It never rains but it pours.
It’s been a busy 2 days. 🙁
Russell on Schwarzenegger
Russell Beattie doesn’t pull any punches critizising Arnie. Ahem, I have to agree with him, but as I can’t vote in California, it doesn’t bother me too much! (200 standing for the election and counting according to the paper this morning, including a 100 year old woman!)
Movies for your pleasure at Pocket Movies
Just visited PocketMovies.net again after a long hiatus. There’s a plenty of goodies to download! Loved the Happy Birthday one, it’s cute! 🙂
Posting from 2.6 . . .
Err, wow! I just booted into Linux 2.6 and am shocked at how speedy everything is. The mouse cursor acts like it’s on steroids. Browser windows pop up really fast. The GIMP loaded quickly.
I loaded 3 photos from the baseball game on Sunday into the GIMP. Each is 2560×1920 pixels, or between 1.8MB and 2.2MB in size. I ‘auto-corrected’ the colour on each to build up a large cache and the system is responding well. The auto-correction is quite intensive, both in CPU and memory terms. If I had done that while running 2.4 my machine would have ground to a halt while the images swapped in and out of memory (I also have Moz FB, xchat2, MGT, and Kmail open)
Another test – when working on the GIMP and large images, if I swap desktops it takes a few moments for the images to swap out and my browser and mail client to come back in. Not now! The images take about 1/2 second to redraw, and moving back to my browser desktop I can start typing here again immediately.
Of course, it’s not a completely fair comparision. I’m using the open source Nvidia driver, not the propreitary one I used before. I’m going to get the propreitary one working next.
(Tested on an overclocked 300 -> 500Mhz PII, 300MB RAM)
Almost forgot – I’m recompiling the kernel as well..
Multi-part forms with css
Simon Wilson linked to an improved on a nice multi-part form built with css. It looks great, it’s fast, but I see one other major problem: validation.
For the server to validate the input it must check all the input when the form is completely filled out. The browser can do initial testing using Javascript but that’s not to be relied on.
If I understand the code (and I haven’t tested this myself), if errors in validation occur then the server will have to probably redirect to the anchor for the first page with an error.
I’d like to take a look at this technique myself later..
Linux.ie and free software projects
Prompted in part probably by this report on the state of GnuCash, Linux.ie will now accept banners from Open Source projects looking for a bit of attention. There’s more details on the page above, but be aware that not all banners will be accepted, and less mature projects won’t get a look in at all.
This is a service to boost awareness among new users to Linux. That means the applications have to work well and look good!
Update! I joined the #gnucash channel to lurk for a while. The first thing I saw made me grin.
<conrad> Oh man. I go away for a day, and hundreds of people join the channel…..
That spam-free feeling
Ah, yes. It’s a good morning when there’s no spam in your inbox! Over the past few days a new breed of spam found it’s way into my inbox.
This new spam was short in length, almost completely html based with short sentences and didn’t ever score over 3.5 on Spam Assassin. I spent those last few days training SA to recognise the new spam and this morning my inbox is empty once more!
My bulging SPAM folder has reached 6.5MB (No, I don’t get that much spam, I haven’t emptied it since Aug 6th!) and hardly a false positive in sight! Happy times indeed!
The Cool Passion of Dr. Dean
TIME Magazine ran a series of articles last week on Howard Dean, the presidential hopeful. I hadn’t a clue who this guy was, except that Kevin Lyda and others were pushing his website occasionally. The Time article above is balanced, showing the good and bad sides of the candidate.
In the printed article there’s a chart drawing comparisions between Dean and Bush. They’re not so different…
Found in a Red Hat kernel spec file
Thanks Waider for this..
#
# Dear Mr. or Mrs. Journalist,
#
# The changelog below is a list of modifications that have been made
# to the kernel at one time. By no means does this text reflect any
# official position of Red Hat, Inc. nor does any text reflect what
# is in the actual current kernel, due to the fact that we actually log
# tests and one-off builds as well.
#
# Sincerely yours,
# Arjan van de Ven
# Red Hat Linux kernel maintainer.
#
Good morning!
Ah yes, another week, but the pressure isn’t on yet. I went to 2 baseball games at the weekend – saw the White Sox win on Friday and Sunday. Great games, good entertainment and got some great photos!