What's up with Hatim?

The war of the browsers has had a new twist after the introduction of Google Chrome. Wikipedia has a nice entry about the ongoing competetion. Just to give some of the browsers a try I switched on my Windows box (shamefully these days I do it more often than I used to, thanks to many propietery services of Banks and Universities which are not available to linux users). I have installed all the major browsers and I decided to give all these browsers a test run on my machine. The OS in question is a Windows Vista Ultimate (64 bit version with 3 Gig RAM). I used a highly page-ranked entry to do some javascript tests, and the results weren't surprising to me. These tests were not done by using any scientific method. My firefox installation is probably bit heavy with all the addons. In practice I do find Chrome and Opera to be bit faster than the other browsers.

First came Opera with 140-160 ms range, following behind was Chrome with 185-205 ms range. Firefox 3 was not very consistent with its results but it was also close to 195-210ms range. Safari on windows was in the range of 280-290ms. The worst was ofcourse IE7 which was coming in the range of  1450-1470ms range. 

Next I decided to do some rendering speed tests. First I ran a simple rendering test, but after reading a detailed report on tests done for Safari 9.5 I also did full progressive raytracer tests. Following are the results of one time run only

• 27.745    Chrome
• 32.033    Opera
• 38.079    Safari
• 47.478    IE
• 896.077  Firefox

Chrome also came first in the simple redering tests. For me this is proof enough that Google has produced a real fast browser. What I don't like about Chrome for now is no extensions and no linux version but that will probably be solved soon. I am also surprised to find firefox performing real bad. Perhaps the people at Mozilla should start focusing on performance issues as most end users don't care about  bells and whistles, but a simple browser for daily chores.

I have to confess that I have never owned a DSL connection. It was always a Fiber optic connection or a shared T1 line at the workplace/university. With the ongoing price wars for DSL connections I decided to get a connection for my self at home (actualy it was for my sister). The connection was ordered in April 2008 and then there was a long wait. Every time I would call to them they would make up some excuse. In the end around June 15th I decided to lynch the call center guys. In limits of decency I lynched him on the phone, and the next thing you know that with in 24 hours the installation of modem was done. It was running fine for one week, when it suddenly it stopped working.

On inquiring from the people in Tech support I was told that this connection was not installed to begin with. I admit that there were probably few loose ends to tie, for example when ever there was an incoming or outgoing phone call the DSL connection would drop. And even though the connection was dropped if the DSL device was on, there would be noise. I had to literally beg the equipment installation guy to make my connection work as I had lots of work to catch up to, he gave me some one elses ID (how typical of Pakistan, solve a problem by breaking rules).

Then I lodged a complains a few times with PTCL(the telephone company) to clear the noise and they always give me a token number (like its a big prize). In short getting a DSL connection in Pakistan is not easy even though as compared to previous years prices have come down considerably. With no electricity or sane internet I wonder why people think Pakistan is an ideal place for outsourcing.

Solaris was my first direct interaction with UNIX(first college lab session for introduction to computing in which we were taught how to send/receive our email through pine). Since then I have always been fascinated with Sun machines and Solaris. It may be long time before I own a kickass  Sun Server for my own personal use, but with Solaris_x86 in picture, I can play with one of the most advanced operating system on the planet on my old P4 box (I also plan to install Minix, *BSD, and lots of other open source OSes).

I ordered a free Solaris Express DVD of solaris from Sun's website. I was surprised to get it within 2 weeks as normally these things reach pretty late in my locality. I popped it into my Intelx86 machine and fired it up. It booted kind of slow, but that could have been my DVD drive. It was not pleasant to find out that the default X server which the installation DVD loaded was not showing up on my Intel D865 based vga.

I booted again in text mode and started the installation process. After a reboot I looked into how to configure X and network. I was unable to get both working in the first try. I went to Sun's support chat site and I was mentioned the hardwae compatibility link. I tried the Solaris device detection java webstart applet. Every thing checked out (except for my bt878 based tv tuner card). The JNLP mentioned a link for third party network drivers, which I later downloaded (but was only able to get working after some beating around the bush)

Then I decided to visit #solaris on irc.freenode.net (from my other machine)and boy was that an eye opener. First this I learnt is that Solaris is not Linux ( I knew that, but if you even mention name of Linux in #solaris you get flamed easily), second #solaris has lots of rude shrews. They help less and try to establish that their  "brain size" is more than yours since you asked a question. Although looking up on google before you ask a question is always recomended, but it is possible to not find answer to a simple question from a Google search. Any ways I decided NEVER to goto #solaris. I would like to leave the self contained so called UNIX admins to their own sad lonely existance. I went to #opensolaris where people are friendly and enthusiastic (like any open source project).There I got some good pointers.

Solaris has two kinds of X servers;Xsun and Xorg. Xsun is probably a good choice for Sun machines, but Xorg produced better results on x86 machines. The problem I encountered was that the default configuration produced by X -configure was only good for higher resolutions. A utility called kdmconfig lets superuser choose between the two servers. The configuration of Xorg is similar by the use of 'xorgconfig'.

Solaris x86 express edition comes with alot of goodies which include StarOffice 8, Netbeans 5.5, Sun Studio Enterprise, Gimp, Firefox to name a few. It has two desktops CDE and Gnome. Gnome based desktop looks quite polished (just like Ubuntu).

Overall my first impessions of solris are quite positive. But these impressions are superficial and very cosmetic. In reality I am more interested in knowing more about the internals of Solaris (Kernel and TCP/IP stack and things like DTrace).