If you asked me in the past what drove progress in PC hardware I would have said ‘Games’ and I would have been right. Some time back with the Pentium 2 we crossed the line for the amount of power that a simple PC needs. Everything else is for games. The AGP bus (1x, 2x, 4x & 8x), 200+ million transistor graphics cards, 3D surround audio cards, and 3+ GHz processors with 1MB L2 caches all for the Internet? No silly for Games.

In rescent times users have started to do things with their computers and make demands of their equipment that have actually started to drive hardware design in new directions.

• Rip, Mix, Burn, Encode, Compress, Backup, Share(legally of course)
  Suddenly people started to collect huge amounts of large data files. Audio and Video files. They started editing movies at home, encoding their albums, compressing their DVD’s. Compression uses raw CPU power and now you have another reason to want a fast CPU. This has also caused a quiet revolution in storage. Most PC’s now have more than one hard drive. Moving all this sats around between partitions and disks takes bandwidth and fast spinning drives. So now we have SATA, 8MB caches on the drives, 10,000rpm Raptor drives from Western Digital, 300+GB drives from several vendors. No one has yet told us how we are supposed to backup or protect a 300GB hard drive full of family video and music. I think a quick buck could be made on solving that problem next.
• When the Internet Attacks
  Someone at AMD took notice of all these systems being compromised by buffer overflow attackes. The NX or No eXecute bit was created and now Intel, Via and Microsoft are getting in on the action. No more can a buffer overflow cause arbitrary code execution. NX capability is a must for your next computer, perhaps more than x86 64.
• Cool and Quiet Computing
  Cool computers are easier to keep quiet, they require less cooling aparatus and slower spinning fans. Suddenly everyone has become a quiet PC nut. The computer is moving into the living room as the HTPC and it cant make any more noise than the AV hardware the masses are used to. 100 watt heat output isnt going to let this happen, even with water cooling. Both Via and Intel are maving to build ultra low heat/low power chips that can be used in an HTPC or a laptop. For high end chips the tak is now about dual core CPU’s that feature twice the transistors at 1/2 the speed for almost equal performance. Of course all this messing with the CPU’s innards has caused everything you ever understood about Megahertz to become myth and ledgend from a time long past. Intel and AMD will both be using model numbers on their chips from now on. Via is getting away with quoting their CPU power in watts of heat disapated.

These are interesting times indeed.

I been taking it easy this week reflecting on how things are going with mindshare. One thing that I regret is not blogging more often. the main reason I don’t is that the process is too complicated. Using the web UI for Moveable Type is painful, but that’s what I’ve been doing so far. Write in Word, post from the browser. Edits need to go back into word to be spell checked. To do pictures id need to open an FTP tool as well.

So I went looking for a tool to help me do all of this. A posting, spell checking, image uploading, XHTML writing, honest to goodness program. Turns out there isn’t anything that entirely fits the bill. You can have your pick of the following:

• BlogJet – This is a cool tool. Setup was easy to follow. Nice clean interface, uploads pictures. Its still in beta and doesn’t have a spell checker yet. I love it for its simplicity, here its about the post, not about the tool. You write straight into a preview pane, no HTML if you dont want to. I think with a spell checker it could easily become my favorite.
• MTClient – Much more powerful that BlogJet with a proper in line spell checker. The bad part is there is no preview, so its back to writing HTML tags by hand.

I think ill use a mix of the two. BlogJet for posting and MTClient for proofing and editing. And ill try to post more often, both to waves and to mindshare.

Wow… Its been a while since I updated here. Iv been busy with school, life,
family, friends, love and such. The start of this semester was something of a
rollercoaster but that’s all behind me now. Speaking of family, shouts out to my
brother Darren, its his birthday today!

I promised Sean a full review of my Nokia 3650. The short version is "I like
it!". Not much bad to say about the phone, the battery last all of 2-3 days for
me even with the Bluetooth receiver off. Its mad to play games on it in class.
I’m only slightly missing the MP3 player in some of the other Nokia models. The
PC Sync stuff is quirky but it gets the job done.

Work on the Thesis is going slower than I had planned. It turns out that
distributed synchronization without a server of any sort is a very difficult
problem with no perfect solution. I think that I have something worked out now
that everyone will like but its going to take a while to get it up and running.

Tonight is Halloween of course and we are throwing the usual party at the
usual place ;-). This year we had to give out tickets to keep the size of the
thing down. No admittance without a costume, no exceptions!

I solved the creeping/drifting text problem with the menus under IE6. I had to recode my templates a bit but was able to maintain the visual effect I wanted. The gory details of the bug and a demonstration can be seen here. Much appreciation and thanks to Big John for maintaining “Position Is Everything” where that bug page is hosted.

Menus should now display correctly in IE 6 which is the only browser to manifest this bug.

Update: the bug also manifested itself in a more subtle fashion in the body of entries, this is also fixed now.