About a year ago, I led myself to believe that I’d find the time to play Fallout 3 on this new gaming PC that I’d build. Here are the parts that I’d picked, with my dear friend Eddie’s help, circa December 2008: Part Price GPU Gainward 4850 512MB 244 CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 474 MotherBoard Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P 0 RAM Corsair PC2-6400 DDR2-800 (2x2GB) 128 HDD WD Caviar Black 640GB 138 Power Supply Vantec 500N ION2+500W 75 Case 3R System K400 59 The total is SGD 1118, excluding an optical drive, monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers.

Since my previous post I’ve tried: MEPIS 8; KDE 3, based on Debian 5; Ubuntu 9.04; GNOME 2, based on Debian 5; Linux Mint 7: GNOME 2, based on Ubuntu 9.04; Kubuntu 8.04; KDE 3, based on on Ubuntu 8.04. I’ve compared MEPIS 8 and Ubuntu 9.04, in what was called an unfair comparison by some. I think some of the commenters even indicated that Ubuntu 9.04 would’ve come up tops; I beg to differ.

I encountered this issue in a recent project. Basically I use SWFUpload to post files to a CakePHP controller. It worked beautifully, until I removed this one line in beforeFilter(): $this->Auth->allow("swfupload"); I was using the Auth component, and without the line above to allow unauthenticated access to the controller action, then we have a problem. Hope this helps somebody then.

I tried out Ubuntu 9.04 a week ago. I know I’m not exactly comparing apples with apples, since MEPIS 8 is based on Debian 5.0 and uses KDE 3.5, whilst Ubuntu 9.04 uses GNOME 2. I might be better off evaluating Kubuntu, the 9.04 release uses KDE 4, which I’d used previously, and disliked due to its gradual reduction in snappiness. But back to Ubuntu versus MEPIS. I’ve been running MEPIS on a (slow) Compaq nc8230, while Ubuntu runs on a (fast) IBM R52.

With reference to this event, I’ve decided to take my own shot at predicting the outcome of the 2009 NBA Playoffs. 5 points are awarded for correctly picking the winner, with an additional 2 for correctly picking the number of games played. First Round (27) LAL-UTA (LAL in 5) (7 points, LAL won 4-1) DEN-NOH (NOH in 7) (0 points, DEN won 4-1) DAL-SAS (DAL in 6) (5 points, DAL won 4-1) HOU-POR (POR in 6) (0 points, HOU won 4-2) CLE-DET (CLE in 5) (5 points, CLE won 4-0) BOS-CHI (BOS in 6) (5 points, BOS won 4-3) ORL-PHI (ORL in 5) (5 points, ORL won 4-2) ATL-MIA (MIA in 6) (0 points, ATL won 4-3) I picked Miami (Dwayne Wade), New Orleans (Chris Paul), Portland (Brandon Roy) over the Hawks, Nuggets and Rockets respectively.

With reference to this post, I decided to write my first Greasemonkey script. I don’t subscribe to cable TV, so I get my sports news fix mostly by reading. Now that the NBA playoffs are in progress, I use NBA.com on a daily basis to read recaps like this one. I’m upset enough that the Lakers – one of the eight teams I’m rooting for – lost, without having to right-click “Game Scoreboard”, copy the link, and replace “gameinfo.