Parents, do you have a teenager that has your computer wrecked with I-DONT-KNOW-WARE on your computer? Please continue reading this post to help you solve your problems. Well, at least learn a technique to address the issue.

I have a side hustle where I work on computers. I have one client that has a son that BSODs their laptop at least once every six months. I am not knocking my steady business, but the madness must end.

I suggested the parent to “sandbox” their computer. What is sandboxing? It is a way to configure your computer to not keep newly installed programs after the machine restarts. The concept is kinda like a real sandbox. When you are finished playing, you clean/smooth out the sandbox to leave it the way you found it.

So I referred the parent to use sandboxie to install on their machine and try it out for another six months to see if it makes a difference.  There are other sandboxing programs out there. Raviratlami’s blog (8/2006) has shed some additional light on the subject. I really hope that this resolves the issue… If not, there is always SecondChance by PowerQuest.

Pamela Gellar of Atlas Shrugs. Is Google censoring anti-Obama stories?
Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs claims the search engine giant has banned her groundbreaking articles about Obama – a technique many people refer to as “sandboxing.” However, Atlas Shrugs is not new, and Gellar believes her stories have been intentionally suppressed by the Internet giant – especially ones about President-elect Obama. She said her exclusive stories about Obama’s birth certificate that once received thousands of hits every day will not come up in Google word searches.
“I was in the top five search results before the story got legs,” she said. “These stories drove 12,000 to 15,000 people to my site every day.”

This weekend, I was installing a GIMP denoising plugin into my computer. I had tried to read the GIMP documentation on installing plugins, but when it came to Windows, they basically avoided the problem altogether. They made it seem like a hard task; many people do not know what the diferences is between a precompiled binary and source code is. You can’t write help files for developers; they already know what to do. You have to write help files for the masses.

The “heroics” as they called it could be done in a much simpler fashion. Plugins, at least for desktop applications, could have this simple work flow for users to follow to obtain the plugin they need.

1. Sync GIMP with the GIMP plugin registry website so GIMP can poll for new plugins

2. User manipulates graphic interface to download plugin from site into correct directory

3. Plugin works the next time GIMP is run.

(This is very similar to Ubuntu’s Add/Remove Programs.)

Currently, you have to put a binary into a non-specific folder by hand… now I have 2.4, so I naturally thought that the plugin should go into the 2.4/lib/gimp/plugin directory… but no, it doesn’t. It goes into the depreciated 2.0 folder. This caused me 20 minutes of utter frustration.

This is something that most developers do not know: frustration accumulates faster then you think. I suspect it actually grows exponentially, but I have yet to prove that (though I assure you that I’m actively researching it).

We should not expect, as computer scientists, for users to know where to put anything of our program. This is another sandboxing technique, and to run with the metaphor, a new toy shouldn’t be hard to reach.

The Firefox 3 Beta 1 (download) was finally launched this week, and from what I’ve been reading, it promises better memory usage along with interface tweaks. So, I decided to give it a spin. There were some basic concerns of course, like conflicts with my existing Firefox 2 setup, incompatible extensions and general instability/performance issues.

However, there’s also an easy way to overcome this problem using sandboxing software like Sandboxie and Altiris SVS (lifehacker article on using SVS). I had installed Sandboxie sometime back after reading about it in a few places. It is quite simple to use – you just need to launch the desired program using the Sandboxie tool. I went ahead and got the Firefox 3 beta and ran the installer in the sandbox. The thing to note about the sandboxing is that though the installation is in a sandbox, the Firefox settings (including extensions) from my version 2 installation would be used, but in a read-only fashion, so that compatible extensions can be used as on a regular upgrade, bookmarks are carried over, and so is the session restoring.

Anyway, the beta installed without any glitches. Then, on launching the browser, it notified me of a bunch of incompatible extensions (as suspected) – greasemonkey, mouse gestures, del.icio.us bookmarks, downthemall, tab mix plus to name a few. So much for hoping to use Firefox 3 beta as a version 2 replacement.

The interface tweaks were seemingly minor, but did make a difference. For one thing the toolbar paddings seems to have been reduced, which gives it a cleaner look. Then there’s the star in the address bar for quickly marking sites along with the places folder in the bookmarks toolbar which lists the recently and frequently accessed sites, tags etc. The bookmarking process has also been overhauled, with support for tags along with with a modified organizing interface. All in all, the interface tweaks are quite nice, without any drastic changes.

Coming to the performance, the memory usage did seem to be lower than version 2, especially after leaving it running for some time. In version 2, the memory usage gradually increases with time and number of opened tabs. This aspect seems to be a lot more efficient in version 3, in the beta itself. The interface also seemed snappier when switching between tabs, and opening new ones. Of course part of this could also be due to the fact that almost a dozen extensions were disabled in the beta due to incompatibilities. But, it seems we have something to look forward to on this front.

I have been seriously considering the switch to Flock (which is based on Firefox 2, and is compatible with many of the Firefox extensions) for the last few weeks after being bogged down by the version 2 performance. Firefox 3 seems to hold some hope on the performance front in addition to other improvements, and should be a welcome upgrade from version 2. However, I won’t be switching till the extension compatibilities are sorted out (if not for the extensions, I would’ve been on Opera). What about you?

Update: Found a couple of reviews on Ars Technica and ZDNet, plus a memory usage comparison