reddyenumber4's blog

I got a new hard drive and Windows 7 today. It’s super functional!!

I’ve not got a 500gb drive split between Windows 7, Ubuntu, Arch, Some mystery system I have yet to decide on, and a nice meaty FAT32 partition to hold shared filed between Windows and Linux. The whole thing is like having a new computer. This makes me feel all warm and snugly like installing operating systems back in the 90s.

The program I’m using currently is called Windows Live Writer. I got is as a part of the live essentials, programs that are not included with the computer, but easily downloadable once things are installed. It connects to the blog API in drupal and allows me to write and preview blog posts from my desktop.

I’ve also been playing with Windows Mail, a program also not included, but easy to install. It’s pretty neat as well. Everything looks great, everything is all frosted glass and slick lighting. The preview functions are gorgeous, and the taskbar/startbar is actually excellent. I wasn’t too keen on the pinning function at first, but I’m starting to realize that it provides an excellent way to maximize taskbar use, organize applications, and use quick launch functionality. I tried to use as many Microsoft apps as possible to see what a fresh “Windows Experience” was like. Since I’ve been using XP since 2001, and therefore a proponent of third party and open source programs for a long time and especially during the broadband expansion of computing, it’s been interesting to see Apple advocate this sort of centralized set of programs that everyone needs and that make computing a one stop shop at the Operating System. I’ve been watching Microsoft put this sort of platform together for a few years now, and the end result is pretty fantastic.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, but this is the best Windows yet!

I've been working for the last week on organizing and uploading information about the zipit z2 wireless messenger and how to go about flashing it to boot debian linux.

Hunter Davis figured out how to get the system working, and Aliosa27 has done excellent work with userland and emulation, but there's not a lot of organized info out there about where to go from there.

I decided to put everything into a few pages on this site, and I'll probably be retooling it for another week before releasing it on reddit and such to the general public, but it's a really fun thing to be working on as a side project. The zipit runs most things, and I'm just working on trying to make things as usable as possible after the base install.

I've got just under a gigabyte of storage left on the miniSD, so now I'm trying to figure out what the "optimal" combinations of programs for the device will be. What is the best wireless manager, is word processing possible, can the device do power management, etc.

I'm excited to do some more work on the wireless frontier, as right now I'm limited to manually connecting to unsecured access points or WEP. I really need a super lightweight system for connecting to WPA2 networks with authentication. Unfortunately, after networkmanager and wicd, there doesn't seem to be a lot in the way of functionality like that. But then again, I didn't know almost anything about apm until this week, so there's always little nuggets of joy to discover when it comes to linux.

So I suppose I'll end here for now, and keep working on my zipit pages, and in the near future, I'll actually have some content on here that other people find interesting. Fancy that!

Ecomnemonics: A field of study where reasearchers develop simple memory devices to relate complex economics topics.

"How will I ever remember the flaws associated with time series and cross-sectional data when running an econometric analysis on my model?"

"I suppose that's one for the econmemonicists to tackle."

After a fair amount of effort and waiting around while FTP transfers complete themselves, I've finally gotten the drupal variant of the site up and running mostly to the specifications I had envisioned.

Time for the slow and painful process of generating new content without burning myself out.

Not that I haven't had to do this before, every website I've ever owned has gone through this process of creative destruction, and for the most part, they were all better for it. Still, the thought of hundreds of pages of material gone to be replaced with hundreds more yet to type makes me positively weary.

Still, I really like the integrated comment system, the simple tagging and organizing with taxonomy and views. The list of features that this CMS is capable of just grows by leaps and bounds every week.

I decided to just give in and redo the site using Drupal instead of Mediawiki. I'll be refining settings for a few days, but this should be a better platform for simple editing and serving up all sorts of content.

More to come...

-Red