LinLog

As I mentioned the other day, I recently acquired a hand-me-down laptop. My sister-in-law bought herself a shiny new Dell and gave me her old Compaq Presario R4000 with the dead battery.

So I'm currently in the process of fixing this system up. So far I've just wiped the drive, laid down a fresh install of Windows XP SP3, and installed the drivers and some standard applications. It's actually not a bad little system - Athlon XP-64 processor, 80GB hard drive, DVD burner. Hardly state of the art, but it beats the pants off my old Dell Inspiron B120.

Aside from the battery (which is gonna cost me about $75 to replace), there's only one problem: memory. The system comes with 512MB of RAM, which was fine for the time, but is a little small now. The problem is that the system has two 256MB RAM modules - one of which is under the keyboard, which is really annoying. And they're not especcially cheap modules, either - it takes DDR PC2700 sticks, which go for about $40 per gig on NewEgg. By way of contrast, I recently got another 1GB stick of DDR2 PC5300 to max out the RAM on my Dell, and it only cost me $12 with free shipping.

So I'm debating how much to get now. In better times, I'd just spend the $80 and max out the memory. But times are tough, and it's an old laptop, and I'm already spending $75 to get a new battery. So maybe I'll just stick to 1GB, or perhaps even half a gig. It wouldn't be quite so annoying if they'd just used 1 stick in the first place. As it is, I'm going to lose half the existing RAM if I upgrade either DIMM slot, so I'm not going to get out of this as cheap as I'd hoped.

Either way, it'll still be nice to have another laptop around, so that Sarah and I aren't fighting over the one. And even if I max out the RAM, it's still way cheaper than getting a new system, so it's still a win-win situation.

Note to self: no more buying cables at the dollar store.

Last week I was in the local dollar store looking for pocket-sized packages of tissues and lint rollers (because there's no point spending a lot of money on that sort of thing), when I came across some of those retractable USB cables. You know, the kind that have the spring-loaded roll so that they wind themselves back up - kind of like cheap blinds. I probably should have known better, but come on - it was only a dollar!

Anyway, this afternoon I tried using that cable and it didn't go so well. I attempted to use it to connect my 320GB external USB drive to the hand-me-down laptop that my sister-in-law just gave us after buying a new system. I was using SystemRescueCD and PartImage to take a drive image of the original installation - you know, just in case - and the performance was...let's just say "disappointing". More specifically, the estimated time to completion, on a 75GB drive, with about 40GB used and no compression on the image, was around 11 hours. For those with no point of reference, using the same external drive to image my other laptop, which has about 30GB of used disk, takes maybe half an hour.

And what's worse, partimage kept hanging every 5 or 10 seconds, so even that estimate wasn't accurate. I left the laptop to image while we went on a wine tour of Seneca lake this afternoon, and after being gone for about 7 hours, partimage still said it had 6 hours of work left.

So, just to check, I tried it with my regular USB cable and, sure enough, it's running along at 667MiB/min, estimated completion time 55 minutes. It's still running a little choppier than my other laptop, but not too bad.

So I guess this discredits my old opinion that cables are cables and they either work or they don't. Turns out there are different levels of "not working". Like I said, I should have known better.

Well, the new year is upon us, we have a new president, and the economy is in the toilet. So I figure this is as good a time as any to try something new. That's why I'm switching to Windows.

Of course, I'm not switching switching. My home desktop is still running Kubuntu 8.04 and will be for the foreseeable future. However, a couple of weekends ago I burned a System Rescue CD, shrank the Kubuntu partition on my laptop, and set it up to dual-boot Windows XP. I also resurrected the long-dormant Windows partition on my PC at work. I'm still keeping Kubuntu around on both systems (at least for now), but I'm making an effort to actively use Windows more often than not.

There are a number of reasons for this. For one, I've been getting a little fed up with Linux lately, especially after the last Kubuntu upgrade. I'm thoroughly unimpressed with KDE 4, I'm getting tired of things crashing randomly under KDE 3, and I find that I just don't use or want to use much Linux-specific software anymore. It's also been a while since I felt really connected to the community and I was never really a "true believer" in Free Software or the power of Open Source in the first place. So I just feel like I don't have as much of an anchor in the Linux world anymore, despite using it every day.

The Windows world, on the other hand, seems to have a lot to recommend it these days. For instance:

1. It's the native platform for .NET. I did a little .NET work at my last job and quite liked it. I've been wanting to get deeper into .NET and C# for a while now and using Windows will allow me to do that more easily.

   Yes, I know Linux has Mono, and that's all well and good. But let's face it - it's just not the same. For one thing, Mono isn't as complete as Microsoft's runtime. For another, the tooling just isn't there - MonoDevelop is a fine IDE, but it can't hold a candle to SharpDevelop, let alone Visual Studio. And, of course, Mono isn't as marketable, as most of the companies looking for .NET developers are working on Windows.

2. Powershell. I've been wanting to try out PowerShell for a while. I keep hearing about it on .NET Rocks and RunAs Radio and it seems really cool. Again, there is a Mono port (called PASH) in the works, but it appears to be only about half done, whereas PowerShell on Windows is pretty much mainstream now.

3. It has everything I need and more. I don't remember where or when, but within the last few months, I came to a realization: pertty much all the software I care about runs on Windows. Granted, there are a many programs I use on a regular basis that are UNIX-only, but all the stuff I really need is cross-platform: Opera, Firefox, Komodo Edit, Vim, PHP, Python, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. There are even Windows ports of most of the common UNIX utilities (awk, sed, grep, etc.), not to mention Cygwin. As for the things that don't run on Windows...well, I found I'm just not all that attached to those programs, and there are Windows programs that do the equivalent anyway. So really, even with switching to Windows, my toolset doesn't change that much.

4. It's just more marketable. Let's face it - the economy is bad and I haven't the money or the inclination to move to where the jobs are. In other words, if I wanted to live in New York City or California, I wouldn't be working in Rochester right now. So it makes sense for me to develop my skills in a direction that's in demand in my area.

   From the online research I've done, Java and .NET seem to be the most in demand in the Rochester area. Java may be bigger, but the fact is that I know jack about Java, whereas I have some experience with VB.NET and C#, so that seems like a more viable path. By contrast, there's usually only a handful of PHP jobs available, and apparently PHP developers are a dime a dozen anyway. And despite all the hype, I've only ever seen 1 Ruby job available within 50 miles of my house.

So off I go on this new adventure. Hopefully it will all go well and I'll emerge a happy and productive .NET developer. The only problem is I might have to change the name of this blog.

Well, I feel stupid. I just finally got syntax highlighting for PowerShell to work in Vim. I did a little Googling and found my solution in the PDF document linked form this article. Why you need an 8 page PDF to explain this is a completely different issue.

Turns out I was just missing some lines in my filetype.vim file. I already had the syntax, indent, and file type plugins, I just didn't think to add the code to activate them (for some reason I thought that stuff was loaded dynamically). However, page 6 of that PDF gave the answer:

" Powershell
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.ps1,*.psc1 setf ps1

I just added those lines to my filetype.vim, below the corresponding entries for Povray files, and voilà! Syntax highlighting now works.

Just on a random link propagation note, today I found a very handy guide on making your own CD jackets out of paper. I was burning a couple of DVDs and didn't have any empty cases laying around, so I figured there must be a good way to fold them up in a piece of paper. A little Googling turned up this handy guide. It has a PDF of instructions and even measurements for use with different sizes of paper (though you can pretty easily eyeball it, especially with US letter).

Just thought that was a useful little piece of information. I'm going to have to hold on to that one for those frequent occasions where I have a disk and nothing to put it in.