February 2004 Entries
This evening I put in my order for the components to build my next PC. Not feeling any buyers remorse yet but from reading a report of the recent Intel Developer Forum and I can see that it will be quickly obsolete with PCI Express, DDR2 and BTX boards coming later this year.
I'm writing up the building of this Quiet Gaming PC in this new article.
Article in Wired Magazine subtitled "How India became the capital of the computing revolution." Worth reading if you're a software developer. Some interesting quotes:
"But isn't part of this country's vitality its ability to make these kinds of changes?" I counter. "We've done it before - going from farm to factory, from factory to knowledge work, and from knowledge work to whatever's next."
She looks at me. Then she says, "I'd like to know where you go from knowledge."
Within four years, IT outsourcing will be a $57 billion annual industry - responsible for 7 percent of India's GDP and employing some...
Well I've been agonizing over building this PC with the hardest bit being what graphics card to buy and where to buy it from. I finally settled on an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro which I managed to buy off Ebay for only £114. Seems like a pretty good deal. If you check out Tom's Hardware VGA Charts, its rated quite high and I got it for less than most 9600XT cards go for. Just need to stick a Zalman VGA heatpipe on it and I'm set. Ebay seems like a really good place to pick up video cards. As power...
Awesome. A real PC in the palm of your hand running Windows XP. Reserve one now.
Interesting article from Intel. Check out the table at the bottom. Those new processors are hot! Now I see why most quiet oriented systems stop at the P4 2.8C. I've got a P4 1.6A which turns out to be coolest in the table although also the most sensitive to case temperature. I should be able to crank down my case fans....
Been doing a ton of research on the Internet trying to figure out what new PC to get. I've finally decided that anything based on the top notch Intel 875P chipset isn't generally worth it. Overpriced. The best chipset currently is the Intel 865PE or it's sibling with integrated graphics, the 865G. Via and Sis both have fairly competitive chipsets but there's no advantage to them so I'm sticking to Intel. I prefer Intel to AMD and don't plan to revisit that choice. I want something that will support the next generation of Intel processors code-named Prescott. The 865x series...
Version 0.30 of Mono has just been released. Looks like they're making good progress. Yet another interesting piece of software to play with. Also noticed that an alpha release MySQL v5 is out which includes support for stored procedures. By v5.1, MySQL starts looking really good with support for triggers, views, constraints, etc.
Still watching to see when it will be viable to port Microsoft web apps over to Linux. Develop on Windows (with Microsoft tools) and deploy on LAMM (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Mono). Deadly.
Looks like BTX is set to take over from the ATX motherboard form factor. Products out this summer I believe. Good news for SFF machines.
Cool idea. Forget databases. With massive cheap RAM just keep business objects in RAM and persist snapshots of them once in a while. In-between snapshots, record all incoming commands in a log file. If you crash just, rehydrate the last snapshot, apply commands in the log file and keep running. Read the FAQ for details.
Key issues with the approach:
Data must never grow larger than memory (massive swap file?)
No query language for object pool (solvable)
Impact of object schema changes on production systems
Possible data inconsistency if exception thrown
Loss of declarative specifiers for data types and relationships
Benefits:
ACID all taken care of; no...
I'm shopping for a new PC to replace the old PII 266 (!) that the kids have been using to play games. They're beginning to play 3D games that just won't play on it and I don't want those games on my machine. And I figure I can recycle that old PII into a Linux box to muck about with.
But what to get! Something small but something fast. Something that looks good but isn't noisy. I'm verrrrry tempted to go for a full blown up-to-date gaming machine so that I can put my favourite games on it as well as the...
I've just started a consulting gig for a charity helping them to setup a website. Today we had our second meeting and I've pretty well convinced them to go with an Open Source Content Management System. All the candidate CMS's run on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Well, ok, sometimes the database and script language differs but close enough.
Yep, an ex-Microsoft Consultant pushing LAMP. Guess I've lost my religion!
It's just that the best free Open Source CMS solutions are all on LAMP and it's very rare you can find it on Windows. And if they do support IIS/SQL Server, you...
Still keeping an eye out for an inexpensive RAID solution. The Fibrenetix FX-605-FW/USB looks nice.
Got fed up with Microsoft Media Player 9 and went and bought a copy of PowerDVD v5. Purchased the standard version and downloaded direct from Cyberlink (for immediate gratification!). Was having codec problems with media player as it wasn't playing the ISO images of some DVD movies I had and just locking up. PowerDVD played them perfectly.
I did do a quick bit of research beforehand as the choice was between WinDVD and PowerDVD. PowerDVD seems to be the more popular choice but there's really very little to differentiate them. WinDVD sells too many addon's while PowerDVD bundles it all together. Got...
Spent a few hours this evening trying to figure out why Windows XP wouldn't boot up on my second disk partition. It would just get to loading the agp440.sys driver and hang. This was completely baffling as it had been working fine and I'm sure I hadn't installed anything new the last time I had used it. The agp440 driver is related to the video card but this is a red herring since after this driver, it loads ACPI stuff. From reading around the 'net it looks like this hang indicates a hardware error somewhere.
I tried getting more info by...