Chris Johnston

I did a job for a client and had some extra cash lying around, so it was off to the local Best Buy to pick out a new toy. The original plan was to buy a new hard drive for backup purposes. That plan was scrapped for something more fun. (Actually, I decided I should learn to use my new DVD burner for backup instead of spending the money on a new hard drive.)

So, after wandering around the store for far too long, I decided to get myself a new set of speakers. Besides, my old speakers were rather old. They were a 5 year-old set of Yamaha speakers plus an 8 year-old Labtec sub-woofer.

The speakers that I decided to buy were the I-Trigue L3500 2.1 speakers from Creative. If you are looking for an excellent set of speakers, I highly recommend these. The sound is exceptionally crisp with brilliant mid and high end tones with a sub-woofer that can shake the room.

I was playing Unreal Tournament 2003 on the new speakers and it was just incredible. The rocket launcher would literally shake the floor.

Now, I realize that it is only a 2.1 system and not a full fledge digital 7.1 surround system, but I don’t have the space to install anything more than a 2.1 speaker system. Plus, I tend to watch DVD’s on my home theatre system and am not a big gamer, so the 2 speakers are more than enough for me.

I just can not get over how good these speakers sound.

Article link

Just in case you have been living under a rock and have not been following and using eclipse, the eclipse team have released Eclipse 3.0. I have been using the various RC versions for the last several weeks and it really is an amazing IDE. The more I use it, the more I like it.

Eclipse

Here is a bunch of articles all centring around Linux in the workplace. There are reviews of Sun’s Java Desktop and Red Hat’s new Desktop along with a comparison between Office 2003 and OpenOffice.org. If you are looking for information on how Linux stacks up in the workplace you should check out these articles.

Article link

In case you have been living under a rock, here are some software updates.

• Firefox 0.9 - The browser that everyone should be using. Delete Internet Explorer now and go with Firefox.
• Aqua Data Studio 3.7 - My favourite software for accessing and working with databases.
• Eclipse 3 RC2 - if you do not know about eclipse yet, where have you been.

That is all I can think of right now.

I want to create some Content Management Software that I can use to power several different websites. I want it to power my website and at least two other people’s websites. However, each of these sites will be completely different. The only similarity is the fact that each site will need to have dynamic content that is easily updated and easily added. The question is how to do this?

What are my requirements? I want the entire site to be highly modularized so that I can added different components to the sites as needed and each component will plug itself into the site with a minimum of setup. I want to style to be easily changed. Whether this is through css or through a templating engine, it must be easy to be changed. Each site can not look the same. They just need to share the same underlying code. Each site also needs an administration console that will allow the owners to customize various parts of their site. Not to many requirements, eh?

The question is how to actually do all this? What language to use, do I use a templating engine, do I use an API, how do I use an API, and many more. Hopefully over the next several months I will be able to find some answers to all my questions.

Believe it or not, there are several types of technologies that I personally hate. Technologies that, although I really hate using, I still can’t live without. Here is my list (in no particular order):

• Cell Phones - miniaturization has a limit. Most of the new cell phones that are availble today make it slightly higher than my cheek bone. The biggest problem is that sound does not come out of my cheek bone. In addition, most cell phones can do half a million things including make a phone call. The problem is that they only have a few keys. This means that those half a million functions are mapped to about 12 keys. This guarantees usability hell. I have yet to find a ‘user friendly’ phone. On most of them, just trying to make a phone call is hard enough, let alone anything else. I do not want to surf the internet on my phone.
• Office Phones - These are about as bad as cell phones except that with a cell phone you at least get a manual to guide you, with most office phones you get half a million buttons mapped to half a million functions and no instructions anywhere as to which button does what. And to make things worse, most functions require these strange key combinations - press the L button followed by #321 and the vague number that you heard over the intercom. I think I have finally come to grips with the ‘press 9 and then the number you want to dial’ thing.
• Microwaves - My biggest problem with microwaves is that although they are relatively simple to use once you figure out how to use them, the process you use on one microwave will never ever be the same on another microwave. Each microwave has its own interface, has its own way of entering the cooking time, has its own procedure. How hard is it to standardize these things.
• Fax Machines - This is actually just an irrational fear of fax machines. I think if comes from the time that I was asked to fax an important document and ended up sending off three blank pages to the recipient. Apparently, I had placed the pages in the fax machine the wrong way. No one ever told me that you placed them in upside down.

I have set a new personal uptime record on my Linux server. I am running WhiteBox Linux and it has proven to be rock solid under nominal load. The new uptime record that I set was 47 days. There was a power outage in my apartment last friday that shut the computer down or the new record would undoubtably be much longer. So, currently, I am 1 day and 23:11 hours into a new record.

Ya gotta love the stability of Linux.