Logan Buesching

In response to a post by Luke, I thought that I would give some insight my current PC setup, past setups, and reasons for what I have right now.

Background

I put together a pretty decent desktop computer 6 years ago, which would eventually evolve into an Athlon ~2000 (can’t exactly remember) with 1 gb of ram and ~800gb of disk space. When I went to college, I wanted a brand spakin’ new laptop, so I got myself a Dell 600m (1.5ghz centrino w/ 768mb RAM). Until recently, this was all I had. My desktop was sufficient for whatever gaming purposes I had, and my laptop did a pretty good job of running whatever I put on it.

Past Setups

I’ve had a lot of past setups with varying degrees of usefulness. Each setup has brought new experiences and has delighted me in several different ways.

Desktop (Win)/ Laptop (Win)

This was my initial setup before I started college and before I really got into Linux. I would mainly use my desktop for gaming / torrenting, while my laptop I used for going to class and portability. Once I started learning Linux and realizing that all my assignments for the rest of my college life would be in a Unix environment, I decided to put Linux on my laptop and finally start to learn it. It took awhile to get use to using Linux (Ubuntu was an infant and not very popular at the time), so I went through almost every major distro attempting to get my wireless card to work. I think I settled on Fedora Core 1.

Desktop (Win)/ Laptop (Linux)

With this setup, I used my Linux laptop for all my CS uses and my desktop gaming purposes. I also ended up using my desktop for non-CS school work because of Microsoft Office. I have never quite enjoyed using OpenOffice or AbiWord, which is why I don’t use Linux for any office-related activities. Another use for my desktop was for multimedia. Not only did I have better stereo equipment on my desktop, but I also enjoyed Windows Media Player. The only downside to having the Linux Laptop was that wireless at Purdue’s campus has never been kind towards Linux. Ever.

Desktop (Server & Router & Desktop)/ Laptop (Linux)

After I realized that I was pretty much solely using my laptop and had stopped playing games/watching movies, I decided to dive into how to create a router / webserver / mail server. This setup lasted for around 6 months while I toyed with DNS, CUPS, Apache and many different firewall applications. I learned to cope with the Linux media players, and decided that a stable wireless connection at Purdue was over rated, and pretty much only used my desktop machine for storage. I was primarily a laptop user at this time, working solely in Linux. The only game I played was Warcraft 3, which worked fine under Wine.

Laptop Only (Linux)

My server had started to become really flaky due to hardware issues that I believe I found to be a faulty north bridge fan (yes, I have a fan on my north bridge). I would eventually move all of my internal storage drives to external enclosures, and anything that connected to my desktop I connected to my laptop. I had an external mouse, 3 hard drives, speakers, microphone, headphones, a USB TV connection, and thumb drives. Every single time that I wanted to move, I had to unmount and unplug all that stuff. The wireless connection on campus didn’t help either – so whenever I did take my laptop to campus, I would be able to be on the internet for about 5 minutes before the signal dropped. This became cumbersome so I ended up not taking my laptop with me everywhere I went – thus losing the exact portability that they are suppose to provide. I sure as hell wish I had a docking station for this exact purpose. When I did take it with me on my trips home, it would take a book bag and 1/2 to carry around all the drives and peripherals.

My New Apple

Starting my senior year, I was getting tired of my current laptop as it was quite under powered for my usage and my desktop machine was getting really, really flaky. After the north bridge fan finally gave out, I decided that I needed a new computer. Yes, a $20 part made me purchase something 2 orders of magnitude more than what I needed to spend to fix the problem. I had around $2k to spend on a new machine and didn’t know what to get. I decided to get an Apple 24″ iMac for several reasons, but the most profound is that I wanted to see what all of the apple fanboys were raving about. With Leopard coming out, I thought that it would be the perfect timing, and I would be able to run Vista on it.

After about 2 months of using my new Apple, I must say that I haven’t had too many complaints. It took me awhile to learn “The Apple Way” of doing a few things such as menu bar’s and their use of ctrl/alt/apple keys. A big reason why I decided to go with Apple was because the OS was based on Unix, which gave me my beloved command line. I thought that this was the Holy Grail; I get nice usability combined with the powerful command line, what more could I want? Well, fast forward two months and I barely use the command line as it is right now. The mappings of the terminal aren’t the same mappings as they are on linux, and I find that they sometimes conflict with OSX bindings. I know that it’s something that I can fix, but it’s a hassle and nullifies a huge selling point.

Why I Changed to Only Using My Desktop

As of recently, I have basically stopped using my laptop entirely. One of the biggest reasons is because of the flaky wireless connection on campus, and that I don’t do anything on my local machine anymore. I guess I can install my LAMP setup on my laptop again to not need the wireless but then I have to worry about syncing up all my databases and start needing to do partial SVN commits for when I want to switch the machine that I’m working on – not fun. I think I’m going to go back to dual booting my laptop to Windows and Linux, and use Windows while on campus and Linux when at home.

Another reason for my sole desktop usage, my laptop doesn’t have the screen space that I have grown to love. I have a 19″ LG monitor, and a 24″ Apple monitor that has basically made me love screen space. Whenever I start to do development work on my laptop, I feel cramped. When I’m in full blown development mode, I can have around 3 full-screen coding windows + firefox + mysql query browser + command line, and still have screen space to spare. When on my laptop, I can have 2 emacs windows and my screen space is used.

