yaleman.org

I’m really an AMD fan at heart - who wouldn’t be - they are cheap, fast and these days they are stable as well. Intel‘s been behind in most desktop chip related matters since they released the Pentium 4, with its long pipeline and surface-of-the-sun temperatures.

I’ve been using a P4 based system as my linux desktop because in 2004 when I set it up, the support for NForce2 chipset related gubbins wasn’t that good, and there wasn’t a high performance/quality motherboard with anything else for AMD processors. It was an ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe WiFi Edition, with a couple of SATA controllers, onboard raid, fast chip and four memory slots - a great board all round. The 2.8Ghz “C” chip that was in it was a good speed for the money, and it’d worked well as my desktop workhorse since I bought it, but lately I’d been feeling the need for speed.

I got linked to a cool little game that’ll break your mind - Check out 3D Logic on Newgrounds here. So far I’ve gotten to level 28 (the last level) and I’m determined to finish it before I finish work 🙂

Pity you can’t save the game or get a generated password to go back to where you were up to in the game. 🙁

Boy do I love randoms, how they amuse me.

Ok, that sounds lame, but it’s appropriate. I was driving to work on Monday night, got to the end of my street and saw a small shape on the other side of the road. My brain said “Echidna” and then my eyes caught up and agreed, so I slowed down just in case it was - I didn’t want to run it over. Just as I’d slowed all the way down the crazy thing ran and hid under the middle of my car!

I seems that Google labs have found that nearly all established simple binary search algorithms are broken. Sometimes being bigger IS better 🙂

I decided that it’s time for me to grow up and learn a compiled language, so I had a look around - there were the main ones - C, C++, Java or C# - I was talking to a friend and he said to look at C# because it’s so kickass. Cross compatibility, easy RAD, lots of resources - why not? It’s everything Java was supposed to be, but didn’t end up being 🙂

My laptop’s definitely not what you’d class as a high-performance machine by any modern standards. It’s got a celeron 400 processor, 128MB of ram and a 6gb hdd. This doesn’t leave much room for an operating system with all the bells and whistles - Windows XP is definitely off the list - I’ve been running Windows 2000 Professional on it for the past six months so I could do things like simple graphics editing of my photographs on the run, and coding in my spare time at work.

I’ve got a dollar, I’ve got a dollar, I’ve got a dollar hey hey hey hey!

A funny little song, and it applies to me! I was out in the carpark stretching my legs and getting some fresh air via my cigarette and found a shiny cold dollar on the ground - score! 🙂

Recently I bought a new hard drive - finally getting a half-decent speed SATA drive, upgrading from my quartet of 80gb IDE drives. I had a few woes trying to tie it all in, so I ended up reinstalling my PC. At first I stuck with Gentoo, then got sick of trying to work out its annoying bugs and went to SUSE.

As I tend to have a load of windows open at the one time, and I like to see them all at once having dual monitors is a must for me. The ATI 9600 card I have supports this, being dual head, and I’d had it running (kinda) on Gentoo just before I went through the reinstall process.

Well, that was an amazing long weekend for me. I was working my usual overnight shift on Friday night and decided that I wanted to climb a mountain. Years and years ago my family and I (well, mum, my little sister and I; the other two are wussies) climbed Mount Beerwah, so that was a good start. Looking on the web I found the Glass House Mountains and Surrounds page on the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency (now National Parks, Sport and Recreation) website. There’s a few pages there with maps and so forth - we ended up relying on this map in PDF form to get us there.