sethbc’s (infrequent) blog…

The last couple days have been pretty fun. First of all, Dad got to Budapest just fine. We’ve been going out to nice restaurants and doing the touristy stuff.

On Friday, we took the tram down to the big market, and scoped out all the sausages. We walked back to our apartment, and on the way got some coffee at the Central Kaveház. That evening we went to Cafe Kör for what was one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten.

Yesterday morning, we started the day off at Gerbeaud, which is a pastry and coffee house on Vorosmarty Ter. We had planned to go to the synagogue, but in our haste we failed to realize that it was a Saturday. Needless to say, that trip has been postponed. We decided to go see St. Stephens, which is just amazing. The inside is a touch on the gaudy side, but it is fairly amazing none-the-less. We were unable to view the hand however. Maybe we’ll come back to that on Monday. The rest of the day we spent walking up Andrassy Utca to Heros Park and back. Though the park doesn’t have anything on Margitsziget, it is still an amazing place. There is an ice rink there, much like the ice rink in Central Park. By the way, in case anyone says otherwise, west end city center is enormous. I ended up getting a jacket there, and I’m very pleased with what I got. Last night we went out to Kiskakkuk (the little Cuckoo), and had another thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. And didn’t wake up until the next morning when…

Okay so maybe the only person in the world who’ll get that reference is my Mom. Try looking up Arlo Guthrie .

Alright. Well I’m done with my exams, and all I can hope for is that I didn’t fail anything. A couple of the exams were pretty tough though. I certainly hope the professors aren’t bad enough to fail any of us.

Anyway, I’m going to go try to meet my dad, as he should be in Budapest now!

Well I have an exam today, EU Competition Law. Hopefully everything goes well — this guy has been known to fail people in the past. I feel like I have a good grasp on the material though, so things should turn out just fine.

It looks like Apple did a bunch of things yesterday. They’ve certainly had a busy couple of months!

First, they bumped the PowerMac line to dual-core chips. This is certainly cool, as it definitely gives the PowerMac a major performance boost, but I wonder what the point is? Apple said they’d be releasing the Intel stuff by next year, and I’m more interested in waiting on those. I don’t feel like buying some piece of hardware that has already been deprecated. That being said, this is a major revision of the PowerMac hardware, and I’m sure that the facilities in OS X for multi-core chips will support the x86 chips as well. All this has left me wondering about the performance of the new Intel chips. When they release the new Intel PowerMacs, is it going to be a step backwards? I’m certain that they don’t to do this.

Second, Apple bumped the PowerBook G4 line. The bump doesn’t really affect performance that much, but it brings the PowerBook more in line with the notebook offerings by other companies. My biggest complaint with the PowerBooks has always been with the screen. You’ve got a 29 inch laptop screen that is at 640×480. Okay, so I’m exaggerating, but there was certainly a problem. The other thing Apple did was keep their battery life at about double that of the competition. I’m not sure that its double, but I’ve got to say that by using the new G4’s, the power requirement is definitely lower, and the battery life is supposed to be 5.5 hours now!

Finally, the big announcement that Apple made yesterday was the release of Aperture. This is yet another move by Apple that keeps them at the forefront of the professional media market. Now I’m hardly a professional photographer, and my camera doesn’t even support RAW, so this isn’t all that useful for me right now, but it is definitely promising. I’ve often thought of getting a Digital SLR, simply because I love the ability to control every aspect of the shot. A Digital SLR is certainly not the kind of camera I need over here in Europe (I want something that’s small and easy to carry), but I’d be interested in getting one in a couple of years.

I think Apple has made some really smart moves in the last several months, but I would shy away from buying their computing hardware for the time being. Of course, I already have a PowerBook and I don’t need a desktop over here, so I’m not necessarily talking about myself. I’ll just say that it is definitely a good thing Apple had some not-insignificant hardware bumps in the pipeline and very strong revenue support from the iPod before announcing their shift to Intel. I don’t have any hard numbers right now, but I assume that hardware sales have lagged a little bit as the hardcore Apple fans wait for Intel hardware to emerge. Regardless, it looks like Apple has pulled a complete 180 from their position in the late 90’s, and it looks like things are only getting better.

Technorati Tags: Apple

buntu 5.10 is looking pretty good. I downloaded the powerpc livecd last night and ran it on my laptop last night. Things ran alright, except for a couple of glitches (discussed below). I thought that the interface looked quite nice, and from having used Ubuntu on servers for quite some time, I love the concept of the ‘universe’.

