April 9, 2006 at 10:04 am · tags: Misc
In these days I’m evaluating some alternative browsers instead of my once beloved Firefox. The reason why I’m looking around is because of the heavyness of the Gecko browser. On my (old) 512mb of RAM powered Duron 1300Mhz machine it takes 6/8 seconds to start, other 5 seconds to be “responsive” and it’s damn slow on the navigation process. Not to mention the 140+ mega bytes of RAM occupied by a single instance of Firefox (less than 30 mega on Windows XP) with only GMail open 
So I decided that I needed more from my browser. I started tweaking it, disabling the fast page cache but nothing really changed. I tried with Epiphany but then I realized that the real problem is Gecko not Firefox itself so I removed Epiphany. I tried the KHTML engine with Konqueror and it looked cool but I had some small problems with the rendering. Last but not least I evaluated Opera9 that I was following through the Opera Watch blog and Opera weekly builds. It’s cool, it’s not even a beta version but it’s really fast in the rendering process (stunning!), its startup time is really short, it’s very cheap in memory occupation. Opera 9 supports quite every standard out there now.
It’s a different experience. I have to get used to new shortcuts, new interface and new environment. I think I’ll miss some extensions but slowly (if Gecko doesn’t change) it will become my browser of choice.
Opera 9 is good, try it. Firefox it’s also cool (Gecko as a rendering engine rocks anyway) but weighs too much on my machine.
April 5, 2006 at 6:30 pm · tags: Java Python
It can’t be that it’s going to take more time translating Python code to Java than the time to code the algorithm in Python first.
I started converting the algorithm contained in a public method with two arrays of char as arguments but when I decided to switch to java.lang.String it occured me that I had to change a lot of things on the inside (first absurd thing):
- All this enforced types thing sucks. I know templates are there now in Java but they don’t really resolve the problem of genericness and also I don’t have Java 1.5 at school, so forget them.
- It’s not kinda possible that arrays have a “length” public member and String(s) have a method. This is inconsistency of a language. And to me sucks.
- I find really awkward the thing that with arrays I can use “arr[i]” indexing notation but String items have to accessed with “charAt”. This really sucks
- It’s not possible that a 2006 language carries on with a stupid problem such as the coupling of classes and name of files. It sucks to have to remember to change the name of the classes or change the name of the file. Shame on you Java.
- Staticness and compilation separated from execution it’s really boring.
- Last but not least. What’s wrong with you Java-guys loving so much this everything-boxed-in-a-class thing? I want classes when I need classes. No way I’m going back to the Java world domination front. Python is a freedom language. No fuss.
So Java really sucks to me now. I love freedom languages. I want to be free to concentrate on what I have to write in my Emacs not how to write it or counting the semi-colons or the braces. No no no. Really thank you Guido for coming up with this lovely language.
