YJL

Ive noticed there is quite some online manpage websites, but every time when I needed to refer to a certain page, its hard to choose, because I had no idea which one would be reliable.

A manual page may have different sources, for example, the sed(1) on Linux and on *BSD, they are apparently from different sources. On GNU/Linux, it will be the GNU Sed; On *BSD, it will be the BSD version, so the contents will be different as well. Also, even Linux distributions may make small changes on special occasions, for instance, gcc(1) on Gentoo, there is a couple of notes added regarding the changes were made by Gentoo developers.

Some sites, I dont have a clue who is providing those pages, and definitely no idea if it would still be accessible tomorrow. I dont want to have a dead link if I can avoid.

Even some of them I dont fear they would disappear someday, but it doesnt seem to be enough for reference. I wish someone would create one not only having the versions, but also having the anchor to specific line like VCS repository web viewing, section anchor is just not enough.

The following is the list, I split them by the systems and different features, or the tables would look squashed.

I have known Justin.tv for years, but only recently I started watching StarCraft II gaming streams. I was bored, no blogging, gotta find something else to kill time.

Just like every websites, the stream pages have too much stuff. When you just want to watch the stream and to chat, thats all. But you get a lot of stuff you dont need, that wastes browsers resource to keep them.

Yes, you can pop out the stream and chat. However, you dont want to pop them every time you want to watch. Why not just a simple URL, bookmark it, and you can get the stream and chat? Moreover, sometimes, I open two streams and one YouTube video from my subscriptions. I need something simple.

Therefore, I started writing this Clean Justin.tv Viewer, here is a screenshot to get you the idea of what I was thinking:

The viewer is seen at bottom right corner. My window manager is dwm, I switched to it only for a couple of days. The web browser is Firefox with Vimperator. Everything is as cleanly as possible. You dont see the window title bar because of dwm, you dont see space waster of browsers toolbars. The only unnecessary thing you can see is the statusline of Vimperator.

At first glance, it looks like a normal Justin.tv embed, move your mouse over below the logo, you should be able to see the controls.

I like the chat box overlays the video and I can hide the bottom bar to make the video as largely as possible.

I am using Firefox 64-bit beta 5 prerelease nightly build, it works well on my Gentoo. And Vimperator also works, well, from the repository, of course. I have to edit the install.rdf because it only sets up up to beta 4. I bumped the version and built the xpi, it works great!

Almost all addons are not compatible with beta 5, AdBlock is the only one has an update for beta 5 prerelease, but I disabled it later. The reason I dont want to use AdBlock is same as I have with Chrome. The speed has been improved, though it is still slower than Chrome.

I think I should get some numbers, so I tested it with first website I could find from search.

Before I show you the results, I must tell you that I just wanted to get a rough idea about how fast they could execute JavaScript, I didnt try to make sure my system is all ready for the benchmark test to run. I had some programs running behind but they were not heavy tasks. Firefox 3.6.8 (8 addons) and Chromium (2 extensions) have some addons installed, but I dont think it would make big difference if I disable them.

Now, here is the chart and numbers:

From the results, Fireforx 4.0b5pre is about 60.8% slower, but a benchmark is an intense test in different special cases. The real use might not result in such difference. When I just fired it up, I immediately felt the performance improved and I couldnt real tell if its faster or slower than Chromium. The memory usage also seems improved, though I havent used it thoroughly.

Vimperator is always something very important addon for me, I even tried to create a similar way to open bookmark in Chromium. Since its already in beta stage and stable enough for me, so I think I should probably go back to Firefox and Vimperator. Hope the future release could have more performance improvement. UI improvement is really useless to me since I use Vimperator.

localStorage is a feature of HTML5s Web Storage. You can store or retrieve as the followings:

localStorage[key] = value;
value = localStorage[key];
delete localStorage[key];

localStorage.setItem(key, value);
value = localStorage.getItem(key);
localStorage.removeItem(key);

localStorage.key = value;
value = localStorage.key;
delete localStorage.key;

You can list:

for (key in localStorage)
  console.log(key, localStorage[key]);

You can clean up at once:

localStorage.clear();

You can put every thing in but you might not get what you put in, because

The setItem(key, value) method must first create a structured clone of the given value. If this raises an exception, then the exception must be thrown and the list associated with the object is left unchanged. If constructing the structured clone would involve constructing a new ImageData object, then throw a NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR exception instead.

I got few suggestions from one of my blog posts. I wasnt really testing them but only some of them.

• Grooveshark: I think this one is the best. You can edit your playlist, though that isnt easy to build a playlist with Groovesharks Flash interface in my opinion. The embedded code has only one Flashobject.
• Blip.fm: You can only embed one song only at a time.
• My Flash Fetish: This seems to have lots of users. It has many different skins. You can decided if you want it autoplay or shuffle the songs. You need to sign up in order to get the code.
• The Music Hutch
• Gcast: This one seems to serve podcast shows, but I did see someone use this to play music.

Do you have any more suggestions? leave a comment!