OS X 10.5.5: CPU pegging with Firefox

Even after five updates it's not clear that 10.5.5 is a better OS for my iMac G5 than 10.4.11. Leopard is probably optimized for the Intel machines, and I suspect the security measures (memory address changes) have their price.

The biggest problem now is it's slow. In particular Firefox routinely pegs the CPU (activity monitor) on 10.5 whereas it didn't on 10.4. The type lag is very annoying. In general it feels about 10% slower for most of what I do.

So if you have a PPC machine on 10.4.11 you might want to wait until you buy a new machine to switch.

Update 9/27/08: I find a few other people noticing this. Some are disabling the memory cache. I'll try the new google toolbar and look for other extensions to remove.

See also:

Gordon's Tech: OS X 10.5 bug 5: archive and install cross-user startup (login) item application: "In the course of updating my MacBook and iMac to 10.5 I've previously documented four significant bugs (though the last may, after some fixes, have limited impact):

* LaunchDaemons: cannot login from admin account
* Permissions - apps cannot be updated
* Keychain First Aid 10.2 running on OS X 10.5
* The unknown user and group bugs

Now I can add a fifth bug [1].

The Archive and Install form of the update process (this or clean install are the only safe choices, both have big issues) applied login items belonging to my wife's user account to my own account. I suspect it applied them to all accounts, but I haven't dug through the rest yet.

Digital radio - Apple style

Well, that was certainly stealthy.

Suddenly digital radio is upon us - quite unexpectedly.

My first awakening was the excellent Minnnesota Public Radio app for the iPhone -- a joint venture between MPR and CodeMorphic - a Twin Cities Mac dev shop (interesting projects!).

So now I can play digital radio in my car while I drive to work -- through my iPhone. (Yeah, it won't work as well as it does at home, but don't you think Sirius/XM worry about this?)

That reminded me that M has been asking for a radio for the kitchen. There are some excellent radios still on the market, and we'll probably get one, but we also have a pretty nice iTunes/AirTunes/iPhone Remote setup already in place. Didn't iTunes used to play streaming radio?

Turns out they still do, iPhone Remote will find the stations in my playlist, and the choices and quality are better than I remember. Consider CBC Jazz ...

CBC Radio 2 Blog - Tech Q's?: How To Listen To The New R2 New Internet Channels

... Peter kindly walks us through how to listen to R2's new internet radio channels, which include classical, Canadian composers, Canadian songwriters, and jazz.

Over to Dr. Peter:

'Audio on the internet used to be a minor miracle . . . but a really lousy sounding one. Especially for music! Often it still does sound bad. But not when it's coming from CBC Radio 2.

Today we launched our new new Internet Radio Channels and we're pretty proud of the sound quality...

So we've created some 'How to' files to help you make your way.

* How to Listen to CBC Radio 2's New Online Channels
* How to Connect Your Computer to Your Audio System...

The 192kbps Jazz stream sounds as good as my 192 kbps encoded Jazz tunes. In other words, good enough for my ears. There's even a Big Band station I'll try out on my mother.

There's even a "staff picks" list in iTunes now -- new each month.

So now Apple rules digital radio.

Anyone noticing?

Gordon's stuff, now in 35 languages

As if English weren't bad enough, my less unpopular blogs now feature a translation widget. If you try it you can see me in, say, Chinese.

The widget uses Google's statistically based machine translation. It was pretty easy to install and the translation is very quick. Give it a try; ignore the eerie Twilight Zone background music you might imagine.

Yes, more future shock. Not to worry, the translations are probably pretty bad. I suspect to get good results from machine translation you have to use a translation-optimized version of your native language with simple grammar, no homographs, longer words, no abbreviations, less jargon, etc.

I was provoked to experiment when reading of new Google Translator Languages such as "Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian ...Vietnamese". Each can translate to the other, but I read that English is always an intermediary. A double translation is going to be pretty funny, but not terribly useful.

The first part of the embedding process is to go to translate.google.com and visit the tools page. That's where you pick up your JavaScript.

Then go to Blogger Layout and, from the Basic menu, choose the HTML/Javascript widget. Past in your JavaScript and then arrange the widget on you blog template.

I wonder if I'm better in Danish.

iPhone app for listening to Minnesota Public Radio

Apple will never install an FM tuner into the iPhone/iTouch/iPod, so MPR has introduced a streaming iPhone app for them alone ...

MPR: About Us: Mobile Services

... Listen to MPR on your iPhone and iPod Touch with the MPR Radio iPhone application. The Current, Classical MPR, and MPR News are all available to stream on your iPhone or iPod Touch when you install the free MPR Radio application from the iTunes App Store...

Funny to spend all those CPU cycles to do something that was once so very cheap. Digital radio, of a sort.

PS. There's a cute preview of their iPhone oriented news service. Sooner or later mmprnews.publicradio.org/iphone will go live.

It will be interesting to compare the quality of classical MPR to, say, Sirius or XM.

