Firefox vs. Chrome

Firefox and Chrome are the only two browsers that I use. Firefox is the primary and Chrome is the backup. A determination of which is the better browser is bound to be subjective. How does one define better? Does is come down to speed, reliability, rapid fixes for exploits or a combination of those attributes.

I'm inclined to believe that Firefox and Chrome are in the same ballpark in all of those things. To Google Chrome's credit, it isn't nearly the resource hog that a fully loaded installation of Firefox is. Albeit, that doesn't matter so much in these days of cheap RAM and 64 bit computers that can address tons of it. My rather modest desktop has 8 gigabytes of RAM installed and if the motherboard would accommodate it, I'd have at least 16 gigabytes.

Where Firefox pulls away is in customization and extensibility. Google Chrome has made significant strides with the introduction of their own extensions. However, Firefox still has the upper hand. I have 25 extensions installed in Firefox. I use them all on a daily basis, so much so that the way that I use the web is dependent on them.

Moreover, while Chromium (the project on which Chrome is based) is open source, Google Chrome is not. Mozilla Firefox remains an open source affair, and the ability to peruse the source code (even though I probably won't) is comforting.

So, in my admittedly subjective estimation, Firefox remains the king.

Firefox 4

Didn't Have To Buy A New PC After All

My PC had been giving me trouble of late. Once booted, it ran fine. However, it was taking longer and longer to post once the power button was pressed. I suspected everything from a bad power supply to a faulty switch to a burned up capacitor somewhere on the motherboard.

I really didn't want to buy a new PC just yet. My 3½ year old quad-core HP (w/ 8GB of DDR2 RAM) is still in the middle range of PC performance. In fact, if I was to replace the stock NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT graphics card with something a bit more robust, it could be pressed into service as a low end gaming rig. As is, it handles my browsers (FF4, sometimes with 50 tabs open), business software and occasional video rendering quite nicely. Toward the end of the year, I'd like to replace it with 6 or 8 core system. However, the increasingly unreliable boot up of this one had me thinking that I might have to buy another system, now, that wouldn't be much of an improvement over the current one.


Since the prices of power supplies are so low nowadays (I bought a 600w ATX PSU for $30) I decided to gamble on a new one. If the booting problems were to disappear following the installation of a new PSU, then I'd know that was the problem. If not, I would have had to buy another computer and eat the $30 cost of the PSU.


The actual installation was a bit of a pain in the ass. My desktop PC case is one of those tiny proprietary pieces of crap that aren't designed  with easy upgrades in mind. For one thing, the panel behind the motherboard is riveted in! Moreover, the interior of the case is so cramped and full drives and useless bays (i.e. an HP proprietary media bay for a portable hard-drive-like-thing that cost more than a external hard drive many times its size) that I had to remove most of the components in order to be able to remove the various power connections to the motherboard... not to mention being able to remove the old power supply.


I've built and upgraded enough PCs over the decades that I took the necessary precaution of labeling every single wire and taking close-up pictures with my phone along the way. It is a truly sickening feeling to realize that you have no idea where a errant wire is suppose to go.  HP doesn't offer a detailed schematic of the motherboard. They, of course, don't want their customers to repair their old computers.


I'm happy to report that my hunch was correct. When I reassembled the computer, including the new 600 watt power supply, and reattached all of the cables in the back of the case: power, 1 DVI, 1 HDMI, audio out and a slough of USB cables, it booted immediately. I was a bit shocked... and perhaps the slightly bit disappointed that I didn't have to do any trouble shooting like in the old days.


FYI, to anyone faced with a similar issue. Don't be afraid to get in there and hack around inside your desktops. Just make sure that you have disconnected the power, physically, and then press the power button so as to discharge any stored voltage.

A Welcome Surprise At The DMV

First of all. There is no Department of Motor Vehicles in my state. Registration of automobiles and whatnot falls under the auspices of the Secretary of State in Michigan. The offices where one would renew one's licenses or take a driving test are simply referred to as the Secretary of State.

That said, irrespective of what you call these places they all have interminably long lines in common. I had to buy license tags for 2 vehicles today. Of course, I should have renewed them by mail weeks in advance, but I--like the 200 or so people crammed into the office when I arrived--didn't. Anticipating having to take a number and then twiddle my thumbs for a couple of hours, I had preemptively loaded several television show episodes ("30 Rock," "The Office" and the like) onto my Droid 2 smartphone.

However, much to my delight and surprise, brand new license renewal computer kiosks were sitting in the glass-enclosed foyer of the office.   I had the necessary documents and credit card stipulated as being necessary to complete my transactions without actually entering the seething throng of humanity on the other side of the entryway's glass walls. Of course, I was dubious as to whether it would work right up until the moment that the mechanical beast spat out my registrations and tags.

