Randy Pausch: an inspiring video

Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon who believes in making programming, specifically for entertainment purposes, accessible to everybody. Sadly, Professor Pausch has an untreatable form of cancer which will take his life in the next few months. This week, he gave a talk which is truly inspirational. This is a person I wish I could have gotten to know.

M-x gdb

I really wish somebody had told me about this a long time ago:

Firefox Caching

Federico posted about some work he was doing on making Firefox not cache as many uncompressed bitmaps in memory. I was playing around with the cache stuff and noticed something: my Firefox cache is full of youtube videos. YouTube videos aren't exactly the best thing for Firefox to cache. My internet connection is fast enough that streaming the videos works just fine. I suspect that most people who use online video frequently do so on a connection that can support streaming (otherwise, YouTube would be painfully slow, and they'd go do something else).

It turns out that Firefox's cache is based only on least-recently-used. So, let's say you have a 50 MB cache. Right now, all 50 MB of it is full with cached javascript, css, images, etc. You go to youtube and start watching a 10 MB movie. 20% of your cache gets blown away. In all likelihood, you'll never view that video again.

Even worse is if you listen to a flash-based media player. The MP3s that this downloads are cached just like anything else. So if you listen to 50 MB worth of music your disk cache gets blown away.

Probably LRU isn't the best technique to use here. I'm not sure how one would evaluate various choices (what is a representative test set of browsing sessions?)