wrightin.gs

My New Ultimate Developer Rig

Since I got a Triple-Headed monster and I am now working form home for the most part, I have had the desire to get a new desktop PC to drive my monitors better and get better productivity at home.  I figured the cost of the new desktop would pay for itself probably within a week.  I tried to use my current desktop for 3 months and it was just too painful (that sentence exists for the wife acceptance factor).

I followed the advice of several co-developers (Scott Hanselman, Dustin Campbell, Jeff Fansler, Justin DeCourcy, and Bill Wheelock) and got the parts that they suggested or they have already used to build their own ultimate developer rigs.  Here is a list of what I got:

• ANTEC P182 Black ATX tower case - I ordered this from mwave because I wanted the black which newegg did not carry.  I can not how good this case is.  It is the best designed case I have ever used.
• EVGA Nvidia nForce 680i SLI Motherboard - I originally ordered the MSI P6N SLI Platinum Nvidia nForce 650i from mwave because it was cheaper and I was already ordering the case from mwave but the board had a short in it.  I knew that Dustin had issues with this motherboard as well, so I opted to take Jeff Atwood's advice and go with this Motherboard.
• Corsair 750 W Power Supply - This is a really nice power supply and probably the largest that will fit in the case without having to remove the bottom fan in the case.  I wish I would of gotten a modular one with removable cables but I was able to fit all the extra cables in the case nicely.
• Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz processor - What can I say...lots of power.
• 4 OCZ Gold 2 GB Sticks - These are really nice high quality RAM sticks.  The motherboard will support 8 Gigs and I plan on using Vista 64 to take advantage of all the RAM.
• 2 MSI GeForce NX8600GTS PCI Express x16 cards - These will support my Triple Headed Monster just fine.
• 4 Seagate Barracuda 500 G 7200 RPM drives - I was originally going to run a 10,000 RPM drive for the OS and a large 7200 RPM drive for data but I opted to go running RAID 0 + 1 with 500 G drives and for this, you need 4 identical drives.  This will give me really fast IO speeds with 1 T of space.
• 2 Lite On 16x DVD-ROM drives - I like to have 2 drives when I rip something (er, backup).  These are really fast and cheap drives with Lightscribe.

This new rig is super fast!  My build times have decreased dramatically and I can actually now use the Windows Ultimate DreamScene backgrounds.  How fun!  I have to say that Vista is a lot better with a PC that supports it.  It is now a little more fun to use.

For the install, I followed the advice from Jeff Atwood on his Coding Horror site for when he built the ultimate developer rig for Scott Hanselman.  I would suggest looking at that if you want to build your own.

Triple Headed Monster

So I ordered and recieved a new Dell 30" monitor and completed my triple headed monster as seen here.  I am really excited about having this much screen real estate.  I have been working with 2 monitors for quite some time and I have been wanting this set-up for a while.  Since I am now a lot less mobile, I thought that now would be a great time to do this now.  It will allow me to be a lot more productive.

The problem was trying to find a video card that supported a dual link DVI cable and resolution that the Dell monitor required.  My motherboard only had one PCI-Express card slot and my current video card that I was using was a Radeon X700.  I found a video card that supported Radeon X1550 technology and supported Vista.  This worked well because I was able to just plug in the card and the Radeon drivers that I already installed for my PCI-Express card worked.  I have to go and watch my porn write code in all it's glory.

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired with Windows

First and foremost, I have lived and breathed daily in all the versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 3.1.  Secondly, I am a developer that loves and uses Microsoft technologies to pay my mortgage every month.  I develop in Windows and for Windows and make a pretty decent living doing so.

That being said, Microsoft has got to get it's act together and get it together quickly.  I am soooo fed up with Microsoft Windows Vista.  I am fed up with it's stability, it's "features", and it's "user interface".

I bought a MacBook for my wife about a year and a half ago.  I bought it for her because they have a reputation of being a lot more user friendly than a PC and she is not the most computer literate.  Her experience with the Mac has been less than stellar mostly due to the incompatabilities with other equipment such as printers, etc and the Office for Mac (another Microsoft program) suite.  I on the other hand have grown to love the little things.  I am going to contrast the little things that the Mac does well below with my issues on the "revolutionary" Vista PC.

I am sick and tired of...

