TenFourFox taps disused resources of your aging PowerPC

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Many of us geeks, especially those of us in the IT world replace our hardware almost as often as fashionistas change wardrobes. For some reason, I have a thing for old hardware. While I certainly don’t use it on a daily basis, I have a hard time parting with my favorite gear. I see it as something akin to automotive enthusiasts that like to keep that prized vintage car in their garage. They won’t drive it to work every day, but that doesn’t mean they don’t love taking it for a spin on the weekends.

I have a similar relationship with some of my favorite machines. I still use a 15″ PowerBook G4 at home on a fairly regular basis. (in fact I’m typing this post on it right now) At it’s heart is a 1.67Ghz PowerPC G4 processor. (the last model and fastest PPC Apple ever delivered in a laptop) By today’s standards, this single-core machine barely stays ahead of most netbooks. It’s battery is dead, and it gets fairly hot when you push it, but I find it to be perfectly adequate for most things.

Apple’s support of the PPC architecture ended 2 OS revisions ago (Leopard or 10.5) and even the Mozilla foundation dropped support from their Firefox browser after the 3.6.x series. (and even that will stop receiving updates soon…) Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised to find a project known as TenFourFox not only recompiling the latest Firefox from source, but actually making PPC specific improvements as well! TenFourFox is basically Firefox, but separately optimized for PowerPC G3, two flavors of G4 and the G5 CPU. That would be enough in itself, but the developers didn’t stop there. They’ve swapped out the old just-in-time JavaScript compiler with their recently completed nanojit for PPC which beats even Apple’s native Safari browser. (which until recently was the only browser with anything close to decent performance) This is all possible because there are still people in the Open Source community interested in this platform who know how to leverage resources like AltiVec. Kudos to the TenFourFox team for keeping this aging platform relevant!

Don’t take your health for granted

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As I sit here resting my back from this week’s physical therapy routine, enjoying a cold beer and my Anjunabeats playlist, I’m keenly aware of the state I was in two weeks ago. It was a Saturday like most others. I was hooking the bike trailer to my 21-speed hybrid road bike in preparation to take my daughter on an afternoon ride through our favorite bike trail. My back had been a little sore the past few days, (probably due to overloading my messenger bag) but I hadn’t really given it a second thought. It never occurred to me that what I felt might be an early indicator of a serious injury.

As I was finishing adding air to my tires, my daughter tripped on the driveway and skinned her knee. (she’s only 4 and doesn’t always understand why we tell her not to run…) I dropped what I was doing, scooped her up and took her into the house to get fixed up. I stopped in the kitchen, I think instinctively because I felt something, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I picked her back up and as I made the first few steps up the stairs to the bathroom I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my back and was unable to carry her any further. Thankfully my wife was there to take over because I was almost completely incapacitated.

Every step, every movement of my body those first couple of days were met with intense pain. It never occurred to me that something so simple could bring someone my age, quite literally to his knees. I felt like an 80-year-old, not someone in their mid 30’s.

The fault is entirely mine. While I’ve been telling myself that my 15 minute walks to and from work are good exercise, I haven’t been making much effort to stay in shape. Sure I do the occasional bike ride or walks around the neighborhood and I play Wii Fit plus, (sometimes) but nothing regular. Once my physical therapist clears me for more strenuous activities, that is going to change. I’m not going to let this happen again.

Back in the saddle

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It’s been a while since my last post, about a year in fact.  This will come as no surprise to those who’ve followed my blog before.  In my defense, it wasn’t entirely my fault.  Back when I decided to convert my static weblog over to a proper blog platform, (and being cheap) I decided to host it myself with a free dynamic domain service.  For the most part, this worked great until one day that company decided to stop providing some of the domains for free.  I didn’t want to pay $15/year for a single hostname when I could have multiple domains for the same money.  I looked at other free solutions, but I just couldn’t trust that these domains would stick around.

Fast forward to today:  My trusty Compaq Evo, while tiny and very power efficient (try 35W @ idle running a Pentium 4 CPU) just wasn’t cutting it.  I wanted a new machine with multiple cores, SATA and GigE.  I had an AMD Phenom x3 CPU collecting dust in my computer room, so I decided to order up a new motherboard, and a pair of 2TB drives.  The new machine definitely eats more power, but it’s also got to keep 4 disks spinning.  I’ve also broken with tradition and installed Linux on this server.  (my previous servers have always been at the latest version of Microsoft’s server OS to give me extra practice before implementing at work…)  Hosting this blog on a WIMP platform has been an experience in frustration at times, so switching to LAMP was already a desirable option.  The last piece of the puzzle was to find a domain I liked that was cheap and easy to remember… and that brings us full circle.  I definitely should’ve done this sooner.