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I Am In Fact Alive

·471 words·3 mins
Articles announcements assorted geekery linux personal tech

Wow, where the hell have I been?!

It’s two days shy of a month since I last posted, which is an eternity online. As is probably obvious, I’ve been really busy with work and all the other interesting things that life can throw at you. :)

My software for work is rapidly approaching the deadline testing date, and in the world of personal programming projects I decided to completely redesign the database for the diplomacy server from scratch. I’ve learned a few things in the last couple months that illustrate some of the more fundamental errors in my previous model. I’ve also been busy trying to learn how to use the Symfony framework for PHP, as well as beginning to do some dabbling in Python and Ruby. We’ll see how that goes…

Of course the thing that’s been taking up the most of my former blogging time has been my new baby. I built him myself.

I apologize for the low quality of the photos, they are just a couple quick “post-delivery” shots I took with my cell-phone right after I had it up and running.

This was my first build, something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and I am really happy with it. Since I put it together I’ve been having a ton of fun tweaking and optimizing all of my BIOS settings, customizing my Gentoo installation, setting up the old computer as a home file and database server, and checking out the performance of my new system.

The Specs:

  • Case: Thermaltake Armor Full ATX Tower (it’s really huge, but an awesome cooler with a ton of space)
  • CPU: AMD Athlon 64 bit X2 (dual core) 4400+ (currently at 2.2Ghz, but I haven’t even started overclocking the CPU yet)
  • CPU Fan/Heatsink: Zalman CNPS7000B-CU LED (blue LED cooling fan, super quiet and takes great care of the CPU)
  • Motherboard: ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
  • Memory: 2GB Corsair Twin DDR Ram
  • Video Card: GeForce 6800 XT 256MB Overclocked
  • Sound Card: Audigy 2 ZS
  • First Hard Drive: SATA Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM 74GB w/ 16MB cache
  • Second Hard Drive: 3.0 GB/s SATA Western Digital Caviar 7200 RPM 250GB w/ 16MB cache
  • First IDE: NEC ND-3550A 16X DVD+/-RW Burner
  • Second IDE: SONY DVD-ROM 16X
  • And a floppy in case I need to flash the BIOS

Since my old computer was being relegated to server duties, I took my nice Creative speakers and Westinghouse 19" LCD flat panel and gave them to my new computer. I administrate the old one through ssh and sftp (mostly because I’m too lazy to set up a standard ftp server and sshd gives me sftp for free).

Oh yeah, and I also recently discovered the joys of gaming in Linux, so that’s been distracting too. :D

I’ll be back with more frequent posts from now on, I promise.