A few weeks ago I created a data feed in the same vein as Paul Kedrosky’s (now defunct) BubbleWire. The Coming Soon feed lists “interesting” domain names that will soon expire. For my purposes, “interesting” means that the domain name is a common english word. Here’s the FeedBurner link:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/gurge/coming_soon

For the technically proficient among you, here’s how Coming Soon is generated:

1. Each night a Ruby script fires up on my linux box.
2. The script fetches the list of expiring domains from pool.com. You can find the link on their home page.
3. Each domain is given a quality ranking.
4. For the time being I’m only interested in domains with QUALITY=1, which means that the domain is in the 3esl list.
5. The interesting domains are placed in a db.
6. The RSS feed is generated and uploaded to gurge.com, where it gets picked up by feedburner.

I have several other quality rankings:

• is the domain an uncommon word?
• is the domain two common words put together?
• is the domain two uncommon words put togehter?
• etc.

I found that the other lists are way too long to be useful for casual domain watchers like me.

Putting together a PC from scratch is fun and not too difficult. Line things up, put in a few screws and flip the switch. If you hear the happy POST beep, you’re good to go.

Installing the OS is another story. I’ve fought (and won) several epic battles with various linux distros, trying to convince them to accept common PC hardware. Hopefully we’re near the end of the “compile your own kernel and drivers” era. On the other hand, Windows always installs perfectly. Locating and installing drivers is generall pretty easy since hardware companies target Windows as their main platform.

This time, things were different. I’m embarassed to say that I ignored the warnings on the newegg message board. I figured they were out of date, or uninformed. In retrospect I should have paid far more attention to things like this in the newegg reviews:

“ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: …

Cons: Sata/Sata Raid has to have a floppy for f6 (not included), but the drivers CD is bootable and has will make the floppy with easy to follow instructions.”

Let me translate this into something more meaningful for the casual reader.

When you try to install Windows XP onto your brand new SATA RAID array, Windows won’t recognize the drive. Googling indicates that you have to press F6 during an obscure 3-second interval of the initial XP install process. A prompt flashes on screen for a few milliseconds to inform you of this fact.

If you manage to hit F6 quickly enough, Windows will then ask you to insert a floppy with the correct SATA drivers. Not a CD or USB key, a floppy. A floppy?!?! Who the hell has floppy drives anymore, especially in a home built system?

So, you run out to the nearest store (Computer Stop on Aurora) to buy a floppy drive for ~$15. When you get home, you have to install the floppy drive into your old PC in order to copy the SATA drivers to a disk.. Let’s hope you haven’t yet taken apart the old PC. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to find the SATA drivers online. You have to use the magic install CD that came with the motherboard. Let’s also hope you haven’t taken the CDROM out of your old PC!

Don’t forget to detach the floppy from the old PC and drop it into the new PC.
Assuming you’ve done everything correctly, and you have good reflexes, you will now be able to press F6 and tell Windows about the drivers so it can talk to your RAID array. Luckily I played a lot of Egyptian Ratscrew as a child so that part wasn’t too much of a problem. Windows will now install perfectly.

Time spent assembling the new PC : 20 minutes
Time spent getting XP to recognized my RAID array : 6 hours

“Blackbox” is my new Windows PC. I ordered the components from newegg and put it together last week. Here’s the breakdown:

• case / power - Antec Solo Black / Seasonic S12 380W
• motherboard - ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA
• cpu / fan - AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (socket 939) / Arctic Alpine 64
• video card - Gigabyte Geforce 7600GS
• ram - 2x 1GB G.SKILL DDR 400
• disk - 2x Samsung SpinPoint 250GB (for RAID 1)

Total cost including tax and shipping ~$850. This is a big upgrade from my old machine, which had a dinky P4 and only 512mb of RAM.

