My aging Pentium 4-based desktop died last week and once again, I was in the market for a new PC. I had been wrangling with the old one with its loose DDR and IDE slots that have caused me so much grief from time to time when the slightest jar would make things go haywire.

For about half of what it would have cost me about 3 months ago, I was able to get a pretty decent (for my purposes) rig based on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Fortunately, I was able to keep all my IDE hard drives so that cut the costs even further. But my new motherboard has only one IDE port, the rest are all new stuff like SATAII and PCIe. The motherboard is based on Intel’s 945G chipset and as far as cheap motherboards go, it looks like a pretty solid board. I have no need for a new graphics card (yet) as I don’t have any “must play” games right now. Come to think of it, it’s been a while since I last played games on a PC since I got a PS2.

What I ended up with for PhP 17,000:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 (from what I read on Intel and hardware review sites, this chip is now discontinued which explains why I got this one for half of its initial release price)
• ASRock ConRoe945G-DVI motherboard I had to bump up it’s factory-installed BIOS because it kept resetting my S.M.A.R.T. settings for the hard drive)
• Funky looking ATX case that whines like a dying animal when its chassis fan is turned on.
• 4 512MB DDR2 memory sticks

I was able to reuse my old IDE drives. Too bad I could use only one of them. The two remaining hard drives are relegated to “backup storage device”.

As usual, it’s a dual-boot setup with both Windows XP Professional SP2 (32-bit) and Ubuntu 7.04 (64-bit). I really notice the performance difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu. I tried both versions to see if there was any perceptible difference. Suffice to say, things are a lot snappier on 64-bit. As expected there were some problems with apps that stubbornly refuse to go 64-bit (Adobe Flash, JRE plugin). But nothing that a quick visit to the Ubuntu Forums didn’t fix.

Overall, it’s been a pretty good experience running 64-bit as a first class citizen…

Title says it all. I am no longer tracking the CakePHP project and therefore my CakePHP modifications project is now officially dead. This is mostly due to time constraints but there are other reasons as well. I will not go into the details for the other reasons but those who know me already know what those reasons are.

Of course, hosting for these patches continues as well as my ThemeableView class which some CakePHP users out there found useful. If anyone else is interested in taking the reins for this class, please feel free to do so. No need to contact me or anything, but a trackback to this post would be nice so that I will know who is currently maintaining this class. This will allow me to direct them to you for any updates that you may post.

On another note, the project that has been taking much of my time lately is a new website for posting free online classified ads for cars, trucks, and bikes. This website is currently US-centric. We have plans to extend worldwide if all goes well with the current setup. So, if you’re in the US and you wish to sell your vehicle, or if you’re looking to buy a preowned car, truck, or bike check out PreOwnedCar.com. If you know someone with the same needs, please tell them about this site.

We are also currently in the final design phases for PhilWeavers Version 4. I am currently divided between doing this new version using Django as a base or simply going back to the drawing board and creating a new PHP5-based framework. We’ll see how this pans out in the later stages of development.