My new machine is a beast!

I've been waiting a long time for a new development machine. With founding my own company I've finally been able to allow myself to buy one. There are still a few things missing as I wait for updated Hardware (like a graphics card, hey nVidia hurry up!!). But apart from that it's super fast, perfect for development. All in all I'm quite satisfied with the hardware so far. I'm mostly running Windows 10 Pro but occasionally ArchLinux as well.

Hardware Overview:

• Intel Core i7-8700K
• Asus TUF Z370-PRO Gaming
• G.Skill DDR4 32GB PC 3866 CL18 RAM
• Watercooled using a CoolerMaster MasterLiquid Pro 240
•  In Win 101C Midi-Tower
• 1TB Samsung 960 PRO SSD
• About 25% Overclocked
• Dell U2718Q Monitor 27" 4k display
• Das Keyboard 4 Professional
• Logitech MX Master 2S
• Sennheiser PXC 550 for amazing sound

My workplace power machine!

My new company Enaweg

With February I officially founded my own company! It is called Enaweg and creates software on demand among other things. This has been a busy time, planning for almost two years, reading lots of business stuff, calculating costs, getting enough financing going to start, talking to banks aso.

Also long time no post here! :( A lot has changed since 2013. I married a wonderful woman, become a father twice, first a girl then a boy! Furthermore, I travelled some parts of the world (Cuba, USA, Mexico, Island, Italy, North Germany, England, Ireland, Portugal). And there is even more, like I bought a house with a nice garden and am self-renovating it, almost finished with that! Also got a Surface Pro and bought a new powerful desktop system for work, newest stuff, watercooled. Maybe I find time to post more about some of that stuff. And I'm now converted from using Ubuntu to Arch which is awesome!

Anyways, nice to post again after way to many years, and check out ENAWEG!

Selling my lovely Dell Inspiron Mini 10v

I'm selling my lovely Dell Mini 10v Netbook. (I have a blue cover, not black) As I have an other laptop now I don't use it anymore. Besides some small test installations. I still love it, its a great little netbook. The hardware is a bit dated already but for normal tasks it works well. Great for Skype calls, Youtube, Websurfing, writing documents and similar stuff. Not so good for playing games or HD Videos.

Specs:

• Intel Atom N270 (1.6 Ghz) CPU
• 1 GB of DDR2 RAM
• 10.1 inch with a 1024 X 576 resolution
• 160 GB 5400 RPM 2.5 inch hard drive
• 1.3 megapixel Webcam
• 802.11b/g WiFi card (not sure about n, need to check)
• SD Card reader
• Windows XP (I run the latest Ubuntu 12.04 on it, works great, Windows 7 works great too)
• has no Fan! completely silent ..

I took good care of it and it has no obvious signs of usage. (no scratches or anything like that) The keyboard is very nice. I bought it for ~320 EUR and I would like to have 180 EUR for it. Also, it does work well as a Hackintosh.

Update:
- Wikipedia EN

Vacation: Lisbon

Been on vacation for about a week in Lisbon. Beautiful city, nice people, loved it. Free-Walking-Tours are great. Hostels are nice and clean. I stayed in the My Lisbon Home Hostel. Lisbon offers a lot of beautiful places around the city. We did take hundreds of pictures all over the place. Meet a few lovely people over there and had lots of fun. Visiting all the nice places did make the vacation a bit exhausting. But was still totally worth it.

Next vacation gonna be nice and relaxing with the sea and a sandy beach to lie around all day long. Maybe Greece? Or Italy? We'll see ...

Time Tracking Solutions: Toggl

Had a look at a few time tracking solutions. It's easy to loose the overview of how much time you spent on a project if you work on a lot of different projects at the same time. So, I did search for a good solution that fits me. The few requirements I had where as follows:

• very easy to use (else I won't use it for long)
• cloud/server based (as I want to use/access the same data on all devices I use)
• multi-platform (I use Windows, Android and Linux daily. WP7 would be a nice bonus)
• decent overview of time spent on projects (graphical analysis of some sort)
• free (for personal use. As I only use it privately. Very cheap would be acceptable but I rather go for free in this case)

My choice fall onto Toggl. Mostly they do everything over a website. Their platform apps (Win, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS) are basically a container displaying the website. As the website is very well done this does work well as long as you have internet access. I'm not sure how far they use HTML5 to make it possible to use it while not having access to the internet. As having internet is usually not a problem for me I don't care too much about that.

I think Toggl is a really neat time tracking solution for projects. It's very simple and has a nice structure. Tagging tasks is a neat bonus I don't really use but still nice to have just in case. I'm curious how long I'll keep using this ...

