The old saying is true. Back in November I had to do a website on factory workers in the industrial revolution for social studies. In January and February, it had over 12,000 hits! Maybe I should post more reports and such from school to boost traffic to my other Brettia sites. It’s sort of sad that the subdomain with the highest number of hits is not even a major part of the site, but…
I changed the design of the blog from a table-based layout to a DIV/CSS-based one. It’s much smaller and faster. And it looks good. I like the logo. Can you tell I had four Dr. Peppers? Wow, my cat is weird. And you should check out the sites of the day at left. It will be updated as much as possible. Bye.
In the interest of not being cursed, I’m blogging about Friday the 13th on Monday the 16th. No, actually I’ve just put off blogging for quite a while now and I’ve finally decided to give it a go again. Sometimes I’m just too lazy, others I’m too busy, etc. Unlike some bloggers that have to blog about every little thing that occurs both in their own lives and in the lives of others (which can make reading weblogs quite redundant), I just blog when I can and only when I really want to. If I have to push myself to do it, I know that I should take a break for a while.
But now I’m back for a bit, and I suppose I should update my huge reader audience of about six people (myself included) with the latest events in my less-than-exciting life. First of all, I stated in earlier entries that I might be going to Europe (for the third time) in March, but it doesn’t appear that that will happen. If I hadn’t been there twice already I would be much more disappointed, but, at the risk of sounding ungrateful, the novelty has worn off a bit. And the financial impact is no longer worth it, especially this time, when my whole family was going to go. Plane tickets alone were going to be $2,500, and the hotel room was at a nice resort that we had a timeshare thing for.
So at least something would have been free. But $2,500 is still a lot of money, too much after getting a new car (Toyota Sequoia), new kitchen appliances, and Christmas, which is always a pain in the wallet. For the same reason, it doesn’t look like I’ll get any sort of parental aid in my little computer venture that I’ve been harping on incessantly since I started blogging way back in July of 2003. Even though the topic has been thoroughly discussed, there are some new developments to record, one of which is that my good friend/teacher Mr. Trapani has found a poor kid whose parents took his PC away. Why is this good for me? Trapani wants to help him build a new one, and it looks like I’ll get to help while perhaps building my own computer at the same time.
This could be good and bad, good because I might be able to loot the district’s parts closet for network cards and such, and bad because I’ve learned recently that now is not the best time to build or buy a PC, mainly because of new technologies becoming available in the near future. First of all, PCI-Express, the replacement for old, slow AGP and PCI expansion card slots which are used by most necessary computer components such as video cards, will come into being sometime this summer. It would be stupid to buy a $300 motherboard with PCI and AGP slots when PCI-Express is due out so soon. Then there’s the BTX form-factor, which is a new initiative spearheaded by Intel to change the configuration of motherboards to be more air-flow friendly and to increase performance. Again, buying a motherboard now would be wasted money. Finally, I’m still a bit worried about building a computer myself because breaking a component or frying a motherboard would be catastrophic. I’ve heard the horror stories, and they’ve made me want to keep my case shut and my hands out of the computer’s innards.
Then again, I was able to successfully pry apart my Pavilion 8660C and install a new video card and fan around Thanksgiving, which was a triumph for me, though perhaps a small task for more experienced computer builders. There’s about an 80% chance that I’ll do everything and have no problems, and the odds become even better if I buy a motherboard combo, meaning a motherboard that already has a processor installed. One of those wrist things that prevents you from shocking the inner parts would keep that possibility at bay, and I would have Mr. Trapani and the other tech department people to help me if I really screwed up, but…I dunno. My self confidence isn’t incredibly high when it comes to handling tools and parts. I’m much better at destroying than I am at creating.
But if I did decide to go ahead and build a computer, either now or later on this year when PCI-Express and BTX have arrived, what parts would I choose? I’m really stuck on that question, because I really don’t want to get the wrong thing and then be stuck with a worthless component. I think the key here will just be planning and research. PC Magazine recently did an article on building computers, and this was their recommendation as well. One guy said he spent two full weeks researching and calling people before he put his together, another said he just went to a computer store, bought all the parts he thought he’d need, and put them together. It took him all of a weekend. I guess some people just get lucky.
