News and Views

Mozilla has come out with a new version of Firefox: Version 3.5.

There are several improvements in this version. I especially like two of them:

1) They finally seem to have memory management under control. Previous versions of Firefox would seem to slowly take up more and more memory, and never release it even when you closed tabs. This version seems to use much less, and you regain memory when you close a tab. It’s about time they fixed that!

2) Private Browsing. You can enter a “private browsing” mode, where nothing is kept on the computer to show where you went or what you did. Useful if you are using someone elses computer and want to do banking or private email, or just when it’s nobody’s dang business what web sites you were visiting.

The page rendering engine is supposed to be faster, but I can’t really tell a difference.

Anyway, I’ve been using it for about a week so far, and find it an improvement.

I run Linux on my Netbook, and find that it works perfectly well in that application. On my netbook I primarily need a web browser and email, along with the ability to view media and PDFs, and run Skype and ICQ. I don’t think there’s any reason to pay anything for Windows on a Netbook.

But I don’t run it on my main computer. My main complaint about Linux is the difficulty I find installing new programs. There are lots of free programs for Linux; almost anything you can do in Windows, there is a roughly equivalent program for Linux. But installing those programs is such a chore that I usually just don’t want to bother.

Linux enthusiasts are going to tell me it’s easy. If your particular brand of Linux supports RPM, just find an RPM packaged version of the program (if it exists), open a shell window and type,

rpm –ivh packagename

If you’re lucky, your version of Linux may even have a GUI-based RPM interface, but you still have to figure out how to use it.

Or, if it’s not RPM and you get it in a “tar”, just open a shell window and type:

tar –xvzf Apackage.tar.gz
cd Apackage
./configure
make
make install

Oh, yeah — before you start this you should log in as root, otherwise you will probably get errors about insufficient rights.

See this long page for more insight into the complications involved with installing programs on a Linux computer.

Compare this with Windows, where you simply double click the setup program’s icon and in a minuter or two it’s done. There’s rarely a question about which version of Windows the program is designed for, or if you have the proper installation package.

Why can’t Linux be this simple? I’m running old versions of Firefox and Thunderbird on my netbook, because I don’t want to jump through the necessary hoops to upgrade them.

Linux has come a long way, and in many ways is as good as or better than Windows. But for me this is a real show-stopper. Linux can’t be a mainstream OS until it is simple to install and upgrade programs.

Gisele left early this morning for her annual month in France. She is only taking 3 weeks of class this year, in the city of Tours. The other week will be spent traveling around the country.

Angela happens to be there at the same time, so Gisele will get to spend some time with her sister.

After 4 days of vacuuming up bees, I decided it was time to get serious.

I went to Lowe’s and bought a can of “Wasp and Hornet Spray”. They can’t advertise that it kills bees because they are protected, but they assured me it would work fine.

I found the most likely place for a hive — it’s a box-like extension to the wall where the dryer hose goes out. I drilled a 3/8″ hole through the drywall, stuck the spray nozzle in the hole, and sprayed for a few seconds. Then I quickly covered the hole with duct tape.

In a few seconds a gentle buzz turned into a loud hum that grew until it was a frightening roar. Thousands of bees must have been beating their wings, trying to find an enemy to attack. The vacuum cleaner was sucking at the outside entrance, and could barely keep up with the swarm as they flew outside. Many of them got past, and we could see them swarming around the porch light.

I sprayed poison into a few other nearby locations, and got more reactions in a couple of them. But it was clear that the first shot had been on target.

It took almost an hour before the roar died into a faint humming sound, and we went to bed.

This morning I sprayed a little more in, just testing if there were any live bees, but there was no reaction. So I cut a hole through the drywall into the box. Here’s what I saw through the hole:

I had reached in and broken a small piece of the honeycomb off before I took the picture, but most of it is intact here. The two bees on the comb are dead. Look carefully in the bottom and you can see lots more dead bees — about 2 inches thick. There were even a few larvae, though they’re hard to see in this picture.

Here’s what it looked like after I got it all out:

That’s a lot of comb to have been created in the few days they have been there, especially since I have been continually decimating their workers. I guess they had been as busy as bees.

And here’s a close-up:

There’s honey in that comb, but not a lot. I was sucking up most of the bees before they had a chance to get back in the hive, so they didn’t deliver much nectar. Even this wasn’t edible, because it was soaked with insecticide.

Finally, here’s a picture of the vacuum cleaner with dead bees.

The canister is 12 inches diameter, and the bees are 3 inches deep (with a little drywall dust on top of that where I cleaned up after cutting the hole). That’s about 340 cubic inches of bees. Assuming a 10 x 10 x 10 cube of 1000 bees is about 4 inches on a side, or 64 cubic inches, there must be around 1000*340/64 or over 5,000 bees. And that’s probably a low estimate.

Things are quiet in my house again. I feel a little bad about killing off so many bees, but I didn’t want to take any chances. The bee man who came on the previous call said that he doesn’t try to save the bees any more, so they would have died anyway. I guess the local beekeepers have plenty.

I am having problems with both birds and bees.

First, the birds: My peaches are ripening on the tree in my back yard, and there are lots of bites and nibbles. The worst part is that birds will eat them at a greener state than I will, so they spoil them before they are ripe enough for me.

I put up a net over the tree, but birds, with their excellent eyesight, can find any little hole in the net to get in. Unfortunately, once they get in under the net they aren’t nearly as good at finding the hole again to get out. So each morning I get up to find 2-3 birds stuck inside the net, sometimes with feathers tangled up in the mesh. I have to raise up one side of the net and then chase them out. At least 2-3 birds a day don’t eat as many peaches as however many were getting to them before, but I’m selfish and want them all to myself. Little by little I’ll find and patch those holes.

