Manda QoP

Check this out for free domain names: http://www.freedomain.co.nr/

The next Auckland Girl Geek Dinner event will be at the end of August, probably the last Thursday. I've got a couple of NetGuide 12 month subscriptions to give away at this event, huge thanks to NetGuide for those. The venue and speakers aren't yet finalised so I will let people know more details when they are available. Tickets will go on sale tomorrow for those of you brave enough to trust us based on previous events. :)

Just had a quick read of this: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html . Question... They're not planning to make the notebooks with this o/s available until the second half of 2010, and they're targetting it at x86 and ARM processors. But isn't x86 on the way out? Surely by 2010/2011 more pc/notebook sales will be 64-bit? Or am I missing something, which is entirely possible given that I read the article at some point near midnight.

It is a black art trying to get the costs right on a development estimate. Too much money and the client will go elsewhere, even if your quote is realistic and reasonable. Too little and you become one of the suppliers the client goes to when the realistic estimate sounds too high. If you're one of the second estimate types, the sort who say it will cost less than it actually will, then you run the risk of not completing the work on time and within budget, you will have stressed out staff and may end up costing your company money instead of making money. So what to do about this? Personally I aim for realistic where possible and include a contingency amount as well just in case of blowouts. I also do a very detailed breakdown in the estimate so the client knows why this project of theirs will take 2000 man hours. So a client has approached you and asks "how much to build this? Just give me a rough estimate of dollar amount and time". You have very little detail, perhaps f

I gave in and bought the i7 processor - shiny, pretty thing that it is. I may have been a magpie in a former life.

After much trial and error at the weekend (at least 10 minutes of investigating), it appears that the HDD hasn't gone kaput on the monster PC at home, the CPU has died a horrible death. What a terrible shame, now I'll have to buy a new motherboard, CPU, memory... blah de blah... The thing is though, do I just want to get spannerbox to make me a spiffy new 64-bit machine that I can dual-boot (cubase and 64-bit do not play well together), or shall I just upgrade the current box. It'll probably cost the same whichever way I do this but I guess if I upgrade the Thermaltake box at least then I'll get some moolah back - the box itself is worth a few hundred bucks. If anyone has a spare (free) i7 processor lying around with a compatible motherboard, feel free to send it my way. :) Rest in pieces CPU.

This morning I had a horrible fright. Background To The Scare I recently backed up my entire life onto a new 1TB external HDD, and I mean everything . All the poems, lyrics, music, artwork that I've created since my school days, all the photos of friends and family going back to the year dot, all my certificates and numerous other things. You get the drift, it was shit loads of data and a lot of it had great personal meaning. I imagine that a lot of us nowadays keep our life on the computer, so this could happen to anyone. My PC has recently done a bit of travelling, it's been from Auckland to Whangarei and back sitting in my 4x4 that Mum & Dad kindly babysat whilst I was gallavanting round the UK. I arrived back a few weeks ago but have been using the laptop. Last weekend I decided to set the PC back up. Nothing untoward happened. The PC booted up. I plugged in the external HDD, again, all good, everything showing up. Now I fully deserve what happened to me next.