We all know that computers heat up when you use them.
The recent processors take up more electricity and heat up more than ever. Intels do better than AMD’s, but they are not cool at all (while the old G4 on powerbooks didn’t even need a fan).
Overclockers are growing, sites about overclocking, modding and so on popped up like muchrooms in the last couple of years. The growth of this new way of using computers also helped the growth of “modding”, the art of modifying your computer and making it look nicer. You can add lights, put a window on the side (or use a plexglas case and make it entirely transparent), you can have neons inside the computer.

Cooling is probably the most important part of overclocking and modding. We have big fans running slowly and silently, we have smaller fans running faster. We have liquid cooling. There is everything you can dream of.

This is how my friend cools down his main webserver.

I have more pictures, but you really don’t want to see them! 😀

I imagine those modders that are probably having shivers right now.
I remember when I went to buy my first computer. I would have treated it like a tiny chick, moving it slowly, never shaking it, putting it down softly on the ground.
I went to the shop where I ordered it, told my name and the guy went in the back. He came back holding the computer on a shoulder with one hand and asked “where’s the car?” and we walked out and he put in the car as if it had been a piece of wood or something that would have NEVER broken… I was so SCARED that it would break up in pieces! 😀

Is it inappropriate to post such a link on my blog?

I’ll let you decide. No other words.

After a LOT of emails, many teleconferences and a lot of work, a public draft was published!

It’s still a draft and there is still a LOT of work to be done, but it’s good to have a first version public and hear the comments from the community.

I would REALLY like to hear comments about this.
Get it now! It just takes half an hour to read…

I don’t want to say anything other than “read it”, but I would really like to hear from the community.

I am not about to talk about logging visits and tracing users, but rather write log files.

Adding logging functions while you are writing a new software is really boring. It is one of those things that while you’re writing the software you don’t feel the need and think it will never be of any use.
Unfortunately softwares always have a flaw somewhere and users, for some reason, tend to do something that you hadn’t predicted.
When I started to write software I used to write only a few lines of logs here and there, just because someone told me I should do it.
Now my softwares are FULL of logs, almost any single action has a possible line of log. Of course I set many different levels of log, but when a new application goes online, I always have the logs set to the maximum. I want to see what happens and be able to trace it in the first days online.
I learnt the importance of logging where a client wanted me to explain why one of his customers was complaining and we could not find what hadn’t worked properly. It has been really hard and basically we did not have an answer, but that day I decided that I wanted to have an answer the next time that this would have happened.

Logging is the only way you have to discover is something went wrong, what the user did to make your software crash or fail. It is REALLY important in my opinion. You should not only write logs, but you should also make sure that the logs you write will be useful. This is not simple, if you don’t know the problem, you can’t be able to write the logs that will be useful, so you should try to image what could go wrong and first of all make sure your software will “fail gracefully” and then you should try to log something that should be useful to replicate the problem and possibly solve it.

These are my two cents for a better programmer. 🙂

Even Google has eventually launched a personalized home.
All the most common features are there such as headlines from “Top news”, feeds from sites such as Slashdot or Wired, weather forecast, etc.

While personlizing I noticed that all the requested “sections” were being simply added one after the other, divided into three main columns. I immediately wondered that it wasn’t the order I would have wanted them to be… But Since it was just a mere test to see how it worked I didn’t pay too much attention.

While editing the prefences of the single feeds (you may change the number of headlines to see, for example), I incidentally dragged the top bar of the section a little bit to the right (instead of simply clicking on “edit”). I noticed that the bar was following the mouse pointer… A little lamp instantly turned on over my head. I grabbed the bar and moved the section in another spot and magically the section was moved in another column and in the exact position I wanted it.

That’s magic!

Do you remember HTML 3.2, with all gray background and only <hr> to separate text?

Since I bought my first notebook I have tried to make regular backups.
Most of the software I develop eventually goes on a CVS/SVN server so I wouldn’t probably really lose anything, but still, saving emails, many PDF’s I stored in the years and so on would be nice.
For this reason, about once a month, I run a backup script and copy the generated tbz2 on an external drive.

A few months ago, for some strange reason, my mac didn’t start properly and when I restarted the Stickies were gone.
After only 3 months, I eventually dedicated the needed 10 minutes to restore the last backup that I remember should be before that date and, *MAGIC*, my Stickies are back!

Now I’m happy I did backups! 😀

I just downloaded Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 for Mac.

I am really happy with it (tested for about a day now). The most important thing, as a Mac user, is the prefs window. It is eventually more Mac-style and most of all it’s lightyears faster! This was really needed as the old prefs window was really annoying.
Some other widgets have been made more Mac-style. That’s nice too.

Here’s a pic of the prefs window:

I hope no one @Mozilla will feel bad, but from the first tests I’d say that the rendering is the same. Not that this is bad, I am quite happy with the rendering engine of Mozilla, I would not use it, if I weren’t totally happy with it. You actually can’t do much better than this (maybe website designers should start doing a better job…).

Pages for HTTP errors has also been updated. I read some posts on mozillazine of people wondering what could have been changed. Well, the change is that you will now see a nicer page when you try to connect to a non-existing site, for example. Here’s a sample:

I have to say that I was expecting something revolutionary, but it hasn’t happened.
The Mozilla engine hasn’t evolved much as it is already GREAT!
Firefox is really satisfying too, a nice layout for a great engine. What else can we ask for?

With Firefox 1.x I remember that sometimes Google pages such as gmail or blogspot used to take a lot of RAM (and hog a little my little PowerBook) when I left them open in the background. Gmail keeps reloading and from a really high point of view it would seem that Firefox doesn’t cleanup the memory properly. blogspot.com, on the other side, seems to use something in their blog-editor that sometimes HOGS the CPU.
All this happens on my Mac, I have no idea if it happens/happened on wintel or linux.

I will test more and eventually come out with an update.
As far as I have seen until now I’m pretty satisfied. gmail has been in the background for a few hours now and the blog-editor hasn’t presented any hog, yet.
We’ll see.

I have recently purchased the iPod shuffle.
As I had said, I wanted to buy it for a while. I have always thought that buying the original iPod was not a good idea because I didn’t need 60GB and I wanted something small. The Shuffle seemed the good solution.

As I wrote in a previous post, I miss the display while I still think you can live without it.
Now the new iPod nano is out. I think I JUST need it.
I watched part of the presentation, I still need to watch the rest, but it’s definitely beautiful!

Take a look here:
http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/

And the presentation here (you’ll need quicktime, of course!):
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/specialevent05/

I really wish I could review it, but it’s not possible at this time. I will have to wait for a week or so. I will check if they have it at an apple store near me. 🙂