Little T in the Cog linux

Archive for February 2011

New Toys

2011-02-07

So many shiny new things out today! Just installed Chrome 9 and I've gotta say I like it a lot. The biggest thing stopping me from using it in the past has been the terrible performance of animated gifs (a problem that seems to effect all WebKit based browsers). I know, I know... Animated gifs are the scourge of the web but unfortunately on one of the forums I frequent a lot of users have animated gifs as their avatars and opening a page full of them used to stall the browser for up to 30 seconds as they all stuttered into life. For whatever reason Firefox never suffered from this problem, and now with the latest release Chrome is also smooth as silk - and loads pages very quickly to boot. Will be interesting to see how good Firefox is when 4.0 is released...

The other big news is the release of Debian 6.0, a.k.a "Squeeze". I've already upgraded all my personal machines (including this web server) and plan on doing my work machines over the next week or so. The upgrade was smooth enough for the most part, at least on all my virtual machines (I'm running XEN on this rig as the box it runs on - an Intel Atom - doesn't have the VT extensions built in so I can't use VMWare/kvm etc) with only the hypervisor requiring some tweaking to get things working. There are a few new things which may take some getting used to (dash instead of bash for the shell, new boot sequence, some service name changes) but hopefully I'll survive :-)

It's funny because actually the whole thing feels more like Ubuntu... The student teaching the teacher?