Archive for the ‘misc’ Category
Upgrade 08
I have spent yesterday and today working on upgrading my home PC. It is a five yearly ritual that I observe.
These are the components:
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHZ (E8400)
- Memory: Kinsgton HyperX DDR2 1066MHZ 2GB kit
- Motherboard: ASUS P5Q-Pro
- VIdeo Card: ASUS PCI-E 512MB 9400GT
- PSU: Widetech 550W
- Mouse: Evoluent Right Hand
Total cost: 814.63
I bought Evoluent mouse as I feel that my right hand is stiff at times, I think the Microsoft Optical Mouse that I use might have something to do with it. I hope it can spare me from RSI.
The one on the left is the new PC. The pic on the right is the old PC that is going to be my sister in law’s PC and Jet was working on it 
No time
I put forward a suggestion for us to have some sort of bookshelf at the office and we can stack it with books. I was thinking that by reading more all of us can improve together.
But then our manager chuckled and said one thing that hits me "who have time to read?". He is absolutely right!
I regretted putting the suggestion, in few seconds my utopian development dream crashed by the harsh reality sigh.. no time..
Dual monitors anyone?
Suggested to my boss today that he should offer the developers an extra monitor for a dual monitors setup.
He took my suggestion and asked who want to have an extra monitor, to my surprise it’s only me and the QA guy that want it. I am really puzzled, I thought everyone would just jump to the offer.. Very strange..
Dual screens
Ah my new treasured toys (Acer X193W):
Replacing my faithful (and very bulky) LG monitor of 5 years.
Firefox 3 first impression
Is it just my imagination or is Firefox 3 really lighting fast? My manager seems to notice that too.
And the memory usage so far never exceeded 100k (it’s been around 95k for my usage pattern). My Firefox usage pattern is consisting of opening quite a number of tabs (usually at least 10 tabs), I believe because of this Firefox 2 quite often crashes (memory usage can easily grow to 200k) but this hasn’t been the case with Firefox 3.
So far I am quite impressed.
Document management software
I am in the search for a tool that will help me convert paper documents into a digital library whereby I can easily do categorizing, do searches and so on.
Few things that I want to store:
- Bills
- Magazines articles
- Church sermons, house parties, conferences etc2
- Quotes from books?
The amount of papers I accumulated is freaking me out, I really want to throw them out, but "what if" I need to refer to them in the future.. argh!.
Know anything like that?
Sydney Adobe AIR launch
I just came back from Adobe AIR launch at the Powerhouse Museum.
There were about 200 people attending. There was a presentation by Mark Blair, interview with panel of four, AIR jam session and followed by 5 AIR applications showdown.
I was quite surprised that Commonwealth Bank Australia is one of the AIR adopter in Australia. It’s good news that such a prominent financial institution is behind the technology.
We were given chance to vote for one of the 5 apps. Andrew from webqem with his travel AIR application won the crowd, it was very slick application, I can’t help to vote for it as well.
I was very interested with Mark (from Gruden) ’s AIR desktop time tracker widget that hooks to JIRA, it would be extremely useful tool for day to day work, kudos to whoever it is at Gruden that comes up with that fantastic idea. Hopefully they will release it for public use.
I am not sure how useful it is for me to have attended the event, I was soaking wet when I got there as it rained heavily, I got t-shirt which is too small for me (I should’ve been given XL instead of L and I didn’t check.. sigh), I didn’t win any prizes either, none of the people that I know went to this event (sent the Adobe email to people at work, no one replied) and I am not the sort of person who approaches strangers and talk to them (if you bump me in any of these events please say hi ) so I was by myself, so much for networking opportunities.. oh well.
But I guess it’s consistent with me calling myself "Adobe Web Specialist" (although I only know CF at the moment) on my LinkedIn profile .
New RA site is live
RECRUITadvantage’s new website went live this morning. It will be a central component to the new marketing campaign strategy that seeks to boost RECRUITadvantage online presence.
I spent few days converting the static HTML from the marketing company to CFM templates. I also ported some functionalities from the previous website version to the new one as well as adding new functions.
I am quite happy to be doing some front end coding once again, especially given that my role is mainly focused on the logic side of things.
Windows XP on Dell Inspiron 1520
My brother in law bought a Dell’s Inspiron 1520, he asked me to install Windows XP on it. It has Vista Basic pre-installed.
I thought it will be a straight forward process, but all my install attempts ended up in the dead blue screen and I had to resort to re-boot the laptop. After the 2nd blue screen, I decided that it’s probably too much work to fiddle around, I am pretty sure it can be done. I have done quick googling, while I didn’t find any links showing how to replace Vista with XP, I found some good links detailing how to have Vista and XP dual boot, well I don’t think my brother in law is that desperate for XP that he wants to sacrifice disk space to have both OSes running.
Vista does feel a little different to XP though, glad I don’t have to personally use it yet.
