The long-awaited new laptop has arrived at last!

By 'long-awaited', I'm referring to how long I've wanted a new computer and saved for it. I definitely don't mean how long I've waited, after ordering, for it to ship: it was only a week ago today that I placed the order! Since they say it takes 1-2 weeks just to configure it usually, I'd say that's not bad at all.

Here are some relevant specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, 2 MiB L2 cache, 800 MHz FSB
2 GiB RAM
120 GB 5400 RPM hard drive
8x DVD burner
nVidia Quadro NVS 140M, 128 MiB VRAM
15.4" WSXGA+ widescreen, 1680x1050 native resolution
3x USB 2.0 (1.1 was incredibly slow with large amounts of data)
IEEE 1394 (Firewire)
Sundry other features (some kind of card reader, keyboard light, wireless internet, etc.)

There are tons of intangibles about this machine that I just love. The craftsmanship is head and shoulders above the competition -- it's a solidly built machine. (After owning a Dell for 3 years, I came to realize that's important to me!) The sound is surprisingly clear for laptop speakers. And it's so incredibly quiet, too! When I turned it on for the first time, I couldn't even tell whether it was on when I closed my eyes. Last night I thought it was getting rather loud; turns out, the noise was from my other laptop several metres away.

Far and away, the biggest downfall of the computer is Windows Vista. The OS is simply not ready for prime time yet. My system is a beast, and once Vista boots up it runs it well, but it seems to take forever to boot up in the first place. I've even had a blue screen of death already! And several of the features just don't work.

The reason I'm keeping it instead of 'downgrading' to XP is to keep an eye to the future. I've no doubt that, in the 3+ years I'm guaranteed to have this laptop, MS will tweak and patch to the point where Vista's a decent OS, like they did with XP. I'd rather just keep slogging away with Vista until they do.

Of course, what will make it bearable will be the 'other' OS on my system -- Gentoo Linux. I can't wait until I get it installed so I can actually start getting stuff done on my computer. I've never dual booted before, but Thinkpads are supposed to be awesome for Linux and I have extensive day-to-day experience with Gentoo.

In the meantime, at least I have the machine in time for the NIST trip in a week, and the MMM conference at the beginning of next month, where I'll be giving a talk!

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If somebody told me a month ago that I could have:
- My favourite team of all time, the Cleveland Indians, advancing to the ALCS
- The hated Yankees eliminated from the postseason in the first round, once again
- A bonus paycheque of $147.35 because of it
I would have flipped out. Last night, though, that's exactly what happened!

Well.. almost. Technically the cash is just a refund, because that's how much I paid for four tickets to game 5. With the Tribe taking the series in 4 games, that game will no longer be played, so I should be getting my money back pretty soon. Of course, the downside is that I miss seeing probable Cy Young winner C.C. Sabathia in a playoff game at the Jake, but I'm glad because this lines up the Tribe's pair of aces for the ALCS against the BoSox. (Not to mention, having just ordered a new Thinkpad, I could frankly use the cash at the moment!)

Here's to the 2007 Indians -- the best Tribe team I've ever seen, who have a great shot at taking the World Series!

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What follows is the text of a spam email which evaded the Carnegie Mellon spam filter. Notice how it scrupulously avoids any spam-like phrases. So, where's the message? In a black-and-white image file containing the text. Pretty clever. Enjoy!

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It's been a real pain to be without a working laptop. Here's a brief history of my tale of woe, right up to the happy ending.

I was trying to get the new cedega version to work, and somehow I got the idea to run the python updater. I eventually was able to play Deus Ex on my laptop -- or, at least, to run it. It played at twice the normal speed, making it effectively impossible. Meanwhile, a staggeringly diverse array of essential programs (evolution, openoffice, ghostview, firefox, etc.) just started crashing. So Tuesday of exam period, I decided to wipe it & reinstall.

