setup

Considering the jump to a tri monitor setup?

This weekend was quite literally a gut check. Summarized in spectacular powerpoint fashion… Microsoft Vista is quite possibly the worst f*cking software ever written. Ever. Period. End of Story. Weekend-long pounding stress headaches suck. SUCK SUCK SUCK. Building a computer from scratch got a lot more complicated in 8 years. Building a computer with a pounding stress headache is a fracking awful. Hard drives arriving DOA (complete with that sickening head clicking) SUCK....

Desktop Dual booting – Kubuntu Feisty 7, Windows XP Note: All prices quoted are via Newegg as of 8.15.07 (and will hopefully decrease). Detailed specs via link (usually to newegg) Motherboard Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 $125 [link] Processor Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz $295 [link] Alternate -- Intel Core 2 Duo [link] Memory (2x) Crucial 2GB Kit (1GBx2) - DDR2 PC2-6400 (2x$136) [link] Video Card EVGA GeForce 8800GTS 320MB $300 [link] Alternate [link] Sound Card Creative SB Audigy SE 7....

I believe I have officially retired my desktop. My trusty (and severely abused) desktop put together in 1998 1999 (thanks Jeff) has served faithfully. However its 500 MHz processor and slow hard drives finally did it in. Right now I do most of my computing on my laptop, for the simple fact it really is much faster. I tried installing Linux (Kubuntu) on it, but my motherboard (Abit BE6) has a “exotic” UDMA controller by Highpoint, that doesn’t seem to work well....

In case you were curious, I thought I’d give a run down of the Firefox extensions that I use. Its extension system is quite impressive, keeping bloat away from the main executable, while at the same time letting users have full control over customizations. With IE being so incredibly stagnant, Firefox has stepped in and filled the void. It has also given developers hope that you can code to standards! Though unfortunately, you inevitably have to include some hacks to get IE to work (but that is the reverse of what it was even a year ago)....

So this post was supposed to go out last weekend. I had turned on Wordpress’s feature of scanning a POP3 email account to add posts. Needless to say it looks like it doesn’t work, so I’m just going back to manual postings. So much for that feature. Anyway, the exciting news of the day is that my new laptop arrived. =) Multiple things prompted this - the primary reason is that a few weeks ago, my Fujitsu (which had faithfully served me for almost 4 years) just flat out croaked....

I was planning on buying a new laptop this summer. I was going with a IBM Thinkpad, because I wanted to finally get one before Lenovo completely took over production. To sweeten the deal, I get an IBM discount through Lockheed. I had picked out the model I wanted, and I was waiting for it to drop about $100 more dollars before I was going to get it. I discover today that the settlement between IBM and Lenovo was finally inked today, and now its officially not an IBM Thinkpad (though Lenovo is going to keep using the name for the next five years), but even worse, I don’t get my nice corporate discount any more!...

This list is more for me, but I thought I’d put it out there so people could comment on it… maybe add some of your own. This is a list of all the software I install upon a fresh reformat of my computer. I’ll try to add links later. Software to Install: Drivers (Display, Video, Printer, Keyboard) Microsoft Service Packs & Patches Grisoft Anti-Virus Quicktime Divx Winamp MySQL (plus control center, java connector) PHP Tomcat Apache Eclipse (plus plugins: PHP, Lomboz) Dreamweaver Quicken Webshots Trillian OpenOffice burnatonce Cyberlink PowerDVD Paint Shop Pro iMatch RegCleaner Tweak UI Statbar TortoiseCVS Java SDK Winzip Adobe Acrobat SmartFTP Adaware PDF Creator DVarchive VirtualDub mldonkey VideoLan

So CVS hasn’t been working like it should. And I’m still trying to get settled into a development environment. When I was running Windows 2000, I had everything set up and everything was familiar (ie not stressful). Well, since iTunes torched that, and I made the leap over to Linux, I just haven’t had the chance to set up something comfortable where I can get web development work done. I got Eclipse up and running, but I can’t get CVS to work properly with it, so its just frustrating....