Last week, I rebuilt my computer again (making this the third machine I’ve run on since this site opened up). Here’s the list of what I upgraded in the system:

ABit IP35 Pro Motherboard

A great motherboard with passive coolers on the MCH, ICH, and PWM component areas. A very handy digital readout is available on the board to troubleshoot boot-up issues (no more beep codes), and the overall layout is excellent. However, I have a few minor problems with the board. The SATA connectors are angled at 90 degrees, making it very difficult to attach the cables from my drives. I’m currently using SATA ports 5 and 6, because ports 1 through 4 are physically inaccessible. Also, my wireless network card wasn’t happy with the board, and I had to switch back to my old one, which has lousy reception. I’m going to fix this problem in a novel way; stay tuned for further details.

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale CPU @ 3.0 GHz

After much thought, I decided to go back to an Intel CPU (after using an AMD X2 4400+ for a while). The Intel chips are just faster right now, and they use less power, allowing them to run a little cooler. I had a difficult time getting the stock heat sink to snap into the mounting holes on the motherboard, causing the motherboard to bend around the CPU socket (which concerns me). I’ll probably spring for an after-market cooler at some point to remedy this situation.

2 GB of Geil DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) SDRAM

I’ve never used the Geil brand of memory before, but Anandtech recommended it on their last holiday buying guide, so I picked some up. The chips run at a default 5-5-5-15 timing, but they support 4-4-4-12. I made one attempt at overclocking the chips, but Windows wouldn’t boot, so I reverted back to the defaults. Changes in the default memory voltage is probably warranted here, which is something I failed to do on my first try. The copper-orange heat spreaders are very sexy.

BFG Tech GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) 512 MB

The 8800 GTS-512 line of graphics cards is based on the new nVidia G92 chipset (using a 65nm die). It’s notably faster than the 8800 GT, which is the card I had my eye on for a long time. The 8800 GTS has a larger cooler that’s not as loud, and it’s a beast of a graphics card. This is the first card I’ve had that takes up two slots on the motherboard, leaving me with only 2 out of the 3 available PCI slots. It runs a little warm (70 degrees Celsius at load), but I’m willing to live with that for now.

Corsair CMPSU-620HX 620W Power Supply

I was concerned that my old 500 W power supply wouldn’t have the juice required for this new build, so I bought this highly recommended Corsair model. It’s modular, which allows me to use as few cables as I need, and it’s incredibly quiet.

2 Seagate Barracuda SATA 250 GB Hard Drives

These Seagate drives are a little faster than my old ones, they’re 90 GB larger, and they have double the cache (16 MB).

I have been test driving this new setup with a few games. Call of Duty 4 looks amazing in high resolution with all the eye candy turned on, and it has elevated my opinion of the game. The Crysis demo ran great at 1280 x 1024 at the ‘High’ graphics setting, and I may be able to push it a little farther (I’ve ordered the full game, by the way; I’m very excited). Team Fortress 2 is thrilling at 1600 x 1200, and even Half-Life 2, which will be four years old later this year, looks great running at 1600 x 1200 with 4x FSAA. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 should be equally as nice.

The last few Firefox 3 nightly builds have changed the way SSL URI’s are displayed to the user. In Firefox 2, accessing a secure site results in a yellow background for the address bar (which I think is a particularly elegant solution). For reasons I don’t fully understand, Mozilla is getting rid of this implementation. In new Firefox 3 builds, the background of the ‘favicon’ will change depending on the security of the site. A blue background indicates an SSL secured site, while a green background indicates an EV SSL secured site. Moving the color to the favicon, in my opinion, makes things a little harder to understand. A heated debate about this inevitably appeared in the corresponding bug, and there will likely be more confusion over this in the future, as more public users begin to explore the Firefox 3 world. I fully expect an extension to ‘fix’ this feature, so all may not be lost. This is a very strange decision on Mozilla’s part, and it should be interesting to see what the end result is.

Maybe I missed the memo, but I just don’t understand everybody’s sudden infatuation with Twitter. It seems as if everywhere I look, people are ‘tweeting’ about the stupid, mundane, and sometimes horrifying events in their daily lives. Does anyone here use Twitter? And if you do, why?

I am now an official WordPress contributor! While converting Born Geek to WordPress, I noted that the Movable Type importer did not obey the WordPress database case constraints. Movable Type posts export themselves as “Published” while WordPress expects the value to be lower case (“published”). After finding and verifying this bug, I wrote it up and submitted a simple patch, which was then accepted. The fix will be included in 2.5.1!

There’s a great article over at ShackNews offering a preview of the new Team Fortress 2 updates coming in the next week or two. In addition to discussing the new Goldrush game type, they also take a look at the brand new unlockable weapons for the Medic class. Some of the new weapons really sound exciting, and I’m really looking forward to this update.

I have squashed a few ugly CSS bugs here at this site:

• Internet Explorer 7 should no longer show a horizontal scroll bar on every page
• The italicized text in the header should no longer be clipped on the right
• Font sizing rules in the comment form have been improved

I am aware of several serious IE-specific bugs over at Born Geek, and I’ll work to fix those ASAP.

I have finished migrating Born Geek to WordPress 2.5. Read more about it over at the corresponding news post.

This weekend, I hope to migrate Born Geek to WordPress 2.5. I’ve gotten tired of having to deal with the quirks of Movable Type, and I think WordPress has evolved enough to support what I want it to do. Performance issues should be interesting to watch, though I intend on employing the handy WP-Cache plugin to help out. Hopefully the transition will be a smooth one, but expect some down time at one point or another. All my Firefox extensions, along with the update manifest, will remain up so that updates remain available.

I ran across a story at BBC News (via Digg) that is just plain depressing. It seems that Knut the polar bear killed 10 live carp in front of zoo visitors. The seemingly natural act has caused some controversy, with critics saying that the fish shouldn’t have been there in the first place. German media claims that the fish were there to clean up algae, and they quickly point out that we are talking about a polar bear, the most carnivorous bear species in the world.

Won’t someone think of the children?!?

Last night, I spent several frustrating hours trying to untangle a problem with the update manifest for my Firefox extensions. After releasing my updated extensions, I noted that while CoLT automatically updated without any problems, Googlebar Lite did not. I double-checked, triple-checked, and even quadruple-checked everything I was doing. Everything I had done for CoLT was exactly what I was doing for Googlebar Lite. But the automatic update consistently failed.

As past experiences have taught me, simply walking away from the problem is occasionally all that is needed. Taking a mental break is a surprisingly effective way of going directly to a problem’s solution. And this is exactly what happened last night.

Being well past my usual bed time, and having made no progress towards a solution, I decided to call it a night, and so headed to the bathroom to take a shower and brush my teeth. As I stepped into the shower, the solution instantly occurred to me! I was incorrectly using a wild card in the minVersion value in my installer manifests (2.0.0.* instead of 2.0). Immediately after getting out of the shower, I rushed to test the solution. Lo and behold, it worked.

Sometimes, all it takes is walking away.