Browsers: Chrome vs Iron

Well, this was going to be a Chrome review of sorts, but after a very short time using it I've moved on to another browser so it's now less of a review than a comparison post.

The rest of the pack

I've used Internet Explorer (IE) for most of my browsing years, simply because it was bundled with Windows. Recently I was doing some web development and (a) my browser (IE7) wasn't quite cutting and (b) I needed to test the website in multiple browsers to ensure compatibility with them. I installed Firefox and Chrome and (later) IE8.

  IE: My main issue with IE7 was that it lacked some features the other browsers had, such as web developer tools/plugins. (After acquiring IE8 later, it turns most of those missing features have now also been adopted by Microsoft... imagine that!) In terms of displaying websites, IE in general isn't as compliant as other browsers; this means that where other browsers display website components as expected, IE can give unexpected results, meaning that extra coding is required to deal with IE's many quirks.

  Firefox: Firefox has plenty of handy add-ons, one of which came in very handy during web development: Firebug. I won't go into details, but it's a developer's dream. Unfortunately, after installing only a handful of add-ons in Firefox, the browser took very long to load (5+ seconds) and that is simply unacceptable.

  Chrome: During web development, I installed Chrome in order to test the site in what I expect may become a mainstream browser. I decided to jump in and give it a chance, abandoning IE. Chrome is supposed to use less memory and crash more gracefully, and more. Here are some issues I came across:
- pictures often didn't load (just showed a placeholder instead);
- slow site loading (could be due to safety settings);
- frequent failed page loads ('oops this page appears to be broken or missing');
- freezing to the extent that I couldn't access Chrome's own task manager;
- I can't set it to auto-load the home page upon opening a new tab;
- there isn't much in the way of options;
- a big intrusive prompt (almost) every time I try to download a file; this seems to have been addressed, however, in the latest release.

Iron

  So what is Iron? It's a web browser by SRWare that, just like Chrome, is based on the open source project called Chromium. Iron looks and feels pretty much like Chrome, with a key difference in mentality: it's all about privacy.

Chrome sends Google the following info:
- anything you type into the address bar, regardless of whether you manually submit it (by hitting Enter or clicking Go); this is how Chrome can give search suggestions as you type, by submitting data to its servers as you type'
- when and from where it was downloaded;
- details of crashes or failures;
Further:
- Chrome creates a unique identifier that could theoretically identify a user;
- Chrome remember exactly when it was installed;
- Chrome uses error pages from Google's own servers instead of local ones;
- Chrome installation includes installation of Google Updater;

Bottom line: Google does a lot of usage tracking. Apparently it's in the process of anonymizing collected data, so that the end user can't be linked to any data... yikes!

Iron scratches all of the above data collection, and in addition it has a built-in ad blocker.

A few of the above 'issues' can be overcome in Chrome in its options or with various tweaks or add-ons.

Now I'm no security freak, and I have nothing to hide browsing-wise. But in principal I'm against rampant data collection by Internet companies. Plus the existence of Google Updater on my system has always annoyed me. Hence my interest in Iron. So far it's been stable, fast, and without the bugs I encountered in the version of Chrome I'd been using in the last month.

new hard drive

I ordered a new hard drive this week from TigerDirect. Unfortunately I delayed for a few days so it won't be arriving until Monday. Yes, I can be an impulse buyer and hate to have to wait to get something. More than once I've planned out a perfect system to purchase and then bought something completely different because they didn't have what I wanted in stock; that's the problem with shopping at physical stores.

I ordered a Seagate 1TB drive (1000GB). It's not the largest capacity drive available, and I don't need even that much, but for the cost per gigabyte it was easily the best bargain.

Speaking of cost per gigabyte, I threw my hard drive purchases onto a chart (or the ones I have receipts for anyway) to see the progression of prices over the years. Click to enlarge.



It's on a logarithmic scale and looks fairly straight. Of course, being a log scale, any minor crookedness can mean major deviation. Take the period around 2000... doesn't fit the pattern at all. That happens to be when the dot-com bubble burst.

Also note the lack of data between 1996 and 2000... no receipts :(.

So what pattern am I talking about? Since around 2002, the cost per GB seems to halve every 18 months. That's about the same as dropping by a factor of 10 every 5 years.

Somewhat relatedly, there once was this guy named Gordon Moore. Okay, he's still alive. He co-founded Intel. And 44 years ago he came up with Moore's Law, which initially predicted that the number of transistors that can be crammed onto an integrated circuit doubles every year. A decade later he altered his prediction to doubling every 2 years. Combined with other improvements beyond simply better cramming, performance of integrated circuits seems to double every 18 months.

The cost per gig during the dot-com craze was halving every year, possibly due to inordinate amounts of money going to R&D. But that obviously didn't last. If current trends continue, we'll be able to buy a 10TB hard drive for $100 before 2014. Place your bets.

Ooh and I look forward to 1PB drives before I'm 45. Let's just hope they're not the same big clunky noisy failure-prone heaters we have today.

Synergy: 2 PCs, 1 mouse/keyboard

For years I've had an old desktop computer sitting beside my newer one, and for years I've semi-seriously considered getting a KVM switch, which is a piece of hardware that lets you share one mouse/keyboard/monitor between multiple computers.

