Firefox 3/2 side-by-side on Windows

Want to use FF2/3 side by side? Check this. Although it describes the procedure for Mac/Linux, everything is almost the same for Windows. Just check this recommendations:

  1. Download the *.win32.zip from the night build.
  2. Unpack on a new directory, say \Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3
  3. Create the new profile as described
  4. Create a shortcut to \Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3\firefox.exe with options:
     -P newprofile -no-remote

That’s it!

On Ruby & Python Performance

I’m working on some algorithms taken from the amazing book “Collective Intelligence” by Toby Segaran. Some of these algorithms can be pretty computing intensive, so I’m working also in _yet another implementation_ of MapReduce on Ruby/DRb. So I had to re-implement Toby’s Python algorithms on Ruby, which pretty straightforward.

This is a little chart of the processing time of one of the algorithms running on different languages/implementations with the same data subset.

 

Language Version Time
Ruby 1.8.6 16.6 seg
Python 2.5.4 4.15 seg
IronPython 1.1.1 10.45 seg
Ruby MapReduced 10.65 seg