Masonic Apple

It’s been a few months already that I haven’t used Windows. The unreal amount of time that it takes to make Ubuntu play sound or use a second monitor and then do it again after a software update drove me straight to Mac.

By the way, why does the “applications” icon look so masonic?

Lazyweb

Dear readers, I have a couple of things you could help me with..

1) Do you know a cheap and usable alternative to godaddy.com? A service with even cheaper domain prices (it’s $10/year for a domain) and a reasonable user interface?

2) I am still planning my switch to Mac – I am still using my Windows desktop and latptop at home and a Ubuntu desktop at work. Ubuntu is great for web dev, but at home I do need to connect to a lot of various peripherals that are basically unsupported in Ubuntu. Also, I like the pretty. Anyway, I am thinking of buying a G5 tower on eBay for about $1000. Hardware-wise it’s a dual processor machine similar to my dual Xeon Dell, but it was only $500 on eBay.. So, is this the best way of getting into Macing on the cheap? I don’t want to buy a Mac Mini because it cost an arm and a leg to add a second monitor.

3) I already mentioned this, but does anybody know a good Linux sysadmin with Apache/MySQL administration skills who’s looking for a job (preferably with some php coding skills)? Let me know, k?

Some Microsoft Poetry

I have not had any problems with Windows 2000 for years. Until the last couple of months. One of the patches must have done something to the crispy crunchy goodness that is Windows graphics code. Since then – nothing but trouble. It seems to begin when I have too many windows open. It happens both at work and at home where I have completely different video cards.

I already replaced a floppy drive in my home computer with an internal memory card reader. This left me totally unprepared to nasty progression of : messed up window rendering -> bungled driver upgrade -> 640×480 only mode -> 640×480 only mode in safe mode only -> crash -> crash -> crash -> fundamental system file corrupted -> repair boot that DEMANDS THE STUPID RAID DRIVER ON A FLOPPY -> a whole weekend with a computer that has all my files on it that won’t even boot. This is what you get when your operating system of choice has graphics code mixed in with everything else.

That’s it. From now on there will be a fully built Linux server with all my files on it somewhere in my apartment. Hopefully in a couple of years I’ll be able to make a complete switch to Linux. Lets face it: Windows XP is slow, buggy and generally crappy. Especially in it’s Tablet PC variety. I can’t even imagine what crap they are whipping up right now without Dave Cutler, but that doesn’t matter. It’s going to be too little too late. Now, if there was a whole lot of developers walking around MS campus with Cutlers boot squarely up their collective asses things might have been different. And now Windows 2000 is messed up by patches. Linux starts to look better and better.

From I bet you didn’t know this department

Ctrl-alt-del, the three finger salute has an official name. It’s SAS or “Secure Attention Sequence”.
I learned that from Microsoft’s Tablet PC site.

C1. A Tablet PC without an attached keyboard must support a single, dedicated, non-overloaded hardware mechanism for generating the Secure Attention Sequence (SAS), also known as "CTRL+ALT+DEL" or "CAD."
C2. If the SAS button is implemented as a Human Interface Device (HID), the HID-compliant button driver must provide a keyboard collection to report the SAS event.