Clete’s Blog

Slashdot’s tenth anniversary is approaching (I can’t figure out exactly when) and CmdrTaco is writing a history of Slashdot and how it came to be the greatest website ever. (well.. it’s my favorite news site) He just released part 2 of the history. It’s a very interesting read.

Check it out here.

On a negative note, here is my Vista stability report. It’s a nice feature of Vista, but it shows how horrible Vista is. This is the highest stability rating that I have received in quite a while. The X’s indicate that one or more programs crashed during that day of use.

Click to enlarge:

This shows that Vista isn’t all that great…

I just found two good features of Vista. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but they are brilliant. The first one is the Snipping Tool, which I used to get the below picture. You can take a snip of a portion of the screen. It’s missing some features, like selecting a portion of the screen and having it wait x seconds to snap the picture (for example, so that you can take snippets of rollover text). The second one is the Windows Sound Mixer. If you click on the speaker icon in the taskbar and click Mixer, you get this great mixer where you can change the amplitude and/or mute any single application. Check it out below:

It’s time for my monthly screenshot. I prepared them earlier today. Currently, I don’t have a Linux screenshot, as I was getting a kernel panic and was too lazy to fix it, so I reformatted (because Windows was messed up too). So, I will hopefully have a Linux screenshot soon. For now, here they are!

Click to enlarge:

Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit Edition; The wallpaper was done in Photoshop with a simple stained glass filter:

Now here is the interesting one… Windows 95 running in VMWare:

(Check out that amazing render of phpBB!)

Well, not much has happened this past week. My dad came up to school and it was great to see him again. I still miss the rest of my family. Things are going pretty well here. It’s beautiful outside, with the leaves changing colors and falling off. The leaves began changing colors here a few weeks ago. I will (hopefully) be posting some pictures, but then again, I have said that a hundred times already. If you haven’t already checked out a sample of some of the pictures that I have taken, check out my Picasa album.

School work is going well. I’m awaiting my exam grade from Honors, which I am anxious about. All of my other exams that I have had so far have come back with good grades. I made a 118 out of 120 in Computer Science. The two points missing were because I put my using lines (e.g. using std::cout;) in main() instead of next to the includes. Tecnically, it isn’t an error. Oh well. In statistics, I made 110 out of 110 on my exam, so that made me happy.

More to come later. Maybe I’ll post a sample of a class that we are writing in class (which I improved past what we worked on).