sutton050

Its that time, I have been maxing out my machine repeatedly, I had two options upgrade or build new. Money determined that an upgrade is all I can afford, between the server rebuild earlier in the year, building myself a new rack-mount table and just generally being skint my budget was low, super low, like £200. Lets go over what the machine is.... I'm running an Intel Core i7 950 3.0ghz.  This is a four core (eight thread) chip, it cost the earth when I bought it as an early adopter of the newly released Core i7 series.  My upgrade comes in the form of an Intel Xeon X5670, clocked slightly slower I do plan to overclock the chip, but it lifts me to 6 cores (12 threads).  There's also a whopping increase in L3 cache, I see this as the last and only upgrade path for this machine. The motherboard hosting this is a very trusty Asus P6X58-e, I've loved every minute of this board, and hope that applying the overclock will be as easy as everything else working with it. As I am o...

A long time coming, here's another story from my days long past, this one takes me to my very first serious role in an IT department, I was however just the dogs body.  The company ran many old PC's (which I actually was around to see mostly be updated to nice Compaq Pentium III's) and they had a couple of high spec Silicon Graphics workstations in the design department. The main manufacturing control and purchasing system, as well as payroll and a bunch of other services ran on a dual 386 based mini computer, which had a custom cut of ScoUnix and a bunch of bespoke C programs comprising the actual system stack, this was accessed by a whole host or Gandalf multiplexers combining the serial connections down from a hundred or so Wyse brand terminals (I wish I'd have nabbed one of those before I left). Anyway, it was time for this back end stack to be updated, and so a pair of Compaq Proliant servers were brought in, these were dual Pentium III class with a dedicated stora...

Health & Myself What a whirlwind few weeks I've had, first of all, I've had some minor medical work done so not really been in the mood to do anything very interesting except recuperate in my spare time.  I've also got on-going dental treatment going on, so I'm doubly aggravated. Next I have been so busy with work, I've had a change of job title, I've been effectively promoted into the lead developer role for the platform/product range I work on; this is sort of a defacto position, as I'm the ONLY developer working in this area at present, however I'm now officially the man on point and am about to reform a new development team around it.  I will be working in Scrum methodology with this new team, we'll be pushing product to both Windows and Linux, Git will be our source control system (no matter what anyone else says) and I'm going to leverage C++ as the core product with tools all being produced in Python, very exciting stuff. Server Issues...