Case:  Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS Black Aluminum/Steel ATX Full Tower

Power Supply:  PC Power & Cooling TURBO-COOL 850 SSI T85SSI SLI, EPS12V, SSI 850W!! Continuous @ 50°C Power Supply 90 - 264 V UL/ ULC/ CE/ TUV

Motherboard:  SUPERMICRO H8DCE-O Dual Socket 940 NVIDIA nForce Professional MB

Firewire Card:  Koutech 4-Port FireWire/1394 PCI

CPU: 2x  AMD Opteron 285 Italy 2.6GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket 940 Dual Core Processor

System Drives: 2x  Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150

SATA Controller:  Areca ARC-1220 PCI-Express x8 SATA II Controller Card RAID level 0, 1(10), 3, 5, 6

Data Drives: 8x HITACHI Deskstar 7K500 HDS725050KLA360 (0A31619) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s. That’s right. I said 8 of them!

Hot-Swap Backplane: 2x Athena Power BP-SATA3141B 3 x 5.25"Bays to 4 x 3.5"HD (SATA) Back Plane

RAM: 8x  Transcend 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM ECC Registered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Server System Memory

Video Card:  XFX PVT71UZDF9 Geforce 7950GX2 1GB 512-bit (256-bit x2) GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Xtreme

Monitor: Dell 30” UltraSharp Widescreen Monitor

I am now in the process of installing XP Pro x64, just to make sure the hardware and 64-bit drivers work under XP. I've only got 2GB of RAM in it now, but plan to expand as soon as I'm sure it's all going to work.

I was able to create a x64 disc from the MSDN DVDs but the setup couldn't find the EULA and it stopped. I don't have the disc with the ISO images, so I'm downloading it. I am just happy that it boots at this point.

You probably heard if you listened to .NET Rocks! #200 that we used the word "video" a few times. We recorded us all on video, and I'll be editing all that into the next .NET Rocks! Movie. It will be available on DVD sometime in the near future.

Geoff took some photos from the shoot. Here are a couple of them, and more are coming tomorrow.

Geoff Maciolek, Rory Blyth, Richard Campbell, Carl Franklin, Mark Miller, and Mark Dunn

The Mondays Crew! Carl, Mark Miller, Geoff, Richard, and Karen Greenwald

Hey, was that the funniest "Dumbah than Me" Mark Miller has ever done, or what?

We cover a lot of entertaining ground on this landmark episode. Carl treats us to a live performance as well as a preview of a remake of a classic. We quiz the previous DNR co-hosts and give out a bunch of free swag! Also, Mark Miller acts a bit confused.

http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=203

So Let Me Tell You About My Hobby

What’s that you say? You’re stuck in a foreign land, surrounded by the local idiots who all speak some crazy/different language? Who can you turn to for advice in this delicate situation? The Millinator, that’s who. Mark reveals everything you need to make a positive impression.

All Together

Carl, Karen, Richard, Mark, and Geoff are all together in the studio this week. Mark delivers what could be the funniest dumbah ever, Carl takes his cat to a questionable vet, Karen gets pissed at exploitive parents, and Richard... well, you know.

Proposed Amendment to the Neopoleon County Blue Laws

There is another sinister affront to the good Neopoleon County to which I have been made privy in recent and difficult times.

Technology Meets Geeky Humor
Carl Franklin’s road from hotshot programmer to funny podcast guru
Armi Rowe, Shore Staff Writer
E-mail: A.Rowe@shorepublishing.com
Original Article: http://theday.com/re.aspx?re=e483d943-556b-4627-9f3f-ed21cf14c009

Carl Franklin's talk show Mondays airs whenever listeners want to tune in and their earphones are not hooked up to the radio. They listen to his track through a podcast they can access with their iTunes subscription or through a download from the Web site www.mondays.pwop.com on an mp3 player or computer.

The full name of the weekly podcast show is “Mondays: What Sunday Threw Up.” As listeners reluctantly begin their workweek, the witty one-hour show offers entertainment from a crew that dishes their current rant, vent and eye-opening epiphany. This is delivered with a huge dose of sarcasm and comedic timing.

From the listener's end, you imagine the cast of four sitting together in a studio somewhere as they sound off each other. But the reality is that technology ties their voices together across the hall from separate sound booths with phone-line data traversing the country from as far as Southern California and Vancouver to a studio in New London. It is set up as a multi-track recording on Friday nights, edited over the weekend and then becomes available for downloading on Monday mornings.

