FIREFOX.

For Those Low On RAM #1
When Firefox caches your pages to make your browsing fast, it may cause the program to consume memory that needn’t be used at all. Drill down to browser.sessionhistory.max_total_ viewers. The value there is probably -1; set it to 0. The result is usually a small decrease in the RAM used, along with a slight decrease in rendering speed, and the action is therefore recommended if you’re RAM-challenged.

For Those Low On RAM #2
You can adjust a setting to make Firefox take up less RAM when it is minimised, offloading stuff to the hard disk. Create a new Boolean value called config.trim_on_minimize, and set it to True.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that: reports indicate that after you minimise Firefox, memory usage does go down, but slowly creeps up as time progresses. You’ll have to test this yourself (monitoring memory usage via the Task Manager) and see if it’s any good.

For Those Low On RAM #3
Firefox has a special “Back-Forward cache” for recently-visited pages, which works differently from the regular browser cache. The default setting for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers is -1. This saves a set number of pages depending on your RAM; some say it saves up to eight pages if you have more than 512 MB of RAM.

Bet You Didn’t Know

Googling Made Easy In Firefox, typing keywords in the main address bar by default searches Google for those keywords! You don’t need to use the Google toolbar! The catch is that the default setting is to use the “I’m feeling lucky” option. Browse down to the String keyword.URL. Try setting it to “http://www. google.com/search?&q=”, which is the Google search string for general searches, without the quotes. Now when you enter a word in the address bar and press [Enter], it will take you to the Google results page.

However, different people say different things regarding this, but you can try changing the value to 0 for memory savings.

Automatic Updating
Firefox periodically daily checks the Mozilla Update Web site (http://update. mozilla.org)-in fact, once a day-to see what’s new. If there are critical patches, the home page displayed at startup is replaced with a warning page. If there are any patches at all, an icon appears on the menu bar. To turn off that functionality, make sure app.update.enabled is set to False, and set app.update.autoUpdate Enabled to False. The latter setting stops Firefox from polling the Web server to see if there’s anything new to report to you.

Then, there’s the question of updating your Extensions-the same thing applies. The corresponding about:config valuesare extensions.update.enabled and extensions.update.autoUpdateEnabled. Set both these to False to prevent Firefox from automatically trying to update extensions.

An Appearance/Time Trade-Off
If your Bookmarks toolbar contains a lot of bookmarks that have site icons, Firefox will download them all in order to make the toolbar look pretty. Site icons can also be downloaded if the sidebar is displayed. To turn off icon retrieval, set
browser.chrome.site_icons and
browser.chrome.favicons to False.

A Convenience/Data-Pull Trade-Off
You’ll often find yourself spending a lot of time looking at one Web page while lots of other pages are loaded into tabs behind the current tab. The most convenient arrangement is to have those tabs load their pages while they’re still hidden. When you change tabs, it’s likely that the page in the tab will be ready to view, and this is the default.  At the same time, if you maintain, say, five tabs, you’re demanding five times more data. In this age of tabbed browsing, people often open tabs “just in case.” So it could be a waste to load the background tabs.

So drill down to browser.tabs. loadInBackground and set it to False if you seem to exhibit the above behaviour, that is, keeping tabs open “just in case.”

Disable IPv6
On some Linux distributions, Firefox has issues with Google servers because of difficulties with the IPv6 protocol. You can try changing network.dns. disableIPv6 to True.

Dancing Ads
Don’t you hate animated GIF ads-assuming you haven’t installed Adblock-dancing away while you’re trying to read? Just go to the String image.animation_mode and change it to “none” to stop all animated images, or to “once” to let them run. You can revert to the default behaviour using “normal”.

The Annoying Blips!
accessibility.typeaheadfind .enablesound is by default set to True; the “Find as you type” feature makes a beep as you enter characters in a string that is not on the current page. The search field turns red anyway, so to turn the sound off, set that value to False.

How Often?
You can turn off automatic updating altogether, but some think a better idea is to select how often the checking for updates is done. App.update.interval determines how many seconds Firefox will wait between checking for updates (at the URL specified in app.update.url). The default is 24 hours (86400 seconds). You might want to change it to once a week or once a month.

Do You Need Tooltips?
Tooltips are shown by default when you hover your mouse over certain items, like when you hover it over the “new tab” button, you’ll get something like “Opens a new tab.” This is controlled by browser.chrome. toolbar_tips. Set it to False to disable tooltips. This will also disable tooltips to items on some Web pages.

A Possible Speed Enhancer #1
The network.http.max-connections setting determines how many simultaneous HTTP connections can be made. The default is 24 on most installations, but if you’re on a fast connection, try increasing this value to, say, 48 to allow for more open connections-thereby speeding up browsing of multiple pages.

By increasing the value of this setting, you’re only raising the maximum possible number of connections, not increasing the actual number of connections Firefox makes every time.

A Possible Speed Enhancer #2
Network.http.max-connections-per-server determines how many simultaneous connections can be made to a single server. The default is 8 or so. Try increasing the value for fast connections to something like 16 in an attempt to increase browsing speed. Setting this value very high, in conjunction with a high value for the settings mentioned after this one, could be interpreted by some servers as a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, and your connection could be refused.

It may also actually slow down your browsing, and it’s poor netiquette to pound servers with lots of connections from a single machine. Therefore, experiment with this value, but don’t go too high.

