Jason Crowther’s Blog

Monday, I took a day off to concentrate on some chores that never seem to make it off my to do list. On of which was replacing the OS harddrive in my primary PC at home before its impending failure.
Starting with a brand new 120Gb ide drive, I figured it would be best to do a dual boot between XP and Fedora Core 5. So, I started by installing XP and allocating it 30Gb. 4 hours and later (suffering throught sp2 + all updates since) and 10 (no kidding!) reboots later, it was ready to roll.

So, next I put in the FC5 dvd. after little headscratching, I figured out the custom partition tool (100Mb boot, 2Gb swap, 30Gb root, 50Gb data.) 20 minutes later (oh yeah, dvd install is the way to go) and 1 reboot later, I thought I was ready to go. Doh, Fedora wasn’t on the GRUB boot menu? It kicked over to XP after a few seconds. Oh well, at least I didn’t break the XP install.

That was Monday night… Yesterday morning I was going to check my mail and noticed that my machine rebooted (more XP updates). I’ve got a quirk that I get I BIOS error message every time I boot about a drive being missing because my BIOS backup battery is dead. So, I hit the F1 to continue and noticed that FC5 grub entry wasn’t missing, you just don’t see the OS selection list unless you hit escape to kill the default boot timer. Sweet.

Some final FC5 config questions and another reboot and things are looking good.

On my daily run through digg, I spotted that the Windows Vista RC2 was now available to everyone (formerly it was available only to folks who signed up for the beta testing program.) I remembered that it was easy enough to get the installer, but you needed to have an install key to keep it running for more than 15 days. A few posts down on the dig page, some one provided a link that got you an install key with your live.com id (aka your Windows Passport.)

So, I figured what the hay, lets see what all the fuss is about. A mere half hour later, 3.2Gb iso file was downloaded. I think it took longer to burn to dvd on my ancient 2.4X writer than it took to download. After clearing my pc activity for a few hours with the wife (being that its the print/scan/copier for our network) I swapped out my windows xp drive and put in a random 20Gb drive I keep for messing around with new operating systems. So, I put the freshly burned installer disk in the drive and booted back up.

After about 10 minutes of random copying and status messages, it asked me for the install key and which drive it should put vista on. Have to say the partition manager interface was pretty nice. I quickly nuked the FC5 install formerly on the drive and created a new partition with zero head scratching. After that it said we’ve got enough details for now, and went on about its way installing.

About 45 minutes and a few rebates later, it asked me a few more questions (where will this machine be used? home/work, and my login account info) and then did a performance test. I guess this where they try to figure out just home much eyecandy your hardware can handle. A few more minutes of harddrive griding and a few screen blinks and blanks later, I’m at the Vista login screen.

It managed to get my video set up pretty much correct. Hmm, the audio doesn’t seem to be working. Wait a tick, there it goes. Internet seems to work. Windows networking doesn’t see the rest of my network. Doh, wrong workgroup. After hunting around in the control panel (why to they regroup all the applets with every release? argh…) So I eventually change the workgroup name. The network config stuff looks about the same as XP to me (so much for that complete rewrite?). I click off to save my change and… of course, get the prompt to restart. Geez, I can change my network config until the cows come home in FC5 and never have to reboot.

The only reason I wanted to connect to my network is so I’d have some music and pictures to check out all these fancy new explorer views for this kind of stuff. Man, network browsing is pretty sloooow. Hmm, lets play some mp3’s in the new media player. After taking about 30 seconds to spin up WMP tries to play something. Its having all sorts of problems. Its all distorted and skippy. It appears not be getting enough CPU time. Strange, all that’s running is WMP and 1 explorer window. Enough of that.

The new interface stuff is just OK. Nothing that I’d say was jaw dropping (like XGL). The way new windows fade into view is kinda nice. Translucent window edges? Nothing to write home about. The new start menu? A lot nicer than XP. Global search? Hmm, not much to really search on but seemed kinda slow.

