Sanders lives!

Ever had that situation where you are just driving along in a car and something interesting comes along? Certainly not an frequent situation. This is where those phone cameras come in very handy . . .

Sanders!

Opera 9 Tech Preview #2

What can I say, Opera just keeps improving itself. It's the best browser around that makes heavy, frequent and intermittent web surfing much easier to deal with... My picks from the latest release (still not officially out of testing) would have to be:

• Updated about:config - great way to customise those browser internals
• Highlighted page search - This has been long time coming, just like in FireFox every search within the current page will be highlighted at once, for better search overview.
• Integrated BitTorrent client - sticking with uTorrent for now
• Tab hover page previews - might come in handy, although it takes a while to load, it's often just faster clicking on the tab and seeing the actual page. Probably useful as the number of tabs increases.
• Per site customisations - turn off that popup blocker for a site where you want popups ;)
• AJAX based Widgets - kindof don't see much of a point in these as being a part of a web browser so far since I use Y'z Dock. It certainly seems to be a step closer to Opera's missing Extension like interface that FireFox already has.
• RSS Aggregator and archiver - yes I know it's not new in this version but I use it rather extensively. Best thing about it is it's house keeping of previous articles, basically if you delete one article from an RSS feed it won't show up there again when the RSS feed updates. And also all of the RSS items ever received are kept there until deletion (the archiving system).
• Session saving - Continue your browsing from where you left off. Crash proof feature that's been around for a long time.
• Font rendering - still not good enough when pages are zoomed in/out. It's probably due to it's page rendering system, which seems to cause 2D acceleration troubles on my Nvidia 6600GT Graphics Card. Basically I have to reload the display settings by for example changing to another resolution and switching back, while Opera is still open

What is surprising to me is the fact that Opera installer (for Windows at least) is still under 4MB in size. Even It's HTML rendering engine performs far better than Firefox and IE on the Acid2 test. Still this does not stop Blogger post editor to become "less functional" when opened within Opera, even with browser identification spoofing set to Mozilla or IE (browser what you say? Press F12 within Opera, it's the last 3 options).

No I didn't like IE 7...

Solaris 9+ and Nohup

How to deattach a long and already running process from it's shell (or parent process in general) so that it can be left running on the system intact, even if the user who triggered the process logs out? Nohup does it (assuming it's the right version):

 $ nohup -a -F -p [PID] 

These nohup(1) extensions seem to be only available on Sun Solaris 9 and up.