But so far, my biggest hardware concern is the processor. For a while, I was interested in the AMD Athlon 64 (or 64 FX) processor, since it is the first Windows-compatible 64-bit processor to be manufactured. And the reviews have been pretty good, at least when using it for 32-bit applications (current apps are 32-bit, future applications and some server programs will be/are 64-bit). But I came upon one review of the Athlon 64’s performance when running a beta version of Windows XP 64-bit Edition, and it was decidedly poor. This was mainly because the operating system used was a beta version, and because 64-bit is so new that most part manufacturers haven’t released 64-bit drivers yet. When they do publish 64-bit versions of their drivers, the Athlon 64 will do much better, hopefully. But I have no idea how far in the future that will be. I might just pick parts that have 64-bit drivers already, but that would severely limit the selection.
The alternative to an Athlon 64 would be Intel’s Prescott-based Pentium 4 3.2E Ghz Processor. The ‘E’ after the 3.2 means that it is based on the Prescott processor architecture, which is much newer than Northwood, the old architecture that standard Pentium 4’s are based upon. The Pentium 4 is a much better choice for compatibility with Windows and other components, but it is 32-bit, so it won’t be compatible with future 64-bit games and applications. I’m still thinking on this one.
The next most important component is memory, but it doesn’t take much to decide how much or what type is needed. Different processors/motherboards need different types and support different speeds of memory, but that won’t be much of an issue. I’m probably going to get 512 MB or 1 GB of whatever type (ECC,DDR SDRAM, etc) I end up needing.
After memory comes the hard drive, which again will be an easy choice. I know I want a 7200 RPM SATA (serial ATA) drive, and about 120-160 GB of space. I’ve seen some great deals recently from Western Digital on 200 GB and 36 GB (10000 RPM) drives, so I might look into getting one of those.
The final major part is the video card, and I’m not sure if I want to use the GeForce FX 256 PCI card I got a few months ago or if I want to buy a new one that is AGP or PCI-Express, which would be much faster. If I do get a new one, I’ll get a GeForce FX 5700/5900 or an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro rather than the top-of-the-line GFFX 5950 or ATIR 9800 XT cards. I can’t imagine paying $500 for a video card; that’s half my total budget!
Now for other cards, I’ll need a gigabit ethernet card (about $30), a FireWire card ($20), a USB port card ($20), a sound card, and perhaps a wireless networking card. Those are all subject to change depending on which parts are already on the motherboard. Onboard FireWire, network, and USB is good, while on-board sound is usually not great, and I’ve yet to see an on-board wireless card, unless Intel’s Centrino processor counts.
After cards comes drives, of which I’d need the following: floppy drive ($10), CD-RW drive ($50), and a DVD-ROM drive ($40). I might be able to find a CD-RW/DVD combo somewhere. Notice that I don’t want a DVD+/-RW drive yet, since they’re still quite expensive and there’s still competition over which standard (+R or -R) should become the norm. I don’t do much video editing, anyway (I can’t on my current machine).
And that’s about it. Of course, there’s always a monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers and such to buy, but that isn’t as high a priority as just getting the box itself put together. I’d like to use the new PC as an addition rather than a replacement for my old one so that I could network them together and install Linux on one and other good fun stuff.
Speaking of Linux, I retried Fedora again over this past week. I liked it, to be truthful, but it just comes down to the fact that Windows is just plain easier to use and customize to my needs. I know that statement would spark vehement opposition in any Linux community, so let me explain: It’s not that Windows is better than Linux, it’s that Linux is much harder to use for a Windows convert than for a Unix junkie. I only got as far as I did this time around because I’ve tried various Linux distributions (some more than once) over the past year or so and I’ve learned a lot from experiences with them. Red Hat-based distros have become my flavor of choice, but I’m burning a Slackware install CD right now to try it out. Last time I did I was turned off by its non-graphical installation system, but I think I’m ready for a second attempt now.
Oh, by the way, the reason I got rid of Fedora after only a week was that I stupidly tried to upgrade it to the newer kernel, version 2.6, which it promptly chewed up and spat out. The fact that my Windows XP installation survived unscathed and uncorrupted is a testament of my Windows/DOS computer skills. I was really afraid for a moment, especially after installing Fedora on Tuesday and getting the simple message “Error loading operating system” when I tried to boot. Then the PartitionMagic rescue disks were nowhere to be found, so I popped in the PM CD in the hope of finding some kind of rescue utility there, and lo! There it was, a beautiful scaled-down version of PM running in an emulated Windows 98 environment, just for me. I set the Windows partition active, and all was saved.
