Bert Garcia^2.0

An hour of Googling turned up the answer.

Skype has been my main form of communication for the last couple of years. $30 for a year of service, $30 for a Skype-In number so landlines or cell phones can call into me, add in another $30 for a Philips VOIP151 USB phone, and it’s a very cheap solution with excellent call quality.

My only gripe has been their application, it’s always felt heavy and consumed way too much memory for my tastes. An application that sits in my Windows tray all day, shouldn’t be using 60,000K of my precious ram. And when called upon, it shouldn’t paint the screen like it’s struggling with my display adapter, each tile coming in piecemeal.

Today, I went looking for answers, there had to be a solution. In the dark crevices of Skype’s support forum, which is hidden behind FAQ after FAQ, there was this post. A long time user of Skype laid out the cruel facts, that all the 4.x versions of the software were slow and used up way too much memory. He recommended v3.8.0.188, the best Skype ever written he claimed.

Armed with this information, I headed over to FileHippo, and grabbed Skype 3.8.0.188. Removed my installed v4.2.0.158, and rebooted the computer to clear out any loaded DLLs. When installing this older version of Skype, I clicked the options button, and unchecked the Extras Manager, that’s the additional SkypePM.exe process you see in Task Manager.

Upon startup, Skype’s screen popped up instantly, since 3.x version’s default interface was more like an instant messenger client. Made a call to their sound test service, the girl with the British accent came through clearly on the USB phone. Grabbed my cell phone and called into my Skype-In number, a small popup alerted me that a call was coming in, no lag in site.

Task Manager reports Skype.exe using 8,492K, now that’s more like it.

Operator, oh could you help me place this call?
You see the number on the matchbook is old and faded

Needed a wider external display for my laptop.

Most of my web development happens on a Windows XP laptop, it was hooked up to a 19 inch Samsung 930B LCD as it’s external display.

On the laptop’s screen I run my web browser, the external display is used mostly for coding, with either Komodo IDE or Notepad++ running. With the Samsung at 1280 pixels wide, I felt cramped.

Perusing the Net turned up a 20 inch Acer H203H LCD at Best Buy for $99. Did the usual reading of online reviews and they were mostly positive, no mention of dead pixels or dead on arrival scenarios. So I headed over to my local brick and mortar electronics store and made a visual comparison of the Acer alongside more expensive LG and Samsung displays. I bought the Acer.

So far I’m pleased with the new display, I really like having 1600 pixels of width so I can display sidebars in Komodo and not have the code window shrink too much. My only concern was going from 1024 to 900 pixels in length, but I don’t miss the 124 pixels I lost. The display also has a matte finish, which I prefer over the glossy displays that are so common today.

Last night I fired up VLC and watched a movie on the Acer, the living room TV will miss me ;)

She needs wide open spaces
Room to make her big mistakes
She needs new faces
She knows the high stakes

During the 1980’s, Jerry Pournelle wrote a column for Byte magazine entitled The View From Chaos Manor. The column followed Jerry’s trials and tribulations with hardware and software. Back then you were lucky to have one home computer, Jerry had many, all with cute names.

In 1983, I bought my first personal computer, a Compaq portable. Hooked it up to an Okidata parallel printer and started my own a family of computers and peripherals. The Compaq and Oki are still with me, along with every piece of hardware and software I’ve ever acquired.

Pictured above is my current home office layout, the two laptops I use, an external monitor, an LCD TV and wireless laser printer on the right. Scattered around the house are more laptops and desktop computers, the back storage has the museum of 386, 486 and Pentium computers.

The view from geek manor, because I wanted to be like Jerry.

Ooh-bi-doo, I wan’na be like you
I want to walk like you, talk like you, too
You see it’s true, an ape like me
Can learn to be like you, too

Think different!

Apple slogans remind me of doublespeak, those phrases made popular in George Orwell’s novel 1984, like war is peace and freedom is slavery.

Steve and company want you think different, yet Apple fans all think alike. Should Apple make an iToaster, you can bet their morning bagels would be placed into one of them, and come out branded with a nice little Apple logo on it’s side.

The I’m a Mac and you’re a PC commercials make me laugh, because a Mac nowadays is just a freaking PC inside. I’ll give them credit though, they’ve taken a Unix operating system and made it user friendly. I can’t see myself paying double the price for a laptop just because it has a giant glowing Apple logo on the back of it, your mileage may vary.

