*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Have you ever felt like the world was moving at the speed of light, yet you were just doing your own thing?  That’s how I’ve felt lately.  It seems everyone has tons of stuff to talk about on their blogs and Twitter.  I decided I was going to force myself to write a blog article this morning to start my Christmas vacation off and after thinking about what I was going to blog about it hit me.  I don’t have anything to blog or twitter about!  Call it a Blog / Twitter Slump if you will.  Then I started writing and things started to flow so much that I broke this post into a series of blog posts entitled “A blog post about nothing”, each one dealing with a different segment.

What’s Happening With the Podcast

If you’ve been following along with the shows of Deep Fried Bytes, we are up to show #22 now.  And if you haven’t been listening, then Santa has you on his naughty list and isn’t going to come see you this year, but I digress.  Technically we should have produced show #24 by now but I have been traveling and getting ready for Christmas so not much time to do final production work although Woody has been staying ahead of me with his edits. 

Honestly, I never thought we’d make it this far with the show but we are starting to get into a groove with it.  We are working hard to tweak our post production work to make things sound as good as we can.  We’ve learned a lot over the past several months and continue to keep trying to get better.

To say having a podcast eats up a tremendous amount of time would be an understatement.  My co-worker beats me up all the time saying, “… you haven’t blogged anything good in awhile…”.  Which I then reply, “Well I blogged about the podcast that took 10 hours of work to create, that isn’t enough?”  Of course he laughs and then says no, it doesn’t count. 

It does take a lot of time to record, edit, finalize, mix down, normalize, compress, and then do final production work on the show.  The only thing that helps us to keep going is the community.  It is great when we are at an event and our listeners give us positive feedback.  Of course negative is good to hear as well since that makes us better, but knowing we are making a difference out there really matters. 

In community news, Deep Fried Bytes is an official sponsor of Codemash 2009.  Both Woody and I will be at Codemash 2009 and are planning on recording a lot of shows.   Anyone that wants to listen to us record a show live is welcome to sit in.  If nothing else it will give you an idea as to how much we have to edit out.

One of the things we watch closely on the podcast is our numbers.  We launched the show late in the 2nd quarter of this year and got off to a good start.  The 3rd quarter of this year broke all of our expectations and the 4th quarter this year has already beat the 3rd quarter.  The numbers for the show have grown each quarter and that is a good thing.  Especially in this economy.  Oh wait, we don’t charge for the show, I forgot

That means we are reaching more people and attracting new listeners.  A big thank you to everyone who has blogged, Twittered, Facebooked and whatever else you have done to help spread the word about the show.  We appreciate your efforts.

That’s pretty much the latest news on the podcast.  As always, keep your tea glasses full, and your axes sharp.  Deep Fried… out. 

Read Part 1
Read Part 3
Read Part 4

Have you ever felt like the world was moving at the speed of light, yet you were just doing your own thing?  That’s how I’ve felt lately.  It seems everyone has tons of stuff to talk about on their blogs and Twitter.  I decided I was going to force myself to write a blog article this morning to start my Christmas vacation off and after thinking about what I was going to blog about it hit me.  I don’t have anything to blog or twitter about!  Call it a Blog / Twitter Slump if you will.  That’s why I entitled this series of blog posts, “A blog post about nothing”.

What’s Happening at Work

At work I’ve been working on some really interesting stuff with WCF that will provide ample blog articles for awhile but I am not ready to open that can of worms just yet.  All I can say is they will be definitive guides on how to work with WCF in certain situations.  At least, I hope they will be. 

Last week I was in Michigan working onsite.  Woody, who hosts Deep Fried Bytes with me, was working in Detroit and I was staying in Livonia which is about 20 minutes away.  Instead of Woody staying with his brother driving 45 minutes back and forth from his client he stayed with me since I had a couch that pulled out as a bed (gotta love the Embassy Suites).  That was good because it gave us a chance to catch up and plot some up and coming shows and other stuff. 

On Wednesday after work we drove over to Ann Arbor to listen to Jason Follas present “Well isn’t that Spatial” at the Ann Arbor Dot Net User Group.  Afterwards I handed a bunch of Deep Fried Bytes stickers out, and a slew of us went to go out and eat.  There was massive geek talk and it was great to see Jay Wren, Bill Wagner, The McWherters (Jeff and Carla), Darrel Hawley, Jay Harris, Dan Hibbits, and a slew of others I can’t recall because it was so long ago.  I did put a twitter face with a name while I was there.  I finally know who IGNU (Len Smith) is now.  I’ve met Len before but he has a cartoon character as a picture on Twitter, thus I had no idea who he really was.

