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This weekend I built a new PC. After spending a few hours and cutting myself I finished. Oh, I had to install XP three different times for various reasons. You can read my post "To Build or not to Build".

Well, I spent countless hours debating if I would build a PC, or just save myself that hassle and buy one. I priced out a system I wanted on Dell's website. This was for a system with the following specs:

• Pentium 4 1.8 GHZ
• 512 MB RDRAM (Rambus)
• 60 or 80 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
• CD-RW
• Intel Chipset (I don't trust the others, and for good reason)
• 1394 Firewire
• Geoforce4 Ti 4400 or 4600

Here was the Dell Price:

$1,418.00

So let's see how I did. I was able to salvage the following parts from another PC:

• CD-RW
• 1394 Firewire
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• Windows XP Professional (hey, I work for Microsoft! this costs me $30)

And the total cost came to:

$1150.00

So I managed to save myself about $268. There were a few differences. Dell wasn't offering me the new .13 micron Intel Pentium 4 1.8A processor. For the difference between the "A" series and the regular .18 micron chips check out this article. I also got an Intel 850MV motherboard with Rambus memory and LAN. I went with Intel because I don't trust all those other hokey motherboards. At least with Intel you know you are getting good old American quality.

This processor is the main reason I built a Pentium computer vs. the cheaper Athalon. My roommate has an Athalon XP right now and I have a few issues with it. Primarily, it's big, power hungry and noisy. The new Intel .13 micron chip is really small. Plus because it's Intel you know that there are all kind of optimizations for Windows. Bottom line, this processor screams. My PC boots in under 15 seconds.

Now, did I pay a price for the $268 savings? Well don't you always when you build a PC? What went wrong for me? Well it was the fact that I wanted to take advantage of the new S3 Standby Mode (other wise known as Suspend To Ram). Intel calls this Instantly Available PC.

Well the problem for me was that even though all my hardware supported this, I installed Windows XP with the BIOS set to the S1 state (which is regular old standby). S3 is a setting that needs to be enabled. By doing so, the computer can go into standby mode drawing only 5 watts. The benefit is that the computer appears to be off, but resumes from standby in a few seconds. It's bliss.

Well, I spent 4 hours troubleshooting this problem. Eventually I found some google post that indicated that if you install XP in S1 mode you can never get the OS to sleep in S3 mode. There is a command line tool called DUMPPO.EXE that Microsoft makes available in some OEMs that allows you to test out all the standby functions of the PC. However, when set the S3 mode like so:

DUMPPO AC MAXSLEEP=S3

Then it works. Of course I didn't find this out until after taking my PC apart, putting it back together and so on. However, the problem is when you reboot, this setting is reset to S1 again. Oh well, so much for not re-installing XP. I'm doing that now.

Why oh why do things like this have to happen? I just sent some mail around Microsoft to find out why there isn't any mention of this anywhere on the web. Intel doesn't mention it, and Microsoft doesn't have a Knowledge Base article describing the problem. Maybe it's because they don't want anyone to use this feature?

Update: well it turns out that my hack above only worked during the current session but then reset after a reboot. I had to re-install the OS after all.

Why Do New iMacs Surf So Slowly?. User complaints confirmed by an independent test maintain the new flat-screen iMacs are reallllllly slow on the Web. Seems the problem is an operating system legacy issue. By Paul Boutin. [Wired News]

Interesting article, especially since my roomate (Jimmy) is quoted in here. I bet this kicks up a s#%^ storm.

Fortune.com- Peter Lewis on Technology [Daypop Top 40]

Boy oh boy, and I thought I had problems dealing with companies that provide "services".

Microsoft backs Bluetooth with hardware. Chairman Bill Gates plans to announce Thursday at WinHEC that the company is putting its muscle behind the wireless networking technology. [CNET News.com]

Finally. Now my bluetooth phone can talk to my PC!

New Gear Alert: Cornea CT1702 Digital LCD/TV

Just picked up a Cornea CT1702 LCD. I bought this LCD based on many recommendations from friends.

Basically this LCD is made by a little unknown company that is a subsidiary of Cornea Technology, the third largest TFT-LCD and plasma display manufacturer in Korea. They make excellent LCDs with 400:1 contrast ratios, which is dammed good. The display is really bright.