Slow was pretty much my general impression. Granted I’m puttering along on a 2 year old machine (2.8Ghz, 1Gb, Nvidia FX5200 128Mb graphics), but it still seems like things could be faster. I poked around for a while trying to find a config area to tweak which Aero effects are turned on off to see if I could find something workable, but gave up after 10 minutes. I’m sure its probably in there, but I’ve had enough for now. Pretty much the whole time I was in Vista my CPU was locked in at 100% and the harddrive was buzzing about 2x as much as it normally does with XP.

As a glutton for punishment, I tried to fire up the Media Center on the office chance it might recognize my cheapo tuner card. After 30 minutes in the MC setup wizard, and failures in the channel scanner and program info downloads, I figured that getting that work wasn’t gonna happen. That and the test videos for configuring video options looked more like a power point presentation (flip flip flip) than a video at full screen on my hardware.

So after my little experiment, I bid Vista a good bye and good luck, swamped my harddrives back to XP land. Its not as fancy, its stable enough for me, and its whole lot more snappy. Back to my short term plan… convert my existing windows boxes to FC5 (or FC6?) and my longer term plan… to get a Mac.

Haven’t had time to sit down and do any writing lately, between work, exercise, visiting relatives, and some side projects.

Exercise-wise (man, that’s a nice domain. nuts, its already taken.) I’ve been trying out some new stuff. Turns out I messed myself up a bit in the final stretch at the ARC Run half marathon. I think it was either the last 90 degree left or 50 foot pea gravel pit that did me in. Not sure exactly what I did. But had some pain shooting up and down my leg for a few days. I couldn’t localize it down to foot, ankle, calf, or knee specifically. It seemed to hurt in different places at different times.

So, I thought it was time for a good a little time off from running. So I started swapping some runs at the Y for weights, some outdoor runs with skates, and just plain vegging out a bit.

The weights are a nice change of pace after all the miles. Feels good work work some different (forgetten?) muscle groups. After the first 2 works I was in agony with soreness and pretty much unable to lift my arms above my shoulders. Thankfully, that faded soon enough, and I haven’t been nearly as sore in sessions since then. The calf machine also helped stretch out my problem leg. I think I’m gonna try to stick with the weights circuit (Monday’s and Friday’s seem to be working well) and see if I can tighten up some problem areas; namely my gut and man boobs.

Skating was also a welcome change. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember/realize that my skates do a pretty good job chewing up my ankles. My k2 skates are a few years old, but the inner boots seem to be in pretty good shape. I checked for excessive wear in the boot areas where they cause me problems (on my left ankle, really bad on the inside) and they still seem pretty cushy there. Blisters in that area kinda suck as almost all my other shoes tend to irritate the same area afterward. I should try two pairs of socks (maybe a high pair and a crew) next time and see if the extra padding fixes the problem.

With alternative exercise and light miles on the track at the Y, I think I’m about 95% back to normal. Did my a first 10 miler outside in a few weeks yesterday, and felt pretty good through out. Was a little a little sore in that leg afterward, but I think it was more due to not having gone that far in a while, than anything related to the injury. This run also put me past 1000 miles for the year!

Side project-wise, I’ve been working on my own RSS reader. I’ve been using Feed On Feeds for a while now. Its quite usable its beginning to get a little clunky as the number of feeds I track has grown. I thought about trying to hack the additional functionality I wanted into FoF, but its php based. I know enough php to probably do what I want, but its kinda painful to shoehorn stuff into other folk’s code.

So, I’ve embarked on writing my own reader from scratch. If you couldn’t have guessed already, I’m using a perl cgi backend. Whipping up some code to fetch/parse/store RSS information was pretty straightforward.

I’m currently working on the interface. Of course, I’m shooting for something Web 2.0-esque that’s Ajax-ified. I’m enjoying learning some tricks along the way. The DOM manipulation development process is proving to kinda interesting compared to the pure CGI world I’m so used to.

I’ve got about 24 hours in so far and I’m pretty pleased. I’m also to the point where I might consider letting some friends give it a shot. If you’re interested let me know. Outside of that I’m gonna start a wish list for features then start bagging ‘em out a few at a time.

Ok, enough rambling for now. Flirting with the idea of going for a quick run, if I can just put off some chores, may I just might head out…