Ubuntu, such a foreign sounding word… but I could almost say, it is my most favorite word as of right now! Ubuntu Dapper Drake has transformed my AMD K6-2 400Mhz machine into a more powerful webserver than I could have ever thought possible! Using XAMPP and eAccelerator to serve the pages quite speedily. It’s still not comparable to the new Mac Pro with 16GB of Fully Buffered DRAM, but hey it works for me.

If you’ve never tried Ubuntu, or any other Linux distro, I encourage you to download a LiveCD. This allows you to boot the kernel right off the CD and see what it looks and runs like. If you like enough, you can install it right then and there.

I will have to say, jumping into Linux was a bit scary at first, but as I do more in it, it becomes more familiar and I welcome the change. Finally constant disk activity has disappeared and now there is memory to spare. I just hope the hard disk doesn’t fail…

So my brother decided he needed a laptop, but of course he wanted one that would game too. So he decided to get on eBay and find one. On his first attempt, he ended up with just a e-mail that stated that the auction wasn’t valid due to the sellers account being compromised. After that mishap, he started to look for more believable deals. So he found a Dell XPS Gen 2 for sale in one of the 48 contiguous states. A few days and $1,200 later, the laptop arives. I’m a little worried it might be broken, piece of junk, or maybe just really used. Holy crap was I wrong! This laptop doesn’t have a mark on it. Windows XP MCE 2005 freshly installed, all we did was plug it in, start it up and away we went.

This XPS has some real horsepower too! It packs an Intel Centrino M with 1GB RAM and a GeForce Go 6800 Ultra into a quite beautiful package, not to mention the huge screen. It is only slightly less powerful than our desktop PC, which to me is quite impressive! I would have to say, even though it’s not my laptop, I will definitely be looking forward to playing some games (like BF2!) on this massive mathematics mauling machine with its pixel pushing GPU!

Went to Van’s Warped Tour Friday, man was it fun! Just not so much when 220 lbs guys try to crowd-surf…

Bands that we (Shane and I) saw included, Senses Fail, Less Than Jake, Motion City Soundtrack, hellogoodbye, Armor for Sleep, NoFX, and a few more.

We attempted to take pictures with a $20 digital camera, but it kept erasing the pictures from its memory (gotta love volatile memory for storing precious data…). So I ended up taking a few pictures from VX5200 phone, but the quality stinks. Regardless, they are posted in the gallery under ‘Warped Tour 2006′. I might see Shane has some better pictures on his Razr. I plan on going to Warped Tour ‘07, and hopefully armed with my digital camera.

There’s a really cool AJAX homepage service called Netvibes. It is quite functional, and has a great amount of “modules” including things such as Custom RSS Feed modules, Flickr and Digg modules, Gmail module and much more! Coupled with that, you can add Meebo to one of the tabs, and have AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and Jabber/Gtalk inside of Netvibes. In my opinion, Meebo is a lot better than AIM Express.

On a different note, I hope to have a new server up and running before the end of the month, so if you visit and hate the fact that it takes 2 minutes to load the page, that hopefully will be fixed soon…

-Tom

I found this interesting site on digg.com the other day called LikeBetter. It allows you to go through and pick which photos you like better of the two displayed on the screen. If you sign up it will keep your choices and you can see if people are like you. I haven’t really seen much of a purpose or ultimate goal for this site, but it’s fun anyhow.

Other than that random link, I posted a page with my program “Restart Autorun ver. 1.0“. It’s a small Java program that allows you to restart all of the programs that start when Windows starts. This could be useful for use after playing a game, for instance. To learn more about it, go check it out.

-Tom

So says Ed Whitacre from AT&T. He supposedly believes that there should be more of a business than just ISPs providing ‘free’ access to websites and services. Everything can be commercialized, and this makes it better right? WRONG.

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors. These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services — or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls — and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.

WE as an internet community need to stand up and tell these companies that they can not do this. Please go to SaveTheInternet.com and write your congress men to tell them they need to support Net Neutrality. Don’t let big business kill the internet.

More information about Net Neutrality.

-Tom

Well, first senator Ted Stevens makes himself look like an idiot, in front of all of Congress, now we have another idiot among the crowd. Don’t get me wrong, Comedy Central has some funny shows, and I’m sure that Steven Colbert can be funny at times, but this is just annoying. Colbert told the audience to find the Elephant article on Wikipedia and to change it to falsify information. He calls being able to change information to suit your reality ‘Wikiality’. All I have to say to him is, you are certainly a large douche. Thanks for trying to destroy what millions have worked hard to build. At least the antivandalism bots caught him, and the rest of the idiots trying to change the page. Not to mention, Colbert got banned.

Other tech news today includes someone who put a cellphone into a rotary phone case. Not really sure why, other than the ‘what the heck’ factor. It is completely portable, after all. And someone wrote some software that mimics a wiki, but works like notepad. So you can supposedly write pages of notes, and the program will be able to collect popular terms, (such as bach, in their example) and you can find all of the entries that match up to those tags. Sounds pretty slick to me.

-Tom