The second mistake (before the almighty KERNEL) came sometime on Wednesday, when I stupidly CHMODded the /etc directory 700. For those who don’t know, CHMOD is a Linux/Unix command that changes permissions on a file or directory, allowing specific users or groups to read it, write to it, or execute it. The /etc directory is where most configuration files are stored, and by CHMODding it 700 I kept other applications from being able to read or write to it, thus crippling my installation. Time to whip out another rescue disk, this time the Fedora install disk, which had a rescue terminal on it. A few commands and I was back up and running fine.
The third mistake wasn’t really a mistake, it was more of a problem that needed fixing. This was a driver problem with my video card. You see, Linux, unlike Windows, doesn’t come with drivers for every known component out of the box. Instead, you get generic drivers that are enough to run the system with so that you can find better ones on the Internet. I was lucky enough to find that NVIDIA does have Linux drivers for their video cards, so I downloaded the package and typed the ’sh insertfilenamehere’ command to install it. But no, it could not be executed while the X server was running. What the hell is an X server? And why is it running?
I quickly found out that the X server, or XFree86, as the package is called, is what runs the base graphics and interface of the Linux operating system. So I tried to figure out how to shut it down, and could not. Then I found from reading some forum posting or another that I had to change the runlevel. Linux has several runlevels for different tasks. Runlevel 5 is probably the most common, which is fully-booted with X server running. Runlevel 6 restarts the computer, and runlevel 3, the one I needed, was a simple command prompt, like booting Windows to the DOS command prompt. The neat thing about Linux, though, is that you can change to a runlevel and back without restarting (except for runlevel 6, of course).
So I type the “init 3″ command to switch the runlevel, finally was able to extract and execute the package, and voila! It seemed my troubles with the video card were over. But it was not to be. To take advantage of the new NVIDIA driver, the XFree86 config file had to be edited. Since I was still in the command line, I used vim, a text editor, to edit the file. Once the changes were made, I had a problem: I didn’t know how to get out of vim! I was about to force a shutdown and lose all my changes when some random command triggered the vim help file, which told me that I had to type ‘:wq’ to write (save) the changes and quit. I did this, switched quickly back to runlevel 5 (it still is so cool the way you can do that), and was done.
The switch to runlevel 5 brough up a new NVIDIA splash screen, which happily told me that I had done everything right by displaying a large, green and black NVIDIA logo on my screen. When the system had finally booted into GNOME, the graphical desktop, I opened up a game called Chromium which had been incredibly sluggish earlier, so sluggish, in fact, that it almost crashed the computer (not easy in Linux).
Chromium was awesome! The graphics were smooth and perfect and fast. Everything was as it should have been. And to make my state of heaven even more complete, I tried BZFlag, a cross-platform tank game I discovered recently, and found that it works even better on Linux than on Windows. Now I was elated.
There was only one problem: there was nothing else to do. After those few days, I had run out of new applications and ideas to try. I couldn’t successfully do any kind of PHP development in Linux, since all the programs I tried just weren’t worth the hassle of trying to configure them to my needs. And that’s what it comes down to with Linux: it just isn’t worth the hassle. I’ll continue to learn it and I’ll continue to try new distros, but I just can’t switch to using it as my primary desktop environment. Windows will always be easier, because it is already configured to my exact specifications and needs. To configure Linux, I’d have to compile several programs and fool around with permissions and change dozens of configuration files while perusing thousands of pages of documentation. I just don’t have the time for that. Maybe this summer, but not yet. Maybe I’m just not ready yet. But I’ll get it eventually, and that will be a good day.
I suppose I should end this long, poorly-typed entry of horror now. I racked up about 15,000 keystrokes while writing it, too, which should make up for an entire week of nothing. (The Linux WhatPulse client isn’t very good.) But before I finish completely, I must state that I have decided that I will get a new computer for my birthday, with my own money. This I solemnly promise, and I will only break this promise if I find that I need to wait longer for some new technology or another to come out.
Wait a sec:
I forgot something. Yesterday (Sunday) I went with my good friend Jim to Estrella Mountain Park to this festival thing called Estrella War. It’s where all these people get together in medieval gear and bash each other to bits with rubber arrows and padded spears and swords. It was really cool, and it sure beat going to church. Thanks, Jim, for taking me.
You can see my efforts at creating a blogging system here. I recently optimized some of the code and re-OOPed things. It’s working very well now.
AND IT’S SO FAST!
(compared to MT)
I’ve typed another 200,000 keys in less than three weeks. For me, that’s pretty good. Of course, there’re other WhatPulse members who type that much in a single day. Ouch. No wonder the leader right now has over twenty million keystrokes.
