This holiday season was especially tortuous; I had a mountain of computer parts sitting in my office taunting me while I was enjoying the holidays with family and friends. Sure, I was happy to be spending that time with them, but it was a little bittersweet since I wanted also to be playing with my shiny new toys.

On New Year’s Eve, I got started opening boxes and assembling the computer. For the most part, everything went together very smoothly. Between starting to put everything together and putting the wrapping touches on this blog, I encountered two minor problems and two major ones:

Minor Problems

1. The CPU Cooler (Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus) I bought was ginormous; it was virtually bigger than my head! It took a little bit of elbow grease and sweat to get it mounted correctly and squeezed into the case.

2. The monitor had a sticker on it that was very difficult to peel off the bezel. It took me longer to carefully remove the sticker than what it took for the operating system, Windows 7, to load from scratch.

Major Problems

1. The RAM I bought, Corsair Vengeance (4x8GB) DDR3 1866 MHZ (PC3 15000), is being auto-detected at 1333MHz instead of 1866MHz. Manually setting the RAM’s multiplier results in the motherboard saying you’re being too aggressive in your overclocking, and defaulting back to 1333MHz. I spoke with Corsair’s technical support people and they turned me on to this DDR3 Memory Frequency Guide from AMD. Apparently, when using all 4 DIMM slots it’s not possible to run at 1866MHz. This was an unfortunate mistake I didn’t catch in time. I suppose I could return the RAM and exchange it for something cheaper, or I could spend quite a few more bucks and get 2x16GB 1600MHz to stay at 32GB total and almost attain the faster speed I wanted. In the end, I was so happy with the machine, I didn’t want the cost savings from buying slower RAM or the performance gain of working around this you-cant-run-4-DIMMs-at-1866MHz-on-AMD-FX-CPUs issue.
2. Before the upgrade, I was unaware that Windows 7 Home Premium is limited to a maximum of 16GB of System RAM. After tinkering with limiting the system RAM for disk benchmarks, I stumbled across the fact that Windows was reporting a system of 32GB system RAM, but only 16GB of it was usable. In order to get to use all 32GB of the RAM, I had upgrade to Windows 7 Home Professional (or Ultimate). The most disappointing part of this was that it cost me an additional $90 to do the Windows Anytime Upgrade.

The Butt Dyno

For those of you not into cars, the Butt Dyno is an unscientific way for a driver to measure the effect of an upgrade to his car. It’s not a precise or specific measurement, but it’s significant; if you could feel the effect of the upgrade then you could enjoy the upgrade and brag about it to your friends. The same can be applied to computers; you don’t need an armful of system benchmarks to conclude that your PC is faster-you just need to sit at it for awhile.

My initial impressions for my new computer can be summed up in a single word: Wow!

Firstly, the display is nothing short of amazing when compared next to my old display. The monitor is extremely bright, crisp, and expansive both in size and resolution. I’m going to need to start finding software to help me set up and manage a window layout in order to make the best use of all the territory that is now in front of me.

Secondly, the computer is incredibly responsive and fast. In every aspect of use; boot time, opening up applications, working with browsers with dozens of open tabs, etc… I fired up my favorite game, Team Fortress 2 and used Chris’s TF2 Configs to set all of the video details to maximum and run at my display’s native resolution of 2560x1440. My frame rate was consistently in the 80+ range. Considering that within the last month I had to use one of the more basic configs to drop down the detail in order to keep my frame rate playable, this was astonishing to me. With the graphics details turned all the way up, the game looked and felt fantastic but remained completely playable. Despite TF2’s relative old age, I can’t remember ever being able to take one of my favorite video games and play it at maximum detail and have it feel enjoyable after this kind of an upgrade.

Now, the only problem with the Butt Dyno is that it is always subjective. Just about any recent computer is going to feel much better than my three-year-old PC. The butt dyno results are very encouraging but whether or not I achieved my goal of tripling my performance will also be determined by the benchmarks and comparisons to the results from the old PC.

Benchmarks

I was really excited to get the benchmarks running; for all benchmarks I used all the same settings from my previous benchmarks. The only exception is that I added an additional benchmark of the Crucial M4 SSD to see if there was any added benefit from the six extra cores I now have with regards to disk I/O.

Processor / GPU / System

I started off with my GPU benchmark first, because I knew it would be my smallest boost in performance. I had previously upgraded the video card in my machine roughly 12 to 18 months ago. Because of my budget, I wasn’t able to triple the number of CUDA cores, so I had to settle with only doubling the number of available CUDA cores. I was expecting to see the least amount of improvement here. My original score was P8199. Running the same exact benchmark on my new computer resulted in a score of P16902. Which was an increase of 206%.

Then I ran Geekbench; previously my old system had scored a 2847. After some whirring and clicking the new PC scored a respectable 10545, an increase of 370%, which was well past my goal of tripling overall performance.

I followed that up with the overall system benchmark, PCMark Vantage. Earlier, my old computer had scored 3671. Running the same benchmark on my new computer resulted in a score of 14228, an unexpected increase of 388%. I had expected the graphics component to weigh down the improvement just a tad, but the performance increases in other areas more than made up for it and nearly quadrupled my score.

Disk

Just like I was only expecting meager gains from the video card, I anticipated extraordinary gains beyond my goal moving from a platter drive up to a solid-state drive. I had some problems trying to run the same exact settings as before; specifically I had the benchmark create a file that 10 * the amount of system RAM to negate the benefits of caching. However, since I have 32 GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, clearly I would wind up creating a file much larger than the total capacity of the SSD. Furthermore, I was using the SSD as my primary storage, and after loading up all my apps, the SSD only had 85 GB free. What I decided to do was to limit the amount of RAM using Windows boot parameters. That way, I could bring total system RAM back down to 2GB and reproduce my prior benchmark settings.

