Finally, I bought a gameconsole. An XBox 360. The Playstation3 remains expensive, and the XBox 360 has dropped dramatically in price lately. So for 199 euro (239 and 40 cashback) I now have an XBox 360 Pro (white one) with 60GB harddisk, and two games (Lego Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda). Not a bad deal, if you asked me.

Apart from the noise it makes, I like the machine. I think I like the color even better than the black from the Elite, but that’s a matter of taste.

My nickname (SwitchBL8) was already taken on XBox Live, so I’m called “SwitchBL8 360″ there, for obvious reasons.

My surround receiver has some issues, so I brought it in for repair. That leaves me with my stereo amplifier (Denon PMA-1500, one could do worse…) and a lot of speakers. Of course I can only hook up the two front speakers. They are full range satellites, so basically I don’t need more. But I’m at home, with too much time on my hand, so I wanted to connect the subwoofer as well. It’s an active subwoofer, so it should be connected un-amplified. My analog Denon only has a pre-out (no digital out), which are two RCA connectors, one red, one white, you know the drill. It’s not difficult to connect those to the subwoofers line-in counterparts, albeit that the subwoofer is not in close proximity of the amplifier.

So….I googled around to see whether I could use my coaxial digital cables on a regular RCA. Turns out a lot of people are doing it the other way around, just to hook up their set el-cheapo-style. I figured: why not the other way around? I took two coaxial digital cables, connected them correctly (left to left and right to right) and switched on the subwoofer. To hear…..perfectly good sound. YES!

On the left the back of the amplifier, on the right the back of the subwoofer

In case you were wondering, the yellow cables are a pair of Vandenhul D-102 MkIII. They are great when using Denon equipment.

Netbeans 6.5 is no more beta/RC. Finally a decent IDE for Python, or PHP. Oh, and of course Java ;-)

…according to this news item. It’s about time.

Update (15:21): You can download the prereleases here. And I have it working in Ubuntu 8.10 (x86_64 version obviously) with FireFox 3.0.4. Browsing to about:plugins shows the Flash plugin as “Shockwave Flash 10.0 d20″.

I have a new toy: an Asus EEE PC. Because I signed up for a contract of two years with XS4all, they gave me one for free. The EEE minilaptop comes in two variants (Linux and Windows), and they give away the one with Windows XP (Home, Dutch language). It has a slightly smaller “disk” to compensate for the price of Windows. Of the 15GB total, you are left with about 12GB free diskspace. Enough for what this device is intended to do: internet access, chatting/webcamming online, showing your pictures to your friends and family.

The machine comes with Microsoft Works and with Staroffice8. But…the keyboard is so small, that you will only use Works and Staroffice to read and modify an occassional document you have been sent, not to write your latest bestseller. I’m a touch-typer, but I can not type on this keyboard without making lots of mistakes. The keys are not in the right place. So even chatting is slower now, since I constantly have to look at the keyboard.

The batterylife is not too great. I haven’t done any real testing, but after about two hours the powergauge is nearing the lower end of the scale. Not sure if this is because the battery is new and should be fully emptied and charged first. Anyone?

The screen is surprisingly good and has a native resolution of 1024×600. So basically an 800×600 screen stretched to widescreen. But if you want to watch a movie you need an external dvd player or harddisk, since the laptop does not have a built-in dvd player. Watching a movie over the wireless connection is very doable: I just started Aeonflux (a DVDrip stored on my NAS disk) with VLC (seperate install) and it runs flawless.

Not much more to say about it. It’s a very light machine and very quiet, since it has no real harddisk (but solidstate). I think it’s kinda cute to have in the livingroom, for the occassional internet-access or other basic things, for the real work it’s not a replacement of a real laptop/desktop. Great as a holiday companion, that’s for sure.

In under 24 hours, I had a server crash twice. On the console I could see something about MySQL running out of memory, but other than that, I could not do much with the system other than pressing the reset-button. For some reason, the Wordpress table “wp_postmeta” was about 46 megabytes (about 550,000 records), and trying to do something with that table resulted in timeouts etc. I could see the table contained a lot of records with meta_key = “_utw_tags_” and meta_key = “_utw_tags_0″. UTW is Ultimate Tag Warrior, but that’s a plugin active when I write a post, not when visitors access my blog.
So I performed the following command:

delete FROM `wp_postmeta` where `meta_key`= "_utw_tags_" or `meta_key`="_utw_tags_0"

That deleted about 540,000 records, and now the weblog is very responsive again, and the server is a lot less busy. That’s a good thing, right?

To the people still following this weblog. I’m still there (here?). But I can’t spend much time behind a computer because of my back pain. The hernia is back (pun intended) so another surgery has been scheduled. Other than that: I’m feeling fine.

And as Arnie likes to say: I’ll be back.

Tuesday I was in the hospital for my final checkup. So I hoped. The neurosurgeon thinks my pain is not coming from another hernia but from a nerve. He thinks one of my nerves has been damaged, which basically means I will have to learn to live with this amount of pain every day. That sucks big time, since without painkillers I can’t even normally walk or sleep or do anything for that matter.

It can also be an inflamated nerve, since that can be tricky to heal and with some people it takes quite some time to be painfree again. Hopefully that’s what’s causing my pain. A couple of more weeks in pain is doable, I’m not sure about the “for the rest of my life” option.

One of the add-ons still not modified to work with Firefox3 is Zombiekeys. But I found that this inconvenience can easily be fixed. Download the xpi, and open it in your favorite archive manager. Extract the file install.rdf and find the line in the Firefox section that reads:

2.0.0.*

Change the 2 into a 3 and save the file. Now update the xpi with your archivemanager by putting the modified install.rdf back into it. In Firefox open the xpi-file (File->Open File, or CTRL-O). Restart Firefox to enable the add-on.

Tomorrow I’ll be having an interview to get back to work. Finally, after almost a year. It’s nearby, it’s a job I can handle and they don’t mind if I can’t show up on occassion when I’m experiencing too much pain, so the conditions look promising. I’ll keep you posted.