Welcome rebooters! You probably stumbled upon my site via the front page of CSS Reboot where this site is featured as one of 50 premium rebooters. My redesign for PaulStamatiou.com was supposed to come in time for my spring break but it took longer than expected so I launched it on March 31st, exactly one month ago, with this post. My old design, which I have released, was a skinny single-column mod of the K2 theme. The design you are currently looking at, dubbed Defiance, was my attempt at a more professional design allowing me to show more content (many of my guides are lengthy, making reading them on a skinny layout a challenge) and provide for easier navigation. Continue Reading »
Take a look at this 5 minute screencast showing you how to make a simple, AJAX-ified web application that loads images from flickr using the Ruby on Rails platform. Many new database-backed web services are using Ruby on Rails to accomplish things with ease compared to the older PHP methods. I’m not one to code when bored but RoR is an intriguing open-source framework. Browsing at job listings, it seems that RoR is more and more frequently becoming a recommended skillset. Continue Reading »
As I don’t have too much time to blog right now given all of my finals, I’m going to share a few links that I’ve been enjoying recently. Continue Reading »
Wondering why one of your OS X applications seems a little sluggish on your Intel Mac? Maybe it is running through Rosetta translation and could be a PPC application. Well there is an easy way to find out via Activity Monitor. Fire up Activity Monitor in Applications » Utilities. You will see a column on the right labeled kind. Simply enough it tells you whether that application is “Intel” or “PowerPC.” This is especially good for Mac users that Continue Reading »
Yes, dead week and finals have reared their ugly and mischievous heads. This is just a little fyi for everyone about a slow down in posts for the next week or so. On campus, dead week is the term for the week before finals week, supposedely exempt of all assignments, and it generally portrays two main emotions about students. There are the students bogged down with projects and assignments that get no sleep and then there are the students with nothing that are generally happy, don’t go to class, game all night or finish off their alcohol before their parents come up the next week. I am the student with lots of projects on my hands. Here’s a list. Continue Reading »
Apple closed their online store this morning sometime around 8am and when it was back up less than an hour later the 17″ PowerBook G4 had vanished, with a shiny new 17″ MacBook Pro in its place. This new MBP is a comparative deal considering the 15incher. It features an astounding 1680×1050 resolution (the same as found on my 20″ Cinema Display), a 2.16GHz Core Duo processor, a 120GB 5400RPM hard drive (a faster 7200RPM 100GB model is an option), 1GB of DDR2-667 RAM, an 8X DL DVD burner and a FireWire 800 port all as standard, for $2799. This is actually the exact same price point Continue Reading »
When Apple released Boot Camp, they made it easy for anyone to dual-boot their Intel Mac with OS X and Windows. A recent discovery from the people that were able to get Windows booting on an Intel Mac before Apple came along with Boot Camp allows you to triple boot with Linux. Unlike the Boot Camp method of installation, some advanced tinkering around with chainloading Linux’s lilo bootloader from the XP ntldr bootloader is required. It’s definitely clear that Apple’s Intel Macs are an extremely valuable commodity to the computer enthusiast, letting you run every OS under the sun. Continue Reading »
If you have recently switched to an Intel Mac, you may have noticed that your favorite BitTorrent client, Azureus, does not work. Luckily, the Azureus wiki has a special build of the current version, 2.4.0.2, modified to work as a Universal Binary. Until there is an official UB for Azureus, this seems to work great. Download it directly. Hat tip to Felipe for the link.
Update: The download link no longer works. You might be able to find a UB version at GetAzureus.com soon, otherwise keep trying that link.
Update 2: Working download link thanks to Andrei’s comment.
Hot on the heels of Part 4 comes Part 5. In Part 4 I spent a bit of time on using image maps to decrease load times and save bandwidth. I thought I would expand upon this and dedicate Part 5 to creating a faster loading blog. Most of these concepts can be applied to any website or blog, however they are meant for K2 as it is fairly loaded even at default. Hopefully, by the end of this article your blog and server will be able to handle mass-traffic, such as from Slashdot or Digg, much more easily and help you conserve costly bandwidth. Throughout this article, I used this website optimizer to find out how large each page is and how many items load. Continue Reading »
Scrivs, the coolest CEO this side of the blogosphere, has announced that May 17th, 2006 is the official date for round four submissions into the 9rules Network. If you are considering applying to join 9rules, keep an eye on the 9rules blog as Scrivs will be releasing a series of posts regarding what he looks at when evaluating websites. Round four is purposefully a few weeks after CSS Reboot so people have time to work out any bugs they may find, as well as keep up with their content.