A few months ago they were making the CT1703 which had DVI input, but to cut costs they removed the Digital Video Interface (DVI). That was incredibly short sighted as there is no reason to buy an LCD without DVI. It amazes me that people even buy analog LCDs, they don't know what they are missing. The price on this display was $530 so it was a steal for a 17inch display.

Well, this display is the only DVI capable display that they still make. It has the added bonus of having a TV tuner with remote control. It's also VESA compliant meaning you can attach a variety of industry standard arm mounts. So I got it on ebay for a bit under $700. I plan on using this display as the new monitor/tv for my new guestroom/office in our new apartment.

I just ordered this new keychain. I should get it in a few days.

I got an email from Marc Barrot asking about hooking up Entourage and Radio. Well since I work on Entourage you'd think I would have thought of this first . Well I remember that I had that thought last night but quickly forgot it while in a sea of endless fighting with my Mac to get the SOAP posting working (remember, I ended up going with XML-RPC).

Well, I'll probably first hook it up to Entourage Notes and also likely add one for Entourage Calendar. I could see this getting pretty interesting. I could probably use categories to allow you to write a bunch of posts offline and have them batch processed to Radio. Now if only the Radio SOAP Blogger API supported categories.

I got Simon Fell's Word to Radio Macros working with Mac Word X and Mac OS 10.1. I mainly did this because some one posted that they were sad that this was a Windows only solution. Well I made Simon's work by putting together some AppleScript and Visual Basic. I used XML-RPC instead of SOAP because I wasted 6 hours trying to figure out why the SOAP version didn't work. I then realized this was because one of the params for the API is "password" and guess what? Password is a reserved keyword in AppleScript and I saw no way to fix that. Oh well.

There are four steps to setting this up.

1. Install the Word Macro. Download the following file. Open it and select all and copy the text. Launch Mac Word X and select Tools->Macro->Visual Basic Editor. Select Normal in the Project Window and select Insert->Module in the file menu. Paste the text that you just copied to the clipboard. Now select the name field in the Properties Window and name it "WordRadio". It is very important that you do this or the AppleScript will fail. Now you are done with Word. Click the "W" button in the top left toolbar and your back in Word.
2. Get the Script Menu for Mac OS 10.1. This menu will allow you to run AppleScripts from the Finder. After you install it select Open Scripts Folder in the Script Menu.
3. Download the Word To Radio AppleScript and place it in the folder that you opened at the end of Step 2. Make sure to open the AppleScript and add the necessary info if you have a username and password for your Radio Server. Also if you want to post to a remote radio server you can enter that info as well (note: proxy servers are not supported because Apple's software doesn't support them).
4. Configure Radio to allow posting via the Blogger API. You do this by going to prefs page and make sure that XML-RPC & SOAP are enabled, and that the Blogger API is enabled.

That's it for now. Go type some stuff in a Word doc, select "Word To Radio" in the new Script Menu and your post should make it's way to your Blog (note if your menu bar is running out of space, the script menu may not display. If that is the case, switch to the finder first).

There are some things that can be better such as:

• better install process
• ability to update a post
• better error checking
• support for paragraphs

but that should be good for now as I've run out of free time for now. Enjoy!

By the way, if you look at the transcript from wed and you do a search for “Omar” on the page you’ll see my name.

Do we need the penny?

Steve Zellers is connecting AppleScript to Google.  [Scripting News]

Here is the entire transcript of the talk Kevin Browne (GM of Macintosh Business Unit) gave on our campus yesterday.

Google: "With the Google Web APIs service, software developers can query more than 2 billion web documents directly from their own computer programs." Bravo!  [Scripting News]

Very cool!

Microsoft to continue Mac support. update As a five-year agreement with Apple Computer draws to a close, Microsoft reiterates its support for the Macintosh. [CNET News.com]

It's interesting to go to an event, and read about what tech writers say... especially when you work for the group they are talking about. Anyway, hopefully the media will be less paranoid about the fact that the technology agreement expires in August while MacBU marks is 5 year anniversary shiping lots of amazing software. Of all the products we've shipped in that time, I've had the opportunity of working on 2 of them with 4 releases in 3 years. It's been fun!