I thought I'd save myself some time (heh) and use genkernel for a default config. My reward was a non-working wireless card and the inability to start X-windows, among other annoyances. Attempts to "patch it up" with a regular kernel didn't really help, so I decided to wipe it and reinstall.

Well before I could get too far into it, Amy got to town, and you can guess who took priority between her and the computer! Not having time to finish up before we hit the road, I decided to wipe it and reinstall.

I never got home for more than a day at a time until it was practically New Year's, and we never stayed anywhere with wireless internet for me to get the installation done. When I finally got settled at home, it was a matter of getting the essentials up and running and sniping at individual problems, one at a time. It wasn't until yesterday that I finally got something genuinely new.

Apparently X does true transparency, and it looks very neat indeed. Be sure to check the transparency screenshots to see what I mean. Well... right now I only have one since my screenshot program is being finicky about actually picking up the transparency. But trust me, it's cool!

I still have to get a few more things done, like getting the USB ports running for digital cameras, or fixing the obnoxious vim scripting error that kills ftp browsing. And, not having a laptop prevented me from getting caught up on my email, not to mention the grant proposal deadline I missed! But at least I'm back in business, and ready for round 2 at CMU.

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My computer's been out of commission for a while, and I only just got everything reinstalled. Even now it's not really up to its old standards, and there's a lot I'm still working out.

Imagine my surprise when I visited my blog and found it overrun by spam! Luckily, they only got one blog entry, and it wasn't that bad, all things considered. They seriously misjudged their target audience if they thought hawking viagra on gpi.com was going to get them anywhere!

Unfortunately, I did have to disable anonymous comments. It was easy to do (thanks to my foresight in design!), but I really would have preferred not to force people to register just to tell me what they think of my blog entries. The good news is that user accounts are totally secure, in terms of spammers being unable to get your email addresses. The only way to get 'em is to look directly at the database! So, you're all safe.

Have a happy New Year! :)

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I'm beginning to think there might just be something to this idea of "user testing".

In the past 24 hours, I've had people very close to me complain about serious issues using the site. First was when I told Amy I'd given her picture posting access, and that it should show up in her menu. I asked her to hit Refresh under her User menu; she told me nothing happened. After a little back and forth, I eventually determined that she was hitting the refresh button on her browser instead. The reason was simple: she didn't realize those words on the top were drop-down menus! I assumed most users would expect to find menus at the top, where they're generally found in applications. But people just aren't used to that kind of functionality on the web. The item has since been renamed Update Privileges, a much more descriptive name than Refresh.

Then this morning I had an exchange with my brother about registering, which took place in the comments section for all to see. After I fixed the initial hiccough leftover from my transition to PHP 5, he told me the button didn't work. Eventually, I realized that he must have had some errors in his page, so of course the form wouldn't submit. Now, I still think the backend coding for the forms on my site are masterfully done. The transparent client-side/server-side error checking is a beautiful thing, and it's implemented quite elegantly. But it's all pretty worthless if the user doesn't know what's going on! To someone unaware that there's sophisticated error checking taking place behind the scenes, it just looks like the button doesn't work. I fixed this by adding an additional error message at the bottom when a form fails to complete, telling the user to check the rest of it.

The point is that I never would have thought of these problems just using it by myself. I'm just too familiar with the system. My access levels changed? Oh, I'd better hit Refresh under my User menu, because the menus are stored on a session object to reduce the load on the database. The form wouldn't submit? I must have made an error of some sort; I'd better scroll up to see what it is. These kinds of things are the most natural in the world to me, but to someone who didn't build the site from scratch they can be pretty obscure.

Granted, I don't yet have a solution for all the problems. The main problem with the User menu is that people don't know that's what it is: they don't expect it to drop down on mouseover. And I can't really add content telling people that's how it works, because the drop-down behaviour is presentation and can change at any time with a new stylesheet. But at least I'm aware the problems exist, and aware of their nature. That's a good start!

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