It all started in Franklin's basement nine years ago. He had just moved from Ledyard when he purchased a new home for his family in Waterford. He had been working for two companies in Minnesota as a home-based computer-programming developer.

“I had made a big name for myself in California. I was a hotshot programmer so they let me work from home,” said Franklin. “It was the worst job I ever had.”

Due to the demanding hours, working in solitude, having no support staff and finding great difficulty separating work from home, Franklin decided to quit his home-based livelihood.

He decided to make a living sharing his knowledge. Between speaking engagements as an industry expert, he authored two books on Visual Basic and Internet Programming.

In 1999, he set out to try teaching weeklong hands-on “How to Program Along With Carl” workshops specifically for developers at local hotels. According to Franklin, recognized by Microsoft as a technical leader in the programming community, most development training at the time was done by training organizations that would teach general computer programs like Word and Excel and there was a need for his training approach among the technologically savvy.

“People were hungry for knowledge,” he said. “Programming is not an exact science. It's all problem-solving. So it takes somebody with experience to teach it.”

People who had read his industry magazine articles, heard him speak at conferences and accessed his Web site knew that he knew his stuff. His course drew a wide student body of programmers from as far as Oklahoma and from countries like Denmark and Brazil. At this point, he was still working out of his basement, doing all his e-mail and organization there and using the hotels for their computer equipment and teaching space.

By 2000, Franklin had secured his own space in downtown New London at the Dewart Building on State Street. He set up a training room and leased 20 computers, a projector and a big screen. Working for himself and teaching this niche material became a lucrative, steady gig for Franklin over the next five years. Today, he markets this training business as www.franklins.net and no longer does all the teaching. He teams up with other experts he has met through interview on the show, allowing them to use his training space and sharing a small cut of their revenue.

The 39-year-old Waterford father of two daughters realized yet another brainstorm in 2002, when he entered the podcasting frontier. There were companies experimenting with video on the Web, but that was not proving successful. A self-described public radio show addict, Franklin loved Saturday morning shows like “Car Talk,” “Whadya Know” and “Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.” He observed that no one was doing anything with radio about technology. This was before podcasting even became a word. Why not use a talk-show radio format discussing technology on the Internet?

Hence the 2002 birth of www.dotnetrocks.com, a weekly talk show for people interested in programming in the Microsoft .NET platform. According to the site, the show ranges from introductory information to hardcore geekiness. Franklin has been quoted in Wired Magazine and The New York Times for his participation as a pioneer in podcasting technology.

“Now, instead of speaking at programming conferences, Richard and I will interview someone live on stage, record it and turn it into next week's show,” said Franklin, who co-hosts the .NET Rocks! Show with Richard Campbell, also recognized by Microsoft as an expert in building scalable Web sites on the Microsoft .NET platform.

They are regular speakers and “live show hosts” to programming conference audiences all over the world, having recently recorded shows at the Tulsa Tech Fest, and in faraway places like Sofia, Bulgaria. They are scheduled to air another one from Barcelona in November. In 2005, the site generated 1.5 million downloads, generating much of its revenue through advertising sponsorships.

During the first year of .NET Rocks! the show's podcasts focused purely on industry expert interviews with some casual jokes thrown in occasionally. By 2004, Franklin's new co-host, funny guy Rory Blyth, inspired a comedy segment that the crew added, stretching the show from one to two hours. At first, they received positive feedback, but downloads were not increasing.

According to Franklin, there were “rumblings in the community that they did not like the fluff. This resulted in “Mondays,” the November 2004 comedy spin-off, which satisfied the need for .NET Rocks! to maintain its purely business focus and for the edgy comedy skits to stand alone, devoid of any awkward placement.

Franklin gathered an ensemble of funny colleagues who are also blessed with technical genius: Mark Miller of Southern California, Richard Campbell of Vancouver and Geoff Maciolek, the sound guy from New London. Then there is Karen Greenwald, a mother of two in Waterford who Franklin said was not technical at all but happened to be “his neighbor and the funniest female he knew.”

“It's unbelievable. She came in here once about 10 minutes before recording. I said, 'Whatcha got?' and she said, 'Nothing. I had some thoughts,'” recalled Franklin. “She's got a pad, 10 minutes of writing and then it was the funniest thing I ever heard.”

