This Sunday the sailing season formally opens at my sailing club, the Williamstown Sailing Club, and this year I am doing my bit to contribute to the running of the club. Today we launched a brand new website for the club witch we hope will bring people together online. The new website is: http://www.williamstownsailingclub.org.au/. Do take a look at the website and then come join us on Sunday for a social sail and BBQ at the club.
This morning I woke up thinking “I need to upgrade my computer!”. Of course I don’t really need to upgrade, the applications I use don’t require a high spec machine and I haven’t played games for over a year, but there is something about being in the geeky arena that requires a certain level of excitement over your hardware. My current desktop was the product of me wanting a faster machine when I moved to Australia and having too much time on my hand not to make it happen. This time, I would only upgrade the CPU, motherboard and memory, all the other stuff is quite reasonable for my purpose.
Another reason for looking into this was that I don’t tend to follow what’s happening in the hardware world that closely and every now and then you need to upgrade your knowledge in that arena. The main reason for my antipathy is probably that desktops are not that sexy any more. The clunky workhorse, sitting on or under your desktop is just a bulky, noisy, wire infested box that you cant seem to get rid of. Despite 20 years of exciting hardware development, when it comes to the crunch, the cheapest way to get good computing grunt into your hands, is to buy one of these boxes.
And so the saga continues. Every three years or so you upgrade the big black box to get the power processing happening. Not that you really need it or even give it any heavy work to do that often, but you still just have to have it available, or else risk your general interest in the geeky side of life.
At any rate, after looking at some reviews and prices I came up with the following combo:
This would come to $774 and its probably not a bad combo. But to be honest, I think I’m going to wait for a bit and buy new sails for my boat rather than do an upgrade at this time.
+ ARS Technica, the guide http://arstechnica.com/hardware/guides/2009/04/ars-technica-system-guide-april-2009-edition.ars
+ My supplier http://www.cpl.net.au/
+ The CPU http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/chipsets/p55/p55-overview.htm
+ The mobo http://www.gigabyte.com.au/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=3161
It is only fair to give credit where credit is due. Recently I came a cross this elegant tutorial to create a slideshow using jQuery which I found very usefull during my current web project. The author, Jacob Gube deserves praise for the effort he’s put into writing the code for this slideshow and its presentation on the Six Revisions website. There are lots of people who provide assistance like that to others and sometimes I feel guilty that I dont do more of it my self. At any rate, thank you Jacob and Six Revisions for your great articles and tutorials.
Recently I found out that the fourth computer in the world to be built was designed and built in Australia. In 1949 a young scientist at CISRO proposed and got funding for a project to build a computer. The project was successful and the computer was built. It took about a year and soon after it was complete it was donated to Melbourne University where it was used to execute programs and calculations for about a decade. The computer is now at the Museum of Melbourne where it can be seen in its reassembled state. As I walked through the room hosting the computer I could not help but think back to Reiknistofnun and the old geeks I used to work with over there. They would have fitted perfectly in these settings as young men, with hair. There are even pictures at Reiknistofnun where it looks like they are in that very room. In fact, I think that might be Maríus’s chair in the picture!
For some reason a file got copied to the wrong place on my server and it brought all my websites down. I have now found it and fixed it but since I had no time for a few days the downtime was quite long. Anyhow, were back up and you can expect a new entry soon.
Yesterday I started a new job, my first in Melbourne. The company is called Interlex and my role there is developing a website. The company is small but versatile in what they do. Their services span most aspects computing services that a small to medium sized organization may need. The software development team is very talented and they have done some really cool projects. The project I am working on has been graphically designed and website features described and then I take it from there. I cant say what its about at this stage but I will write a post about it once I have released the project.
My first day there was good. There is a team of great people there and I felt very much at home. Its funny how every computer nerd in every corner of the world is really the same. If you speak the language of computer geekiness it does not matter where you land you are very likely to feel at home. That was my experience yesterday.
As I have had some time to play around with programming lately I decided to solve a problem that has been bothering me for a long time: how to store my recipes! For a long time I have been looking for a piece for software into which I can put all the recipes I have been collecting but not found anything I am happy with. After downloading all the desktop applications I could find on the web and found that they were not doing what I was after I finally stumbled onto one that I found to be close enough, RegiDean. After using it for several years I finally decided it was no good. Firstly it was impossible to synchronize the computers. If I added a recipe into one computer it would then get lost once I start using another one. Secondly they upgraded to a new version and getting the old files into the new version was quite a hassle, plus the new version is very unstable. I finally decided this would do no longer and sat down to make a website where I can upload my recipes, share them with others and not have to worry about loosing them. The result is http://www.myrecipes-online.com!