The good news is that the SSD is many, many magnitudes superior than my old hard drive. The bad news is that it’s SO much better, that I had a really difficult time getting to the data on a graph and have it make sense. We had to put three different y-axes on the graph in order for it to make the most amount of sense.

Basically, when running the same exact settings in IOMeter, Total I/Os Per Second increased from 405 to 36,512 (over 9000% improvement) and Total MBs/Second increased from 5.2 to 142.63 (over 2700% improvement). Overall, disk performance increased so far beyond my 300% goal that it’s almost comical.

What I Could Have Done Differently

The two major problems drove up my price up by another $100.00 or so. Firstly, wanting to have 32GB of RAM forced me to upgrade my OS, which was a substantial unplanned expense. Secondly, I paid a premium to buy 1866MHz RAM that I have to run at 1333MHz because I filled up all 4 DIMM slots. Had I been a little more thorough in my shopping and research I would’ve chosen to do either of the following to try and under $1000 total:

1. Only buy 16GB of 1600MHz RAM: This would’ve saved me $90 on the Windows upgrade plus, around an additional $90 in the cost of the actual RAM. This would’ve put me well below my budget of $1000.
2. Buy 32GB of 1333MHz RAM: This only would’ve saved me $20-30 dollars total; I still would’ve had to pay for the upgrade to Windows 7 Home Professional

Conclusion

Ultimately, I hit one goal and missed the other. In almost every measurable regard my computer is at least three times as powerful as my prior computer. It literally runs circles around the old computer and as far as upgrades go, this is the one that stands out as the most impressive that I can remember.

The goal I failed on was the budgetary goal I set out for myself. And I’m more than satisfied missing out on that goal. I wanted to prove that for $1000 you could buy a very nice computer and display. By tweaking components a little bit and/or waiting for prices to fall over, time this is very attainable. I exceeded the $1000 mark, but that enabled me to buy a bigger SSD and get my new computer up to 32 GB of total system RAM. In the long run, these splurges will be well worth the money spent. Now, you’ll have to excuse me. I have a hankering to play Team Fortress 2 at 2560x1440 with every video option set at the maximum setting.

As part of my computer upgrade, I decided my display could use an upgrade as well, and I budgeted in the neighborhood of $300 to spend on the monitor. The monitor that I currently have has been with me even longer than the PC that was being upgraded. I started browsing all the IPS displays I could find on Amazon and dug through lots of reviews.

Dual Head vs. Single Head

A long, long time ago. I bought two 17” CRT monitors off of some special deal for about the price of one and picked up a 2nd video card for my computer. That has to be around the worst-possible dual-head setup possible. The monitors were ginormous and occupied 110% of my available desk space; the desk even slightly buckled under their weight. Despite all the problems, I was hooked. I’ve had more than one display for quite awhile up until this computer. I was tempted to split my display budget in half and find the very best deal I could find on a monitor. There were a ton of monitors in my price range; in fact so many that it made digging through all the different brands and monitors a bit daunting.

The other choice would be to find the biggest & best display around $300 and continue to live a single monitor lifestyle. I’ve certainly grown accustomed to this, and I don’t entirely mind it. A few months ago, one of my favorite bloggers wrote this great article about 27” 2560x1440 displays ordered directly from Korea. Comparable monitors obtained locally are still quite expensive compared to these displays. If you look at comprable “local” monitors on your various sites, they all seem to be starting in the $700 ballpark.

Ultimately, this was practically a coin flip. The cost and performance of the two smaller monitors actually nudges out (in my opinion) the bigger monitor by just a hair. If you can find two 1920x1080 IPS displays for about $300 then you get more pixels at a lesser price. On the other hand, when using two displays you have the bezels of the two monitors acting as a barrier between the two displays. And if you like to sit centered behind one monitor like I do then you incur significant diminishing returns on that second monitor, even more so if you’re frequently doing things like playing games full screened like I tend to do.

Decision

In the end I decided I would focus on one monitor enough that I should go ahead and buy the biggest and baddest monitor my budget would allow. One of these Korean 27” 2560x1440 IPS displays lines up perfectly with what I’m trying to accomplish. There’s no shortage of them listed on eBay and they all seem to be priced right around $300.00. Most of the sub-$300 were auction-style listings; because I’m famously impatient, I picked the cheapest “Buy it Now” listing I could find from a well-reviewed seller and ordered one for $319.90. Here’s a link to the auction, and a screenshot if the listing expires.

The long and short of itm is that it’s a no-frills 27” monitor with an IPS display and a gargantuan resolution of 2560x1440. The only drawback that I could think of was the lack of any other allowed inputs other than DVI-Dual. As far as I’m concerned that’s not really much of a drawback at all, but it may inhibit some users out there. In worst-case scenario mode, I had some concerns about what might happen if the transaction went poorly. I also expected a tremendous amount of shipping time, but it was ordered on 12/22 and delivered by 12/27. In my opinion, that’s nothing short of miraculous, considering there was a weekend and a holiday between the order and delivery. All in all, I’m pretty comfortable with the purchase and the decision. My only regret was not being able to afford one or two more of the monitors to set up a really expansive amount of display real estate.

So, at the the end of 2012 we decided to go ahead and buy a new computer. I had a pretty firm budget: $1300 total; $1000 for the computer and $300 for the monitor(s). My other goal in the upgrade was to improve system performance by at least three times. In my prior article, I took a bunch of benchmarks to gauge just how “fast” my current machine was.