• Waiting for the damn PC to sleep.  I click on sleep and wait, and wait, and wait and finally after 30 seconds, the damn PC is sleeping and using less battery.  On the Mac, just close the lid and right away you are saving battery
• Waiting for the damn PC to wake up.  Same deal as sleep.  It takes a minute for all the drivers to get themselves back to a good state (if that happens at all).  On a Mac, it just works right when you open the lid
• Docking/Undocking.  In Windows, this has always been a toss up.  Will my display work?  Will my network connections work?  You have to wait and see.  Kinda fun except when you get to the meeting and have to reboot because undocking/docking must be a problem that Microsoft just can't figure out.  Maybe Microsoft Research should stop playing with coffee tables and work on this issue.  Macs do not have docking stations so maybe they can't figure it out either.
• Drivers. I know that this is not a Microsoft issue, accourding to them but dammit, I disagree.  It is part of the Windows experience and it reflects badly on them.  Drivers need to be more stable and they need to work really, really well all the time.  They should help OEMs make these and test these.  Macs definately are ahead here because they control the hardware and the software.  Looking back, not such a bad idea Bill?
• Deleting a damn file.  WTF takes so long?  Mark the file as deleted in Windows, flip a bit for f*** sakes.  In Mac world, Move to Trash takes 1 second and you no longer see the file and hear the little wringled paper sound no matter how many files/folders you move there.
• Folders.  I love the fact that my default documents folder is in C:\XXXX\XXXX\XXXXXX\XXXX\XXXXX.  This makes my mom, sister, next door neighbor, and babysitter all call me and go where the hell is my file.  On a Mac, there is a Documents folder and an Applications.  Simple.

I am sick of these little things bug me on a daily basis.  It cuts into my productivity more often than not.  This would be a simple fix for me if I did not love the tablet form factor. 

I could just get my own MacBook and use Parallels and Boot Camp for my developing within the Microsoft stack.  The problem is that I would loose the tablet form factor and I am not willing to give that up yet.  The tablet allows me to do a lot of different things than just using the keyboard.  Ink allows me to think in a different way, take electronic notes for clients, etc.

So my hope is that the ModBook is not yet vaporware.  This things needs to come out soon so that I can have a MacBook that is a tablet.  It is supposed to be released in the 4th quarter of this year.  The problem is that it has been pushed back 3 times now.  Will this thing ever be released?  I am praying and checking the site everyday and I have one on pre-order.  Will this solve my issues or create more?  I will have to get one before I can answer that.  There are a million questions I have for this device.  I will surely blog about them if I can ever get my hands on one.

TEO / ClearContext Fix

I asked before what happened to the support of TEO.  I was having an issue with TEO and I did not hear back from Josh Einstien on the issue.  I reported that he got back to me soon after that.  We did some debugging and found that the issue was related to having ClearContext installed as well.  It turns out that it was a ClearContext issue and they have released a fix for it.  Thanks Josh and Brad from Clear Context on working that out.  Very much appreciated!

Visual Voicemail without an iPhone

Sean Alexander blogged about some freeware called Callwave for your cell phone.  It takes over your voicemail from your service provider and sends you an email and a text message when you recieve a voicemail and/or a missed call.  They also have some software you can install on your PC or Mac.  If you are running Vista, they have a sidebar gadget or a Mac widget that shows how many voicemails you have and from who (just like the visual voicemail from the iPhone).

I Hate iTunes

I have been running iTunes on Vista for the past 3 months and everything has been fine except that iTunes will crash from time to time.  It would never screw up my library.  I even bought a new 80 gig iPod a couple of weeks ago so that I can watch some movies and video podcasts while I work.

Anyway, I woke up this morning to get my iPod ready for my trip to a client.  I start my desktop machine, it automatically starts iTunes because my iPod is docked and poof...my library is all screwed up.  My songs are all there except for all my purchases.  My podcast subscriptions are gone.  Movies, gone. Games, gone.  It sucks because now I have to deal with support to get my purchases back and then I have to set up all my movies, podcasts, and games.  I don't get it.  iTunes has been running good for the past 3 months.  Who said Apple can't write horrible software?

More Lenovo X60 Vista Drivers Available Today

Lenovo has posted more drivers for Windows Vista and the X60 tablet on their web site today.  They include drivers for the monitor, trackpoint, and power management amoung other things.  I am in the process of installing them now.  One step closer to selling my old tablet.  You can get them here.

The "Wow" starts after you get over the lame displays

Frank LaVigne posted a picture of the Best Buy displays for Windows Vista.  One word sums it up for me.....lame.  Come on Microsoft, lets see....five years in the making, the biggest upgrade to your operating system to date, and the largest risk Microsoft has taken and this is the display you have come up with?  I realize that Best Buy has had some constraints in the display size, etc., but listen paper flyers, small posters, and a couple of shelves does not really scream inviting.  How about using some technology?  How about using some of that marketing budget?  This display just screams Windows 3.1.

Newsgator Desktop Sync for IE7

I am a Newsgator user.  I love all the options they give you.  I mainly use the online reader only.  The problem is that IE7 has a built in Feed reader and subscriber which is really nice.  It automatically detects feeds within web sites as you visit them.  The problem with this feed reader is that it is not extensible like the search tool is.  It does not allow you to change the providers.  I do not want to have two sources for feeds and I am not about to leave Newsgator.

No need to, Newsgator has come to the rescue again.  They have a beta of a desktop sync tool which allows a user to replace their Newsgator feeds with the desktop, replace their desktop feeds with Newsgator, or merge the two.  I downloaded it on my new Vista box and I like it.  Here is a screenshot of the tool:

The really neat thing that this can be used for is the Vista Feed gadget.  This gadget displays the feeds right on your desktop in the gadget sidebar.  Now I have all my Newsgator feeds right on my desktop.  Nice!