Sperrobjekt Weblog

I just installed the recent beta 4 release of Firefox 3 (Firefox Portable, to be exact, thus making it run alongside my trusty Firefox 2). Firefox 3 is blazing fast, but this may be due to the fact that I've got almost no add-ons installed. My Firefox 2 has to carry the burden of 27 active extensions that may or may not slow down the whole applicaton, who knows. All in all, Firefox 3 seems to be very stable already, but I need my add-ons for web development and so on. That's why I've been looking for other things to do with the new beta. When I found out that Mozilla Labs released a new version of Prism, their stand-alone XULRunner applicication slash Site Specific Browser. If you install Prism 0.2 as add-on to Firefox 3, it allows you to create and export new applicatons from within the browser. The new apps then use the browser's rendering enginge, it seems (I'm not exactly sure how it works). Yet, again, the resulting app feels considerably faster than the old Prism. I'm using an installation of tt-rss on my server as web based feed reader. Now that it's running as a Prism app, it seems to respond so much faster than before - which reduces the amount of time I need to read all my feeds. Great!

Today, I got myself an external USB sound card and tried to install it on my notebook running Ubuntu Studio. It's a Trust SC-5500p because that's the only affordable model my retailer had in stock. To cut a long story short: I didn't work as I hoped it would. I could get heavily distorted sound out of its front speaker output jack, but the rear as well as the center outputs remained silent. I thought the days of insufficient support for hardware on Linux were over, but: FAIL! Since I swore to myself that I wouldn't spent hours and hours an installing packages and hacking config files anymore, I returned the device, and I will start to look for another affordable solution. Suggestions anyone?