New Hardware

New toys…for me…how nice!

@work, 3 weeks ago, the decision was made to get rid of an old iMac 350 (blue, dv).
Hooray! The user of the iMac was given my G4 450, and I was told to buy a new iMac G5.

The fun thing was…there wasn’t an iMac in Stock in the whole Netherlands…I phoned several mac-dealers. Begged to to sell me their show-models, but no luck.
But….there where several who did have the 1.8 Ghz G5 in Stock.
And I got clearence to buy it!
(actually, I prefered the tower over the iMac, because I like my Phillips TFT 19″)

Jeej!

The same evening I rushed to the Apple-dealer to load the very heavy box in my car, together with some additional ram.
The design, the look, the feel…wow…the first days I found myself stroking the shiny aluminium over and over again. The machine is less noisy as my previous G4, and the new graphics card is making Tiger even look better. I know it’s the entry level (since 2 days even EOL in Europe) but boy, compared to my G4 it screams.

And the real fun…6 days later on my birthday, I got an iPod Mini, in gray, because that matched my new G5 so nicely :-D
I did have the 1G 5Gbyte iPod. But that one was showing it’s age. I like the newer OS of the ipod, it has really matured compared to the 1G iPods. And I discovered that podcasts are fun. Listening on the returntrip of work to the Daily Source code has really made the bus less boring.

Visual Programming with Java

For my Open University course I have started with “Visual Programming with Java”.
I know it’s more fun as Discrete Math :)
And it’s quite fun to finally “learn” programming, as I’m a autodidact. The level is very very basic, but that doesn’t matter to me. In the last years my experience is that it can be very helpfull to really learn the basics.

The real fun is that I have to use windows again. The course uses Borland Jbuilder 8, with a license which only runs on windows XP according to the manual, but I use it on my very old windows98 machine without any problems.
And oh boy, what is an IDE fun. Programming like playing with LEGO.

“You have forgotten a semi-colon right here”.
Oh…thanks :)

Instead of digging through 2500 lines of code where that missing T_SPACE is…
Java is also fun to work with. Very straightforward and easier than C (no memory management / garbage collection needed). I really can tell know where PHP has it’s roots. It really helps me getting some insight in OOP concepts, which are used in PHP 5 as well.

btw…writing this on windows, Wordpress really looks better in Firefox as in Safari…damn.

Gargleblaster.org

To my complete surprise, Gargleblaster.org has still more as 50 unique visitors a day.
Not very bad for a blog which hasn’t been updated the last 2 months.

Life can be busy, priorities can shift.
Anyway…I’ll try to post something more in the next months…