Read Part 2 
Read Part 3
Read Part 4

 Listen To This Episode 

http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-22-the-future-of-net-dotfuscator-with-gabriel-torok/

If you have ever used Visual Studio you may have noticed in the tools menu there is something called Dotfuscator.  This is the tool that allows .Net developers to obfuscate their source code and it has been in Visual Studio since 2003.  In this episode we caught up with Gabriel Torok, President of PreEmptive Solutions, at PDC 2008 and discussed some of the news related to Dotfuscator announced at PDC.

Enjoy.

How To Listen To The Show

1. Directly From The Web Site (or click the link above)

When you visit the site look for this:

Clicking the triangle will launch the Yahoo! media player and automatically start playing the show for you. As long as you leave the browser window open the player will stay open. Clicking off the page WILL stop the player!

2. Subscribe via iTunes and Zune

If you have iTunes or Zune installed on your computer you can subscribe to our show. In iTunes open the Music Store and search for “Deep Fried Bytes”. In the Zune software, go to the MarketPlace select Podcast and search for “Deep Fried Bytes” to subscribe to the show. You can also click either of the two icons below to automatically subscribe to the show if you have iTunes or Zune installed.

3. Subscribe to RSS Feed

To stay current and up to date with the show, subscribe to the site’s RSS Feed. If you don’t know about RSS feeds you can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

If you already have an RSS reader installed and setup, click the feed icon below to grab our news feed.

 Listen To This Episode 

http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-21-talking-performance-with-performance-preacher-rico-mariani/

We have YAPDCT (yet another PDC talk) for everyone.  One of our good friends Jennifer Marsman introduced us to one of the legends at Microsoft, Rico Mariani.  Rico is currently the Chief Architect for Visual Studio.  He’s been involved with performance for years and has some interesting takes on why developers should take performance seriously up front in their design. 

We lobbed Rico an open ended question to kick off the show to get him going and he ran with it from there.  If you write code, no matter the platform, you should listen in.

Enjoy.

How To Listen To The Show

1. Directly From The Web Site (or click the link above)

When you visit the site look for this:

Clicking the triangle will launch the Yahoo! media player and automatically start playing the show for you. As long as you leave the browser window open the player will stay open. Clicking off the page WILL stop the player!

2. Subscribe via iTunes and Zune

If you have iTunes or Zune installed on your computer you can subscribe to our show. In iTunes open the Music Store and search for “Deep Fried Bytes”. In the Zune software, go to the MarketPlace select Podcast and search for “Deep Fried Bytes” to subscribe to the show. You can also click either of the two icons below to automatically subscribe to the show if you have iTunes or Zune installed.

3. Subscribe to RSS Feed

To stay current and up to date with the show, subscribe to the site’s RSS Feed. If you don’t know about RSS feeds you can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

If you already have an RSS reader installed and setup, click the feed icon below to grab our news feed.

Christmas is right around the corner and what better time to start thinking about building a new developer machine.  I’ve been wanting to build a new computer for several months now but I haven’t kept up with the new boards, cases, video cards, etc.  Over the Thanksgiving Holidays I spent a fair amount of time researching and pricing the kind of machine I would build if I built one right now.  Instead of keeping all this hard work to myself I decided to share it.  Who knows, maybe someone out there is looking to upgrade or do a new build.

Here’s what I did.  The first thing I did is throw price completely out the window.  Well, I threw it out up to a point keeping in mind that this is a development machine, not a gaming machine, although they both have the same things in common, SPEED.  I also tried to weigh certain things out, for example, the video card I chose is not the fastest thing on the market, but it is pretty close. 

Case $149 – Coolermaster Cosmos S

I like to start with a case when building a new machine.  The case is important on many fronts.  I’ve owned cases that took 15 minutes to get into and I’ve own ones that took 15 seconds.  The case I settled on is the Coolermaster Cosmos S.  Personally I like front I/O panels and this one is nicely concealed.  It is also pleasing to the eyes and has 7 bays.  This makes it easy to support hard drive coolers and plenty of drives for RAID 0, 1, 5 or 10 configurations.  I had a full tower years ago that had 5 and I had it completely full.  Thus 7 is very welcomed.

Motherboard $299 – EVGA X58 3X SLI

The most important thing in building a new machine is the motherboard.  Researching this machine I spent probably 4-6 hours just on this one part.  I read more reviews and forums than I care to mention. 

