Older blog entries for Waldo (starting at number 147)

Motherboard

I finally threw in the towel on this Asus A7V-266e motherboard. This is that Asus ("aye-SUSE," for the curious) motherboard that they sent me last week to replace the previous one that was broken when I bought it. It's unclear, but it appears that this motherboard is used. In any case, it doesn't work at all. The fans spin, but that's the extent of its functionality. So, once again at my expense, I'm going to mail this motherboard back and hope that the third one that they send me will work. If it doesn't, I'll be asking for my money back and getting a new motherboard. After three months, I think it'll be time for a new brand entirely.

Motherboard

I got my broken motherboard back today. Asus mailed it back. They don't appear to have done anything with it. It came with a printout attached to it, with various form fields such as "Missing Part:", "Replaced Parts:", "Error Location:", etc. All are blank.

It appears that I could have saved a lot of time by simply mailing this motherboard to myself. Thanks, Asus.

Update: I called Asus. Turns out it's not my motherboard: it's a used one. That's right: I bought a brand new motherboard that was DOA (Dying on Arrival, return a few weeks later), I sent it back to them and they replaced it with a used motherboard. The woman that I talked with had such a thick Korean accent that I was entirely unable to understand what she was saying. I'll have to call back later and hope that I can somebody else, so that I can ask them what the hell they're trying to pull.

PostNuke

I've been spending more and more time reviewing the code of PostNuke, and I've started to submit bug reports and such. I'm trying to slowly warm up to it rather than just start submitting patches. :) I think that it has the potential to be very, very good. At the moment it's extremely ugly, primarily in that it lacks any sort of grace.

Mail

I've switched my mail mail server from Sendmail to Postfix. I like it better. I've also started using SpamAssassin instead of Spambouncer on that server. I think I like SpamAssassin more. It worked faster, with less tweaking, and appears to be more actively updated. I wish it came with a plug-in to filter out Klez, though.

Verisign is a horrible, horrible, horrible company. I hereby resolve to move all of my domains that remain with them to DirectNIC as soon as I am able and never suffer through their "service" again.

I sent a thank-you note to the makers of Gallery the other day. I'd sent one before, but I felt that I should tell them anew how much that I love it. I strongly believe that it's one of the most solid open source projects out there. Should anybody ever have need for a web-based photo album, look no farther. It doesn't get any better than Gallery.

My brand-new motherboard -- an Asus A7V266e -- is dead. I'd been having a bunch of trouble with my shiny new system in the last few weeks and I didn't know why. I've finally swapped out every PCI card and peripheral, leaving only the motherboard intact, and the same problems persisted. (Sporadic booting troubles, spontaneous reboots, lockups, etc.) I've e-mailed Asus to see what to do. This is my first purchase from Asus, so I'm a bit nervous. I gather that they're a reputable company (otherwise I wouldn't have bought their motherboard), but I'm guessing that it'll take something like six weeks until they've got this old motherboard and I've got a new, functional motherboard.

Anyhow, there goes my shiny new Linux box. I'm back to my PowerBook with Mac OS X. (Which I love, but I really wanted to use my sexy new system.) Oh, well.

Google APIs.

Mmmmm...

chexum: Thanks. :) It turns out that I did that right, but just remembered what I'd done incorrectly. Hopefully your comment will prevent others from toasting their hard drives (or whatever nasty thing might result.)

I ran hdparm on my system (named Vig) with really impressive results. hdparm -c3 -m16 -u1 -X100, to be specific. Timing buffered disk (as per hdparm - Tt /dev/hda) reads went from ~12MB / sec to ~39MB / sec. Damn.

Window Manager

Turns out that, on a fast system, I prefer Gnome over KDE. I've been a KDE guy for the past 6 months or so, but Gnome is just sooo much nicer on the eyes, and the applications are much nicer (not that I can't run them in KDE). Anyhow, I think I've been re-converted to the Church of Gnome.