Pooya Karimian

Sundays are my email clean-up days. I use Fusemail’s own web-mail for normal daily email checking and every time I read an email that needs further attention, I will leave it as unread. Then in my free time, weekends mostly, I open Thunderbird, Sunbird, Firefox and Notepad. I use Thunderbird to read the mailing list emails in threaded-view and to find the unread mails. I use Sunbird to mark events in my calendar. In Firefox I look at the links and bookmark important ones. And in Notepad I write down the tasks that I should do but there’s no special deadline or something for them to go in calendar. I save that text file on my desktop. This way the number of unread email are dropped from 200-300 to less than 50.

I had lots of emails about pkLaunch (which has now been downloaded 1000+ times), which I was mostly forgetting to reply back. So I made a fancy Ajaxified commenting system that people can use to leave their comments and questions in the pkLaunch discussions. You can try it on a test page here. It still needs more polishing.

OHUM Aloodeh CD finally arrived today. O-HUM is an underground Iranian rock band, singing lyrics from Hafez. I really enjoyed the new album and I suggest you support them by buying it, especially that they released their two previous albums for free. The Album is published by Bamahang productions with nice cover art design from Zartosht Soltani.

Listen to "Atashe To":

- O-HUM official site
- CDbaby.com: Listen to samples and Buy
- 1999 Album: Nahal-e Heyrat
- 2002 Singles: Hafez in Love...
- 2005 Album: Aloodeh

Being a fast browser, Firefox will cache lots of stuff in memory and sometimes tends to be lazy releasing this memory even after you browse away from pages or even after closing some of the tabs. This will lead to a high memory usage (sometimes over 100MB) after hours of use. One work around for that is to restart Firefox. In that case using an extension like SessionSaver can help by restoring the old browsing session again, but still not that great.

A better solution that I found is to set the following preferences in Firefox. You can change them by typing about:config in the address bar:

config.trim_on_minimize = true
(MS Windows only. Determines how Windows handles memory for the browser when minimizing. Create it as a boolean value if it doesn't exist)

browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers = 0
(Number of history pages cached)

browser.cache.memory.capacity = 16384
(The maximum amount of memory to use for caching decoded images and chrome. Create this one as an integer, if it doesn't exist)

These parameters will decrease browser's responsiveness; instead it will have a smaller memory footprint. Also as a result of setting config.trim_on_minimize to true, whenever you minimize Firefox, Windows will aggressively take back as much memory as it can from browser. This will cause the memory usage to go down to 4-5MB. And the nice thing is that after you maximize the browser windows again the memory usage will be less than what it was before.

Also if you are the kind of user how don't want browser windows to be open and tend to close it as soon as you were done with your work and then open it again when needed, Firefox Preloader will improve Firefox startup time. It preloads a copy of Firefox without chrome in background, so clicking on Firefox icon will just open a new window fast.