I've now had the chance to use it a fair bit, and I thought I'd give you a small summary based on my experience.

• It rocks.
• It's better than I had hoped.
• It is sex on a stick.

Buy one. Now.

That is all.

The keyboard that I bought, a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000, was one that I had seen recommended on a few sites. I was told that the keyboard was good to use, was comfy, and that it was quiet. After reading the reviews I decided to take the plunge.

Since buying that keyboard, I've barely touched my desktop computer. That is how much I disliked the keyboard. Instead I stuck with my laptop. My pokey, slow, Vista-infected laptop rather than my dual-screen, dual-boot desktop. Sure it was comfy as far as the hands were concerned, but the layout just didn't feel right. It could be that I'm too used to having to use the standard keyboards that the ergonomic ones just don't feel right. On top of that, the issue of the incredibly noisy spacebar was one that I just couldn't get past. The rest of the keyboard was relatively quiet, but that damned spacebar required approximately 150N of force applied to it before the damned thing would budge. Silicon lubricant did nothing. The only way to make it budge was to hit it, and hit it hard. Needless to say, it was uncomfortable and very noisy.

For the sake of this discussion, I won't go into detail about the extra keys which were really tacky. Let's just say they sucked, and they felt flimsy.

I went back to the drawing board and started researching again. This time I came across a keyboard that took my eye straight away. One that was recommended by another mate, and a man who updates his hardware more often than anyone I've ever met (you know who you are ;)). Again, I did some reading and decided to take the plunge - scared that I might end up making the same mistake.

I didn't. This keyboard is a dream. It's saved my desktop machine from total banishment! My saviour: the Enermax Aurora KB007U Premium.

Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen, this keyboard will make you feel like you've died and gone to heaven. I could spend hours and hours dribbling on about how this keyboard makes me happy downstairs, but instead I'll try and sum it up in these few points.

1. Brushed aluminium keyboard - nice and heavy. You will not see this keyboard moving around the desktop as you try to type. It's also nice and cool on the hands.
2. Tactile response on the keys is just fantastic, and is incredibly quiet. The act of typing is a joy.
3. Standard layout - no keys added or removed. They're exactly where they should be.
4. USB 2.0. Say no more Nice and responsive.
5. Just so happens to come with a USB 2.0 hub as well. This will definitely get some use!
6. Also comes with audio jacks for those people who feel the need to use them - this isn't something I'll be using, but it's a nice to have feature.

Seriously, I can't begin to say how happy I am that I have this keyboard.

If you're in the market for a new keyboard, and you've got the dosh, make sure you invest in one of these. You won't regrest it.

Today I finally replaced it. I invested in a new Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard which feels really comfortable. In the past I've avoided these funky shaped keyboards as they haven't really felt right, but this one really does feel good. It has a stack of extra features and buttons, and I think it'll have a well-deserved existence on my desktop. The keys are nice and quiet, and they don't seem to struggle to register like the old one did (a good sign for a new keyboard I know ;)).

There is but one small issue - the space bar. While the other keys are just fine, the space bar is one noisy key. It dishes out quite a clunk each time it's pushed. The reason for this is that if I don't push it hard enough the bugger won't godown (see, there's a classic example of it). To get it to push down, I have to hit it quite hard and that's where the noise is coming from. Right now I'm a little concerned about it, and I'm hoping that it'll get quieter and less noisy as it "wears in".

While I was shopping I thought I may as well fix a couple of other issues that I have mentioned in my other post about activation.

First of all I now have a new stick of RAM, so I'm back up to 1GB. Unfortunately I can't go any higher due to my borked motherboard, but it'll do for now. There is a noticable difference in speed now that I'm back up to that amount.

Next up I bought some more Artic Silver thermal grease. I was informed a while back by a mate (Marc) that I'd botched the grease job on my GPU and hence the temps were stupidly high. So I've grabbed some more of this stuff to fix it up. I'll get to that over the weekend, and hopefully we'll see an improvement in GPU temperatures.

Lastly, I bought a new webcam. I did have a Logitech QuickCam Messenger, but it was basically a pile of shit because:

1. The image quality was awful.
2. It didn't work on Vista.
3. It didn't work on x64.
4. It didn't work on Linux.

I did a bit of research, and ended up buying a Creative WebCam Vista, which has nothing to do with Microsoft's Vista. For AUD $20 you seriously can't go wrong. The camera is a fantastic purchase and does everything I need it to!

On the whole I'm happy with my purchases. I just hope this damned space bar doesn't ruin it all!

