Firefox is still slow, it wasn’t (just) Adblock plus. I’ve even tried with a totally clean profile and it can still take 60 seconds to launch. If Firefox was the last thing I shut down (say last thing at night) then it opens instantly even if it’s 12 hours later (like first thing in the morning). However, if anything else (reasonably significant) is run in-between then it takes an age.
Investigation continues.
Firefox had been getting slower and slower to start up. It was getting stupid, 30 seconds, 50 seconds, longer. If I started Firefox (and made a cup of tea while it was launching), closed it and restarted it, it would only take a few moments, maybe 5-10 seconds. I turned off Firefox’s check for updates option, maybe it was causing issues, but to no avail.
It was really frustrating. A search of the web turned up a million posts about Firefox startup being slow but nothing really useful. One suggestion to turn off session restores, but I was sure this wasn’t an issue with disk writes, it didn’t seem to be doing anything in the seconds it was taking to start, no churning, not much CPU.
I check my add-ons, and I was only running four. British dictionary, Xmarks, Web Developer and Adblock Plus. At which point I had some kind of epiphany, and disabled Adblock plus. Then I went to bed. No point in just starting Firefox straight away, it was always pretty quick until some period of time had passed, so I figured being asleep should lull it back into a slow start.
Double clicked the icon this morning and 0.5 seconds before I could start browsing.
I’m pretty sure FF3 was slow and not just FF3.5, but maybe it’s worse with Adblock plus and FF3.5. Maybe I was doing something wrong with Adblock plus in Firefox, who knows. All I know is that without ABP it now takes under a second to launch Firefox and with it, over 50.
I’m just pleased it’s all working again and I’ll pay the price by manually ignoring adverts (and just hope Firefox avoids issues when adverts from Evil Sources [tm] attempt to install malware by just viewing the ad).
So that’s it – all my sites / domains are moved off gradwell now. Just waiting for them to action my request to cancel my outstanding services. I’m in two minds whether to reconfigure Thunderbird to use Nildram for usenet or whether to just wave goodbye to NNTP entirely. I was really only using it for the gradwell private groups and haunting long abandoned places as a by-product. Hard to let it go totally though, I moved from FidoNet to Usenet and it was that which got me involved in lots of things which eventually led to where I am today.
So yeh, hard to let it go.
Gradwell have re-branded (personal opinion of their new website is that it looks horrible) and appear to be far more focussed on servicing businesses than individual technical users. I’m sure there’s a much better future in that direction, but it would have encouraged me away even had the service not stunk and had I not received sales calls at the same time.
Gandi have been great, and 1and1 have been entirely invisible, other than a single brief outage a couple of months ago it’s been fine. All-in-all it took longer than I hoped (near 4 months) but less time than I feared and wasn’t painful at all. The only complexity was related to the .com registrations and changing owners (from me, to me).
Added what looks to be an awesome plugin for creating a mobile version of the site. If you’re viewing this through an iphone / ipod touch or android phone you should see the new style (you can turn it on and off at the bottom of the page).
Obviously, I can’t check from Android, if you can, let me know if it works.
This is the plugin home page – WPtouch
Spam comments have changed over the last few months. When I first started the blog the spam comments were essentially heavily laden with links to other spam sites. Either blatant (just lists of links) or thinly disguised (long diatribe of text with links spread throughout). Recently though, there’s been an increase in short comments in which the spam is just a URL link of the submitter. The comments all have the same thing in common – ego-stroking.
They cover the following types,
I guess some people get suckered in by the ego-stroke and are encouraged to approve the posts where they would normally ignore them. Since my ego is already the size of a small mountain I need no further strokage and so am immune. Or maybe it’s because I’m not as easily fooled. Or maybe my self image is so bad I can’t for a moment believe any of the comments are true. Whatever the reason – they still don’t make it past the spam filter on the site.
Soon we’ll be seeing the following class of spam,
I’ll hold out against those as well I think.
Wizards of the Coast provide a mail service where you can send rules queries for their games, including D&D. This is cool, because it seems no matter how well a rulebook is written there are always some issues which are confusing.
I thought I’d send them a query about a rule – and you have to sign up to their site, okay, I guess that keeps the spam down. So I started the signup process. They needed the regular stuff, username, e-mail, date of birth. My postcode? Filled them all in – then, three, security questions and one additional question you might get asked on the phone, all required so they can prove who you are if you forget your account details.
Come on.
It’s a forum user ID. If I answered those questions they’d know more about me than the bloody tax office. Anyone who did manage to get access to my data would know enough to convince other people they were me. It’s not like WoTC are running a banking operation or something like that. I just wanted access to their forums and the option to mail them a rules question.
Clearly, I just made up answers to the questions that I’ll remember but that aren’t true, in fact to simply things I just picked the same answer to all four questions even if it made no sense. Reducing the point of them having multiple questions. Sometimes you can have too much security.
Half the fun of playing online games, MMORPG’s specifically, are the patch messages, this is my favourite in a long time.
The broken pieces of the Bridge of Khazad-dûm were backwards, with the longer piece on the west side of the chasm and the shorter one on the east. They have now been reversed. This could cause people who logged out while standing on the broken bridge to log on in midair and plummet to their dooms. This should teach them not to log out on precarious bridges!
So, I finally moved the site away from Gradwell (the last stage was the domain, registered with them, which moved today). It’s been served by a different server for a little while but all the bits are moved now.
So that leaves me with two domains on Gradwell, one which I run for a bunch of EQ’ers which will take more planning to move and the original one I used to open the Gradwell account which has a few things hanging off it, which will take longer to move in stages.
Typically their service has improved now, but it’s too little too late, I was tired of the bad performance, bad communication, bad planning and bad technical implementation and just couldn’t justify giving them my money to provide that service, or lack of it. I know no where is perfect, and I have no illusions that the current hosting platform isn’t ideal, but now I’ve taken the time to split the hosting and the DNS management, it’s a hell of a lot easier to move sites around in future.
Thought I’d see if you can use the wordpress app to write posts off-line and what do you know, you can. We’re just on our way to weekly d&d (4th ed.) and the m1 north bound was slow bit it’s cleared up now. My fighter made it to level 5 last time we played but various events transpired against us and it’s been a few weeks since we got together.
Probably a lot of downtime things in this session, dead companion to replace, gear to restock etc.
To the authors of spam bots, or to the people paid pennies to submit spam comments – don’t you think it would be worth your while to check after submitting the spam (say after 5 days), to see if it was actually posted. If it wasn’t you can assume that it was successfully blocked, and can stop trying to submit to the same site again.
If it was posted, you can assume it wasn’t blocked and resources you save from trying to post to sites which don’t publish your posts can be re-directed at the sites which do.
Clearly this is more efficient at your end, saves you money and time, and reduces green house gasses across the planet. We can presume that sites accepting your spam either want it or deserve it, and hence are acceptable targets.
None of the spam (several thousand, a tiny amount I should think compared to real blogs) you ever try and post here makes it through and yet the same sources try and try and try again – give it up guys – it’s not working for you.