Basically, TweetSum shows you all the people who are following you and who you haven’t followed back and you are able to drag those followers into one of the other two columns. The first of those columns is called “Followed” which is basically a list of people who you have followed. Once you drag a person into the column, it automatically sets your twitter account to follow them. Then the last column, and my personal favorite, is called “Meh.” and it is there for all the people who you do not want to follow.

Whats most impressive about the service is the interface. It has a very slick javascript interface which lets you drag, drop and even group followers together.

Overall, it is a neat little service and I am definitely going to be using it to manage all my future followers.

In a way, I can understand why some of the crappy shared hosts out there go down often and in many cases it is not their fault. What usually happens is that a user on one of their servers suddenly gets a traffic spike and blows the whole server down. If you so happen to be on the same server, well tough luck, you are going down with everyone else on the server. That is just the nature of shared hosting.

So understanding the above problem, I decided to move to a more “reliable” could solution and so MediaTemple stroles happily into my life. All was well for the first week or so of hosting with MediaTemple until suddenly I started seeing a little down time here and there. Not a big issue I thought to myself until it kept persisting and to this day, still persists. Today alone I have had trouble connecting to my databases, setting up a .co.za domain because one of the MT nameservers were down and also trouble with extremely slow website performance. Here is a screenshot of one of the many errors that frequents my website - This one happens when my site cant connect to their MySQL servers:

What is even worse, is that MediaTemple would not let me purchase the hosting plan on a month to month basis because I wanted to pay via paypal. So I am stuck with a years worth of crappy hosting. (Slicehost, when the heck will you start accepting paypal?). The only way to fix my shared hosting troubles is to go dedicated which I fully intend to do. Not only do you have more control over your hosting, but someone else’s website is not going to bring yours down.

I am going to try get a partial refund out of MediaTemple and hopefully if they budge, I am going to move to another web host. Slicehost looks good even though it isn’t fully dedicated hosting. It will mean a little downtime when moving sites across, but will hopefully save me many more hours down in the future.

1. Work
2. Study
3. Blog/Projects

Each of the above are extremely important to me and need to be worked on daily. The problem is getting them all done. I have decided that I need to build myself a daily schedule. One of the biggest problems with building and following a set schedule is that I sometimes work overtime or need to study harder for an upcoming exam etc. Thats why I am building myself an extremely “loose” schedule that is not based on time blocks.

What I have decided is that instead of time blocks, I am setting myself specific goals that need to be achieved and I will juggle my time each day to get all the tasks done. I will be setting time periods for each item, but these will not be followed religiously. So this is basically what my current schedule looks like:

• Morning-Afternoon: Work
• Late Afternoon-Evenings: Study
• Late Evening/Weekends: Blogging and Projects

It is very simplistic and may look extremely easy to follow, but from my experience it isn’t and you have to be extremely disciplined to follow any sort of schedule. There will be days where the different blocks are switched around. For instance I may have to study some weekends to meet assignment deadlines. I have also dedicated more time to work for the very obvious reason that I am required to work a certain amount of hours to reach specific deadlines.

I am going to monitor my progress over the next few weeks to see how things go and hopefully I will be able to get everything I need to do done. It is easy to get caught up doing a certain task and neglect other important things (which is basically happening to me now) and hopefully with the simple above schedule I will be able to overcome that.

Basic Home Server Specs

• Celeron 440 2.0 GHZ processor
• 160gb SATA Hard Drive 7200rpm
• 2GB DDR2 RAM

Whats On My Server?

The purpose of the server is mainly for storing and sharing files. The other big thing was that I wanted it to talk to the various Windows machines in the house and to my Xbox 360.

First in the process of creating the server was obviously to install the operating system. As mentioned above I decided to go with Ubuntu 8.04 server edition. Once the operating system was running there were a couple of configs that needed to be setup and software that needed to be installed such as setting a static IP for the machine and installing basic admin tools like SSH.

When all the basic configs were out of the way I immediately setup Samba. Samba allows you to share a Linux machine with Windows machines. Installing Samba is really easy and Ubuntu server edition comes packaged with it pre-installed. There is pretty much no config required, once installed you can start sharing files with Windows machines.

The next thing I had to install was uShare to stream content from the server to my Xbox 360. uShare lets me easily access all the media that I have on the server and view/play it directly from my Xbox 360. If you want to do the same with your Xbox 360 but don’t know where to start, check out this tutorial which will show you how to get it all setup in a few easy steps.

Lastly I wanted to create my own software repository. I haven’t got this working 100% yet but basically having the repository allows me to download software/system updates once and then update multiple machines through my server. In the repository I am not just storing updates but actual software as well and even full Linux distributions…

What I Still Want To Add

There are a few things I need to add to the server before it is a perfect setup. First is obviously another hard drive. I want to get a terabyte drive for the machine for pure file storage/backup. I have another IDE drive laying around that I think I will also add to the machine even though its only 40 or so gigs.

I then still also need to write a couple scripts that automate various tasks. I could obviously download these scripts, but writing them myself is just part of the fun.

