Just in case you were curious, my longest post is "Making a ruckus over Ruckus" with 761. I've written 9675 words in 53 posts. That's on average 10 wpd and an average of 183 wpp.
So, the new Ubuntu distro has made it’s debut, and I can say I’m pretty happy with what it has to offer. The upgrade this time was a much less invasive process, compared to 6.10 to 7.04. It only took me about a total of 5 hours of work to get the machine fully upgraded, re-configured, and functioning again. The only thing that is kind of daunting about upgrading, is the fact that the updater wants to replace a lot of the config files with their distributed default ones. If you choose to replace or keep, no data is lost, but it can be a real pain in the butt to track down what is going on when something isn’t working. Overall this time, i felt more confident in what the updater was doing/replacing, so I guess I wasn’t as nervous as last time. From a desktop user perspective, this new distribution has some things that make it a lot more user friendly. I can’t really comment too much on these things however, as of right now I’m only running it on my server. I have seen a little bit of a performance increase, my load has dropped a bit, but the cpu usage has gone up. I’m not sure if this is a symptom of the tickless kernel or not, but regardless, as long as the system is stable and performs well, I’m happy. I would recommend the upgrade for anyone who is thinking about it, and for the people who have yet to try Linux, now may be a great time to take the plunge into OSS.
I don’t read too many news stories that effect me in a way that this one has. I’ve known now for a while that Microsoft was trying to get their new Office Open XML document format ISO approved. I figured that Microsoft’s OOXML format was good enough, and that it would be a good thing to have an “Open” format as an international standard… Boy was I wrong.
I suppose in principle, a ISO open format would be a wonderful thing, but OOXML is definitely not ready to become that format. In her article, Stéphane Rodriguez lists 13 different scenarios where the Whitepaper results from Microsoft don’t seem to actually be valid. She even goes as far as listing the exact steps necessary to reproduce the results. From a programmatic perspective, OOXML is amazingly bad. A programmer could probably spend a good couple years trying to write code that would be able to work with these remarkably unpredictable XML documents. Some of the elements in the VML part of the documents aren’t even valid XML elements!
It is good to see that someone (among others) is standing up against bad standards. Microsoft is inciting a format war, that doesn’t necessarily need to exist. They are afraid of being left behind as governments and other public bodies see the need for an open format, and are starting to move to ODF. Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of open source and standards, said “What the world needs today … is a real open standard versus a vendor-dictated spec that documents proprietary products via XML. ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past.”
I found a funny blog article about programmers and programs being depicted in Hollywood Films. It’s pretty much true, I just wish movies didn’t depict computers in such a naive and complex way. Alwell…
10. Most code is not inherently cross platform
Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit!
If real life were like film I’d be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter.
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…
Over the last week, I have been working pretty hard on this site to get it too look nice, and function easily. It has been a rocky road with WP Plugins, HTML, JS, PHP and server software.
I found a solution to my server crashes, WAMP5. This program is much better, in my opinion, than The Uniform Server. Not to mention, configuring WAMP is a whole lot easier.
Along with new server software, a photo gallery, and some AJAX have been added. Plus a host of other cool stuff. This is all thanks to all of the great devs that write WP Plugins! Thanks guys!
Now, I just have to get my template to pass XHTML Verification. I have a feeling this will take a while to do, but for now, the page seems to be functioning correctly in both Firefox and IE6.
All comments on the site are welcome and encouraged! Problems on the site can be reported to me either via comments, or the ‘email me‘ link at the left site of the page.
Yes, yesterday was officially Pi day (3/14), but it’s 2 AM on the 15th, so technically its not Pi day anymore.
Yesterday a few notable things happened, Apple put their first full length movie on iTunes, Disney’s High School Musical (for $2.99), then took it down, then put it back up (for $9.99). I suppose they haven’t quite worked out all of the kinks in the movie system yet. I don’t know about you, but 10 dollars for a 400 x 250 pixel movie? Yikes… don’t think so.
I came across a little project that was kind of interesting, a motorized, optically tracked turret appropriately named, TheSentryGun.
The idea of this project was to create a fully-automated sentry gun, capable of picking out a human target and accurately tracking and shooting him or her in the heart. Really, the idea was to find a cool robotics project for the summer while I was working at an advertising agency, and I’d only ever seen sentry guns in movies (like Congo) and video games (Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress Classic).
I guess the creator of the project searched for another similar project but didn’t find one…
Happy New Year. Hope everyone had a good holiday season.
Back to school again, time to reminisce with old friends and attempt to make some new ones. Maybe this semester will be less work… no probably not.
On to more important things. Battlefield 2. If you like FPS and you are one of the elite few that have PC capable of enough FLOPS to cure cancer, this is definitely the game for you. The graphics are ridiculously amazing and the gameplay is addictive. I honestly bought this game, and I don’t buy many games. If you have played any of the Battlefield Series games and liked them, and your PC is one heck of a workhorse, then pick up this game.
Most sites have features such as POTD (Picture of the Day) or SOTD (Site of the Day), well I’m going to start a new feature called… FOTP ( Feature of the Post). This will include just a cool thing I found or use, and a short blurb about it. So here goes the first FOTP.
If you dislike the featureless IE and you are not sure you want to switch to the Flaming Fox Browser Thing. Then try this program. It was actually featured at CES and has won alot of awards.
