Simple tasks like switching between Firefox and Thunderbird are driving the load on my machine up over 4, and if I'm trying to run Amarok at the same time, it drives it up to 8. In fact, my machine frequently climbs up into the 7-9 range, bringing my apps to a crawl and frustrating the hell out of me.

So I've decided it's time to buy a new computer. I'm going to replace my aging Sony Vaio desktop machine (which runs Linux) with something newer that has more RAM, a faster processor, and a bigger hard drive.

The thing is, I'm not entirely sure where to start looking. A quick walk through Circuit City a month or so ago lead me to believe I can get a rather "big" computer for as low as five hundred bucks, which further leads me to believe that if I were to buy something online, I can get a huge pile of RAM, a fast processor, and a big honkin' hard drive for even less.

I run Kubuntu, and use KDE as my desktop (though I occasionally switch to Gnome when I get bored) and I mostly use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Amarok, and run PokerStars in wine. I'm looking for something that can do all of that without slowing my machine to a crawl.

Anyone have any suggestions on where to start looking?

Edit: I don't think I have the patience to build my own machine out of individual parts. I also don't have any real loyalty to any particular company or architecture. New Egg has lots of machines with AMD processors, and though I've always had Intel processors because more things seemed to run on x86, that's not as much of an issue as it once was, right?

I haven't posted anything in a while, and that's because I decided to be modeless instead. But now I think I'll switch back. This account has a lot of history. I'll keep using modeless elsewhere (on Digg, for example), but on Slashdot I'll be Spy Hunter.

In case for some reason you desire more information about my nick choice, here's the deal: I chose Spy Hunter as a reference to the original game, specifically the Commodore 64 version. Since the release of the Spy Hunter remake games, this nick has gotten more popular and I can't get it most places, so I wanted something less common as my online persona.

Modeless is a user-interface term. I always prefer modeless dialog boxes over modal ones, and I can't stand it when dialogs are modal for no good reason. For instance, web browser option dialogs which lock the window used to open them, though every other browser window continues to work just fine. Plus modeless is not in most dictionaries and not already registered at most sites, except hotmail. I think everything has been registered at hotmail.

I am absolutely stunned that Slashdot's editors would give credibility to a completely false story, pushed by a paid industry PR professional. As Rugrat said,

The "article" is not an article, but a press release written by an employee of a public affairs company.

"Tom Harris is mechanical engineer and Ottawa Director of High Park Group, a public affairs and public policy company."

For a website that spends so much time and energy combating FUD from Microsoft, and the MPAA and RIAA, it is baffling that FUD that was paid for and is pushed by the oil industry would make the front page here.

Come on, Slashdot. You can do better.

For the last year or so, I've been happily using Debian, with a mixture of sources so I was stable, but current, just like nearly everyone who uses Debian.

Then I tried to upgrade or something insane like that, using aptitude, and the whole thing went tits up on me. No amount of cussing, kicking things, or actual tinkering with the software could save my machine.

I thought about asking for some advice in the Debian forums, or on one of the lists, until I ran out of fingers in my entire family tree to count the times someone said some variant of, "Shut up, noob! Your stoopid and not leet leik I am! Go back to Winblows! Ha! HA! HA!!!1"

Yeah. Guess I'm not venturing into those waters, so I figured I'd just have to grab my network install CD and start over (luckily, I set up /home on its own partition a long time ago, so if I fuck something up really bad, I don't lose all my porn very important data.

The day I planned to reinstall Debian, I read that Dapper Drake had been released, and everyone loved it so much, they totally wanted to marry it. A friend of mine, who is wise in the ways of science and the air speed velocity of unladen swallows has also been singing the praises of Ubuntu for a long, long time, so I grabbed a Live CD to see what all the fuss was about.

Holy shit. What an awesome bit of work it is! It's the first Linux distro to find every single bit of hardware on my old Sony Vaio desktop machine, including all the USB ports. It looked great, too, and was the most "Mac-like" Linux I've ever used.

