Shamil's Blog. Software Engineering Processes, Android, CI, Devops.

The story is very short. Some modern apps are just a resource vampires. Like for example Slack (which I don't regularly use) or Telegram (which I do). Let's see idle use:
- Telegram consumes 1% CPU time (14 minutes in total for 3 days) and 68Mb RAM
- WinWord with 2 docs opened consumes 0% CPU (0 (zero) minutes 34 seconds in total for 3 days) and 43Mb RAM

Labels: cpu, memory, opensource, ram, resources, telegram, winword, word

I don't like an annoying videos crying out loud on me from respectful web sites (mostly ads). Also I don't want to setup another one Chrome extension (230000 users using that). I already have too much of them. And yes, uBlock Origin cannot stop them all.
So I've patched Chrome (chromium actually) source code and compiled it for myself from source. Voila, it works! Patch is below just to know how simple the change (that is being discussed for 2 years with no effect, while the problem itself exists for much more than 5 years) is.
And yes, I don't mind pressing manually for video to start every time. Also I don't mind stop wasting my data plan and draining laptop battery. Thanks Google for being unfriendly and not having any user settings for this ;-)
Disclaimer: published under MIT License. That is, simply: "as-is", no guarantees, by downloading this patch you know what are you doing.

Labels: ads, autoplay, chrome, chromium, linux, opensource, patch, video, webkit

Just a few notes for myself. Took a minute to look through Brave(.com) browser and stuck upon mention that it uses NaCl in Crypto. Why the hell to use NaCl? I get used to disable NaCl  in Chrome when I could - until chrome:plugins control was removed. I just believe that crypto must be as close to CPU as possible, as native as possible (no JavaScript crypto code) and HW accelerated on CPU level. The lesser layers the safer it is, cause so no secret keys could be left in memory to be read by some other process.
Second thing (which could be not relevant, but looks strange anyways), is that it used npm as package manager in previous days.

Labels: brave, browser, crypto, linux, opensource, security

I rarely pay much attention to opensource software bugs, but this regression is kind of severe as it touches security of desktop system.
I use Arch as desktop OS, with mate.  After latest update pacman -Syu I noticed that I can lock screen only once after restart or so. It works like this: when selecting "Lock screen" from menu it just does nothing, and it's nothing also in .xsession-errors. So screen remains unlocked.
When I (maybe mistakenly) try to manually execute mate-screensaver it says like "screensaver is already running for this session".
So I took way of getting rid of mate-screensaver and installing and using xscreensaver instead (pacman -S xscreensaver). It works just fine.

Labels: arch, linux, mate, mate-scresnsaver, opensource, screensaver, xscreensaver

Here's how to find the regexp syntax for 'ag' - the silver searcher:

man pcrepattern

Labels: ag, linux, man, opensource