New Tablet PC

Right, I am blogging from a brand new HP Tablet PC running Windows Vista - and I will continue to run Vista on it till I get a Ubuntu CD because I have exhausted all my bandwidth and can’t afford to download more ( We’ve got the world’s worst ISPs - they have no idea what their Linux authentication client looks like but they seemingly offer “24 x 7 Linux support” ).

Well, I am not too sure what to make of this PC but I can confidently say that AMDs run bloody hot - just too hot. For instance let me point out my ancient acer travelmate 4500 with 256 MB RAM and 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium M processor. The thing is as silent and the fan only goes whrrr… when I happen to watch flash videos in Mozilla IceWeasel ( from what I hastily gathered a few months ago, IceWeasel was FireFox without its icons but do correct me on this. IceWeasel is turning out to be a PITA since the last few updates ).

The keyboard’s OK and I can’t seem to be able to write anything with the pen but I am not too sure why I need to use it. I currently have this thing set at Maximum Battery life and the fan seems to have silenced.

Anyway, Vista seems to be ok but since I am practically logged in as root all the time on my Debian lappy, I have to get used to it asking the admin whether he really has any intention of changing his network settings ( please don’t comment on how dangerous it is to run as root all the time as those speeches happen to bore me. A true sysadmin always logs in as root ).

Setting up my favorite language on this pc:

Troubles all round.

Python’s website says that the amd64 package is to be used to install Python 2.5. I asked it to install the msi package and it told me something about wrong processor. Turns out that the package marked neither as w32 or 64 is suitable for installing it on my box. Oh well done.

The bright side is that I can finally see a powerful IDE in action ( I am using eclipse which doesn’t really run, let alone fly, on my acer Travelmate ).

I was looking for a tool like Glipper for Windows as I find it extremely hard to do anything with a clipboard that doesn’t have history. I found something called Ditto. It seems to be doing its job very well so I am quite OK with it.

I am still waiting for the Ubuntu CDs to arrive…. going by my experience during the the days of Feisty Fawn, the people at Launchpad take a good 6 weeks to send in those CDs.

BTW, I have taken up a few interesting pragmatic programming ideas and I will blog about them soon. Oh yeah, as my tweet says ( as of 4:04 pm IST ), I have received my rejection letter from MIT and I have scribbled all over it. To think, till a minute before the results, I was dreaming of working on the Semantic Web under prof. Tim Berners Lee and would have given two limbs to be there…… Oh stuff it.

If there’s one thing I suck at, it is ending blog posts, particularly posts like these.