Geany – A lightweight IDE

Ever since I left Windows, I’ve always looked for a replacement of for Visual Studio. Though I have yet to find one I have found several programs that are quite nice. Though I do all of my coding in gvim now, I still wanted to have an IDE around just in case I ran into one of those situations where I feel that having an IDE would somehow benefit me in writing code. I used to use Anjuta as I have posted about before but it was huge, not near as big as Visual Studio, but I still felt I could do better. Which led me to geany.

I actually found Geany through one of the many liveCDs I’ve used in my time though I can’t for the life of remember which one had it. Geany is a lightweight IDE so it can’t do near what IDEsAnjuta, Netbeans, or Eclipse can do, but it does what the basic IDE should do. It has syntax highlighting, code completion, auto-indentation, and so on. My laptop is approaching the 5 year mark of its life so it can no longer handle a lot of the modern programs. I wouldn’t dream of trying to run beryl on it along with KDE. It would just be to much. Though I do plan on trying beryl and Gnome on my desktop.

If you’ve ever used Bloodshed-IDE then you’ll probably feel right at home with Geany. In my opinion both are merely glorified text editors that have a built in command to compile and run the programs for you, where a full IDE would have a myriad of features designed to help you code faster and better. Before anyone screams “Well if that’s all you want, vim can be configured for that!” your right it can, but I hardly consider vim to be an IDE of any kind and you could probably get smacked for saying so.

I fully recommend Geany and in fact I even gave it to one of my friends on a Wolvix CD so he could learn to write code in Linux. So if you want a tad more than vim, but not quite as much as Anjuta I don’t feel like you can go wrong with Geany.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Wolvix Help

I recently wrote a paper on how to use the Wolvix CD I burned for him. He was a total newbie to Linux so the paper was fairly comprehensive. He has yet to complain about it, so I assume it must of been fairly helpful. Anyway, on my Google web page, I have posted two versions. One version is for total newbies to Linux. The second version assumes some computer background and picks up where the first left off to include a minor how to on how to get started programming in Linux. The documents are far from complete and I plan on updating them shortly. I have yet to post on the Wolvix forum that I wrote them and I won’t until I feel that they have at least reached my humble approval. They are up for download in PDF format though for any who wishes to take a peak or even comment. All comments are welcome of course; good or bad.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Wolvix Guides

Bye Bye AMD

Sadly I am back at school, so that means I will not be able to play with my desktop for a while. Which means I can’t fix Quake2 nor play Quake2 in all of its high resolution glory. I haven’t actually bought a video game in years, and truth be told my copy of Quake2 isn’t exactly legit. But that’s the best and newest I had at the moment so I was trying it out and why not? I have nothing to lose really.

My laptop has become very stable. Its almost totally up-to-date and has all the program I currently need on it running smoothly. It has pretty much left me bored. I haven’t worked on my lame web page in a while but then again I don’t really have to much left to put on it. I’ve written several howtos, I don’t know how many actually read them though. I have also posted several of my configuration files. All from my laptop. I don’t know if anyone actually uses those either, but they are there for personal reference if nothing else.

This category thing that Blogger has put in its beta version is in my opinion a pain the butt. I constantly forget to apply them to my posts, and if you haven’t noticed I’ve only applied them back a couple of months, so don’t be surprised when half my posts don’t so up. I would go back and stick all of them in as well, but that just takes to long. I have neither the time nor the will to do it, so it won’t get done till Christmas at the soonest. Gotta love Christmas, but I will save my wish-list for another post.

Enjoy the Penguins!

A small update

I am sorry for the complete lack of posts recently. My desire to do anything kind of work recently has been nil. I don’t really consider my blog work per say, but it requires more effort than I really want to give right now. Its sad too because my computers are suffering.

I did manage to install Quake2 on my AMD64 machines downstairs but its having a sound issue. An ALSA buffer under run is killing my frame rate and making the game unplayable. I do believe if I can resolve the issue the game should fly along at any resolution I wish to play at. Thanksgiving break ends tomorrow more or less. I have to go back to school Sunday and school resumes Monday so I don’t really consider Sunday any more of a break than the Friday I came home on. My lack of motivation to do work is really concerning me. I’m in the process of applying for graduate school and I can’t even find the will to work on my undergraduate work. How will I ever find the motivation to pass graduate school? Who knows. I try not to concern myself with it to much to be honest.

