High CPU Loads!

I was recently re-encoding Pink Floyd's the dark side of the moon in a higher format, and while I was doing that I was watching a podcast with quicktime and I wanted to search something with Firefox. When I clicked on the Firefox Icon in my dock it took seriously over a minute to start up. This kind of confused me until I took a look at my iStat Pro widget and saw that my CPU load was REALLY high. I just thoiught I'd take a second to explain what that means and why it's bad.

So what you are looking at a set of three numbers; in this case they are 6.98, 4.93, 2.92. These numbers stand for the load percentage over the last minutes, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes respectively. What's that mean? Given the data above, over the last minute I was loading the processor 698% of the intended load over the last minute, 493% over the last 5 minutes, and 292% over the last 15 minutes.

A normal load set would be something like .42, .35, .38, meaning you haven't done too much that is processor intensive. It's very bad to stress your processor A LOT in a short time, but it's nothing to worry about every now and then. You generally don't want to make your machine have a higher load average than 5 for more than a minute or two at a time.

Moral of the story: try not to do too many things at once that are processor intensive (I.E. encode a cd while watching an H.264 video, while checking your email, while chatting away on AIM).

For more information on CPU Load Computing check out the Wikipedia article on the topic.

DownThemAll! is a MUST!

Since you're now using Firefox 2, and you probably download files now and again, you should check out how awesome DownThemAll! is. This is an awesome extension that is way more than just a downloader replacement, it speeds up your downloads... a lot.

Here's some proof... I went to the Apple Developer site and got a nice big file to download with both downloaders. Well, here's what happened:

On top is the DownThemAll! download window downloading at 2.76 MB/second and on bottom is the standard Firefox downloader downloading at .54 MB/second. The standard downloader took 26 minutes to download the whole 938.2MB file, while DownThemAll! took only 6 minutes. Wow, literally over 4 times faster.

How is that even possible? Apparently DownThemAll! downloads your file in parts, in other words instead of tackling the entire file at once it downloads 5 different parts of the file at the same time(5 is standard but you can change it to anything from 1-10) and puts them all together after they are finished.

Moral of the story, definitely check out DownThemAll! Read more about it, or if you're using Firefox 2 right now and you want to try it, click here to plug-in the file.

Firefox 2 is official!

Firefox is, hands down, the best browser available. That being said they just released their newest version that has, of course, tabbed browsing, Anti-Phishing capabilities, and the best part... the extensions! I just wanted to let everyone know about the new release, if you want to know about a bunch of really cool extensions that will give you tons of added functionality without cluttering up your browser check out this week's OS X Tips!

Overflowed Options

Have too many important apps to fit on your dock? Then you should check out Overflow, a virtual dock that stores and organizes any apps and folders you want. Just hit the F1 key to access the window and launch any app of open any folder just by typing the first few letters of it's name and hitting enter, or clicking on its icon.

My Dream App

Ever had an idea for an application and wished that someone would make it? Well MyDreamApp.com is the place that took that idea and ran with it. So 25 of the submitted ideas were chosen to be a part of the MyDreamApp contest. This contest was a 5 week long contest where each week anyone on the web could vote on their favorite application ideas. Each week the ideas with the least votes were kicked off and the next week voting would be on the remaining ideas. Today was the final day and the top three applications were voted in and they are going to be made. For a rundown on the winning apps, check out my Helpful Hacks page for this month!

iPod nano (Product)Red

Apple released an addition to their already popular iPod nano collection: the (Product)Red model. Apple states that for every (Product)Red iPod nano they sell they will donate 10 dollars to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS in Africa.

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