ben lowery

After some trials and tribulations with the mobo I ordered to get RAID 1 working @ home, I finally broke down and picked up a new motherboard and processor. After doing some reading and price comparisons, I decided on the MSI K8N Platinum Pro with an Athlon64 3200+ processor. All my other system components stayed the same, as I didn’t feel like changing out everything, and this whole journey has been costly enough already.

Initial impressions of the combo: much quicker than the Athlon 2500+ I used to have, especially for CPU intensive things, like encoding audio. I don’t play a ton of games, but the ones I do play seem to have a bit more pep. The main thing is that this thing has been quite stable, unlike the Asus A7V600 I was using. That board and the chipset it uses have some known issues that were causing my system to freeze up every few hours, leading to quite a bit of frustration. Unfortunatley, I’m out of the RMA period for the ASUS board, and the hassle of returning it outweighs the money I’d save by getting it replaced, so for the moment I’m stuck with it.

At least it was cheap.

I just stumbled upon a cool utility that lets you create a TrueType font from your own handwriting, the result of a contest over at PCMag. Tim Sneath released a font he created using the utility, so you it looks like it works quite well. Now I just need to borrow a tablet pc for a little while… Or maybe I could pull this off with my Wacom tablet at home?

I just found myself creating a new EventArgs to go with a custom event handler in C# and I remembered the standard advice of “always derive your event args classes from System.EventArgs”. The thing is, I have no idea why you would want to do this. I don’t see any value in dealing with things in terms of the base class, and it doesn’t provide any features, so why bother?

Via Lambda the Ultimate, I found a great article on how rich client-side web apps are evolving and where things like OddPost and GMail have come from, and a bit of a look at where things are headed.  This is a space that has always fascinated me; maybe I’ll get back into in the near future.  I always liked the idea of a client that did a smart job of fetching and caching data, reducing roundtrips to the server.  It just seemed like the right way to go, but it was fraught with perils.

After a great dinner at Chiboust, Mandy and I headed down to the waterfront to enjoy the nice summer night.