yay! dual monitor!
but still not quite.
A friend brought her laptop over yesterday, and I’ve been up half the night to play around with it, and guess what. The notebook comes with “built-in” support for dual monitor. So that miserable monitor that had been rejected by my motherboard, is now perfectly functional to complement this notebook’s LCD screen in a dual monitor setup. I’m excited!
- (dec 11) -
Well, the excitement was over by yesternoon, unfortunately. She went home, and so did the notebook.
yay, dual-monitor!
err, not quite. not yet. Bad luck to me.
I have a spare monitor for a while now, and it occured to me why don’t I try a dual-monitor setup. I read it could be as simple as having two graphic-cards and plug into them a monitor each. My motherboard has onboard VGA and an AGP graphic card, so perhaps it would work, some website told me that setup should be fine. Unless…
I quickly pulled the monitor from the store-room and plugged things in and out.
yeah, unless. Unless the motherboard does not allow it.
And that’s exactly what my motherboard does (not). It seems to disable the onboard VGA if there’s a graphic card installed to the AGP slot. I should’ve taken this into consideration when I bought the motherboard, but then I never thought to have a dual-monitor setup. Besides, if I wanted this kind of setup, I would’ve bought a graphic card with dual ports instead.
so no dual-monitor yet.
There’s always need for more space on your computer screen, now isn’t there?
Editing a video and wanting at the same time to see the preview. Or Photoshop, you need every damn screen-pixel you got. What about multi-panes application like Thunderbird and Feed Reader. Or running a full-blown IDE like Eclipse, MS Visual Studio, with all the helper-windows floating around, there is not much space left for the source-code editor (which is why I still prefer plain source-code editor). Or typing code-snippets while looking at the example from an e-book, you keep switching windows back and forth.
Oh boy, I want that dual-monitor. I want it bad.
I was kind of hoping to learn some windows-GUI stuff, I mean all this while I only know web-programming of which my knowledge is limited only to PHP (out of more than a dozen of others), web-interface of which my knowledge translates to HTML and CSS.
My long interest of having the IMDb database explorer on my computer signifies only one thing; I got to learn windows-GUI programming. IMDb currently provides data (it’s downloadable) and some command-line interface for it, but obviously that’s not enough. Having a GUI for it will be more fun, and would be even more so if I am able to build it myself.
Actually, I’ve developed a PHP application to do some of my IMDb-related interests, result of which is online somewhere on this site. But there’s a limit to what I can do with it. I need to get more visual!. PHP-GTK is not an option at the moment, .NET is.
So I resort to reading some .NET books. I was flipping through lot of books to preview them and see which one suits me better. In the end, there’s this one book from Microsoft Press. It’s funny that sometimes good stuff is where you don’t look. I’ve always thought books from MS Press were all too technical.
Well, book is only the first step, I’m a long way from having my own IMDb local interface. IMDb to me is like water to a well, what am I without IMDB, yeah right. So to speak. Well, IMDb site is the one site on which I spend more time than on any other sites (sometime back it was Wikipedia). “Why was Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet filmed in black and white”? Go to IMDb.com and come back with the answer.
Enough said.