Last week my computer stopped booting. I didn't get around to looking at it until a few days ago because I had visitors over from the UK. Not just that, it is Christmas, and the last thing you want to be doing on your Christmas break is to be fixing computers.

I spent an hour or two playing with bits and pieces to try and determine the error. The problem was that the third DIMM slot on my motherboard (which, incidentally, has been a bit of a nightmare since I bought it) is dodgey. I removed a 512MB RAM stick from the offending slot over to slot two and the machine started to come alive again. I was pretty happy about this, despite the reduction in RAM speed due to the configuration, since I didn't need to buy anything to make it work again!

So I left the machine for a couple of days again as I was happy with what I achieved. But today, because the study was in a bit of a state due to the bits of computers, manuals, and various other things I'd strewn around the room while investigating, I thought I'd finalise everything and tidy up.

Since my computer case was open, I thought I'd do a bit of housekeeping. I wasn't really happy with the way it was laid out inside so I thought I'd tidy that up a bit first. I removed my WLAN card because it was flaky at best in 64-bit, and I'd had enough of the lag spikes (time to go back to cabled LAN). I moved my video card to a different slot to create a bit more space between it and my HSF (which is awesome, and does a great job even if it is a behemoth!). I also adjusted the fans a bit, cleaned up a lot of the dust, and moved a few of the cables around to improve air-flow.

So with all that done, I fired up the machine.

.. and got nothing. Shit.

The investigation started again. I thought that I'd go right for the previous culprit and rip out the RAM stick that I'd moved to see if that would resolve the problem. Thankfully, it did. So right now I'm running on 1/2GB RAM, not ideal to say the least but the machine is booting which is a lot better than it not.

The machine booted, and up came windows. It was at this point that I remember it telling me that a few days back it wanted me to reactivate Windows because of a substantial change in hardware. Of course, I ignored this stupid box because at the time I hadn't changed anything. I'd moved a RAM stick!

But today, it greeted me again. This time the message was different. In essense, my 3-day "window" of reactivation had expired, and I was being forced to reactivate it now. And I do mean now. Now as in right now before I was allowed to log on. Oh, but there's a problem here you see, because prior to logging on, there's no network connection. So when you try and activate Windows before logging on, it can't activate over the Interweb because it can't get to it. Of course, the activation fails. But does it let me log in? No. What does it do? I ties itself into an infinite loop of ...

1. Try to log in.
2. Fail because it's not activated.
3. Try to activate.
4. Fail to activate because it's not logged in and hence can't connect.
5. Goto step 1.

Not happy. Not happy at all. Not only had I not changed any hardware in the system (all I'd done is move it around, and remove a WLAN card) to force the reactivation, I am now stuck with a machine that won't let me log in. Nice eh?

Here's a nice little side-note for the Linux fanboys (yes, you know who you are). For yonks, a slight modification in anything to do with the video hardware in my machine would result in my linux graphics setup shitting itself. I'd then have to spend a chunk of the day trying to get it to work again with my dual-screen setup. But not this time. I'd mucked around with everything inside the machine, and what happened when I booted Linux??

Wait for it... WAIT FOR IT!

Nothing. It booted as if nothing had changed. Video settings were the same. Dual-screen worked. I sat here a little stunned for a while and I was brought back from my daze by the little blinking icon in the system tray telling me that I had updates to download. The network had connected, and everything was sweet.

See that Microsoft? Right there. That is what should happen. Nothing more, nothing less. When I reboot after a hardware change, I expect you to continue as if nothing had happened. I expect the network to connect without me dicking with it. I expect a nice little "Hello OJ, you legend, how else can I make your life easy today?"

So hats off to you LinuxMint. You made my day! Now, if only you hadn't borked my Firefox install Time to update you to the last version me thinks, and give you a bit of the love and attention that you deserve.

As a final note, it looks like I'm going to have to buy some new RAM, and while I'm there I'm going to ditch this UK keyboard as it has been driving me nuts for the last year and half. Time to get back to the Aussie (some might say US) layout.

The solution: Zalman VF900-cu.

When I installed it last night I was beyond happy. The quiet HSF, quiet case, and the quiet case fans were in blissful silence alongside this masterpiece. My case was silent again! This piece of kit is fantastic. Go get one if you need peace

The first thing was the news that there's a class action lawsuit against Nintendo due to the apparently insufficient quality of the straps that hold the Wiimote on the wrist. After I first read this I decided to do a bit of research into the cases where people had lost their grip, snapped the band and witnessed the Wiimote flying through the end and breaking either something expensive, or someone's face (or both!). In every case, the person's actions have been incredibly excessive. Sure, the Wiimote no doubt gets you going. It's easy to get caught up in the moment and let excitement get the better of you. But to swing that controller that hard while expecting it to stay in your hand makes you (the user) a complete tool. Instead of just easing up a little bit and admitting that they've gone over the top, the users are now saying that it's Nintendos fault, and in the classic American tradition, they're suing.