Spaces, expose and custom mouse buttons - sweet

Until now 10.5 hasn't really done anything for me. Yeah, I can now share the shared folder, and that's good -- but, on the other hand, Leopard remote desktop is a toy.

Spaces, though, they're nicer than I thought. For example:

macosxhints.com - 10.5: Drag and drop between Spaces

... If you have two applications in two separate spaces (e.g iPhoto and Keynote), and you would like to drag an item from the first application to drop in the second application, here are two easy ways to do just that.

First, you can drag the item (file, photo, etc..), press F8 and then select the other space, then drop the item into the other application. Or you can drag the file, press Command-Tab, and then drop the dragged icon on the other application. You will then be switched automatically to the other space to drop your stuff, just like in Tiger.

But it gets better. My Microsoft Mouse has four buttons and a clickable scroll wheel. I mapped button 3 Expose - desktop, button 4 to Spaces, and the wheel to Expose - all windows. (To do this I set button 4 to "Mac OS controlled", then in Spaces Preferences set button 4 to show Spaces).

Now, if I'm working on something, I can click button 4, then I can drag windows between spaces (nice). I can also use the expose buttons within any spaces window I click on.

I have 4 spaces now and will probably scale up. You can assign an app to a space, and I might do that for the Finder, but in general I prefer to organize by task. That's why I'm de-emphasizing tabbed browser use -- I prefer to use windows and Spaces to organize my work.

Google Reader now has tagged streams

Google reader shared feeds now inherit the tag of the folder(s) they are assigned to in Google Reader. You can see them in the post footer when you view a post within Reader, and if you click on them you get a filtered version of the shared post list:

For example:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/user%2F06457543619879090746%2Flabel%2FSciTech

shows only posts from my "SciTech" tagged feeds, or posts to which that tag has been manually added during Sharing.

The above link requires a Google reader account. For heck of it I tried:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/06457543619879090746%2Flabel%2FSciTech

but today that gives "permission denied". Likewise I wasn't able to discover a feed for this stream; the feed associated with the filtered page is the general shared item feed.

Still, it's progress. Soon I might be able to share my sci and tech posts without sharing my (very Dem) political posts.

Making your Google custom search the IE and Firefox defaults

I love my Google custom searches, I’ve made a subset of them the “start” page I use on all browsers and platforms.

My favorite search engine includes Google, but I’ve added biases including

1. everything linked to from links in my Google Reader exported OPML file
2. my Gordon’s Tech/Notes extended memory [1]
3. my legacy web pages
4. everything I like and add via my toolbar embedded Google Marker

Why do I love this search?

Say you search on “In our Time" and “Social Contract” in standard Google. Today you go to the evil iPlayer oriented BBC site, the streaming-centric site that never mentions podcasts. With my custom search engine I go instead to the virtuous original site.

My biased Google is flat out better than straight Google. For me, anyway.

It’s annoying to have to go to my special page to run it though. I’d like to replace my browser search in Firefox and IE with the Google-Gordon search. In the old days that was easy – just run a search, extract the URL, add a wild card, and paste it into the browser like so:

• http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&ie=UTF-8&q=TEST&sa=Search to something like
• http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&q=$w (Windows Live Toolbar syntax)

Now it’s harder, but not terribly harder. It’s just terribly hard to find out how to do it.

For Internet Explorer 7 it’s very easy. From the search drop down choose “find more providers” and follow the simple directions to “create your own”:

So I just pasted in:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&ie=UTF-8&q=TEST&sa=Search

and it works:

You can also create a Google Toolbar 5 custom button and in Windows Live toolbar search you just enter this URL:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&q=$w

I don’t know how to create a custom search to over-ride the Firefox default search, but, and this was surprisingly hard to find, it’s not hard to create a custom Google/Firefox toolbar button:

The Google Toolbar's Custom Buttons feature makes it possible for you to create buttons and share them with other Google Toolbar users via our Custom Buttons download page at http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/buttons/gallery
To create a search button for your favorite site, please follow the instructions below:
1. Open Mozilla Firefox and visit the search page for which you'd like to create a custom button.
2. Place your cursor inside a search box on that site and right-click your mouse to view the context menu.
3. Select "Generate Custom Search" and click "Add."

Holy cow. These bizarre directions actually work. I added my button and made it my new default. A couple of caveats:

1. The directions are all for XP. It does work in Firefox 3/OS X, but some of the directions don't apply (ex: where xml is stored)
   
2. This wouldn't work from the Gadget form on my search page, I had to go the google hosted page directly.
3. To get the XML, so you can host the button, you use Google FirefoxToolbar:Manage:Select Button:Edit:Advanced Edit.
   

I put my search button XML file on one of my personal sites. This link is supposed to add it to a Google toolbar:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.faughnan.com/gordon_google.xml

Buttons can be submitted it to the Google Button Gallery, but I don't have delusions of grandeur.

[1] Damnit Blogger, give me backlinks! BTW, I remember when “extended memory” had a different meaning, as in “QEMM”.