Peter’s blog

I have finally had enough with the all the memory leaks of Firefox and have switched to Opera.

I have been a long timer Firefox user, since the really early days, but lately the memory bloat has just increased beyond what is comfortable. My browser is sometimes running for weeks at a time and it is not unnatural to see Firefox reach the 800MB mark even though I might only have 2 tabs open. The consequence of this is that the rest of my programs, xemacs mail iChat and Serendipity Blackmagic become unresponsive for a few seconds as I switch over to them. The worst part of the experience though is that Firefox will sometimes lock up all the tabs while it is trying to connect to some ad site or doing garbage collection.

I switched to Opera a week ago, and after a small transition period I am no really happy with it, It is always responsive, does not use much memory and has this most awesome feature called Speed dial.

Technorati Tags: firefox, opera, switch

Mountain Bike Hits 130.7 MPH … on Snow:
A 33-year-old Austrian sets the world speed record for mountain bikes, breaking the mark on a snow-covered course in the Chilean Alps.

Technorati Tags: cycling

Seems like the iPod can now work on Linux again.

We’ve won!:
Thanks to some inspired work by a few heroes, we’ve managed to work out how to get everything working again.

This is what we’ve found out: the hash at 0×58 is the one that matters. And we know how to generate it.

It’s a cryptographic signature combining data from the iTunesDB and a device specific identifier (called the firewireid) and some (formerly) secret numbers.

Instructions for linux users on how to fix their iTunesDB files are here. Windows users are going to have to wait a little while. (For interested programmers, the code to generate the hash is here.)

The heroes in question include wtbw, nopcode, teuf, simon and many others from #gtkpod.

Let’s all hope that (if they haven’t already from the iPhone unlocking) Apple learn that fighting against us is pointless. It’s a waste of their time if the open source crowd is going to get past it in just a weekend.

Technorati Tags: itunes, linux, iPod