A Possible Speed Enhancer #3
If you are connected to a proxy, network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy determines how many connections to keep alive at any time. The default is 4; you can try a higher value (such as 8) to improve speeds. Raising this to a very high value will stress out the proxy server, and may ultimately result in slower browsing for everyone on the proxy. So this one depends on if you’re callous and selfish-if it does lead to a performance increase, that is.

A Possible Speed Enhancer #4
If you are not connected to a proxy, network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server determines how many connections to a single server to keep alive at any time. The default is probably 2; you can attempt a higher value (such as 4 or 8) to improve speeds. Similar to what was mentioned above, raising this to a very high value will stress the server you’re connected to, and will either result in a refused connection, or slower response times from the Web page for every person trying to connect to it. Again, this one depends on how selfish you are…

Fill Smart
If you’ve got two curves overlapping each other and want to fill the area between them, you’d have to go through a whole world of pain to accomplish this in older versions of CorelDraw. Fortunately, you can use CorelDraw X3’s Smart Fill tool to do that for you now. Just click inside any closed area-this could be the intersecting gap between two curves as well-and CorelDraw will create a new object that fits snugly into that space.

Cool Effects Using The Interactive Blend
You can add considerable amounts of style to your documents using this simple tool in CorelDraw. Start with any two curves, and select the Interactive Blend tool. Click on the first curve and drag to the second for a smooth morphing effect. To tweak the density of curves along the blend, slide the blue arrows along the line (see screenshot). If you double-click anywhere along the blend line, you can create an intermediate point which you can now use to change the direction of the bend-blend along a number of lines instead of just one.

If you want to blend along a random path, hold down [Alt] after you

click on the first curve. You can now draw the path along which you want the blend to occur.

Creating Wires And Ropes With The Interactive Contour
New to CorelDraw X3 is the Interactive Contour tool, which can easily create concentric curves around a central object. To create convincing wires using this tool, start with a single freehand path, select the Interactive Contour tool and click and drag on the path.

Set the contour steps to a considerably high number (you can do this either by entering the value manually in the top toolbar or by playing with the white slider on the contour object itself (see screenshot). Now use the Object and Colour Acceleration sliders (see screenshot) to bunch the contour lines towards the outside to create the illusion of viewing a wire or tube from above.

Warcraft 3
When Blizzard, one of the most revered names in the RTS genre, debuted Warcraft 3 in 2002, and followed up with the expansion pack The Frozen Throne (TFT) a year later, thousands of players were bitten by the Warcraft bug (they still are)! Unlike other RTSes, WC3 is all about attacking and attacking soon, while building up. Micro-management is the key here, and most battles don’t last more than 15 minutes, and are finished with Tier 1 units-with a few Tier 2s thrown in, and a level 2
(or 3) hero.

Micro and speed being tantamount, let’s look at some of the most important strategies in the game. Bundled in these tips are some common-to-all-races shortcut keys as well.

• Use the [Shift] key while assigning workers (peons too) to build up. You can queue up multiple buildings this way to be built by a single worker.  Never keep builder units idle!
  

• Don’t hoard gold! If, in the first five minutes of the game, you have more than 350 gold, you are not rich-you are slow! Tech up the research tree, build more buildings and units. You aren’t earning any interest on all that yellow!
  

• Attack and attack early! We can’t stress on this enough. Don’t let your opponent build up, research up, and for God’s sake, don’t let him expand! Keep harassing his base, all the while bolstering your forces, and teching up!
  

• Once you have your first hero, rally your troops to him by setting his portrait as a rally point (by right-clicking on it), for all troop production buildings. This way any newly created units will automatically take off after your hero, irrespective of where he is on the map. This really saves a lot of time. Even your second (and third) hero should be rallied in this way.
  

• As Human you can use peasants to creep close to your base. Just convert some of them to militia (keep some at resources too), and use the rest. Your hero will level up faster, simply because he can attack earlier. Use on green-coloured creep camps only!
  

• Build orders are very important, but can change from opponent to opponent. Here’s a sample-as soon as the game starts, put four workers on gold, queue a sixth worker, and put the fifth on your altar (hero production building). As soon as the second worker appears, put him on your primary troop production.

At the same time, remove one of the guys tasked on gold, and use him to build a farm (or your race equivalent structure), the seventh worker should be put on wood, while the fifth worker who should have finished the altar-task him back to the gold mine. You now have five gold miners, and the rest of your workforce should either build or focus on wood.

• When you attack, make sure to pull back units that are wounded, employ hit and run tactics, and you can keep a couple of powerful summoned units (if your hero is a summoner) just outside the enemy base. This way, while retreating, you get some free hits in case any enemies follow you.
  

• Even when you must pull back, only do so for a short distance, regroup, and focus again. Never pull back entirely from an enemy base.
  

• Focus-fire works wonders with ranged damage units, like riflemen, archers etc.-but do not use focus-fire when attacking with melee. Simply attack ground: focus firing will waste precious time, as your melee units will take damage, just getting into position to attack the unit you focused on.
  

• Don’t lose units, and certainly don’t lose heroes! Each hero lost is like minus 1000 gold, not to mention you stand a good chance of losing the game!
  

• If a unit-or even a hero-is perilously close to death, and you’re still being attacked (or cannot heal the unit), use your own units to finish the job. Deny enemy heroes valuable experience points this way.

There you have it! All the basics you need to successfully see you through Warcraft 3 multiplayer. It’s highly additive though, so do take a look at the time (your real-world clock) every once in awhile!