Month: February 2011

new desktop :)

This pay cycle I decided that it was my birthday month, and I was tired of my old desktop struggling to keep up with things (like, say, flash videos on youtube, or even low end gaming). With Kirsti’s encouragement, I spent about $700 on newegg.com and got the parts for a new build which has gone super well so far. (Ironically since they arrived during the work day and I was pretty busy, Kirsti did most of the actual putting together of the stuff I’d intended to. I think my total contribution was installing the power supply in the case, putting in the motherboard offsets and installing the optical drive.)

CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 955 (3.2ghz quad core)
RAM: 16gb ddr3-1333 (4x4gb, G.Skill)
MB: Asus M4A87TD
Video: Gigabyte GV-N450OC2-1GI (Nvidia Fermi 450 card, 1gb vram)
HD: WD Caviar Black 1TB (sata 3, 64mb ram cache)
DVDRW: an old but still functional ata133 LG dvdrw, recycled
Case: a ThermalTake black atx mid-tower, forget the model number
Power: antec 650w green (so named for high conversion efficiency)
OS: Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop

So, so happy with how it’s turned out. :) I’ve done things with it like have two operating systems installing into virtualbox in the background (various testbed VMs) while playing Portal via Steam on wine fullscreen in high res and it never stuttered. Ripping a DVD took less than half an hour (and I’m not sure that I found the right config options to tell HandBrake to go multi-core). OS install went smooth as silk, the hardware is super-performant, and best of all it’s quiet! The loudest sound it makes is the very faint noise that comes from really thrashing the crap out of the hard drive. I kind of wanted to get an SSD for main storage, but the $/GB ratio was still just a bit out of my reach, and I’ve heard of just enough bugs and glitches still being worked out with them that I felt that sticking with spinning rust for now was the safe call. With sata-3 on the motherboard, I’ll probably still be able to upgrade just fine to an SSD in a year or two when all the software and hardware kinks have gotten worked out.

how to cleanly exit SLIME mode in emacs

Because I constantly forget how to do this whenever I’ve got cause to fool around with SLIME mode in emacs (usually when working through Land of Lisp, which is on Safari too), a note to myself:

  1. in the SLIME buffer, press “,” to enter a slime command
  2. enter “sayoonara”
  3. press enter to exit

This is enough to exit back out to ordinary emacs (from which ctrl-c ctrl-v exits, naturally).

good weekend :)

I love weekends where I don’t have to work (at least, when I’m not getting paid overtime — you want to give me time and a half on top of my nominal hourly rate and my attitude towards overtime changes immediately, heh). Got a reasonable amount of studying done (could’ve been more, but still a fair amount), which even though the example problem sets are somewhat tedious doesn’t really feel like work so much as highly directed fun. I’m hoping the most recent death march project is pretty much put to bed.