The second thing that's got to me is the new Aussie rule that states that you're no longer allowed to link to copyrighted material. I'm not sure how broad that rule actually is, but it does sound like you could end up with someone suing you for linking to their blog post, their home-made video, or whatever it is that they've put online - even if you've helped increase the traffic to the site. I'd have sent you a link to the original SMH article, but I wasn't sure if that was legal. Let's be honest, if the rule is that broad and you can't even point people at a newspaper article, the world is going nuts. The original idea of hypertext linking is now being threatened - as you're no longer allowed to use them! Sure, link to pages in your own site, link to Google, and tell them what to search for. That should be ok. But direct linking looks to be a no-no.

Total and utter crap. The world is going nuts! If we keep going at this rate it's going to become illegal to do anything other than read emails - and considering the amount of SPAM that's buzzing around the Internet the value of that doesn't look too good. We're going to have to nip this shit in the bud before it goes too far. Not only will it stop the open communication and information sharing mechanism that the world is, but the threat of being sued will prevent people from innovating - that's not the kind of world I want to live in.

Those of you who use at least two monitors for day to day work will know what I'm going to say in this post - those of you who don't (and in particular, never have done) should listen and listen good! Because the joy and productivity increases are just awesome.

Here's a shot of my current desktop - including the newly purchased Samsung 204B LCD monitor which is this years Christmas present to me from Amy, aren't I lucky!

One of the good things about this is that it's forced me to clean my desk up, but that's only a small win compared to the others

So what is it about having more than one monitor that makes working a joy? The first thing for me is screen real-estate. Now some of you guys who have one extremely large monitor as opposed to two smaller ones will be saying "we get that too", and yes you do, the stuff that you don't get I'll be talking about in a minute When you're developing any form of application being able to see lots of information on screen at once makes your life a lot easier, particularly when you're debugging code. The amount of information you need and have available vary depending on the language that you use, but for my example I'm going to use my language of preference, C++, writing my software of preference, games.

If you're debugging games, you may (or may not) want to have the following information available:

• Call Stack
• Watch Window(s)
• Memory Windows
• Registers
• Source Code
• Machine Code (ASM)
• Solution Explorers
• Breakpoint Listings
• ...etc

You get the point. There's a LOT of information you can have on screen at any given time, and being able to see what you need at any given time is great. Try fitting even half of that stuff onto a single monitor! It's a tough job. If you have a massive monitor, then it's a bit easier, and easier again if it's widescreen.

So, that just caters for your dev environment. What about the software itself!? You need to see that running while you're debugging - if you're writing PC games, you don't want to have to debug in windowed mode as it's not really a great reflection of how things will run when you're running fullscreen - so you should really debug fullscreen. With a single monitor, not possible. With dual, totally possible.

Bear in mind that most other people have lots of other stuff running too - all fighting to get a piece of that hard-core on screen action:

• Email
• Web Browser(s)
• Instant Messenger(s)
• File Explorers
• Terminal Windows
• ...etc

Another thing that I consider to be tres bon is the ability to have what appears to be multiple OSes running at the same time but on different monitors. I am, of course, talking about sticking an install of *choose your operating system* running inside a Virtual Machine. Fire up your virtual machine, drag it onto the other monitor and maximise - viola! You have two computers running at once (effectively ;)) and they each have their own totally viewable desktop (without the pain of having to switch). It's a joy to behold!

Once you've experienced multi-monitor dev, you'll never want to go back to a single monitor. To me it's like going back to dial-up when you've had broadband - it's just not possible!

What do you guys think?

That little blurb isn't really necessary reading for the purpose of this article, I guess I just wanted to let you know that I have a bit of a background in playing, and building, games. I'm sure that many gamers out there will agree with me when I say that it's getting to the point now where there are so few titles being released that really push the boundaries of gameplay. There are a s**tload of games released all the time, most of which suck (either fully or partially). To be honest, I don't think there's a game on the planet that doesn't suck in some way. The thing is, in my opinion, the amount of suckiness (let's call it suckage to keep with the gaming theme) in games is going up and up. Suckage is increasing rapidly, and I've been finding it hard to get excited about new gaming technology (such as the next-gen consoles) and the games that will be running on them ...