For years I have been an Asus motherboard fan.  But I have kept my eyes on EVGA for awhile.  They are renowned for their support and support of over clockers.  The EVGA X58 3X SLI motherboard was just released a few weeks ago and it is the board right now to own.  Some features are it supports the new X58 Intel chipset which supports the new Core I7 Intel processors.  This board also supports 3 SLI video cards as well as 12GB of memory.  On a lot of other boards, the highest you can go is 8GB, but the new chipset expands this with 6 DDR3 slots which support 2GB each.  This means that you will either have 6GB or 12GB in the machine as you buy the memory in a sets of three. 

CPU $1029 – Intel Core I7 965 Extreme Edition

Intel’s new Core i7 965 Extreme Edition is crazy fast and not only that, it can be over clocked to 4.2GHz reliably with the EVGA X58 motherboard.  Just be sure to invest in a water cooled unit.

This processor has 4 cores and is capable of running 8 threads at a frequency of 3.2GHz as well as supports the new bus interface called QuickPath.  Windows will report your machine having 8 processors in it since it can support 8 threads. 

To give you an idea of what this new processor is capable of, the current Core 2 Extreme QX9770′s scored a 3D benchmark of 4,922.  The i7 965 Extreme Edition clocks in at 5,716.  And the other kicker is the price for the QX9770 is $1399.  Enough said.

2 Video Cards @ $259 / each – EVGA GTX 260 Superclocked Edition 896MB

For the video card I settled on the EVGA GTX 260 Superclock Edition.  As I mentioned earlier, it is not the newest board out.  But honestly, the difference in price doesn’t justify purchasing the GTX280.  Of course to support SLI we need two of these, however, for a developer rig, one could get buy with just one, unless you wanted to support more monitors.

The other reason I settled on this card is EVGA has a current special on this card and the X58 3X SLI board.  This is not easy to find and I stumbled upon it.  The deal is you buy the board and 2 GTX 260 cards you get an instant $70 rebate (more if you buy three).  Even comparing prices on NewEgg, this deal still worked out to be cheaper.  Here is the link to the deal:  http://www.evga.com/articles/00443/ 

Power Supply $339 – Thermaltake ToughPower 1,200 Watts – Quad SLI Ready

To support the higher processors, multiple video cards, multiple hard drives, DVD, etc, more power is needed.  A power supply is something one absolutely cannot skip out on.

I settled on the Thermaltake ToughPower 1,200 Watts power supply.  Thermaltake uses industrial grade components and is used by high-end OEM’s.  You really can’t go wrong with this one since it supports Quad SLI, Crossfire and more.

2 Memory @ $249 / each – Patriot Viper 6GB DDR3 1600 (12GB)

To get true performance I wanted to go with 1600 memory and the EVGA X58 3X SLI board supports it.  Patriot Viper is a highly regarded and the price isn’t bad either.  Since the motherboard supports 12GB, that’s 12GB of memory for $500!  Not bad.

DVD $94.99 – LG Blu-ray / HDDVD / DVD GGC-H20LK

Blu-ray drives have come down tremendously.  LG is known for making great products and since I really don’t use this device except to load software I’m not looking to spend a fortune.  This model supports Blu-ray, HD DVD and is a DVD RW. 

Sound $0 – On Motherboard

Conserving money I decided to use the built-in sound on the motherboard.  I would probably opt for the Creative X-FI Elite Pro or something higher end only because I work with audio so much for our podcast.  The onboard audio for the motherboard is perfectly fine.  Thus, $0.

2 HDD @ $229 / each – Western Digital 300GB Raptor 10,000 RPM

The Western Digital Raptor hard drive clocks in at 10,000 RPM.  The slowest part of a computer is the I/O and having 10,000 RPM drives definitely helps.   The only thing I haven’t decided is if I would put these in a RAID 0 configuration or just use them as two separate drives.  As a developer I run a lot of virtual machines and need to have virtual machines run on separate drives.  RAID 0 would be the fastest option but not for VM’s if there is only one drive.    There are still plenty of options for storage and I haven’t completely settled on what I’d do at this point.   All I do know is these drives will be in the mix somehow. 

Total

$3416.97

That includes 2 video cards, 2 300GB drives, 12GB of memory

What’s missing?  Obviously I didn’t list a liquid cooling system, I’m still shopping around for options.  I would also probably include a couple of HDD coolers.  Those drives spinning at 10,000 RPM are going to generate heat, best to keep them cooled.  I like the Vigor iSURF II’s if you are in the market. 

Like I said, I spent a lot of time figuring out what I’d build starting from scratch today.  Hopefully someone else out there will find this useful.  And of course, if you have any recommendations I’d love to hear them.  I don’t know when I’ll start to build this machine, certainly not this year, but at least this gives me an idea now for cost.