teh TODDtastic webLog-a-majig

What is all the fuss about Vista? PC-Mag just rated it the biggest disappointment of the year. They explained that it isn’t all bad, but they said it was disappointing because some things were thrown out at the end. Sure, that is disappointing, but I wouldn’t say it is the most disappointing product this year. I would say the first consumer Quad Core AMD chips are more disappointing than Vista… and those are only disappointing because they don’t yet have a chip that beats the Intel Quad Core chips. Come on, stop picking so much on Vista. People even pick a lot on Leopard. Here, I will defend both. Keep in mind, I don’t like Microsoft’s crap, I just put up with it.

It took me until the end of August to finally accept that Vista isn’t that bad and actually go ahead and install it on my computer. I did so on a random day. I just took all important data off my system, formatted my drives, setup a RAID-0, and went on my way hoping it would work, just trying it out, you know? Well, I can honestly say that I was very pleasantly surprised. Why? Everything worked except for my motherboards proprietary hardware monitoring, which isn’t a big deal. I am most surprised that I had no issues because my motherboards manufacture, ABit, does not support this board anymore, much less putting 64-bit Vista on it. So the fact that I installed 64-bit Vista, got the plain nForce4 drivers from nvidia, and didn’t have a single problem, not even any issues having it installed on the nvidia RAID, was a big surprise and it was very much so welcomed.

To this day, the only problem I have had is the lack of hardware monitoring and an issue with a cracked game that I tried to install that was old and the crack was unable to work (I believe it was potentially a 16-bit crack, so it’s understandable). And my system works perfectly fine with Aero. It runs very quickly. The only complaint I have with it is that Vista does really take a LOT of RAM to run smoothly, but I have enough to keep it going. I’m not going to say that Vista is 100% perfect, because it isn’t. But nothing is. Just lay off it, geez. I guess one major flaw with it in my book is its inability to properly handle dual screens. It is actually very embarrassing. Ask me more about that if you want details.

Now… Leopard is a different boat, of course. Now, I think it may have been over hyped by new Apple adopters– the people that bought an iPhone because it was the rad thing to do then decided to also get an Apple computer because they wanted a new computer… not knowing anything about computers in the first place. Then hearing that Apple has a new operating system coming out, they had to be very excited because they are now all about Apple.

Leopard isn’t perfect. I know that. There is one very annoying bug I wish they would fix, but at this point, they just haven’t. But I wouldn’t call it a huge disappointment, either. Overall I’m pleased with it, very pleased. Sure, there are a few things that I hate about it, but overall there is no major issue with it. People are just pissed off because it didn’t really add that much to the front end. It actually did, but then again, not all that much, I agree. But a lot of the stuff they made better was underneath the hood. Such as CoreAnimation, and 64-bit from the ground up, better memory management (that’s a very noticeable improvement), and better networking support. All these things I think out weigh the few cases where people got BSODs after upgrading from their hacked up Mac OS X Tiger. I simply did a completely clean install and I had no issues at all.

I guess you should keep in mind that I’m a more advanced computer user and I tweak things and in general have good karma when it comes to computers. Yes, I turned off that completely stupid UAC in Vista disabled a bunch of stupid services. I also did a safe amount of tweaking in Leopard. I also tweak stuff in my servers and my phone. It’s just what I do. But because I know what I’m doing, I think I have far less issues with stupid stuff that people can’t stand in Vista. Just fix it if you don’t like it, geez. Don’t bash it. Just take your frustrations out on a printer or something.

I write this post from none other than a widescreen monitor.

I have noticed that the world is clearly going to all widescreen. TV of course is going widescreen, that is what the entire high definition standard is focused around, being wide aspect ratios. And slowly but surely, computers are going completely widescreen. I wasn’t so sure about this when I first noticed it happening about 3 years ago. I kept telling myself that it is stupid to have widescreens for the desktop. I really didn’t have any interest in that because it seemed to me that you usually want more height in your displays for computers. Especially for web browsing and text editing. While these are two applications where widescreens are bad, in general widescreens look a lot better.