He said that they all fumbled their way through the first 16 episodes and by the 17th episode, the show evolved so that each character has a bit. Franklin offers “Things I've Learned This Week,” Greenwald showcases “Girl,” Miller points out the week's idiots in “People Dumber Than Me,” and Campbell reviews Web sites selling geeky toys in a segment called “Richard the Toy Boy.”

All the characters provide good support for each other as the reigning bit leader chimes on. This results in what sounds like letters to the editor with an edgy twist.

“I wanted it to be that way,” said Franklin, who said that what makes his ensemble work is setting each other up and self-deprecation. “If the four of us sat down here right now and had a conversation it would be 'Mondays.' That's the way that we are.”

These days, between his training company and the two podcast shows, Franklin is gainfully self-employed. “Mondays” has since produced two additional podcast comedy spin-offs: www.millaseconds.com, a 5-10 second weekly rant from Miller and www.thesmartestman.com, a 10-minute narrated essay over music. Both air weekly on Saturdays.

But Franklin can't help pursuing more new projects. In February 2005, he created Pwop Productions, which is the umbrella name for .NET Rocks! and Mondays. It is also the company that now offers professional podcasting and audio services to the business world. He has developed podcasts for Nintendo, Eastern Mountain Sports and Microsoft's Academic Alliance.

Franklin's talents are far-reaching, but it also has local business appeal. Recently, his services were tapped by the Thames River Wine & Spirits to create www.wineradio.com. He is looking to work with more local businesses that are interested in experimenting with this hot medium.

Waterford

  Venkat Subramaniam on Ruby-like Features of .NET

Dr. V opens the door to new worlds in .NET as he shows us some of the hidden Ruby-like features .NET developers can use today.

http://dnrTV.com/default.aspx?showID=41

<Diabetes Technology/>

This week Scott and Carl talk about the latest technology around dealing with Diabetes, as well as a short discussion of the basics.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=50

Josh talks with Carl and Richard about SQL Everywhere, Windows Vista, and the Visual Studio Class Designer, as well as his new role at Microsoft as a Breadth Architect Evangelist.

http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=202

The Angry Show

Karen sets the tone for this show with stories of domestic dumbness. Geoff follows suit with an eruption against microphone touching, and Mark has stories of dumb that involve our fearless leader. Carl gives the dogs at the baggage claim an unexpected treat, and Richard finds some bad bad bad bad toys.

Neopoleon County Blue Laws: Effective Immediately

My blog has been getting a bit rowdy lately, therefore these blue laws will be effective immediately, without exception.

My Boss is an Idiot

This may be your last chance to hear Millahseconds with Mark as a full-time employee. Next week expect updates from the unemployment line and soup kitchen. But don't worry about that. It's time to take on the man. Think your boss is dumbah than Mark's? Mark offers his first round of proof in this week's episode of Millahseconds. Listen in.

Mark Miller on Events and Delegates

Mark Miller takes delegates, a fundamental programming feature, where few have gone before. This show is as entertaining as it is educational.

http://dnrTV.com/default.aspx?showID=40

<Scott Guthrie/>

Scott catches up with Scott Guthrie in an interview covering Ajax, Asp 2.0, extender controls, CSS adapters and more.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=49

Carl and Richard were in Sofia, Bulgaria at the very first DevReach conference last week. A lively panel discussion is accented with short interviews with the locals.

http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=201

This year will be the ultimate prank, so long as I can actually pull it off. In theory it will work great. It's a real-time video image of a head floating in the doorway that actually talks with the people on the porch.

My outside front door is a full-length glass door. The inside door will be open and you'll see up the stairs into my house. As soon as the doorbell rings, the head will appear, look at the kids and say "go away! There’s no candy here!" or something. It will then proceed to comment on their costumes and talk to them. Of course, it's me in a mask or makeup or something.

The Ingredients:

• A decent LCD projector with a good contrast ratio.
• A low-lux color CCC video camera
• A wireless lapel microphone connected to a mixer
• A 5'x5' sheet of black fleece
• A transparent projection screen big enough to cover the glass in my front door
• A wireless security camera with audio
• A set of powered speakers to hide on the porch with a subwoofer under the cement platform.