I probably will lose my momentum soon, since I finished a major English project yesterday that required much typing. But, though I felt relieved to finally get the English thing (I had to write an epic) over, I was then smothered with more projects in Spanish (we have two going right now). Sra. Nasr is a great teacher, but she loves projects, especially those that require presentations or speaking, a little too much.
Other than that, she rocks. I’ve never met a teacher who knew their students so well, or who was on such good terms with so many kids at the school. She’s almost like a student herself. And my other teachers are all right, but they just don’t come close to her. Mrs. Young, my PE teacher, lets us play ping-pong almost all the time, with occasional runnings of the mile, which have been labeled, “NASCAR”.
And Mrs. Kulinski is nice as well, though she can be strict. Then again, Mrs. Kulinski is rarely even at school any more. She had some kind of emergency surgery not long ago, and that and illness has kept her absent. She has a new aide this semester, a sort of teacher-in-training, who teaches for her. I don’t think she’s even taught an entire period (for my class) this semester. It’s almost like she left or something. I dunno.
Then there’s Mrs. White, who doesn’t tolerate talking in class well, which is bad for her, since my period is full of 8th graders from the middle school. I ask, why didn’t I have the option to take geometry in 8th grade? I mean, my math grade in middle school was only a steady 99%, but I guess that just isn’t good enough. More likely, I was overlooked.
After lunch I have Mr. Fogelson for social studies. Of all my teachers, he seems most knowledgable about his subject, which is great for a first-year teacher. He has his moods, I guess, because some days he’s perfectly happy and others he can be a bit gruff. But he’s a good guy overall.
After “Fogey” is biology with Drechsler, who is the look-alike sister of an English teacher at Sonoran Trails, whom I never had. The CSHS Drechsler is really…hyper. She even admits that she acts half her age (she’s 28). But as for actually getting us to learn the material…she isn’t that great. Her teaching methods just don’t make much of an impression on me, I suppose. And there’s my general hatred for science. That might be a problem.
And biology is my worst class when it comes to jerk children (see better definition in other entries), and people who are just plain stupid and annoying. So I have to put up with them. They don’t really bother me at all, they just are almost unbearably dumb. It’s hard to keep from screaming at them. And I’ve pretty much stopped answering questions in that class, since people just stare dumbly at me when I say anything as if I’m incorrect (a rare occurrence).
It’s weird that I would hate science when PHP is so science-like. Each script is like an experiment, and when you test it you log the results in your mind and try something else to get what you want. It’s endless guess and check. But according to SitePoint, my standards of coding are all wrong. Really, they’ve only served to confuse me with their articles on OOP (object-oriented programming) and Access Control. Not because I don’t understand the scripts, but because I don’t understand why the way I do it is wrong. Quite frankly, I like my methods (literally!). I don’t see any reason why they should be rewritten differently. They’re OOP, but supposedly they’re just not OOP “enough”. I dunno.
Oh, and before I go boil myself in the shower and fall into bed, I forgot one teacher, Mr. Trapani, who will most likely be reading this tomorrow. Now he’s probably thinking that I’m going to flame him for some reason or another, but not now, not today (though perhaps some other time). I actually pity him, because he’s been given a job that one person cannot do easily. He has to put together a video announcements show, manage the technology lab and the website, and do everything else that normal teachers do, like input grades and such. That isn’t fair.
In a perfect world, he would have one person to teach video technology, one to do web development, and he could do everything else. He needs an aide, or something. Then perhaps he’d have time to get the web development stuff going. I mean, the school website might soon get knocked offline because he doesn’t have time to pay the bill or figure out why it wasn’t received. There’s something wrong here.
This is where I come in. I am supposedly his child prodigy, the one who will get everything working correctly for him. If only I didn’t have to take PE, then I could be in one of his classes. Actually being there for more than half an hour each morning would be helpful when I’m trying to “reform the system” here. But there seems to be no real way around that, since my parents can’t drive me for zero hour, and first hour is not a very productive period for me to be in. Sixth period is the holy grail, and that’s Spanish, as I said before. So it’s a no go.
And I could just continue sending him lengthy emails stating what is needed, but what is needed most is someone to do what I’m asking. Some of it, like setting up a development environment on the network server, I could do if I was able to come in second period and talk to his networking guys about it. I’d prefer to have a separate Linux server for development, just for the sake of Linux’s extra PHP features. But the network server would be easier, since everyone would have access. So we’ll see how it goes. I must die now.
Eggplant.