Newegg vs. Amazon

If you’ve read prior articles, or you know me at all, then you know I’m a huge Newegg fan. I’ve bought parts from them for over the past decade. Not every part, just the majority of them. Recently, my friend Pat hooked us up with Amazon Prime. Because of the holidays, I was pretty excited to get free two day shipping on all of my computer parts. In doing my research, Amazon was cheaper on quite a few of the same components that I was looking at on Newegg. However, in the end it’s probably a moot point, as Amazon is charging sales tax in Texas and that probably ended up eating up most of the items’ price savings.

Meeting the “Upgrade” Requirement

In order to call it an upgrade, a few components need to carry on from the prior machine. In my case, there’s not much worth carrying forward. Almost the video card, but I definitely want to upgrade that. The power supply I bought to drive that video card will definitely move forward, as will the hard disk drive for some additional storage. And finally, I’m going to use my Windows 7 license. As an additional bonus, I have a 2 TB hard drive that I’ve been using in an external enclosure that was made unnecessary by my FreeNAS box. I’ll use as some storage as well.

CPU, RAM and Motherboard

I spent 95% of my research time agonizing over which direction to go-AMD vs Intel, which motherboard chipset and how much RAM. Well, the RAM part was easy, seeing as how I remember spending $400 of my hard-earned busboy money on a whopping 4MB of RAM into my first hand-me-down computer ages ago. I went ahead and decided to max out the RAM by buying 32GB of Corsair Vengeance (4x8GB) DDR3 1866 MHZ (PC3 15000) for $179.99

After pouring over pages of benchmarks and reviews of the latest AMD and Intel CPUs, I decided that I wanted 8 cores and that it seemed like AMD is giving the best bang-for-buck. In this case, I decided to go and pick up the AMD FX-8350 FX-Series Black edition for $189.99.

I spent literally hours trying to decide between the AMD chipsets that support the AM3+ CPU. The 970, 990X and 990FX all seemed to be pretty equivalent for what I wanted to do. There’s very little chance that I’ll be doing SLI anytime in the near future, so most of the additional benefits of the 990X and 990FX are lost on me. However, in reading reviews on the various 970 boards, it seemed like support of the FX-8350 CPU was spotty; if you had an older revision of the board it required flashing the BIOS to get it to boot. Rather than risk buying something that was going to require me to jump through hoops, I looked at the 990X boards and found them to be marginally less expensive than the 990FX boards. For $137.99 I picked up a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3, which definitely had all of the DIMM slots, 6.0Gb/s SATA ports and PCI Express x16 slots that I needed.

Budget remaining: $492.03

Videocard

My primary goal on buying a video card was to make sure to double the number of CUDA Cores currently available on my current Geforce GTX 460. In looking at the prices, that seemed to be the sweet-spot in my bang-for-buck calculations. I ended up deciding that the Geforce GTX 650 Ti seemed to be the right family of cards to be shopping in. Because my current card had 1 GB of video RAM, I decided to double that up as well by looking at video cards with 2GB of video RAM. For $169.99 I chose the EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2048MB.

Budget remaining: $322.04

Storage

Storage is one of the areas in which I decided to splurge. I knew that I wanted an SSD, but I was leaning towards a smaller SSD to use for caching. But because prices have fallen down below $1 per gigabyte I decided to use an SSD as my primary storage device. Currently, I fluctuate around 200Gb of usage for everything installed on my PC and there’s lots of fat to be trimmed out of there. Because of that, I felt that I could very easily buy a Crucial m4 256GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive to use as my primary storage. The SSD set me back $209.99

Budget Remaining: $112.05

Case

Because I was bringing over the power supply from my prior computer, I only needed a shell of a case. The budget was starting to feel a little bit tight, so I employed a friend and Google to search for the best “budget” case with a slew of internal hard drive bays and that would fit my motherboard. For $39.99 I found a NZXT Technologies Source 210 Computer Case (Black) which seemed to fit the bill.

Budget Remaining: $72.06

Odds and Ends

The CPU I bought didn’t include a cooler, so I picked up a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus for $24.71. Because I picked Amazon, I thought it made sense to go ahead and include sales tax to my bottom line which came in at $76.54

Budget Remaining: $-29.19

The Fine Print

I didn’t quite make my $1000 budget. There’s certainly a bit of fat that I could trim from the computer; a less expensive motherboard, slower RAM, and a smaller SSD all jump out at me as items that could’ve been less expensive, saving me quite a few dollars. However, I had another goal of tripling my existing system performance, and ultimately that wound up being more important to me than a small overage on the budget. Besides, there’s got to be at least a hundred dollars of “old” parts which are coming over from the upgraded computer. If I really wanted it to look like I stayed inside my budget, I’d find a way to give myself credit for those pieces.

Complete Parts List

• AMD FX-8350 FX-Series Black edition
• Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3
• Corsair Vengeance (4x8GB) DDR3 1866 MHZ (PC3 15000)
• EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2048MB
• Crucial m4 256GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive
• NZXT Technologies Source 210 Computer Case (Black)
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
• Antec 500W Power Supply (from previous computer)
• Seagate Barracuda 500GB Hard Drive (from previous computer)
• Western Digital 2TB Hard Drive (random unused hard drive hanging around)

Lost Dogs

On our way to dinner last night at The Allen Wickers Pub last night, I spotted two lost dogs wandering down the southbound frontage road of 75 in Plano. This was between Parker and Park (see below). I wrote about it a bit from dinner on my Facebook page, but I wanted to blog about it and get it out there in case their owners were searching for them. I assume they had a home because both dogs, despite being a little dirty, seemed to be well-fed and were both wearing collars.

