I had some ideas for Java GUI components earlier today, and it occured to me that, as the package naming convention is to use one's domain name reversed, it's high time to finally get a domain registered, plus hosting.

So I'm the proud soon-to-be owner of hircus.org, hosted by DreamHost that helixblue uses. Thomas, you might be getting a rebate on your next payment, I put down toadstool.se as my referrer.

On a side note, PayPal should be embarrassed at themselves. I tried paying through them, but since I'm in a different country from my registered address, they keep asking me to confirm the unusual login attempts - and even after I confirmed each time, failed to carry the transaction through! Grr.

Indonesia's as hot as usual (though with some respite - it's been raining heavily for the past two-and-a-half day, to the point that water enters through my bedroom window if I don't close it), most people in IT still have an unhealthy reliance on Microsoft (an Internet cafe just made the newspaper for succumbing to being respectable and.. not switching to Linux, but buying XP Home licenses instead. To be fair, a lot of people go to net cafes to play LAN games, so they don't have much of a choice. I shudder to think of the viral infestations they must be having - if they pirate Windows, chances are they run pirated AV software that are unregistered and thus, having out-of-date virus definitions).

Home Internet connection is metered, so I'll probably have to rely on my brother to bring back a copy of Fedora Core 4 next month. I was banking on being able to download it before I leave on vacation, but they pushed back the release date by a week to clear the release name through legal.. ugh. Incidentally, life must be really annoying for AMD64 Linux users in Indonesia. The Linux vendors I've found only stock Fedora's 32-bit version! One could always, of course, get SuSE Professional (which costs much more, as it is a commercial distro) which comes with both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries on the same DVD.. but, sigh. If I were to come back permanently I'd definitely have to lobby AMD to raise their profile a bit more. Knowing how horrible driver support for Windows XP x86-64 still is, it's in AMD's benefit to ensure a ready supply of 64-bit OSes, after all, especially in a developing country in need of cost-effective solutions.

The bizarre thing is, at a recent Microsoft conference in Jakarta they were apparently showcasing Windows and SQL Server 64-bit.. running on an Itanium 2 workstation. The locals were impressed too, which is rather worrying. Itanium 2 for HPC, sure.. if you can pay the air conditioning bill. But as a database server.. come on, it's not exactly the best chip for integer processing, is it?