Why gigabyte should revive the I-RAM concept

Gigabyte created a neat little niche product called the I-RAM, its basically a board that allows you to plug in up to 4gb’s of DDR ram and run that through a Sata 1 connector, giving you essentially a massive ramdisk. It requires no drivers, and is blazingly fast. Unfortunately in that incarnation it was doomed to failure. Why?

1. The device itself is expensive, $120 is about the cheapest you’ll find it online.
2. DDR ram is very expensive. Cheapest 1gb sticks you’ll find online cost about $50.
3. Sata I is slow.

Now, around 2006 they showed off the I-RAM 2, it was everything that the I-RAM One wasn’t, and they bloody shelved it. It used Sata II (3.0gbs/s), DDR2 (1gb sticks can be had for $25 each), and supported up to 8gb’s of ram.

Now, why might this be useful? Oh lots of applications. Say you’re an independent web developer, you could easily use an 8gb solid state swap space for handling data or streaming media. Next, your HTPC, streaming large portions of the video through that swap. Putting your /var /tmp and /swap on it for large NAS’s. There are many many lovely uses for it, and Gigabyte shot themselves in the foot on the first go around.

One of the biggest uses I could see, is use in a “poor-man’s data-center” Large solid-state storage and server motherboards with lots of ram are bloody expensive and require ECC ram. A Cheap off the shelf unbuffered solution that totals less than $500 is a bloody steal in comparison. (That’s say $100-150 for the device, and another $200 for 8gb’s of ram, at my $25/gb price, for a total of $300-350). Gigabyte simply needs to actually market it as such.

I can think of one huge potential customer, who makes most of their own servers using cheap off the shelf parts: Google.

And one smaller customer who would love to put it to work in his home NAS: Me.

LyX: A word processor unlike any other

I just recently discovered LyX in the repositories of my Ubuntu install (although its available for MacOSX and Windows as well), and let me say something briefly:

If you are a student, writer, publisher, or what have you, you should *definitely* be using it. Its so much easier to do type-setting its not even funny.

It took me about 2 hours to go through the included tutorial, after-words, I took an 8 page document I had been writing in a text-editor (not a word processor, think notepad) and within 15 minutes I had it sectioned, sub-sectioned, table of contents, bibliography, etc. All consistently typeset. In fact things like sectioning and cross referencing are handled automagically for you.

For example:
    If you create say…

       Section 1: Farms
          Section 1.1: Cows
          Section 1.2: Chickens
          Section 1.3: Horses
       Section 2: Crops
          ….etc.

And then decide you want to make it look more like this:

    FARMS
          Section 1: Livestock
              Section 1.1: Cows
                    Section 1.1.2: Milk or Meat?
              Section 1.2: Chickens
              Section 1.3: Horses
          Section 2: Crops
              …etc.

You do not have to go back and re-indent, nor do you have to renumber all your sections, LyX handles this automagically for you. Also if you put in cross referencing material like (See Section 1, chapter 1,) And then decided to move Section 1 to be section 2, your cross references would change automagically as well =).

Seriously, this will save you so much time its not funny.

To install LyX on Ubuntu simply type in terminal:
  

sudo aptitude install lyx

Same thing should apply to most other debian based distros (That use the 2.6 kernel) check your repository if you use yum or rpm, for MacOSX and Windows install, check the LyX website (use google ya lazy bum)

Xipietotec’s Law of Games

First law of games: All card games, which are based upon a game franchise which had it start in a different game genre, are not as good as the original. Corollary: Generally, they blow chunks. Subset: Chunks is my Dog. QED.

Improving the functionality of some of my favorite apps

Just a few ideas I’ve been tossing around to improve the functionality of several applications I use frequently.

For one it would be nice if Drivel or Gnomeblog became more scribefire-like (except well, working that is), that is having categories, ability to write new pages, upload media, apply tags, etc.

The big thing though, which I would like, is the following functionality to be added to deskbar. Deskbar is allready god, it has replaced my start menu. In fact, I’ve even edited the icon to look like a “start button” for Ubuntu. However, there’s one problem, sometimes when you’re looking for a file, deskbar only really wants to do one thing with it. Lets say we have file foobar.py, well you could potentially want to launch it, or open it in gedit, or scribes, or your favorite text editor of choice. Or if it were a rather big python project, maybe you’d want to open it in an IDE of some sort. It would be nice if you could tell deskbar what you want to *do* with the file.

I propose something that uses a “commenting out” system: so /*gedit*/ foobar.py, or */open.folder*/ foobar.py, or conversely: foobar.py /*gedit*/ the commenting out prevents deskbar from trying to display and further search for a pattern match.

Yes I know you can *kind of* do this allready with deskbar: gedit /path/to/foobar.py. But this defeats the point of deskbar, namely not having to care where your files are actually located in your file tree.

Lets try this again: Scribefire (using CSS formatting rather than xhtml)

    Scribefire is a suprisingly light weight firefox exentsion that allows you to post to your blog (and even work offline) without opening your blog page. This is incredibly useful of course, especially if you’re doing a write-up about something.

    For instance, currently I’m rather pissed at how bloody impossible it is to find any source distribution of Metisse. Which is the window manager for Mandriva currently, Mandriva has gone out of their way to make Metisse impossible to find, so that you have to download and run their distro. This is despite the fact that Metisse is licensed under the GPL. As such of course they’re required to provide source code…but not necessarily make it easy to find.

Just seems kind of sneaky and underhanded if you ask me.

    Anyways, back to the functionality of scribe fire. It is literally one of the most responsive applications for firefox I have. It literally takes longer for my del.ici.ous tag-search to pop up than scribe fire. And scribe fire has a nicely featured editor in it. Additionally it actually has an access page to my del.ici.ous bookmarks. It has a note-book scratchpad for writing quick notes. A sorter for multiple blogs, category listing (and the ability to add new categories) History, and access to my pages.

    Also there are three view panes. A “word processor” view, an html data view, and finally a “this is how it will display as” view. It also allows me to add technorati tags, bookmark it to delicious, post as draft, and add trackback URLs.

    And the best part is? It’s a single intuitive interface that is more responsive and easier to use than WordPress’ interface. In fact, of all 3 of the applications I’ve allready listed, it is by far the most superior.

You can get it at: http://www.scribefire.com/

Oh, by the way? It supports extensions and themes to itself too

Test using gnome blog entry poster

Just a general test using the gnome blog entry poster…. Drivel does not seem to support word press at this time

IMified Test

This is just a test to see if IMified posts to my blog correctly, you can find IMified at http://www.imified.com/ it allows you to post to your blog via IM Clients…supposedly it’ll let me do it over gtalk/jabber too, but I couldn’t get that to work.