My new computer

A couple of weekends ago, I completed the somewhat quaint task of assembling a computer.

Parts were chosen on a value basis.  By no means was I going for maximum performance, but I didn’t go for the cheapest components either. As CompUSA recently re-opened stores in my area, I bought from them when possible.

Components:

• Ultra MicroFly SX6 micro ATX case with 600 watt power supply. This was a close-out at CompUSA for $80.
• Asus M3A78-CM motherboard. Again $80 from CompUSA, seemed to be the cheapest motherboard they had with modern technologies.
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor. Yet another $80 item from C-USA.  The motherboard dictated an AMD processor. This seemed to offer a good price/performance balance.
• Western Digital Cavier Black 750 GB hard drive. $90 from New Egg.  A lot of reading of reviews went into this decision, yet it came down to a mental toss of the dart.
• Sony DRU-V200S DVD burner. C-USA had these on sale for $30.  Pretty basic. Doesn’t have Lightscribe; to me that’s just something else that can fail.  Getting a Blu-Ray drive seemed silly as prices are sure to drop quickly.
• Acer X193WBD. $130 from C-USA
• 2 GB Kingston DDR2 1066 SDRAM.  The mother-board accepts up to 8 GB. Didn’t see any need to start maxxing it out just yet.

I downloaded and installed the 64-bit version of the Windows 7 beta along with 64-bit Ubuntu 8.10.

I scrupulously avoided Vista, so I can’t really say anything intelligent about 7 vs Vista.  That said, I have enjoyed using 7.

The only problem I’ve run into in Windows was with the Java plug-in and Firefox.  Since there isn’t an official 64-bit version of Firefox, I’m running the 32-bit versions of each.  The plug-in didn’t run out of the box.  Somewhat foolishly in retrospect, I filed a bug, thinking that it was a Windows 7 specific flaw.  However, while Googling around for a fix, I came across a blog post pertaining to the same problem in Vista 64-bit.  Following the steps in the post resolved the issue.

I didn’t have any sound when I fired up Ubuntu (apparently due to the on-board sound driver).  I fixed it, but don’t remember how (as I’m typing this from Windows, I don’t have the history handy to find the page that contained the solution I used). Otherwise, no issues.

Yahoo front-page testing IE only

A couple of weeks ago or so, I saw a notice on Yahoo! that they were looking for people to give feedback on their front page (IIRC, it was tied in with possible new designs; honestly my memory is kind of fuzzy on what it was exactlydic).  Sucker for playing with new stuff that I am, I filled out a short questionnaire and submitted it. 

A few days later I got an e-mail from "a marketing research company that has been commissioned by Yahoo! to conduct a study among their users", notifying me that someone would be calling me in the next few days to asess my suitability for the study.

I got that phone call today and it started off happily enough.  I was asked which front pages (AOL, MSN, Google, Yahoo) I used, what parts of Yahoo  I used, and whether I was related to anyone in the marketing, media, technology business.  All of my answers were apparently satisfactory.

The final question I was asked was "What web browser do you use?" I answered "Firefox" and my questioner asked whether I was sure because she thought that was an ISP.  When I confirmed my response, I was informed that they were looking for users of Internet Explorer only and was thanked for my time.

Sigh.  

technorati tags: Yahoo, Firefox, IE

New location for profiles

(Things changed yet again this afternoon, pardon the overstrikes)

 And due to the Mac’s directory structure, the location on it ended up being same as it ever was

Overnight, the default location for profiles (the folders that contain your favorites, saved passwords, etc) on Linux and Windows, and Macintosh changed.  

Because of that, Flock users will have a fresh new profile the next time they install a new version of Flock.  This will give the appearance that their old profiles have disappeared or are otherwise lost.

However, that is not the case.  All one needs to do is copy the contents of the old profile directory into the new one.  

On Windows 2000 and XP this means copying the contents of C:\Documents and Settings\<your user>\Application Data\Mozilla\Flock\ into C:\Documents and Settings\<your user>\Application Data\Flockinc\Flock\ C:\Documents and Settings\<your user>\Application Data\Flock\Browser\

On Linux this means copying the contents of ~/.mozilla/flock/  into ~/.flockinc/flock   ./flock/browser

On Macintosh this means copying the contents of ~/Library/Application Support/Flock into

~/Library/Application Support/Browser

 

 

technorati tags: flock

Flock now running happily on my Windows partition

In a couple of previous posts, I alluded to the performance issues I was having with Flock.  For example, merely typing ‘about:’ into the URL bar caused CPU usage to jump to 90%+ for at least ten seconds (during which Flock was unusable).

Well, today I had to take apart my laptop again (for the same reason as before).  While it was in pieces, I installed Flock on a Windows desktop, and didn’t have any such issues (even though the desktop has 128 mb RAM vs 512 on my laptop). 

The desktop installation was completely fresh, I didn’t import any bookmarks, history, etc.  That was not the case for my laptop installation, it took in everything from Firefox profile.

Not to say that my Firefox profile has a lot of stuff associated with it, but the first item in history is titled HURRICANE IVAN and is from when the storm was active.

This seemed to be the source of my problems with Flock. I ran cmd.exe to bring up the command line, then doing ‘flock –profile manager’ from the command line to bring up the Profile Manager so that I could created a new profile.  Created the new profile that was not associated with anything from the past, and now Flock runs quite happily.  Hooray.

technorati tags: [object XULElement]

Flock hourly builds are usable again

The severe problems with Flock developer and QA builds (blogging editor unusable, favorites menu not working, etc) have been fixed.  I haven’t played with it much yet, but at the moment, the only regression I notice as still being present is the duplicate toolbar, something that can be fixed by re-checking in Anthony’s checkin from a couple of weeks ago.

technorati tags: flock

The swag has landed

This just in from Federal Express…

technorati tags: Flock

First post from Flock

My endless tinkering for the sake of tinkering continues.

A couple of weeks ago or so I installed Ubuntu Linux on my laptop (it replaced the Suse installation that had resided alongside Windows).  I’ve been quite happy with it.

I then set up a build enviroment for Firefox and got it to compile happily.  After doing that I decided to see if I could build Flock as well. Following the fbuild instructions I got Flock to build as well.  As noted previously, I’ve downloaded Flock on Windows, but have had no opportunity to play with it as it is afflicted by a horrible performance bug.  However, the bug does not seem to exist on Linux.  So I configured the Flock blog editor and am typing this post from there.  Yay.

Firefox 1.5 Released

The latest edition of Eye of the Storm’s web browser of choice, Firefox, was released today. Go and get it. I’ve been running preview versions of it for awhile now and absolutely love it.

Flock non-review

My inability to blog (without the use of a backup site) when my laptop became inoperable had me looking for a new blogging tool.  I had been interested in wordpress.com, but up to this point accounts have been invitation only, so I was unable to act on that desire.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover yesterday that one could receive a wordpress.com account by downloading the Flock web browser.  The front page of the Flock website warns that “this preview ain’t for the faint of heart” (i.e. it could prove to be crash-prone, etc).  No worries for me as I am accustomed to running such things, whether they be called previews, betas, whatever.  I thought I would have something new to play with as well as something to write about.

 Alas, that is not the case at this time.  I am seeing bug 1392 in all its glory.  After the browser has been running for a short period of time, routine tasks such as opening a new link (same window, new tab, does not make a difference), max out the CPU for a prolonged period of time (sometimes upwards of a minute).  Definitely a ‘blocker’ for me, so no review or comments for now.

 On the off chance that anyone reading this wonders or cares, the build id is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051021 Flock/0.4 Firefox/1.0+