So I have been looking for new desktop computer. I like to build desktops myself just because of the experience, but right now there is a hardware madness going on! Oh you have to believe me… 🙂 Until a few days ago I had only thought I knew about the current state of processors and hardware in general, but, was I wrong!! Currently there are at leaset a gazillion different processors and amazingly there are only two companies that are making these processors. Just take a look at this article by Tom’s Hardware that discusses mainly the intel processors, the fact that there are a dozen pages talking about the processor models is just plain nuts! Now what makes the choice even more tough is that a lot of these options are way too close for going with one or the other. On Intel’s side the new dual core processors are starting only $30 more than the current Pentium 4 600’s.

Now its not just the processors that are like this. On the graphics side you have SLI, PCI-Express, AGP, some of which play hand-in-hand but can also work as a standalone so you have to watch out for those. Last night I found two video cards both eVGA 6600LE, one 256MB and the other 128MB for the same $89 price. After some detailed browsing of the specs I found out that the 128MB version has a faster memory (500MHz vs 400MHz). Which one is better, who knows? Just means more research.

On the storage side you have ATA, Ultra ATA, SATA-I (Serial ATA), SATA-I with NCQ (Native Command Queuing), SATA-II 3.0Gb/s… So you have to consider not only the size but also the rotation speed, buffer, interface and any other features (like NCQ). Again the the thing that makes this tough is that a lot of these have very close pricing. For instance I found a Seagate 120GB SATA-I drive with NCQ for $89 and for $6 more ($95) I can get a Western Digital 200GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s drive; so now I have to decide whether the NCQ is really something.

Same thing with the rest of the components: motherboard (options, overclocking features, etc.), RAM (CAS Latency, Timing, speed, DRR vs DDR2), Power supply (watage, noise level-which is important to me)… Man o man, what I am going to do 😀

Someone in #rubyonrails today asked about filtering specific tags with the RedCloth textile library and I was surprised to find out that the library does not have anything by default. Looking for a little while I found this article that tries to solve this issue, take a look if you are interested.

I just installed Ruby on Rails on a server at home, but after running the WEBrick server I got the following error:

MissingSourceFile in <controller not set>#<action not set>

After looking around for a few minutes I found out that this was caused by how I was running WEBrick. Basically you have to run it from the main application directory and not the script directory. So you should always run "script/server" instead of "./server" inside of the script directory.

Today I had to deal with an issue involving errors for COM components. So I started looking around for tools that would help me with this task. After a few minutes I found COM Explorer 2.0 by 4Developers. The tool looks very nice and does most of what you would like it to do. One thing that this program is lacking is search, and I had to look for a DLL server whose name I wasn’t exactly sure of. I ended up finding a hack to accomplish this, basically I generated an HTML report with all the DLL servers and then searched that HTML report in Internet Explorer. Other than that the pricing for one developer seems a little expensive but the site- and corporation-wide pricing sound like very good deals.

You can download the beta here.

Last few days I have been working on a GUI for the rfstool which allows you to browse ReiserFS filesystems on Microsoft Windows. The only thing is that after I started working on the project I found out that there were already two GUIs for it! So I went and checked out the more friendly looking one and realized that the GUI would freeze up as rfstool was copying large files in the background. This made me think that this would be a good time to learn some multithreading in Windows Forms and make my version large-file-friendly :). Anyways now you can download the first beta of the application. In addition to multithreading I added irregularly shaped "About" form just for fun 😀

In addition to a few things I still to need add the credits for the icons. Below a screenshot of the main form and I will posting the source once I clean it up a little and add some more comments 🙂

COULD NOT FIND ATTACHMENT AT POSITION ([inline:1], ‘1’)
Screenshot of the main form

Is it just me or does everyone agree that creating tasks in Exchange 2003 is much harder than it should be? Today I and colleague spent quite some time trying to create a task, it kept giving us a 403 Forbidden. After searching around for quite some time we found out this was because we were specifying the DAV:displayname property. So after removing that we were able to create a blank item (it was E-mail item, not a task item) in a user’s task folder. Now on to the next step, assigning all the properties. We were able to specify the type by setting the outlookclass to IPM.Task and still haven’t figured out the how to assign the individual properties.

I think Microsoft really needs to add some serious documentation for Exchange 2003 and WebDAV. Until then if I get some time I will try to put a tutorial about Exchange and WebDAV once we are done with the project.

A few days ago while looking around for the shorcuts to the immediate window I found out that Visual Studio .Net 2003 supports incremental searches! CTRL+I and CTLR+SHIFT+I triggers the incremental search. So far I have found it to be very useful when jumping around the code (I am used to the ‘/’ searching in VIM and Firefox) and thought I would bring it up.

For those of you who do not what incremental search is… incremental search searches for words as you type… so pressing CTRL+I and then ‘w’ will find the first occurrence of ‘a’ after the cursor, then ‘h’ will find the first occurrence of ‘wh’, then ‘i’ will find ‘whi’, and so on. The good thing about this mode is that you don’t use the find dialog box, so its becomes very handy.

Now go and start searching! 🙂