The Playstation3 and the Xbox 360 have both been released now and while I don’t really care to won either system any time soon I do see a very interesting and naturally less spoken of battle being fought out. Sony back the Blu-ray disk technology while Toshiba backs HD-DVD. Both are new disk formats out to replace the current DVD. While I personally feel like HD-DVD is the better technology, especially for those under the Linux persuasion, I have a bad feeling Blu-ray is going to win. That is of course assuming there will be a winner. Remember when burnable DVDs came out and everyone waited to see if the DVD-R or the DVD+R would win? Well the thrill of the fight is long over but a winner as far as I can tell has not emerged. Both formats for the most are used interchangeably with most people. Almost all of the DVD burners you buy support both formats. I don’t honestly remember even ever hearing what the difference was supposed to be. They have the same capacities and speeds. While there is an obvious difference with the Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs I can almost feel the same thing happening again. The only thing that I think might prevent another draw in the format war might be the sale of movies. When the DVD-R / DVD+R war was fought the standard disc format was already settled, the DVD. The only thing you really had to worry about was what kind of disc do I want to make illegal copies of Terminator 2 on? Now the the tables have turned. Its now more like, how many dvd players am I going to have to buy before this over?

I personally am scared. The PS3 supports Blu-ray of course because of its parent Sony, while the Xbox 360 does HD-DVDs because Microsoft believes the format is more digital sharing friendly. Another twist that you may not see coming is the PS3 is Blu-ray ready out of the box. The Xbox 360 requires an add-on to get HD-DVD capability. And yes, all Xbox 360 games are on a standard DVD not an HD-DVD unlike the PS3 where everything is Blu-ray from the get-go. So the final twist is you find that the gaming market will ultimately become the deciding factor in the race. With out a doubt, considering the high price of Blu-ray and HD-DVD players, many people will resort to watching their movies on their PS3 or Xbox 360. So our new movie format may all come down to who sells the most the game systems. Scary isn’t it? That a bunch of pre-pubescent boys may be deciding the fate of audiophiles everywhere. I’m scared.

Another thing that concerns me is which ever format wins will ultimately find its way into my desktop. I don’t want to have to buy two new drives (one Blu-ray and one HD-DVD). I do not have the money for that. Now or anytime in the foreseeable future. Some Linux users are poor.

In conclusion, the day I see Linux distributions being distributed by either Blu-ray or HD-DVD discs, I’ll know when the battle is coming to or has come to a conclusion. I fully expect distros like Debian to be the first converts. And why not? With an ungodly amount of discs their a perfect candidate for the 50gig Blu-ray and 48gig HD-DVD.

Enjoy the Penguins!

I’ve finished the GRE

And as expected there was a rather large gap between my verbal and quantitative score. I’m a math major so I expected my quantitative to be a good bit higher, and it was. Neither score was as high as I wanted them to be, but I gave it my best shot. Now all thats left is finishing mailing in resumes and transcripts and wait for the (hopefully) good news.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Big Test

At 12:30PM today I take the GRE. At this point this pretty much decides my future with computers. Wish me luck!

No new posts in a while, sorry

Okay, I know I haven’t posted in a long time. I like to measure how long its been based on how far down the page my most recent post is on Gentoo Portage. Mine last post is no longer on the page period, so yeah its been longer than usual.

I’ve hit a lot of personal business lately resulting in a lack of posts on here. I have to take the GREs for graduate school Thursday, I also had a Latin test Monday, I’ll be taking a Philosophy test Thursday as well, and I am of course steeped in homework. So I’m still busy to say the least. Luckily Thanksgiving break is near and I’ll be able to at least to my homework leisurely for a week instead of being under constant deadline.

Finally I think when I get home I going to check out Sourcemage. Another source based distro. Once you get past the goofy naming convention the distro doesn’t look that bad. To me it looks like what I imagined Gentoo to look like during its first couple of years of existence. So I think I’ll try it out on my desktop. I’m just going to blow the Gentoo install right off of the hard drive. I don’t use it and I really want to play around with other distros more than I do.

