It had been threatening to pack in for a while, but one of my treasured 17" DELL CRTs finally decided that enough was enough, and went off to silicon heaven. It had a good run, considering that it cost me £20 from eBay at least 2 and a half years ago - though the P&P wouldn't have been much less than that again.

So finally (probably to much jubilation and mockery of my insistence on using CRTs for so long), I've finally purchased a TFT monitor, and will soon have more permanent desk space available for coffee cups and assorted clutter. The unit in question is an Iiyama 17" LCD 1280 X 1024 Black 2ms. It looks rather nice, and I'm hoping that the 2ms response time will go some way towards changing my opinions on cheap TFT screens. I've always said that I couldn't afford to replace my CRTs with a TFT that could match the image quality and response time. I hope I was wrong. I'm used to the 20.1" Sony TFTs we use at work, and I'm probably spoiled slightly - those things go for around £500 these days, whereas the Iiyama above is less than £150.

Incidentally, I was reminded of some discount vouchers that Dabs emailed a while back, offering £10 off an order over £100 placed by 28/2/07. A fortunate discovery indeed, I thought. Perhaps my late display unit remembered that email, and chose its time to go accordingly. Or perhaps it was just 10 years old.

The identical unit that I'm using at the moment was manufactured at the same time, but seems to have seen less use, and is still very bright without cranking the brightness beyond 60%. Hopeully I'll manage to preserve this piece of computing history until it's 20 - by that point it'll probably be illegal to own, and impossible to dispose of.

My new toys finally arrived on Friday afternoon, after almost 2 weeks of Dabs waiting for stock. It was worth the wait though.

I left work on Friday, resisting the urge to join the folks that were heading to the pub, and headed home to open the presents that I'd bought myself. I was pleased to see, on opening the box, that everything was there - I might have had a fit if I'd had to send something back because it was wrong (unless it was better than I'd ordered, obviously...). I gutted my machine, in preparation for its new innards. The old components will go in the machine under my desk when I can be bothered. Some fiddling, and a very secure heatsink later, I applied power. Obviously, it worked first time, and Linux even booted without complaint. The only problem that I encountered - which wasn't my fault - was that the lead for the HD light on my case is wired backwards. This was fixed fairly easily, albeit with a bit of fiddling.

Naturally, one of the first things that I did was to run a benchmarking tool. I chose 3DMark2003, mainly because the most CPU intensive thing that I do regualrly is playing games. I wasn't expecting great things, since I still have a fairly crap video card. There were no real surprises as far as 3D performance went - not a great deal faster than before. What did amuse me was that on the CPU test - where 3DMark renders the same scenes in software mode - I was getting frame rates equivalent and occasionally better than the hardware accelerated tests. It seems likely that the software rendered scenes have less detail than the hardware ones, but it's amusing anyway. Out of curiosity, I asked Sam to run the same tests on his machine. Unsurprisingly, his results kicked my arse as far as hardware mode went (his card was top of the range when he bought it), but any kicking went the opposite way in software mode. Yey! This isn't conclusive proof though, as it's possible that he was running in a higher display mode than me. I don't feel like verifying it though :)

I've been fighting with other peoples' code at work. We bought in e-Commerce software for a site that one of our clients is launching, and it's lacking in some fairly important areas. Being a pessimist, I reckon that it's deliberate, to persuade you to pay them for custom development. Sod that. It took me the best part of Friday, and much of Monday, but I managed to find the appropriate place to insert the 8-10 lines of code required to allow adding of extra information fields to product categories. The system already supported adding of fields to individual products, and its feature to allow you to add them to categories did nothing more than iterate through each product, and add an extra field to it. This meant that any new products in a category didn't get the extra fields. Useless. The simplicity of the change (when you can actually find the right bit of code through all the decoy methods) makes me believe even more that they're at it. No matter - it's done now. I spent this afternoon trying to track down an email problem on the site - only to fix it, and have the previously working part stop working. Arg.

Still, this stupid site will be out of the way soon, and I can concentrate on finishing my plasma screen app.

Next on my evil masterplan: buy a new video card. This one should do...

Bwhahahahahahahahahaaaaaa!