The process wasn't without glitches. It would be generous to describe the responsiveness of the--no doubt enterically-opportunistic-bacteria-encrusted--touch screen as shitty. And, the bar code reader did not work at all. Had it worked, the necessity to enter any information via the touch screen would have been precluded entirely. Still, after one abortive attempt to enter a code that would access my records, it actually worked. I had reconciled myself to the loss of 2 hours of my day. But, as it turned out, the entire process of renewing the license plates for two vehicles took less than 5 minutes.

It was all I could do to restrain myself from opening the door and shouting "Suck it" to the technologically impaired ramble sitting on their respective duffs and fingering tickets who's numbers wouldn't be called until well after I'd enjoyed a leisurely lunch and casually made my way back to work.

Liquid Sky - You Go To Hell

So you're dead now, shit
And you're going to hell
Straight from your marijuana jungles
Straight from your lies, your lies, your lies
You dropped dead fuckin'
Suits you well, you go to hell
We'll go to hell I'll go to hell too
But i know I'm damned and you never knew
So you weren't ready to toll the bell
For me it's easy, from hell to hell
I'm not dancing in marijuana jungles
I live in concrete mazes stone and glass
Hard like my heart, sharp and clean
With no romantic illusions to changing the world
I don't lie to myself that love can cure
'Cause i know I'm alone and you fought that every day you lived
You lied, you died, you lied
You go to hell, suits you well
Shit

L'Age d'homme... maintenant ou jamais

I'm dying to see this movie, but it hasn't yet opened in the United States. Romain Duris is one of my favorite actors, and Aïssa Maïga--in one of her biggest roles to date--is the Franco-Malienne goddess of my idolatry.

(more later...)

The Racist Subtext of LOTR

I have serious problems with the racial coding of the Lord of the Rings films, ie. Orcs and Uruk-Hai being played by Maori actors, the black and brown armies from the East, etc.

Peter Jackson took his casting cues from the underlying racism of his source material. In Tolkien's books, all of the humans who side with Sauron are people of color; Haradrim are Arabs, Easterlings are Asians, and the Southerns of Far Haradrim are Africans. (There is a passage in The Return of the King that refers to the men of Far Harad, i.e. Africa, as being "black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues." I've hated Tolkien since noticing this during my second reading of LOTR at age 11.)

The people of middle earth are all white, with the Gondoreans being the whitest and accordingly, in Tolkien's view, the most noble. But Aragorn, the King, is of a still whiter meta-human group called "The Dúnedain of the North." They originated outside of Middle Earth on an island of whiter-than-the-whitest-Scandinavian white men, called Númenor. The Númenors in Tolkien's milieu are dead ringers for the Hyperboreans of early Nazi mythology.

LOTR's is all about how far the men of middle earth have fallen from that purest white state. This is why Aragorn is so significant. Not only is he of Númenorean blood, but he has Elven (whiter still) ancestry (via Lúthien Tinúviel) and even divine ancestry (via Melian). His eventual marriage to Arwen Evenstar is meant to purify the Whiteness of the Gondorean royal line and bring about a golden age. It's all racist clap-trap

What I find interesting is that Hitler believed in a very similar mythology. Hitler, who was heavily influenced by Madame Blavatsky's Thule Society, believed that the once pure Aryan blood of the German people had been diluted through interbreeding central Europeans, Slavs and Jews. He tried to bring them into a whiter, more Aryan, state by eugenic means, specifically the forced breeding of Norwegian women in Aryan baby factories by German officers. This was Hitler's Lebensborn program. The Norwegians and Swedes were the Gondorean's of Hitlers philosophy. Also, Hitler supposedly believed that the lost city of Atlantis (Thule/Hyperborea) existed and had been home to the super white "aryan" race that spawned all northern Europeans. This is a direct and obvious parallel to Tolkien's Númenor (or rather Tolkien's mythology was a direct parallel to it.)

For those who haven't read "The Silmarilion" (Tolkien's magnus opus,) Númenor was the island from which Aragorn's ancestors came. It was not of middle earth, being in the far west, halfway between middle earth and and Aman (Aman is a heaven on earth were gods, who are never mentioned in LOTR, live. It is these gods, The Valar, who sent the Istari--wizards, of which Gandalf is one--to Middle-earth.) The Númenoreans eventually tried to make war on Aman, seeking to become immortal themselves. The Valar responded by sinking Númenor beneath the sea (Sound familiar?). What was left of the Númenoreans sailed to middle earth and founded the Northern Kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor. Gradually as their Númenorean blood was diluted the fortunes of these kingdoms fell. In the end Mr. Whiter-than-the-whitest-White-man, Aragorn, reunited both northern kingdoms, purified his Númenorean bloodline by marrying his distant half-elven cousin, Arwen Undómiel and lived happily ever after. This is exactly what the real life Aragorn, Adolph Hitler, wanted to do in the real life Middle-earth, Europe.