The transparent screen gets taped on the inside edges of the glass door, completely covering it. I am sitting in the basement in front of the black fleece. The color camera is sitting on an LCD monitor aimed at me, and I've got the lapel mic hidden but close to my mouth. That mic goes to a mixer which is fed to the speakers under the porch. The wireless security camera is outside, aimed at (but out of view of) the porch. The video feed from that goes to the monitor, and the audio feed goes to a small earbud in my ear (also out of view of the camera). The LCD projector is hidden and projecting my face onto the door. I can see and hear them. They can see and hear me, and there's my semi-opaque head floating in the window. Hiding the LCD projector is the biggest challenge. We may have to use one or two mirrors.

We're going to videotape the whole process. I promise to share. :-)

Some Thoughts on Reincarnation

I think I've managed to explain some statistical trends, here.

Hey, British People Don't Suck as Much as we Thought!

Mark extends an olive branch of peace to those oh-so polite British folks, and learns a thing or two about rubbers and spotted dick. Hey! It's not what you think!

<Jeffrey Snover, PowerShell Architect/>

Scott turns the tables and interviews Jeffrey Snover, the Architect of PowerShell (previously Monad) and gets the lowdown on the history of this enhanced management shell.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=47

I’ve learned that “mamka mu” means “Oh Shit!” in Bulgarian. However, I learned this after we spent 4 hours in a restaurant agressively toasting “mamka mu!!” and drinking large quantities of rakia.

I’ve learned that shaking your head means yes and nodding means no in Bulgaria. Fortunately, I was warned before I did my talk.

I’ve learned that when you ask the locals how to say “thank you for the beer” in Bulgarian, they might tell you how to say “my mother is a sheep” or “I have three testicles”, so always get a second opinion.

This is a photo (click to enlarge) taken by Sahil Malik at what was our best night out since we got here. We went to a great restaurant up in the mountains of Sofia, which we got to by taxi. The road turned to cobblestone as the grade increased, and the driver was absolutely booking up this road. Potholes be damned. From left to right are Goksin Bakir (the Golden Boy RD from Turkey), Mire Ivanova and Svetlen Nakov (See Julie Lerman’s Blog later in the week for a video of this crazy Bulgarian Chalga man), and Stephen Forte… all doing the Chalga dance.

The DevReach conference was two days (October 9 and 10, 2006) in Sofia Bulgaria.  I did a talk on RSS, Podcasting, and Syndication, and we also recorded a live .NET Rocks! at the end of the first day. Listen to next week’s show for more stories from Sofia.

In this episode of Dot Net Rocks, one of our earliest guests returns to talk about the power of (and problems with) the patent process, and the growing complexity of intellectual properly law in the Enited States, Europe, and the world.

http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=200

the Bluvaries Show

Carl, Richard, Mark, Karen and Geoff are back once again! The recurring theme of this week's show is not unlike the infamous Hawaiian Lackanookie syndrome. Bluvaries.

We had some technical and timing issues this week, but Lawrence is fast at work editing Mondays, and it WILL BE ONLINE sometime today…. we hope.

What I Learned at Sea World: Part 2

Mark brings some yummy churros to Sea World's shark tank. What could go wrong?

Ultimate Power

Autospelunking, and special times in the night. Children need ways to keep themselves busy...

In response to my last post, I just got a very happy email from Newegg.com:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting Newegg.

Your RMA number  for a replacement is XXXXXX, I sent you a separate email with all the instructions how to send the item back to us and I issued a $10.00 credit to cover the shipping fee. Thank you.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please visit our FAQs page.

Thank you,

Darlene Gutierrez

Thanks, Darlene! You guys rock!

No, I’m not talking about Don Henly’s 1990 masterpiece, I’m talking about the PC to beat all PCs. Yes, I’ve decided to build the biggest damned machine I’ve ever seen anywhere for my new Workstation.  This is to be my PC for development, testing, gaming, and audio, and video production. Of course, I am looking forward to Vista 64–bit. I’ve played a bit with the beta, but the state of drivers was not all that good, so I'm waiting for RTM.

