.11g) and was unable to get WPA working. The gnome network manager thingy was able to detect networks but never fully connect.
  • Can’t play DVDs. No it not a decoder problem, just lots of seek/reading errors from the DVD drive. Apparently turning DMA off will fix this, but that’s not really a solution.
  • Suspension and hibernation, well, just didn’t work

Now I said almost. 20 minutes ago I whipped out my original XP disks with FCKGW scribbled on the front (because my laptop didn’t come with any discs) and booted up. New laptop = SATA HDD = Drivers needed to detect HDD. So I don’t have a driver CD, or a floppy/floppy drive, and my desktop computer doesn’t have a working burner (Gigabyte DS3 MB with a single PATA channel with two HDDs).

Hmm, perhaps it’s a sign to install Vista :-)

Posted on 12. February 2007

Very simple captcha decoding using the Canvas tag

Ever since learning about the canvas tag I’ve been wanting to try this. Yes, the captcha I used is amazingly simple to break, but, I doubt I’m smart enough to tackle anything more complicated. Though I feel it still serves a good proof of concept (espcially when combined with Greasemonkey)

canvas captcha

Posted on 11. February 2007

Digg: Javascript overload?

The Digg front page (28KB) requires 2 (3?) CSS files and 17 Javascript files to be downloaded before it can be displayed. This shouldn’t be a problem as the files should be cached on the first visit. But I wouldn’t’ be here writing this if that was the case. It appears that max-age is set to 60 minutes on almost everything, even the images.

I used the Live HTTP Headers extension for Firefox to examine all the HTTP responses sent when doing a full refresh, to see just how much data was being transferred.

File sizes are the actual number of bytes sent by the server (minus HTTP protocol overhead). Most files have been compressed using gzip.

Front page: 6,928 bytes in 1 file

CSS: 9,550 bytes in 3 files

Javascript: 238,830 bytes in 17 files

Images: 32,030 bytes in 25 files

  • Not interesting

Time Comparison

  • Minimum data to download (HTML + CSS + JS): 255,308 bytes
  • Everything (HTML + CSS + JS + Images): 287,338 bytes
  • Speed in bytes = (speed in bits / 8) * 0.85 (overhead)
  • This doesn’t take in consideration latency or HTTP overhead

Minimum (no images)

  • 56k: 46.2 seconds
  • 256: 9.4 seconds
  • 512: 4.7 seconds
  • 1500: 1.6 seconds

Everything

  • 56k: 52.0 seconds
  • 256: 10.6 seconds
  • 512: 5.3 seconds
  • 1500: 1.8 seconds

Is this really acceptable for a website? Or more importantly, a simple front page?

Just how many features are being used on the front page?

Why should (almost) everything expire in 60 minutes?

Posted on 28. January 2006

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