Mind you, I’m not a bigot, I’d love to get my hands on a used Mac mini and throw Debian on it for a low-power web server. I do own a 5th generation iPod, but I ditched iTunes for foobar2000 with the foo_dop plugin. My son owns an iPhone, it’s a neat wireless device, though I got my eyes on an Android phone because I want full control over my devices.

Now, for you fans of the Cupertino based company, I give you iHype, a neat little web page showing the latest Apple news from different outlets. The slogan, Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

Someday they won’t let you, now you must agree
The times they are a-telling, and the changing isn’t free

Gone are the days of Microsoft Frontpage.

At the dawn of the Internet, we had to hand code HTML pages by hand, Notepad was our friend. For personal use it was alright, but having to maintain clients this way was mucho cumbersome. Should anything change in their world, like a product price, we had to do the answer phone call, edit said HTML file, then ftp it up to the server dance.

Then came Frontpage, the answer to all our dreams, we thought. Code said website, upload it to the server, then hand it over to the client and they’ll handle the updating from that point on for the small details. We soon came to realize that Frontpage gobbled up our beautifully crafted code and spit out Redmond’s own brand of what the web should look like, ActiveX, VBScript, et al.

On June 8, 1995 came the message to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi newsgroup from Rasmus Lerdorf. Personal Home Page Tools, or PHP for short, was born. Fast forward to July of 2010 and PHP is the most widely used Apache module on the over 100 million servers that the Apache web server is running on. Microsoft is in second place with 53 million servers.

PHP served these words to you, I filled out a form on the backend of Textpattern CMS, the content management system that controls this site. Now we can design sites and hand them over to clients for their updates, our design code left untouched, nicely adorning the content.

Textpattern, like PHP and Apache are Open Source applications. They are free to download and utilize as we see fit. We’ve gained control of the most important medium since the printing press, and I’m so appreciative. As a tip of my hat to the many developers who give of their free time, I maintain PHPXref, a cross referenced code library of PHP applications.

You have held us down for so long
Everything you said, it was wrong
You can’t even look us in the eyes
While your headlines scream out pompous lies

Giga, my trusty Debian Linux server for the last six years needed a break.

When summer hit the Carolinas, extreme heat followed. Keeping my large tower server on all day was producing even more heat, constant fan noise and drawing more electricity. Keeping the home office’s room air conditioner on all day to compensate the central air, made more noise and drew even more electricity.

This prompted me to turn a five year old laptop into Lenny, the portable server. This laptop has a dead battery and last year needed the internal power jack connector to be replaced, so it was a prime candidate to sit on a desk, wired to power and our internal network.

First off, I needed to repartition the 60GB drive with GParted. I removed the Windows XP partition since there was a Gateway recovery partition, created a 1GB swap partition and a 50GB ext3 partition for Debian. Next up was a net install of Debian Lenny, chose only the base system, I would apt-get what I needed after I had a working operating system.

The laptop booted up just fine, using very little of it’s 768MB of ram. Did an apt-get of the usual suspects, Apache, PHP and MySQL. With very little tweaking I had a nicely working LAMP machine where I can work on my websites. I use XAMPP on my main laptop, and it works rather well, but having a true LAMP stack for testing is worth the dedicated machine.

Though I’m comfortable with editing config files in the /etc directory, Webmin does an excellent job. A few more tweaks, some more apt-gets and the laptop was flying along serving web pages just as fast as my huge tower server. Seeing how well the laptop was running, I decided to install Xfce from backports. I don’t really need a GUI, but it’s nice to be able to load up Firefox for testing sites on a Linux platform.

Four days into running Lenny on the laptop, I decided to repartition. I removed the 5GB Gateway recovery partition, moved the swap partition to the front of the drive, shrunk the /root partition down to 5GB and created a /home partition of 50GB. The laptop would run Debian for the remainder of it’s life, it felt like the right thing to do.

If the sun refused to shine
I don’t mind, no baby I don’t mind
And If the mountains fell in the sea
It ain’t me, you know you’ve got to be free

My 5 year old laptop was running hot.

After cleaning out the vents and raising the laptop a bit from the desk’s surface, the idle temps were still hovering around 50C, and under load, the temps would jump above 60C, prompting the bios to issue a shutdown order.

