Tuesday Misc.

Did you catch the new Firefox 2.0.0.3 release today? Based on the release notes, it seems the primary focus was on security. I’ll have to track down the other changes — it seems to be running much better on my work machine since the upgrade (by better, I mean fewer CPU spikes that would essentially lock the machine for a few seconds). I’m curious why that might be.

Speaking of Firefox, I’ve been dabbling with Swiftfox on my old xubuntu laptop. I’ve only been using it for a couple weeks, this’ll be the first time I get a feel for how current it’s kept. I like that I can get a build targeted directly for my (old/ancient) processor. Seems to help it run a bit faster.

That reminds me, I need to keep an eye on the fluxbuntu folks and see if a release might be coming out soon. That might be just about what I’m looking for. I recently stumbled over this one, haven’t had a chance to do more than read a few pages on the site. It seems that fluxbuntu and Swiftfox would pair nicely together.

This weekend I upgraded a web server from a single core AMD Opteron 1800 to a dual-core AMD Opteron 2200. There seems to have been a difference based on a few comments and a noticeably lower avg. cpu load. Tonight I stopped at the data center on the way home and tossed in a second dual-core processor and another gig of RAM. I can’t wait to monitor it tomorrow!

Next to upgrade will be the database server as it is going to be pushed harder (our volumes are climbing nicely). It is currently a pair of hyper-threaded Xeons and just 4GB. I’m thinking it may be time to jump to 64bit for OS and SQL Server. More memory; databases just never say no to that.

I’ll be offline a bit over the next week with some family fun. Hopefully with some “down time” too!

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