Another thing is I also still need to set the machine up so that I can access it remotely. Currently I can only access it on the home LAN but when I travel I want to be able to do small backups and also access important files.

I had a ton of fun setting the machine up and learnt quite a lot in the process. As mentioned it is still a work in progress and I will definitely keep you updated when I do upgrades, install new software etc etc.

The Tech Specs

These specs will vary from machine to machine. The one I purchased had the following specs…

• 15.4-inch WXGA (1280 x 800) TrueLife (glossy) screen
• 1.73 GHz Dual Core T2370 processor
• 1GB DDR2-667 SDRAM (takes up to 4GB - which I upgraded to)
• 160GB 5400 RPM SATA HDD
• 8x Dual-layer DVD±RW drive
• Intel Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller
• Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g Wireless Card
• 4 USB 2.0, HDMI, VGA, IEEE 1394a, RJ11, RJ45, 2 headphone, 1 microphone, 1 ExpressCard 54mm slot, 3 mini-card slots, S-Video

The Good

• Price - You definitely get a bang for you buck with the Inspiron 1525 series. I paid R7000 (About $650-700) for my machine and I couldn’t find a better deal at the time from the other brands/manufacturers. My machine came with Windows Vista home edition and a 3 year on site warranty.
• Performance - I am judging the performance based on the intended market for this machine which is probably a lower end user. For tasks such as word processing, browsing internet, email, editing photos which an application such as picasa, this machine performs very well. Windows Vista is known to be quite a resource hog and with the 1gig of RAM and Dual Core Processor, the machine ran decently.
• The Look And Feel - This machine is quite a pretty machine. It obviously aint no Macbook, but it comes in various different colors and is pleasing to the eye. The keys and mouse are laid out nicely and I also like the fact that the touchpad mouse has a scroll bar down the side.

The Not So Good

• RAM (For heavier users) - I run some pretty CPU and Memory intensive software and I found that it lagged a little with just the 1gig of RAM when I opened multiple pieces of software. This was totally expected though. After upgrading to the 4gigs of RAM that it can take and installing Ubuntu 64bit edition, it flies
• Volume Touch Pad - Something that is quite frustrating and you will have to learn to deal with if you purchase this machine is the volume touch pad that is on the base of the laptop. It is jittery and quite annoying. I have mostly resulted to using the volume control in Ubuntu. I have noticed though that other manufacturers are using similar volume touchpads. I was testing a brand new, top of the range HP the other day and it had a very similar volume touch pad with the same issues as the Dell Inspiron 1525 volume touchpad.
• Built-in Webcam - I know, I know, you can get the model with a webcam built in, but I didn’t and I wish I had. It is the one thing on the machine that I really still want.

Overall, it is a decent machine that I would recommend to a business person, student, mom etc who uses office software frequently and does other light computing tasks such as surfing the web and email.

If you are a heavy user you will definitely want to upgrade the RAM and perhaps even install a 64bit operating system (be careful though, some of your software that ran on your 32bit operating system, may not run on the 64bit system). With a RAM upgrade you will definitely notice a huge difference in the system performance and it will actually run all your software very nicely, even with multiple processes running.

Obviously the results must be taken with a pinch of salt and as the author quite rightly mentions, in any benchmarking test there are a number of factors that an influence the final results.

Click here to read the article and see the results.

Pretty spiffy eh?

Before they made the changes, you had to click the action menu to label an email. The menu was extremely long and difficult to use. They have now separated the labels into their own menu. They have also added the “Move To” drop down menu which allows you to easily move your emails into a different label. Both these menus now also have a search box in them which allows you to easily find labels.

The only thing I still want is the ability to mark an email as read without having to use the actions drop down menu. I usually need to mark emails as read quickly and something like a little “mark as read” button would be perfect for this. It just takes way to long to use a drop down menu.

I am currently in my first/second year of doing a Bsc in Computer Science specializing in software engineering. The reason I am first/second year is not because I failed but because I switched half way through a Bcom degree to a Bsc degree. So, the first semester of this year I am doing 9 first year modules and then will complete the few second year modules I have left during the last semester. Then finally in the first semester of 2010 I will complete the degree and perhaps attempt my honors, then masters etc etc

I am quite excited about this year of study. Its the first time I am studying something that I really enjoy! The Bcom was not a good fit for me. These are the 9 modules I enrolled for:

COS101 - Theoretical computer science
COS111 - Programming 1 (Doing C++ in this module)
COS112 - Programming 2
COS113 - Fundamental concepts of computer systems (Excited for this one!)
CSS101 - Comprehension skills for science
MAT103 - Linear Algebra
MAT111 - Pre-calculus
MAT112 - Calculus
STS105 - Statistics

Exciting stuff! A lot of it will be a refresher of stuff I already know but that is always a good thing!

What all this really means is that I need to jack up and put my a into g. I have a LOT of studying to do, plus a ton of work and then I definitely can’t neglect my own personal projects. I really slacked off towards the end of January and also first few days of February. I didn’t do any good blog posts and I unfortunately didn’t get my January project finished (which btw, I will have finished this month plus another project).

So it’s time to buckle up and move onwards!