Latest changes on the site

1. A new category was added to document my progress with triple booting Ubuntu, Mac OS X, and Windows 7.  You can find that on the left under “Mac OS on a PC!” or right here.
2. I posted what my system specs are.  It might be of interest to you if you are thinking of building a Hackintosh since my system just so happens to work perfectly with ipc OSx86 10.5.6 and the 10.5.7 update.
3. I have set up all the links on my site to open up in a new window/tab.  I personally like this, but you may not.  If so feel free to leave a comment.  I’d like to know what you like/dislike about my site so feel free to give me feedback on it.
4. The “Find Me” section of the site has been put on hold. After I finish installing OSX with Ubuntu and Windows Vista I’m going to give it an overhaul that will make it much cooler and a lot more functional. Until then there will be no updates on my location – but feel free to take a look at what is there if you like.
5. I still have to change some of the look and feel of this site, but that’ll come in a week or two.
6. Some of the content from freshme.at has still not been transferred over, but it will be here soon as well.

What’s going on in my life

Math final this Thursday (7-30-2009).  After it’s done I’ll have a lot more free time to work on things, but there are a few things on the back burner that have to be completed right after it’s done and before anything else.  The first most important of them is the last unit of Cultural Anthropology and a final paper on Iftikhar H. Malik’s “Culture and Customs of Pakistan.”  I have to complete this independent study – it’s already been extended three times!

I also have to finish designing my aunt’s cottage website at http://www.mostscrappingfun.com/, as well as another web project at work which is a LAMPP based file upload system.  I’ll post the source and an installation package here when I’m done with it since most of the work was done in my free time.

That’s about it; after I finish everything up I plan on enjoying a few weeks of my summer.  It really sucked being so busy this summer, I need to make sure it doesn’t happen again next summer.

System Board

• Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R
• Intel P45 Chipset
• ICH10R (Raid 0,1,510) 6 Ports
• Integrated Gigabyte SATA/RAID Controller w/2 Ports
• Capable of 1600MHz FSB but running at 1333
• 1 PCI-x16 2.0 slot
• 3 PCI-x slots
• 3 PCI slots
• Realtek ALC889A Sound (The usual 6 Ports)
• 1 gigabit lan port (Realtek 8111c)
• 8 USB 2.0 Ports
• 1 IEEE 1394a (Firewire 400) port
• ATX Form Factor
• 2oz Copper PCB for heat dissipation
• Great board, no problems so far.  I don’t like “FakeRaid” controllers, but pretty much all manufacturers do this so I can’t complain.  The RAID0 is a big performance increase based on the benchmarks I did.

Processor

• Intel Core2 Duo E8500 (1333 FSB, 3.0GHz, 6MB L2 Cache)
• Stock Intel heatsink / fan which is quiet, but sucks to install.
• Had this OC’d to 3.6 GHz without a problem, but I put it back
• Socket LGA775

Memory

• 4GB Patriot Viper PC2-8500 (1066MHz) with green heatsinks. Dual channel DDR2.
• Was able to improve the timing on this by a notch, and it was stable but had to increase the voltage slightly.  I ran memtest86+ for about 4 hours with no errors.  I also put this back because this memory is actually based on the PC2-5300 standard and is overclocked out of the box.  They should tell you about this beforehand IMO.

Graphics Card

• PNY Verto 8600GT 512MB

Drives

• 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA hard drives. 250GB, 7200RPM, 16M cache, NCQ, Sata2. They were in a RAID0, but not anymore due to OSx86 compatibility issues.
• 1 Western Digital 500GB 7200RPM PATA drive (16M Cache) from my old computer.  It’s now in an external eSATA enclosure w/fan.
• 1 Western Digital OEM 250GB SATA2 hard drive (7200RPM)
• 1 Western Digital OEM 80GB SATA2 hard drive (for swap and pagefile space)
• 1 Lite-On EIDE DVD-RAM drive.
• 1 OEM DVD burner, unknown specs – EIDE.
• Countless other notebook drives in USB enclosures, thumb drives, SD cards ,etc.

Power Supply

• Antec EarthWatts 650W PSU. Awesome PSU – very quiet.

Case

• Rosewill R6AR6-BK.  I thought it would suck because it was cheap, but it’s actually an awesome case.  The only complaint I have is that the front bezel wants to come off all the time.
• One 120mm fan in the rear (one of those quiet-flow fans)

Other Cards

• KWorld PlusTV HD. Kind of a POS, but at least I can watch TV and record it too.
• Dell wireless PCI to Mini-PCI card with a wireless-n card.  Not sure exactly what it is but it’s compatible with Linux and OSX!

Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse

• Acer AL2216W 22″ LCD (DVI).  Not a bad monitor, there are a couple annoyances and it’s nothing really special, but it is a very nice monitor for the price and everything looks great on it.  Pretty damn good for a college student – it was a birthday gift from my girlfriend. Thanks Samantha!
• Dell 17″ CRT (black to match everything) that I got free from work. It’s nice to have dual monitors, but it would be better if it was an LCD.
• Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0. Microsoft keyboards and mice are legendary – as Chris Pirillo put it.  For one time, I’d have to agree.
• Microsoft ComfortCurve Keyboard 2000.

I also have all my USB peripherals hooked up to a powered USB hub that has very bright blue and red LED’s. This is then plugged into a USB switch which is hooked up to my PC and laptop dock.  My monitor has DVI and VGA inputs, so I use the VGA for my laptop dock and just switch over using the monitor.  A poor-man’s KVM switch.

That’s about all I can think of at this point.

Then there was the problem with these GPS postings crowding out my real posts on the homepage, but a plugin called “Simply Exclude” took care of that part for me.  Now my problem is that the Google Maps links show up as just text on the posts.  I went back and made links out of them all, but it’s somewhat unnerving because when I send an xGPS email to a regular email address the link shows up just fine.  Perhaps I’ll write a Wordpress plugin that recognizes links based on analyzing the words in your post and automatically makes them for you…

I’ll get around to that later (if I ever do).  At the moment I have a math final coming up next week, a test and a final paper for Cultural Anthropology (hundreds of pages of reading), and a web page for my aunt’s cottage that I need to finish.  And don’t forget all the typical IT problems at work on top of the FTP/Web upload system I’m developing for them.

So I guess I’d also like to point out that tracking someone’s GPS updates via WordPress is kind of inefficient anyways.  That’s why I bought the “PathTracker” app from iTunes, but it too has it’s flaws.  For me it always seems to freeze permanently which forces me to uninstall it and reinstall it… but I chose to just keep it uninstalled.  You can find that app and try it for yourself at http://pathtracks.com/.  I will say that the author was nice enough to get back to me on my email about it, and there is a new version out now so maybe it’s better than the version I had installed.  I’ll reinstall and update it eventually and post my results.

In other news, this day was marked with the installation of this blog, an arithmetical error on a math quiz, a late start at work, a fried gx280, and a finalization of some other things at work. It was also full of stress – or more specifically, apprehension of what is to come in the next few (days, weeks, months…).

More about that later… the agenda for the blog should start with removing this awful looking header and replacing it with a decent image.  Other than that this WordPress theme (Atahualpa) is pretty good looking.  I tend to like minimalist ones that are easy on the eyes. I also have to import some posts which will be a process since I have to resurrect a site that was built on a poorly coded CMS that uses hard links to internal pages meaning I’m going to have to modify my /etc/hosts file to make my system authoritative for my old, abandoned domain. I’ll also have to import a databse using the SQL dump and then hopefully I’ll be able to sort through everything and figure out what’s worth salvaging.