I think the one invention that had to happen to in any way allow widescreens to successfully come to computers was the scroll wheel on your mouse. It is probably near impossible today to find a mouse and enjoy using said mouse without a scroll wheel. It was a pain to have to mouse over to the scroll bar on the side of the window to scroll through things, but I do remember those days very well.

So, the widescreen revolution, as I’d like to call it, started primarly on laptops. It makes good sense on a laptop. My MacBook Pro, and almost every laptop I see around school has a widescreen display. They are useful due to the fact that a wider keyboard can be included on a still fair size screen. You almost have to do some shopping around to find any decent laptop with a 4:3 display, but they are still out there.

Next, the desktop started seeing more and more widescreens. The leader here was probably Apple by switching all their computers to widescreens several years ago. And at the beginning of this last summer, I purchased my very first widescreen monitor. I did a little research on this but not too much because I kind of needed an LCD monitor in a hurry. I still picked a pretty decent one especially for the price. I picked the ViewSonic Optiquest Q20wb. It got me through my situation where I needed the LCD and is still used every day. When I moved back home after the summer, I replaced the crappier of my 2 CRT monitors with my new LCD monitor. Eventually, I decided the CRT just looked ridiculous, and I eventually stopped my computer from giving it signal and once I discovered I could live without it, I took it off my table.

The single monitor was definitely something that could work, but I still had an itch to need that second monitor back. So, I started watching it on the on-line stores. I eventually noticed it start to disappear from some of them, which led me to believe it may not be around for too much longer. I don’t know if this feeling is right at this point, but I’ll continue on. I eventually sucked up the price tag and my lack of job position at this point and went for it. I ordered another one. It felt good when I clicked the confirm button. I waited with extreme excitement all week for it to arrive.

Now that it is here and hooked up and running, I feel at home now. I never thought that I would like 2 widescreen monitors, but as of now, I find that I’m in love with the setup. Sure, it is very wide, but you just have to love the 3360×1050 resolution. So here I am, sitting with a widescreen MacBook Pro to my far left, and two 20″ widescreen monitors directly in front of me, in all their glory. It is very nice having 2 matching monitors for a change, too. I highly recommend!

This isn’t a long drawn out post….. just a quick mention of something that happened to me recently in quote form…

I can’t believe it…. So, the first time I really get into actually sitting down and writing my english paper, and it is the middle of the fucking night when all I want is sleep!

I can’t figure out how my mind works sometimes. I’m off to bed now.

When I first heard of Facebook, I thought it was a good concept. That was before it went public and became really popular. Everywhere I go, I see people on a computer checking Facebook. It WAS a great site, but lately I’ve become more and more pissed off by it. It used to be that it was nice, simple, and elegant. No clutter and no way to modify it to put shitty themes on it. That was when it was great. However, at some point they added applications, which could have been a good idea, but of course it is there to abuse. Now, I have to constantly fend off all the stupid applications that people invite me to use. I hate doing that. Ever day, I need to ignore at least 2 new applications, usually having something to do with vampires, or free condoms, or super super super advanced walls. These things alone clutter up the Facebook pages. I hate wanted to just go write on someones wall, but having to scroll all the way through 50 applications to find their wall. I hate all the stupid twinkly things and having all the “Vampire bite me!” and “Pirates win!” and “Here are my top friends, you aren’t cool if you aren’t on my list.”

Please, let the madness stop! What happened to the simple networking concept of it?! Why is it that every time such a site gets popular, it gets abused to shit? Is it because the general population just likes their web sites nice and shitty?

This will be my first hardware review!

As many of you know, I opted for the one, the only Apple MacBook Pro 15.4″ Matte 2.4Ghz. Some people that know me were surprised, and obviously questioned why. I’ll tell you why. I love it. I’m not going to lie, I just plain love it. Since I first saw it in 2006, I have wanted it so bad. In fact, for the last several years, since Apple started making more professional looking machines (bright colors and bubbly designs are OK for kids, not for professionals), I have loved the designs. But then, seeing them take the latest G4 laptop and making it even thinner and sexier, and significantly more powerful with an Intel chip, I have wanted nothing more.

