Various subjects

I've been messing around with my system a lot lately. Mostly because I had some issues last night whilst I was trying to upload some homework. For whatever reason, my system seemed to hang badly. Firefox wouldn't do anything, and I had bouts where finder wouldn't respond either. Looking in to it, I discovered something interesting. I was downloading a torrent file, I won't say which one except to say that it was over 50GB large. That's right, 50! But the first one didn't connect, so I found a second torrent. Suddenly my system is sluggish. All the while, i'm trying to finish my last program and a plot to go with it and upload that to a folder before the deadline. It was already 2 days late. But Firefox behaved horribly during this time. But before I go into that, let me explain one thing to you people out there. If you are using Azureus, the java based torrent client, be prepared for it to automatically reserve hard disk space for the file you have elected to download. For me, I had a total of two files, each over 50GB in size. That left only about 3GB of free space for all other programs and processes to fight over. Not good. However, 3GB is a lot of space, and that was after what was taken in virtual memory, so theoretically it should have been fine. But Firefox had other things to say about that.

As I use Firefox more, I'm starting to see some more serious issues. For example, this stupid beachball problem. It's only browsing the web, how hard can that be? My cell phone can do that. But from time to time, Firefox just doesn't want to do anything . And yet, Safari is still limited. The beta release of Safari is okay, it improved on some things such as being able to display the rich text form of this entry box I'm using to add my blog for today. But it still doesn't support other things that both Firefox and Camino support. I still like Firefox, but my issue yesterday really angered me. And now I'm noticing other stupid little things. When I'm home I use an external monitor to widen my desktop. Obviously, my desktop monitor is much larger than my 13" macbook screen. So, naturally, I like to view my webpages on the large monitor. But Firefox 2.0.0.7 has made that very difficult. My bookmarks and anything else that brings up a menu (right-click), the menu shows up on my primary display. That is a seriously annoying bug. And I've heard others complain that Firefox only snaps to their main display and refuses to show on an alternate. I haven't had that problem yet, but the menu thing is annoying enough. I honestly don't know where I stand right now on the browser issue, which one do I like, which do I not like? I'm not sure anymore. I think I still like Firefox, but they have to fix these issues. Safari isn't being developed fast enough to make it worth while, and so I doubt I'll ever really like it enough to replace firefox. I can handle a slightly slower browser, but not an unresponsive one, and certainly not one that has issues with different types of content.

I've been playing around with different window managers for X11. I have many many ways to run programs on my Mac. I can use parallels to run most windows programs as well as any linux program. But... there is still that promise to get these things natively on Mac. Or, at least, native enough. Basically, parallels takes up too much space in both the installation and in memory usage. I'd much rather have X11 up and running to do all my linux work. This may be a mistake though, but it's something I'm willing to try out. However, I like and kind of miss Gnome. I have learned how to use different window managers and tried several, but the one I've always liked is gnome on metacity. So, I'm downloading that now to try to get it running. If it works half as well as in a typical linux distro, then I'll be a happy camper. However, this whole venture might be in vain for I'm still using Unix and every physics department in every university is using linux. It will be difficult to get every bit of software that I'll need to run on the mac natively or in X. I might simply be better off using parallels, which is fine, but not preferred. I think what I dislike the most about running linux in parallels is that it doesn't have a coherence mode like the windows versions. That is, running windows in parallels gives me the opportunity to drag and drop files and such that the linux version doesn't have. In fact, I have to quit linux first just to use a shared storage location. This is highly inconvenient. So, the more linux like I can make my mac, the better. If things work out I'll post a screenshot of gnome running in X11.

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