I’m not a dog-expert but I wanted to describe the two dogs we spotted:

The first dog appeared to be a collie of some sort. We think she was female but didn’t really examine her closely. She was brownish-red and her most distinguishing feature was that she had only one hind leg. For the purposes of this blog, I nicknamed her “Tripod”. Tripod was sweet and she came right up to me when called and sat with us.

The second dog, who I called “Butch” appeared to be some sort of Rottweiler mix. I’m not familiar with the breed, but I recognized some of the traits in Butch. Butch was wary, but extremely interested in remaining near to his pal. Butch wouldn’t get close enough to me for me to grab his collar. Butch didn’t seem aggressive at all, but he didn’t have much interest in us except for that we had his friend for a while. I didn’t have much of anything on me to help catch Butch and I didn’t want to risk scaring Butch back out onto the frontage road.

Ultimately, I thought it was the lesser of two evils to lead the dogs away from the frontage road rather than to split them up and only catch one of them. I ran some errands and did some last-minute Christmas shopping. I spent about an hour driving around the area to see if I could spot them again but I didn’t have any luck. Hopefully, this means they found their homes. I really, really, really hope so.

If you live nearby and are missing your two dogs, this is where we spotted them, and we did our best to herd them away from the really busy traffic. The last we saw them, they were headed southbound behind Allen Wickers towards Park southbound on Premier Drive. If you want to talk, reach out to me: (Email: [email protected], Twitter: briancmoses) and I’ll give you my phone number.

Here’s a link to an ad I posted on CraigsList: Spotted: 2 Lost Dogs (3 legged Collie & Rottweiller-ish) (Plano – 75 Frontage road & Enterprise Dr)

Plano Animal Control

I understand that it’s Christmas and that the animal control department probably isn’t one of the best-funded units. I called right around 5PM and your phone system told me that you were closed. The person I spoke to was polite and tried the best that she could to help me, but when I asked for help to catch this other dog, I got absolutely no help back. When I asked if there was anything else that I could do, any other groups that I could contact I got absolutely no information back from you and that’s extremely frustrating.

You asked if I would be willing to keep them at my house until you guys were open again after Christmas (a reasonable request, which I would’ve considered) but offered me no help whatsoever when I said I couldn’t catch the other dog. And you were no help when I asked if there was anyone else who could lend a hand.

There’s nothing more frustrating or disappointing than to call someone for help and to get absolutely nothing back. For when you’re closed, how hard is it to make a list of contact information for other people/organizations who do rescue work? How about some tips on catching and handling a distrustful dog? It doesn’t seem like that much to ask, but apparently it was.

For Next Time

Today while out shopping, I built myself a little doggie rescue kit. I picked up a couple different sized leashes and collars, a squeaky toy, and some treats. Over the next week or so, I’m going to build a list of organizations in the area that I could call. We’ll keep that kit in our cars and that list on our phones. If you have any organizations or people in the Plano area to suggest, please use the comments section to provide any contact info. Thanks!

The other day, my father called me up and wanted to talk computers. He’s been looking into upgrading his monitor; unfortunately for him his computer is pretty old. To get up to the resolutions he was wanting he was going to at least have to buy a video card. Once you tip that first domino, all the rest come falling back behind it; after some suggestions, Dad decided it’s probably best to be looking at a new PC.

That got me thinking just exactly how old was my PC? It has been showing its age from time to time recently seeming to lack some oomph and occasionally locking up. It had seemed like quite awhile since I purchased it, and when I made the purchase, this PC was at the very, very, low end of what was available. I bought this PC from Dell because I couldn’t beat the deals that they were offering if I tried to do it myself. I logged into Dell’s small business website-the deals are always better there-and tried to find my order date to no avail because you can only go back two years on their website. After some digging, poking, and prodding, I ultimately discovered that my PC had been purchased and shipped in November of 2009.

Up until the beginning of 2012, I thought my do-it-yourself computer days were behind me. Firstly, I never thought I’d be buying another desktop; laptop computers’ video capabilities had gotten to the point where I could do everything I was doing on a laptop that I was doing on a desktop at right around the price point I like to shop at. Secondly, with places like Woot, dealspl.us, and the like, there always seemed to be some PCs out there with better sale prices than if I built it myself. However, during 2012 I bought a Nexus 7 a fantastic device that meets almost every one of my mobile computing needs.

Because of the Nexus 7, I decided to build a price-conscious yet beefy desktop. After some serious negotiations with my wife, we set a budget for $1000 for the PC, and for good measure I budgeted an additional $300 for new display(s), since my current monitor has been with me since before this PC.

The Old PC

My current PC is a Dell Studio 540. It has an Intel E5300 running at 2.6 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, and a 500 gig platter hard drive. I upgraded the video card to a nVidia Geforce GTX 460 quite a long time ago, and because of the video card’s power requirements I also upgraded the computer’s power supply. It’s actually been a decent little computer.

Benchmarks

As a starting point, I decided to run a variety of benchmarks on the computer. I wanted an overall System benchmark, 3D benchmark and an I/O Benchmark in order to measure the amount of upgrade. For my benchmarks, I chose: Geekbench, 3DMark Vantage, PCMark Vantage and [Iometer].

PCMark

I picked PCMark Vantage as an overall system benchmark. The initial score was 3671. Just for full disclosure, I had to edit this screenshot to make all of the information fit in my blog’s template nicely.

3DMark

For video performance, I measured my performance in 3DMark Vantage. I decided to go ahead and run the benchmark with the performance settings. My system scored a P8199.

Geekbench

To get an idea of how my CPU was performing, I ran a benchmark using Geekbench. My computer scored 2847.

