While at home for reading week, I set up my development environment on Windows XP Professional, 64-bit. XP x64 was never meant to be run on real hardware, as it lacks driver support from hardware vendors. However, it was free for students and quick to set up with VMWare as I only had to enter the license key for an unattended install. I originally indended to carry around the virtual machine on a 8GB USB, but the hard disk file exceeded by a few GB. I managed to shrink all the files required to run the virtual machine combined down to less than 3GB. Here’s a quick run down of the process that requires about 1 hour for a computer to complete:

1. Uninstall unused applications
2. Delete downloads manually
3. Clean out temporary files with CCleaner
4. Shutdown virtual disk and make a copy
5. Hook the virtual disk into slot2 and start the virtual machine Settings -> Hard Disk -> Add…
6. Zero out unused parts of partitions on the copied disk with KillDisk wipe
7. Shutdown virtual machine to work with the virtual disk file
8. Defragment copied hard drive under Settings -> Hard Disk -> Utilities
9. Compress copied hard drive
10. Find the virtual machine working folder under Settings -> Options tab
11. Replace the larger virtual disk file with the smaller one
12. Create a zip folder of the virtual machine files, 7-zip is suggested

It’s easy to see why this process works, if you understand how file systems work. Because deleted files are still on the hard drive, they cannot be compressed in the virtual disk file. So the idea is to overwrite those unused sectors of the hard drive with zero’s. VMWare’s defragment collects zeros together at the end of the disk, and compress completely removes them from the virtual disk file, shrinking the file. If you’re making a clone of the virtual machine for later use, it is suggested to start the operating system again as it will detect hardware changes and reconfigure. Many of these steps take a few minutes to complete, so it is wise to have something else to do while waiting.

Update: Instead of using KillDisk, CCleaner has a wipe utility under Tools -> Drive Wiper. The default settings writes zeros over the free space. Compared to my method, it’s slower. One way to speed it up is to give the process realtime priority in the Task Manager.

While working on the new Fiddle Salad, which required several languages with native Ruby compilers, I downloaded and installed Ruby on my Windows machine. Ruby by itself wasn’t a problem, but when I run gem install rails, some kinks come up, like missing a lib folder in a package. Then I moved on to installing therubyracer, which I guess is an optimizer, but it wouldn’t compile with mingw on Windows. After that, when initializing a rails app, it got stuck on bundler, which I used to install several packages. Like one user said on stackoverflow, Ruby isn’t meant to run on Windows.

So this morning I got ruby set up pretty quick. Just follow these steps:

1. Download turnkey rails http://www.turnkeylinux.org/rails
2. Install on VMWare Player
3. Set Networking to Bridged
4. Connect using SSH to the address shown after installation
5. 

That last part took a bit of searching on Google for me, because I expected a full Ubuntu installation, with GUI. But the download was only 253Mb. As I thought more about it, it made sense. I was glad how easy it was to set it up in a virtual machine. Once the VM was installed, I installed Rails with gem install rails and set up the build tools.

 Update: therubyracer is the Google V8 embedded within Ruby. There is a list of other engines here: https://github.com/sstephenson/execjs

Recent comparisons of browsers focus on JavaScript speed. There are many ways to measure browser performance, including image load time, reloading from cache, start time, and css rendering speed. While Opera was in the lead a few years ago, it has been branded as the fastest browser again.

You should notice the ad on the left for Chrome. So which one is the fastest? I ran the tests on Linux and Windows.

Benchmark Method

There’s nothing special about using JavaScript to detect when onload is fired by the browser, as long as the browser follows the convention that it is fired after the page is loaded. This used to be an issue I noted to the point of just using Firefox and ignoring other browsers. According to this article, it was fixed 2 years ago. So I took the benchmark from the site and ran it. Not surprisingly, Firefox came out highest on the score. Actually, that’s a negative score. Ideally, the page takes no time to load.

Linux

Google Chrome for Linux is different from the one for Windows, as the benchmark would load the first site for the first time, but could not time it nor reload it. Opera got stuck on MySpace once and kept adding more elements to the page, possibly due to an ad that is not usually loaded locally. I ran these tests on Sabayon Linux with kernel 2.6.30 (I expect 2.6.33 to be faster, since it has been patched with Con Koliva’s kernel enhancements). An interesting note here, not seen in other parts of the result set, is that Arora took longer to load pages on the first time, but was faster on all subsequent reloads. The total score for Arora comes second to Opera. On another note, Firefox with the same extensions, ran faster on Linux than Windows.

Windows

Not surprisingly, the winners on Windows were 32 bit browsers. Aside from the small speed increase due to smaller pointer sizes in 32 bit applications, I think Opera and Chrome are faster browsers, as they advertise. A surprising result is that 64 bit IE ran faster than 64 bit Firefox. I noticed that a while ago, but decided to stick with Firefox because it has add-ons. Iron is a stripped down version of Chrome compiled from source. It should be slightly faster, with the slimmer binary and no personal tracking features. I ran this on Windows 7 Pro 64 bit Version 6.1 (Build 7600).

Conclusion

Opera beat all other browsers, just with its default settings. A little more tuning of redraw rate and memory use could improve the score. I expect the real results when browsing to deviate. Chrome and Firefox has DNS prefetching, Firefox and Opera have pipelining. To improve that DNS fetch speed in Opera, you can set your system to use OpenDNS to resolve domain names.

