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I’m now on my fifth day of using Ubuntu on my office machine. Slowly, I’m starting to get accustomed to working with it, but there are still a variety of things that I still need to do from time to time.

For those that haven’t read my previous posts on this topic, I’ve switched from Windows Vista to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10) on my Dell Studio 17 laptop that I use at the office. Even though Ubuntu has a great ability to “just work,” often times it is difficult and unintuitive to get certain things to work. So, I decided to blog about all those difficulties so that I can have this information to rely on later and so others can benefit from my experience.

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Samus, my main machine, was having some issues earlier today, so I opened her up and felt around. I touched the graphics card and was nearly burned. I loaded up a temperature tracking program and found that it was running at 93°C. That’s nearly 200 degrees Farenheit. I was amazed that the GPU hadn’t been damaged by this heat.

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I got Ubuntu successfully installed on my office machine (Dell Studio 17) yesterday. Today, I’m going to use it all day at the office while making notes on what still doesn’t work, what I could get to work, how I fixed problems, and I’m sure some random ramblings will enter at some point.

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I have a Dell Studio 17 for my office computer. It’s a nice machine, but Vista fails horribly on it. The ATI driver for it causes a BSoD on average, once a day. I’ve finally had enough, so I’m switching over to Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex.

I’m writing this post as I install and configure Ubuntu. This will make it easier for me to keep track of what I did in case I need to undo something later or if anybody reading this wants to make the switchover as well.

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Web applications developers such as myself often have a hard time keeping up with everything that’s going on. There’s always some new programming or scripting language, new standards, new browsers, new technologies, new paradigms, new social networks, and on and on. Every day, something new happens. The end result of all of this always ends up being very similar: people demand faster applications that deal with ever-increasing amounts of data which end up putting massive stress on the server architecture.

As we toil to improve the performance of the applications and their snappy response times, it becomes easy to forget about how we can tweak settings on a low level to provide massive speed improvements on the front-end. For example, most people don’t know that you can configure MySQL to take better advantage of the resources that the server has available.

By default, MySQL is configured to consume a relatively limited amount of memory resources. Start giving MySQL more memory to work with, and your application’s performance can improve greatly.

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One of the these days I’m going to have to start working with AJAX. To date, I haven’t really had a need, but I’m going to get way behind the curve unless I start working with it now. I recently stumbled on a page in the WordPress Codex called AJAX in Plugins. This will be my starting point for working with AJAX and WordPress. Hopefully I can start cranking out some cool new plugins with AJAX goodness soon. Once I do, I’ll blog with some more details about what hurdles, if any, I faced when developing WordPress plugins with AJAX support.

Many clients have shared concerns with me about using the built-in Update Services feature of WordPress to automatically ping services like Ping-O-Matic. Why are they concerned? They have heard horror stories from fellow bloggers or read random stories you can find on the web about WordPress sites being blocked from these sites due to a variety of different reasons. Unfortunately, there is much more information out there about the problems and very little information about solutions. In this post, I aim to address the major concerns and provide solutions where solutions are needed. Read more