Category: Geekdom

If you have a pile of free time, head over and read this article on 99 Performance Tips for Windows XP. Saw it originally at TinyApps, but others have it, too.

Somebody has far too much time on their hands, and has managed to get both Windows 95 and 98 running on his PDA. Link from The Raw Feed.

Want your blog to ping a pile of sites at once with just one URL? Then make sure it’s pinging the Ping-o-matic and ping 12 sites all at once instead of plugging in a pile of URLs. Via Neil’s smaller world.

It runs slowly but it runs. With the right software, and a lot of patience and time, you can do it, too.

I’m a MovableType user. Version 2.661 powers this site. The software is great, powerful, and has worked well for quite a while. I, like most of the world, have been waiting patiently for version 3.0 to be released. I was part of the beta team, though I didn’t have time to test it like I wanted (nor did I feel comfortable testing it on this site because of all the trouble people were having installing the beta). The beta process as a whole wasn’t handled too well, either, with numerous bugs, poor communication, and other problems.

Then came a simple announcement that nobody in the community expected. Version 3.0 will, for the most part, be a paid product. Yes, there is a free version, but it limits a great deal of people’s usage of things. And the pricing structure and licensing of things made a bunch of folks angry, though SixApart answered and addressed most of the questions in a follow-up post.

MovableType is great software, there is no doubt about that. And, I agree with Ken (partially) that MT should cost money. My gripe is two-fold:

1. The lack of communication from SixApart. There was no rumors, no hints, no nothing that this was coming. Beta testers and long-time users were completely thrown for a loop with this.
2. Better care of the community by SixApart. There are hundreds of developers out there writing wonderful plug-ins for MT, many that have been folded in as native code to the distribution. And there were probably thousands that donated to the project as well. In my opinion, a personal license should have been giving free to all donators of $20 or more, period — not a discount, but a full personal-edition license. Folks like use have kept this project going because of our donations, and I feel like we’re now asked to pay more for a project that we’re responsible for keeping alive. This is what the folks at Trillian did, and I think it would’ve been appropriate here.

But, again, they have that right. Why? MT is not free software. It never has been. It’s distributed for free, and came with source code, but it wasn’t free. The project survived and thrived in the blogging community because Movable Type was free enough. It wasn’t GPL or anything like that, so Six Apart had every right to do what they did. I guess it just pisses me off how they’ve alienated their loyal users.

Obviously, this has sparked quite the debate in blogging circles. Everybody was debating the issue all over the frickin’ web, and a bunch of people leaving, many of them moving to WordPress using some of the ideas at these sites (though there are some problems with MT 3.0’s export routine), or they’re trying out Expression Engine.

Here’s my conundrum: I’m running ads on this site — they’re small, they’re at the bottom of pages, and they’re non-intrusive. I’m in violation of MovableType’s licenses because of those ads. I put them up so I could pay the hosting bill for this site, and it’s done that and to work on knocking down some of my medical bills. So I’m already screwed in that regard, because I don’t have the $195 to buy a commercial license. Heck, even if I got rid of the ads, I’d still be in violation because I occasionally link to Amazon using my affiliate tags — and I’ve probably made a whopping 12 cents on that.

Secondly, Perl is not my specialty. If I could call any language my specialty, it would be PHP (and I’m not a super-whiz at that, but at least I know what I’m doing). I’d rather be using a PHP-powered system.

Lastly, I don’t like being limited by the license of a product, and that’s what I am right now. A “free” product should be free to do whatever you want — commercial, personal, or otherwise. Thank goodness for the GPL.

So far, WordPress meets all those criteria.

SixApart distributes a free version of MT, but it truly isn’t free. Don’t be surprised to see this site move to another system at some point. I’m probably going to upgrading to MT 3.0’s Free edition in the meantime until I find something that will work out dandy for me.

On a side note, I’m sure this entry will take a while to upload as it tries to ping all the sites I’ve linked to.

This is a very handy tip:

Open a Command Prompt window and leave it open. Close all open programs. Open TASKMGR.EXE from the Run command or by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ESC. Go to the Processes tab and End Process on Explorer.exe. Leave Task Manager open. Go back to the Command Prompt window and change to the directory where the undeletable file is located in. At the command prompt type DEL where is the file you wish to delete [the path to the file]. Go back to Task Manager, click File, New Task and enter EXPLORER.EXE to restart the GUI shell. Close Task Manager.

PCI Express, which is debuting within the next few months on Intel chipsets, is the replacement for both the AGP and PCI slots that are used for expansion. The speed at which data travels through PCI Express slots is a ton faster than standard PCI and AGP slots. The graphics PCI Express slots will, at their start, roughly run at the speed of an AGP 16x slot (you can only get a hold of an AGP 8X board now on high-end boards).

Graphics cards are going to fly on this new sub-system, but here’s the best part: AlienWare plans on building motherboards with two PCI Express Graphics slots so you can hook the graphics cards together. This reminds me of back in the day when Voodoo2 SLI configs (two cards running in tandem) were about the best damn thing you could have in your system.

But the trick with this is that you’ll be able to hook together video cards from different companies. Oh damn that would kick ass, assuming you could afford it. Meanwhile, my AMD 1ghz machine with an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 is clunking along just fine at home.

Yes, Nick, I missed this before, so if you use TopStyle and MovableType, you can download code snippets that will make creating custom CSS templates much easier. I’m mostly posting this here for future reference when I decide to redo my templates on this site, but I figured I’d share in case anybody else uses TopStyle and MT.