Dell now sells AMD processors

As I was reading the USA Today today I noticed a massive AMD logo staring at me. Not in the market for a new computer I had no real reason to look any closer but curosity always gets the best of me. So my first instinct, as I assume it is with most people, is who is selling? I will look at specs second because all computer companies offer roughly the same hardware in their computers. So the quaility I associate with the brand has come to mean more to me than anything. Expecting an HP ad I was extrememly surprised to find DELL written in massive letters across the top of the ad! How did this slip under my radar? I saw no news of Dell decieding to use AMD processors in the desktop and laptop market. Even at that, Dell has never really advertised their sell of AMDs in the server market.

This tells me two things. One, Dell is getting desperate to turn around their ever increasingly poor performance. Apparently thier so desperate they’ve now abanonded their Intel only stragetgy. Second, it would also appear Intel has begun to loose face. Granted Intel is looking good from the point of view of the Apple market, but on the PC side of things it looks like Intel is starting to get desperate. On TigerDirect.com they’ve even gone as far as to place a massive flash ad with sound on how thier processors are the best in the world. Sound familar? Perhaps you remember the ad campaign by AMD a year or two ago challenging Intel to duke it out. If I recall the challenge was never accecpted.

AMD or not; I still will not buy another Dell comptuer. Building my own desktop allows me to custimize it the exact way I want it and also allows me to have tighter control over the budget as well. I am no longer forced to over pay anywhere from $20 to $150 for another stick of ram. As far as laptops are concerned, my Dell Inspiron 8200 is one of the best laptops I’ve ever used. Hardware wise I’ve never had serious trouble with it. It has proven to be durable, reliable, and although heavy for a laptop, portable enough to keep me happy. On the same hand though many of my friends have newer model laptops from Dell. How do they compare? Terrible. Absolutly terrible. They constantly overheat, break, and malfunction. I would not have a new generation Dell if my life depended on it. Unless I go small business, it looks like HP is my last bastion of hope for a decent laptop.

Enjoy the Penguins!

New distrobution: Tux GNU/Linux

There is a new distribution soon to be out. The title of the post is a link to their page and there is also a link at the bottom of the article. Its called Tux GNU/Linux. As of right now the distribution is only up to version 0.3 which makes it alpha in my opinion but that’s debatable. As of right now there isn’t anything that would make it special or different from competitors. Its in heavy development though so I expect a lot more from it in the near future. The website is nice looking and if the desktop follows along with the theme of the icons on the website I assume it will be rather nice looking as well. Their mission statement according to the web page sounds pretty much like every other distributions mission, so I’m still waiting for the differences between this distribution and countless other is. Its being based on Debian, a nice solid choice. Slackware seems to be the new cool liveCD distro base, perhaps Debian will become the new cool HDD distro base. We’ll see. Until then check out Tux and see if you think there is anything that sets it apart from the crowd.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Tux GNU/Linux

(C++) + Advanced Calc = No free time

I’m technically and Mathematics and History major so for me at this point computer science is more of a hobby than a serious endeavour like it will be soon. That doesn’t make my will to learn C++ any weaker though. Even though I consider this first course in C++ my last computer course at Marshall University, I still want to learn as much as possible. My teacher is making that impossible and we are starting to get into topics that are over my head and I feel are near impossible to learn without some help from a trained computer scientist. Or in plain English, I need a real teacher to replace the one I have.

When you combine C++ with my Advanced Calculus course though I’m really starting to drown. In calculus its not so much I don’t get it, I just don’t have time to do all of it. Proof after proof not to mention your typical undergraduate style homework problems add up to more time than I have. Not to mention, unlike some people I’ve met, I can’t do homework every waking hour. I just don’t have it in me. I need breaks, I need leisure time. No, I’m not talking five hours of video games every day leisure time, but atleast an hour to just chill and not think about school. Right now I don’t really have the time for either option. In fact I have Advanced Calculus and Philosphy homework due tomorrow that I should be doing right now instead of this, but I need to vent somewhere.

Enjoy the Penguins!