Brain Assassin

Long time no post. Yeah. Let’s just say that it’s sum­mer, the weather is fine and I don’t wanna spend more time in front of my PC than nec­es­sary. Besides, I had some busi­ness to take care of. Any­way, a few peo­ple asked me to return to writ­ing more reg­u­larly. I picked a topic that has really vexed me over the last few days: Cal­en­dars and MUAs (Mail User Agents, com­monly referred to as mail clients).

I’m cur­rently using Out­look XP and I wanted to change some­thing. Frankly, Outlook’s IMAP sup­port sucks and it’s really bloated. All I wanted was a well per­form­ing MUA that sup­ports IMAP. After I did a lit­tle research I found that Sylpheed exactly fits my needs. It’s small, it’s fast, it doesn’t need much mem­ory, and it sup­ports IMAP. Unfor­tu­nately, Sylpheed doesn’t sport a cal­en­dar. That can’t be much of a prob­lem, I though. Lit­tle did I know that look­ing for a cal­en­dar appli­ca­tion would eat up a lot of my spare time.

I dis­cov­ered some PIM (Per­sonal Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment) soft­ware that would fit my needs but almost every appli­ca­tion had a major draw­back. First of all, I didn’t want to pay for it. Oth­er­wise, Essen­tialPIM would’ve been my first choice, even though they charge you twice: Once for the Pro appli­ca­tion and once for the plu­gin needed to sync with my Google cal­en­dars. Well, I took a look at the Chan­dler Project but that has a lot more to offer than I want. Next, I tried Mozilla Sun­bird. In com­bi­na­tion with the Provider for Google Cal­en­dar 0.4 exten­sion it did actu­ally work. After some exten­sive test­ing I real­ized two things. First, the exten­sion didn’t always work sat­is­fac­to­rily and Sun­bird has a mem­ory foot­print of about 35 MB.

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You tend to fill your Desk­top with a lot of icons and use is like a clip­board? You like the the sim­plic­ity of drag­ging stuff onto the Desk­top for later pro­cess­ing and it serves as your prime down­load folder? If that’s the case, you might want to check out Bump­Top. Accord­ing to the web­site Bump­Top is “a fresh and engag­ing new way to inter­act with your com­puter desk­top”. I can assure you that it sure is. This piece of soft­ware tries to mimic your real-​​life desk and it does so in quite a nice way. You can push, pull, toss, pile, and sort your doc­u­ments with sim­ple ges­tures. Sound like some real cool stuff. Check it out:

To my mind, how­ever, man­ag­ing the desk­top only is the first step. You see, with an appli­ca­tion like that you don’t wanna restrict your­self to your desk­top. Pro­vided that they can seam­lessly incor­po­rate Bump­Top into your Win­dows there’s one place I’d like to see it: It would be way cool if they man­aged to inte­grate the soft­ware into the Win­dows Explorer. I can almost see it in front of me -- on the left hand you have your usual tree-​​view and on the right hand you got Bump­Top fea­tur­ing a 3D view and all the afore­men­tioned fea­tures. That would be awe­some. I hope they think of some­thing like that.

Yes­ter­day I upgraded my router (Linksys WRT54GS) soft­ware to Hyper­WRT Thi­bor 15c because the last upgrade was made in Q1 2006. Addi­tion­ally, I changed from my ISP’s DNS servers to the OpenDNS ser­vice which proved to be a wise deci­sion. Accord­ing to the web­site, OpenDNS is safer, faster, and smarter. The inte­grated phish­ing pro­tec­tion and the spell check­ing func­tion seem to work quite nicely as pre­lim­i­nary tests indi­cate. Even so, I can live with­out these func­tions so they’re to be con­sid­ered a nice-​​to-​​have. What’s impor­tant though, is the fact that my inter­net con­nec­tion really became faster as far as the resolv­ing of domain names is concerned.

