making apps, making webs.

Well, well... after spending a night optimizing some graphics code I noticed I could upgrade to the new version of ubuntu... Jaunty 9.04 on my laptop . After an hour and a half, of installing (which I had to come back to about 8 times because it had stopped to ask me questions mid way)... I came back to a new system. Ya! I thought. Apparently a faster boot, and other such goodness... and all fresh packages as well!!! However my boot time is now slower. It also takes longer for everything to start after login. Also my graphics are half the speed they were before upgrade. This is non-3d stuff too... 3d 'accelerated' stuff takes a much larger hit. damn. Moral of the story? Don't believe the hype... and also wait until others have upgraded first before you do to try it out. I think the graphics slow down is related to this bug ... reported in november last year. So if you have intel graphics... DO NOT UPGRADE YET!!! If you do, everything will go really slow. If you have...

Some decoration for my laptop.

I don't like to contribute too much to all the pollution that getting new hardware contributes too. There's lots of perfectly good old hardware being given away or sold at low prices in second hand stores and online auction sites. A couple of months ago I got a Dell latitude C610 laptop from a place down the road from me that restores and sells old laptops. With only 20 gigs of HD space, and 256 megs of ram it's not anything close to what you'd buy new. However it seems to do ok. I also like to use older hardware for developing software - because it's like 'eating my own dogfood' in a way. If I see the performance problems that the slow computers experience - then I can fix them up. All too often I see websites that perform slowly on old machines, or don't fit important information on their small resolution screens. My franken box The laptop is so nice, that I've mostly retired my old duron 850mhz desktop machine... which I've had since 1997...