About to buy a new laptop

I’m about to buy a new laptop. I’m still happy with my Thinkpad T60p1 even though it needs a service to get rid of some heat problems and this annoying display issue, which has become worse lately:

Anyway, the new laptop is not for me but for my wife, so that there is less competition about the one we already have! 🙂

One option would be to get me a new laptop and let her inherit the T60p, but I have an 1600×1200 pixel display now and the Thinkpad T Series models with 1920×1200 pixels are outrageously priced! I need some really good new business for 2GooD Productions in order to afford it!

Miguel de Icaza observed that Lenovo finally offers Linux preloaded on some machines but I can’t find anything about that on their Swedish web site. It would be good to avoid paying the “Microsoft Tax” the next time a buy a Thinkpad!

When my wife found out that Dell offers their Inspiron 1525 with the design below, she wanted one of those, and who am I to argue? I’ll make sure the specs look alright and pray that I can get Ubuntu running on it properly.

blossom.jpg

(Image is Courtesy of Dell Inc.)

1 At least if I don’t think too much about the issues with the fglrx proprietary graphics driver from ATI.

My first AJAX!

Probably years after everyone else, I’ve made my first AJAX-enabled web page today. As I do this from within Ruby on Rails, it was virtually painless to remove or replace a piece of HTML.

My next AJAX step was to get in_place_editing working. The first problem was the InvalidAuthenticityToken and the second issue was that I use a different controller, but now it works fine!

SourceForge.net Marketplace spam

I’ve been a member of a number of SourceForge projects since 2001 and I can’t recall that I’ve had any previous complaints about their services to the Open Source community, but I’ve been getting “Turn your skills into cash at SourceForge.net Marketplace” mails for a while now and my annoyance keeps growing. Some DNS checks on marketplace.sourceforge.net shows that a company called ExactTarget is running the business. I previously tried to change my e-mail address in their “Profile Center” to [email protected] but on Thursday I got another of the mails. This time I think I managed to unsubscribe. Unsurprisingly, I’m not the only one annoyed by this venture from SourceForge.