Linux, Part 2

Today I got the Vostro 1400. Starting it up and getting Vista going wasn’t bad, but it took a while. I had opted to get rid of most of the software bloat that Dell usually includes, but still had to set things up, download updates, etc. Vista is the slowest thing ever.

After I got everything set up, I decided to try installing Ubuntu (see Linux, Part 1 where I downloaded and tried out the installation CD). I knew the first step was shrinking the main hard drive partition to free up room. But Vista doesn’t make this easy. I still don’t know how to get to that control panel other than by searching Help for “partition” and then clicking on a link that opens the utility. I struggled with that for a while before I went back and read the article that said I didn’t have to do anything but free up the space (not create a volume, which I couldn’t do). The Dell came with the hard drive already partitioned into 4 parts. I think one is for a quick-booting media player, the other is a recovery disk, one is diagnostics, and the other is the rest of your hard drive with Windows on it. (In Ubuntu they are called MEDIADIRECT, RECOVERY, DellUtility, and OS).

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Asian Grouper

For birthdays and other special occasions at work sometimes we will go to a restaurant near Little Five Points called Front Page News. They serve regular American fare with a little emphasis on New Orleans food. One item they have had for years is a grouper sandwich. Sometime last year it started to come out that most restaurants offering grouper on their menu weren’t really giving you grouper. This is because we have eaten almost all of the grouper in the ocean and it is very hard to get anymore. Groupers mature very slowly and a typical fish might be 40 years old. Fishing for grouper is completely unsustainable.

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Linux, Part 1

In my musings about having an internet tablet and then deciding on a notebook and then finally buying a Dell Vostro 1400, I thought that I could make up for a lack of computing power by using a less demanding operating system like Linux. Learning more about it, the particular Linux package that seemed best was Ubuntu. When Dell sells a computer with Linux, they install Ubuntu.

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Budget Notebook

After considering some kind of internet tablet I realized that an inexpensive notebook is a much better buy than an underpowered $400 Linux device. I found some notebooks in the $400-$500 range at Fry’s made by Toshiba or Compaq. With 15.4″ screens, all of them were over six pounds which some reviewers considered heavy. So I went to notebook review where you can filter on price and weight. Surprisingly, there was a 5-pound(ish) Dell computer for $499. I had looked at Dell recently, but they didn’t even mention the Vostro line of notebook computers. Apparently the Vostro is a “small business” computer and Dell feels like consumers should buy more expensive Inspiron or XPS notebooks. Even better, the Vostro has free shipping right now. There is a still less expensive Vostro 1000 (I’m looking at the Vostro 1400), that starts at $399, but once you add in a few extras to make it roughly equivalent to the 1400 (the 1400 uses an Intel Celeron processor and the 1000 uses an AMD Sempron), the price difference was fairly small.

Since the democrats in Congress have decided that I should receive nearly the full $600 stimulus rebate, I thought I should go ahead and blow most of that on a laptop. Rather than wait for my check in May, I think I may pull the trigger on this deal this weekend. The nice thing about Dells is they are very popular among Linux hobbyists, so I may try setting up the computer to boot in Linux as an option.

Sitemaps

I wanted the transition to the new website to go as smoothly as possible. In the past there were certain things you could do to help search engines categorize your page. There are simple things that are part of HTML like using a title tag, using header tags to identify important parts of the page, etc. But you can also add META tags. A description of the site is good, and the descriptions I used would usually show up in the search results under the title of my page. At the time it was good to include keywords, but those seem to be less important now and instead the search engines find their own keywords in the text of your page.

Looking into all of that again, I signed up for Google’s webmaster tools service (they had me verify that I owned my site by including a specially named file on my site). Google pointed me in the direction of using a special sitemap.xml file that would tell the search engines where all of my pages are located and how often they are updated. Though Google seems to have originated this, a lot of other search engines use it too. A lot of websites have an html sitemap for visitors that shows all of the pages on their site, like a Table of Contents. But this file is xml and is intended just for the search engines. A piece of it might look like this:

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