May 302013
 

Give up MacBook Pro to someone else, and moved back to PC laptop.

I was thinking of running Ubuntu on the new laptop so to fully utilize the 16G memory and 4-core i7 processor. However, after two days’ painful trial, I finally gave up and moved back to Windows, and you can image – I moved back to Windows 7 instead of 8.

The problem with Ubuntu and Windows 8 are similar, they were not designed by following people’s common sense, or direct sense, whatever you want to name it. I, personally, believe the usability is OSX > Windows 7 (Windows XP as well) > Ubuntu (Windows Vista is almost the same) > Windows 8.

Heard of Windows 8 is to be upgraded to have something like start button and program folders, etc. though it is still rumor so far. Shall we just name these changes as “graceful downgrade” in case they are really true? ๐Ÿ˜€

BTW, I turned on Hyper-Thread on i7 processor so logically, I’m running a 8-core machine with 16G memory – this is my dreaming machine several years ago ๐Ÿ˜‰

May 282013
 

I was assigned a task to capture web pages as image and run it every day so that we can track changes, I tried several utilities and finally found wkhtmltopdf is the closest one.

The problem is, wkhtmltopdf needs X, while I don’t want to run a heavy X on my server just for this trivial task. So search around, and found xvfb …

Install it, run xvfb-run wkhtmltopdf blah blah and everything works great.

Neat~~~