The cheapest switches allow sharing between only two PCs and don't support USB or DVI. Pretty useless since USB mice and keyboards are rather standard nowadays; plus, why would I downgrade my graphics tothe switch's lousy VGA port when I currently use DVI? The good ones go all out, allowing many PCs and even sharing sound... but that comes at a hefty price.

Anyway, over the years I've realized that sharing a monitor with two systems isn't ideal because when I'm using the older PC I tend to need the new one at the same time. So since I need two monitors, that leaves the problem of needing an extra mouse/keyboard. Desk real estate is too valuable for all that crap to be hanging around around. I guess my needs are down from KVM to KM...

In comes Synergy.


Synergy is a free utility for sharing a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers. It hasn't been updated in a few years, but for the most part it's functional.

The utility requires a host computer to serve the others as clients. I used my XP Pro machine as the host and my old Linux Slackware clunker as the sole client. Here's what I had to do to get it working:

1. Install the Windows binary to the XP machine. Below is the main window seen upon starting Synergy.


2. Set up the host by clicking the Configure button, which brings up this dialog:


First, for each screen I had, I clicked the "+" sign just under the Screens box. The following dialog pops up; for the first of my two screens, I specified a very simple screen name "A" and gave it the alias "xppro" (using your computer name is recommended).


I left the other options alone and added my "B" screen setup in the same way.

Back at the Configure dialog, I then set up links between monitors/screens. Screens can be linked any which way, from any side. The most important thing to remember is that each link is a one-way street, so you obviously want to create links in pairs that complement each other. As shown a couple screenshots up, you fill in details of a link and then press the associated "+" button to add the link.

Notice the flexibility of the link feature: you can specify what portion of the screen edge to use as a "door" for your mouse cursor. I chose to use the bottom 10% of the screens to move my mouse between screens. Keeping an entire screen edge open as a doorway is not recommended, since bumping your mouse can send the cursor to the other computer, which also sets the keyboard to that machine. There's nothing quite like typing an important key combination only to realize you're wreaking havoc in the wrong application on the wrong PC!

3. If, back at the previous screenshot, you specified for your current PC some alias that is not your computer name (as I did), you'll have to click the Advanced button in the main window and provide the alias name.

4. There are many optional features to be enjoyed, such as autostarting Synergy and defining hot keys to switch screens, but I won't delve into that.

5. On the Linux machine, I installed the package from the command line. This being the client machine, things couldn't get any easier setup-wise!

Well, that was simple; now to test. Hit either the Test or the Start button in the Synergy host window on the Windows machine. Assuming that the Synergy installed folder was added to the path in Slackware, the command to run the client side is

synergyc -f host_name

where host_name is the name or IP address of the host computer. The -f switch is optional; it keeps the program running in the foreground, which helps to see whether it's working or not.


Halting the server on the host will make the client keep trying to reconnect until the client is halted as well. Since the client was running in the foreground, CTRL+C took care of that.

A very handy tool indeed. The only problem with my setup is that I still need a keyboard attached to my Linux machine because it's a dual-boot system so the menu on boot-up requires a keyboard to make a choice. Doh!

Hard drive madness

I've always burned through hard drives fairly regularly. Like one or two per year.

This isn't only because they aren't made well (they definitely are not) but also because I have several on the go most of the time.

The current line-up in my main computer is:

Make	Capacity	Age	Notes
Seagate	320 GB	2.5 years	The two SATA Seagate drives are in a RAID-1* configuration. One has already died and been RMA'd** so hooray for RAID!
Seagate	320 GB	1.5 years
Maxtor	160 GB	4 years	An IDE drive that is the result of an RMA'd 80GB drive that was the result of an RMA'd 40GB drive. I wouldn't say Maxtor is the hardiest of brands... and living in fear of losing data is hardly worth the free upgrades.
Fujitsu	13 GB	9 years!!	A tiny old IDE drive that just hasn't died yet.

*RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. RAID-1 is a mirror setup so that all drives are written to identically but are treated as a single drive. So my 2x320GB drives are seen as a single 320GB rather than 640GB -- hence the redundancy.
**RMA = Return Merchandise Authorization: when an item dies and the manufacturer replaces it for free. When it comes to my hard drives, once one dies they generally have to upgrade me since they no longer make the size in question.

And in my other computer:

Make	Capacity	Age	Notes
Western Digital	120 GB	4.5 years	IDE drive currently hosting Slackware Linux 12.1, as well as DOS 6.22 with Windows 1, 2, 3 and 3.11.
Maxtor	60 GB	7 years	AAAARGGHH!!! It's in the processing of dying. It's an NTFS drive used in part by Linux, and it's unable to mount properly every other time. And it's making all the wrong noises.

So six drives working okay (though I'm hearing other occasional clicks) and one about to die. And we won't even talk about all the other ones buried behind the shed over the years.

First!

Thought I'd start a new blog. Why? Not a clue. Maybe inspiration will come to me when I'm doing tech stuff that I care to document. Stay tuned.