... until today!

Well that's not 100% true, I have in some ways been excited, but not to the same extent as the excitement I felt today. The reason is because of the shower of gold that is known as the Nintendo Wii. I have been keeping tabs on the situation surrounding the Wii ever since Nintendo first announced that they were going to be making a next-generation games console, which back then was codenamed the Revolution (which, in my opinion, they should have stuck with - but I'm no marketing genius :)). There's been quite a bit of speculation about how good or bad this console is going to be, and lately it has really been under fire - not just because of it's name.

The first thing geeks do when they hear about new hardware is look at the tech specs and compare to either what's on the market already or what the product is going to be competing with. I'm not going to list all the specifications of the Wii (or it's competitors) but at first glance it does look like the Wii lacks grunt compared to the consoles it's going to be taking on. So already the naysayers are stating that the console will choke because it just "can't keep up". Add on to this the new controller, which is quite out of the ordinary, and you've got most of the gaming population pointing, laughing and saying that the console will "... suck due its lack of power, pissy name and TV-remote-style controller."

I think they're wrong. Very very wrong. There's something about this console and it's features that I find very compelling. The new remote controller initially seems wierd when you first look at it, but when you take a bit of time to think about how it might work, you come to realise that it's actually quite natural. I think that this style of control is going to unlock an element of fun that the other consoles, with their standard games and standard controllers, will fail to unlock. Let's face it, games aren't about the whizzbang graphics, or about how many rocks there are flying about on screen at once - they're about FUN! Nintendo cottoned on to this notion from the very start. Not one person who has played Nintendo games from the start can say that they've not had fun consistently on most (if not all) Nintendo hardware. These guys have mastered the art of producing technology which allow people to enjoy themselves.

The link that kicked this feeling to the front of my mind was one I stumbled on (and I don't even know how) earlier today - it's called the Nintendo Wii Preview. Nine pages of Wii goodness that really need to be checked out. If you don't know what the Wii is, then you should read this and have a look at the official homepage. It's going to be a blast.

In short, I think this console will win the next-generation console wars. It captures an element of fun that the other consoles can't capture. It adds a style of gameplay that the other consoles can't add. It'll make old games replayable purely because of the way you interact with it. It'll get more people involved because you don't have to be a grandmaster with a "normal" gamepad controller any more, you just need to time you natural movements properly.

I think there are so many possibilities for this console that it's going to last for a very long time. I think there might even be a chance for me to get Amy playing some games in front of the TV with me, which would be great fun - especially when we're throwing ourselves around the room because of the nature of the controls.

Come on Wii! I may have laughed at you in the early days, but I'll take your low specs and fun games over the shiny, spaceship-style Xbox360/PS3 with great looking but poor gaming titles any day.

Thank you Nintendo. You've given an old gamer a glimmer of hope that the next generation of console gaming has the chance of being enjoyable, and not just packed with suckage!

The result of losing any part of your computer half-way through a project is pretty devastating, especially if it's the HDD. This isn't just because of the loss of information, but also because of the loss of time that it takes to get things up to speed again. That time includes redoing all the work that was lost and getting a new machine built and ready to go so that development work can recommence.

The purpose of this post is to explore the options reducing the impact of hardware failures on our geek lives. The reason I thought I'd rant was because Danny Ireland recently experienced an event like this.

From this point on I'll be using the term Virtual Machine (VM) as a meaning for having an operating system running inside a window So this might be using VMWare, Microsoft VirtualPC, Bochs or something similar.

To start off with, I'm one of those guys who likes to have his computer running at a blistering/optimum speed even if he's not going to be doing anything that requires it I know I'm not alone in this world either. As a result, the idea of doing my daily activities inside a VM isn't that appealing. Not just that, but VMs tend to always have some form of refresh and response issues which just frustrate me.

On the flip side of the coin, I don't like the idea of having to reboot every time I want to fire up a new operating system, which is one of the things that VMs nail on the head. Another things is being able to have them all running at once if you really want.

The argument for dual-booting vs VMs has no affect on the issues surrounding a hardware failure, I just thought I'd mention a couple issues surrounding the use of VMs.

The main issue that needs to be covered is the minimal recovery time. Minimal recovery time relies on backups, and backups are always in short supply regardless of how good your backup scheme is, because you simply can't back up real-time (well, you can, but is it something that you want to do given the overheads?). Let's look at the areas of hardware failure and the impact it can have on your work.