Went out on the Net and started doing research, everywhere I turned, aging thermal compound appeared to be the culprit. In order to alleviate the overheating issues, I would need to open up the laptop to gain access to the processor, but I lacked instructions. Gateway had manuals on user replaceable parts that you could get to from the underside, but no full blown schematic on where internal parts resided.

More time on the Net yielded images, user contributed wiki pages and how-tos that pointed me to the processor location. I’m no stranger to the insides of desktop computers, but a laptop was always this sealed box that you left alone and when it died, you went out and bought another one. But I didn’t want another one, I wanted to keep running Windows XP.

A quick trip to Radio Shack to buy Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste and I was ready to start the operation. Gathered all my small tools, cleared the kitchen table and gingerly took off the keyboard. An aluminum plate was the only thing separating me from the processor heatsink and fans. Once the heatsink came out, I could see that the old thermal paste was dry and brittle, not doing much of anything.

As per Net instructions, I used alcohol and q-tips to clean off the processor and heatsink. I sparingly applied the thermal paste to the top of the processor, just a thin layer as per instructions. While I was in there I decided to add more memory, switched out the internal 512MB with 1GB, matching the 1GB in the user accessible bay.

Booted up, fingers crossed, fired up Speccy. Idle temps had dropped to 35C, amazed I was, ready to go apply at the Geek Squad. But the true test is under load, Firefox playing a Flash based movie always lights up task manager, just a test I said to the laptop. Under load, the temps never got above 55C, and shortly after stopping the movie, they were well under 40C.

With new thermal paste and 2GB of ram, my laptop and I are happy campers. Yes, you could say I’m entrenched in Windows XP and I ain’t leaving, except to the Debian partition.

We’re having a heat wave
A tropical heat wave
The temperature’s rising
It isn’t surprising

Santa left us a wireless laser printer for Christmas.

Twas a Brother HL-2170W nicely wrapped up in red paper, with a blue bow.

Everyone wondered what was in the box, we left it for last, drew straws as to who would get the honors. The time came, red paper flew and revealed our new press.

Gone are the days of expensive inkjet cartridges. A quick net price check and for $30, a laser cartridge will yield roughly 1,500 pages, that’s $.02 cost of ink per page. On average inkjet is $.06 per page, with the most expensive inks going as high as $.12 per page.

The printer comes with a USB port, an ethernet port and wireless technology. Setup was easy, I used the ethernet connection to configure the wireless security settings and the residential gateway welcomed the little bro into our home network.

Compared to the parallel port lasers of days gone by, this one is light and whisper quiet when waiting on a print job. Pages spit out quickly, even graphic intensive Google satellite maps. Now we don’t need to buy a navigation system for the car, that Santa thinks of everything.

Grandma got run over by a reindeer
Walkin’ home from our house Christmas eve
You can say there’s no such thing as Santa
But as for me and Grandpa, we believe

1,035 days after TerraFirma, a newer design.

TerraFirma2, a design by NodeThirtyThree.

To my surprise, I came across a newer, wider version of my old site’s design at the free CSS templates site I often check.

My only concern was how would my content look, since the old site’s layout was a narrow 800 pixels, but once I programmed TerraFirma2 into Textpattern, the content looked great. Some articles needed tweaking, but overall it was a very smooth visual transition.

Since this new design’s structure is similar to the old one, programming a new Textpattern theme was a snap, and it doesn’t hurt that you’re dealing with the same web designer, who maintains similar HTML and CSS conventions.

The only Textpattern plugin I used on this new theme, and probably the only plugin I’ll ever need, is Jukka Svahn’s rah_function plugin. With rah_function, I can call any PHP function from within the safety of the TxP tag world, oh the possibilities.

Here on terra firma
The fires are raging
The riots up staging
To prove a point to none

Originally called BackRub, it’s home was Stanford University in 1998.

The young search engine, written in Java and Python, ran on the following hardware:

1. Sun Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors, 256MB of RAM.
   • Storage boxes included 3 × 9GB drives and 6 × 4GB drives.
2. 2 × 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers, 512MB of RAM.
   • Internal 9 × 9GB drives between the two.
3. F50 IBM RS/6000 with 4 processors, 512MB of RAM and 8 × 9GB drives.
   • IBM disk expansion box with another 8 × 9GB drives.
4. Homemade disk box which contained 10 × 9GB SCSI drives.

• Donated by the Intel ² and IBM ³ corporations.

The mature search engine is now a verb, just BackRub it.

All for freedom and for pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world