But that’s still not the best thing. No, the good news is that this ser­vice is free! If you’re a heavy user – brows­ing mul­ti­ple sites in dif­fer­ent tabs – you should give it a try. I’m sure it’s worth the few min­utes you need to spare in order to change the IP addresses of your des­ig­nated DNS servers.

Well, my sys­tem isn’t ready yet. I tried and tried and tried again but there are some issues I’d like to share with you. First, there are no dri­vers avail­able for my NIC. It’s a wire­less NIC from Linksys and they sim­ply don’t offer 64-​​bit dri­vers. I tried to go with the chipset dri­vers instead, which are avail­able for 64-​​bit sys­tems. They worked half the way. I could install them and enter my set­tings. It was even pos­si­ble to estab­lish a con­nec­tion with my wire­less router but that’s it. I couldn’t access the router’s set­tings nor any of my other PCs. Not even a ping. Nothing.

Sec­ond, there’s an issue with ATI’s Cat­a­lyst dri­vers. I used 6.10 and they installed fine. They even seem to work fine unless I took a look at the event man­ager. Sud­denly, I knew why boot­ing my rig seemed to last for­ever. “L2c return failed”, the log’s telling me. I didn’t find any infor­ma­tion on it and my sys­tem became respon­sive again. Yeah, I didn’t wanted to roll back to 6.9 so I installed Win­dows XP again. Appar­ently, every­thing is work­ing fine for the moment.

I’ll report back later, if I’m able to.

I’ve been look­ing for com­po­nents the last few days and I was able to come up with quite an inter­est­ing com­pi­la­tion of sin­gle parts. There are some things that need to be said first, though. Just for a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the choices I made.First of all, I’m gonna buy an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, that’s for sure. I just don’t know which one. Depends on avail­abil­ity, sort of. Thus, I’m gonna get an E6600 (Con­roe). At first, I wanted to buy an E6400 (Allen­dale) but this CPU pre­sum­ably won’t be avail­able until the forth quar­ter of this year. Intel’s new proces­sors are fast and they have quite an advan­tage in terms of per­for­mance per Watt. With a TDP (ther­mal design power) of 65 Watts they stay pretty cool, while the new microar­chi­tec­ture as well as the man­u­fac­tur­ing process are cut­ting edge. Even though AMD has cut prices on July 23rd in order to stay com­pet­i­tive there is no rea­son to stay with AMD right now. At least, for me there isn’t. Since Core 2 Duo proces­sors with 4MB of L2 cache should start to show up on August 7th every­thing should go well.

As far as the infra­struc­ture is con­cerned, I’ll prob­a­bly go with the Giga­byte GA-​​965P-​​DS3 because I don’t need all that fancy stuff its big­ger brethren are offer­ing. This main­board seems to offer the best bang for the buck, being based upon Intel’s newest chipset, the P965 Express. Because of lack­ing IDE ports (there’s an extra con­troller on it sport­ing one IDE chan­nel) I had to think my con­fig over. Well, it’s time to get rid of my old Sea­gate Bar­racuda II 40 GB HDD. The rest of my HDDs already sport SATA connectivity.

Even though Con­roe isn’t that bandwith/​latency depen­dant as its pre­de­ces­sors I’ll get bet­ter DDR2-​​800 RAM. I think I’ll buy a Mushkin DIMM Kit (XP2-​​6400 2048 MB CL4-​​4-​​3-​​10). These com­po­nents seem to offer good value. I’ve not decided on the remain­ing parts yet.

For quite a while now I was think­ing on upgrad­ing my PC. My rig’s pretty old by now and I assumed, it would be best to wait until Con­roe gets released. Unfor­tu­nately, my com­puter didn’t think so and said good­bye for­ever the day before yes­ter­day. I can assure you, that really sucks. Now I’m left with my backup rig which is even older. And I don’t wanna buy com­po­nents until Con­roe is out. Intel is bring­ing their engi­neer­ing excel­lence to bear and I wanna be part of it. Ah, wait­ing until July 27th is really hard now …