Samus, my main machine, was having some issues earlier today, so I opened her up and felt around. I touched the graphics card and was nearly burned. I loaded up a temperature tracking program and found that it was running at 93°C. That’s nearly 200 degrees Farenheit. I was amazed that the GPU hadn’t been damaged by this heat.
It looks like there is a big networking problem over at The Planet. Hostgator, which hosts this blog and is hosted by The Planet, is suffering terribly from this problem. My uptime with Hostgator is so high, that Pingdom tracks my site at 100% uptime since it doesn’t track beyond 99.99% uptime. So, this has to be causing lots of stress for the engineers at both companies.
I first noticed this problem when working on a site that is hosted at Hostgator. The site completely failed to load and pings failed 50% of the time.
For about eight years now, I’ve been hapily using Crimson Editor. At its simplest, Crimson Editor is nothing more than a fancy Notepad; however, it is so much more than that. While it doesn’t have all sorts of fancy tools that some editors have, it does support customizable syntax highlighting, customizable colors, line number, visible whitespace characters, basic smart indenting, a file/directory navigation pane, project support, and a MDI interface. Those features aren’t really the reason why I use it as almost all programming editors support such features. I use it because it gives me tools that help me program without doing things that hinder my productivity.
If you ever need to work with DNS servers or domain management, you find tools that help you get an outside perspective of what is happening with DNS invaluable. Years ago I found DNSStuff and immediately fell in love. They have tons of tools that give a wealth of information. I configured some quick bookmarks in Firefox that made making specific requests more simple than doing a dig from a command line while returning more data than any of my system tools could possibly offer.
A little more than a year ago, DNSStuff changed from free to a paid service. Since I found their tools so valuable, paying a few dollars a month for the service was a small price to pay. In fact, I was happy to pay for the service and quickly purchased a subscription for a year.
Sorry for the lack of updates. Much has happened in the past couple of months. I aim to get things back on track and keep the updates rolling. I also think that the content that I’m going to be producing will be much more valuable to my readers.
There were a large number of TF2 cosplayers at AnimeFest 2008, so we got as many of us together as we could and had some fun. Thanks to my friends Aubrey and Tristan for taking the pictures.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the Demoman (guy with the eye patch and grenad launcher).
I know that some of them aren’t the best quality, but they do have some great humor or interest, so I left them in the batch.
Things were going well with my Linux trials. I ran Ubuntu through its paces with the Live Distro with great results. I was really excited to get on with the installation when I ran into problems. Apparently I have too many drives in my system and GRUB didn’t get loaded properly. Working late Sunday night, I thought I had finally found the problem. So I went to bed satisfied that everything would work well when I started working on it again Monday; however, my computer had different plans.
I woke up yesterday morning to a dead computer. We had a storm roll through, so I thought that the power supply’s protection circuit was tripped. After trying to get the system to start for a few minutes with no sign of life, I started to get really concerned. I thought maybe my motherboard had fried. After testing the power supply removed from all the other components, I found that it was the problem. The power supply was completely dead with not even the faintest hint of fan spin when supplied with power and switched on (yes, I did short the green wire to tell the unit to turn on).
Fortunately, my power supply has a three year warranty, so I plan on doing an RMA for it to get a refurb. However, that does little to help me now, so I ordered a new unit to be overnighted and should get it today.
After I get my system back up and running, I’ll resume my Distro testing. I hope to start posting results soon.
As I talked about in my Time to Switch to Linux post, I’m ready to finally migrate away from Windows and into Linux. The biggest question for me is which Distro do I want to start with. Me being a lover of lists, I have a few criteria that I want the Distro that I select to meet:
Over the past few years, I have developed a very strong desire to dump Windows entirely from my day to day computing. I tire of the obscure errors that no one has answers for yet are easily reproducible, the way that Microsoft is enforcing its “genuine Windows” initiative in ways that irritate paying customers while only mildly bothering pirates, and how Windows always has a black box model of operation which always keeps me, the user, out of the loop on what my own computer is doing. The final insult: User Account Control. I disabled that within minutes. Talk about a useless feature. People who know what they are doing will always click yes because they know what they are doing. People who don’t know what they are doing (the ones that were the primary focus for this feature) will quickly learn to always click yes because clicking no may prevent them from doing what they want.
Good news. I was contacted by someone with AnimeFest earlier today, and I got my registration taken care of.
So, let this be a lesson. If you having a hard time getting a group to contact you, call them repeatedly, send emails to every address you can find, post on the forum, and send PMs to every person on the forum who has a title.
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