I realize that a lot of you are mocking me right now, but listen for a second: I'm not interested in hacking on my kernel to make sure something is detected during boot, or modifying all sorts of settings in a text editor just so I can make the damn thing find my camera . . . and don't get me started about CUPS. I love technology, and I love and fully believe in "free" as in speech, and I'm grateful for free as in beer. But also really into "works," as in just does. And on my machine here, Dapper Drake just works, and it's awesome. This is the Linux distro that I can take to my parents, and to my friends who are drowning in a sea of FUD, and convince them that they don't really have to be part of the Borg if they don't want to.

And ultimately, I believe that has to be our goal if we're going to convince people to give Linux a real, serious try as an alternative to Windows. We need to be able to tell them, with confidence, "Put this CD in your machine, and give it a try. I think you'll like it, because it just works."

(Cross-posted to WWdN)

The final table of the 2005 World Series of Poker started at 4pm yesterday afternoon, and wasn't finished until just after 7am today. I'm not sure, but I think that's a record. I'd call Pauly to be sure, but something tells me he's crashed out until at least Sunday.

Two qualifiers from PokerStars made the final table, and one guy, who qualified using free play points, made it to the final two tables, finished in 13th place, and won $400,000. Not bad for a freeroll!

Speaking of Pauly and PokerStars, we're doing a charity tournament on Sunday in memory of Pauly's friend Charlie Tuttle:

Charlie is from Clarksville, Tennessee and he's a twenty-six year old music enthusiast who loves hanging out and playing poker with his friends. Charlie was dealt a bad hand in life when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, which he has been battling this past year. A couple of weekends ago, he was hospitalized because two tumors in his chest pressed up against his lungs, causing him breathing problems. I don't have to tell you how serious his condition was.

Felicia Lee, who is fighting her own battle with cancer, knows several top professional poker players, so she got several of her friends to call Charlie: John Juanda, Marcel Luske, Max Pescatori, and Barry Greenstein to name a few. In fact, when Barry Greenstein won his bracelet in the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha event, he dedicated it to Charlie.

As Pauly wrote:

Situations like this one make you reassess what's really important in life. Las Vegas is a city built on greed. Poker is a game that often attracts some of the lowest forms of life. However, in the past two weeks, there has been a small group of professional poker players who have earned my respect and admiration. Amidst all the darkness and debauchery, I have caught a few glimpses of the bright side of humanity. The hearts of some of the biggest sharks in Las Vegas are filled with compassion.

Thank you, Charlie, for inspiring us all. We'll never forget you.

Charlie passed away on June 22 and his friends have organized a charity poker tournament this Sunday at PokerStars. It's going to be a lot of fun, and I hope to see lots of WWdN readers there.

Details:

SUNDAY, JULY 17th
18:00 EDT (15:00 CDT)
PokerStars
Buy-in is $20 — all of it goes to charity.
"WPBT Charlie Tournament" under Tourneys -> Private tab in the lobby

I'm sure this is just begging for vandalism (unless those douchebags have grown up and finally kissed a girl) . . . but there is an error on my Wikipedia page that needs to be corrected. I'd do it myself, but that's against Wikipedia editing policy.

I am not in Brother Bear. Willie Wheaton, Wil Wheaton, Jr., and Reginald Maudling (Mrs.) are all not me. I've tried to get this taken off imdb, but someone (well-intentioned, I'm sure) keeps putting it back, and Wikipedia editors (also well-intentioned) are putting Brother Bear back up . . . so we're in an infinite improbability loop, and my towel is getting dirty.

Would someone please correct that, and cite this journal entry so it doesn't get corrected back?

Apple has finally announced a ship date for OSX 10.4/Tiger: April 29. Sites like ThinkSecret have picked up the story with more details than Apple.com has right now. Bizarrely, even though every Mac news site has been hanging on this story for months now, no one else seems to have picked up on it yet. Strange...

