Apparently there is a WordPress podcast. I have not yet listened, but the plain text plugin in the notes looks promising. Also, Venture Bros. season 1 gets good at episode 3.

For fun, I hooked up a Timex Sinclair 1000 to my TV and wrote a short program.

Here’s my whole setup. Three devices are running Linux, one OS X, and then whatever Cox puts on their POS DVR.

Here’s my history of processors I’ve owned in my primary computer. This does not count second, third, or fourth computers, laptops, servers, media, or Seti/Distributed machines. Only computers which were used as my primary machine count.

1. IBM 486SLC2 66 MHz
2. Intel Pentium 166 MHz
3. Intel Pentium 2 266 MHz
4. Intel Celeron 300A 300 MHz @ 450 MHz
5. AMD Athlon 500 MHz
6. AMD Athlon 1000 MHz
7. AMD Athlon XP 2100+ 1733 MHz
8. AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1833 MHz
9. AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0 GHz
10. AMD Opteron 165 1.8 GHz @ 2.2 GHz
11. Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 GHz @ 3.0 GHz

WP-Cache 2.0 showed up on Digg today and with promises of speedy WordPress deliveries. Being the persistant software tester I am, I installed it onto this blog and immediatly saw the page load times at the bottom of the page get cut in half. I then installed it on LiveCDNews.com in hopes of speeding up that site in case of being Dugg again. Of course, having Apache configured to allow more than 150 people at a time on the site will help too.

Peter Write, the author of a bunch of visual basic books, wrote in his blog about his reasons for completely ditching MS software and moving to OS X and Ruby on Rails.

Over and over I’d be lambasted for being too passionate (a condition muppets refer to as arrogance). Time and again I’d find myself explaining basics of programming to people that should know better, people with years of experience under their belts, people that really didn’t care.

There’s nothing more frustrating than having to waste time explaining basic concepts of your job to a coworker in the same position as yourself. It seems that this is acceptable in the IT, but I can’t imagine it passing in any other field. Working as tech support for 4 years at UCSB’s public computer repair facility introduced me to many techs who didn’t know how to open a computer, what a PCI card was, or that there was any way to fix a computer besides reinstalling Windows. The knowledgable techs were few and far between, and I’ve yet to work with one who had passion for MS software.

Steps for install Django on Dapper Drake with Apache2, MySQL5, and Python2.4 already installed:

1. sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-python python-mysqldb python-docutils
2. wget http://www.djangoproject.com/download/0.95/tarball/
3. tar xfz Django-0.95.tar.gz
4. cd Django-0.95
5. sudo python ez_setup.py
   
6. sudo python setup.py install
7. start creating a Django app
   

Other notes:

• python-setuptools included with Dapper is not recent enough for Django 0.95

Since I need to reinstall all my Firefox extensions due to a hard drive failure, I’ve decided to make a list:

• del.icio.us firefox extension: A great addition to bookmarks. It hasn’t managed to replace them completely for me, but pretty much anything that would have landed deeper than one folder in my bookmarks menu now goes into del.icio.us.
• Web Developer Extension: Building websites without this extension is like driving a car without tires.
• Google Toolbar: First thing I do is hide everything except spellcheck and the form filling plugin. Those two functions make installing this worthwhile. I expect FF 2.0 to render the spellcheck redundant
• Google Broswer Sync: Keeps the bookmarks which are not in del.icio.us up to date on my different computers. Also works great as a browser backup utility.
• Forecastfox: because it’s nice to always know what the weather will be like tomorrow
• Adblock: The ads that slow down my dual core system get blocked. Ads should never be allowed to use so much processing power that I can notice it.

Creating a system guide appears to be popular these days, with my favorite guides coming from Ars Technica, The Tech Report, and Anandtech. I thought I’d throw another guide on the net with the main focus being price, with usability and upgradability coming in a close second. Several notes about this guide, everything is from Newegg, because they have a great reputation and ship quickly. No refurbished/open box items are considered, and I have not actually build this machine, these are just parts which look like they would work well together.

• Motherboard/Video/Sound/Network: ECS C51GM-M Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard – $60
• Processor/Heatsink/Fan: AMD Sempron 64 2800+ Manila 1600MHz HT Socket AM2 Processor Model SDA2800CNBOX – Retail – $50
• Memory: OCZ Value Series 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5400) Unbuffered System Memory Model OCZ26671024V – $69 (after $8 MIR)
• Hard Drive: HITACHI Deskstar T7K250 HDT722516DLA380 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 8 MB Cache Hard Drive (3 Year Warranty) – $54
• Optical Drive: NEC 16X DVD±R DVD Burner Black IDE Model ND-3550A – Retail – $36 (same price as OEM w/shipping)
• Case/Power Supply: Antec NSK 4400 Black/Silver 0.8mm cold-rolled steel construction ATX Mini Tower Computer Case 380W Power Supply – $72

Total: $349 + $26 Shipping = $375 ( -$8 mail in rebate)

(read more below the fold to see the reasoning behind my choices)

(more…)

I finally ran a successful backup, which took 16 hours to grab ~750 GB of data. Future runs will be much shorter, as rsnapshot will only be grabbing changes. Scripts now run the backup when the machine is powered on, then email me the results and power the machine down. Next up, getting the machine to power up without me asking. I guess I need to invest in a WOL network card.

I have to be at work in less than 6 hours, tomorrow will be a long day.