Iometer

For my hard drive benchmark, I used IOMeter’s “all-in-one” tests and a test file that was 20GB (Total System RAM * 10) and two worker processes. I measured 405.69 in Total I/Os per second, 5.2 in Total MB per second and an Average I/O Response Time of 2.4636ms.

Objectives

My objective is to overall triple my performance of this PC while staying within my budget. In the initial research achieving the goal is pretty simple; the difficult task is to do it within the $1000 budget that I set for myself. I didn’t really look at any other computer benchmarks out there, since I know that my computer is quite on the low end. The purpose of these benchmarks is to establish a baseline to compare my new computer with.

Up Next

I’ve already done the research and ordered my new hardware. I plan to break the hardware up into a couple articles: one for the computer, and another for the display which is turning out to be the most interesting story in this upgrade. As I have time over the Holidays, I’ll assemble the PC and do some writing.

I was sitting at work today pounding away on my keyboard composing an email when I was haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Past. This visitation happens at least once a year around this week.

Twenty Years Ago (give or take a couple years…)

I am the oldest of the family, and I have two younger siblings: Jeff is about two years younger than I and Amy a little more than two years younger than Jeff. I imagine that we were pretty much like every other set of siblings—harmoniously enjoying each others’ company one minute and the next we could be at each others’ throats.

Every year, the elementary school we attended would have a Craft Fair/Christmas Market before the Holidays. We would save our allowance for what seemed like an eternity so that we could go to the market and buy our Christmas presents for our family. Back then, we were literally spending 100% of our savings on presents for everyone else, and that always felt good.

My favorite category of childhood memories are the memories that came from our spontaneous creation of new games. We constantly invented games that we’d never played before. Most times we never played them again but rare games we played over and over. My memory is fuzzy of exactly when, but I’m guessing I was around 6 or 8 when we invented a really cute and sweet game.

It was Christmas time, probably right around school’s winter break, and we were psyched for Christmas to come. In order to get an early Christmas fix we had invented a new game. Each of us had little plastic bins, which normally held arts and crafts stuff. We each emptied those bins and then left them outside of our rooms. Then we each would find and locate something in our rooms, sneak out to the hallway and leave it in one of our siblings’ bins, knock on the door and run back to our room. After each round of this gifting, we’d meet back up in my room, thank each other and play with our “new” gifts. I don’t remember the gifts exchanged, but I do remember that we all wound up gifting some of our favorite toys that we knew our siblings had been envious of.

During one round of play, we huddled back up and began talking about Christmas to come. Mostly, I imagine talking about the different presents we wanted. In our huddle, I sarcastically told my sister “If you show me what you bought me for Christmas, I will show you what I got you.” Being only six or seven, I had not yet quite mastered delivering sarcastic messages effectively. Amy gave no immediate reaction and I had felt that she understood that I was not being serious.

We all left the room to prepare for our next round of gifting, but this time instead of waiting in her room, Amy rushed back out immediately. In her hands, she held an eraser shaped like an elephant and a matching pad of paper. That year, her gift for me sunk my heart. Unfortunately, this was probably the first of many times that Amy would learn that oldest brother is a joker and was prone to say things without thinking them through.

I did my very best to explain to Amy that I was kidding, but by then the damage was done. Amy started to cry, and despite what many of you think about your big brothers, we don’t actually like to see that. Amy was distraught and upset now “that the surprise was ruined.” This was terribly distressing, I told Amy how much I liked the present and how I was looking forward to unwrapping it on Christmas day again. I promised that I’d be tremendously surprised and nobody would know. This seemed to soothe Amy but I had the impression it wasn’t going to be enough.

The Moral of the Story

There are many lessons to be learned here. Primarily as an older sibling you have an innate power over your younger siblings that you never realize that you have, and secondarily just because your meaning is perfectly clear to yourself doesn’t necessarily mean it is to someone else. Mostly I wish that 6-or-7- year-old Brian would’ve learned and applied those lessons in prior to that night. Then he wouldn’t have to periodically get the nagging feeling that he ruined Christmas. When I get the chance I’d be happy to try teach this lesson. It’s the least a good Uncle can do.

I didn’t mean for this to sound so morose when it was actually bittersweet. The game and the spirit was pretty sweet, especially for the three of us. And, there was a bit of sad sweetness in how much it was apparent that Amy at that age was looking forward to the giving of gifts as much as she was at the receiving of gifts. There’s a significant part of that night that I regret, but a good chunk of the memory is a sizable portion of warm-n-fuzzy.

With Adobe’s abandoning of Flash, those of us hosting our own videos should be in a hurry to implement the HTML5 video tag. But because of the very different approaches each of the browsers are taking in supported video codecs there is no silver bullet and it is not a simple undertaking

I used the HTML5 video tag for the first time in one of my blog articles a month or so ago. I spent almost as much time messing around with the video than I did with writing the rest of the article. Up until recently, I had been using FLV Player, which I have found to be particularly easy, reliable and straightforward.

One of my favorite things about the FLV Player is that I pretty much was able to copy & paste the source from a prior blog, update the URL to point at my new video, and I was ready to go. In HTML5 it is not as simple. Different browsers support different codecs out of the box, so you have to do the work to ensure that you have encoded your video in enough codecs that you cover all (or most) browsers. For my site, I’ve decided that I will encode both OGG and H.264. For non-HTML5 compliant browsers, I still plan to include a FLV video and use FLV Player to display them. Other users might just be out of luck.

You wind up having to do a fair amount of work just to host a single video. Enough work that I very seriously considered just hosting all of my videos up on YouTube instead. However, it dawned on me that I have got a pretty nifty content management system, MovableType 5 powering my blog. Surely there would be a method in which I can create a macro/plugin/widget/thingamajig/doohickey that makes publishing videos a bit easier.

