Ardamis » Projects

My new Dell Precision 690 workstation

ardamis — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 06:06:52 +0000

I just picked up an old Dell Precision 690 workstation, which I intend to develop into a file server, a Windows IIS server, and an Ubuntu LAMP server. This monster was built in 2006, but it still has some neat specs and tons of capacity (7 PCI slots, 4 hard drive bays, etc…), should I want to expand further.

The main specs

CPU: Dual Core Intel Xeon 5060 3.2GHz, 4M Cache, 1066 MHz FSB
RAM: 2GB DDR2 PC2-5300, CL=5, Fully Buffered, ECC, DDR2-667
HD: SAS Fujitsu MAX3073RC 73GB, 15000 RPM, 16MB Cache
Video: Nvidia Quadro NVS 285 PCI-Express, 128MB

This is not a normal tower

Right away, the size of this thing suggests it isn’t a normal tower. It’s about up to my knee and weights 70 lbs. It feels like it’s made with heavier gauge steel than the typical chassis, but that may be me projecting.

I immediately shopped around for more RAM, obviously. 2GB seems a little thin, even by 2006 standards, when considering the way everything else is high-end. The mainboard has 8 slots and supports up to 32GB, but I figure 6GB is a safe place to start.

The workstation has three enormous fans, like, big-as-your-hand big. Running it with the chassis open causes some sort of thermal protection system to kick in and it spins the fans up to the point that they were blowing stuff on the floor half-way across the room.

The CPU has a big, passive heat sink with six copper pipes and sits between two of those fans. I’m tempted to buy a second CPU, but I’ll hold off.

I’m still on the fence about the SCSI drive. It should be super fast, but I’m a little spoiled by the SSD in my machine at work, so it’s hard to get excited about a mechanical drive, even one running at 15k RPM.

The Nvidia Quadro card is also fanless, and has a bizarre DMS-59 connector. An adapter converts the DMS-59 connector into two DVI outputs.

Aleph Studios Is Launched

ardamis — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:33:34 +0000

For some time, I’ve felt that Ardamis.com was being pulled in two directions. It started out as something of a business card, then it landed me a job, and so the focus changed and it became more of a personal blog. A few years later, I found myself posting mainly code snippets from personal projects and announcements of new site launches.

So, I’ve determined that I’ll keep Ardamis.com as a place for experimentation and create a new site to handle the web development business – Aleph Studios. It’s so new that I have to think sometimes about how Aleph is spelled as I type it.

I’ll be migrating some of the pages away from Ardamis over the next week or two.

HTML auction template generator

ardamis — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:18:20 +0000

A friend who does a lot of selling on eBay asked me to develop a web application for generating HTML templates that could be copied and pasted into his auctions. He wanted to be able to add a title, a description, and some terms and conditions, and also to be able to upload images so the auction template would display thumbnails that could be clicked to display full-sized versions in a new window or tab. The more we talked, the more it sounded like something that would be both useful for a good number of people, and potentially a source of ad revenue for us. And so was born Simple Auction Wizard, an online HTML template generator for auction websites like eBay.

I was looking for just this kind of a project because I wanted a reason to play with TinyMCE, an Open Source, platform independent, web-based JavaScript HTML WYSIWYG editor control, and SWFUpload, a small JavaScript/Flash library that does very neat things with file uploads.

The most difficult part was actually getting the templates to look good in a variety of browsers. Because the template HTML appears inside of a larger page, I couldn’t rely on Doctype switching to place IE into standards mode. This meant the templates would have to be developed so that they would look approximately the same in standards-compliant browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, as well as horrible browsers like IE6 in quirks-mode. I tried very hard to minimize the use of tables, but they eventually crept in. I was able to use CSS, for the most part, though if any more issues come up, I’m going to throw in the towel and just do inline styles.

The web app is open to the public, but realize that it’s very early in its development and I intend to continue making changes.