OK, I’ve seen some pretty amazing machines, but never this much power as a workstation. First of all, here is my parts list:

Case:  Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS Black Aluminum/Steel ATX Full Tower

Power Supply:  PC Power & Cooling TURBO-COOL 850 SSI T85SSI SLI, EPS12V, SSI 850W!! Continuous @ 50°C Power Supply 90 - 264 V UL/ ULC/ CE/ TUV

Motherboard:  TYAN S2895A2NRF Dual Socket 940 NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 + 2050 + AMD8131 SSI EEB 3.5

CPU: 2x  AMD Opteron 285 Italy 2.6GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket 940 Dual Core Processor

System Drives: 2x  Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150

SATA Controller:  Areca ARC-1220 PCI-Express x8 SATA II Controller Card RAID level 0, 1(10), 3, 5, 6

Data Drives: 8x HITACHI Deskstar 7K500 HDS725050KLA360 (0A31619) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s. That’s right. I said 8 of them!

Hot-Swap Backplane: 2x Athena Power BP-SATA3141B 3 x 5.25"Bays to 4 x 3.5"HD (SATA) Back Plane

RAM: 8x  Patriot 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Desktop Memory

Video Card:  XFX PVT71UZDF9 Geforce 7950GX2 1GB 512-bit (256-bit x2) GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Xtreme

Monitor: Dell 30” UltraSharp Widescreen Monitor

The Story:

So I have been buying this machine in pieces over the last 2 months. I finally got it all together last night, flipped the switch and… nothing. No beeps. No video out. Nothing. Fans were going. Power supply was pushing juice. Drives spun up. No output.

Geoff and I removed everything, stripped it down to one CPU (trying each in turn) and only 1 GB of RAM. Only the CPU fans. Nothing. Took out all the RAM, unplugged the keyboard and all the hard drives. No beeps. No posting. DOA.

I then went to the Tyan website and read this quote:

I have a DOA motherboard, what do I do with it now?

Any DOA motherboard should be thoroughly tested to insure that there are no basic components that are responsible for this behavior (i.e. power supply, chassis, CPU's, memory and video).  If the motherboard does indeed turn out to be DOA then the board should be immediately returned to your vendor/distributor for swap out.

So I went to RMA page at www.newegg.com, and (lo and behold) I can’t return the Motherboard which I only bought 17 days ago. Here’s what it says:

Unfortunately, our records indicate that the manufacturer's parts warranty for this product has expired. Please contact the product manufacturer for additional service options.
Unfortunately, our records indicate that the manufacturer's labor warranty for this product has expired. Please contact the product manufacturer for additional service options.
This item is still eligible for replacement.

That last sentence sounds encouraging, but yet I cannot select the Motherboard as an item to return.

So, I sent off a letter to newegg. I will let you know what they say. Meantime I have a $10,000 door stop.

Juval Lowy on .NET 3.0

Juval Lowy introduces us to .NET 3.0, clearing up misconceptions and showing off the power of Windows Communication Foundation with a few choice demos.

http://dnrTV.com/default.aspx?showID=39

<HDTV/>

Scott and Carl discuss the current state of Hi-Def Television.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=46

Rob Conery talks about the appeal of Ruby on Rails and Subsonic, his ASP.NET productivity tool with Rails-like features.

http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=199

Yes, you read that correctly. Audio guru, technology wonk, amateur photographer, excessive hair donner, noise-band musician, Pwop sound engineer, and saviour of the world, Geoff (Jesus) Maciolek has committed an act of shaving off nearly all of his facial hair. I, for one, have never seen his upper lip before today.  Here is a photo I just snapped of him at the helm. Click the picture for the complete image.

Does this event mark a significant life change? Is he casting off his worldly attachments in pursuit of more spiritual endeavors? Is he finally moving out of the first chakra?

When asked why he shaved, he said “I got tired of it’

A likely story.

The Goat Show

Carl, Richard, Mark, and Karen are back! Goats are prominently referenced in this show, thanks to Mark Miller. Come to think of it, only a small part of the show has to do with goats. It's just that, well, you'll never forget it. This is for better of for worse. We don't know. Just listen

Live from the Gunks, professional climber Jason Kehl shares stories of memorable sends, crushing falls, and the life he lives in between. Hear about his 5.13+ first boulder ascent in Squamish, British Columbia - aka "summer camp for climbers", and his crushing mechanical bull injury. Jason stokes his creative fires through finding new routes, shaping holds, and sculpting art - including a sculpture of a giant piece of meat, which he's fond of hanging on friends walls when he comes to visit. In this episode, the man with the pimped-out van offers quite the kaleidoscope of climbing life on the road.

http://bluepizza.ems.com/default.aspx?showID=6