You remember a couple of weeks ago that I had bees in my garage. I called a bee expert who came and judged that they were just scouting and would probably move on. I vacuumed them up and he fixed a few holes, and that was that.

Yesterday we noticed hundreds of bees again, near where they had been before, but in an area untouched by the bee man. The stucco wall extends out slightly from the foundation, and there are little holes on the bottom, presumably to let any water out that may get in. The bees were going in and out of one of those holes as if they lived there. So I set up the vacuum cleaner hose an inch or so away from the bee-hole and just let it run. It was fascinating to sit and watch as bee after bee got too close and disappeared with a “thwip”, sometimes several in a second. It didn’t take long (an hour, maybe) until there were very few bees left buzzing around outside. The inside of the vacuum had hundreds–maybe a thousand bees.

The beauty of the vacuum method of bee removal is that when a bee is stressed or injured, it secretes a pheromone that excites other bees and incites them to attack. But with the vacuum, the bee and any pheromones are immediately removed from the area before they know anything is amiss. The other bees never realize that anything is wrong, though I’m sure eventually they are bothered by all their sisters gone missing. They hive must become a lonely place, like an old Twilight Zone episode where all the people suddenly disappear from the earth.

I use Firefox to browse the internet, instead of Internet Explorer, of course. Here are a few other things I’ve found that improve my browsing experience.

1) Install Adblock Plus, and activate one of the subscriptions. This will get rid of most ads.

2) Install FlashBlock. This prevents Flash from playing until you click on it. Since most of the ads that get past Adblock Plus are Flash based, this pretty much removes all of them.

3) Even after you’ve blocked the ads and the Flash, sometimes animated GIFs will wiggle and move in a distracting way while you are trying to read a page. They’re not really ads, but they are still irritating; e.g. lots of people use animated GIFs for their avatars in forums. If you just hit the “ESC” key all animated GIFs on that page will cease to play.

4) If the text or image is too small, hold the control key down and roll the mouse wheel. If you don’t have a mouse wheel then “CTRL +” or “CTRL -” will also increase or decrease the font size in Firefox and most applications.

5) The middle mouse button will open a link in a new tab. I often go to a news headline page (like Google News) and middle click on several headlines, then go and read them at leisure. It’s easier than clicking a link, then going back to the headline page and clicking the next link. This is also a great technique for checking out several links from a Google search. The middle-click trick also opens bookmarks in a new tab.

6) An oldie, but some may not have heard: If you hold the control key while hitting enter after typing a URL in the address bar, Firefox will automatically add the “http://www.” on the beginning, and “.com” on the end. So just type “google”, then CTRL-Enter. SHIFT-Enter will add “.net” at the end instead, and CTRL-SHIFT-Enter will add “.org”, but those are less useful in everyday browsing.

What else?

It was just about 100 days ago that I found Apollo in the throes of a seizure. Shortly after, he was diagnosed with Valley Fever and put on twice-a-day doses of Fluconazole.

Initially his infection level was 32, severely infected. This week we were informed that his level is down to 2 — barely infected!

The vet wants to keep him on the drugs for another 90 days and then test again. If he’s clear, he can stop taking drugs and be called cured.

I think he deserves an A+ for his first 100 days!

We’ve had a swarm of bees move into the attic and garage. Gisele noticed them swarming around a small hole in the wall this afternoon, and by this evening (6:45) there are hundreds of them in the garage on the ceiling and walls. We can’t get to the cars.

I called a bee service in the afternoon and they said they would be here in the early evening. I just called and he said he was really busy; could he do it tomorrow? NO, Please!!!!

A few have made it into the house, but only 3 or 4. I stepped on one — it stung me!

I’ll update after he gets here — hopefully soon!

In case you missed my last comments on the previous blog, I bought a Kindle. It is my birthday present. It arrived on Friday.

I have mixed feelings about it. Mostly it is very nice. Books are easy to download and there is lots of content available (and quite a bit of free content too). The built-in, instant dictionary is very handy, as is the search feature. It’s light and very thin — almost too thin: If I rest my hands on top as I read in bed it is uncomfortable. But I think that’s probably a matter of adjusting.

I have some reservations. My major concern is with the screen contrast. It’s definitely not as good as black text on a white page. It’s more like very dark gray text on a very light gray background. Under good light it is quite easy to read. But in darker environments, where I would be able to read a printed book, it’s too hard to see.

The page-turn buttons are not quite where I would have put them either — my hands don’t naturally fall there while I’m reading. I might have preferred them on the top corners, but it’s not a big deal.

The built-in web browser is a joke, both because the connection is slow and the gray-scale display looses too much web content, but I guess it’s OK to have Google or Wikipedia available in a pinch.

I read in the bathtub last night, but that was scary. Dropping a normal book means at worst you might be out the cost of the book, and at best you might be able to read it after you dry it out. I doubt Amazon will refund me if I send it back filled with bubbles… :\

Anyway, I’ve got a month to decide if I want to keep it. I probably will.

Does anybody who reads my blog have a Kindle eBook reader?

It looks like it might be a great way to read books. The new version 2 that just came out is supposed to improve on most of the problems with the first one.

On the other hand, it’s very expensive. Though you can download books for about half the cost of a printed book, you would have to download a lot to make up for the cost of the reader.

It seems like it would be ideal for someone who traveled a lot; easer to bring one slim reader filled with 10 books than actually lugging 10 books along.

Or should I just download books to my Blackberry? The screen is much smaller and I don’t have access to Amazon’s huge library; that’s one problem with that idea.

My birthday is coming up next month; should I treat myself with this? Can anybody speak from personal experience?