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.

Since I am a menter in , I would like to update what I and my student was done last month. My student is working hard on developing XUL-based Drupal Manager project. That's a short description. For a long one, he is developing a next generation of graphics user interface based on XML technology, aka XUL, proposed by Mozilla. XUL is a candidate for Web 2.0, another one is AJAX. AJAX seems to be better because it runs on most browsers while XUL can only run on Mozilla-based browsers. However, in other point of view, there is a possibility to run XUL on any XUL engine. Some day, XUL engine might be integrated into OS like Java or .Net.

Most of my works relate to grid technology and AccessGrid is one of them. I would like to install AccessGrid on my Ubuntu laptop in proper way. I mean to install AccessGrid via standard deb package plus a repository for next installation. Unfortunately, I have not found any sources for rebuilding on Dapper.

I was assigned to record a screencast for demonstrating look-and-feel of a portal. By the way, my laptop is Ubuntu right now. I don't want to find another machine to do this job so I have to find a way to record my screen effectively. I found How to Create a Screencast in Ubuntu. This is a good article which helps me realize additional capability of ffmpeg. Anyway, the standard ffmpeg does not support this functionality so I have to recompile ffmpeg by myself. Well, I do not like this idea because I will have two versions of ffmpeg in different directory. So I continue finding and finally found how to rebuild ffmpeg in proper way. As a result, I combined 2 approaches as follows.