Firefox 3 SVG Performance Improvement

I did a quick check of my SVG Game of Life demonstration with Firefox 3 and found that it ran much faster compared to Adobe's ancient SVG Viewer 3.03 (ASV). The performance ratio used to be roughly 3:2 in favour of Firefox. Now, it's close to 5:1!

The raw numbers on the same computer: 24-27 fps on Firefox 3, 5-6 fps for MSIE6 + ASV.

Event 7000, DS1410D service failed to start

Windows Event Viewer kept reporting error event 7000 each time I restarted my computer:

The DS1410D service failed to start due to the following error: 
The system cannot find the file specified.

The error is caused by Windows trying to load a file called DS1410D.SYS. This file is part of an application called FlexLM but since I've uninstalled FlexLM, the file has also been deleted.

The fix is find all instances of .../services/DS1410D/Start in registry and set it from 2 (Auto load) to 4 (disabled). See Microsoft KB 103000 article for more information.

Gawk Print Last Field

gawk script to print the last field of each line:

gawk -F <delimiter> "{ print $NF }".

-F defines the separator in the command line, otherwise you would prepend "BEGIN { FS=<delimiter> }".

NF is the number of fields in a line and $n is the value of the n'th field, so $NF outputs the last field.

See Also

• Perl and Ruby versions
• PowerShell and Python versions
• Cut command version

Firefox 3 - Second Impressions

Second impressions after using Firefox 3 for a couple of days:

• Smart Location Bar pretty much replaces the Search bar in most situations.
• Faster than FF2 when rendering of pages with Javascript controls. Load http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa923541.aspx and select some of the menu links at the top of the page. In FF3, the menus expand immediately while in FF2, they used to take about a second or two.
• Identity button is a great shortcut for checking the certificates of secure sites (try http://paypal.com and click on the site's favicon).
• UI improvements:
  • FF3 is prettier than FF2 in Win XP and Vista. The toolbar buttons are clearer and brighter, and there's less clutter.
  • The Find dialog is shorter and less intrusive.
  • Password Manager prompt appears on top of page instead of a modal dialog. You can continue browsing or tell the Password Manager to remember your password.
  • Buttons with focus now have bright highlighting (FF2 drew a hard-to-see dotted line border around the button's label). Would be nice if all controls were highlighted the same way.

2008-06-24: The OK button in the dialog to open or download files now has focus when the dialog opens. In FF2, the OK button didn't get focus until the dialog lost and regained focus.