random

I’ve had my 13″ MacBook Pro since the mid 2009 refresh and it’s been really reliable. Apart from one brief visit to Apple to replace a noisy fan, I’ve had no worries. A few years ago I upgraded from 4G  to 8G RAM, so I’m not stranger to taking the back off it.

Even though it’s quite old by computer geek standards, I really don’t have any performance problems. I do demos with a couple of Linux VMs running Oracle and it works OK. Despite this, I was bored the other night and decided to buy an SSD to replace the internal hard drive. It arrived yesterday, so during last nights insomnia, I decided to fit the hard drive, rather than stare at the ceiling.

The actual hard drive replacement is pretty simple. You can see an example of it here. It takes about 5 minutes.

Thanks to Norman Dunbar for pointing out that MobaXterm 6.3 has been released. You can find the download and changelog in the usual place.

I’ll be interested to see how the performance improvements to SFTP work out. I’ve seen some issues with this during transfers of large files before. The built in NFS and VNC servers sound interesting too. I can think of one situation where the NFS server would come in really handy.

Great stuff!

Cheers

Tim…

I recently filled in this years ACE Director self assessment survey. Among other things, as part of that process I check how many articles, blog posts and forum answers I’ve posted over the year.

Whilst getting these numbers I noticed about 50% of articles I put live this year weren’t promoted to the front page as new articles because they were “back-fill”, written on general topics that haven’t really changed over the years. Of the last 6 articles I’ve written, only 1 has made it to the front page as a “new” article. Some of these back-fill articles were prompted by answering readers questions and some by situations that have come up at work. They all go live on the website, but I’d feel silly posting them as a new article.

It’s been over 20 years since I finished my finals for my first degree, but this time of year never fails to affect my already terrible sleeping patterns. I’ve started waking up in the morning panicking about an exam, which I’ve forgotten to revise for. It takes a few minutes for me to realize there is no exam, so I’ve got nothing to worry about…

Like I said, this happens every year, but I think the fact I’m currently working for University has reinforced the panic in me. I sense a few more weeks of exam panic induced insomnia, before I settle back into my normal insomnia.

Cheers

Tim…

Followers of the blog know I’m a Linux fan, but over the weekend I needed to fix some stuff on a Windows server at work and I took my first tentative steps into the world of Windows PowerShell. It was very much a case of “scripting by Google”, but I managed to get the job done pretty quickly. That episode prompted this tweet.

That resulted in two little exchanges. The first from Niall Litchfield, who must have been a little under the weather.

I read a story last week called McDonald’s Tackles Repair of ‘Broken’ Service. As I came out of the cinema turned into a drive through to give it a shot and see what it was like. In this case the service was fine, but the food. OMG!

Now I’m a vegetarian, so choice is a little limited, but people who know me know that I’m not a fussy eater. I will pack pretty much anything into my mouth, which is why my waistline is rather ample…

Following on from my post about the ACE program, Yuri from Pythian asked what I get out of presenting that makes it worthwhile. In this post I will tell a few little stories to explain why I think writing and presenting are important skills for people, regardless of their ambitions.

Presenting

In a previous post I said that UltraEdit moves through beta really quickly. Today I’m rocking UltraEdit v4.0 Release Candidate on Fedora 18…

Cheers

Tim…

Hot on the heels of the recent UltraEdit v19 release for Windows, comes the UltraEdit v4 Beta II release for Linux/Mac.

I’ve just started using it and so far so good. They usually progress through the betas pretty quick. I didn’t have time to install the beta I before this one dropped.

Cheers

Tim…

The internet has been awash with people bemoaning the decision by Google to close Google Reader. Probably the next biggest talking point has been people asking what they can use to replace it when it’s gone. I’m planning on giving TheOldReader.com a test-drive, once I can get my feeds imported.

The problem with free