Well, my new laptop is now in my hands and I'm pretty pleased with its performance overall.

While Alienware is normally known for their gaming systems, I am actually using it for everything but. All of my standard 3D apps are loaded on it now and the hardware really makes a difference in their performance.

The laptop is configured with:

Intel Quad-Core Q9000 Processor
Six GB DDR3 Memory
Nvidia GTX 260M gfx board

This represents a semi-decent buildout without going completely crazy on the price.

The only drawbacks would probably be $$$$, weight and battery life. Though, considering the power draw of the hardware, the battery life is expected to be short. Plug it in to see the full potential of this thing. The laptop weighs thirteen pounds and when it is in the bag with my tablet and other assorted goodies, the entire package comes to twenty one pounds. Pretty hefty for a laptop. . . .

I'll eventually update the processor and memory as the prices drop ( right now they are ridiculously high ) and drop in a second 260M board for SLI capability once I can confirm my applications can deal with that setup.

My current laptop is more than a few years old. . . . like. . pre-dual core era old. It still functions and serves its purpose faithfully, but it's getting a bit long in the tooth and some of my applications could really benefit from something just a wee bit faster.

I looked long at several laptop makers and the biggest problem with most laptops were the native screen resolution ( I MUST have at least 1280 x 1024 for XSI ) and the graphics card that comes with it. Few of them actually met the requirements.

Then I went completely overkill and ordered an Alienware system. The M17x to be
more specific about it. . .

Yeah they're pricey but, it's:

A quad core
1900 x 1200 resolution
Blu-Ray drive
Nvidia GTX 260m gfx card ( 1GB vid memory )
6gb Memory ( Vista 64 bit )

I tossed around the idea of a faster dual core, but all of my applications ( Rhino, Softimage, ZBrush, etc ) started drooling when they saw the quad, so I went with it instead.

The drawbacks to the Alienware systems ( especially laptops ) are the price, size and weight. Make no mistake about it, I could build one HELL of a desktop for the same price and they would probably weigh about the same lol. . . .

But the thought of having 6GB of Ram available to the aforementioned apps, not to mention four rendering cores, should put some motivation back in me to go model something

While not art related, it is a rather disturbing trend.

Was perusing my firewall logs earlier and noted a high percentage of the incoming hits are all focused on the same socket / port. ( Socket 13102 ) Can't seem to find anything on the net that tells me what lovely variant of trojan / virus / what-have-you this one seems to be, but it is coming from a multitude of address ranges so it is pretty widespread.

Sixty five percent of all the packets dropped at the router are this one targeted socket. Curious as to what it is. . . .


This is a reminder to either have a hardware firewall ( router ) or some sort of software firewall active on your system at all times. If you think your system isn't being scanned, think again. I have over seven hundred ( 727 actually ) unique hits against the router in the past thirty six hours alone and my system is just another random system out there on the net. . . .

You know, I use Linux on a fairly regular basis. Ubuntu actually. It's a decent operating system if you have the personality that likes to get your hands dirty. Get into something and learn how it works. If you're the kind of person who just likes things to " work " without understanding the underlying WHY, then Linux is not for you.

Tonight, I was reminded of this fact in that it took a few HOURS to get the buttons on my seven button trackball remapped to the layout I prefer to use. HOURS to simply swap two damn buttons.
Most probably wouldn't bother, but it's a personal issue

Seriously. If you want to twist your brain into knots, just Google "remap mouse buttons Ubuntu" and wade through the countless pages of code and config files for what should be the one of the most simple things to do.

It's exactly this little issue that is going to keep Linux off the computers for most of the folks out there. It's an outstanding operating system as long as the defaults work for you. If you are one of those who tread off the beaten path a bit, Linux can still be a bit daunting. My personal opinion is that the majority of folks will not have the patience nor the mindset to sit and work at trying to get a simple tweak in place. While a great idea, you have to give Bill Gates credit where it is due. He took the geekiness out of the Operating System and gave it big colorful icons to 'click' and make magic happen.

For those who care, this single command is what it took to swap the buttons around on my trackball:

/usr/bin/xinput set-button-map "Microsoft Microsoft Trackball Explorer?" 1 2 8 4 5 6 7 3 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 10

I simply had to add that command to a startup program. Simple as that. . . .

After creating a lengthy post yesterday, some folks were questioning why I create them in such a strange format. I took a look at the post and didn't note anything particularly odd about it so I didn't give it much thought.

However, I pulled the post up from a different computer ( work ) and took a look at it and I can see what they were referring to. It looks like someone took a hand grenade to my post as the line breaks ended up in random positions on each line. It makes for a very odd looking post indeed.

Typically, I'll edit the posts in an external text editor ( in my case gedit since I'm running a Linux based system here at home ) then copy / paste them over into the input box.

I'm running a combo of Firefox / Ubuntu here at home so I'll have to dig a bit to see what might be causing this. Until then, my apologies for making your eyes bleed