The Approach

• Three videos will be created: an H.264 video with the extension “.mp4”, an OGG video with the extension “.ogg,” and for ancient browsers a flash video with the extension “.flv”
• A Movable Type Template Module will be used to build the HTML5 Video tag. Within this template module, I’d set up the particulars of the HTML5 video tag.
• Each entry that needs a video would call the MT Template Module using the video’s filename (without extension), height and width as parameters.

Benefits

The primary benefit would be the author—me—would save time and space in each entry by using the template module rather than writing each HTML5 Video tag out. I am sure that other solutions exist, like some sort of keyboard macro that builds the bones and then I just put in the particulars but one of the other benefits that I like is that I would be able to quickly update my MT Template Module and re-publish my blog and all of a sudden all of my videos would reflect the update.

Things to Be Concerned About

The solution I picked enables any author to access Movable Types various templates within the entry of a blog. Depending on the author, this could be misused and abused, potentially wreaking havoc on the person sustaining the blog. If I were hosting a blog for other people then I would be hesitant to allow authors to include Movable Type template tags into their blog entries.

Videos

I mentioned earlier the frustrating part of this is the act of preparing the videos for hosting, not the actual “publishing” of those videos. I am not a particularly adept producer of videos. 99% of the stuff I want to publish is stuff I shot with a smartphone or some sort of economical camera. Mostly, I pull the video off the camera and manipulate it. I resize it and encode it into the different formats I need. For this, I use two tools; Handbrake and WinFF. There is an article, Dive Into HTML5 that I found via this question on StackExchange, that I have used as my reference. In this arena I am hardly an expert and it is probably best to leave the explanations to people who are much more adept than I.

Movable Type Tweaks and Modifications

By default, Movable Type does not allow you access to their various Templates within an Entry. If you try and stick a template tag (like I did, for hours) directly into one of your entries or pages, it will simply publish your tag and you will feel foolish when you see the results. Thankfully, the helpful MovableType forums clued me in on an answer: mteval. By setting mteval to 1 on any of the templates that pulled data from my entries, it enabled me use the actual MT template tags within. This involved mucking around in the MovableType template definitions a bit. I modified any template that called the Entry or Entry Summary pages, in each case setting the mteval to 1. To accomplish this I had to modify the following templates: Main Index, Category Entry Listing, Entry and Monthly Entry Listing. When I was done with those edits, I made sure to publish each template that was updated.

That next step was creating a Movable Type template module. In my case I called it “Video.” Within that module, I created the HTML5 Video tag. Pulling the different values from parameters that would be passed to the Video template module within the entry, I wound up requiring including the path as part of the file name. I normally put all of my videos in the same place on my host, but that might not always be the case. I did not want to hard code a path in there anywhere.

Lastly, I went through and updated my most recent blog article with a video to start using my new Movable Type Template module. If you had access to view the contents of that blog, this is what you would see where new Video Template Module is being referenced:

Blog Entry

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<$mt:Include module="Video" video_height="352" video_width="640" video_file="/Videos/Ultimate Car Dock Gearhead Demonstration"$>

If you pull up the source of the page, Movable Type builds this HTML:

Page Source

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<video width="640" height="352" controls="controls">
<source src="/Videos/Ultimate Car Dock Gearhead Demonstration.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<source src="/Videos/Ultimate Car Dock Gearhead Demonstration.ogg" type="video/ogg" />
  <!-- FLV Player for non HTML5 Browsers -->  
  <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="https://blog.briancmoses.com/swf/player_flv_maxi.swf" width="640" height="352"> 
    <param name="movie" value="player_flv_maxi.swf" /> 
    <param name="FlashVars" value="flv=https://blog.briancmoses.com/Videos/Ultimate Car Dock Gearhead Demonstration.mp4&autoload=1&loop=0&buffer=10&showiconplay=1&buffermessage=" />
  </object>
</video>

Conclusion

Overall, this was pretty simple to accomplish. I had some help from the folks on the Movable Type forums that got me pointed in the right direction. I spent more time figuring out how to get all the right videos encoded than I did making the changes to Movable Type and my blog entries to support this. In the event that some change is needed down the road to how videos are published over the web, I have a simple, easy way to go in, edit the Video Template Module, and then republish my blog in order to make that change, which by far beats the alternative of identifying which entries have videos and then editing each of those entries. Depending on the size of your blog(s), this could be a colossal undertaking

Our group at work is pushing to upgrade from Visual Studio 2010 to Visual Studio 2012 as quickly as possible. Because of that, I have been using VS2012 for a few weeks now trying to get a handle on the new release. After receiving a few different merge requests from the developers, I realized that as part of the upgrade, VS2012 did not bring in my settings for using Beyond Compare 3 Pro as my comparison tool.

Thankfully, setting it up appears to be virtually identical as to how it was in VS2010. I used this helpful StackOverflow question as a starting off point do the same in Visual Studio 2012.

For the sake of helping out other wayward Googlers, I have grabbed a few screenshots and shared that information on this blog. In addition, I went through a few different comparison and merge scenarios to make sure what was presented to me by BC3 was consistent between VS2010 and VS2012. Everything looks to be in order.

