The Cramer Family

Firefox is my browser of choice. I really love the tabbed features, extensions and correct rendering of css. There are times though when it feels sooooo slow. It is mainly when starting up the program and occasionaly when opening links in new popup windows. So whenever I can find some tips to speed it up, I am very excited. As long as they don’t cause it to freeze and crash more often.

As much as people talk about what a great product Firefox is, I still have it crash on me several times a day. Fortunately it’s usually not a big deal, and yes I understand that it could be caused by the extensions I have. BUT STILL crashing shouldn’t be the norm. I think that I have been too conditioned to think it’s ok for a program to crash as long as I like everything else.

Anyway, tips to speed up Firefox:

• Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar to edit your browser configuration.
• Set network.http.pipelining to true. (You can toggle it by double clicking on it.
• Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true.
• Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to something bigger than 4. I set it to 10.
• Create a new setting called nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set it to 0. To create a new setting, right click on the page, select New and then select Integer (since this setting is a number).

With the standards revolution in full swing, it seems that a lot of sites look at tables as pure evil. But you are actually supposed to use tables for tabular data. I know it sounds crazy, but information that is supposed to be in a table, actually looks good in a table.

Enter Setting the Table. A very well written and comprehensive look at tables and some of the things you can do to style them. One thing in particular was the col element that lets you style an entire column. Very cool, although I thought I read somewhere the IE doesn’t support this attribute (big surprise). I’ll have to check on that

With all the hoopla about the Desktop Search guides, it is very intersting to note that Windows XP already has a very fast search tool built in. It’s the mysterious Indexer, that through an error in programming, never got hooked to the Search dialog. All you need to do to enable this feature is add a “!” before your search term. The speed is amazing! Everything that a desktop search should be.

Read the Article

Using JUnit With Eclipse IDE by Alexander Prohorenko and Olexiy Prohorenko — Test-driven development principles call for writing the tests before writing any code. Alexander and Olexiy Prohorenko demonstrate how this approach can be used with the JUnit testing tool and the Eclipse IDE.

This is a great article about how you can get JUnit up and running with the Eclipse IDE. I am using Eclipse at work and the more and more that I use it the more impressed I am with its power and usability. And use cases are the best for taking some of the guesswork out of coding.

Digital cameras are becoming more and more common. But creating new pages for every single picture that you take can be time consuming to say the least. Here’s how you can make a simple photo album that automatically scans and displays all of the pictures in a specified folder.

Note: The idea for this came from aspalliance.com. I’ve converted the code to C# and added features,comments and instructions.

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