As I type my MacBook Pro is downloading and compiling the necessary source code for ImageMagick. I'm building some Ruby on Rails-based software that requires file uploads and I'm using MacPorts to install the necessary code. My processor is getting a chance to stretch its legs.

At home I'm ripping and encoding Sex and the City episodes for Maggie. Each episode takes about 90 minutes to process on our Ubuntu server and this morning I queued up three ISO files with 6 episodes each, so it should be crunching away for just over 24 hours solid.

As a geek I get a certain sense of satisfaction when I actually push my machines. Because I don't play PC games and my laptop is used for web development that doesn't happen all the time.

I've always reasoned to myself that I liked programming because I'm smarter than a computer but it's infinitely faster than me. By combining our "skill sets" we can achieve great things. Maxing out the CPU makes me feel like the computer is living up to its end of the bargain.

Does anyone else feel that way?

Edit: Almost 24 hours at full throttle:

Yesterday it filtered through that Wordpress had released an iPhone application. This is me testing it out.

So far my only compliant is that an ampersand is not rendered correctly in category list, but that's obviously easy enough for them to fix in v1.1.

I tried blogging using Safari on the iPhone and it worked but was a little clunky. The interface just wasn't built for this resolution, even with the great scaling available.

I had need to reboot our home server last night and when he back back up X was broken. It turns out it's a known issue and creating some symlinks fixed it.

Thankfully I had the iPhone so I could browse the web and find the solution easy enough. I leave my laptop at the office during the week. It was the first of what will no doubt be many saves the iPhone delivers.

I also noted that YouTube videos had the "Smurfing" effect again (people's skin tones are blue!) and Facebook on Firefox 3 would max out the CPU. Cuh-wazy!

The solution to this is to roll back to Flash v9; an upgrade to v10 snuck through and it's a bit buggy. This is easy enough to do via Synaptic, which I've never used before, preferring apt and more recently aptitude.

My brother doesn't use his laptop that much, mostly because it's old and slow and riddled with viruses. He has an old Toshiba Satellite A50, which has a capable 1.6GHz Pentium M processor and a crippling 256MB RAM. It has a disgusting keyboard and trackpad, and the screen only does 1024 x 768. 

I asked him what he used it for, when he does use it, and it's the typical low-tech requirement of "web and email." And I think his email provider is Hotmail anyway, so it's really "web and web."

Last night I backed up the small amount if data that he wanted to keep (all of his digital photos are on an external drive) and installed Ubuntu 8.04 for him. Unfortunately the installer required 256MB minimum, and when push comes to shove he only has 240MB because the video card steals 16MB. This doesn't cause the installer to bail though because, as far as it can tell, the machine is up to the task.

To help the installer out I switched to the console (ALT-F2) and created and mounted a swap partition. This helped the installer dramatically and meant that it could actually get the job done. I also found in the BIOS that CPU-frequency scaling was enabled, but the installer didn't know how to handle it properly so the machine was locked to 600MHz. I disabled it in the BIOS and it screamed along at its top-speed.

I rummaged around our "bits box" at work and found my old IBM ThinkPad. I popped the back panel off and pulled out two 256MB memory modules. Andrew's machine had room for one more so that got jammed in and now the laptop is much more responsive.

Turning off the Compiz fancy-pants visual stuff made a big change too, making the machine usable, but the extra RAM made it actually pleasurable.

The wireless and sound worked out of the box - it just took me a few minutes to find the external volume control knob.

The combination of more memory (more than double when you consider it's gone from 240MB to 496MB), a pedal-to-the-metal CPU frequency and a decent operating system has meant this old girl has a few more months (years?) of service in her yet... after which I'll definitely be recommending a Mac ;)

On Friday I bought an iPhone 3G. I was expecting Vodafone in the city mall to have sold out of their stock because their store was almost empty (of people) at about 1PM. It turned out that they had moved all of their 16GB units but had plenty of the 8GB models so I picked one of them up. I figured that my 4GB iPod isn't full so I won't need the extra 8GBs anyway and that's the only difference.

Unlike the American consumers, I had no difficulty activating my phone when I got it back to the office. It synced all my contacts, calendars, mail and browser bookmarks automatically, which I expected - I was plugging it into a Mac after all.

The initial applications that are available through the App Store are not that impressive; it's mostly gimmicks that show off the funcionality of the iPhone without providing much real usefulness. Other than the light saber application of course.

So what do I think? My response to that question all weekend has been "it's great!" I do have two gripes, which turned out to be one gripe and one "ahh, I was doing it wrong." PC World has ten, if you want more reasons not to buy an iPhone.

My first complaint is that the QWERTY keyboard you've given on screen in the SMS application has the [send] button right where the backspace is on a real keyboard. That's meant that a few times this weekend people got half-messages when I accidently sent then instead of correcting them. The solution to this problem is simple: send more messages and learn where the buttons are over time.

The second issue I had was with the keyboard again, and takes two parts. Firstly, you can't flip it sideways on some applications (PC World brought this up too). Secondly, because I have man-fingers I tend to type some keys wrong. But I learnt that it doesn't matter! I can type away, making all kinds of mistakes and the auto-correct feature will fix up what I meant. It takes the surrounding keys and works out if you were probably meaning something else. For example: if I want to type "peesentstion" if knows I meant "presentation." Hitting the space bar acknowledges that you want the auto-corrected text so it ends up working really, really well when you know what to do. I spent too long trying to be careful and backspacing when the iPhone would have fixed all my fuxk upd.

See what I did there?

Sure the camera is only 2 megapixel, but Tony takes all my photos anyway. It can't record video, but I only ever record 20 second noise clips when I'm off my dial at a dance party (which I never re-watch) so that doesn't matter.

I am hanging out for a good terminal application to make this complete: where's Putty for the iPhone?