After the Benchmark (you should decide which browser to use)

I measured the memory use!

It looks Chrome and IE were designed for really cheap laptops. (They can’t run on old computers with Windows 2000.)

Access time can slow down disk operations because it adds an extra write every time a file is accessed. This is most noticeable during boot when many files are read, and the access time located on another part of the disk is recorded. To turn off atime, just follow these steps
Windows: simply run “FSUTIL behavior set disablelastaccess 1” at the command line.
Linux: a few more steps are required, since the atime property is set per partition.

1. vim /etc/fstab
2. change defaults under mount options column to noatime

The preview pane in explorer doesn’t work for many files, and I’ve gotten used to seeing a preview of pdf and text files in the file manager in Linux. PDF-XChange Viewer has an explorer plugin and comes with some PDF editing tools. To make preview work with other text files like those with a php extension, there is a tool called PreviewConfig. Here’s what the previews look like:

Preview Pane in Windows 7. Click on the area highlighted to activate.

PDF Preview

After changing some font display settings in Linux, I wanted to test the changes. The specific change I wanted to test was the hinting level adjusted by pixel size. Hinting affects how sharp the edges of displayed fonts are. (Note that this is different from print appearance.) The article that got me started adjusting font display is a post on Planet Gentoo that I read a while ago. I noticed that there was a suggestion to use medium hinting to reduce fuzziness on small fonts. That was interesting, so I turned on full hinting for small fonts, hint medium for medium fonts, and hint slight for large fonts. You can see the result on the screenshot.

Linux

Medium hinting is set for pixel sizes between 7 and 11. As the size becomes larger, there are  noticeable color fringes on the edge of the fonts. That’s where hint slight comes in.

Now, there’s nothing fancy going on in Linux as all the settings can be changed in an XML file. So after adjust font in Linux, I decided to write a webpage to test the different pixel sizes.

I happened to be using a computer running XP while I wrote this, so I decided to run the test on that computer, too.

XP

XP, like Linux, does have color fringes, but they are less noticeable and appear at all font sizes.

Today, I booted Windows 7 to fill out a PDF form and print it across the network. I also planned to do some PDF editing using PDF X-Change Viewer. One thing that makes Windows different from Linux is that applications don’t have system-wide configuration file. PDF viewers have their own font rendering settings. Anyways, here’s what the fonts look like in Windows 7:

7

Fonts in 7 does not have any rendering artifacts. Which is a reason people do notice the difference when they switch to another OS.

This is easy in windows:

1. hit start orb
2. type mouse wheel
3. hit first option
4. set the mouse scroll rate

However, settings in Linux desktops such as GNOME and KDE does not directly set the scroll speed in Firefox:

1. type about:config in Firefox address bar and hit enter
2. make the following changes

• mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines->”false”
• mousewheel.withnokey.numlines -> 6 (default:3)

Scroll to see the changes

(7 or Vista) I noticed that while in Linux hitting the backspace key resulted in multiple hits in less time than in Windows. That made the keyboard on Linux more responsive as a single key appeared much faster on the screen. There’s also a way to turn this on in windows.

1. In the control panel search box, type keyboard
2. Hit the first option
3. Drag repeat delay all the way to the right

Just finished my last exam and now’s the time to update all my outdated software!

The plan is to leave my XP installation that came with the laptop and wipe out everything else. Does that mean Atlantis will be destroyed and civilization has to be rebuilt again? (Who just asked that!) Not that Windows 7 Release Candidate has gone stale, it expires sometime next year. In the past 3 life cycles, I have focused on heterogenous software configurations.

1. XP should have Spore and custom theming
2. Linux distributions should be either user-friendly or technology focused (Ubuntu and Sabayon)
3. Vista with Google Chrome and Gadgets

The basic principle behind this new installation is to keep every system I use consistent. This implies keeping the user interface the same. Several things to achieve this effect:

1. FEBE and CLEO Firefox extensions to mass install all extensions and profiles
2. Firefox as the general purpose browser
3. Font smoothing (yeah Linux and XP have them)
4. KDE as Linux desktop (the destop effects in Vista can be duplicated, and it’s closer to Windows desktop than GNOME)
5. Speed up the slowest part of my user experience (loading a web page in Ubuntu)

Just a few things to note on Quirks:

1. IBM’s Eclipse x86-64 for Windows is hidden. I can understand that the majority of Windows users don’t care about x86 or x86-64, but why keep the download hidden so that there’s no way to find it through links on the website? Now, the x86-64 version works fine and requires Java x86-64. You won’t have trouble finding Java x86-64 for Windows. It’s a drop-down menu under Operating System.(… I doubt the one for Linux works.) If you google search eclipse 3.5 64 bit, you get Eclipse Downloads and Eclipse IDE for 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Java « LingPipe Blog on Jul 21. I’d pick the second choice.
2. eclipse Python 3: Python Development with PyDev and Eclipse – Tutorial or Python development with Eclipse and Ant. Again, IBM’s links are outdated.
3. Becareful, Don’t Look BACK! If you want to write code that can be used on most installations, you’d better write it in Python 2 and use 2to3 whenever you want it to run on Python 3. Try searching for it. You get junk. And more hard to spell stuff.