Recently in Computers and stuff Category

Why would anyone in their right mind want to exchange the Fn and the Ctrl keys on the keyboard? This is confusing and pissing me off.


What's wrong with this keyboard?

I happened to make an accidental discovery. If I place my mouse cursor on the right or left edge of the gnome desktop and move the mouse wheel I cycle through the workspaces. This will prove to be quite useful.

I installed VirtualBox on my Ubuntu laptop and now can run Windows XP as a virtual operating system within its own window. This is much better than having a dual boot system and on startup always having to choose one or the other.



I was hoping to do the same with favorite good old FreeBSD. However, it will not install correctly because it cannot find the boot loader for some weird reason. I tried it with FreeBSD 6.4, 7.0 and 7.1 beta but none of the worked.

Rumor has it that I've decided to become some kind of Linux expert. So who am I trying to kid?!

At least I was happy when I came home today and discovered the big box from Amazon lying on the cabinet in the hallway entrance.

New challenges on the horizon are:

• Understanding the Linux Kernel by Bovet & Cesati
  
• Linux Device Drivers by Corbet, Rubini and Kroah-Hartman
  

By the way, there was also a more "normal" book as part of the shipment, namely:

• A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon

Two days ago I finished his first book called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time which I really liked.

On my way home yesterday, I stopped at the bookstore at the train station and purchased the following two paperbacks:

• Love in the time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Shadowplay by Tad Williams

When I realized I'd inadvertently bought book two I quickly went to Bol.com and ordered book one:

• Shadowmarch by Tad Williams

Am I getting overly addicted to buying books or what? No matter, I've got lots of time to read it all in the train, about two hours per day which is ten hours per week (or about one good novel a week).

This weekend they were having this big 25% computer sale at Media Markt, so I went there and decided to splurge on an ASUS X59SL-AP275C for my upcoming birthday.

Although it comes pre-installed with Windows Vista, the first thing I'm going to do is remove it and replace it with the latest version of my favorite operating system.

I'll go for the bleeding edge version FreeBSD 7.1-BETA and recompile the kernel with the new and vastly improved ULE scheduler.

cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf
cp GENERIC LAPTOP
vi LAPTOP

There are two things to change in this file then we can move to compiling and installing the new and improved kernel.

ident      LAPTOP
options    SCHED_ULE

That's all there is to it. I certainly hope that it works.

Here's something handy for vim power users.

:%s/.*/(&)/g

For those unfortunate souls out there who do not have a clue about what this might be, this regular expression global substitution command will enclose all lines in the current file within parentheses.

Or have even more fun by reversing all of the lines in a file by issuing the following succinct command:

:g/^/mo0

I'm just sawing swiftly through the book Learning the vi and Vim Editor and learning all kinds of nifty stuff to make my editing sessions even more efficient.

Dealing with a really large database and keeping your web-based service scalable can be quite a challenge.

One thing you might want to consider in order to improve performance is to prevent Unix from updating atime (last access time) at every read/write.

This is done by adding the noatime flag when mounting the file system associated with the database and/or files being accessed alot.

Adding this flag will give you a tremendous boost in read and write capacity, so why not give it a try and see what happens?

Reference: Building Scalable Web Sites by Cal Henderson.

The fine folks at Computer Clinic were able to repair my busted laptop, so I am a happy computer geek once again.

As it turns out, they had to take the machine completely apart, re-solder some pins on the mother board, re-connect the voltage outlet, put everything back together again, and reset the power supply.

Nice folks there, and it only cost me 65 euros, which is much much cheaper than having to buy a new laptop (even if the one I have is almost four years old it works just fine for now, although subconsciously I'm hoping for some excuse to purchase another one).

My trusty Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop is busted. If I press the power switch, nothing happens.

I took it to Computer Clinic and sure hope that they can fix it.

This week I was pleasantly surprised by the arrival from Amazon of the latest Spring in Action book.

First two chapters alright, the chapters after that getting a bit too heavy duty for me.

Since it's been awhile since I did any really serious Java programming, I'm a bit rusty in this area and need to refresh some more in order to appreciate this book much better.