How To Speed Up Firefox

I was so disturbed by the slow performance of my FireFox. Then I found this post, it’s an old post by KoRn, but it solved my annoying problem.

Posted on Monday, December 13, 2004 3:45:50 AM by KoRn
Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

• network.http.pipelining
• network.http.proxy.pipelining
• network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

• Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

• Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
• Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New->Integer.
Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

It worked for me! My Firefox loads much faster!

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Chess Game: Strategic Positioning and Timing

I do love playing chess though I’m not good at it. In fact I don’t play it with human. I play it with machine. Chess can now be played on cell phone. I play chess on my Java enabled cell phone.

I love to hear names like Kasparov, Fischer etc. Names that have big influences on chess world. I believe that I had known this game since I was a kid. I remember once I played this with my mom.

I’m not good at playing chess. My cousin does. And a friend of his whom I know, even plays better. Do you ever hear blindfold chess? Two people play chess without the chess board in front of them. So how they play? Well they just speak out what they move. Chess has an established notation. The chess board has 64 squares. a,b,c…h on the X axis and 1,2,3…8 on Y. Moves of its piece can be represented by e2-e4, for example. It’s a pawn move, the opening move.

The wonderful thing of chess game is that it teaches us strategy.  How to move our pieces based on our predictions of the opponent moves to conquer the space, the 64 squares. Strategic plan in moving the pieces is the most basic of this game. Move the pieces one after the other slowly but strategically to form a formation  that is, say, developed to finally make a deadly attack. Position of each piece is very important. Much like soldiers in a war combat. Each piece in its position has to give its best support to each other and to the whole formation.

Timing is also very important. Good pieces position in a good formation alone doesn’t guarantee the winning of the game. I believe chess is about moving the pieces strategically to the right position in the very right time.

There’s another thing left to mention. The quality of the pieces. I remember a fragment of Mahabharata epic when Arjuna of Pandavas and Duryodhana of Kauravas met Krishna before the Kurukshetra War. Both wanted Krishna at their side when the war comes. It’s a dilemma, so Krishna then made an offer. He asked Duryodhana weather to take him, one person, as his ally or ten thousands men of his arm forces. Duryodhana took the second choice and in the end he lost the war.

In modern-day we have what we call SWOT (Strength Weakness Opportunity Threaten) analyses. Chess is exactly about this. Do you play chess?

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How To Analyze Your Spelling, Grammar And Word Choice Online

Trying to be more confident, I used Paper Rater to get some suggestions on my writing. So I pasted my earlier post Why It Feels So Hard To Write In English? to this site and let it analyzes my writing.

The Get Report button brings me these up:



It checks the Plagiarism, says:

No sign of plagiarism was found. That's what we like to see! 

then Spelling, says:

Possible spelling corrections are underlined in red within the text itself. Click on the underlined text to edit, replace, or ignore suggested changes.

In my post I wrote ‘Local language is used in our informal dearly-expressing feelings.’ and the phrase ‘dearly-expressing’ is underlined in red. Paper Rater suggests me to not hyphenate the phrase. It then becomes ‘…our informal dearly expressing feelings.’

and Grammar, says: 

Possible grammar suggestions are underlined in green within the text. Select the underlined text to edit, replace, or ignore changes.

I wrote ‘…in non English speaking community.’ and ‘non English’ is underlined in green. I clicked on the green underlined phrase and got ‘Hyphen Required’.

The most fascinating thing that I got from this online service is that it brings me out the Word Choice suggestions. This is particularly important and useful for me since, you know, as a foreign English speaker my vocabularies are very limited and choosing the right word is the most difficult thing to do. Language has syntax rule. It tells us how words are supposed to be properly placed within a sentence. It has form. Words are to be placed in a certain form. Grammar talks on this. Foreign learner used to study the grammar of the language to be able to say simple sentence such as ‘I go…’ or ‘I write…’ putting the Predicate (verb) directly after the Subject (noun) with no ‘am’ or ‘was’ and not otherwise. But language also has meaning. It is meaning that language has to deliver. And it is semantic that deals with it. Word choice is about semantic and this is very much harder to master. 



