Why does this matter? Well if you don’t want to run automatic updates you can make a note of the second Tuesday of every and just run Windows Update then instead of always having a background process.

I also brought my server into my room and have started using it for TV and such. I realized that it was being used almost exclusively for storage and since it had a lot more power than that I wanted to use it for something else. That combined with my problem with a few games not liking dual-monitors made me recommission it as a Debian box which is sitting in my room now. Whenever I’m playing games or other things on my desktop I use that box for TV. Apart from that it still serves the exact same purpose as before, but it’s also easier to maintain with Debian.

But because I only had one cable coming into my room my desktop had get connectivity through my server. This was a real pain in the ass because it meant that nothing on the rest of the network (wireless, which means my laptop) could connect to my desktop anymore and I had to move everything through the server if I needed it. I also needed to have the server on if I wanted a connection on my desktop. This really wasn’t working for me so I dropped some cash earlier this week for a nice gigabit 8 port switch, couple of cat6 and I hooked everything up faster than before.

So what do I do in a normal day now that orientation is over?

Usually I get a bunch of emails telling me to moves files from one place to another. Renew a few domain names once a week. Renew some SSL certificates as well.

And when there is nothing like that to do? I get to mess around with ASP.NET and try and make a nice WAN map for our company network. With the power of SQL and a whole lot of googling I’ve gotten decently far. I still wouldn’t say that I know much about it but it’s better than just sitting on IRC all day. Which I might be doing anyway…

Oh, and it’s an all Windows environment which makes me a little bit frustrated at times. It’s nice in relation to how things work very nicely across the network when they work. It’s not so nice when things don’t work and you have no idea what is going wrong.

The video card is a vast improvement on my current video card, an Asus Radeon X1950 Pro. First, it supports DirectX 10 which means I can use all sorts of cool new effect in games to make it look just a tiny bit more realistic. Secondly, there have been great architecture improvements in the past 3 generations of video cards. The main one I can think of is the change from separate vertex/pixel shaders to one unified shader model. The X1950 had 36 pixel pipes and 8 vertex shaders which means at best it can use 44. The 4850 has 800 which it can split any way it needs to.

There are some problems attached to the 4850 though. With the stock cooling they have reached temperatures of over 90 degrees Celsius. While this is very hot, and the card is meant to handle it, I opted for HIS’s revision with their ICEQ4 cooler which is a dual slot cooler. This means the heat is moved entirely outside of my case and it’s a much larger fan. The extra overclocking freedom might come in handy and it will probably preserve the life of my card.

After I bought those I started looking at monitors a few days later. I wasn’t going to buy one at first but at just over $400 for a 24″ monitor with what I wanted, great dark levels and 1920×1200, I couldn’t not buy the V2400W. I was going to go for widescreen with my current monitor but at the time I didn’t want to lose backwards compatibility with some older games. Now that I’ve gone for 64bit Vista, a DX10 video card and 4GB of RAM (impossible for 32bit normally) I think widescreen will be the least of my worries. Besides, it handles 1:1 pixel mapping of standard resolutions anyway.

So with the new hardware on its way you can expect that I will be much more productive and be able to use my time much better.

Yeah right, time to replay some games with higher resolution and better textures and effects!

Except there is something different about my mac. It can’t watch those videos. It’s too damned slow. It’s a 7 year old ibook running a G3. It can’t watch youtube video. It has troubles with word processing at times. Which is why I’m only using TextEdit.

Single core, PowerPC, 500MHz. 320MB of RAM, 10 gig hard drive running 10.3. Slowly. At best. But it runs. And it was cheap. And it’s a laptop.

In CS 136 today the prof was looking for someone with a PPC mac and I was the only person to have one. At all. And I know like 4 people with macs myself.

It takes over a minute, and it has been timed, to load the app we do our programming in. That’s quite the commitment just to try out a simple line of code. The temptation would be to keep it running at all times but if I keep it open all the time everything else will be even slower. Even the app to see how much memory and CPU I’m using takes more CPU time than it’s worth. 20-40% just monitoring itself.

At least I won’t get viruses right? right? Well since after typing in some programs and looking at the screen I can see the rest of my sentence come out well after I’m finished I’m tempted to say it has infected itself.

And it does crash, no matter what the commercials tell you. Programs randomly crash, the OS itself has frozen on me several times saying “an error has occurred, please restart your computer to fix it.” Better or worse than a BSOD? I like to be able to debug my problems.

I think I’ll stop the mac rant right there. It’s pretty but it doesn’t live up to the ‘perfect’ machine that everyone expects. Maybe better than windows, but not perfect.

I wrote this on my mac.