THE POWER!

So I did all those upgrades and still decided to overclock the CPU - after all, it is an unlocked Black Edition. So I bumped the CPU multiplier from 16 to 18 for a 12.5% bump in CPU speed. I didn't touch the voltages, and if it starts running full bore for any length of time, it would give the existing fans a very hard time.

Now Running - Debian Squeeze!

Quite a few upgrades both hardware and software to catch up on:

Upgraded hardware to Athlon II X2 245 CPU on a Gigabyte MA-785GM-US2H. This CPU overclocks nicely (and the DDR2 overclocked also.)

Then upgraded to a Phenom X6 1090T with 8Gb of DDR2 1066. Ended up buying a new Antec Solo case to get the heat and noise under control - very nice case. (I feel no need to overclock this chip.)

Tried to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS amd64 and FAILED! (Funny, the live disk ran fine!)

Then upgraded to Debian Squeeze 6.0.2.1 amd64. (I took a hard look at Archlinux and may still give that a try later.) All working very well - I seem to conveniently forget how much custom software I have to install and compile every time I do this.

Oops! Long TIme - No Post

Ouch! Long time no post.

We'll try and get a few out.

Upgraded To Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

So I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 some time back. I did the network upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04. Without a doubt, the easiest online upgrade I have ever done. The weird thing is, I vastly prefer to do a clean install, but I could not get the 10.04 CD to work so I crossed my fingers and went for it. Only thing that did happen was Ethernet didn't work (and I had to scramble to remember the ifconfig commands). I traced this back to the way I had configured /etc/network/interfaces.

Couple of things I did do:

Un installed the Nvidia video card drivers and switched back to the stock vga driver.
Backed up my home directory.

But really, this even went better than the 9.04 to 9.10. I had to reach in and tweak the GRUB settings from a rescue CD after that upgrade to even get GRUB to boot.

Extend And Pretend - How Does It End?

Recent economic signs increasingly point to a "double dip", although I have to agree with Robert Reich that most (98%) Americans never got out of the first dip. I think that even the idiots in DC and on Wall St are starting to realize that there is a snowball's chance in hell that the housing market can get back to where it was in 2007 any time in the next year or two. (I'd argue that it will take ten plus years to that, maybe longer if you include inflation.) Plus, it's now obvious that TBTF banks are making "record" profits, but this has done little to nothing to re-starting the economy. (I would make the argument once again, that bailing out the banks is the problem, not the solution since time, after time, after time, all that was done since the Reagan 80's has been to bail out failing Wall St firms rather than letting them go bust - with one notable exception: Lehman Brothers.)

So when does the Obama government decide to end "Extend and Pretend" and actually start to fix the problems with our economy?

Here's my best guess - we're all Katrina victims now. NOLA is the new role model for how our nation will recover. The middle and lower class will get left to fend for themselves, the rich will be protected and coddled by the state. The economy will continue to disintegrate, our country will continue to fracture.

Problems With Libgphoto2 in Karmic?

Strangely, gthumb is no longer able to import photos from a CD or from Compact Flash. What's up with that?

Looks like it's this bug.

This is a pretty easy bug for me to work around so far, and I'm sure Ill run into more Karmic Kola issues. I'm working on a post on transcoding in Karmic - apparently ffmpeg is left unable to use h264 and aac due to potential patent issues.

Health Care Reform

Man, February flew by without a thought! And much of March.

I'll have to say - I've been spending lots of time and energy watching and posting at other blogs about Health Care Reform. I'm not impressed with President Obama or the Democratic party. The proposed HCR is very weak, pretty much a bailout of the health care insurance industry that created our current mess.

Just giving everybody the option to buy into Medicare, with a graduated cost scale, and fixing Medicare, would have been much better.