There were only a couple of gripes I had with Ubuntu, and both of them can be traced back to the fact that I’m running it on an Apple. First, there is no support for the Airport Extreme. That is a crying shame, but it looks like progress is being made! The second problem is the one-mouse-button issue. There is no way to right click anything, and I just wish there was some way to do this.

Don’t worry Fatty, I feel your pain.

I want to buy about every bike I see. Okay, not every bike, but definitely a road bike, two mountain bikes, and a fixie/single speed or two. I’ve been looking at Matt Chester’s stuff ever since I started reading about single-speed bikes. As far as getting a road bike, I’m in the same exact boat. I want something I’m going to be able to put some serious mileage on. I definitely need to get back into mountain biking too, but I’m just not sure I’d want some big fat dual suspension beast. Of course, a duallie is always nice in certain situations!

One thing I know I don’t need on any of my bikes are super-sick components (which is bound to cut the cost a lot). Let me put it this way, I don’t care if my pedals weigh 195 or 250 grams. A better way of saying that is that even 7 pounds of extra weight on the bike isn’t worth doubling or tripling the price.

Well I’ve been reading a lot (as I mentioned in the past), and I’ve gotten hooked on the Jack Ryan series by Tom Clancy. I think they are pretty well written, and the stories are engaging. My only complaint with Clancy is that he uses confusing names a lot of times. Cortez and Chavez for instance. When I’m reading fast, my brain is on pattern recognition mode. Cortez and Chavez look similar enough to make it difficult to see the difference. For that matter, I think in one of the books I’m reading now there are two people named Alden. Thats just too much. Anyway, aside from that minor gripe, I’m liking the books.

I’m curious though, what order to they go in? Not published order, but actual chronologic order. It would appear to me that Jack Ryan has been both the President, and an analyst. I think he publishes some of them out of order.

Technorati Tags: Books

So I’ve been trying to look for a laptop that is completely supported by Ubuntu. I’ve been using linux on a laptop since probably 1994, when I ran Slackware on my Gateway Colorbook, and for a while, Linux ran fine. I’ve run linux on a Gateway Solo, an Inspiron 5150, and a Powerbook. None of these laptops ran flawlessly under Linux. I know the hardware vendors aren’t making things easy for the Linux guys, but I would really like a laptop that supports both sleep states 3 and 4. I mean, suspend to RAM and suspend to disk just shouldn’t be that hard.

I’ve pretty much given up on my Inspiron, the BIOS is just too broken to support the right sleep states, but I’m hoping that there are other laptops out there that will run smoother. Its not that I’m getting ready to buy another laptop right now, but I’m interested to see who is playing ball (or at least functional on Linux). I’ve pretty much given up on using AMD64 for the time being. It runs fine on my server, but it can be a lot more trouble than its worth in terms of some binary only packages. I’ve heard that IBM’s run pretty well, but wireless is always going to be an issue. I’m either going to have to go with an Atheros (which I have laying around), or something under NDISWRAPPER. Obviously I’d like to see something without a binary blob, but you’ve got to cut your losses somewhere.

Speaking of WiFi, I’ve been wondering how easy it is to use now. I’ve never had good luck with Linux wireless, especially when I’ve protected my access point with WEP (lets not even get into WPA). The other problem has always been “roaming.

Congrats to the folks over at Ubuntu for getting Breezy out the door, I can’t wait to get it running (though I am loth to put it on my powerbook). In just a few short years, Ubuntu has risen to the cream of the crop. The best way to describe it is a combination between Fedora’s focus on usability, and the size of Gentoo’s package repository. Sure you can’t compile all your code using -fBREAKMYCODE or -f1+1=3, but I don’t need that. Breezy is another important step for Ubuntu, and Dapper Drake (the next release) is going to be extra special for them.

Speaking of, the boys at GNOME (okay, well at least one of them) appear to be delving heavily into software optimization. I’ve been reading Federico’s blog about his attempts to speed up the chooser, and the results look definitely promising. Like Mark said in his announcement for Dapper, this is the release (of GNOME and Ubuntu) that is going to be going head to head with Vista. Now I haven’t really seen anything on Vista, but from what I’ve heard, its just going to be catch up with Tiger. I think the work being done on GNOME is quite important. While adding new features is important, they should never be added at the expense of basic performance.

Technorati Tags: Linux, Ubuntu

I’m finally done with the 8 hours of class I had. Man, I haven’t had that much school since like grade school. Check that, I never had 8 hours of class in grade school, at least we had recess! Needless to say, today was just exhausting. I think I’m going to head out tonight and go dancing at the same place we went before. Turns out, it was called “Music Pub,