In my post I wrote ‘We are a nation of hundreds of tribes.’ and ‘tribes’ is underlined in blue. Paper Rater says It is a Bias Language. Even more, it explains the term, says:

Bias words and phrases may express gender, ethnic, or racial bias. These can turn people off. Bias-free language has the same meaning and treats people with respect.
Replace tribes with

• ethnic groups

I honestly still feel not as so comfortable as when I speak and write in my language after all these analyzing processes. But at least I got ‘someone’ I can consult to.

Please leave your comments.

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Why It Feels So Hard To Write In English?

Why it feels so hard writing in English? Simple answer to that question is because I live in a non-English speaking community. So English is not my daily language. It’s my other (second) language. Second? Not exactly too. My second language is my national language. The first words I learned when I first able to talk is my local, mother tongue language. I am a bi-linguist. I speak in my local and national language.

We are a nation of hundreds of ethnic groups, each having its own specific language and culture. Even we have ‘foreign’ speaking people among us. They’re Chinese. This is something that I truly pride of. But at the downside I hardly express my thoughts and feelings in English.

When can I speak in English? Hardly got a chance. I speak daily in my local language with families and relatives and when I meet others I speak in my national language. Local language is used in our informal dearly expressing feelings. Formal conversations mostly delivered in national language.

I guess the hard things I find in expressing thoughts and feelings in English is the lack of practicing. This is something that for a long time had been there in my mind. I read a lot, not only books or texts written in our language but also in English. I got no as much serious difficulties in doing this as in writing or speaking. Reading gives me more time to process the information I try to grab and understand. It’s not ad-lib. But in the way backwards, expressing out whatever I’ve got in my mind, obstacles come up.

This is my first serious trying of writing in English. Hope you, if happened to read this, may get the point I try to deliver. Please leave your comment.

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Rileks...Mengerjakan Blog Butuh Waktu

 

Ada tip menarik dari Barbara di BloggingWithoutABlog soal bagaimana sebaiknya kita menyikapi aktifitas blogging. Blogging katanya adalah hobby, sama seperti hobby lainnya. Barbara kemudian bicara soal quilting, membuat kain dari perca. Ini yang dikatakannya:

...when someone decides to make a quilt  they don’t race to get it done. No. They take time to find a pattern. Then they pick out the perfect fabric. They’ll carefully cut out each piece and painstakingly start making their blocks. When their blocks are done, they’ll arrange them “just so”, stitch them together, etc….. It may be years before the quilt is done.

ketika seseorang memutuskan membuat quilt (lihat gambar), mereka tidak terburu-buru menyelesaikannya. Tidak, mereka perlu waktu untuk mendapatkan pola, mencari bahan yang pas, memotong tiap bagian dan sedikit demi sedikit mulai membentuk potongan. Ketika potongan itu terbentuk, mereka kemudian menyusunnya "begitu saja", menyambungkannya satu sama lain dst... Bisa jadi perlu waktu bertahun-tahun agar quilt itu selesai.

Analogi yang bagus. Di awal memulai blog, ada dorongan untuk (tergesa-gesa) segera menerbitkan apapun dalam jumlah banyak. Padahal untuk apa isi blog kita buat banyak kalau tidak ada yang baca?

Soal ini memang bisa dirasakan banyak orang. Menemukan sesuatu yang baru apalagi menarik, selalu membuat kita ingin banyak-banyak mencoba.

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Apa Itu Search Engine?

Search engine adalah program yang digunakan untuk mencari informasi di lingkungan tertentu dan menyimpannya dalam database. Istilah ini seringkali terlalu dikaitkan dengan Internet search engine, yakni search engine yang didisain khusus untuk pencarian informasi di Internet. Sebenarnya search engine bisa juga dimanfaatkan untuk pencarian konten offline seperti misalnya katalog perpustakaan, konten hardisk di komputer pribadi, atau katalog koleksi museum dsb. Search engine membantu kita mengorganisir dan menampilkan informasi sedemikian rupa sehingga informasi tsb mudah diakses.

Ada tiga hal menyangkut search engine: crawling, indexing, dan searching. Sewaktu crawling, search engine mencari konten baru yang tidak ditemukan pada crawl terakhir, termasuk update file dan halaman web. Kemudian ia mengindex informasi yang didapat, mengambil keyword lalu mengelompokkannya. Di Internet misalnya, indexing sangat dipengaruhi oleh keyword dan meta tag yang menyediakan informasi mengenai halaman web.

