First up is Intel’s VIIV platform. I caught a demo of box hooked up to a Haier plasma display. It’s basically a Windows Media Center PC paired with a couple of Intel hardware - motherboard, CPU and LAN controller - with MCE compliant wireless keyboard and mouse. Runs an Intel P4 Dual-Core processor. Didn’t bother to find out the memory configuration though, these kind of setups is out of my graps for now ;). I also doubt that I’ll buy such a box when I can afford such a setup. It’s much more satisfying to build it from scratch, not to mention get cheaper parts, better performance and flexibility.

Also caught a glimpse of Sony VAIO Micro PC running Windows XP. A bunch of booth girls were demoing the unit. Again, it’s not something I would categorize as must-have because I’m not so sure I want Windows running on such a device. A portable computer must have excellent battery life. To run Windows, you need fast hardware which means poor battery life. So what’s the point? Another problem is the tiny display, the fonts and graphical items looks tiny on the 800×600 display. Better try next time, Sony.

An Asus booth was running demos of 3D Mark 2006 of powerful Radeon cards. Never having owned any SM3 capable card, I never bothered installing 3D Mark 2006. Even 3D Mark 2005 refused to run completely on my aging Radeon 9700. While waiting for the demos to load (there was a series of demos actually), I snapped some pics of the hardware used, and of course their “wall of glory” depicting their latest range of motherboards and graphic cards.

And finally, I was surprised to see a couple of a whole slew of vendors selling Core 2 Duo processor systems. This means that the CPU is already available, and it’s just been announced for the past, what, 3 weeks? Intel is definitely getting it right this time. And I’m Core 2 Duo envy. The system doesn’t come cheap though, at least a couple of hundred ringgit more expensive than their AMD counterpart. But this time around, I know that the extra dough buys extra performance. AMD is the underdog again. Core 2 Duo is the processor to own for 2006!
  

Hey, did you know that there’s a Malaysian Open Source initiative called MyOSS? And they have a blog too. Well, now you know. Go take a peek. I met the friendly folks at PC Fair recently, sitting among a bunch of penguins (one really big one). I chatted for about 5 minutes to which a guy asked me about what distro I use (Ubuntu, of course!) and showed me a brief demo of XGL running on openSUSE. Pretty cool effects running on a plain old computer (so the guy claims). I wonder if XGL will run on multi-mon setups? I’m a fan of multi displays and if XGL doesn’t play well in that config, it’ll be a deal-breaker for me.

That’s the name of a utility (Windows only) that copies the path of any files selected with either a back or forward slash. For the regular Joe that uses his computer for WWW and email, this might not seem very useful but for software developers, this could indeed. I can remember more than a dozen times (usually during prototyping since using absolute file path is a bad idea anyway) when I needed the file path for use in coding. For Java developers, this also helps in auto-converting the backslash to a forward slash which is a good practice to ensure whatever non-absolute file path used doesn’t break when run in a *nix OS.

Essential Developer Utilities: ClipPath

That’s what Buildix is claiming to be. Buildix is a Linux distro (based on Knoppix) that bundles a few piece of software that enables Agile development. It includes Subversion, CruiseControl and Trac (wiki, bug tracker, project management). I’ve never used any of those but SVN is something I’m pretty familiar with since I’m currently using CVS. I can certainly see value in using Buildix. Too many times have I heard the excuse of searching for the proper software tools to do Agile development.

Come to think of it, I think using Buildix can benefit almost all developers, not just Agile folks. I know that source control and bug tracking software is a must, I advocated their usage in my previous company. A wiki for running projects is certainly nice to have to bring any newbies into the fold quickly. Cruise control (with unit testing) can do wonders for quality and bring up integration speed.

Take note if you need to quickly setup a development environment for a software development team.

Tweak3D.net has a Windows XP 15 Minute Tune-Up that should benefit the majority of Windows users. I’m planing to look into CCleaner myself, but just for fun. Everything else the guide recommends is actually a regular practice for me:

1. Turn off useless services - check!
2. Start only essential programs (Real Player, Quicktime, MS Office and Adobe PDF fast start are NOT essential programs) check!
3. Rid the system of spyware, or better still, prevent them from installing in the first place - check!

Having said that, I know that I run a lot of programs in the background, some of them are necessary evil. Background services for iTunes and Nokia PC Suite are the worst offenders. Nokia PC Suite not only runs 2 or 3 processes in the background but it also runs my IVT Bluesoleil software for me. And don’t think it’s easy to disable them too, killing them via the task manager won’t do. No, I’ll have to dig into the Services list and end them there for them to stay off. The worst part is that if I run Nokia PC Suite, every single background program runs again. This behaviour could be a bug though, the latest version of Nokia PC Suite seems to stay disabled if I kill it via the task manager.

Other resource hogs in my system include antivirus and firewall software. Like I said, necessary evil. It’s either I run these two, or have a dozen malware processes wreak havoc.