New workplace

Now I have moved to a new workplace. Down to the dungeons, far away from the coffee machine. It is a room for 24 persons and so far we are 14 here. There have been no actions taken to reduce the noise from people talking and the wall paint is a sharp orange color from the 70th. We probably have to live with the ugly colors, but I heard that there is some hope for getting some noise reduction in the form of plants and soft screens.

During planning everybody was fighting to get a window seat, except me. I picked the seat far away from the windows in the back of the room. I am a bit more light sensitive than my colleagues and I don't want to annoy them, and me, by pulling down the shades every day.

In the picture here, you can see my small workspace. People tease me for my big fat monitor. I am almost the only one at work still using a CRT. But I am picky about the resolution. I am using 1600x1200 and if I take an 19" LCD that they offer I will get a resolution of 1280x1024. So I rather let them tease me and wait until I can get the LCD displays with 1920x1200 resolution. They exist in the market but it takes a good while until my work decides to bring them in. Actually last week I saw that they now offer 26" LCD widescreens. 26" is a lot... 24" or less would be enough. I will ask my boss and see what she will say about it. The small LCD to the right in the picture is not mine. It was put there by mistake. I let it be for now...

On my big fat screen you can see a pro weiqi game. It is my screen-saver program sgfsaver that is replaying the weiqi pro games on random. On my small laptop screen you can see an old background image I made using povray. It say "ARS". Actually it is not my default background... I put it there only for the picture. :)

Mobile blogging test

I have had this blogger applet in my Sony Ericsson mobile phone for quite some time now. So it is about time to test it out.

The picture is taken with the phone camera not so long ago this autumn. Cold in the air and the poor bug have problems moving. I helped him off my path to the grass on the side and then kept walking home.

New server on the way

My old Linux server died. First a fan stopped working so the computer froze now and then. After not so many days it refused to start at all again so something in the hardware is fried. I guess there is something on the motherboard that burned up. I really hope there is no real damage on the hard drive. That would be a small disaster because I have no fresh backup.... :P

So now I have ordered parts to build myself a new server. First time ever that I will get a new computer as server. Previous I have only taken some old computer that is ready to throw away and made it to my server. The one that just died was my fathers before I asked if I could take it when he bought a new one. He had even bought a new one after that switch. My dead server is probably over ten years old and deserves to rest in peace.

This is the specifications of my new server:

• Antec mATX Cube NSK1380 - (350w)
• Gigabyte Socket AM2+ mATX AMD 780G (GA-MA78GM-S2H)
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2.9GHz / 2x512kB Socket AM2 (65W)
• Corsair XMS2 Xtreme 2048MB DDR2 XMS2-6400 800MHz
• D-Link Nätverkskort DGE-530T 10/100/1000 (PCI)
• Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB (7200RPM / 32MB / SATA II / NCQ)
• Samsung SATA DVD±RW 22x - Svart (Dual Layer) (SH-S223F)

and a

• D-Link 5-Ports Switch DGS-1005D 10/100/1000

I didn't do so hard investigations about the hardware so I really hope I didn't make any bad/stupid choices. As long as it works well I don't care much about the performance. My previous server had 350Mhz CPU and 384Mb of memory and that worked very well except in the graphical X Window interface using KDE which was a bit flickery and slow but still usable. Maybe that pain was mostly because of the really bad graphics card.

I am not sure yet if I will use the hyped up Ubuntu or the old reliable Slackware that I have always used before. I have actually used Slackware since summer 1994 and am quite comfortable with that distribution. I have used Ubuntu on my dual boot workstation and think there are both good and bad things about it. Most things I feel that is bad is probably my lack of knowledge about Ubuntu so I should probably choose that one for my server so I learn everything I need to know. But it feels almost like betrayal to not use Slackware any more. Hmm.. so hard decisions... What should I do?