Death Due To Lack of Swap

Alternate title: Somebody better re-boot my programmer real quick or blood, guts, RAM, and little green boards will be strewn all over the office.

Mark O’Neill is blogging about my life on Geeks Are Sexy ^TM. His post, When all that’s left is to re-boot your day, is cutting awful close to home as I listen to the moans, groans, curses, and other unintelligible mutters from the office next door, aka my programmer’s cave. I think programmers are rather prone to days that go all to shit. They go to bed late, therefore the wake up late, setting them up for trudging into that engineering meeting fifteen minutes after they were meant to give a status report and without having gotten down their second cup of coffee. Their computers are always crammed with cutting edge products and beta releases, a toxic recipe for errors, conflicts, and system meltdowns. Instead of designing the scope for their latest project, they’re busy submitting bug reports because their new hydrogen powered keyboard doesn’t work quite right with the latest release of Redhat. In frustration they pound said keyboard into the desk, spilling that last precious drop of coffee all over their papers. They’re now coffeeless because they never told their adoring wife that they had used the last of the coffee…and milk…and sugar. And so the day goes on: angry boss, angry co-workers, angry clients, angry wife, and most of all an angry, frustrated, caffeine-deprived programmer. Rinse and Repeat (he stayed up until 6 AM because he insisted on making that keyboard work).

I’m going to print Mr. O’Neill’s post and tape it to my husband’s forehead in a few minutes. Unfortunately, I don’t know if a fifteen minute nap is going to do it for my programmer today. Why not, even though he desperately needs the sleep? Because the same laptop will be waiting for him when he wakes up.

Until a week ago, my programmer had a large, black IBM something or other. Somehow or another the memory was slowly being corrupted. He turned the laptop into the company he was working for and than summarily quit (not because the laptop sucked, though). The problem: I cracked the motherboard on his personal laptop about a year ago. It collects dust on a bookshelf. So me, being all sweetness and light, offered to let him use my laptop until he picks out a new laptop for himself. New problem, my cute little System76 can’t cut it. Don’t get me wrong, it works for me just fine, but all I’m running is Open Office and Firefox. My programmer’s got Eclipse, IDEA, Java, Oracle, consoles, documents, Gimp, and three other things I can’t identify running. And, according to him, System76 didn’t configure the computer to have any swap.

Swap? What are we swapping? Does this mean I get my poor little computer back?

So today, I would desperately love to re-boot my husband. But that’s only a temporary solution. What I really need is for someone to give me laptop advice. Something that doesn’t come with Windows (or Mac OS X), doesn’t cost as much as a mortgage payment, something that can run twenty or more RAM sucking programs at once, and something where I can’t crack the motherboard.

Please, take mercy on a simple girl, and send me some laptop ideas. Or the world might just lose a gifted programmer today. No re-booting will save him. Somebody’s primary hard disk will never be found again…

(No programmers were hurt or will be hurt due to this post, but my little temper tantrum just now sure felt good.)