I have also started using my desktop as my TV. Ironically, the software that came with the device does not work with Mac or Vista 64-bit (even though it’s Certified for Vista). I tested out Nero 8 on Windows and found that it has about a 3 second response time, which makes it 100% unsuitable for playing Playstation games. I purchased EyeTV and found that it is a great piece of software. It even responds quickly enough so that I can play games!

Finally, the ability to store passwords on my desktop. I never stored passwords on my laptop for fear of it being stolen. With my desktop, I feel a bit more secure with saving some passwords on it and find it’s very convenient. I also don’t have the problem of undocking / docking my desktop, I can just plug everything into it.

Conclusion

After several years of using my laptop as my only machine I have recently switching to using my desktop as my only machine. The main driving force behind this was the fact that my laptop was not really portable, had small screen space, underpowered at the moment, and didn’t really have a working wireless connection on campus. My desktop has become one of my greatest joys because of the mammoth screen, ability to use it as a TV, and it’s large amount of system resources which make my applications all the more zippy.

I am putting together a demo site for my company, and I need to put © character at the bottom of the page. So in XSLT, the way that you do that, is you put © as the entity tag (XSLT doesn’t inherently support ©). So I put it in and happen to get © in it. That’s weird… so I try to Google search for © and guess what turns up? They translate the © into the © symbol!

Try it yourself! Do a Google search for © and you’ll see that they translate into the © symbol!!

I wonder what other neat features they have that aren’t well known…

I have often told people about the bike shed story, which is always something to keep in mind.

Let me first prefix by saying I know Gutsy Gibbon is in beta. So now that we have that out of the way, I have recently upgraded my Ubuntu laptop from Fiesty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon. For the most part, I am pleased with it, except for a few items. Most of my problems relate to Gnome, X, and ATI drivers.

When I first updated, I got terrible vertical lines on the left and middle of my screen. These were about one inch long and rand the whole length of my screen. After a few hours of messing around with my xorg.conf file, I finally realized that it was not a problem with X, but rather an ATI driver problem. I downgraded my driver by downloading the latest drivers from Feisty Fawn. These seemed to fix the problem. I then started to incrementally upgrade my drivers to xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.7.193-1ubuntu1 which happened to work well. After buzzing around on Launchpad, I noticed Bug #150361. In the details, a developer noted a new version of the drivers (6.7.195-1ubuntu2). I tested these out and they fixed the issue.

Now what happens is whenever I try to play Warcraft 3, randomly the game crashes and the terminal spits out: X connection to :0.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown). I can only assume that this has to do with an update to X, which I will probably have to spend some time trying to find out what happened . Thus is the life of a beta tester!

Over the past two weeks I have been searching for a job and have come across some amazing opportunities. I have been extended an offer by one of these companies, and it seems that after this initial offer, about 1/2 a dozen more companies have contacted me to interview with them. I was really excited to hear my first offer and I am extremely pleased with it. I am very grateful that the company has given me a lot of time to think about the offer and allows me to get a good feel of what other companies can offer.

When I told my adviser about the offer, she was really excited for me. One of the first questions that she had asked me is what I felt made me stand out as opposed to other candidates. I have given this a lot of really deep thought in the past and I feel that if I had to pick one trait of mine that I have that gets me recognized, it’s that I get really passionate about my side projects. My one project that I have worked on over the past three years I am really proud of and feel that I have matured and learned a lot through it. Whenever I start to talk about the project, the challenges that I have faced and the skills that I have learned, I get extremely excited and it really shows. I get the other people excited about the project which in turn gets them excited about me.

Often times, projects just need a cool cam…

I recently read an article at ONLamp.com about why people write free documentation. As being part of the PHP documentation team, I thought that the article would be an interesting read.

The author goes to show that most people tend to write the documentation because they want a thriving community and personal growth, but they don’t write for thrills or because they enjoy writing. Let me reemphisize that last point: People do not write the documentation because they enjoy writing. I have often been asked why I started to join the PHP team, and I can honestly say that it’s not because I enjoy writing. My father often asks why I contribute to something where I get no monetary reward. It is hard for him to understand how this is like community service, but on a different level. I joined the PHP documentation team to help out and give back to the community, to learn PHP on a more intimate level, and to hopefully be able to study the source and contribute to PHP 6 and beyond.

I enjoy working with the PHP team and have been slacking off in my contributions, but I hope to find some time to help out during the school year.

Facebook better get its act together, soon. This type of MySpace BS better not become the norm or else I will cancel my account… these apps should be banned.

Last night, I went to the theater to go and watch the new Transformers movie. I was a little disappointed with the results. Sure, the ultimate bad guy may be Megatron, but it’s a little cheesy when they are trying to be serious and there is yelling about Megatron, Bumble Bee, The All Spark, and whatever weird kiddish names are in the movie. It may have worked on us when we were 5 years old, but now that we are 25, it’s really, really kiddish.

Although Steven Spielburg was an executive producer on the set, the movie has as many plot holes in it as a movie about swiss cheese would have. If you went into the movie expecting to only see some sweet action scenes and robots blowing shit up, then you will leave the movie feeling satisified. Or maybe you went to go see the new chevy camaro… then you will be pretty damn happy. It’s a sweet car.

So whenever I try and tell my parents, friends, girlfriends… ok, (I’m kidding about the girlfriends part) about what computer programming is, what frameworks are, and generally, what I do while in school, it becomes rather hard. I realized this early as it’s difficult to explain recursion to a new student, much less impossible to explain recursion to your mom, so I have decided upon what the best analogy for relating to computer programming is.

The Car

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