I finally broke down and ordered that laptop: Promedion (Clevo) 5600 with Northwood P4 1.8GHz CPU, 256MB DDR ram, 30G HDD, 64MB ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, 15″ 1400×1050 TFT, 3 year on-site.

When I get the thing, which should be in a week or so, I’ll make sure to write up a detailed review and document the laptop’s transcendence to the next level of computer consciousness (i.e. the Linux installation). Fortunately I didn’t have to pay the Microf*ck tax (the forced inclusion of a Microslop OS) like with so many other mainstream notebooks.

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I found this posting on groups.google.com, bless its heart. It’s very positive about the Clevo 5600 and mentions that it’s also marketed as the Fosa 5600, Prostar 5694 and the Area 51 gaming laptop by AlienWare. I’d been drooling about the Area 51 before, but at that time I didn’t know what the Clevo looked like, so I didn’t recognise it.

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Mozilla 1.0 has been released! Nuke IE (unless you’re already using a real OS), install Mozilla and enjoy some compliance goodness.

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SpamAssassin kicks ass. What to do with all this extra time…

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The Clevo 5600 is also sold as the M-Tech 5600 as well as the Sager NP56xx series.

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The Acrobat Reader 5.05 linux plugin just works with Mozilla 1.0rc3. Of course. :)

Here is an interesting article about why Eric S. Raymond likes Python. It’s an interesting read, whether you’re an esr fan or not.

My VisSym 2002 trip to Barcelona was great fun. We made good use of the time in Spain and even spend a few nights in a Parador in Cardona. This was on the pricey side, but is definitely worth it.

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I’m in browser heaven. I bought Codeweavers Crossover 1.1.1 for a measly $24.95, so now my already hard-core Mozilla 1.0rc2 can also make use of all the winblows browser plugins, such as Quicktime, Windows Media Player 6.4 (ugh), Flash 6, Shockwave and so on. This is a great piece of software and it’s stable too!

Did you know that “xam = reduce(operator.add, map(operator.mul, xa, xa)) ** .5” calculates the magnitude of n-element vector xa? I had to wipe away a tear when I wrote that. It’s fast too. To run an interesting python benchmark, download this.

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If it were up to some politicians, South Africa is not going to have a population to worry about in a few years time. The president’s (Thabo Mbeki’s) view on the AIDS / HIV link is disturbing and so is the racism with which he and some of his supporting members of state approach scientists who oppose them. Mbeki’s strong point has never been his intellect; unfortunately he does not seem to realise this.

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Since PWM, I’d gone back to fvwm2 and then back to icewm. Seemingly, that wasn’t quite enough hopping around, so I built the latest greatest gnome 2 preview using the GARNOME distribution, which is a pretty cool BSD ports-ish way of building gnome 2. Well, gnome 2 looks good but isn’t there quite yet.

Soooooo, I thought that I should give KDE a try again, seeing that they’ve passed the 3.0 milestone. My oh my, it’s even prettier than 2.2 and the strange thing is that it’s quite a bit snappier as well! I have it running with Mosfet’s high performance liquid and it’s seriously drool-worthy. For a run-of-the-mill screenshot, click here. There are even debs for testing available (go to #debian-kde on openprojects.net to see where and how) so installing is a cinch.

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That was really quick… I now have an ADSL connection to the oodles and oodles of bandwidth that the TU has lying around. :)

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