djst's nest

New Hardware

I just bought a better computer! I got it really cheap, and it's nothing to brag about, but here are the specs (that I know of):

• Pentium 4 2400 MHz
• 2 x 128 MB DDR (333 Mhz Dual Channel) ¹Currently I have an additional 512 MB chip plugged in, resulting in 768 MB with Single Channel (166 MHz). I plan on buying an additional 512 MB chip and sell the 128 MB chips in the future.
• Built-in graphics card (Intel 82865, sucks big time)
• Built-in Network Adapter (Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet)
• Built-in Sound Card
• DVD-ROM

For the record, here are the specs for the old computer:

• AMD Thunderbird 800 MHz
• 2 x 128 MB SD-RAM (100 Mhz)
• GeForce2 32 MB AGP card (brokenLately, the whole screen sometimes becomes a mess of misaligned pixels.)
• 10/100 Network Adapter
• Soundblaster Live 1024 Sound Card (brokenThere's a pulsating low-frequency distortion that's really annoying. Makes the subwoofer go nuts.)

Of course, I have also moved my TV card and CD-RW drive to the new computer. It's a HP computer (d330 uT(DF393T)) so I don't really know the motherboard manufacturer, but I think it's an Asus and I know the frequency is 533 MHz.

Tanenbaum about Linux and monolithic kernels

I knew Andrew S. Tanenbaum wrote MINIX, the simple UNIX-like operating system that (among other things, I'm sure) inspired Linus Torvalds to write Linux. I know this because I took a course on Operating Systems where we used a book written by Tanenbaum.

What I didn't know, however, was that Tanenbaum and Torvalds had a debate back in 1992 about MINIX vs Linux, or more precisely, micro kernels vs monolithic kernels. I learned a lot while reading it and I recommend anyone interested in operating systems to at least skim through it. I found out about it from Tanenbaum's response to Ken Brown about the claim that Torvalds didn't write Linux.

My blog is slow

My blog scrolls slowly in Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine. What's more, the blog scrolls extremely slowly in Gecko on Linux. This is because of the fancy semi-transparent background used on each blog entry, to make the background of the page (with the birds) appear brighter on the entries. Internet Explorer doesn't support alpha transparency in the first place, so it's not really an issue there.

Anyway, it turns out that Gecko should be able to perform a little faster if it were tweaked. In fact, Gecko hacker Boris Zbarsky just filed a bug report about this. Let's hope it's possible to speed up the performance!

5-3

Not again... :(