Stupid Robots

The Mac OS X install on my Mini 9 was recently borked (friend was borrowing it, and an unclean shutdown corrupted the file system), and I didn’t have the install discs on me. I’d also been messing with the Lucid Lynx beta in a VM on my machine, and was very impressed with the level of polish, so I decided to install Ubuntu on the Mini again and see how it went.

This was a couple days before the release date, so I downloaded the release candidate and ran form there.

1, 2, 3, 4, (wait, what comes after 4?)
Just testing features as I add them. Posts from Wordpress and MobileMe were migrated over by hand, as well as the comments for those posts.

Now, code testing

#include <iostream>
 
using namespace std;
 
void main(char **args, int argc){
    // This will print the words "Hello World"
    cout << "Hello World\n";
}

Switched over from Laughing Squid hosting (the older stuff, not the cloud hosting) to Dreamhost. While LS was decent, I wanted to do some more complicated things (custom DNS settings, subdomains) and didn't want to have to rely on someone else to handle it. That, and Dreamhost was having a massive discount on Martin Luther King day. So, the migration is complete, total downtime of maybe 3 hours or so. Coming up: Drupal. I've been messing with Drupal quite a bit recently, and I like the way it works (content creation, management, coding).

A slow computer is a pain to use, and trying to figure out what's causing the slowdown can be a difficult process. Here are some steps I use to figure out what's slowing me down.

The first step is to figure out what's prompting the slowdown. If it's happening at login or at startup, it's probably a program launching in the background. You can see which programs are starting when you login by going to System preferences, then the Accounts pane. It should pop up showing your account. Click the tab titled "Login Items".

Hmm, been a while since I posted here. Well, back to fun stuff.

My family (minus my dad and I) use a PowerPC Mac mini for their computing needs. It's been going fine for 3.5 years now, but it's been getting a bit slow, and the 80GB hard drive is running out of space. I convinced my dad that a hard drive upgrade might help with the speed, and would definitely give my mom more space to store photos. We ordered a 160GB drive from Newegg (this one), so a 2x increase in space would be seen.

I rip my DVDs using a combination of Handbrake and MacTheRipper. I use the 3.0 R14m version. Find a good torrent on TPB, I can't remember where I got it, but I didn't pay the stupid 'donation'. As they're using libdvdcss, it's kinda illegal for them to be using it without releasing the source. For Handbrake, I'm using a beta I compiled a while back that has processor specific optimizations. It also has the patch for the Quicktime AAC encoder. If you want it, drop me a comment, and I'll put it up, but it's only for Core 2 Duos.

Here's a good portion of the applications I use on a day to day basis. Hopefully someone finds something they didn't know about and I've helped them out.

First up are my media apps. Music, Photos, Movies, it's all here.

So, yeah! An honest-to-god website. I'll try to fill it up with fun stuff over time, so check back in a while (or subscribe)

A little while ago, I needed to watch some videos encoded with the Indeo 5 codec. This is a major pain in the butt on modern operating systems, as Apple didn’t relicense the codecs for OS X, Microsoft doesn’t support them under 64 bit Vista, and Ubuntu requires you to recompile MPlayer for it to work. I got them to play under Ubuntu on a virtual machine in OS X, but I thought that there had to be a better way. Turns out there is. Go to the download page for the MPlayer project, and download the OS X binary, and the OS X codec pack.

I was reading this article a bit ago. In it Bjarne Stroustrup talks about the inadequacies of American CS education. On point he brings up resonated with me. I took AP Computer Science A and AB (in Java) in high school, and something we learned early on was how to make our code look nice. Ideally, we didn’t put comments on the same line as code, and in AB, we had to document each method with preconditions, post conditions, and a general description of the method.