Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

It’s 3 a.m. on Sunday the 26th and I’m just wrapping up the final touches to several upgrades and changes to Prymal Rhythm’s Website.  First up on the list is a calendar girl contest.

All of these hot babes are great looking but it is up to you to select your six favorite as they compete for a chance to be in an official Prymal Rhythm calendar.  Putting together the actual contest involved a good amount of PHP work by my programmer/site developer.  We had to come up with a way to help prevent ballot stuffing and figured the best way to do that is to require registration with a username/password and an confirmed email account.  This is where the next upgrade came in:  a new Members Area and a Forum for fans to chat with each other through.

This is a surprise bonus feature the fans have not been made aware of yet.

The last thing we did was basicly give the entire website a face lift by wrapping every page in the theme that was selected for the forum so the entire site matches and looks really cool.  There’s still a little work left to do but I would have to say we’re about 80% done now.  It’s been quite an exercise.

I recently rebuilt my PC with all new hardware (new motherboard, CPU, RAM, eventually a big terabyte hard drive, and most importantly a NICE video card).  As a result I’ve been spending more time gaming on my PC.  I more or less quit gaming about 3 years ago after I started using Ubuntu more instead of Windows.  No, I didn’t really hold back on gaming because of Ubuntu (I still had Windows installed and could easily fire it up if I felt like playing), but I stopped because my hardware really sucked.  Not only that but there weren’t really many games on the market that seemed to be worth a damn, so I didn’t have much incentive to spend money on hardware.  Holding off for a few extra years helped me concentrate more on learning a new operating system in the meantime and saved me a lot of money on new hardware.

In short, I think I’ve put about $300 into all the hardware and it’s more than capable of playing Crysis as well as future games based upon the id Tech 5 engine.  The card I purchased is a nVidia 9600GSO with 756MB of video RAM (yes, the card came with that silly door hanger pictured above).  The amount of RAM alone is 3 times more than any card I’ve ever had in the past so I knew I would likely be very satisfied with its capabilities, and I have been VERY satisfied.  The CPU is an AMD X2 (Dual Core) 5600 (2.9 Ghz per core).  After doing some tests (video conversion in particular) the system appears to be just a hair over 4 times faster than my old setup.  I’d write more… but I got some gaming to do.

Yesterday I opened up the new Prymal Rhythm website at www.prymalrhythm.com.  It’s not completely finished, but we had to get something out the door fast.  There will be additional content, such as a photo gallery added in the future.  But otherwise the site is pretty much done.  Check it out, sign up for their news letter, pre-order an autographed CD.  And if you live in Denver or Ft. Colins, grab some tickets to one of their shows.

I recently gave the lowest bid to the KABVI to build them a custom PC.  It’s the first quad-core system I’ve built, and also sports a very bad ass SLI-ready nVidia motherboard (capable of accepting up to three video cards in SLI mode).  Plus it has that cool piano black case.  Though this wasn’t built to be a gaming system (though it truth, it is capable…I should ask if I can barrow it and play Crysis).  It was built to be fast, familiar and stable, which is why it’s running Windows XP and not Vista.  It’s great to know you can still buy OEM licenses for SP3.  So thumbs up, Microsoft!

The PC was set up to function as a networked server.  I installed wireless adapters in two other PCs and maped shortcuts to a shared folder on the central PC that the other two can move files to.  I also donated a laser printer, a nice HP Laserjet 1200 that was given to me by another client of mine.

Here is the obligatory photo of the guts:

It even has a floppy drive with flash memory card readers built in.  Bling bling!

Anyway, it was a fun build.  First time I actually had to attach the heat sink with a backplate and screw pins.  (Yeah, it’s an Intel system).  I think the power supply might have weighed just as much as the case.  And the 22-inch widescreen LCD they had me plug it into was pretty sweet too.

Just a little over a month ago I wrote a blog announcing my undertaking of a voluntary website redesign for the Topeka Habitat for Humanity website. So if you’re wondering what’s been keeping me busy, it’s been this site. I’ve been working on it rather steadily for the last week getting a lot of productivity done. I was recently given a heads up about the upcoming Home Show at the Kansas Expocentre  so it was clear we needed to get it online very quickly. Fortunately, we are already very near completion, and have set the official live date for TODAY!

The new website, to be located at www.topekabahitat.org, may not be online just yet, but here’s a screen shot for you to look at and salivate over until the real thing is put online sometime later today.

The template design comes courtesy of NTT designs, a site referenced to me at ubuntuforums.org.

The photo gallery is still a work in progress and is not online yet but will be soon. We plan to have an interactive map (hopefully I’ll be able to get the Google Maps API under my belt to achieve this) and use it as an index of previous and current builds, linking to a home page of sorts for individual houses. Again, a work in progress, we’re kickin ideas around.

Ok… now back to my book about Python…