Project Gutenberg Etext of In Defense of Women by H. L. Mencken

Have Fun ...

CC.

When Apple revised their Powerbook line earlier this year, they added Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS), a detector that can be used to protect the hard drive if the machine gets dropped. Chances are, they probably weren't expecting it to be used as a video game controller, but Balooba software figured out a way, as demonstrated in Bubblegym. According to the author, "this might be the first computer game that is controlled by moving the notebook computer itself." Who says Macs can't play the best games?

The UI is definitely slick, but it definitely has some quirks, some annoying. Some random observations:

• The maps seem to be three dimensional. Look at the map of a complicated highway interchange and you'll see that it seems to get the over / under ramps correct. (For example, look at this map & zoom all the way in -- it pretty accurately reflects a complicated, braided set of onramps & offramps).
• On the other hand, it's not completely three dimensional: while the map has surprisingly current data for Boston's Big Dig, for example, it doesn't actually illustrate the points at which the roadway goes underground. Considering that some of these tunnels have surface roads over them, or will in the future if they don't already, finding a way to denote a tunnel seems important.
• It doesn't show one way streets! This is absolutely essential, especially in urban areas where a lattice of one-way streets can force you to take convoluted routes to follow the seemingly simple paths you could have taken if all the streets were bidirectional. A map service that can't show this data is much less useful than one that does. (That said, the trip planner does seem to show routes with an awareness of one-way streets, and will plot different to & from directions accordingly. So they do have the data, and they do use it where it matters, but they aren't making it visible in the interface. This may have been a deliberate attempt to constrain against information overload, but in this case I think the user really does need that data visible, at least optionally.)
• While the UI is nice and responsive in a way few other web sites are, it has some idiosynchroncies. For example, if I search to a map, then scroll somewhere else, then go to a different browser tab, it sometimes snaps back to the original search when I come back, rather than whatever I was looking at. If I do a new search, it scrolls to the new location from the old one; while this looks cool and may be the desired result if I'm thinking about directions, other times I may be thinking of a completely new & discrete search, and don't want to treat the two searches as a set -- some kind of "new search" option would be good. (This last one is subtle to describe, but kind of annoying once you pick up on it -- it's definitely useful, but maybe a little too helpful, ya know?)
• I like the way it dynamically fills up the current browser window size: note the way the map is always just a bit shorter than the current view is tall. If you resize, the page will start scrolling or have a white margin on the bottom, but will quickly redraw to match the new geometry. Clever.
• The overlay of local data seems much more polished than it was with last year's Google Local. Maybe this will mean abandoning Google Local as a separate entity and incorporating its functionality into Google Maps -- they're already most of the way along to doing exactly this.
• As widely requested, non-US/Canada data would be nice, but I'm sure such things are on the way. Moreover, Google already pulls interesting geolocation tricks, such that a request for google.com from an internet cafe in, say, Switzerland, will automatically and transparently redirect you to google.ch. Likewise, a search for http://news.google.com will redirect you to http://news.google.com/news?ned=de_ch&hl=de. I'm sure that once this gets going, Google Maps will also automatically send visitors into a mapping application that is relevant to their location.

Wish list items:

