After much deliberation I finally shelled out for a new fan and new hard drive.

Fan wise, I bought the Gigabyte G-Power Pro (link) which is now running like a dream with a fan control knob on the front of my computer out of a 3.5inch drive bay. The heat plate and heatsink is connected by heatpipes that run round the side of the heatsink. Essentially the heatsink is hovering about an inch above the base. It’s dropped my core temperature down to about 40 whereas it was almost 75 before and destroying my computer. Oh well, it’s what you get for buying a Prescott processor and using their fan. I didn’t realise they’ve got a bad reputation when I bought it.

To accompany my 80gb Seagate Barracuda, I’ve bought a 250gb Seagate Barracuda. I’m now running 5 partitions. 2 ext3 ones, one with my media on, and one with my Ubuntu install on. The other two are fat32 and nfts, for my music and Windows installation (gaming) respectively. Each of these partitions carries about 80gb of space. Of course the 5th is simply my Linux swap partition.

I’m so pleased to have a clean install of both OS’s and to be able to do my tasks without having to deal with my computer reseting at random intervals. Hopefully this fan will outlast my processor and cause me no problems itself.

I decided a few days ago to install Windows, for Age of Empires, and since I can’t be bothered to go and rewrite the MBR, I’m stuck with it for a while. Since using Linux, I realise what a rubbish system Windows really is. I really noticed this when it crashed.

Under linux, if an application crashes the windows manager, I hit ctrl-alt-f1 and it opens a terminal. I can then log into that and kill the application. Or if the problem is more serious, I can hit ctrl-alt-backspace and reset the windows manager in itself. On Windows, if an application crashes the windows manager, the task manager is part of the windows manager too, so I have no means of killing the problem application.

Another thing with Linux, in it I had complete control. If I wanted the computer to switch off in 10 minutes I’d open my terminal and type “sudo shutdown -h 10″, then type my password and it would do it, no questions asked. With Windows I’d probably have to get an external application for the timing.

Okay these are my current hates about Windows, more to come, I’m sure.

I started college about a week back and I’ve made quite a few new friends there. When greeted with the fact that I used Linux, they nearly keeled over. I was hence named a genius and they were completely and totally amazed. To be greeted with that astounding response made me think what kind of an image the Linux community is projecting. Of course there is elitism in every community which doesn’t help at all, but there is this image of Linux being only accessible to computer geeks and geniuses. Is it necessarily true? Some would say no, but you could argue that yes it is. I had to spend literally hours at the command line when I first used Linux with a cable dangling out my window to connect to the router, just so I could get ndiswrapper to work with my wireless drivers. 3d support with my ATI card took another 3 or 4 hours to set up.

There are people who use Linux who advocate to non users the benefits of Linux, but I am reluctant to recommend it to most people for fear of its sheer complexity to set up. I use it because I was forced to when my Windows broke. Through that I got used to it and I began to understand how to do certain things. Had Windows not broken, I would never have attempted to work it. Windows is far too easy to set up, as it sees nearly every device you put in it.

People say Linux is ready for the mainstream. I don’t think so. I still think it needs a few more years.

Recently, me (with no programming experience except PHP) and a friend (similar experience) have been looking into porting Jokosher to Windows. I’ve been floating round the web looking for sites that give me some idea, and I’ve set up a public Google notebook to keep track of these sites and information. What I’m after here is any other sites or information that could guide me or help me. The language is python, and the framework is Gstreamer. What I’m after is how I’m going to use the dependencies that Jokosher uses.

Any help or info would be much appreciated.

A couple of days ago I got my GCSE results. I was going to post them sooner but I was held off by the fact that the majority of the past 2 days have been a blur . I’ve got an A* in Maths; As in Chemistry, Physics and IT; Bs in English, Geography and Biology; Cs in French and Spanish, and a D in RS. I’m very pleased with them considering that the lower the grade the less important I felt the subject in question was. It’s also very good results for the A level courses I’m planning on taking: maths, physics, electronics and computing, and I’m really looking forward to it.

The only thing I’m not particularly looking forward to is Computing. In the other colleges they give you a choice on what you want to do programming wise, but in the one I’m going to they force you to study Visual BASIC and nothing else. Not good considering I’m a linux boy. Can anyone with experience in these matters tell me how knowing Visual BASIC will benifit me (i.e. what languages it is alike to… etc)? This also means I will have to install windows again and download Visual BASIC for there. *sigh*, don’t you just love proprietary standards.

I am a massive fan of the Gorillaz, so upon hearing a fantastic song that I’d never heard before on Last.fm, I jumped up and immediately found out which album it was that I was missing. I picked up a copy of “G sides” (2002) and listening to is great. There are some brilliant remixes on there and brilliant original songs as well. One that stuck me down immediately was “Left Hand Suzuki Method”. It’s been pieced together in a unique way, and well, it sounds amazing. It’s by far less commercial than either of the other two albums, and I suggest that any Gorillaz fans try it out.

Over the past few months, some of you (especially LugRadio listeners) may have been aware of the project called Jokosher. It is a collaborative effort to create an easy to use, audio editor for the masses. It uses the GStreamer for a back-end and GNOME for the front end. It has just made its first release and I thought I’d mention it here because watching it being developed blew me away in terms of the power and skill of the FLOSS community. Unfortunately thats all I could do, just sit back and watch and describe what I saw in the Wikipedia article (yes, OK, I’m a fucking Wikipediholic, I know).

For more information on Jokosher, check out the site, and see the Wikipedia article for a description of it.

Truly incredible.

Yep I did go to the LUGRadio live event. You might not have seen me, but I frequented the area around the pool table, MAME cabinet, and Clan.lugradio table. Drinky, Adam Sweet, if you come across this page, I’m the one who kicked your ass with mines .

Overall the event pretty much rocked. Some of the talks were boring (I won’t name names), but overall I throughly enjoyed it and learnt a lot about Linux, open source, and how badly the community surrounding it can dance. I’ll see everyone who attended next year, for sure.

I actually did try this. But I got bored within the first few days and upgraded again to the nightly 2.0b1 branch. What can I say? It looks brilliant. Another Microsoft killer for sure. Some say it might even pass the Acid 2.0 test, but that is yet to be seen in action. To the right is a screenshot that I took of the M/S killer when it was still installed as the official download, that can now be seen in the Mozilla Firefox wikipedia article (well, at the time of writing – here is a link to a revision with it on).

The application is great. It’s been reworked and un-quirked to make it enjoyable for all users, not just ones who take the time to learn the application. The RSS reading system has been upgraded and now it is just fantastic. Right now, I’m editing in a box with fucking spell checking. I kid you not. You can undo closed tabs, restore all tabs after a crash or hang and you can reorder and change your search plugins. All of these additions will probably be feature regressions for the slow catch up game of IE7. And I think that with IE7 introducing tabbed browsing to the masses will encourage users to switch over, if merely to see what the fuss is about. I can’t wait to see the future of Firefox, and I hope and wish it every success. With any luck, Microsoft will drop their browser and install Firefox as default. It won’t cost them anything, especially not in licensing, and it would free up developers for them. Think forward to open source possibilities Gatesy! You know it’s right.

That is correct. I haven’t been to Spain and I most definitely have not been neglecting this blog. Okay? All clear? Right.

I succumbed to the Internet whilst in Spain, and all the computers I had to work on were riddled with Internet Explorer spyware/adware. You’d think that Internet cafe would at least be secure enough to avoid downloading that type of crap. But not, it seems.

Other than that, in the world of technology, nothing seems new. I am currently trying out Firefox 2.0b I shall report back to you as soon as possible.