compiz standalone, ubuntu resource usage, and the fictional philosophy website

so i was working on a project to see if i could get ubuntu to run faster. the first thing i tried was fluxbox, but once i realized color inversion wouldn't work, i had to move on to different things. i found this compiz standalone how to and tried implementing it. apparently compiz is a window manager in its own right, and since it has the color inversion capability, thought i'd give it a go. unfortunately, when i did the instructions listed on the how to, i still ended up with a gnome desktop O_o. having absolutely no clue where to go from there, i have since put the project on the shelf in the back of my own mind.

interestingly, however, the reason why i think that this is even worth investigating is because i thought that ubuntu was using way too much ram. a clean boot of gnome was stating 900MB of ram were being used in top. i realize i may not understand how top calculates memory usage, tried investigating this but once i heard it gets it from /proc i stopped my investigation. one interesting thing i discovered, however, was that the shockwave flash plugin was using 380MB in chrome. i noticed this after the audio in flash stopped working. i am thinking there might be something related here. i guess something like flash could cache first to swap or a temp file on the hard disk, then cache to ram. from the looks of it, this is probably not happening. of course, i have no idea how to fix it. even if shockwave flash were open source, i still couldn't address the issue in the source code. but, i guess being aware of this is better than not being aware of it.

on an unrelated note, i was working on getting my website hosted on my notebook using apache. this has worked in the past, but because i've been moving around so damn much (between my mom/aunt's house and a friend's) i've had to pick up and take my notebook. the idea is to host the site on my notebook, and leave the notebook running where i'm living now. unfortunately, it looks like i'm going to have to find a different solution, since it looks like timewarner is blocking port 80 now, which is truly a shame, because i'm pretty sure i couldn't find a decent hosting company for less than electricity costs to run my notebook. ah well, back to the drawing board, maybe i can find a VPS that's cheap enough to justify putting the site up, i guess in the mean time i'll just work from http://localhost.