jasonwilder.com

From my switch to Ubuntu, I quickly noticed that hitting the backspace key in Firefox doesn’t go back one page.  It’s very annoying.  It looks like you can change the behavior of the backspace key pretty easily.  This post explains how to fix it.

I’ve used Windows for home and work for as long as I can remember.  I rarely upgrade because I always run into problems and I end up wasting a weekend trying to resolve them.  I like things to just work.  At work, I just recently got a new T61 ThinkPad, which is very similar to my T61p that I have at home.  It came with Windows XP which is fine but many of my coworkers use Macs or Linux.  A lot of the software I’m using isn’t as Windows friendly as I wish it was and I’m really the only person using a Windows box so I have to figure out all the weird quirky Windows issues myself.  I spent the last few days resolving them all but it just feels like I’m fighting with my machine which is very distracting.  So… I ended up making the switch to Ubuntu Linux 8.0.4.  I’m actually writing this from my new install.

I have installed a few flavors of Linux on my home PC over the years, mostly Redhat, and it’s always been a very painful process.  Most of my Redhat installs were relatively painless but it was too complicated to get everything working.  There package management didn’t really work so I would waste a lot of time trying to find dependent RPMs to installs.  Plus, Gnome and KDE always had strange usability issues that I didn’t know how to resolve.  So, I was very hesitant to switch to Linux for a work computer since I actually have to be productive.

I have to say that I am really impressed with how easy the install and setup of Ubuntu was on my laptop.  I burned the ISO image, booted from it and about 7 steps later, I had a working dual-boot of Windows XP and Ubuntu.  Pretty much everything worked straight out of the box.  This guide was really helpful if you are looking for information.  I had to add support for the middle button for scrolling.  Worked just like it says in the guide.

Unlike my Redhat experiences, package management is really easy with Ubuntu.  I tend to use apt-get more than the GUI and I haven’t had single issue.  Every app I find online to install was available via apt-get except for XMMS (I still use the classic Winamp MP3 because it works great and XMMS looked pretty similar).  I couldn’t find a package for it so I had to build and install that manually… but that was really smooth as well for a change.

The only issues I’m having at the moment is the right “alt” key doesn’t seem to be registered and hitting the “backspace” key in Firefox doesn’t go back.  I’m sure I’ll resolve these eventually.

Overall, Ubuntu on a ThinkPad T61 works great and I may install in on my T61p after I get more comfortable using it.

I just read about Amazon.com’s Dynamo storage system. It’s a very fascinating application of distributed systems algorithms. Well worth the read if you are interested in a large-scale storage architectures or distributed algorithms.

I finally bought a new laptop. I was debating for awhile to switch to a Mac or stay with a Windows laptop. I ended up buying a ThinkPad T61P. I have had ThinkPads at work a few times and have always liked using them. My last laptop was a Dell Inspiron 8000… it was desktop replacement laptop that weighed ton and ran really hot. You have to put a pillow on your lap to use it because it gets so hot.

This ThinkPad is great though. It’s very light and doesn’t burn my lap like my Dell did. The only downside was that I ended up maxing the thing out with 4GB of RAM but Windows XP can only see 3GB because it’s a 32-bit OS. I didn’t want Vista because I haven’t heard many good things about it. Maybe one day scrap XP and install 64-bit OS that can see all my RAM. The screen has a resoultion of 1920×1200 which is really nice if you like to see things small and have multiple windows open. I have found the font on some web sites to be too small to read so I have to manually increase the font size in the browser. Sites that are a built to a fixed size and don’t auto-scale can be difficult to use… but I haven’t come across that many. Overall, I’m very happy with it and would definitely buy a ThinkPad from Lenovo again.

After 10 years, I have finally made an effort to get my site in order. If you have been here before (which I doubt you have), you’ll probably remember a “Coming soon…” message on my home page. I put that up the last time someone asked me why my page was blank. I even installed this cool blogging software since you can’t have a site these days without a blog. So… welcome to the updated jasonwilder.com!