W7 running hot

For some reason W7 is running hot. Not hot enough to make me freak out and pull the cord and battery, like Ubuntu did that one time when I was fiddling. But hot enough that I've installed and am playing with SpeedFan. http://www.almico.com/sffaq.php

New W7 -> go reinstall grub

I'd forgotten how long it takes to install Windows, even W7. I read a freaking book in less than the time that it took to install, goddammit. (I Shall Wear Midnight by Pratchett) But it's done now. When I have time I'll re-dl all the programs that I like to have...

For now, though, my first task is to re-enable GRUB. Dammit, Windows. I forgot that it did that. At least it's easy to undo.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/reinstall-ubuntu-grub-bootloader-after-windows-wipes-it-out/

Also, playing with run>compmgmt.msc is fun.

CS GRE

I have a study prep book for the CS GRE. I think the book is a year or few out of date, but the problems in it are lots of fun- which is to say that some of them are goddamn complicated.

I'm still halfway through four CS books because life is all complicated and stuff. Hopefully I'll get to finish them soon. They rock.

List:

CS GRE (I'm not taking it, just reading the book)

Coders at Work (big book!)

Practice of Programming

Design Patterns

and I have a couple more sitting around for when I get done with those. Mostly Ruby stuff.

.iso (windows)

The unpaid version of MagicISO is basically useless. I use InfraRecorder, which is simple and fast and makes me happy. http://infrarecorder.org/ Opensource ftw.

I'm very happy to have a legal version of W7; they're so damn handy. Right now it's burning from my external to a DVD, and it's working just excellently.

Yesterday was Ruby-themed

I spent most of yesterday solving a (fairly simple) problem using Ruby. Under a hundred lines of code (and refactoring could cut that down by half or more, I think!)

It was a great learning tool, though. I know a hell of a lot more about Ruby than I did two days ago. I want to do that all the time.

I'm going to need some more coffee if I'm going to do it this afternoon, though. Didn't sleep well. Need a nap. or a deadline. I like deadlines. Also coffee.

Zzzzzz.

New OS time

My intelligent but not a CS geek roommate updated her Ubuntu partition, and then happened to reboot. And... after login, she gets a completely blank screen. After a while, the default wallpaper loads. Wait as long as you like; nothing else happens.

I booted into a root shell and poked around a bit, but didn't make any definitive change to the problem. I gave her an openSUSE cd that I picked up at GHC, and last I saw her she was backing up a couple files preparatory to a full wipe and install.

Because a couple days ago, a virus hosed her Windows partition (I guess McAfee isn't perfect, lol) and (despite rancorbeast, Ben, and I fiddling with it- and replacing corrupted kernel32 and setup32 etc with uncorrupted local versions and hopefully-functional downloaded versions) she gave up on it.

Well, hell.

I, on the other hand, this morning acquired a (MSDN legal! ftw!) version and key of Windows 7 and I plan to burn it to disc and keep it handy for my inevitable needs. Maybe I'll make a VM on Ubuntu and load it there.

My Ubuntu partition (10.04) is behaving well, and I don't plan to update to 10.10 for a while yet, since this is the machine that I use all the time and I hear that there are some fun bugs that I don't really want to play with at the moment.

Legalese

Format legal code in LaTeX, run all modifications through github. Rancorbeast's idea. Implementation...

PowerTop and PeerGuardian

PeerGuardian + Windows64 == fail
Workarounds here:
http://forums.phoenixlabs.org/showthread.php?t=15268
None of them suit me, so I guess it's back to Ubuntu. I should really get around to that VM.

Also, I managed to use PowerTop to tell my iwconfig to disconnect every 500ms even when not idle, and it took me a bit to realize that that was the problem with my connection. Fixing it was easy once I knew what was up, tho. So... remember to not do that.

I'm planning to pick up some parts on Newegg and build myself a desktop because it sounds like fun and I haven't built anything computery for a couple years. Chips, yes; computers, no. Bah. I'm still debating whether I want to do some kind of crazy steampunk enclosure.

PowerTop for Ubuntu

http://www.linuxpowertop.org/powertop.php

I noticed recently that my laptop gets about 30% more battery life under Vista than under Ubuntu 10.04. Which is not how these things should be! So... Powertop. It's pretty cool. Still fiddling with it. Link above for screenshots and faq.

ChicagoRuby Meetup at ThoughtWorks

http://www.meetup.com/ChicagoRuby/calendar/13617890/

Oct. 5, 2010

6-8pm

Presentation 1:

Jasmine for JavaScript testing: probably better than what you've been using.

http://blog.michaelphines.net/using-jasmine-on-rails-3

Presentation 2:

New application: http://gathers.us/ for event management.

By the way, Obtiva is hiring. Ask the presenter about it at http://twitter.com/#!/ethangunderson

"The rails community really loves Mongo- they love basically everything that is new and shiny-"

His presentation includes the Picard facehand. Picture. I like this guy.

"It just works! It's all ponies and stuff. That's actually a really terrible idea, I think... ORMs are worthless if you don't understand what they're doing."

MongoMapper and Mongoid. (These do what they wanted to do but they didn't use them because of the above quote?)

"Mongo isn't single-server durable." has to do with write path. Must have at least two notes in a cluster for durability.

"Our adventure in data modeling: "

Option 1- separate events and groups. bad idea. option 2- embed events in groups. but this is a bad idea because there's a limited doc size. 4mb limit! "It's so people like us don't do thinkgs like that."

Practical limit is 100-500k, depending who you ask. Because tossing that repeatedly across the network is just irrational.

option 3- sngle collection inheritance. Worked well, but learned; if you migrate into it, the old events don't have a Type attribute, so you need to backfill that or everything will misclassify itself.

noSQL = "screw you, DBAs!" (but not so much...)

Register at chicagodb.com for an event hosted by Obtiva on oct 18th.

Mongo Chicago IIT Oct 20th.

Go to spkr8.com/t/4704 to review his presentation.