Compare:

• Extension: .*
• Operation: Compare
• Command: Local Path and Filename for Beyond Compare Executable (bcomp.exe)
• Arguments: %1 %2 /title1=%6 /title2=%7

Two way Merge:

• Extension: .*
• Operation: Merge
• Command: Local Path and Filename for Beyond Compare Executable (bcomp.exe)
• Arguments: %1 %2 /savetarget=%4 /title1=%6 /title2=%7

Three Way Merge (BC3 Pro Only):

• Extension: .*
• Operation: Merge
• Command: Local Path and Filename for Beyond Compare Executable (bcomp.exe)
• Arguments: %1 %2 %3 %4 /title1=%6 /title2=%7 /title3=%8 /title4=%9

X-COM over the Years

Nearly two decades ago, I became addicted, terrified and completely transfixed by my first video game. I spent countless hours cooped up in the computer room trying to find a way to triumph over the game. It is the first time that I can remember that I was so focused on the video game that a rather innocuous in-game event startled and proceeded to scare the utter bejeezus out of me. This game was X-COM: UFO Defense which came out in 1994 and was purchased by myself probably within the first year it was released.If I recall correctly, it was a pretty casual purchase. I saw the game at my local computer store and plopped down my hard-earned money from one of my restaurant-industry minimum wage jobs thinking, What the heck, this sounds fun. I could not have been more correct. What followed was hours upon hours of challenging, thoughtful and entertaining gameplay. Over the years, I played X-COM: UFO Defense well beyond the point it was obsolete.

Over the years I have contemplated on what I think the best video games of all time are. Between types of games and the amazing advances made possible by constant hardware advancement, it has always been difficult to compare these games and list them. However, I cannot imagine that X-COM: UFO Defense is likely to be topped by many games at all. It was and still is a tremendous blend of strategy, action, suspense and difficulty.

This made the following years pretty difficult. There was a pretty disappointing sequel, XCOM: Terror from the Deep shortly after XCOM, which was not received as well and quickly gathered dust on bookshelves to be disregarded for other titles. As I churned through different video games, I hoped that another game would grab hold of me like X-COM: UFO Defense. From time to time, I would hear or read rumors about the next X-COM game, but those always wound up being a massive let-down when those plans were either cancelled or the game released really was not comparable to the original title.

Screenshots from the Original X-COM: UFO Defense

Imagine my delight and surprise when I signed into Steam a month or so ago to see a XCOM: Enemy Unknown as a featured game recommendation for me. After reading a few encouraging reviews but not too many, I picked up a copy for myself.

What is XCOM: Enemy Unknown?

In my own words, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is not really a sequel, but more of a new take on the original title. The basic concept of the game is the same: aliens are waging the beginning of an invasion on Earth. Governments band together to fight the invasion; your funding depends on how well you respond to the invasion. If you have poor results, countries drop out and take their funding with them. At the same time you are recovering, researching, duplicating and using alien technologies to fight back the invasion.

Combat against the aliens takes place as a turn-based strategy. You control a squad of soldiers whose responsibility involves eradicating the invaders. A soldier can only perform so many moves in a single turn, plus there are a number of between-turn actions such as Overwatch that you may want to use to protect your squad during the alien’s turn. The soldiers under your command improve as they gain experience, learning new skills and specialties along the way.

The ultimate goal of the game is to turn the tide and take the fight to source of the aliens invasion. This is opened up as you progress through the missions and research goals laid out for you.

What is Different and New about XCOM: Enemy Unknown?

Since it is a re-imagination, there are some wrinkles to the new title that I wanted to mention specifically. These are tweaks that are different between the original version and this new version. For almost each of these changes I understand the concept behind the change; if I were a purist I might be a bit disappointed, but in general these changes are things that I wound up liking.

• Smaller Battles: The size of the various battles seems to have shrunk by a bit. The maximum size of your squad has been reduced, the amount of territory that needed to be covered has shrunk, and the number of aliens needing eradicating has dropped. In the original game, I cannot tell you how many hours I wound up spending hunting down that one last alien who seemed to have way more movement ability than my soldiers did. Often times, when chasing these aliens down, I lost soldiers along the way, which was always frustrating. I am not sure how I felt about this change. While I appreciated not having to waste a bunch of times exploring an expansive terrain sometimes I also felt that I would have preferred a more expansive scene to conquer.
• No more Ammunition: One of the things that frustrated the heck out of me in the original game was the fact that you not only had to research and build the weapons, but also ammunition. Whenever I had weapons powerful enough to fight the aliens, I did not have enough materials to keep those weapons in play. The fact that I did not have enough materials to make the ammunition is probably a reflection of my poor game-play but I always felt that it was a little too much of micro-managing. I do not mind taking a turn to reload the soldier’s weapon, but I always minded having to make sure each soldier has enough spare clips in their inventory to make it to the end of the battle.
• Psi-linkage of Aliens to their Weapons: In the original X-COM, you recovered weapons from the dead corpses of aliens. Your soldiers could then use those weapons, even if you had not yet researched that particular weapons technology. I remember many times picking up weapons off of dead aliens and using them immediately against the aliens. Sure, I could not manufacture the ammo (see above), but they helped even things out early on when my poor little rookie soldiers were getting massacred by the advanced weaponry. To fix this in the latest X-COM game, weapons are linked to their owners and self-destruct if the owner is killed. This was rough in two regards; you can’t even out the playing field when the aliens have a massive weaponry advantage early on, and secondly, if you want to research that technology you had to capture and keep the aliens alive. Capturing a live alien is no small feat, and requires a bit of risk and luck on your point. It took me a few missions before I captured my first alien and I wound up losing one or two decent soldiers along the way.
• Only One Base: In the first rendition, you provided coverage to additional countries by building bases on different continents. Each of those bases was a huge drain on your budget because you had to build a big enough base to house the hangars and whatever ancillary facilities were needed. In the latest game, you build up your coverage by basically purchasing hangar space from different countries and launching satellites to cover the region. Of the two approaches I am not sure which I prefer. It seemed to be easier to cover the globe and reduce panic in the latest X-COM game than it ever was in the original.

