Hi. My name is Rich and I'm a tortured artist.

The Confession

Well, really, I'm more tortured, than artistic. And it may be argued that the artistic is more artifice than artful. But I try, nonetheless.

Folks who don't know me well (meaning just about everybody) don't realize I have this creative half that doesn't wield its powers in the company of friends and coworkers until long after we meet. In fact, not knowing myself as well as I ought, even I remained largely unaware of this need to create until the beast was unleashed during my final year of high school. My more "public" facing personna tends to be bookish, I suppose — and there's a good reason for that: I'm rarely without a book. Even in good company.

Not quite a misanthrope…

As long as I'm in the

As I mentioned previously, my workhorse laptop was stolen late December, 2006. Since then I've been using a much older laptop circa 1988. Okay, it's not that old, but it's a Pentium 4 with only 500 MB of RAM ... and it turns out, my Firefox browser occasionally likes to suck up about 3-400 MB of that RAM in one sitting.

Of course, that might have something to do with all 47 of my favorite extensions ("My Firefox on crack: the best extensions I could find").

Every time I install Firefox on a new machine, I wind up tweaking its registry settings to improve its page-load time and network connections to give me a better browsing experience. This time I needed to do the same thing, but also minimize some of the RAM I'm using. While doing the research for my tweaks, I thought I'd share my results with you in case you're interested and brave enough to muddle around in the Firefox about:config settings. Also, I wanted to save my notes on my blog so I won't have to trawl the Net again the next time 'round.

For some reason, my weblog became the target of hundreds of referrer spam hits from pornographic websites over the last week or so. I keep an eye on my referrer logs (a record of URLs that generated traffic to my site), and lately a bunch of URLs showed up which had no business being there. Some URLs are obviously pornographic, but there were one or two that looked innocent enough that when I clicked through to see who had linked to me, I got an eyeful. I really, really, don't need that.

So, I did some research. I didn't want to get into a trap of having to hand-modify my .htaccess file or a whitelist or a blacklist file for obvious reasons: the universe of porn and poker sites is potentially infinite. I waste enough time on this blog anyhow!

Angsuman's Referrer Bouncer looked