• Realtime traffic data would be nice, the way Yahoo is now offering. Factoring traffic data into trip planning would be a good next step. Factoring in predictive traffic data would be better -- e.g. "when should I leave and what route should I follow if I want to get from Boston to Washington, D. C. without hitting rush hour traffic in New York City?"
• Being able to place constraints on planned trips would be nice. "How do I get from Medford MA to Burlington MA without using a limited-access highway?" (Maybe I'm riding a bike; maybe my crappy car can't go above 40mph -- it doesn't matter why, it should just be possible to ask for it.). "How do I get from Medford to Burlington, with stops in Reading and Woburn along the way?" (Maybe I have errands to run in those towns and don't want to make a series of trip plans when I can just have one with waypoints.) "Accounting for traffic lights, frequent traffic jam areas, highways, and tolls, what would be the fastest & cheapest commuter-time route to and from Somerville MA to Waltham MA?" (Taking the turnpike is longer but might be faster, but it will cost a couple bucks each way; surface roads might be fast, but congestion in certain areas is chronic; what route will be most reliable?)
• Topographic data would be nice. Using it as a factor in trip planning would be better, e.g. "I want to bike from Somerville MA to Waltham MA on a route that avoids major roads and big hills. Please find me a route."
• Weather data would be nice, but not as critical.
• Accurately showing one way streets is essential. Finding a way to depict underground streets (or bridges, etc) would be nice, but the lack of it isn't critical.
• The functionality to create a link for the current view doesn't work properly: it'll give you a search that more or less shows the region that was being examined, but it will be all zoomed out and improperly centered. It would be nice to have a better approach to this.
• Support for Safari would be nice, but I suppose it's on the way...

This is an intriguing start, but I can see all kinds of ways to build on it, and hope that Google will continue to improve the product now that it is available to the public (as opposed to services like Google News, which is good, but seems to be basically identical to what it was when the beta went live a couple of years ago). Unlike Google News, the unfinished aspects of this tool are obvious enough and annoying enough that I'm not sure I'd yet be willing to make this my primary tool for searching for this kind of information.

So, anecdotally, it looks like Google's anti-blog-spam campaign may be working. A handful of easy changes to my home blog seems to have helped tremendously:

• I looked over Google's plan, and Movable Type's recommendations.
• I added the Movable Type implementation of the "nofollow" plugin
• I renamed all the MT CGI scripts so that spammers have to actually look to find the comment URL.
• I added a new script at the old comment & trackback URL:

  #!/usr/bin/perl -wT
  print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
  1

• After noticing that the spammers all seem to have a referer of "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)", I added the following code to the comment script:

  sub squash_spammers {
  my $agent = $ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} ||= "";
  my $referer = $ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} ||= "";
  if ( ( $agent =~ m/NET CLR 1.1.4322/ ) ||
  ( $referer =~ m@\.info/$@ ) )
  {
  # print "Content-type: text/plain\n\nsorry\n";
  die "Sorry, this is a spam-free zone. $!";
  }
  return;
  }

  This is now called in the eval block that does the rest of the work for the comment script, so attempts to spam me automatically fail. If I need to add more criteria, I can hook them in as needed, but these two rules seem to have caught everything so far.

Since making these changes, things have gotten much better. I've had no comment spam this week (usually, a handful makes it past the comment spam plugin), and more strikingly, the amount of referer traffic -- requests for random URLs with referer fields like "http://buy-zanax-online.best-buy-site-4u.info" -- has almost, if not quite entirely, disappeared. This is wonderful.

We'll see how well it's working a month from now though ...

So, out of curiosity, has anyone seen the guts of a Mini-mac yet ? The pictures I've seen on Apple's site -- particularly one of the motherboard and one with the cover removed -- give you some ideas -- compact motherboard, RAM on one side, skinny optical drive on top, mini-speaker in front -- but I'm curious about the hard drive: did they actually jam a full sized IDE drive in there, or is it a compact laptop model or a super-compact iPod one?

Some of the rumor sites were paying slavish attention to the deals Apple was making for bulk purchases of minature hard drives from Asian manufacturers. All of this speculation centered around the possibilities for new iPod models, but it occurs to me that at least some of those drives are probably going into the new Mac as well.

So -- has anyone had a chance to get pictures of a disassembly of a mini Mac yet ?

My wife's company would like to transfer her to an office in their Swiss office in Lucerne / Luzern, but she's got baggage -- me.

So, they're willing to sponsor her, take care of her visa & other paperwork, help set her/us up with an apartment, and bring her over for a couple of year, while she learns how the European side of her company works and she gradually makes her way up the management ladder.

