Monthly Archives: January 2010

One’s Boxes: 1997-2010

Posted by in General

A good friend, JD, posed about his favorite home built computers since his first in 1997. So, one thought it would be appropriate to share one’s computing history.

Let’s start back, a long, long time ago, in the year 1997. That was the year one received one’s fist computer. It was nothing special, a salvaged embedded computer with a Pentium 100Mhz, with a 1GB 2.5″ drive and 32MiB of ram. When one received it, there was no OS on the hard drive, so one had the pleasure of learning how to install Windows 98 on it. Unfortunately, one does not have any photos of it, and the case has since been recycled (If one still had the case it’d be a nice mini-ITX case).

Fast forward a few years to February of the year 2000. This is when one built the fist and only, all new parts, computer. It had a Pentium 3 866Mhz (Coppermine core, 133Mhz FSB) in a slocket adapter to fit into a Soyo Slot 1 motherboard. It was equipped with 256MiB PC133 SDRAM, a 20GB 7200RPM Western Digital Caviar Hard Drive, a Creative Soundblaster Live, and an ATI Rage Fury Pro. The best thing was it had no problem playing all of the games one had at the time. Some time later, one upgraded the video card to a Nvidia Geforce MX 4000, upgraded the CPU to a P3 1.0Ghz, added a 200GB Western Digital Caviar SE, added a 16X Pioneer DVD burner, and added 512MiB of PC133 SDRAM.

Fast forward to February of 2006, one acquired a second hand Athlon 1.4Ghz (Thunderbird, 266 FSB). Joining it was an ATI Radeon 9600 (completely passive), the Creative Soundblaster Live from one’s previous box, and 512MiB of DDR ram. For storage, it had a 20GiB single platter Fireball drive, and one’s 200GB Western Digital Caviar SE. Eventually, one of the sticks of memory flaked out, and one replaced it with a 512MiB stick of DDR400.

After a few short months, in May of 2006, one upgraded again to a P4 2.0Ghz (Northwood, 400Mhz FSB). This was a brief stint when one did use on board sound, since the Intel motherboard supported 5.1 audio. One equipped it with 1.5GiB of DDR memory (mixed speeds), and a 160GB primary drive. Later, this was upgraded to a P4 3.0Ghz (Northwood, 800Mhz FSB) and the video card was upgraded to a Nvidia Geforce 6600GT.

Now, skip ahead to about a year ago, January 2009. One upgraded to a second hand Celeron 430 (OC’ed to 2.4 Ghz using a “pin” mod), with 4GiB of DDR2 800 memory, a 250 GB Western Digital RE drive, and a Radeon x800XL. This was one’s first system to have a SATA hard drive, and it had Windows 7 Beta installed on it. A month or two later, one upgraded the video card to a Radeon 4830 (and subsequently OC’ed it a little), and installed a Creative X-Fi Titanium. A few months later, the Celeron 430 was replaced with a Core 2 Duo E8500, a Blu-ray player was installed, and Windows 7 RC was installed on the hard drive.

Finally, we’re at the current box. One took the CPU, memory, Blu-ray player, and sound card, installed them in a new case (the very nice Lian Li PC-A05B). Windows 7 Pro (64bit), was installed onto a Intel X-25M (Gen 1), and a 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor was installed for storage. The motherboard was upgraded to a Gigabyte P45 chipset board. In the not so distant future, the PSU and video card are going to be replaced (to a Corsair 650HX and a Radeon 5800 series card), hence no cable management had been done yet.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

3 Comments Updated:

Comment Policy

Posted by in Announcements

This really has not been a problem in the past, but one feels compelled to spell this out due to the actions of a few commenters in the past month or so. On this site, one reserves the right to delete or modify any comment deemed unacceptable. Modifications may include, but are not limited to:

  • Changing name
  • Removal of offensive language
  • Removal of information that may compromise the security of the commenter’s web server
  • Removal of excessive links

When selecting a name, please use either your real name (e.g. John, John Doe, John D., or J. Doe) or an appropriate pseudonym (e.g. miller). Do not use overly generic names, or names that look to be SEO baiting in nature (e.g. friend, buddy, Plugin Developer, WordPress Experts, etc.). Do not impersonate the admin, or any registered users (e.g. admin, mtekk, John Havlik). Failure to adhere to these guidelines will result in your name being changed (if one values the content of your comment) or your comment being deleted.

Although this site’s primary audience is over 18, please keep your comments suitable for work. One does not need this site to be blacklisted by the likes of Websense. Remember, anyone can read these comments, including current or future employers.

When posting errors presented by PHP, please reduce strings like “/var/www/sitename/htdocs/wp-contents/plugins/breadcrumb-navxt/breadcrumb_navxt_class.php” to “…/wp-contents/plugins/breadcrumb-navxt/breadcrumb_navxt_class.php”.

Unless the link pertains to the content of your comment, please leave it out.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Mixed Colorspace

Posted by in Art

Colors are important, having the correct one can make or break a design. That is why professionals and even some enthusiasts spend copious amounts of money (well maybe not quite that much) on devices to ensure that when a color is picked, it looks the same on print and on the screen. Even with these devices, there are many pitfalls on the computer side.

Case in point: what looks like a rich crimson in improperly color managed FireFox, The Gimp, and Windows Paint is actually a rusty maroon in color managed Windows Explorer, and FireFox (when set to manage CSS colors in conjunction with profiled images). While this is better than in Windows XP, it is still annoying.

When Microsoft redid the graphics driver framework for Vista, they should have forced color correction onto the graphics drivers. That way, all applications would use the same color translation LUT and individual applications would not have to be aware of color profiles. Maybe they could do this for Windows 8 (then one could be in one of those “Windows 8 feature was my idea” commercials).

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

A New Year

Posted by in General

With the changing of years, months, and the forthcoming changing of seasons a change in design and accompanying style is immanent. Originally, these changes were to take affect last summer. Yet, somehow they were delayed, as have other projects. This comes from a desire to separate more professional content and personal content (well, it would allow the posting of more personal content as of late little has been posted). While being the self proclaimed “Enemy of the Spammers”, one has not made proper use of this tagline. So there are two options, earn the title, or relinquish it. One’s choice will be apparent in the coming weeks.

Now to talk about a neglected project. WP Trainer, still hasn’t seen the light of day, even though its code base size is equivalent to that of Breadcrumb NavXT. Lack of direction is really the reason for the delay. There is almost too much to do with it, after a concise scope is defined work will resume. The other hold up is that some portions rely on things that are possible in WordPress but are quite hackish to implement (many of these problems went away in WP 2.8, and more went away in 2.9). Currently, WP 3.0 is the target platform. Finally, some work being done at the moment on Breadcrumb NavXT will benefit this project.

Breadcrumb NavXT will probably have 3 feature adding releases in 2010 (3.5, 3.6, and 3.7). The current version in development, 3.5, will add support for custom post types and will contain many “under the hood” improvements which will be detailed at a later date. The release time frame for this around mid to late Q1. Version 3.6 will add extended support for WPMU/WP 3.0, essentially covering the one thing that makes WPMU a different animal. This release will correspond to the WP 3.0 release (probably in late H1).

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]