The site gives a simple way to upload your recipes and a very clean view to use them. There are no millions of recipes to organize and sift through, that´s what Google is for. There are no fifteen fields to enter data just to get one recipe in there. There are no folders, categories or long and winded registration processes. There is no up-selling or cross-selling or advert, just a clean and simple interface. The site is in its infancy and I hope I will have lots more time to spend on it because there are a fair few things I would like to add just to make it more fun. Do take a look and don’t be afraid to try out my lobster soup recipe, it is absolutely stunning and only takes 10 hours to make!
Yesterday our site was down for a few hours due to some maintenance work on my part. Sunsite has now been put into a completely new spot on our servers and although there is no real difference in its performance or functionality this change was quite significant. What I did was upgrade our account with our hosting provider so that now I can host multiple websites on that one account. That meant I had to move sunsite down into a subdirectory and make changes to the DNS structure to keep everything clean. There are already new websites on that account now and more coming up soon. For now you can take a look at the all new Elwood Croquet Club website at http://elwoodcroquet.com and later I will post more of the sites coming up.
Almost four years ago now, I built a desktop computer that has been my companion during the last turbulent and traumatic four years. We have done everything together. From building and running international websites to watching romantic movies and even moving houses a fair few times. She came with me to Australia and now it seems it was only to be discarded and ignored.
It was in early December 2003 that I sat down to design a powerful working horse to perform some magic for my customers. I looked up the spec specialists at Ars Technica to see what they were recommending at that time, talked to master Kiddi and looked up the prices on his price comparison website. After much deliberation I decided to get an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ CPU, MSI K7N2 Delta-L, Samsung 120 GB disk, 512 MB of memory and a simple but efficient case to put it all together in. Once she was ready I named her “Eldskírn” after my first boat and turned her on. She was fast!
Now, four years later she is still reasonably fast. I over-clocked the CPU and increased the speed from 1800GHz to 2200GHz. This put her back into the arena of useful computers but unfortunately it also meant that I had to improve the cooling system by adding more fans to the case. I added 3 new fans and modified the case to improve airflow and she still over heats when I make her do difficult things. Worse yet the noise of all the fans make you feel like you are in a factory. And so, with a heavy heart and trepidation I started speccing a new machine.
My process was much the same as before. Look up the Ars systems guide, talk to Kiddi and then find a good value. Luckily my local computer dealer, Centre Com is quite cheap. In fact one of the cheapest in Melbourne. They offer good prices and the staff are friendly and helpful. You do however have to know your stuff before you walk in there as there is very little stuff on display or even in stock and the staff are swamped with work. Long chats about the properties of various components is not what you feel like doing there. After going through the process I made my decision and ordered the components.
It took me most of the day to put her together. She was playing a little hard to get. I had to install the operating system twice and the wireless network card kept freezing her up. Once she was satisfied though she turned out to be a real beauty! Intel Dual Core 2 E6750, Gigabyte P35-DS3R with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 8600GT video card with a fan free cooling system. I have named her RUDI-TOO, after my second boat. She purrs like a kitten and stays cool at all times while delivering outstanding performance. I ran the Performance Test software to see exactly how powerful she is and boy was I happy with the whopping 815 points she gave me! That is an improvement of about 500 points over old Eldskírn who scores 325 points when she is over-clocked and about 250 when in normal mode. My old laptop, Nafni scores only 125 and Suze´s brand new laptop is scoring 420 points. She is big, she is bold and she is beautiful; my all new power machine!
Thank god for network users who don’t know what they are doing! As I write this I am still waiting for all my computer gear to arrive with the rest of our stuff from Iceland and although we have a phone connected I haven’t arranged for a connection to the internet. My laptop has however detected a few wireless networks in the area and one of them is completely open. Either this is an evil genius luring people to use his network to then spy on his neighbors, or which is more likely the person is totally unaware that is network is open for anyone to use. I´m betting on the latter and happily checking my email and writing entries to the site. Once I have my own connection set up I am going to use WirelessMon 2.0 to find my kind neighbor, bring him a bottle of wine and teach him about network security. I just hope he wont get too angry at me for nicking his net.
: Ohhh þetta er æðislegt hláturs stream hjá þér ......
: ég sendi þér email, sástu hann?
: Valberg I need a help... sko fyrir éri voru bjánar sem stálu helming af nafni fyrirtækis míns, kalla sig hopp, heimasíðan þeirra er það sama [...]
: hehe, no sharkies lately, but there were dolphins swimming around my boat the other day!
: So anybody bitten by shark resently??? just making a confersations eða spjall