Need A Hardware Upgrade

So, I decided that I need some hardware upgrades. I really didn't buy much in 2011, so it's time to replace some old stuff and extend some of the not so old stuff. As hardware selection is a complex thing with lots of things to consider I put together a small list. Maybe someone has a similar taste in hardware and finds it handy. So here it is:

1. My main PC needs a second monitor. I like to use (and have one now) a 16:10, 23"+ and IPS panel monitor. I've decided that I want this baby here: HP ZR2440w (my current one is a HP LP2475w)
2. Also I want to replace my main mobile phone (an HTC HD2 running Android) with something new. This is a hard choice as I love the Nokia N9 but want to have an Android phone as well. I think the N9 would be the right phone for me. Maybe I'm just gonna keep the HD2 for Android development.
3. Thinking of buying a tablet. Lots of them are coming out this year. I guess I'll likely wait till later in the year to decide what I want. The Spark may be a nice one for me to play around with. But maybe I'm waiting for something better and bigger. Who knows ..
4. I'm still looking for a good hardware solution to wake me up in the morning. I like to wake up to some nice music. Sonos offers some nice things I would like but is rather expensive.
5. Looking into digital cameras. Want something better than my mobile phone cam (which is horrible). Would love a Sony NEX-7 but its rather expensive for my taste (and from Sony). So I guess I'm going with a Panasonic DMC GX1 for now. The H-PS14042E lense (or a similar) would be nice if it happens to fit. Maybe I make that my birthday present :).
6. And finally I need to replace my aging Netbook (can't play those HD videos). It's an old Dell Mini 10 and I'm not sure what I want to replace it with. Maybe that's gonna be replaced by a tablet. 

I'll see what I'm actually going to buy. Nice new things to play around with this year. The first and most important thing will be the second monitor as its just so nice to work with that. The rest is more for toying around with anyways :) ...

About Focus & Change (on my webpresence)

I've started to change a few things related to my (and my projects) online presence. But first a bit of background and what's there right now. Years ago I purchased some webspace and domain names. At the time All-Inkl.com has been my service provider of choice. I've had no problems so far and am not planning on switching anytime soon. The problem is that I have to manage the different websites on this space. Updating things isn't very hard but still takes time I rather spend on something more productive. Nowadays there are enough services offered to replace a few things I used to manage "by hand".

For some time I've been running my own wiki page for projects. This has mostly been "private" information about unreleased projects. Last year I already started to use Google Sites for this as they offer everything I need for that. I can keep them private and let others edit the pages wiki style as well. It's simple and straight forward and I don't need to mess around with background technology. I've used this for most of 2011s projects. A few of these will hopefully be released this year. Furthermore, I use these Google Sites as an Idea dump for future projects. It's just simple, has all needed features and I can access it from everywhere without the need to remember separate credentials. It's just very convenient this way.

Also, I've had a personal webpage for a long time now (started in 1996). This page has always been about my projects. Later it started to become a little more about my person by adding a CV as well as a blog to it. The current iteration runs on Drupal 7 which I'm pleased with. But I still want to remove the burden of keeping it's software and modules up-to-date. In 2011 I've already struggled a lot with that (on most of my sites). I already moved my blog off the site in 2009 (and I'm glad you could find my current blog ;). Blogger has been good enough for me and I especially enjoy the good Google integration. So back then Blogger has been a natural choice. I'm planning to migrate the rest of my site to Google Sites in the coming weeks. Mainly this is the (short) information about my projects as well as my up-to-date CV. I'll keep my old site running for some time but will not update it anymore.

This will hopefully free up some of my time for these low-changing sites. I plan to keep GameDev.at as well as the digitalDreams page on my webhost for now. Hopefully I'm able to get them up-to-date soon. Especially I'm sad that GameDev.at doesn't work anymore. That one will take some time to fix.

More on Google Sites in an other post soon ...

Drupal 7 admin pages slow

So for some time I've been running Drupal 7 for my private webpage. It has been slow as hell on the admin pages. The "frontend" side works fast and without any slowdown. There are others experiencing the same trouble. A lot of others it seems.

For years I've been running Drupal now and it's only since I switched to version 7 that it started to have speed problems. It has a major slowdown on all admin pages. They take sometimes 30+ seconds to load and almost every admin page uses 10+ seconds. The high times cause PHP to throw an error (Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded) that some function was running too long. I constantly got these errors on admin pages. It was barely usable. I had to reload pages multiple times (often 5+ times) to finally get them to show. Each time I had to wait till the timeout came.

Furthermore the update.php page had the same problem. I couldn't update more than 2 modules for some time. Now I updated to version 7.2 and with that updated all modules to the newest versions. I wasn't able to update two of the modules. They run into this timeout even when they where the only modules which needed an update. So I desperately needed a solution for this problem as one was the views module which I need.

