My new toys finally arrived on Friday afternoon, after almost 2 weeks of Dabs waiting for stock. It was worth the wait though.

I left work on Friday, resisting the urge to join the folks that were heading to the pub, and headed home to open the presents that I'd bought myself. I was pleased to see, on opening the box, that everything was there - I might have had a fit if I'd had to send something back because it was wrong (unless it was better than I'd ordered, obviously...). I gutted my machine, in preparation for its new innards. The old components will go in the machine under my desk when I can be bothered. Some fiddling, and a very secure heatsink later, I applied power. Obviously, it worked first time, and Linux even booted without complaint. The only problem that I encountered - which wasn't my fault - was that the lead for the HD light on my case is wired backwards. This was fixed fairly easily, albeit with a bit of fiddling.

Naturally, one of the first things that I did was to run a benchmarking tool. I chose 3DMark2003, mainly because the most CPU intensive thing that I do regualrly is playing games. I wasn't expecting great things, since I still have a fairly crap video card. There were no real surprises as far as 3D performance went - not a great deal faster than before. What did amuse me was that on the CPU test - where 3DMark renders the same scenes in software mode - I was getting frame rates equivalent and occasionally better than the hardware accelerated tests. It seems likely that the software rendered scenes have less detail than the hardware ones, but it's amusing anyway. Out of curiosity, I asked Sam to run the same tests on his machine. Unsurprisingly, his results kicked my arse as far as hardware mode went (his card was top of the range when he bought it), but any kicking went the opposite way in software mode. Yey! This isn't conclusive proof though, as it's possible that he was running in a higher display mode than me. I don't feel like verifying it though :)

I've been fighting with other peoples' code at work. We bought in e-Commerce software for a site that one of our clients is launching, and it's lacking in some fairly important areas. Being a pessimist, I reckon that it's deliberate, to persuade you to pay them for custom development. Sod that. It took me the best part of Friday, and much of Monday, but I managed to find the appropriate place to insert the 8-10 lines of code required to allow adding of extra information fields to product categories. The system already supported adding of fields to individual products, and its feature to allow you to add them to categories did nothing more than iterate through each product, and add an extra field to it. This meant that any new products in a category didn't get the extra fields. Useless. The simplicity of the change (when you can actually find the right bit of code through all the decoy methods) makes me believe even more that they're at it. No matter - it's done now. I spent this afternoon trying to track down an email problem on the site - only to fix it, and have the previously working part stop working. Arg.

Still, this stupid site will be out of the way soon, and I can concentrate on finishing my plasma screen app.

Next on my evil masterplan: buy a new video card. This one should do...

Bwhahahahahahahahahaaaaaa!

I've just finished my fifth cup of coffee today, and it's almost time to get back to coding..

The past few weeks have been nondescript, nothing really happened, but it wasn't really dull either. Work-wise, things are going well. I've got my own project to work on (mine! all mine!), which I'm aiming to have finished and polished up for the end of the week. I started hacking around with it a few weeks ago, but other distractions meant that I'm only just back into it again this week. The hard bit is already done, which involved some hacking with Managed DirectX to get decent 2D graphics performance. I'm currently building a GUI that has to be an exact clone of a Macromedia Director movie. I'm not even going to consider DirectX for this one, GDI is good enough. When I've got it working - which should really be by the end of the day - I'll start refactoring the hacked together mess that passes for my display application, and tie the two together. When that's all done, we'll deploy my app in place of the current Director application. This is the slightly scary bit, as the current system (up until Sunday afternoon) had a one month uptime, where there were no support callouts. While in theory my app should be more robust, such things can never be taken for granted.

Things have been even less interesting outside work - staying in to watch films, going home early on Friday night, getting to bed at a reasonable time to be up for work in the morning. Yawn.

I ordered some new toys at the end of last month, which are still to arrive. This is to be a much needed upgrade to my desktop at home, which is starting to strain when I'm playing games. Doom 3 just isn't playable at the moment, and Half Life 2 gets a bit choppy if there's anything too spectacular happening. I decided to go 64 bit, as the Athlon 64 has been around for a while now, and is actually affordable now. I'll be getting an Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB of DDR400 RAM, an MSI K8T Neo2 Pro motherboard, and a 120GB Maxtor HD for good measure. I went for socket 939, rather than 754 - which means I'll be able to upgrade to a dual core Athlon 64 if and when they appear. Not that the cost of a new motherboard is going to come close to the price that dual core chips will be going for when they appear. Also worth mentioning is that I chose a motherboard with an AGP slot, rather than PCI-Express. Going the PCI-Express route would mean that I had to buy a new graphics card at the same time, and really, AGP 8x is fast enough for me for the forseeable future.

Anyway, back to work..

Woo. This'll be my first post since my birthday. Nothing's really been happening, except for the party on Friday 28th. Much Jack was consumed, and all concerned appeared to have a good time.

I'm settling into work, getting my hands dirty with some managed DirectX using C#. There's plenty to do, and I can always go off and do some PHP, C, C++, or Java for a while if I get pissed off with DirectX. Life is good, and I get to choose what I code in. I also have a really geeky desk - two 20" Sony TFT monitors, a cool Sony VAIO desktop, and an evil genius style black chair. I may post pictures at some point..

I have also aquired a new toy - an O2 XDA, which is basically just a PDA with some phone bits added in. It's a bit of a silly size to use as a phone, and definately too fragile to go anywhere near the pub, so I'm just using it for games right now. I've found a fun bubble game, and I've installed SCUMMVM.

Mmm toys.

It's a bit depressing that I'm sitting up at quarter past 11 at night, and thinking that I should go to bed soon. Dear me.