27 Mar 2007

Tut 4 week 4

Last weeks tut number 4 was for fit2001 was not very interesting, we used the time to ask questions in a group about the assignment. I think the assignment will be quite interesting. We spent quite a bit of time discussing it in the Group.

The session we had with the Lecture was quite quick it was only about 15 min. I sure we got all the info we need for the assignment.

tut 3

I have not posted in while, tut 3 was a bit of a let down. We were supposed to listen to a pod cast with the creator of Basecamp, Jason Fried. It did not happen till after the tut. This is because the internet connection at Monash is controlled buy telkom (read below).

I went to the web site for base camp and did some wikipedia research on the topic. I think its quite an interesting product which was developed in a non traditional way. Similar to Many of the Google things which is release a beta, and keep in a beta state while the users interact with it and give feed back. They call this a gamma sate. It is rapid user centered development. As a good idea gets out their on the web and then the users get to decide how it looks and works.

Its interesting to see that their are other way of doing the same things, and with the internet we have not explored all of them.

1 Mar 2007

Operating Systems and A new computer

I recently got an new Acer travelmate 5623, as my previous HP nx9110 stoped working. According to HP it stoped working because of mother board ware and tear. Which would cost R 5000 to replace.

My new Acer came with vista as it was a R 1000 cheaper to go with vista over XP. Apparently Acer is not shipping their products with system disks. So I had to use my DVD writer to create an image of my system for back and install purposes. Good thing to, with in 2 days I had to reinstall vista to get around an annoying error message that kept coming up. It had to to with user profiles and the folders linked to them.

Vista gave me the a real shock when I saw that the system was using 600MB of ram from start up. So I set about changing some of the services and performance setting to see if I could change that. I prefer to at least 80 % of my ram free. I was only able to free up 200MB. So 40% of my ram is dedicated to just ruining my system.

I have had one trouble of another since I got vista. Their program compatibility system kinda works as I was able to install and use open office and FireFox. I could get it to work with PDFcreator, it just wouldn't let me install it.

Vista is a bit easier to use but that dose not account for more then half my ram disappearing. Gnome is just as easy use if not more and it only requires along with the Linux system about 220 MB on start up. Which is why I am now switching to opensuse 10.1.

I hope to do every thing this semester in Linux, and after trying out opensuse 10.1 on one of my external drives I have to say Linux is really impressing me. Novel has really done some thing impressive with suse. It is almost an replacement for Windows in terms of productivity and easy of use.

Almost a replacement but not quite. I have to manually install my Realtech 8111 network card and my Intel pro 3945 doesn't work probably. Linuxes big problem is still hard ware compatibility. Hardware manufactures are sticking to where the money is and at the moment that is with windows. The just don't put in the same effort to make hardware work with Linux.

Their are still solutions to all these problems but they are some times very complex. For instance to update the driver for my wireless card I have to download and separately install 5 different packages to get around the dependency hell in the Linux system.

I still plan to move to the more stable and efficient suse 10 .1 with Gnome as my desktop because I can Google my Linux problems and find a solution, but with windows I have to wait till some lackey at Microsoft puts out a security up date to fix my vista problems. I will and suggest any one wanting to go the vista route wait till SP1.