Hi everybody, and Merry Christmas and Happy new year and everything else. I wish joy for everybody out there, and peace.
Lots of things are going on here, and I have been under lots of stress in the past monthes, two heavy website and multimedia software design and development at the same time, and some other unpleasing life issues.
Of course I don’t claim only bad things are happening, I am also having many good things happen to me, but ok, let internal issues aside 
While I am developing this two projects, I am also exploring new topics in software and web design. So far I have gone deeper into many languages, from deeper usage of Javascript, to CSS2, changing my priority web design language from HTML to XHTML and XML.
I am really going to like this change, XML is something I can not describe, but I feel enjoying using it, and for my other project, I am exploring things like Adobe Flash CS4, to Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex, to Pure Basic and even some VisualC++ of Microsoft, while almost everybody knows I prefer ANSI C/C++ over anything which involves some kind of work from Microsoft .
Some other changes in the past months have happened which I have really enjoied it. First, my daughter have gone to first grade and after almost 3 month now, she can read and write and I believe this is an evolution for every person. This is were we got our power to learn more.
Then I did something really relieving. My Windows were killing me after 4 years of not being re-installed, it would crash several times a day and you know how dumb WindowsXP is, and it can’t even keept itself clean. MY registery was 180 MB, can you believe that?! I tried every piece of junk software I found to clean up my registery and Windows, to no avail, and it got worse and worse, and in the past 7,8 years which I have been forced to use Windows I have always been unhappy, and missed my good old Amiga.
I have been downloading several versions of Linux since end of summer, planning to make a really big change, and to ease the life, and to get rid of Windows, finally.
I had Ubuntu Hardy Heron, Novell’s SuSE and Open SuSE, Linux Mint Elyssa, and afew others. I have been recently uninstalled my older SuSE as it was heavy and wanted to update it in whole, but my 160 GB hard disk was almost filled and I needed its space, but I changed my mind and got a new 320GB for more freedom and for those projects I mentioned in the beginning.
I wanted to chose one of those Linux so I habe another option on this machine in addition to WinXP, and suddenly I tasted this Linux Mint, I have played with all of these diferent linuxes on different machines and none is as great as Linux Mint. Some of Linuces can not read your Windows partitions. Some can only read it but can not write to it. Some have fonts very different than what a WinXP user have experienced with. Some are also very heavy, even being a Linux, consume your CPU power so hard your machine will actually work slower than with Windows!
But, Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu itself, which based on Debian itself, is almsot the fines of all I have ever experienced.
It is a Linux, who can read, and write to your Windows partitions so easily that I have shared all my pictures and music and video folders with it on windows partitions.
It is very efficient (I use the Gnome desktop on it and I am used to it very fast, it is very easy to use) and works much faster on my 4 year old machine, that I am relieved and feel no need for a new machine now.
Then its graphics power is so high, I actually have a much more fancy desktop effects on this machine using my old NVidia 6600GT than what you can see on most Vista machines. The Desktop is actually liquid, you can make ripples on it, you can trun it and see the other 3 desktops with your mouse or key combinations. It has some carousel like application chooser, a four side desktop cube etc. etc.
Then something really funny when you install it. It actually asks you if you want to import your windows accounts into it! It can migrate your windows to Linux without any hassles!
Ok, I am not affiliated with authors of Mint, and they also provide it for free so this is no advertising, explore the rest your self, using its live CD.
After I installed Mint (version 5 is called Elyssa), I simply migrated all my email from Thunderbird on WinXp to Mint, also my book marks from FireFox to FireFox on Mint (and almost every software there has a twin sister here on Mint). I also took a copy of my Windows main partition, formatted that partition, and reinstalled windows, just for when I need to play a windows only Game, or for when testing my web designs on IE, and for when clients want a Windows only software.
Now I spend most of my time on Linux, and have installed Apache 2 server as well as everything else on it, and when I am designing web sites, I design and run them on my machine and when evrything is fully tested, mirror them to the client’s web host.
I feel really free now, every tool you need, you go to package manager, search for the proper keyword, and when you find the proper program, you simply ask it to install, no money is going to be paid, and your software is ready in a few minutes.
And please don’t kill me before I say this, you have almost no virus there, although you can be extra careful and install a free virus killer like ClamAV, with just asking package manager to install it for you
Ok, enogh for now, my brain overflows are finished for now, I guess.
Paymaan.
