I'm trying to teach myself to sing . Unfortunately, it was so quiet. I could not hear any sound at all. Only I know is that my sound card works well with ALSA so the problem could be firefox don't know how to deal with ALSA properly. By the way, every questions have their answers including this one. Eventually, I found a good blog since last January. I just need to install alsa-oss (already done) by sudo apt-get install alsa-oss. And then modify /etc/firefox/firefoxrc to use ALSA as below.

It seems I forgot about ipdb.mysql during last upgrade so I got a comment about my mistake. To fix this problem, I will upload as an attach file with this post so you can get it anytime you want. I don't commit it to the CVS because of its size. It might take your updating into big trouble for diffing 5MB text file.

As of today, Linux Kernel 2.6.x has been hacked for lots of local root exploits. Anyway, it doesn't matter how many they are but it does matter that most of that exploits valid on most Linux stations. One serious case is that they also valid on even cluster distribution like NPACI Rocks. In other words, the whole servers in a cluster maybe exploited for cracking bigger goal, e.g., password decryption. Ones may argue that it is not that dangerous because they are local root exploits, not remote root exploits. Yes, they are. But you have to imagine the power of grid computing where you can run a job seemlessly on remote clusters with automatic executable staging. That's enough. One may exploit the whole grid instantly.

In browser war, there are big three player in this game. The first one and my favorite is Firefox. Anyway, it seems like Firefox is beating by IE 7 and Opera 9. While other competiters trying to promote its usability and resource usage, Firefox is still focusing on extensibility and performance. One big problem here is not performance but resource consumption. In other words, Firefox is growing up and it is not for machine with main memory lower than 512 anymore. Well, to make it more fair, we are engineer and we talk by exact value. I found a comparison. Let's skip to the resource usage. The article measured memory usage in MB with no pages load on MS Windows XP Professional SP2. The result turned out that Opera 9.0 consumed 53 MB followed by Firefox 2 Beta 1 at 42 MB and IE 7 Beta 3 at 24 MB. After loading 6 tabs, Firefox 2 Beta 1 ate 73 MB, IE 7 Beta 3 at 70 MB, and Opera 9.0 at 52 MB. The last performance test is startup time in seconds. Opera 9.0 was the winner in this criteria while Firefox 2 Beta 1 is the slowest one.

My favorite feed reader is because I can read all entries without moving mouse pointer. The former one is Sage which is a Firefox extension. Sage is good but big at the same time. One good thing of Sage is cookie. Since Sage is integrated to Firefox, it read feeds with cookie authentication perfectly. Anyway, Sage is not the right one for me so I switched to Google Reader which is much more simpler. I had lived with Google Reader for a few months without problem until last week. I went to seminar in a hotel without network. That was a sad story. I was unable to read any feeds at all. So after I came back, I looked for an offline feed reader for the next chance. Eventually, I found Liferea, standed for Linux Feed Reader. What's a good name?

Skype seems to be the best VoIP right now in terms of capability and scalability. In addtion, it officially supports many Linux distros like SuSE, Fedora Core, Mandriva, Debian and its families, and other Linux-based system by static binary format. For debian package, especially Ubuntu, it works nicely. I got menu immediately the installation finished. In this latest beta version Skype for Linux 1.3 BETA, it supports both OSS and ALSA. Luckily, it also lets me choose ALSA device by myself so I can use my USB sound card easily.