About SG & Site News

My 2002 era XP machine died last week: the motherboard failed after years of 12-18 hour a day use. I decided not to replace the motherboard as even new P4 motherboards do not provide much support for "ancient" technology like IDE drives, AGP 4x video cards, etc. -- buying a new motherboard would mean replacing most of my peripherals as well. I finally decided to go with an Emachines ET1331G-03w.

The first stage of the move to Drupal (from Wordpress) is finished. Software Gadgets is up and running with categories and comments again functional. There is a new Index page where all posts and pages are indexed in alphabetic order -- no need to guess the category. The anti-spam features on the comments are working. More features will be added with time, but this site is operational again.

You are probably wondering why I switched from Wordpress to Drupal. There are several reasons.

Software Gadgets is moving from Wordpress to Drupal and the site will be a bit messy for a while as I get it set up and configured nicely. Wordpress is a very nice blogging system, but it seems to use a lot more CPU time than my Drupal sites do. It's probably gotten a bit bloated with time and new features. Drupal, at least as I have it set up on my Linode VPS seems to be much more CPU efficient compared to Wordpress -- even with plugins like Supercache enabled on Wordpress. We'll see how it does under Drupal.

I've been running Ubuntu as my primary operating system since the Fall of 2007. I ran Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) as my primary OS while running Windows XP SP2 in a VirtualBox virtual machine running in seamless mode to use the Windows program I just could not live without. (Seamless mode displays the Windows desktop and the Ubuntu Gnome desktop at the same time making it look like both Linux and Windows programs are running on the same machine -- no switching between the virtual desktop and the real desktop.)

I've finally upgraded to WordPress 2.5. My upgrade experience was quite good this time because I used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin, version 1.1. Note that the version listed on the download link on the linkd page is "0.1" but it actually downloads the current 1.1 version of the plugin. I installed the plugin and started it.

It's been several months since Software Gadgets had regular updates. There have been several reasons for this:

1) Serious illness in the family. My wife has been diagnosed with oral cancer. Dealing with this has (and still is) taking time and energy. However, things are finally moving and the situation is improving.

2) I switched my computer from Windows XP as the primary OS (running Ubuntu in a VMWare virtual machine) to Ubuntu as the primary OS (Running XP in Virtualbox seamless mode).

As most people reading this blog probably know, I've decided not to upgrade to Vista. I would need a new computer and really have no need for one, other than to run Vista. I have, however, upgraded to 1 gig of RAM over the weekend and this has finally allowed me to run Windows and Linux together on one desktop.

I come across an interesting software gadget almost every day as I cruise the web. Unfortunately, I don't have time to download and test every gadget-like program I see -- especially if neither I nor my associates have an immediate use for the program.

I have decided, however, that I should at least mention the more interesting/useful looking software gadgets I stumble across here. These posts will appear in the new "Discoveries" category. "Docoveries" posts will often be little more than a name, a quote from the gadget's site, and a link to the site so that readers can find out more.

After over a month of fighting Thingamablog database problems (see this post on the "old blog" part of this site for more), I am happy to announce that Software Gadgets is back, hopefully better than ever.

I've switched to Software Gadgets to WordPress. This means that site readers will finally be able to comment on posts -- provided the comment spam doesn't overwhelm my very limited time for dealing with it.