Let me first start with the cost. I got a student discount of a whopping $200, but even then, that only covered the tax plus a little more. So, it ended up being nearly $2500, still. That is a lot of money, I understand, but I can tell you right now, it was worth it. Many of my friends opted for the dells, but they ended up having to go with the 17″ versions to match the chip in my 15.4 laptop. Going to the 17″, from what I’ve seen, makes it simply to big to carry around. One of those 17″ dell will not even fit in my backpack laptop compartment. I did not want a 17″ laptop, but I didn’t want any smaller than a 15.4″.

Now, lets review all its sexy lines. This thing is 1 inch thin. In that 1 inch, it fits a powerful 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM (which I will be upgrading to 4GB soon), an 8600GT 256MB, 160GB HD, 8X DVD Burner, and a whole lot more! This machine packs so much power into such a small, sexy package that you can’t help but to drool when you see it. It never slows down for me. I love the fact that is holds more power than my big desktop (currently). It maintains pretty good battery life; nearly 4 hours, depending on what I’m doing. The hardware amazes me every time.

One feature that is something that I know for a fact that Windows never pulls off consistently, if at all, is when I close the lid, the machine goes to sleep, and it stays asleep. I have never seen a windows computer do that every single time, and resume without issues, or stay off, for that matter. There is nothing that can stop my MacBook Pro from sleeping and staying asleep with everything I’m working on intact.

Now, the OS. I’m not going to say that Mac OS X is flawless, that is a common misconception. No OS is flawless, I don’t care what you say. I’ll tell you right now, Tiger has serious networking issues, but remember, Windows does, too. Connecting to networks is no problem, it just simply isn’t very friendly with windows systems, and when you go to a different network, such as school, it seems to get very confused about those shares (kind of yells “Where the fuck did it go!? What do I do?!”). But, overall, the OS is amazing. Why do I love it? Because it is fluent to me. It is unix based, and I can’t even explain to the average computer user how much I love having access to a unix terminal at any time. Also, the OS does hold more of a “It Just Works” type of rational than Windows does. When I plug in a flash drive, it just pops up in Finder. There is no stupid “Found New Hardware, Please wait while we figure this mess out.” It Just Works. Same thing with a mouse, camera, scanner, whatever.

Also, the OS does just have a certain theory about it that just says it was built for efficiency. The keyboard shortcuts are much better laid out in OS X than in Windows. I truly feel like I can get more done on it in less time. In addition, the GUI is designed in such a way that a novice user can use it easily, but also an advanced user, like myself, can customize it a lot.

So, you are a person that thinks I spent too much for this sexy machine. Well, I did do some shopping around. First of all, to even get this amount of power in a dell, you need to go to the small to medium sized business website, because their consumer line does not even over up to the 2.4Ghz chip. Then, to build a comparable machine, it will cost approximately the same, even today. And, it will still not be as sexy, it will still have a glossy screen (glossy screens are terrible), and it will also lack the wonderful Mac OS X.

But I can’t game much on here? Not true, again. Boot Camp, as you probably know, allows me to install Vista or XP on here, making it possible to be just as game friendly as any Windows laptop. Then, Apple is starting to collect game manufactures who are willing to write games for Mac OS X as well as windows. So, I really think Apples could be a future gaming competitor, which can actually be more easily achieved because Apple controls all their hardware, so incompatibilities will be very limited.

I am at this point patiently awaiting Mac OS X Leopard. I will most likely review that after I’ve been using it for some time.

So, in the end… MacBook Pro – Love it. Recommend it. 10/10, 5/5, whatever scale you want to use. Don’t need so much power, or don’t have so much money to spend? I’d probably recommend something else. Just ask, and I’d be glad to make recommendations!