Videos

There are a few great videos and tons of screenshots available on the Steam, YouTube and across the Internet. I hunted down the trailer and some game play videos. Please feel to provide links to your X-COM: Enemy Unknown material down in the comments section.

X-COM: Enemy Unknown Trailer

X-COM: Enemy Unknown Game Play Video

Conclusion

I was very excited to buy, download and play X-COM: Enemy Unknown. I have racked up over a hundred hours of game play. And unlike the original, I did something in X-COM: Enemy Unknown that I was never capable of doing in the original: I completed the final mission. As with all sequels, there were some aspects of the new game that did not quite measure up to the first game, but there were many areas in which X-COM: Enemy Unknown surpassed the original. If you were a fan of the first, I am pretty confident that you will enjoy the second. If you had not heard of X-COM before its release, I think you will ease right in and enjoy X-COM: Enemy Unknown much to the same extent that I enjoyed X-COM: UFO Defense back in the day. All in all, this is a worthy reboot of a game that was practically perfect in the first place.

This past weekend, a group of friends and I took our cars out to the North Star Dragway a 1/8th mile drag strip in Denton for one of the Fun ‘N Grudge nights with the purpose of doing a few races with our daily drivers. Since it was November and this was the last event on their schedule for the year, we anticipated that this week would be pretty busy with all sorts of cars. However, the weather (quite cold for most Texans) was down in the 40-degree range, which kept a bunch of people at home.

Back when I owned a turbocharged all-wheel-drive car, this type of night was fantastic to be out driving because everything runs much better when the air is cool and dense. Now with a naturally aspirated motor with tires that have been through God-only-knows how many heat and cool cycles, the weather was not looking to be my ally.

Not that I would let weather be an excuse for any of my times; I already knew I was not going to perform up to the pedigree of my Z06. In the six months that I have owned the car I have pretty much babied it; up until that night I hadn’t even attempted any kind of launch-off of a simulated starting line. And as very few people know, there is a big difference between reading about it on the Internet and actually doing it.

Altogether, that night; I personally made five runs down the track and my friend, “The Greatness,” made two while I gave him a chance to put his money where his big mouth is after mocking me for being so tremendously slow. Good news was, my friend was just a little bit slower than I was.

Pass One

Man, was I a bundle of nervous energy. I had a Mothra-sized butterfly running around in my stomach as I tried to recall exactly how the drag tree worked and when I should hit the gas. As evidenced by my reaction time, I hit very, very late; so late, in fact, that I almost wound up racing the cars behind me in line. To make matters worse, my prior experience with high-revolution little rotary motors or four-bangers led me to bouncing off the Z06’s rev limiter not one or two times, but THREE times. Every single shift was way too late; perhaps I should invest in some sort of shift light.

    Reaction....1.0774
    60 FT.......2.3545
    330 FT......6.0101
    1/8 ET......9.0220
    1/8 MPH......81.40

Pass Two

Bound and determined, I made another pass 30 minutes later. This time, convincing myself that I was going to launch so early that I was sure to fault, I managed to cut down on my reaction time by a tiny fraction (18%). Ultimately, I did not have much to complain about for this pass—not because it was so good, but because it was not nearly as bad as the others. This pass wound up being my best of the night.

    Reaction....0.8276
    60 FT.......2.0940
    330 FT......5.74535
    1/8 ET......8.6376
    1/8 MPH......89.86

Pass Three

After the second pass, I immediately lined up for a third. I had taken a pretty good bite out of my first time and I wanted to keep making progress. Again, my reaction time was a little bit better, but not really very good. Additionally, I bogged a bit more on the launch and wound up running just a fraction slower than my prior run.

    Reaction....0.8145
    60 FT.......2.1019
    330 FT......5.7142
    1/8 ET......8.6542
    1/8 MPH......85.24

Pass Four

As I collected my timeslip on the third pass, I had a little bit of difficulty with basic vehicle operation and stalled the car. Seeing how close I was to my prior run, I queued up for another run but made one tragic mistake. Since I had stalled the car out previously, my car reverted back to its “normal” mode with both traction control and active handling enabled. Traction control engaged both off the line and on one or two shifts. Upon seeing the “Traction Control Engaged” message in the car, I let up off the gas and coasted through the end of the race. Upon returning to our pack of friends, Pat pointed out that I was not even going the speed limit on that pass.

    Reaction....0.6730
    60 FT.......2.4632
    330 FT......6.1246
    1/8 ET......9.3338
    1/8 MPH......68.98

Pass Five

A funny thing happened at the end of pass four. As I downshifted and turned off the track, my clutch pedal stuck to the floor. I had joked early on about seeing “Which of us would burn out a clutch first,” and chuckled wryly as I thought karma was playing a joke on me. After stopping in the parking lot and checking clutch fluid, I wanted to close out the night and see if I could improve on my earlier runs at all. I wound up getting a much better reaction time, but a terrible launch. I trapped the second highest speed but paid the price for a poor launch and logged my third best time.

    Reaction....0.3483
    60 FT.......2.3023
    330 FT......5.9315
    1/8 ET......8.7741
    1/8 MPH......88.18

Conclusion

There were a number of things I did poorly; namely, making sure that traction control was off, bad launches, and bouncing off the rev limiter. And there were a number of helpful things I did not do that might have helped like lower my tire pressure and try to heat the tires a bit with a burnout.

At the very least, I doubled the number of passes I had done previously on a drag strip (only 1-2 runs in my ‘92 Eclipse GSX more than 10 years ago). I definitely went faster in the 1/8th mile than I ever had in my Eclipse. Hopefully when the track opens back up for the 2013 season I will be back out there working on getting my time down into the 8.5s and hopefully lower.