I’ve been waiting more than a year for this to fit into normal conversation and it finally did!
Conversation after showing someone at work how to do something on our system.
…
Me: “Well, now you know.”
Co-Worker: “And knowing is half the battle!”
Me: “IT-Joe!”
The State of Maine website has a great little calculator for figuring out how much wood is in your woodpile. Now, it’s not like the math is hard, but this is real handy. It’s especially handy if you are trying to plan on how big to build that new wood shed. Just punch in the dimensions of the pile (or your new woodshed) and it will tell you how many cords are (or will be) there.
A few weeks ago we decided it was time to replace our aging Athlon XP based desktop with something a little more agile and a lot more efficient. We chose to build an AMD Zacate e-350 based system utilizing our existing SATA DVD writer drive and 320gb SATA drive. Add in 8gb of RAM and a sweet little case and you’ve got yourself an excellent web development, image editing, word processing box that uses next to no electricity (sub 30w full tilt), is virtually silent (one small CPU fan and one PSU fan) and is USB 3 compliant. Oh yeah, the best part, Lubuntu.
Lubuntu is effectively Ubuntu Linux that runs LXDE for the GUI instead of Gnome or Unity. LXDE is extremely fast and with very little annoying “eye candy” – I love it. Lubuntu comes with lightweight programs installed as default. It uses Chromium for a browser, though we chose to install FireFox as we like it better. AbiWord comes as the default document editor, though we chose to install LibreOffice as it is a more competent Office Suite. We also installed Gimp for image editing. So far, so good. It’s amazing how fast start up and shut down times are as well as just handling basic web tasks (checking email etc).
*Note*
The Athlon system had been running Windows XP Pro SP3 and held 1.5gb of RAM onboard. In the past I have run Windows 3.1, 95, 98/98SE, XP, Mac OS 7-9.1, X.2-5 as well as Slackware, Ubuntu and Linux Mint all at home. At work I have experience with most of the previous OS’s as well as Windows Vista and 7.
I’ve been making changes to secure my network at work recently. The most recent change is that users logging into our ftp server now have a safe drop box to use that only we have read access to. Once they drop a file in, no one can see it except us. This is important because all of our users share a login, meaning that before this change, anything one user uploaded, another could download. It doesn’t matter most times since users are uploading print files not bank statements, but it is still nice to have more privacy protection than less.
Today just feels like a good day…and I’m liking it.
