Published on
March 24, 2007 in
General.
I love Newegg. I buy all my computer parts from there and have never been let down by top quality service and extremely fast shipping.
Just for the heck of it, I tried to see what a top-of-the-line computer might cost. Dual DVD burners (DVD-RAM and LightScribe support), dual 750GB hard drives (only 7200 RPM, though), 4GB DDR2 800 RAM, a 630 watt power supply, a flash card reader, an EVGA nForce 680i motherboard, an EVGA GeForce 8800GTX 768MB GDDR3 graphics card, and an Intel Core 2 Extreme Kentsfield (quad core!) processor later, the cost was just under $3000. If you add, say $100 for a case and $100-$150 for a water cooling system, you’ll have a complete computer for a fairly reasonable price if you consider the power of this system. If anyone wants to buy me that stuff, I won’t complain. 
As for case, I would probably buy it from Xoxide, since they have some pretty cool cases.
My intention is to build an absolute top of the line system in a few years so that it won’t become obsolete for quite some time. The current technology is starting to get stale, especially considering that DDR3 progress is being worked on and AMD has yet to release a quad core processor of their own, so it’s best to buy the newest technologies shortly after they have come out. Of course, one should wait long enough so that the bugs have been worked out, but not so long that something new is right around the corner.
Bazzite .15 and the Bazzite Repository have been released. See the pages for more information.
I have been enjoying the development of Bazzite (from 5 to 6 every morning) because I’m using Python again. Python was good for web development, but I preferred PHP over it. However, Python is an excellent interpreter for desktop application (although PHP seems to be gaining ground on this with projects like PHP-GTK). Plus, it integrates so well with Linux. It requires a few tricks with Windows and I haven’t even bothered to look at how it performs with OS X. Side Note: I think that MoPiD2 is pretty much canceled because there are some excellent programs out there that do a wonderful job already, so there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel unless you can make it substantially better. I’ve got some ideas for Beryl that will hopefully be useful in the future.
I really need to get back to the news script that I was writing. Before I became occupied with various other things, I was about to release a beta to the public. It’s a collection of a couple of scripts designed to be extremely simple. It’s easy to install, easy to integrate with one’s website, and easy to manage. I’ll get back to writing it soon.
So much to do, so little time. 
The Bazzite Theme Repository is nearly finished. It will allow authors to submit their themes to a centralized database where users can preview and download them. I also plan to add a synchronization feature in the next release of Bazzite so that users can have Bazzite grab and install all of the themes at once. I don’t know if I’ll have enough bandwidth to host all of the files if the repository gets too large, but I’ll worry about that later.
I like my “Custombuntu” distribution. I’ve recompiled many of the major programs from scratch. My kernel is incredibly fast thanks to my ruthless slashing of unnecessary features. I have removed all of the modules, compiling the essential ones into the system and leaving the rest out. However, my system has become a bit too hackish. I removed kdm by hacking it out of the startup scripts and sticking a line into my .bashrc file that starts X if it isn’t running. I also have both Gnome and KDE installed, but I really only use KDE. Having said all of that, I think that I’m going to install Gentoo Linux over the summer, starting with Stage1. I originally installed Ubuntu because I wanted something that would install in a couple of hours and would provide me with a Linux desktop when I needed it, because I assumed that I would continue using Windows. Now that I’ve pretty much switched completely to Linux, I can see how foolish that choice was. So, this summer, I’m going to do things right. I’ll completely wipe everything on my first hard drive, storing all the important stuff to my second drive. Then, I’ll make a small Linux installation on my second drive that will allow me to build a Gentoo installation right from Stage1. I’ll also leave a couple of gigabytes at the end of my drive for a minimalistic Windows installation. After installing Gentoo and getting everything up and running the way I want, I’ll move all of my stuff from the second hard drive onto the first and will wipe the second one and replace it with a better filesystem instead of NTFS (because I have to use NTFS-3G to write my data now). I’m thinking of using Reiser4 since it is extremely fast.
On another note, I finally broke down and tried Sauerbraten (http://sauerbraten.org/) and I have found it to be a pretty fun game. I play on various servers as JJWC.
