Lights and shadows of Firefox 3

Three days after Firefox's third version of the web browser release I think it is time to write a review about the new software. Downloading it was quite hard at the beginning, since it was released worldwide at the same time and with a lot of advertisement and expecting to achieve a world record for the largest number of downloads in 24h the servers collapsed. After three ours of failed downloads I managed to get my copy of the desired Firefox 3, but at a download rate between 5 and 20 Kb/sec, almost like when I was younger and I used a 56k modem. At least the nuisance was "worth" the wait, Firefox achieved the Guiness world record with over 8 milion downloads.

Down to the strict analysis of the software I must say the installation package (as it happened with the upgrade from 1.5 to 2.0) worked perfectly and it kept my bookmarked pages, my add-ons and even my tags intact, not a single change was made, which is great. It was also nice to have the Catalan verision of the software available from day one. I really like the default interface and I have grown accostumed to the new way tabs roll in a very short time. Navigation speed has improved as well, even though not as much in windows as it has in Linux.

But not everything is nice and I have already found several bugs. The first one is that, even though I have marked the option that warns you if you are going to close several tags from a browser window it never does. Firefox 2 worked fine with that.

One of the biggest drawbacks Firefox 2 had was the large ammounts of RAM memory it consumed, and it was announced that Firefox 3 would fix that problem. Well, it has to a certain extent, but has created a new one. I usually have between 50 and 70 tabs open at the same time, I don't like using bookmarks so I keep my favourite pages in tabs, not a good way to work but is how I do it. With so many tabs open it's ovious that the browser will have problems handling them, so Firefox 2 consummed around 400-600KB of RAM memory depending of the number and type of tags I had open. Well, Firefox 3 has decreased this ammount almost by half, now I get a RAM consumption of between 250-350KB of RAM, but I get as well 100% of CPU use. It had never happenened before to me, not even with the diabolical IE, so I'm quite upset about this fact. I cannot have Firefox turned on for a long time because if I do I may melt the CPU an wreck my computer plus it slows down the navigation speed. I hope Firefox fixes this issue as soon as possible, because this is not a new issue and I am not the only one who has this problem.

Ireland, we count on you

We Europeans have been struggling during over 150 years to achieve what we havfe today, a welfare state with many rights for our citizens and workers. The European Union has helped to achieve this common wealth across the countries which are members. Neither Spain nor Ireland would be as wealthy as they are today if it weren't for the EU funds, so we all should praise the work the EU has done for its citizens.

Until now. The EU constitution was a rip-off which took away many of the hardly earned rights and a confirmation the EU was the Europe of the States instead of the Europe of the people. Thankfully, both France and the Netherlands voted no to it and it was dropped off the political agenda. But the EU governments hadn't said their last word and they invented the treaty of Lisbon, which is a new constitution without the name. This time, to avoid surprises as the constitution gave, they have mainly decided to vote it inside the respective parliaments, not by giving the voice to the people with a referendum. Since politicians where the ones who created the treaty the results have not surprised anybody, yes was the result in all countries. What a great example of democracy. But Ireland has chosen the truly democratic way and has organised a referendum which is being voted today. If the result is no they will stop the treaty and all the EU working class will be grateful to their Irish colleagues.

The EU is not exiting any more, a dark shadow of neo-liberalism has been put over it and it seems to have forgotten the rights and welfare of its citizens. Not only because the the constitution or the new treaty, also the new law which allows a worker to do a 65(!) hours a week schedule. Almost worse than in the 19th century. I don't feel encouraged by the EU any more.

Because we love the EU, Ireland vote no!

Update: The result has been no!

Boycott to Air Berlin

Outrageous. A shame. Unbelievable. And amongst all sad. The president of Air Berlin has written the editorial of the in flight magazine of his airline putting down my language and the language of ten million people, Catalan. The government of Majorca, one of the places where Catalan is spoken, kindly asked him if he could train his workers and adapt his services to include Catalan in the flights leaving or departing from Majorca. His answer has been to discredit and diminish Catalan language saying a bunch of lies like that Spanish language is almost banned from the public life, when everybody knows that the weak language is Catalan. What I wander is, why is this monstrosity of human being mettling in internal affairs which have nothing to do with his business? Maybe is he some kind of German Imperialist wanting to invade Majorca? And, putting myself to his same low level, is maybe an unrecycled Nazi wanting to recover the Third Reich which would include the Balearic Islands as a holiday resort? Each place has its problems and nowhere external intrusion is welcomed. You can see the article (in german) here or in Catalan here.

I shall never take an Air Berlin plane until a formal apology is made and this pillock is fired from the company. I encourage everybody with some dignity to do the same, not take any Air Berlin plane, it doesn't matter if you are Catalan, German, Scottish or French. If you want to communicate with Air Berlin to tell them how you feel about this issue e-mail them. Another option is to use the model given here (in Catalan).

Some related links in the news:

• La Vanguardia (Spanish) / Another article
  
• E-Noticies (Catalan)
• 3cat24 (Catalan)
• Avui (Catalan)
• El Mundo (Spanish)
• El Periodico (Catalan)
  

Shame on you mr. Hunold, shame on you.

Change the attribute name of a column in ArcGIS

ArcGIS is a very useful and powerful programme, but sometimes its so complex that to do a very simple thing can become a nightmare. Today I wanted to change the attribute name of the columns of the attribute table in ArcMap because after messing around with a shapefile I had ended up with some funny names. The problem came when I tried to do it and I realised I didn't know how to change the name of the attribute. I thought that by clicking it or just right clicking I would be able to adapt the headings to my desired option. But I was wrong. I went nuts trying many options, exporting the table and open it in Excel, open it with a text editor, using SPSS,... I even downloaded the program DBF Manager to change it, but it was useless. It has been then when I have discovered how to do it.

It is very simple, you just have to go to properties in the layer menu (right click the layer name to access it):

And then go to the Field tag. You will only be able to change the alias of the table, but it should be enough because is what you see in the attribute table.

In my discharge I shall say I had found that menu at first, but when I tried to change the name, not the alias, so I thought it didn't work that way. This has been tested in ArcGIS 9.1 and 9.2

How to know the IP address of a visitor

Many times it is required to know the IP address of a visitor to our webpage. Among the different uses may be recording it to be able to ban a user or to personalize some web services. I will show you how to retrieve it using PHP.

You can know your IP address by creating a PHP file in your server with the following text in it:

So by adding this little piece of code to your PHP project you should be able to retrieve the IP of any visitor.

There are other functions associated to the $_SERVER array like knowing the browser used to access your webpage. This can be useful to know which is the most used browser to surf your page and design it having it in mind to benefit the majority of your visitors (some webpages look quite different depending of the browser used). You can get a full table of the different functions $_SERVER has by creating a PHP file with the following code in it (remember to open it from your server, otherwise it won't work). If you run this file from your computer you will know everything about it and about your server.

Keep in mind that to use this you must have a server with PHP.