Category: Personal

Work begins today, computer fixed

It’s June 1, so work begins today. I’ve started out by looking for a JSP/Java Servlet host for my web development project for the summer. Found out an old friend of mine from high school (Andy) is running a business where he resells server space, and he found me a real cheap price and a lot of features, which is nice. I’ll be the only client of his using Tomcat.

My computer problems seem fixed. I don’t want to jinx it, but the tests are running smooth, and I spent all last night developing without a crash. I really think it was a hot spot on my CPU from uneven spread of thermal paste. I switched to the stock Intel cooler with the “black dust” thermal paste, and it is running better. The only problem now is that the old cooling system makes a bit of noise, but I’ll replace it soon.

I planned on doing some case mods to my ECube along the lines of this and this, but know I won’t be able to do them alone (not without a good drill press). I am going to have the holes drilled by a local glass shop I think (Lion’s Pride in Manhasset?). I don’t receive the Nvidia video card until Wednesday, but I hope it fits and I can have these modifications done at the end of the week.

Hardware instability

Well, I’m annoyed now. My hardware’s been unstable since the start of the summer. In WinXP I experience random BSOD on mysterious STOP codes like 0x0000008E and 0x0000007E (which are like page faults and unhandled system thread exceptions). I’m suspecting bad RAM. I pulled out one of my memory cards and left 3DMark03 running in loop, and indeed the computer still crashed. I have the other RAM DIMM out and will do the same kinda test to see what happens. If this crashes as well, the only thing I have left to suspect is this damn AIW 8500DV, which’ll be out of here soon anyway.

I hate stuff like this.

Leadtek Winfast A360 (GeForce FX5700)

So, I decided I’m going to move away from my ATI hardware (an 8500DV AIW) and on to a cheap GeForce card by Leadtek. According to reviews, my 3D performance should increase significantly (from 1000 3DMarks with my current card to ~3500), and this way I should be able to use the Nvidia Linux drivers which are all the rave lately. Frankly I’m tired of ATI’s piss-poor graphics support for Linux.

The other thing is that now I will move my TV capture to a separate card in the PCI slot. A Hauppauge WinTV PVR Media Center Edition (MCE) 250 is my current choice. What’s nice is that then I’ll also get the capture functionality in Linux, which I’ve been missing with my ATI card.

The only thing I fear is that the Leadtek’s fan won’t fit in my Ecube because the AGP slot is near the side panel. But if that happens I’ll RMA to NewEgg.

Links

Daily Reads

Other Blogs

Projects I’d Like to Work On

  • Glade-3 UI Designer: This is the only real tool out there for designing GTK+ interfaces without resorting to pure-source design. Development has stagnated a bit, but there are some good ideas for the rewrite which is in CVS right now (Glade-3). I am sure if I spent some time hacking it, I could make serious usability improvements and make it a more viable tool; I’ve played with the CVS checkout and although it’s a complete rewrite in terms of internals, the UI design approach is about the same. I think we can do better, and I think this is probably the best project for me to hack if I want to really learn GTK/Glib/GObject. I’ve heard that Dan Wither is working on a GUI designer for C#/GTK# called Stetic, but he hasn’t released anything. I think I’d want a good GTK+ designer first, and then we could make it work with C#, too. Since Glade-3 is a rewrite, this seems like a viable suggestion.
  • Galeon: a tabbed Mozilla-based web browser that is fully integrated into GNOME, is lean, and has a shitload of awesome features I can hardly live without. I have a few ideas for new, useful features I could add.
  • Gnome-Vim: this makes vim a bonobo component so it could be used in other Gnome apps, like Anjuta, Evolution or even Nautilus.
  • Nautilus: the GNOME file browser and graphical shell. I’d like to work on Nautilus’ plug-in architecture, and maybe even write a plug-in or two.
  • GTK+: a toolkit for writing GUI apps in C, I’d like to delve into its internals and focus on hacking toward fixing speed issues (particularly, responsiveness and redrawing, the two things that take the most complaints from “usability experts” coming from other desktop environments).

Fun Stuff

New design

So, I spent a little bit of time to get a new design going on this site. Basically put back together CuteNews 1.31 and coded some nice-looking stylesheets to go with the site. I also had to learn a little PHP for modifying CuteNews and also for simplifying the layout of the site (the header and footer are componentized, and the header has a little php code behind it so that it figures out what page you are on and chooses which images to write to HTML based on that information).

The reason I came back to this site is that I plan on working on a lot of projects this summer, and hopefully I’ll be disciplined enough to document my efforts here. We’ll see how that goes.