Meanwhile, I'll have to leave my job and basically start over; there's basically no chance that her company's Swiss office would have any IT work (it's all either in the US or outsourced to India). But that's alright, it's an opportunity strongly to be considered, right? But I haven't the slightest idea what the IT market is like in this little, seemingly rural part of the country, and there's so much that needs to be sorted out before going and once we get there.

• What skills are in demand in central Switzerland? How does one go about learning such things? Same as here, I guess -- find & browse job listing sites...
• Is there any IT work in a medium sized city, or is it better to commute to Zurich or Bern? How feasible is it to commute that far each day?
• How much of a liability is my weak grasp of the languages? I'm sure I can pick it up once I get there, but at this point my German and French are both very weak, and I only know as much Italian as I can puzzle out from the Latin I took waaaaay back in high school. I've heard it said that most IT work is done in English, but as a practical matter, don't you have to have a grasp on the dominant local language[s] as well?
• Is there any chance of finding full time, salaried employment, or will it all just be consulting gigs? I guess I don't care either way, but a nice predictable job sounds appealing right now...
• Is it better to be paid in Swiss Francs, Euros, or US Dollars? Or will that question even come up? If the dollar keeps plummeting, as it seems like it will, the Euro looks more appealing -- but then when the IRS comes knocking it could become painful, fast.
• What happens back home? We bought a car before this opportunity came up -- a Subaru Forester -- a nice, reasonable car for snows and mountains. Is it insanity to ship it over with us? Is it insanity to sell a three month old car with less than 4000 miles on it? And what happens with our mortgage back home -- does it make more sense to rent or sell?
• Will it make sense to talk to someone at a Swiss consulate before going, or getting in touch with some kind of relocation agency? I suppose it would make more sense than babbling about it on Slashdot, but oh well, the timing of this article caught me right as I was starting to consider all these questions...

Maybe it would be easier to just bus tables at a ski resort and take a few years off from IT...

I need to start working on my resume, or CV I guess. European CVs don't bear much resemblance to American resumes, do they? It seems like they're a lot chattier & biographical than the dry list of titles & skills & credentials that is expected over here. Just one more thing to do in the next handful of months....

So Google has finally offered a form of desktop search, but it only works on localhost. This seems reasonable for the average home user, but an obstacle to setting up something even cooler: a slick Google powered local LAN search engine. Think about it: even on a mostly Mac / Linux network, you can set up one Windows box that has Samba mounted your main network shares with the Google software, and through the magic of HTTP reverse proxying, your whole LAN can have a nice Google search interface into your local documentation.

So. The obvious thing to try then is to set up Apache (or Squid, or similar software) running as a reverse proxy on that machine.

The first thing I did when finding out about this tool was to install it on a spare Windows machine with a couple of Samba mounted network drives (I'm hoping that it will index the content of these drives, but I can't tell yet), then set up Apache as a reverse proxy to provide the indexed material as a URL that would be widely accessible on the local LAN.

So far I can't quite get it to work -- I can connect from another computer (a Mac running Safari), but first I get complaints about running the wrong browser, and then I get errors about invalid URLs that apparently aren't being passed through. Still though, it seems certain that this should be doable, and if it can be done, this would beat the living snot out of the current ht://Dig based search engine we're using.

Google is right to make this tool inaccessible from non-localhost access -- the average home user does not need to have the contents of their hard drive set up with an easy to browse, globally accessible search interface. And I can see where Google wouldn't want this to work on LANs either -- it would cut into their business of selling search appliances. But come on, this is right on the cusp of working as it is, and it's only in beta. If Google doesn't provide a way to turn on access for local (e.g. 192.168.x.x) addresses, I'm sure that Apache or something like it can be configured to do this.

Zoo-sa.

IPA (International Spelling Alphabet): zu:z[e rotated mathematically positively by 180 deg.]

Me is a native German speaker.

No need to remember this anyway, the distro will disappear.

CC.