use more screen space in firefox

Many of my friends and not so friends have seemed to like google chrome browser in that it makes available more screen space for the web page to display. Of course its a good things, especially for laptops with wider screens and scant vertical space. However not many know that firefox has been customizable enough for long so that you can make available more space for you if you need. Though it cannot compete with chrome, you can still extract much more from it. Here's my compact menubar+addressbar+bookmarks bar in firefox all in a single line.
To do this right click on the menubar and click customize. Then modift the toolbars and menubars to your hearts content.

Here's my firefox compact look especially for notebooks. Also notice how the fastdial extension gives you access to most frequently used websites without the need of a separate bookmarks toolbar.

Notice what i did. Moved the addressbar, search bar and bookmarks bar into the menubar. Thats it.
Here's the customization screen

So enjoy the more real estate in firefox.

thermal handler : protect your computer from overheat

So recently i started encoding some of the videos i had from dvds into compressed formats as the dvds are getting scratched and damaged. So i used the avidemux program for it. However my laptop gets overheated a lot during high cpu usage.
Other problems with overheating came when i had to run my dsmc and other assignments. Since they run for a looong time, my laptop overheats and i used to keep it hanging on its side during overnight runs. To my horror once when i compiled openfoam on my laptop overnight, i saw it shutdown in the morning with a failed compile and overheat. So here's my solution for all those who suffer from the problem of overheating computers (for linux users only).
Checkout the all new "thermal handler" from yours truly. The solution for all your computer overheat problems due to high cpu usage.
What it does:
Checks the temperature periodically and pauses processes using high cpu when a certain temperature is reached (default 90) and resumes them when the temperature falls below a certain value (default 65). None of your data crashes. The programs resume from the same state they were paused. No data loss. (Note that root processes cant be paused by the user)
What you need to do:
just run from a shell:

$ python thermal_handler.py [temp_lo [, temp_hi]]

Here's thermal handler at work:

Download it from here : http://home.iitb.ac.in/%7Epankajp/web/downloads/thermal_handler.py

EDIT: Thanks to Prashant Agrawal for reporting that the initial version didn't work on AMD cpus and helping me to test. I've updated the file to work on AMD cpus now. check it out

animate2

Now i present before you the much improved animate2.
Here are the major changes

• Plot saving is fixed when multiple subplots are present
• animate() is retained for compatibility, new users are expected to use animate2() with changed api for the function
  
• Much more customizability
• Plot frame traits (properties) can now be specified. Ex: plot title, axes labels, ticks, colors etc using extended traits notation to set the plot object properties
• Each plot (line) can be customized. Plots can now be of various types such as scatted, line etc. Their properties can also be set such colors, thickness, style (dot-dash etc). Plots can also be labelled to add legends to the plot
• Read the docstrings and the examples in __main__. They explain a lot of common uses.
  

So what are you waiting for. Try the latest animate2. Dont forget to check out the demo sample usage in the '__main__' section of the file
Check out the video below



Video with subtitles explaining the video is available here:
http://home.iitb.ac.in/%7Epankajp/web/downloads/animate2.mkv


Requirements:
To run this you will need the Enthought tool suite ETS (only traits with wx backend and chaco are required)
Hope this is useful for someone.
You can get the code animate.py from here that is:
http://home.iitb.ac.in/%7Epankajp/web/downloads/animate.py