Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

Tuesday, May 20

Geek

Random Acts Of Browser Suckage

There's no question any more: Mozilla is by far a better browser than Internet Explorer. Just two features are enough to blow IE out of the water: popup blocking - I never see a popup - and tabbed browsing. I often have a dozen tabs open. One window, twelve web pages. No clutter, fast, simple. Right-click a link and it opens in another tab while you keep reading the page you're on.

But there's a third and even bigger reason: IE's CSS (cascading stylesheet) support sucks. That's the mildest word I can think of to describe it. What can you say for a browser that implements the right-hand margin backwards, so that your page is guaranteed to extend beyond the width of your window? Or how about a browser that, when you overlay one section of the page on another, makes all your images disappear?

I have a beautiful layout for my new Moveable Type blog, simple and elegant, and IE fucks it up beyond redemption. I could mess around and generate alternate stylesheets for Mozilla/Opera vs. IE, but the whole goddamn point of stylesheets is that you're not supposed to have to do that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 205 words, total size 1 kb.

Sunday, May 18

Geek

Whip That Llama

I forgot to install one little thing after rebuilding my poor PC. This has now been remedied:
Thanks for using Winamp. You are installation number 273,375,923.
Uhhh... That's rather a lot, isn't it?

Mind you, it really does whip the llama's ass.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:59 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 46 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

Oo-glay? Eh-mipto!

And if anyone out there knows the origin of the expression "Oo-glay? Eh-mipto!", please contact me. Click where it says "Tell me", on the left. No, your left.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 32 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

public static void main, public

public static void main,
public static void main,
public static void main,
and typo was his name-o!

I hate Java. It was completely obvious that Java was a huge pile of dog poo the moment they showed the Java version of "Hello, world!":

class HelloWorld {
public static void main (String args[]) {
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}
In Python, the entire program is
print "Hello, World!"
Which is why I program in Python rather than Java.

If you need to interface with Java stuff, you need to take a look at Jython. It's Python, with all the requisite Python goodness, but it is written in, runs on, works with, and compiles to Java. And like all the good things in life that don't cost anything, it's free!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:18 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 133 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

Sitemeter

Useful Web Thingy of the Day is Sitemeter. It tracks how many people are visiting your site and where they came from. And it's free. Scroll allll the way down to the bottom to see. I put it on the left originally, under the Blogger icon, but it's too big and screwed up my formatting. No matter, it works fine wherever it is.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:07 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 65 words, total size 1 kb.

Saturday, May 17

Geek

Shiny Happy Disk Drives

Well, it's happened: Hard disks have broken through the historically significant* $2/GB barrier. The drive in question is a 120GB Maxtor, now retailing for $219. Last week it was $249; two weeks ago it was $269. That's pretty rapid deflation even for a product that's seen price per unit fall by a factor of 5000 since 1990.

So the only question is: How many? The sooner I get rid of the rest of those poxy Deathstars the better.

*I just made that up.

Update: The same supplier has Opteron processors and motherboards. A bit pricy for the home user, but dirt cheap if you need a 64-bit dual-processor server.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 117 words, total size 1 kb.

Thursday, May 15

Geek

Three Processors In Search Of A Buyer

Since I rejoined the workforce I've been thinking about upgrading my PCs. I have two main computers (plus a notebook), and they're both over two years old. They're 1.2GHz Athlons; one running WinXP (which is a whole 'nother story in itself) and the other running Linux (Red Hat cool .

Now, my rule of thumb is to upgrade a computer (assuming I have the money) when the replacement is (a) cheaper than the original and (b) at least twice as good. So, I should be looking for a 2.4GHz Athlon, right?

Small problem: there isn't one. There's a confusing gaggle of performance ratings, and if you're trying to work out how fast a particular Athlon might be, you have to know that the XP2400+ has a 266MHz bus and 256KB of level 2 cache, the XP2500+ has a 333MHz bus and 512KB of cache, but runs at a lower clock speed, and the XP2600+ apparently comes in two flavours, with a 256KB cache and either a 266MHz bus and a higher clockspeed or a 333MHz bus and a lower clockspeed. The XP2800+ has historically come in three different flavours, so very much caveat emptor.

Then there's Intel. I'd rather avoid Intel, not because their products are bad, but because they are evil. Not as evil as Microsoft, not nearly as evil as the RIAA, but clearly on the darkish-grey side of the line. But the Celerons are pretty cheap, and run at 2.4GHz, so...

Turns out Celerons pretty much suck. I'm not sure why, exactly; they have the P4 architecture, and the 400MHz Celeron bus is as fast as that found on any Athlon. Presumably part of the problem is the 128KB cache, but they should be good for something. But I benchmarked a 1.7GHz Celeron, and my tests showed that it was no faster, and often significantly slower, than my existing 1.2GHz Athlons. So, no joy there.

Finally, there's the P4. The shiny new 800MHz bus version is out. That huge bandwidth increase seems to offer only trivial performance increases, though, on the order of 3 to 5 per cent. On the other hand, they all have hyperthreading enabled, so it's sort of like getting a dual-processor system for free. On the other other hand, most of the time I'm only running one thing anyway.

So, what I've decided to do is blow all my money on beer and skittles. Or, since I don't drink beer or play skittles, keep it.

Except for the iPod. Still gotta getta iPod.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:49 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 433 words, total size 2 kb.

Wednesday, May 14

Geek

Learning from Pain Experience

Windows XP is reinstalled. SP1 is reinstalled. Mozilla is back, complete with the mandatory Orbit 3+1 theme. Orbit makes Mozilla look so much snazzier, it's like a whole new snazzier version of Mozilla. All my email, bookmarks, address books and such are where they should be.

More importantly, my incomplete Kazaa downloads are restored in all their glorious incompleteness and busy crawling their way towards completion again.

Hooray!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 76 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

Format Format Format

Watch that Maxtor format.
Format format format
Hard drive!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:36 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 15 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

Death Of A Deskstar

Scrik scrik scrik scrik

There's no more hated sound in all the world.

Scrik scrik scrik scrik

My file transfers all seem to have stalled.

Scrik scrik scrik scrik

I have a new 80 gig Maxtor; I'll do what I must.

Scrik scrik scrik scrik

Another IBM Deskstar has bitten the dust.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:52 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 60 words, total size 1 kb.

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