It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I have spent most of the day happily moving my development machine away from the Dell Optiplex 320 (Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6Gz, 2Gb PC4200 DDR2) to a new Dell Optiplex 740 (AMD 64 X2 Dual Core 4600+, 2Gb PC5300 DDR2) because all of last week while I was programming an RMA database / interface for work the damn thing kept crashing on me about five times a day. Needless to say quite frustrating! Basically I jammed Ubuntu into it with a LILO shoehorn and it had been kind of quirky running 64bit apps. It’s actually a known problem that Ubuntu (or parts of Ubuntu) don’t play well with the 320’s at all.

We received a replacement 740 in today and I said screw it! I need a system that’s not going to crash on me. So I took a spare SATA drive, replaced the pre-installed Windows drive with it, installed Ubuntu with the smexy Ubuntu 7.04 AMD 64 Desktop ISO I burned a couple of weeks earlier and loaded it up. Installation was nearly flawless. The only thing I had to do after installing the restricted nVidia drivers for my GeForce 7300 LE was to add “1440×900″ to my available resolutions and set the monitor refresh rates to play nice with the sleek HP w1907 Sabrina helped me pick out. So now I’ve got a perfectly working Ubuntu box up and running with Beryl and an Audigy kicking out the tunes. No crashes yet!

Right now I’m in the process of copying the data from my old computer to the new one and I wanted to pass along a great new find. I’d been using VMWare’s Virtual Server and Virtual Machine software for a while now, either running linux on Windows or Windows on Linux and thought that I would try something else. VMWare charges money for most of there stuff, and it’s huge (100+Mb or so). Innotek has just released VirtualBox 1.4.0 for not only Windows, and various Linux distributions, but for Mac OS X as well. On top of that they have compiled both 32bit and 64bit versions of it! Even better. It’s free, it’s open-source, and it’s only 15Mb. So now I can test out virtual networks and servers for my fun little projects without the possibility of crashing the entire current domain. A concept the current database “administrator” has yet to grasp. The kind of person who will allow duplicate records in the database because she’s too lazy to clean them up. <twitch>

More tomorrow!

Busy ass week. Wow. First, my raise will take effect for this week’s worth of work. I’m getting a whole dollar an hour more! It’s still about $5 less than I should be making an hour, but that’s still another $120 a month I can use to pay off bills, save up for sparklies and computers, and you know… food.

Secondly, I have been approved essentially “Unlimited Overtime” to bury myself in PHP code to make a quoting module residing on a separate server to tie into our FileMaker solution. Yay! Plus, if I can get this done by the end of the month, I’ll get some “Serious change” as a reward. Kick ass! Bigger shinies! Faster computers! XD

So yeah, I’ll be a little worse for the wear the next couple of weeks working from 9:00am until probably 11:00pm or later. What’s even better is that I get to tell all the helpdesk requests to back off while I’m working on the project! So very, very happy! XD

This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. Time to show these guys what I can do.

<rolls up sleeves> Yosh!