Daily Tech discovered that Seagate has leaked some information about their upcoming hard drives on their website regarding the Barracuda 7200.10 line. Apparently two versions of the massive 750GB hard drive will be offered; a serial-ata and a parallel-ata version. The SATA versions will include support for the SATAII standard’s NCQ, Native Command Queueing, to provide faster and smarter disk access. Both drives also include a 5 year warranty as well as 16MB of cache. Continue Reading »
Yesterday at an IDF in Beijing, Intel released the more mobile varient of their Core architecture based mobile processor, the Core Solo. Two versions of this Ultra Low Voltage processor, the Core Solo ULV, were announced, the U1300 running at 1.06GHz and the U1400 running at 1.2GHz. As you can imagine, ULV chips are the ideal processor to manufacture into an ultraportable notebook due to their low power requirements. I currently use a 3lb Dell Inspiron 300m which uses the older generation Pentium-M 1.2GHz ULV. I can say that it makes for some stellar battery life. However, the U1300 and U1400’s are rather unique in that at peak load, they use only 5.5 watts. Continue Reading »
I have recently surpassed 1 million hits on PaulStamatiou.com since September 12th, 2005. This blog is a bit older than that, but Sept. 12th was the first date I started using blogtopsites. I would have used Mint to track overall traffic but my Mint database had corrupted when upgrading from Mint 1.14 to 1.20. I should have followed Shaun’s instructions. Regardless, today is a day of celebration! Continue Reading »
I was touching something up in my sidebar.php file on Wi-Fi in the student center and it cut-out mid-upload. I will hastily make a sidebar file right now, as I don’t have any backups. =/
Chris has done it again with his substantial post, Vapor Phase Change Cooling. He built a vapor phase change cooling system, utilizing a mixture of propane and oil, that can bring his processor way below freezing providing for a perfect overclocking situation. Chris talks about what parts were involved, how it all went together and how it works. This post doesn’t talk about his overclocking ventures although I’m sure he’ll save that for another post. He was telling me how he got a cheap AMD64 Socket 939 2.0GHz chip up to somewhere around 2.85GHz stable and that was with minimal extra voltage. Hurry up and read his write-up before Continue Reading »
I didn’t think I could talk this much about K2, but over the course of my recent redesign a few things have come to mind that I’d love to share with everyone. This whole K2 customization series has become rather lengthy, so I am really considering making a stylized PDF with them all and adding to each a bit. There might even be a Part 5, so leave comments if you want me to include something. Continue Reading »
I spent a few hours tonight and turned my old Deviance theme into something I can actually release. Deviance is my name for my previous K2 mod. It is a narrow and clean single column K2-based theme for WordPress. It was created upon the latest stable K2 release, 167. Deviance supports the following WordPress plugins out of the box: Brian’s Latest Comments, Related Entries, Ultimate Tag Warrior, Akismet Spam Count, Extended Live Archives and flickrRSS. Deviance also has built-in social bookmarking buttons on each permalink page. However, Continue Reading »
After Ben Gray had asked me a few questions about Mint and the open client mode, I decided to enable client mode on my mint installation. I am a huge proponent of using mint to track website stats. I purchased mint the day it came out last September and couldn’t be happier. It lets me know how many people visit this blog, what they look at, how long they look at it, what comments they leave and what they click to leave my site. It is a very powerful web application. Continue Reading »
Mozilla released a new version of Firefox today, version 1.5.0.2. While this release includes bug and security fixes as usual, the OS X version is now a Universal Binary, making it an imperative upgrade for Intel Mac users. I have been running the DeerPark beta of version 1.5.0.2 for about a month now just for its overall speediness as a UB. Download it for OS X here.
I just thought I would leave you guys with this link, google.com/cl2, before I called it a night. I can definitely see myself using this more than my 30 Boxes account, which hasn’t been touched in weeks. I haven’t played around with CL2 too much but I don’t think it can possibly be less than stellar.