If there is one thing I’ve noticed in the last several years, having matured, held a job followed by an internship, and now starting college, is that sometimes you need to step back and decide what is practical… Where are efficiencies lost? Are those inefficiencies affecting enough to be a problem? Or, do you even care if those inefficiencies are causing a problem?

I have an example of a recent thought that has been receiving some thought lately. You are reading this very blog because it is hosted on a server. This server happens to be in my room (at least at the time of this writing), sitting there, mostly idle, but serving some purpose when it’s needed, by either me or someone viewing a page hosted on it. A server is not something that can be turned off, and just powered on when needed, it always needs to be ready to serve its purpose on call. So, I set up this server, and it’s been running fairly well for over 2 weeks now. I took the easy route and just installed Ubuntu server 7.04. It seems to work pretty well, I’ve got no major complaints, mostly just difficulties in how things are configured because I’m so used to configuring stuff in Gentoo. Because of this, I would absolutely love to actually run Gentoo on the machine. However, this is where I remember why I don’t want to run Gentoo on the machine.

I don’t want to run Gentoo on the server because it is an old server. It is only a Pentium III 550Mhz machine with a whopping 384MB of SD RAM. Not high performance by any modern standard. I’ve had experience running Gentoo on machines, believe it or not, as slow as 166Mhz, and I can easily say that it is not fun for long. The initial setup isn’t so bad; if I were to compile the system from the ground up, it could probably take about a day. It could be done in a few hours if I take the easier method of installing it. But then, maintaining the installation is where the problem comes, especially if I don’t get around to it often enough.

So, the struggle is deciding if it worth the time to setup the server to run Gentoo, and would it be necessary. I still don’t have an answer for this, but that is OK, I have plenty of time to come up with an answer.

Another example I have it actually college. Yes, of course college is worth it. True, people have become very successful without a college education (Bill Gates, for example), but on average, for the average person, college definitely helps a lot. However, not all elements of college are practical. For example, my chemistry class right now. In high school I took a chemistry class and I got the basics down for the most part. I believe that is about all I need to know for my major. But I am in an honors class that is being taught as if I was going to be a chemist or a something that would require a lot of chemistry. But, after this chemistry class, I am not going to need to take chemistry 2 or anything, so, why am I in such a rigorous course? Just because. That’s it. General Education requirements say I need to take it. That is not practical because it consumes a large amount of my time without any real purpose. Not to mention I have to pay for it. Also, at this point I need to truly buckle down in my chemistry class, because it is not going well at all. I am now just hoping for a passing grade in the class.

But the question keeps coming up on whether or not I really belong in college. Is it practical for me to spend all this time, or could I come up with a really good idea and find a way to profit off it? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

I have a class where were I attend a lecture 3 times a week for an hour, no big deal. I read the chapter, I pay attention in the lecture, I take notes, and I’ll study a bit for a test before we take it… But this class has an added bonus thrown on top of that. This bonus is called WebAssign.

My Chemistry class uses this for on-line quizzes. These aren’t your average quiz. These are quizzes sent from a very bad place. Based off a few Google searches, this site is causing extreme stress everywhere it lingers. I mostly find myself just trying to get an answer it accepts, no matter how I get to it, I don’t care. It is just so frustrating to spend about 20 minutes on a problem because you know it has to be exactly right, then it returns the evil statement, “Your answer differs from the correct answer by orders of magnitude.” To which I usually scream some curse words and walk away feeling defeated.

It is not so much that it is a pain in the ass to get it all completed. It’s not even that it takes hours to complete. It is not even that there is no way to hack the source and get the algorithms used to get the right answer (it’s all server side, so that makes it pretty difficult, yes I’ve investigated the possibilities ). It is more so the fact that if you use up all your chances to get the right answer that it will not tell me the right answer or how to get to it! In other words, I learn nothing by completing the stupid assignment! It is just a huge waste of my time, and I’m not alone in these frustrations.

Teacher/Professors only like it because it makes grading very easy… they do nothing!