Actually, for the most part I have gotten the parts. The only thing I’m waiting on now is the CPU (together with a tube of Arctic Silver 5 compound) and the wifi card. Hopefully they’ll come soon, because not having the CPU is a bit of a show-stopper. However, the case…
Ahh, the case. The Antec Fusion Remote. A lovely case, it seems. The construction feels fantastic, nice and sturdy, and the front looks wonderful. But, man! The thing is a beast! I swear that it’s almost as big as my desktop PC. The unit we have to put the HTPC on is just about big deep enough – so long as we don’t want any cables at all attached to the back! It’s either that (and what’s the point of having the HTPC if we can’t hook it up to anything?) or have the case hover over the edge of the unit, which’d look sloppy. No, the case, albeit probably very nice, is going back. But what to do? Every case I look at and like is about the same depth. All the really slim cases would also require me sending back my PSU, probably the wifi card as well, and possibly wouldn’t accommodate the graphics card. Thankfully I came across the Silverstone GD02 which will allow for a standard ATX PSU, a graphics card up to 11.5″ in length and still looks quite nice to boot. Best of all, it’s about 8cm shorter in depth than the Fusion Remote! I’m hoping that I didn’t need to go for the GD05 which is a further 4cm shorter than even the GD02, because I like the ability to have an external 3.5″ device on the case (for adding a memory card reader or similar further on down the line).
Now, the GD02 case doesn’t have a few things that the Fusion does. It doesn’t have a display on the front. To be honest, I’m coming around to the idea of that actually being a really good thing. Do I really want to have a really bright (from what I’ve read) display on the front of the case while watching a movie? No, I think that’d be distracting. It also doesn’t have a remote. Well, the diNovo keyboard with integrated touchpad should do the trick there. And it doesn’t have a volume control on the front of the case. OK, that’s only an added bonus and nothing I’d miss anyway.
So the new case was ordered yesterday from Scan (along with a 1.5TB hard drive), and bless ‘em, it’s already been dispatched and I should have it today! Whoever I ordered the CPU from needs to get in gear because I want to get buildin’! 
A while ago my wife asked me if it were possible to remove all the DVDs we had on a couple shelves and put them in the loft and ’somehow’ put them on to the computer so we could watch the movies… naturally my mind went straight to building or buying a media centre/HTPC. After looking around I found some nice small systems, such as the systems by Acer or Zotac. However, they either didn’t come with a blu-ray player, or didn’t have room in the case to add to in the future (such as adding a tv tuner card or similar). So after a long while, I finally decided I may as well just build the darned thing! (OK, so it wasn’t much of a push that I needed to buy lots of computer components and build a new PC…)
This is what we went and ordered this past weekend:
- Antex Fusion Remote case
probably a little bigger than I wanted, but lots of people seemed to like it
- AMD Phenom II X4 955 CPU
may as well have something that can encode reasonably well!
- Asus Micro-ATX M4a785 HTPC mobo
- LG Blu-ray reader/DVD multi-format burner
- 2GB Crucial RAM
- ATI HD 5450 graphics card
even though mobo has the 4200 line built-in, I think it’ll be better to use a dedicated card
- Logitech diNovo Mini keyboard
Got a few other things as well, such as a wifi card, bluetooth dongle, etc. The only thing I don’t currently have is a hard drive. I’m thinking of a small, fast drive for the program partition and a couple large drives in RAID 1… Actually, is that possible? Can I have one drive in the computer not in raid and two others in raid? Or is it a case of they all need to be in some format of raid or not at all? Guess I’ll soon find out!
Very excited about all of this… Some parts have already been allocated and invoiced, so hopefully have everything within the next 10 or so days.
Published on
March 20, 2010 in
General.
Welcoming to the world my lovely little daughter, Rozalynd. Born on the 17th March and weighing in at 6lb 2oz. Apparently, I didn’t learn my lesson the first time and thought more kids and less time to code would be a good thing…
You see QrCodes popping up every now and again on sites, in publications and the like. I think they can be a very handy way for people with cameras on their phones to get a url or other content on to their phone very easily. (I’m thinking more about those people without iPhones or full keyboards, of course!)
If you’ve never seen a QrCode before, it looks something like this:
Now how cool would it be to be able to generate that automatically for each page on your site and allow people to be able bookmark that site on their phone? Well, I think it’d be pretty cool! So I came up with a very simple ZF view helper to do it for me.
Continue reading ‘QrCode view helper’
Published on
February 1, 2010 in
General.
Today’s date has a lovely palindromic quality to it:
01022010
Cool.
If you’re not sure about Zend_Form’s decorators, what they are or how to use them, then Matthew Weier O’Phinney has the webinar for you:
http://www.zend.com/webinar/Framework/webinar-leveraging-zend_form-decorators-20091216.flv
It’s a great introduction to decorators, how to implement them and how to do slightly more complex things with them. Well worth a watch!
Just ran a bit of SQL on Oracle and this was the oh-so helpful error message I got back:
Warning: ociexecute() [function.ociexecute]: OCIStmtExecute: ORA-00932: inconsistent datatypes: expected BINARY got BINARY
So you’re expecting a binary value and what you got was a binary value, but that’s inconsistent with the binary value you were expecting to be binary?!
So I’ve finally finished the book! OK, I finished it a couple weeks ago but haven’t had a chance to post up a review yet. Of course, I had every intention of finishing it a lot earlier considering I was flying for nine hours to the States and then another few hours on to Mexico – and the journey back again! – but that really was just wishful considering I was travelling with my two year old son. Oh well!
On with the book review…
The book, as the title makes it plainly obvious, is about developing your team in relation to working with PHP. It’s aimed at, well, pretty much anyone who has an interest in developing or working in a team, be it managers who need to set up and manage teams or developers working within a team who want to improve their work flow and procedures, or anyone in between. It does this by giving an overview on several subjects, but doesn’t go as far as to tell you that you must do x, y or z. This is understandable, though, as every team is different and the book acknowledges this.
Continue reading ‘PHP Team Development book review’
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