My Justification
- CL2 is made by Google
- Like all G-services it uses the same login and integrates with gmail
- CL2 can send you SMS alerts to your cell phone for calendar events Continue Reading »
The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, of which I am a member, is completing the specifications for a new ethernet standard, one capable of 10Gbit/second signal speeds utilizing Category 7 cabling and a new type of jack. 10GBaseT is one step ahead of the current Gigabit ethernet that uses the same 8-conductor jack and Category 6 cabling. The most interesting part of this news is that 10GBaseT, to be approved by the IEEE in July, will not use the typical RJ45 connector we’ve all come to love. Instead it will use a radical new connector, the Continue Reading »
Last night, I finally got Apple’s Boot Camp to work properly and dual-boot Windows XP SP2 Professional on my Intel Mac Mini. I ran into a few problems at first so I’ll go through my whole experience so that the same things don’t happen to you. Overall, my only regret was not giving Windows enough space as I found out it runs pretty darn fast. Continue Reading »
Chris Morrell has written a worthy article that shows you how to get the most out of your Firefox browser. He covers several about: config tweaks like the minimize, network, cache and download manager hacks. Chris also mentions some of his favorite extensions, I had not heard of some until this.
I don’t know what a typical college campus is like. Everything I’ve experienced at Georgia Tech is apparently not normal for a university lacking “tech” in the title. I’ve compiled a few things I’ve noticed around school for your enjoyment on this slow news day. I’m working on a Customizing K2: Part 4 but that will take a while, I didn’t think there was enough substance to the story regarding TDK shipping Blu-Ray media and I did not feel like analyzing the performance numbers of AMD’s new socket AM2 processor. Here we go. Continue Reading »
I found a brief post on Mike Peck’s blog [via theory.isthereason], that talked about installing XviD and AC3 Quicktime components to get Front Row on his Intel Mac to play an XviD encoded video. As you can imagine Front Row’s multimedia capabilities stem from the Quicktime player, so you can’t just download codecs for the video file types you want to play. You actually need to install Quicktime compatible components. Continue Reading »
Microsoft’s upcoming productivity software suite, Office 2007, will bring about a change to the traditional file formats. While every version of Office prior was based off of 3 character file extensions, Office ‘07 will utilize 4 character file extensions. For example, documents will now be .docx, powerpoints will be .pptx and excel speadsheets will be .xlsx. Noticing a trend here? They are adding an x to the end of every file format. Continue Reading »
Today Apple released a beta application called Boot Camp, which will be included as a final in OS X 10.5, Leopard. Boot Camp, simply put, lets you create a boot disc with all the proper Windows drivers so you can safely install Windows XP on your Intel Mac. No crazy installation hacks and slipstreaming your own special XP disc. Provided that you have the lastest software and firmware updates, a legit Windows XP disc, at least 10GB free on your hard drive and a blank CD, you can install Windows XP on your Intel Mac. This is great news, I wasn’t going to install and dual-boot Windows on my Mac until the drivers and procedure had matured. It seems like the day has come. Continue Reading »
Bryan Veloso interviewed me on his ever popular Live From The 101 podcast. We’ve been trying to do this for about two weeks but we could never find the time with the huge time zone difference between Atlanta and Silicon Valley. Yesterday, I found a nice chunk of time around 1am after finishing my CS homework. Thankfully, this also worked for Bryan so we fired up iChat after he picked up some kitty litter. Continue Reading »
On the way to class yesterday, I noticed a few tents setup on one of the busier walkways in the middle of Georgia Tech campus. It was none other than the TechKnowOverload tour, featuring several companies trying to reach college students, including Microsoft, Nvidia and Asus. After class I dropped by the Microsoft tent where they had several laptops setup to try to woo students onto the new Windows Live Messenger beta instant messenging client. That’s when it went downhill. Continue Reading »
In the past few months I have setup and helped others install and configure WordPress blogs many times. One of the more frequent questions I get pertains to this page in the WordPress admin labeled permalinks. The easiest way to describe permalinks is by saying that they are pretty URLs. For example, enabling permalinks on your WordPress blog changes http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?p=102 to something like the following URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/2006/04/30/apple-releases-ipod-micro (although permalinks can be setup to display in various formats). Continue Reading »
After several months in preparation, Devlounge.net, a website that plans on being the best resource for web developers, has finally opened its doors to the public. Their plans seem very ambitious, with sections of the site devoted to various web development articles written by top web professionals as well as interviews with those people. The design is rather fly, seems exactly as you would expect a lounge to be, hip and laid-back. Speaking of which, Continue Reading »
