So... there is a problem that exists with users of some ATI cards. I found this problem a while ago after purchasing my Lenovo T500 laptop that came with an ATI Radeon 3650 Mobile video card. The problem is this:

When you install the FGLRX (proprietary) ATI video drivers, and enable compositing - windows take freaking forever to resize, minimize, and restore. Like 2-3 seconds.

Hey all. If you're like me, you like to have a set of headphones at work to keep all of the noise out. You probably also have a set at home to take running, reading, programming and all that other rad stuff you do.

The problem you have, (like me), is its hard to listen to the crisp golden tones that come from your Bose QC3 headphones at work - and then come home and pop in the rectangular ear buds that came with your HTC G1. After about 10 minutes and wondering if your laptop speakers sound better than the ear buds, you start checking review sites for good, cheap headphones.

So, one of the things I hate about using an ATI video card over an nVidia card is the pain that it is to get things like compositing working in X Windows.

I purchased a Lenovo T500 laptop with the hybrid Intel 2500HD/ATI 3650 cards and have had a heck of a time getting the ATI card to work right in Linux. Today, that has changed. :)

This week, I finally took the plunge and bought a smart phone. After researching products from Blackberry and Apple, I finally decided on the G1 from HTC. I also compared this phone with the Hero and myTouch - also powered by the Google Android operating system.

The things that stood out to me are, the Android Market Place, price, and features.

I've been messing with Adobe AIR and have build a small app in HTML/Javascript. I figured I'd see what Flex/AS3 is all about and mess with that a little. Here are answers to things I got really hung up on (and had a terrible time finding documentation for):

HTTP transactions
I am very familiar with how Curl (PHP) and XMLHTTPRequest (Javascript) work. I figured it would generally be similar in ActionScript. Generally speaking - it is. This is how to do it:

import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent;
import mx.controls.Alert;

Ugh. So the tooltips in Pidgin (formally known as GAIM) have a .5 second delay. This is seriously annoying considering the tooltips are usually huge. If you're like me and want to shut these silly things off, do the following:

1. Open ~/.purple/prefs.xml
2. Search for a preference called 'tooltip_delay'
3. Change the value to something like '3000' or '999999'. Its in milliseconds, i.e. a value of 500 would be 1/2 second.
4. Save the file and restart Pidgin

So, I've been hearing lots about this Adobe AIR product for a while - mainly because I've been messing a little with the Yahoo! Widgets framework.

I finally went to Adobe's site today and downloaded it.
Guess what - there's a native Linux version. Guess what else - it was super easy to install. I got confused for a sec and had to make sure I was still using Linux. I went to their app store and downloaded the DestroyTwitter app and hooked into my Twitter account. Once again, it was a breeze.

Okay - I've had this laptop for some time now. I wanted to post an update of just the video card part of the system just because there are a few things I think that are worth noting.

ATI Radeon 3650
This card is great in Windows. World of Warcraft runs very well in 1920x1200 with pretty reasonable settings. I'd consider it about equivalent or slightly slower than my nVidia 7600 GT. When the correct drivers are installed, it uses a low amount of power as well. The configuration tools seem to work well.

Well, I just got Windows 7 RC1 installed. I've never used Windows 7 previously, so I was curious to see what changes were in store. I didn't have a lot of time to mess with it, as its pretty late.

My initial thoughts were:
* The UI is really really different. Internet Explorer has a weird way of grouping tabs/windows. I'm still trying to figure it out.
* Slashdot.org apparently caused IE 8 to freak out and a window came up asking me if I wanted to 'Recover' the page, or some such action.

Okay - I've had this thing for a little while now, and I wanted to update my opinion on the machine.

First, the challenges. When I installed Linux, I blew away the Vista partitions. It turns out this thing doesn't come with a Vista install disk, (or any CDs for that matter). There was a backup partition though... :( After solving this problem, I wound up getting Vista and Linux installed at the same time. (On a side note, I thought Vista Home Basic would be way worse than it its... I actually don't mind it too much. There are, naturally, things I would like to change...)