Stuff about computers

[stabco-blog]

New computer on his way home

I finally took a decision about my laptop upgrade (following my previous post).

Here it is : MSI GS70.

Rendez-vous on this screen for a unboxing'N'drooling session very soon !

Update: Well, I finally decided not to document the unboxing session... I was too excited to just stop and take some photos at the time. Here I am a month later (gee time flies) with this new (not too) shiny toy of a laptop and I must say I am quite impressed.

Positive points:

Weight: 2,6 kg for a 17'' laptop, not bad

Solidness: case is made of hard plastic and aluminium

Keyboard: a full keyboard with numpad, and with a great touch

Noise: the machine makes very little if constant fan noise when idle and it scales up nice for increasing cpu/gpu workload. Compared to this my Macbook air 2011 is a pumped up boombox...

Performance: dual SSD in Raid 0... 900 MB/s read speed

Upgradeability: I already added a HDD for data and opening the beast had been a walk in the park

Negative points:

Screen: 1 big dead pixel, but no big deal for me (it'd be a small problem when I'll sell this laptop)

Touchpad: I admit I was spoiled by the glass touchpad of the macbooks. This one is almost as big, but the general sensitivity is too weak.

Bios: limited functions (cannot manage the graphics part, no access to cpu tweaks)

Video out port: the HDMI and the 2 mini-display ports (which are nice to have, by the way) are connected to the discrete nvidia GPU. I have yet to manage to make a secondary LCD work in Linux...

Overall I'm happy with this laptop and I'm using it as my main web development workstation in Manjaro Linux (after a very bad experience with Ubuntu...) and gaming laptop in Windows 8 dual boot.

I think I'll keep a Macbook anyway, though, for my photography hobby. I'm getting a new Macbook air with a new huge LCD.

[stabco-blog]

Falling in and out of love with Mac

I bought a Macbook Air in 2011 and I've been using mostly for web development and a bit of light design stuff (with strong Adobe oriented pieces of software).

The pros :

Weight

Beauty

Zippiness thanks to the SSD

The cons :

Limited upgrade options. Here I am 2 years later with a mostly full SSD even after a OWC Aura SSD upgrade (256 GB vs the integrated 128 GB).

Poor heat control degrades performances when running 100% CPU. Well, ok... this is mostly for games but everyone needs a break from work :-)

Disappointing global performances for a Core i5. I read somewhere about some memory management problems in OSX... I won't reopen the debate...

I think I'll keep this Macbook for the design oriented part (photography and graphics work with Adobe software) and maybe the music I'm back into and buy a multimedia rig using these new barebone laptops which are the best in terms of bang for the bucks (2000€ for something portable, powerful, customizable and upgradable).

Options are plenty (13'', 15'' or a full fledged 17'' desktop replacement) and sellers, too even in Europe. I opted for http://www.mysn.eu but I could even built the system myself if I wanted.

These are my two main choices :

http://www.mysn.eu/shop/xmg-p303.html

http://www.mysn.eu/shop/xmg-a523.html

Last Intel Core Haswell processors, Nvidia GTX 765M, 1920x1080 screen resolution with IPS tech, several HDD and SSD configurations (2,5'' and MSATA)... A dream come true :)

[stabco-blog]

Simple Form Bootstrap3 integration

begin UPDATE (September, 10th, 2013) Found out a nice and not so hacky custom wrapper for horizontal forms and inline check boxes / radio buttons : https://gist.github.com/adamico/6510093

This gist is a fork of a fork of a fork... of this https://gist.github.com/clyfe/6304508 which added a default input class for a set of form inputs. I still need to figure out how to avoid overwriting the normal radio_buttons/check_boxes input by using a custom named input... end UPDATE

I'm in love with Simple Form and its seamless UI frameworks integration, especially with Twitter Bootstrap whose recently released version 3 has some very nice even if drastic changes in forms support.

Simple Form implements Twitter Bootstrap support with an initializer which allows personalization of its wrappers. These are the changes I made to the initializer for TBS3 forms :

default input class is "form-control" so I added

config.input_class = "form-control"

(this is supported by the last version of Simple Form 3, so do your homework by adding the git source to your Gemfile and then 'bundle update simple_form')

the bootstrap wrapper needs a "form-group" class

no more additional divs separating labels and inputs for (now default) vertical forms, so I just put the default components inside the main bootstrap wrapper

the prepend/append components for inputs have been dropped for a more practical input-group approach. My approach is not very DRY but I just created a new "group" wrapper and wrapped the input component with a "input-group" div. When I want to prepend and/or append elements to an input I wrap those with a simple form input block :

= f.input :field_name, wrapper: :group do %span.input-group-addon prepend = f.input_field :field_name %span.input-group-addon append

[stabco-blog]

Hello world!

Hi there, I recently opened a Wizpert account and they asked me if I had a blog... well, actually I have a lot of unfinished and rarely updated blogs about everything and nothing in particular.

So, here I am with a blog about my web developer and computer stuff in general.

Have a nice time... or not :)