Hugh's Worthless Blog

I was pretty excited that Firefox 4 was released yesterday since I had been testing it out quite a bit during pre-release, and I have found that it runs the Zynga games on Facebook (Farmville, Frontierville, Cityville) much faster than Chrome 10 had on the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 Dell desktop I was using. That alone should make it worth switching! But since it was released I decided to see how many hits we had received using Firefox 4 on our university's very popular meteorites website ( meteorites.wustl.edu ), so I thought I would get some general statistics on browser usage there. I broke the statistics down by the browsers and their versions since I was curious on the version breakdown, especially of the just released (Chrome 10, Firefox 4) and beta versions (IE 9) of browsers. Chrome 8 0.19% Chrome 9 4.29% Chrome 10 2.68% 7.16%    Firefox 2.X 0.19% Firefox 3.0 0.59% Firefox 3.5 ...

I haven't written up a more techie relating posting in a while so I thought I would speak what has been on my mind lately. I was reading in eWeek and online about how Oracle has been stalling further development of OpenOffice.org and how Linux distributions like Ubuntu are therefore switching to the fully open LibreOffice variation of the free office suite (Ubuntu 11.04, the "Natty Narwal", will ship with LibreOffice 3.3.1). Therefore I decided to uninstall OpenOffice.org from my Ubuntu desktop and switch over to LibreOffice since it was a pretty easy procedure to do using apt-get. I have used both Writer and Calc and it pretty much feels the same to me as OpenOffice.org. They have posted the latest fixes and features in version 3.3.1 which sound nice but I have never really needed to use them. It is more about future enhancements and support by an open source community as opposed to the current differences between the two projects. If Red Hat, Canonical and Novell...

My wife was again at the St. Louis County Library trying to find a book that would interest me. She found The Secret Life of Your Cat since I am always pestering our overweight grey tabby named Slinky. I started skimming it and came to a big table showing the equivalent ages of cats and humans. It seems that once they are two years old they are equivalent to a 24 year old person and afterwards they age an equivalent 4 years for each year we age. When I saw that I thought -- online calculator ! I looked around and there are already a couple of them out there (like here and here ), but I wanted to write my own version anyway. Since the ones out there are both JavaScript based, I thought I would write one using JavaScript too, but that would be a bit fancier! My cat age calculator has little buttons that let you increment and decrement the initial age by months and years, and of course lets you convert either way (feline to human, human to feline). My conclusion is that our overweig...

It looks like the people at Google have been very busy working on both Chrome / Chromium and GMail . First the good news. Since all the other browsers like Firefox 4 are working on speeding up their JavaScript engine so they can claim vast performance improvements, well the Chrome folks have done so too. Since I always just use the latest release of Chromium on my Ubuntu desktop, I checked my version I just updated to using apt-get today and see that I am now using Chromium 11.0.676.0 (75353) which I am guessing is using the updated JavaScript engine as used in Chrome 10 (still in beta ). Frankly, I cannot tell much difference since Chromium was already pretty darn fast. Perhaps at some point it just does not make any difference anymore. What concerns me more are the little pesky changes they do that annoy people. For example, last night my son demanded he had to use my laptop so he could more properly play Minecraft  since he was done with all his homework and his own laptop...

There was another mugging near campus last night, but this time two students chased their assailants in a car and were able to get at least one arrested (I bet the other one apprehended was a minor.) Two sophomores were walking on Melville towards the Loop when they were approached by four youths who demanded their money and phones and started beating one of the students. So the other student yelled for help and was able to get aid from a nearby friend in a car. They followed their assailants to Delmar where the police nabbed them. But the question is what effect their actions will have on the occurrence of these random crimes that keep hitting the area (and especially targeted at our students.) I hope more of our students do not start patrolling vigilante style and trying to apprehend these criminals, since some of them will be armed and someone could end up getting shot. I am definitely sick of all the criminals targeting our students and our campus, but I have to admit if I ...

I have always enjoyed reading Thomas J. Stanley 's books since he wrote the Millionaire Next Door over a decade ago. His latest book, Stop Acting Rich , came out in 2009 and I did not even realize it was out. He is another geeky numbers guy like me and I love all the numbers he gives in his books. I wrote up a wealth calculator years ago based on his equations form the first book, but now I have modified it to include the "wealth equation" from "Stop Acting Rich". He has since accumulated a lot more data which provided him with more specific threshold values for when someone becomes balance sheet affluent (BA) or income sheet affluent (IA). These are more specific than his earlier under accumulator of wealth (UAW), prodigious accumulator of wealth (PAW) designations he had in the past. In his earlier books his cutoffs were simply 1/2 the "expected wealth" and 2 times the "expected wealth" as cutoffs. Now with real data he has changed the cu...

I am very glad that the temperature has risen to above freezing finally so that some of the ice around here can melt. The most dangerous situation I have noticed is the sidewalk between the Richmond Heights Metrolink station and the Galleria Mall. That entire sidewalk is a giant pile of ice plowed off the street and everyone walking between the mall and the metrolink station has been walking on the road itself. In this cold weather I have been driving to the station and parking in the lot so I do not have to walk, but that means on my drive home I have to make sure I do not kill any pedestrians! Here is a photo I found online of the sidewalk in warmer weather. Now imagine it completely covered up with piles of plowed ice. You get the idea. The Galleria Parkway is now shared by both cars and pedestrians and that is a bad idea! Closer to Washington University, I am glad that the full sidewalk from the Skinker station to our building is finally cleared. On Monday and Tuesday the sidewal...