The parts:

1. Intel Core i7 860 processor at 2.8GHz, though it apparently scales up a bit faster than that depending on system load.
2. Gigabyte P55A-UD4P motherboard, powered by the Intel P55 chipset and with fancy features like dual gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, eSATA, and a floppy disk drive connector.
3. 4GB DDR3 RAM at 1333MHz. Will probably upgrade to 8GB eventually.
4. PowerColor ATI Radeon 5770 graphics card with 1GB of RAM. Not the best, but apparently better value than the nVidia equivalent in the same price range.
5. 3×1TB Western Digital 7200RPM hard disks. The original plan was to RAID-5 these, but then I found out that RAID-5 performance is not that great with the lousy RAID controller that’s on my motherboard. So it’s just a bunch of disks for now.
6. Pioneer BluRay Writer. Mmm, high-definition movies.
7. Antec 900 case. I was originally going to go for the newer, more tweaked Antec 902, but MSY didn’t happen to have any in stock when I went to get my parts. Meh, this will do. It looks not too bad, and it’s much quieter than I expected it to be. This is probably because of the big fans (insert huge-fan-of-Antec pun here), and the:
8. Seasonic M12-II 520W modular power supply. Apparently Seasonic are known for their quiet power supplies, and this one didn’t disappoint.

So, what does it look like? It looks like … well … any of the other millions of computers that use the Antec 900 case:

Is it fast? Absolutely. This machine has a Geekbench score three times higher than my old computer. The graphics performance is also much more impressive than my old machine: it’s powerful enough to render Portal at 1680×1050 at 200FPS, while my old machine struggled to play it at 20FPS at 640×480.

The best part of it is that now I can play hardware-accelerated h.264 and VC-1 video at 1920×1080p, which means I can connect it to my TV and use it as an awesome media centre. If I fire up a decent media player like Media Player Classic Home Cinema which makes use of DxVA, and start a high-definition h.264 video, it won’t use any CPU power to decode it – the task is delegated to the graphics card. I like this.

What about a monitor? Mouse? Keyboard? Well, I already have all of these. My last notebook was essentially docked, and permanently connected to my 22” LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse. Now they’re all connected to my new machine:

I am planning on buying two shiny new LCDs, as working on a machine with multiple monitors is great, but that’ll happen eventually.

Wait, you didn’t buy a keyboard? I’m glad you asked. Last year, I had the pleasure of buying a Unicomp Customizer keyboard. The Unicomp Customizer is a modern reproduction of the classic IBM Model M keyboard, which many consider to be the best keyboard ever. Unicomp bought the patents and the factory from IBM in the mid-90s, and continue manufacturing these keyboards today. The Customizer is essentially the last revision of the Model M design, but with a different paint-job and a USB controller instead of the antiquated PS/2 interface. Since I already have the best keyboard money can buy, why would I buy another? Sure, it looks like it should be connected to an IBM PC/XT, but it’s an absolute pleasure to type on, and typing is what I do.

But does it run Linux? I guess it does…? It at least booted from the Ubuntu 10.04 install CD. I am planning on installing some flavour of Linux on here fairly soon, and then alternating between it and Windows 7. If I have any trouble, I’ll probably rant here about it.

What did you call it? I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll name my shiny new machine. I’ve tentatively named it CoreBlimey, a combination of being quad-core, and “cor, blimey, that’s fast!”

So, what is it actually going to be used for? Eh, I’ll find a use for it. I’ll play some games. I’ll watch some high-definition movies. I’ll edit some video … maybe in high-definition. I’ll work on Instant Elevator Music 2. Etc.

–Ben

I thought I’d make a post to talk about my newest piece of software. It’s called Instant Elevator Music.

Instant Elevator Music is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a program that plays elevator music while you wait for your computer to do things. It sits in your system tray and waits until it sees that you’re waiting for something, like a download or a file copy. Then, it plays elevator music.

Instant Elevator Music is compatible with a large number of programs because it works by analysing the window structure of the program you’re currently working with. If it finds a progress bar, it will play music. It also has special handlers for programs which don’t show progress bars, but are otherwise things that you have to wait for. For example, TortoiseSVN and the DownThemAll Firefox extension.

The music that comes with it is the excellent Mario’s Elevator by Kmax, but you can make it play any MP3, Ogg Vorbis or Wave file.

Instant Elevator Music also comes with a few overly-advanced settings, including a configurable fade-out, options to tweak the detection of progress bars, and a running total of how long you’ve been “stuck” in the elevator for. Why? It was fun to implement.

For such a stupidly-obvious idea, I’m honestly surprised that nobody has done this before. I came up with the idea while waiting for VMWare to resume a virtual machine. The only UI that VMWare was showing was a progress bar. I thought, “I wish they’d have elevator music for this”. Then I realised, using the Win32 API I could probably make it happen. And so, now we have Instant Elevator Music.

The response to Instant Elevator Music has been a lot better than I imagined. I thought that it’d just get ignored as a program that’s too silly to even bother downloading. Even I’ve thought at times, “Why the hell would someone even make that?” But, I was proven wrong, with roughly 9000 downloads of the software in less than a week, and many positive reviews, even in other countries. Maximum PC even made it their Download of the Week.

So, a huge thanks to everyone who has downloaded and reviewed Instant Elevator Music, and to all of my friends who helped to test it.

–Ben

BTW: I’ve already started work on Instant Elevator Music 2, which will include a few new features and support for more programs. It’ll be out … uh, soon-ish.

The cause of the problem is libxml2 version 2.7.0 and newer, which for some reason changes the way that some bits of text are stripped. Libxml2 is used by PHP to handle XML parsing.

There are a few ways to fix this, wait for the new version of PHP (it’s fixed in 5.2.9), downgrade your copy of libxml2 to a version before 2.7.0, or hack WordPress so it won’t get libxml2 to parse angle brackets. The third option is the easiest.

This patch will fix your XMLRPC issues. The only thing is you will need to update the code to check for libxml version 2.7.3 as well. This can be done by adding || to the end of the lines ending with 2.7.2 and adding a line underneath, "LIBXML_DOTTED_VERSION == ‘2.7.3′ ". Re-upload the new class-ixr.php and rss.php and you’ll be good to go.

–Ben

An interesting fact about the cliTrackPoint: initially it was integrated into some IBM desktop keyboards, before they realised it would be excellent in a notebook. IBM stopped making desktop keyboards with nipTrackPoints, but they later reappeared when UniComp bought out the keyboard manufacturing part of IBM (well, Lexmark at that time, since IBM spun off its peripherals business to Lexmark). They still make the excellent Model M-style clacky keyboards. I’m considering getting one, because they are really nice to type on. Anyway, their EnduraPro model is an old-school clacky keyboard .. PLUS a TrackPoint. It could very well be the best keyboard ever made. If all goes well I could be getting one for Christmas … but I’m still trying to decide whether to go for the Das Keyboard instead. Meh, i’ll figure it out.   

–Ben