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Samus, my main machine, was having some issues earlier today, so I opened her up and felt around. I touched the graphics card and was nearly burned. I loaded up a temperature tracking program and found that it was running at 93°C. That’s nearly 200 degrees Farenheit. I was amazed that the GPU hadn’t been damaged by this heat.

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I got Ubuntu successfully installed on my office machine (Dell Studio 17) yesterday. Today, I’m going to use it all day at the office while making notes on what still doesn’t work, what I could get to work, how I fixed problems, and I’m sure some random ramblings will enter at some point.

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It looks like there is a big networking problem over at The Planet. Hostgator, which hosts this blog and is hosted by The Planet, is suffering terribly from this problem. My uptime with Hostgator is so high, that Pingdom tracks my site at 100% uptime since it doesn’t track beyond 99.99% uptime. So, this has to be causing lots of stress for the engineers at both companies.

I first noticed this problem when working on a site that is hosted at Hostgator. The site completely failed to load and pings failed 50% of the time.

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I have a Dell Studio 17 for my office computer. It’s a nice machine, but Vista fails horribly on it. The ATI driver for it causes a BSoD on average, once a day. I’ve finally had enough, so I’m switching over to Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex.

I’m writing this post as I install and configure Ubuntu. This will make it easier for me to keep track of what I did in case I need to undo something later or if anybody reading this wants to make the switchover as well.

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For about eight years now, I’ve been hapily using Crimson Editor. At its simplest, Crimson Editor is nothing more than a fancy Notepad; however, it is so much more than that. While it doesn’t have all sorts of fancy tools that some editors have, it does support customizable syntax highlighting, customizable colors, line number, visible whitespace characters, basic smart indenting, a file/directory navigation pane, project support, and a MDI interface. Those features aren’t really the reason why I use it as almost all programming editors support such features. I use it because it gives me tools that help me program without doing things that hinder my productivity.

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I’ve always been a big fan of AMVs. Years ago, I would find and archive my favorites and then show them to my buddies when we’d hang out at IHOP. It was always a great way to start conversations about music and anime. Over the years, my focus on AMVs has waned. Fortunately, that has now changed.

Lately, we’ve been having groups of friends over to the house frequently, and queuing up some AMV Hell on the HTPC is a great way to keep everyone entertained and talking. This has broken my fast and got me back into digging around for some great AMVs, and great AMVs are what I found. I had never Nostromo is my new-found favorite AMV creator. Checking out his deviantART page, I found that he’s from Paris, has a pretty sweet computer setup, creates some cool images, and is a fellow fan of The Big Bang Theory. Also, considering how he is younger than me by a few years and has created some awesome AMVs, I am incredibly jealous (even though I have no knack for creating AMVs and probably never will create one myself).

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Web applications developers such as myself often have a hard time keeping up with everything that’s going on. There’s always some new programming or scripting language, new standards, new browsers, new technologies, new paradigms, new social networks, and on and on. Every day, something new happens. The end result of all of this always ends up being very similar: people demand faster applications that deal with ever-increasing amounts of data which end up putting massive stress on the server architecture.

As we toil to improve the performance of the applications and their snappy response times, it becomes easy to forget about how we can tweak settings on a low level to provide massive speed improvements on the front-end. For example, most people don’t know that you can configure MySQL to take better advantage of the resources that the server has available.

By default, MySQL is configured to consume a relatively limited amount of memory resources. Start giving MySQL more memory to work with, and your application’s performance can improve greatly.

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If you ever need to work with DNS servers or domain management, you find tools that help you get an outside perspective of what is happening with DNS invaluable. Years ago I found DNSStuff and immediately fell in love. They have tons of tools that give a wealth of information. I configured some quick bookmarks in Firefox that made making specific requests more simple than doing a dig from a command line while returning more data than any of my system tools could possibly offer.

A little more than a year ago, DNSStuff changed from free to a paid service. Since I found their tools so valuable, paying a few dollars a month for the service was a small price to pay. In fact, I was happy to pay for the service and quickly purchased a subscription for a year.

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Sorry for the lack of updates. Much has happened in the past couple of months. I aim to get things back on track and keep the updates rolling. I also think that the content that I’m going to be producing will be much more valuable to my readers.

This is just the teaser. Click here to read more.