Technical Reviews and Geek Toys

I think I would like to go on a vacation. I can't really say I have ever been on one. No, visiting relatives doesn't really count. When I was in the Air Force a couple guys and I took a weekend and drove to Orlando to see Disney World. This was 1974 and there was not really much to see. I checked the area out using Wikimapia a while back and what a difference 35 years can make.

I recently heard about a new roller coaster ride that will be opening at SeaWorld Orlando on May 22, 2009. The ride is called Manta and it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun and of course being at SeaWorld it is going to be aquatic. Imagine you are Nemo riding on the back of the Manta Ray professor looking for new adventure. Well this is very similar. But, Manta is more than the ride. There are 10 aquariums and more than 3,000 animals living the Manta experience.

Visit the Manta website and join in the fun. Click on the Participate and Win button and learn more about Mana while earning a pass to the front of the line. Be sure to look at the Press Release page where there are videos about Manta as well as other interesting information about it's construction.

I have been using the Joomla Content Engine for a few years now I have to say I don't have much use for WYSIWYG editors. I prefer to write the code and freely use CSS and whatever it takes to lay out a page. However most of my customers who would like to maintain the site themselves are usually not interested or don't have the time to learn HTML or CSS. Some even (I shudder to think about it) type the page into Word and then copy that horrendous blob of code into Joomla and calls it good. The Tiny MCE WYSIWYG editor that comes installed in Joomla works ok although it is limited as to what it can do.

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From the beginning of time... well since Ubuntu 6.06 I have done a clean install whenever a new release of Ubuntu came out. Yes it was a little time consuming doing a complete backup of the home directory, installing the new version and then restoring the backup. But it was enjoyable to me (a geek thing I suppose) as it was almost like a renewal or something. Logging in the first time after the install and exploring the new features... and then re-installing all of the applications that I use.

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I am so jazzed! Ever since I purchased my Acer Aspire One the one thing I have not been happy about is the overall speed. The model I purchased came with Windows XP Home, 1GB RAM and two 8GB SSD cards instead of a conventional hard drive. The internal SSD card is drive C and the external SSD card, when it is plugged in is drive D. It was very obvious the bottleneck was the the drive as the drive light was always on solid. I did several things to try to improve the performance. Virtual memory was not enabled so I enabled 1250MB on drive D. The SSD cards were formated FAT32 so I changed them to NTFS. Both of these changes seemed to help a little, but not enough. I guess the final straw was when I was on a support call and I couldn't get the configuration spreadsheet to open. Now for the rest of the story...

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Today Ubuntu 9.0.4, the Jaunty Jackalope was released. It is exciting every time a new release of Ubuntu comes out. Why is that? Maybe because in addition to regular releases that not only fix problems but adds features and updates installed applications, every six months one can look forward to almost a brand new operating system. And in addition to the various versions of Ubuntu released in the past with this release Canonical Announces Availability of Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix which offers "faster boot speeds, and with a built-for-purpose interface that means that favorite applications and websites are just a click away. Ubuntu Netbook Remix makes a great choice for netbook users. "

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