Chris Jean :: Page 15

I Still Don’t Like Fancy Programming Editors

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.

Categories Development, Random Ramblings
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Discovering AMVs Again

I’ve always been a big fan of AMVs. Years ago, I would find and archive my favorites and then show them to my buddies when we’d hang out at IHOP. It was always a great way to start conversations about music and anime. Over the years, my focus on AMVs has waned. Fortunately, that has now changed.

Lately, we’ve been having groups of friends over to the house frequently, and queuing up some AMV Hell on the HTPC is a great way to keep everyone entertained and talking. This has broken my fast and got me back into digging around for some great AMVs, and great AMVs are what I found. I had never Nostromo is my new-found favorite AMV creator. Checking out his deviantART page, I found that he’s from Paris, has a pretty sweet computer setup, creates some cool images, and is a fellow fan of The Big Bang Theory. Also, considering how he is younger than me by a few years and has created some awesome AMVs, I am incredibly jealous (even though I have no knack for creating AMVs and probably never will create one myself).

Categories Anime, Videos
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Tool to Optimize MySQL Configuration and Performance

Web applications developers such as myself often have a hard time keeping up with everything that’s going on. There’s always some new programming or scripting language, new standards, new browsers, new technologies, new paradigms, new social networks, and on and on. Every day, something new happens. The end result of all of this always ends up being very similar: people demand faster applications that deal with ever-increasing amounts of data which end up putting massive stress on the server architecture.

As we toil to improve the performance of the applications and their snappy response times, it becomes easy to forget about how we can tweak settings on a low level to provide massive speed improvements on the front-end. For example, most people don’t know that you can configure MySQL to take better advantage of the resources that the server has available.

By default, MySQL is configured to consume a relatively limited amount of memory resources. Start giving MySQL more memory to work with, and your application’s performance can improve greatly.

Categories Development, Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
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No longer a DNSStuff fan

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.

Categories Random Ramblings
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A long overdue update

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.

Categories Random Ramblings
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Team Fortress 2 at AnimeFest

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.

Categories Random Ramblings
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Computer Woes

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.

Categories Random Ramblings
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Linux Distro Tests

I’ve poked around with some distros over the last few days. They’ve all been Live Distros running in VMWare. Some of the Distros ran very well like this (Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, and Ubuntu), but others failed miserably in one way or another (Linux Mint, Sabayon). Unfortunately, CentOS cannot be installed from a Live CD, so I was unable to test out its installer in VMWare.

Categories Linux
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Initial Linux Distro Selections

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:

Categories Linux, Random Ramblings
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Time to Switch to Linux?

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.

Categories Random Ramblings
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