After a long time of seaching the net, this is what I found out and did so far:

• It helps to disable all modules that aren't needed (of course). Especially the special modules for the admin pages like the Overlay module or the Update Manager module. These help minimally to increase page loading speeds. I did disable all non needed modules.
• I installed the devel module to check where the problem is. This showed me that its on the PHP side and not the database.
• There are some optimizations that can be done on the database side. I didn't do these as the database seems fast enough.
• Someone wrote that it may be due to not finished installs of some module that messed up Drupal. This could be the case for me. I had a few "failed" upgrades of modules in the past. Uninstalling the module and reinstalling it is supposed to help. Didn't try this so far and it's hard to find the problematic modules. I'm considering a fresh install of Drupal with a new DB. Just need to have time for it and backup all the current data.
• Another obvious solution is to increase the PHP timeout. This is what I did as the other solutions are too time consuming or don't feel "right". Edit the .htaccess file located within the drupal root directory and add a "php_value max_execution_time 90" at the end. 90 stands for 90 seconds, use what you think fits. You just need to remember that you did this the next time you update Drupal.

Reducing Online Noise

Recently I've been thinking a lot about all the online activities which distract me from getting some work done. Things like news sites, facebook, twitter, IMs and other things here and there. Ubuntu does a pretty good job of reducing some of this for me. It seems that this will only improve with the next version and the new Unity UI. Gnome 3 seems to try similar things. I've come to the conclusion that I want to do some of the following things:

• Restrict my social site activity to only once or twice a day.
• Same for news sites.
• switch off most IMs during the day.
• set some times where I'm 'allowed' to do that online stuff (like lunch-break, evenings)
• make it harder to get to the pages by making them less visible

the problem with all this online activity is that I'm now used to this distraction. I'm searching for it. I seem to not be able to focus on a task for a longer period of time in front of my computer. It feels like I'm always missing something. I hate wasting time and thats why I'm so frustrated about this. I guess it's going to be hard to overcome this urge but I hope I manage to do it and finally get things done at home ...

Back from a break

A lot has happened recently and I haven't really been in the mood to post here. Started to regularly go to the gym. Sitting in front of a computer all day at work and doing nothing for your body just isn't a good idea. I feel much better already which also affects my mood positively. I'm a Grooveshark VIP user now as well. They offer a nice service, but more on that in a later post.

I got myself a new phone. A HTC HD2 originally running WinMo 6.5 but I'm running Android 2.3.1 on it right now. Good phone with a big screen, much better to surf the net than my old HTC Hero running Android 2.1. Most of my friends and family got themselves new phones as well. All Android and Windows Phone 7 devices. I guess smartphones are now very mainstream.

I put Ubuntu on my mothers computer and she seems to like it very much so far. This gave me confidence that Ubuntu really is far enough for an average user to use daily. I have high hopes for the 11.10 release of Ubuntu. I think the upcoming 11.04 release with the new Unity UI is great but Unity needs a bit more time to mature. I hope that with 11.10 release Unity will truly unleash its power to the masses.

more later ...

Dendemann - Stumpf ist Trumpf 3.0

Recently I'm a bit addicted to this song & video. So great :)

Dendemann - Stumpf ist Trumpf 3.0

Dendemann | MySpace Musikvideos

Ich hätte sicher noch ne scharmante Idee, für ne Parodie, auf en verdammtes Klischee.
Ich könnt labern wenn ich wollt, voll so intelligent, immer Zeitlos doch niemals hinter dem Trend.
Und dann hätt ich sicher noch, en mörder Zitat aus nem wichtigen Buch das ich hörbar nicht mag,
doch ich würde immer Platz lassen zwichen den Zeilen, für die nachhaltigkeit, mit dem erfrischenden Style.

And the video, sooo MacGyver! :)

Status Update ...

Still a lot to do in the new flat. The kitchen is about the only room thats nearly finished. Bought a Ikea shelf but as I unpacked it I saw that it was damaged already :(. Need to bring it back but without a car it's a little complicated. One of my sisters mentioned that she wanna visit me before Xmas so maybe I have luck and she drives me to Ikea.

Xmas is also nearing and with it the pressure to buy stuff no one needs. I still haven't bought anything besides stuff for myself recently like a new computer :). But I need to start soon or I'll run out of time as in any other year. Always the same with me ;). I hope I find a few good things this year and don't have to buy the usual Wine, Chocolate and stuff like that.

The only thing that makes me really sad is that I can't code anything recently. My webpages would desperately need some love. FengGUI needs a new release. Just no time left for it. I hope that I'll be able to spend more time coding starting with January. But stuff like that you can never know. I really miss it already. Lets hope and see ...

Moving to the new flat

The last week I did move to the new flat. Finally a bigger room for myself and my old/new flatmates. Its a very nice and quiet flat. Just around the corner there is a big shopping street. Everything you wanna buy within 5 minutes walk time is so nice :). Especially if you don't own a car! Metro station around the corner as well as other public transport infrastructure near by. All very nice ..

Only really bad thing is that it now takes me 30+ minutes to get to work. Instead of the 10 minute walk I'm used to. Also its a little disappointing that in this part of Vienna there isn't much to go out besides a few bars. Everything I'm used to in Vienna is at the other side of town. So no walking home anymore late at night :(. Well I guess I'm getting used to it soon ...

Hello Blogspot.com

After a break from blogging, my new blog on blogspot. Let's see how I do around here. :)


still for some time, my old blog on: http://marcmenghin.gamedev.at/v7.0/weblog