Geek Style

For those who haven’t heard before, Google Toolbar is a Real Player Add-on according to following screenshot (Taken from real player autoupdate window):

Note: This is not only a Real Player feature. You can see it in many other crapwares.

As many of you were expecting, Google has taken another step toward gathering user information by integrating Google Accounts (or your GMail Login) with Orkut. And they are just putting all puzzle pieces together.

Now Google has most of the things it should know about you. Your email account (Gmail), your Online Buddies (Gtalk), your chain of friends as well as your interests and how people think about you (Orkut), What do you search for (Google search engine), Which web sites you visit (Google watches your clicks on search results) and many other things you can’t even believe. And I assure you this is not yet-another-conspiracy-theory.

I obviously have nothing to hide, but why google needs this information?

I started loving the new Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 (after all those Deerpark releases). Altough I call it super-unstable. Its quite easy to make it crash. Just go to flickr.com and refresh your page several times.

Despite the unstability (which is negligible for a Beta release), I love the new features, like the ability to move tabs. Its not a brilliant idea at the whole, and I wonder why no one have ever thought of this feature.

I also like the new UI changes like new options window (needs more improvements), as well as the menu-mouse-over trick. Its just getting more and more like IE. And last (but not least) feature I love is the new improvement they made in back-forward navigation speed.

The rendering engine also seems to be improved a bit. You can just see yourself how better it renders the Acid2 test page.

So, I have been using FreeBSD 5.4 as my primary server OS for a while which tends to be quite stable in production environment. To make the story short, I am listing the reasons behind this switch from 4.11-STABLE:

1- Newer OpenSSH
2- ISC BIND 9
3- /etc/rc.d scripts
4- Support for newser disk controllers
5- Support for Sparc64 platform
6- pf and ALTQ support
7- Background fsck

Any many other improvements. As for the stability also, I have not experienced any difficulties so far. However there are small performance degradations due to new SMP features which is negligible.

So here is my piece of advice: Switch to 5.4-STABLE as soon as you can, but do not try to migrate a live system. Even following the 5.4 Migration Guide, you may experience major difficulties.