26 Nov 2007
This image makes 60,000 indexed items. A fair whack of that would be email, but far out that’s a lot of information. (It’s not just a count of files on a system, that’s just indexed documents in my home dir, projects workspace, and email accounts)
New laptop arrives Monday morning, and I’m trying to decide if I even want to move everything off this desktop or not! The laptop has half a TB of disc space across 2 drives (17″ monster), so I’m considering it. I purchased it as a desktop replacement system and it is quite capable of that (specs at end of post)! The desktop provides a good backup should the laptop die/get stolen/run over by a bus, but at present the data is organised to be used, not archived.
By “used”, of course, I mean that liberally disorganised but most-recently-used-on-top sort of structure we fall into so easily. So I have a spot of sorting to do to get everything onto the laptop.
My last computer still has some stuff I’d like to get off it (particularly uni work… to the critics, yes, I do still go to uni!) but it’s been in at Youthworks not doing much since we moved offices, but heavy enough I haven’t bothered bringing it home again, since late last year.
The problem with desktops in particular is that they aren’t worth selling for their potential usefulness. My several-years-old computer (2.4GHz/768MB/somethingsomething… Ubuntu) in at Youthworks could maybe just sell for $350 given a clueless enough eBayer. My current desktop (no great slouch, AMD64 X2 4200+/2GB/7600GS) would be worth about the same to someone who knew what they were talking about… or perhaps $750 on eBay!
Even so — it’s useful to have spare machines ‘just in case’ (for production stuff especially). I’d love to be able to swap those two desktops for laptops of similar vintage, but it’s just never going to be cost-effective. When people get rid of laptops, it’s because they suck (falling apart/general abuse, crap battery life, rubbish specs to start with, etc.). Not so with desktops, wherein most faults are redeemable at minimal cost. And even that minimal cost is often negated by the fact that there’s so much in the way of ‘spare’ parts around the place!
24 Nov 2007
This story appeared in today’s SMH — note the erroneous (yet highly amusing) caption on the lead photo:
(screenshotted for posterity if they go editing)
They say they don’t know why it sunk. I blame Vista ;-)
Update:
So perhaps SMH’s typo was mixed up. ABC (Australia) are running a story on their website wherein it’s universally called the MS Explorer. An ill-fated name for a ship, no doubt!
Perhaps Midnight Commander or Finder would be a more successful name? ;-)
22 Nov 2007
Django’s django-registration version 3 introduces a new class, RegistrationFormTermsOfService, that replaces the tos field in RegistrationForm.
Our app had done that but django-registration’s version change slipped past me (so I had django-registration, just the wrong version), easily fixed with a svn -co http://django-registration.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/registration/ into site-packages.
16 Nov 2007
Finally, Subversion’s PROPFIND is enabled on the proxy server at one place I work, but for some reason Subclipse was still being a little bit special.
Turns out it doesn’t use Eclipse’s HTTP Proxy settings, but needs setting elsewhere.
On Windows XP, this will be in your Application Data path under Subversion. Mine is as follows:
C:\Documents and Settings\joshs\Application Data\Subversion
I haven’t got a Vista machine to test on, but it will still be the Application Data\Subversion folder within the user’s path. (I will confirm this next time I’m on a Vista box.)
Linux users, look in ~/.subversion/
Open the file “servers” (no extension) and scroll to the bottom section, [Global].
Un-comment and edit the http-proxy-host and http-proxy-port settings (and user/password if required, it wasn’t for me) as appropriate and everything will start working. You don’t even need to reload Eclipse.
Productivity just soared!
13 Nov 2007
My old OCZ 520 died a few months back, sadly, and I’d been running on a cheap and nasty power supply ever since (mostly on account of it being all I could afford at the time, and that the power supply conked out just when setting up for something!)
It was super nice and super shiny and under a super 5 year warranty, but only if I shipped it back to the US, at a cost of around $150. Crazy, huh? I’m sure there were cheaper options, but I couldn’t find them. And they probably involved boats, which just take too long :P
Anyway, I went to buy a video camera yesterday and sort-of-impulse-bought (coz I was at the store and had been thinking I really should get a decent PSU before something bad happens for a few months) a Corsair HX-620W. It had great reviews and was meant to be super quiet which is mostly what attracted me to it — I mean, sure, reliable power is great… but quiet PCs are better! I could’ve gone the Seasonic S12 but it’s not modular, or the M12, but it’s louder (extra 6cm fan)… so the Corsair, despite probably being manufactured by the same company and sharing a lot of identical design features, won.
It’s modular, which the OCZ wasn’t. Not a massive deal, but nice nonetheless. Makes for a tidier case:
You can see the modular connectors here:
I’m not using any of the SLI power at the minute (probably ever) but, again, nice to have in a future-proofing kind of way.
It’s also got one particularly massive fan. The OCZ had two 80mm fans that were super efficient and barely ever made any noise at all, but bigger typically means slower rotation & less whining noises, so it has to be a good thing. My HSF is massive enough and you can see even it’s small in comparison.
I also took advantage of the cleaning-up-the-insides to properly attach a few CCFLs that’d been lying around. Finally, the UV-responsive motherboard can glow properly!
I know, IDE cables suck… I’ve only got one IDE drive left, and it’s actually just there as a spare. Should take it out but haven’t had a chance just yet.
Anyway, whilst I was doing all this I realised my graphics card fan wasn’t spinning at all. It’d been making some funny noises when I’d done some stuff inside the case in the past, but I’d always dismissed it because nothing was crashing and I hadn’t changed anything to do with the graphics card. Turns out it hadn’t actually been spinning for ages and the fan had the driest bearings I’ve ever seen. The heatsink was plenty hot, but nothing was crashing. My system (CPU + memory) runs about 15% above clock but I’ve had no real cause to overclock the graphics card (Fury aside, but it needs more than just a faster clock!). So, consider this research that a cheap and nasty Palit GeForce 7600 GS can run with only passive cooling!
Ironically, that fan has the newest bearing in the system.
After I’d put everything back together I realised the chipset fan could probably do at the very least with a clean, but had rebooted by then and left it well enough alone.
Singer Oil is great, but I tried some spray Aquatec lubricant also which seems to be a little finer and would probably work quite well. The graphics fan squeaked a little when it started up… not quite sure why! It was pretty well oiled, but maybe it was still just working through the bearings completely.
Anyway… I think this computer’s nearly ready for summer’s soaring temperatures and increased power instability.