u l t r a m o o k i e

Eileen, Jacob and I were toasting at home — and we just had to get out of the house to enjoy some air conditioning.  We had gone to the mall and Fry’s earlier.  It was too early for dinner.  We had a bag of old mobile phones to donate, so we jumped in the car and headed to our local Best Buy.

After dropping off the phones, we went inside to walk around.  Somehow, we ended up in the desk aisle and that’s when Eileen spotted a deal.  “Hey, this desk is only $11!” she proclaimed.  “Whoa!”  I reacted.  We tracked down a sales guy who looked it up and told us that the display model was the only one left.

Darn.

We’ll have to get the display, but it can’t hurt to ask for a discount because…well…it’s the display model!

After a minute, the sales guy came back with an offer of $1 off!  Yay!  Done deal.

Original price:  $54.

Clearance price:  $11

Our price:  $10

Total savings:  82%

And I didn’t even have to do the hard work in this heat of putting the thing together.

Again?  Really?  Sigh.

Can’t we just all be friends?  I guess not.  It is all business.

Linux is back on my notebooks.  It’s Fedora 9 Sulpher.  Here are my quick thoughts:

• Intel 3945abg works out of the box!  This was true with Fedora 8 also.
• My Atheros-based card works out of the box!  This was not true with Fedora 8 and I am so happy it is true with Fedora 9.  ath5k finally works well.
• Suspend on my main notebook works flawlessly.  It goes to sleep.  It wakes up.  Wireless works when it wakes up.  No video wonkiness.
• It is fast, very fast.  It does not feel as snappy as Ubuntu, but it is a good change from Fedora 7 and 8.
• USB stick installs with persistent data is so cool and useful.  Now, instead of carrying just portable apps on my USB stick, I can carry a whole damn OS.
• The Add/Remove Software application sucks.  So very slow on doing anything.
• I can finally play MP3s for free without hassle.  Nice.

That’s it for now.  I like it.  It’s cool.  I reinstalled my OEM Windows Vista in a VirtualBox VM and it’s working fine.

Update:  Ugh, I pushed the wrong button and deleted this post.  Reposting from memory and half of an unpublished version.

I have been using MyBlogLog for a while now.  I like it a lot.  I tried out FriendFeed the other day and it is basically the same thing as MyBlogLog, but not as nice.  And recently, there have been a lot of new features coming to MyBlogLog that is making it my default page in all of my webbrowsers.  In this Web 2.0 world (when are we getting the Web 2.1 or Web 3.0 upgrade by the way?), everyone has multiple blogs, feeds (like Flickr) and random sources of information (like Yelp, Twitter and such).  It is hard to keep track of all that information — and that is where MyBlogLog comes into play.  MyBlogLog “streams” your friend’s digital lives/information into one central location for you — it is like your very own internet secretary.  Very, very cool stuff.

And if you have a blog, the statistics tracking of MyBlogLog is also very useful.  I use MyBlogLog to look at outgoing clicks on my blog, that’s something not even Google Analytics has.  Yay!

So, if you haven’t tried MyBlogLog yet, give it a shot.  It is a very cool tool.

(And yes, Ian, I won’t get the streams crossed  :)  )

I admit I am no front-end web developer.  For me, writing code for a website is basically:

1. Does this work?  Yes.  Cool.
2. Does it really work?  Yes.  Awesome.
3. Does it look kind of decent?  Yes.  Nice!
4. Can I do some security stuff with it?  Kind of.  Good.

Yesterday was Crack Day at Yahoo! and I guess Alice was in the mood to do a security review of my mindof code.  And she had some nifty front-end engineering security tips for me (since she is a front-end engineer).  And of course, she came up with some horrific hacks that could happen if I didn’t update my code.

So, I just updated the code with the tips that she gave me on the security side (updated code here).  There are some scalability and not-as-critical security enhancements she found, which I need to work on soon.  But, I wanted to get the critical stuff in there right away and released.

My thanks to Alice for the awesome tips and for teaching me some cool stuff.

So, uh, I can code in PHP. I can even do some MySQL stuff. Really, I convince myself over and over again that I can.

Anyways, I was getting into the whole Twitter thing. I think it is pretty good as a microblog. But, I like to have my data for myself. Twitter is cool and all, but I want to run my own thing. So, I went on the prowl to find some Twitter clone. I didn’t find any that suited me — some were cool and all, but still too big and did too much.

So, I wrote my own. I call it mindof. I am now runnning my own microblog using my own software. The reason for a microblog (or as I have seen “sideblog”) is so that I can collect my random thoughts. Most of the time I have lots of random things floating around in my head — all of which would not make a decent blog posting. So, I like the idea of a microblog that just capture a stream of consciousness which would otherwise be lost.

The code for mindof is out there for everyone to see. The lastest version is here. Don’t giggle too hard. It’s not a big project because I don’t have much time between family, work and other things (school, etc).

I’ll try to work on it some. I know there are lots of improvements I would love to see in the code. But, the basics that I needed for a microblog are there already (add entry, delete entry, permalinks, rss feed, and user security). I’d love to add commenting, Twitter updating using the Twitter API, and integrate some Yahoo! services also. We’ll see what kind of stuff I can do with it.

I am happy that at least I finished one release. Yay!

So, I installed Ubuntu 8.04LTS (Hardy Heron) on my play notebook and found it extremely well-done. So, I figured, after four months of Vista on my main notebook, I could switch over. Heron did everything that I need, so why not get away from Vista for a while? I installed it on my main notebook and it was heavenly. The damned thing is smooth, fast, and runs really well. It boots up quickly and has a sense of polish all over. Though, I did switch away from the Human theme over to the blue Glossy one. Everything else was great. Then, I remembered something.

A while back, I found a bug report about the APM settings in Ubuntu that were overly aggressive and led to people’s harddrives dying. What was happening was that when a notebook was woken up from suspend or hibernate, it was unable to decided if it were on battery power or AC. It just decided that it was on battery power — then switches on the most aggressive power savings mode on the harddrives. This causes some people to see their harddrives in a sleep/wake cycle that happened at a rate of 10s per second (most harddrives have a 600,000 sleep/wake cycle limit).

I thought, hey it has been a year-and-a-half since this bug was opened. They must have fixed it already — especially for a Long Term Support release like Heron. Nope, they didn’t do it yet.

I just reinstalled Vista on my main notebook and the Vista SP1 update is running right now.