A Long Weekend

I haven't been going to school since Monday. On Monday I didn't go as I hadn't slept properly the whole night. Then Tuesday was a holiday for Diwali, I think. I didn't go yesterday as a friend had told me that it would be a Cultural Day so there won't be many classes. But I haven't been enjoying much though. I have been a bit busy studying. My exams are staring in about two to three weeks and there is a lot of portion to complete. And moreover this is the toughest academic year I have been thru. New concepts have been introduced this year as well as fully explained which are mostly pretty tough. I just hope that Allah helps me get a good score this year.

School Started At Full Speed

My school started on 11th Oct last week. I have been very busy since. In the first week I had to submit my holiday assignments which I had not completed (or even touched). My tests also started in the same week. I had English & Social Sciences on Thursday. Alhamdulillah both went well. In all the activities the last week went by unnoticed, untouched, unknown. This week too I have been busy enough. I didn't go to school today with a goal of studying for this week's tests which are on Thursday, Science and Arabic. I have completed Science and some Arabic is left. I will complete it in some time.

I have been downloading some movies in the past few days but haven't had time to watch them and I probably won't have it until at least the end of November. Today is the first time in days that I am properly surfing the web. And probably it won't come soon.

I don't know what to write even though it is the one thing I want to do most now. If I ask this question to someone else in my home right now they will tell me that I have tests so I should be studying atleast by writing rather than waste time on the net which is something I like to do but don't want to.

Updated Google Chrome

From the last time I had seen Chrome seems to have had some udates which have helped a lot. Now all the sites I open come up extremely fast (including Facebook which was having problems earlier). But still there are no add-ons or user-scripts though I have read that newer versions of Chrome will have them with less instability problems as compared to Firefox. And I no longer care about the fact that there is no website-loading-status-bar (showing how much of the site has loaded) as the pages load up pretty fast which could also be because I have a nice internet connection. Though I am completely using Chrome now there still is no proper bookmarks organizing tools. 

Google Chrome

I installed the new internet browser, Google Chrome from Google yesterday. The installation package was small and the total installation also didn't take long. The browser has a new look to it and a new interface which may take a bit to get used to. But it absolutely simple and clean like most (I think all) Google products. I went thru some of the comic book-like explaination as to how and why the browser should be better than any other especially if Firefox is in the area. According to the explaination the browser does multiple tasks together like loading the Javascript and other stuff at the same time instead of waiting for one to happen and then proceeding to the other which should make it faster. And the tabs in it are treated as separate processes/tasks so only one tab can crash at time meaning you save all the others.

Most of the pages load pretty fast (compared to Firefox a bit faster). Everytime we open a new tab a page showing most visited pages, recent bookmarks and history search is displayed. We can find out about the memory usage by just putting about:memory in the address bar. There is also a Incognito window option using which no data will be saved in the system af our browsing, download histories etc; in other words it can be used for complete privacy. We can also create application shortcuts for applications like Gmail, Blogger etc onto the desktop using it.

The browser is easy to use but I there's one thing I don't like about it which is that nothing is displayed until almost the whole page is loaded which can include ads and there is no status bar showing how much of the page is loaded. And everything including ads must load as there is no add-on like AdBlock or FlashBlock as in Firefox. I didn't find any add-ons for it or any add-ons option in the browser itself. There isn't even an option for organizing bookmarks. Ocassionally the browser uses more memory than Firefox.

I hope that being in the beta stages the browser will improve much as it is not ready for full time internet browsing. As for now, I will still be using be using Firefox.

The Flights: To and From Hyderabad

My vacation started somewhere in July last week.  And  I had a flight to India on 24th Jul. It was a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight which we had bokked in advance a few months ago. I expected the flight to be an enjoyable experience. But the flight was small. A 3-by-3 seater in the economy section and a common first/business class with 2-by-2. I was in the economy. There weren't any monitors for the seats so the flight was pretty boring.with not much to do. I didn't sleep during the flight. It was a night flight so by the time the flight landed in the Hyderabad Airport it was the next day.This was the first time the I had landed at the new airport. It was just a few months old. It was a pretty beautiful airport. Possibly because it was still new and had not gone thru much rough use as of yet. There were more than enough of our relatives to receive us there.

Our return flight was scheduled for 3rd Sept during the morning hours at around 11:30 so I think I can also call it an afternoon one. We hadn't had any breakfast and were out from home by around 7:30 as the way was a bit long and didn't want to wait in the long lines. There were many counters for the check-in and the the procedures also didn't take too long. After getting in we had some breakfast. I had some Wadas. They small in size as result they are in plural. Soon after we were in the flight. It was similar to the one we had come from but a bit better. I'm saying this perhaps because there were monitors opened for some time and a movie was shown although there were no headphones provided and the ones I had were not of any use. We landed at the Jeddah airport at evening before the sun was down armaybe around the time it passes the meridian. 

Some Internet Speed Incresing Tweaks

The below compilation is solely my own work and I hope ayone utilising it to put it on their blogs, e-mails etc. mention me as it is a result of some serous time-wasting browsing to increse the internet speed and I hope this who find more, better and free ways (but legal) to speed up the net give me some links to whatever they have got.

I don't exactly know why but I was having some problems with my internet speed so I started searching for ways to speed it up. In a post I published some time back (Windows XP Tricks) there was a method to increase the bandwidth by about 20% and now I have come across more methods to increase the speed and am willing to share it about now.

First of all ditch Internet Explorer. Now choose a fast browser, preferable Firefox (latest version) or maybe Safari. I prefer Firefox as all the images always load in it (there isn't a cross like in IE or a question mark as in Safari) and moreover Firefox's download file (7.8 MB) is much smaller as compared to that of Safari(18.6 MB). This will bring about some change in speed. Don't use Opera as it is a bit slow and moreover I don't like the fact that in it for a few seconds the page (which you are visiting) seems unresponsive and then suddenly everything appears.

Next increase the cache size of your browser. In Firefox navigate to Tools, then Options. Now go to Advanced. There will be a box in which the default cache size is given. Increase it. I keep it at 1024 MB. This lets the pages you have visited some time earlier (or maybe longer than some) load faster. Also remove all unnecessary add-ons as this may slow down your browsing speed.

Now download a file by googling it called TCP/IP Configurations or by clicking here as after I got the file the first time I couldn't find it later.

Now download a Firefox extension called Fasterfox. This is similar to Google Web accelerator but is specific to Firefox and updated to the latest version of Firefox.

All these features help in increasing the browsing speed (except the the TCP/IP Configurations I think). In order to increase download speed of file use Download Accelerator. This has free and paid-for versions. The free version is more than enough but if you are still hungry for more speed you can download the premium version as it has some features as well as it is add-free. This one of the few free download accelerators present (or maybe the only one) and I always use it. It integrates into most of the major browsers. To increase the video buffering speed you can use SpeedBit Video Accelerator. This speeds up buffering from all the major sites you are likely to visit in this lifetime and removes those annoying freezes.
Both the above accelerators increase speed by increasing connections to the associated site.

So there's as much I could find. If someone has more please tell me by atleast commenting on this post or mailing me at hazmahsa@gmail.com.

Exams Over

My exams are finally over today. But I didn't feel much difficulty this time. The only exam on which I worked really hard. The other exams just came and went by. Today was Arabic. I did almost everything in it except a 10-mark composition which doesn't worry me much as everything else went well. I have started watching movies now; starting with The Incredible Hulk and Jaanue Tu....Ya Jaane Na. But I have more ready. I have a flight to India on Thursday and I will be there by Friday. The packin is almost done but some things are left.

I hope to enjoy this time too in India