Ya know, I program a lot. I also create a lot of web sites. So, having a good text editor is kind of essential.

For the longest time, I’ve been searching for a good programmer text editor like TextMate.

Unfortunately, I shun Macs like the plague since I can build better, faster, more reliable puters myself for 1/3 the price, so TextMate wasn’t an option. And I most certainly will not run a hacked version of OS X just to get TextMate!

At first, I used jEdit. It’s okay, but not quite what I was looking for. Then, I switched to NetBeans for my Ruby on Rails stuff, and Notepad++ for everything else. Well, that worked okay, but NetBeans RoR support is pretty lacking these days.

Furthermore, I wanted to get the heck away from these darn Java-based text editors. That’s really just silly.

Enter Sublime Text 2!

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Scottie Programming sublime text, text editor

Windows 8 will be released to the masses in October of this year. As a developer, I’m lucky enough to get Windows 8 RTM a bit earlier.

Despite what everyone is saying, the new Start Screen really isn’t that bad. In fact, it will be very nice once all your apps are updated to take full advantage of it. And contrary to popular belief, the desktop is still around, and everything works pretty much like it did in Windows 7.

Still, I have a few gripes: There are no more gadgets. Instead, there are live tiles on the Start Screen. That’s lame.

Worse yet, I have experienced the infamous hanging/freezing issue that was supposedly fixed during the testing phases of Windows 8.

In short, every 30 minutes or so, my puter would lock up for about 30 seconds, the hard drive would be pegged to 100%, and then everything would go back to normal.

Like I said, Microsoft supposedly fixed this in the test versions of Windows 8 – but it seems they didn’t, really.

There are many solutions to be found on Google, but there is only 1 that worked for me…

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Scottie Computers freezes, hangs, windows, windows 8

A lot of people wonder how alternating current (AC) induction motors work. In fact, I myself wondered exactly how they worked for a long time.

You see, I’m an electrical engineer, so I should know these things from my university education.

Unfortunately, in this age of digital everything, power electronics tends to get the shaft in favor of microprocessor design, digital signal processing, and so on. Digital is where the bucks are, you see…

And so, for the longest time, I never actually fully understood how AC induction motors work. DC motors are easy enough to understand, but the AC versions are a bit more complicated. That Tesla was a smart dude (the man, not the car company).

Enter a series of YouTube videos that explain AC motors so well, even a monkey with half a brain could understand it!

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Scottie How Does it Work? AC, induction, motors

This one is a really, really fun problem: You dutifully let Windows download updates. It tries to install them, but fails with some kind of “0×800*****” error code.

Great, what now?

Well, normally you’d just click the button and try to install them again. You’d think that since Windows knows it can’t install the updates, it would try to download them again…

But no! I just sits there and tries to install the corrupted update packages again, and again, and again.

There is a very simple fix for this problem, and you don’t have download anything, or edit the registry, or perform any other gymnastics!

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Scottie Computers error, update, windows

Every now and then, you’ll probably come across some program on Windows that you simply cannot uninstall from the “Uninstall a Program” page in Control Panel.

Normally, it will give you some kind of error that makes no sense whatsoever.

I recently ran across this very issue when I accidentally installed the wrong WiFi driver package. It was an Intel Pro WiFi driver/software set. Only problem was, the puter didn’t have an Intel WiFi card – oops!

Worse yet, I couldn’t uninstall the software because the uninstaller first looked for the hardware. When it couldn’t find the hardware, it bombed with an error saying (you’ll love this): “Please install hardware first.”

I wish I was kidding.

Then I discovered a really handy tool to make everything all better.

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Scottie Computers program, uninstall, windows

If you have a dual-boot setup on your computer involving some flavor of linux, at some point you will most likely encounter a problem with GRUB, the linux bootloader.

For example, maybe you used a tool like Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite to resize your OS partitions. Then you tried to reboot, and you got a GRUB error message followed by the GRUB rescue prompt.

There are several ways to reinitialize GRUB, and most of them involve live CDs and mounting partitions and all kinds of other tricks that will probably make you crazy unless you’re a command-line commando in linux.

Well, I don’t mind the command line, but I also have better things to do.

Fortunately, there is a MUCH easier way to save the day: Boot-Repair!

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Scottie Computers GRUB, linux, repair, ubuntu

Lucky you! This happened to a friend of mine recently. She was minding her own business, surfing the web. A little box popped up, and it looked just like a Windows dialog box that said something about Microsoft Security Something-or-Other.

So, of course, she clicked the button. After all, it looked genuine enough!

Not long after that, a program that looks like the following image came up:

It began to give her all kinds of warning messages. Her GPU was overheating, her processor was overheating, she was out of RAM, and her hard drive was corrupted! Then it made 25 “Error Reading File” windows pop up.

If you are seeing this problem, there is a very simple process to follow to rid yourself of the malware without reinstalling Windows and starting from scratch!

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Scottie Computers, Do-It-Yourself fakeHDD, malware, Rogue.FakeHDD, trojan, unhide, virus

If you’re like me, you still have some Rails 2.3.x apps hanging around. Yeah, Rails 3 is awesome in some respects, but that “2x performance increase” never quite materialized.

In fact, for the most part, Rails 3 is still slower than Rails 2.3. SIGH!

Nevertheless, Ruby itself is progressing nicely. Ruby 1.9.3-p0 was released a few months ago. With faster garbage collection, startup, and file load times, Ruby 1.9.3 is where it’s at.

The only question is: What do you do to make Rails 2.3 play nicely with Ruby 1.9.3?

It’s actually not that hard!

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Scottie Programming rails, ruby, yaml

I hate to say, “I told you so!”, but: I told you so!

Actually, I don’t hate saying it. I’m relishing every second of this glorious moment, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

Okay, I was ashamed for the few seconds it took me type the first sentence, but I got over it.

What the heck am I yammering about? Green hard drives, of course! You may recall a previous post I wrote:

Why You Don’t Want a Green Hard Drive

Recently, Seagate came out and openly called “BS!” on their own green hard drive BS.

I suppose we should praise them for this, but it would have been better if they hadn’t let their marketing bozos direct their engineering department in the first place!

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Scottie Computers, Energy, Spare Me! green, hard drive, hdd, seagate

You’ve probably heard of ARM processors a lot lately. They are used in all kinds of devices like smartphones, tablets, routers, and so on. I’m sure you’ve also heard why they are so great: They’re powerful, and they’re extremely energy efficient!

Well, so is my Intel processor in my desktop computer, frankly. On average, it uses about 9W of power (I measured), and it’s a quad-core chip!

Well, 9W is a lot for smartphones, which have very small batteries. But still, what is the deal with these mystical ARM processors? What exactly are they, and what makes them so great?

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Scottie Gizmos, How Does it Work? ARM, CISC, processor, RISC