How it all began

Everyday we progress forward...

Around last year, a lightning struck a coconut tree behind my house, it snap through the roof and reach my telephone line. It was burnt and the wires reach my modem, Internet was out, at least I still can use the computer, still OK. I cant repair, its cost quite some big bucks to do the rewiring.

and gets better...

Few days later, my laptop processor fan get slower and eventually stop working, 15 minutes  of Windows7 available before temperature too high and it hang, can use despite computer for few minutes only, still OK. I cant get it to repair, did I said I'm poor ?

...and getting much more nicer

After tens of 15 minutes and half an hour cooling down routine (one will get used to something if it cannot be avoided), the hard disk start failing, and Windows7 wont boot anymore, it lingers and its now 15 mins of boot before temp get another high peak. I cant use the computer anymore. There is no recovery CD, its preinstalled on the computer and worse, even if I got one, temp still skyrocket too high to do anything, its pretty much unusable, no more 15 minutes, no more mousing or typing. Its to the point of being a big hot paper weight with mouse and cables attached to it, this is not acceptable anymore.

...until...

All hope goes with the lightning, act of god as insurance says.

diagnosis

The hard disk develop bad sector due to high temperature and multiple sudden power off due to the fan not churning thus making Windows7 takes 15 more or less minutes to boot.

puppy power to the rescue

 Then I remember, I got a 1GB  Campbell soup free thumb-drive (did I said I'm jobless and poor ?) with pupplylinux in it.

Plug it in, boot USB and it boot and works! Accustomed to 15 minutes routine, I shutdown after salvaging few bits of Windows7 data. Yay, finally, silver lining.

Few days later, lets try see if it can handle the temperature, after all its booting from USB and in RAM only, no harm I guess. For hours and hours without processor fan, only hand fan sometime and still no crash, whew, puppylinux on RAM is darn COOL.

afterglow

Cut story short, I manage to salvage, partition, reinstall, protect etc etc all because of the 1GB thumb-drive and puppylinux. Now I use lxpup

and it boot permanent, frugal and on 3 USB stick as precaution and "briefcase". It really deserve it. I did try Ubuntu, mint, and other major

linux distro, almost all heat up the the processor, dustbin. Puppylinux wins and get the partition and won the boot ranking order on my pc.

So after tinkering a while, I saw puppylinux use gtkdialog here and there and it look a bit clunky. Still, puppylinux use gtkdialog as the ui for some of its stuff. Turns out its just

bash script "addon". So...lets make it better.

its quite fun to use bash

As a thank you and to fill time on being jobless here it is - gmould. Its not usable, but slowly becoming better.

gmould is a user interface editor for gtkdialog. Its still in infancy, so please have patience :). Its a thank you gift to puppylinux, the community use it or not is up to them :) . Below is some screen shots for you to view and comment. I still didnt upload gmould, quite busy developing and improving gmould.

Oh did I mention

I still dont have the processor fan replaced ? Damn I'm poor. If you make software using gmould later, ask them to donate to me, OK ? Need (instead of want) new processor fan :):). Seriously its just to know somebody appreciate and USE the software, its an urge for us coders to code. We got real life too instead of sitting coding. I'll write about this later I guess.



I appreciate any comments or whatsoever, just drop a line.

gmould development blog is available at http://gmould.blogspot.com/

gmould code repositroy is available at http://code.google.com/p/gmould/

I still did not upload yet, it takes time to learn all these blogging and git stuff.

this bloggin stuff is tiring me, its not productive.