Jika informasi sudah diindex, informasi mengenai bagaimana cara mengakses informasi tsb kemudian disimpan dalam database. Sebagian search engine juga membuat “cache” agar pengambilan informasi ketika diperlukan menjadi lebih mudah. Ketika kita melakukan pencarian, search engine kemudian menampilkan hasil yang diperluas berdasar relevansinya. Pencarian “apel” misalnya, akan memunculkan hasil mengenai hal-hal yang berkaitan dengan apel, termasuk misalnya, “apa itu apel?” demi kenyamanan pengguna.

Walau semua search engine bekerja dengan cara serupa tetapi kegunaannya bisa cukup bervariasi. Search engine didasarkan pada algoritma kompleks untuk menentukan relevansi hasil pencariannya, terutama hasil pencarian keyword-keyword generik. Pengguna cenderung lebih menyukai search engine yang menampilkan hasil pencarian seperti yang mereka harapkan. Google, Yahoo, Lycos dan Altavista misalnya, berlomba melengkapi fitur masing-masing search engine-nya agar hasil pencarian yang ditampilkan lebih relevan dan lebih disukai penggunanya.

Google menjadi sangat terasosiasi dengan proses web search sehingga pencarian di web kini diistilahkan dengan “googling”. Google sendiri sebenarnya tidak terlalu menyukasi hal ini karena khawatir penggunaan huruf kecil pada penyebutan nama perusahaannya, dan penggunaannya secara generik dapat mengurangi nilai jual.

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Blog di Blogger dan WordPress.com

Ini blog kedua dengan nama sama yang saya buat. Mengapa harus lebih dari satu? Apa yang bisa diisikan ke kedua blog itu? Apa satu saja tidak cukup untuk menampung tumpahan pikiran? Honestly, bukan itu yang terutama mendorong untuk membuat lagi blog yang lain. Fitur-fitur yang ditawarkan di kedua platform (Blogger dan Wordpress) yang lebih menarik. Keduanya, karena sama-sama blog, secara generik memang sama, tetapi soal fitur-fitur tambahannya masing-masing memiliki kelebihan dan kekurangan.

Yang paling jelas misalnya, WordPress tidak mengijinkan JavaScript. Ini terasa sangat membatasi. JavaScript jika tidak diijinkan membawa dampak langsung ke urusan monetizing. Iklan tidak bisa dipasang di WordPress. Soal template, WordPress (WordPress.com, not WordPress.org) juga sangat terbatas, template di WordPress hanya bisa dipilih dari yang sudah disediakan. Sebaliknya, Blogger membolehkan JavaScript. Ini suatu keleluasaan yang menyenangkan. Banyak hal bisa dikerjakan dengan JavaScript. Template pada Blogger juga lebih fleksibel. Tersedia banyak free template untuk Blogger yang bisa kita gunakan di blog kita. Mempercantik tampilan blog menjadi sangat lebih mudah di Blogger.

Blogger tidak menyediakan Categori. Jika pada WordPress kita bisa membuat penstrukturan isi menggunakan kategori (taksonomi), pada Blogger sama sekali hal ini tidak bisa dilakukan. Pengelompokkan cukup dilakukan dengan tag (folksonomi). Tetapi kedua metode pengelompokkan ini sama-sama valid. Page pada Blogger juga dibatasi jumlahnya, tidak seperti pada WordPress. Page, pada blog, harus dibedakan dengan entry (post), tidak seperti pada situs statis.

Hal-hal lain yang menyangkut SEO (Search Engine Optimatization) juga masing-masing memiliki kelebihan dan kekurangan. Entri pada WordPress kini sudah "dijamin" dengan fitur Pubsubhubbub (PusH). Jika sebelumnya menggunakan Ping-o-matic, WordPress melangkah lebih jauh dengan PusH. Dengan fitur ini setiap post yang kita buat, akan segera terindeks di Google sesaat setelah kita klikk "Publish" button.

Apalagi? Tentu sangat sulit membandingkan kedua platform ini karena terlalu banyak yang harus ditelusuri. Oleh karena itu satu-satunya cara adalah dengan membuat blog di kedua platform ini.

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