It’s probably not obvious from the above list but this machine is almost totally silent. The Antec Solo case doesn’t have a traditional drive cage. Instead, the drives hang in a nylon mesh to absorb the vibration. The sidewalls of the Solo have a layer of soft acoustic paneling. The Seasonic S12 is an efficient and nearly silent power supply. Diligent readers may recall that my old PC was discarded due to a faulty video card fan. The Gigabyte video card is fanless. Instead of using the stock AMD Athlon cooler, I dropped $12 for the quiet Arctic Alpine. I probably paid a $100 premium to have a quiet PC instead of a noisy one.

Newegg is an amazing store, and I think that they’re quietly blazing a trail toward better online retailing. Their search features are stellar. Once I’d decided to buy an Athlon 64, I could easily perform a search for “socket 939 motherboards < $100″. Most popular items are absolutely stuffed full of customer reviews. For some reason, unlike the uniform “this product is great!” reviews on Amazon, people will actually give a product zero stars if it doesn’t work for them or if they’re unhappy with the service.

I buy a new PC every few years. Whenever I start shopping I obsessively try to get educated about the latest and greatest, but inevitably I don’t have quite enough time or energy to learn everything. I’m somewhat conservative and the products I buy were bleeding edge a year or two earlier. Sometimes it’s hard for me to make an informed decision.

It may sound strange, but at least THREE of the items on my list were picked out almost solely based on newegg customer reviews. I don’t consider myself a sophisticated PC buyer and it’s a relief to know that my G.SKILL ram gets an average of 5 stars across 150 reviews. If you’ve ever had an encounter with cheap ram before you’ll understand why this is important. There’s definitely a cult of newegg out there, and I remember how amazed I was when Joe, one of my Jobster co-workers, showed up to work in a newegg t-shirt.

Those of you who always buy Dell - please stop and go to newegg instead. Putting a PC together is (usually) fun, easy, and educational. That is, unless you have to setup SATA RAID drivers under XP, which can be a complete nightmare. I’ll tell you all about it in my next post.

Updated: added product links for Patrick

My old shoebox Windows PC was emitting a strange whining sound. I cracked open the case and discovered that the cheapo fan on my cheapo video card was dying. Tending toward lazy, I tried buying a new fan. I carefully measured the dimensions and ordered a similar model from newegg. Total cost : $10. I guess in this case I was a little too lazy because when I tried to install my gleaming new fan I discovered that the old fan was mounted directly on the heat sink. There was no way the new fan would fit without major surgery.

Maybe I should bite the bullet and buy a new video card? I could probably get an equivalent model on ebay for around $75. Though my shoebox was only two years old, it’s AGP slot made it a relic from another era. If I bought a new AGP video card, I would probably end up throwing it out along with the shoebox PC.
I decided to “save” the $75 and buy a new PC instead.

Like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the wheezing fan was a catalyst for massive change in my life. A new question arose. Was it time to Switch?

Flashback to 1997, the last time I owned a Mac. Back in college I was like a mini John Sculley. I pushed Monaco and BBEdit on all my disinterested friends. I released amateurish Macintosh freeware. I hacked AfterDark and learned how to crack with MacsBug. But even good things must come to an end. Upon graduation I put away my childish things and moved entirely to the lucrative, disorganized world of Windows and POSIX variants.

Several years passed. Exciting, productive, disorganized years on XP and Linux boxes. Recently, I’ve jealously watched while one friend after another loudly switched to MacOS, with their shiny screens and bizarre motion sensor hacks. They flaunt their beautiful machines at every opportunity. It’s very tempting, especially for an old school Mac fiend like your’s truly.

So why won’t I switch? Let me enumerate a few good reasons:

Half-Life 2 (and Episode 1-N)
Oblivion
Chronicles of Riddick
etc.

Future posts will detail my new rig and provide helpful hints to make Windows development bearable.

My name is Adam Doppelt. I am a software developer by trade, but I think of myself as a serial entrepreneur. This blog is a repository for random thoughts bouncing around my brain. Areas of interest include software development, startups and games.

See if you can get through my spam filter:

amd@gurge.com