Video Card / Monitor

Easy peasy. This has little do no impact on you as neither of these items are responsbile for retaining state. If either one of these kitties dies on you, replacing them should be a doddle. Most companies would (should?) have spares, and getting going again should take no more than a few minutes. If you're good enough, you should still be able to save your work before shutting your PC down to make the changes required

Motherboard / CPU

Depending on the method of demise, this may or may not affect your work. Sure, it's going to ditch whatever work you've done that's volatile (ie. stuff you haven't saved yet) as most CPU/motherboard failures result in the computer blue-screening, freezing, or totally shutting down. The time it takes to get the motherboard replaced varies greatly. This is due to the fact that figuring out that the motherboard is the problem is what takes the time. Replacing the mobo isn't a huge task, but it does take a bit of time. CPUs are, again, a doddle to replace, and the time to replace is minimal - as soon as you know it's the CPU that's gone.

Power Supply Unit (PSU)

PSUs die in a similar way to what most drunk drivers do. That is, they waver around and end up crashing, and there's always a chance that they're going to take something else with them! The surges in power can kill any or all of the other bits that are unfortunate enough to be connected to the computer at the time. There's no rule of thumb, you're either luck or you're not. Just pray that it doesn't manage to take your HDD with it when it goes, as it's the only thing in the machine that really hurts when it dies. Dan's post contains some information on his PSU woes

Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

This is the real killer. Not only is it capable of bringing your system down, resulting in the loss of all your W.I.P, but it will probably end up taking a stack of other data with it that has already been persisted. This is where things should be put in place to reduce the impact of a failure.

One way of doing this is to use RAID to store your information on multiple drives so that if one of the breaks you still have other copies lying around. This works well, and you'd be very unlucky to lose all your disks in one go. That doesn't mean to say that it won't happen (just ask my father-in-law who's literally had a blast during a thunderstorm resulting in the loss of not just data, but his entire PC).

Another way is to have all your work stored on a network drive, and have that network drive RAIDed and backed up. This at least puts the focus on the system administrator who should be responsible for a strong backup plan which will allow you to get to the data from the day before at the very least. There's stacks of funky network storage solutions out there (check out Paul's purchase of a 2TB NAS as an example). This will increase your network traffic a lot so you'd want to make sure that your network infrastructure can deal with it, especially if you deal in massive amounts of content (eg. like source-art for a computer game). If you deal with GBs of data on a daily basis you'd want to have a SAN or something similar to handle the load.

Hardware aside - there's more to worry about

If you lose your HDD, you're going to have to rebuild your machine whether you like it or not. To some people this is exciting But those people are sick, and are usually recaptured very quickly. To most people, this is a dull and mundane task that they just don't want to undertake. In the case of recovering from a hardware failure, I fit firmly into the latter category. Rebuilding a machine is painfully slow, but there are ways to help get back up to speed quickly:

• Imaging/Ghosting - When you first build your machine, get the OS installed and kill a day installing all the other bits and pieces that you need to do your work (Office, Visual Studio, Firefox, etc), you can use a utility such as Ghost to take a snapshop of your set up and store it to disk. This image can be used to quickly create replica installations on other machines with the same hardware - which is exactly what you want to do when you rebuild your machine. Of course, this comes with the proviso that you have the same hardware when you rebuild. If there's a consistant set of hardware across the organisation, this kind of utility really is a time saver. Unfortunately it's not so fruitful when you have a mixture of hardware set ups.
• Oursourcing - I'm not a huge advocate of this, but it's still an option. By this I mean either hire another company to make sure that there's a replacement machine ready to rock in the case where something goes horribly wrong, or get a deal going with a company like DELL to just get another machine under warranty within 24 hours.

There are other options too.

The common problem across all these solutions is that you generally can't your environment back up to exactly how it was before the total dismemberment of your machine. It'd be lovely if snapshots of machines can be taken at arbitrary points through the day (without the pain of doing it through Ghost) and restored on arbitrary hardware at the drop of a hat, resulting in, not just your environment but your data, being restored. Yes, this is where those VMs come to the party. You can store your VM anywhere, and run it up on any machine that can boot (and that has a VM player on it).

This sounds so fine and so dandy that it's almost too good to be true - and to a point it is. You have to have some plan of managing the backups of the VM snapshots, and you need to cater for when they need to be copied. Most VM images are quite large due to the amount of software that needs to be installed (imagine how bad it's going to be having to copy a VM of Vista, which without any extra software weighs in at a hefty 9GB!?).

Conclusion

I like the idea of having my own VM that can follow me from machine to machine. I like the thought of being able to boot multiple operating systems at any time, and interact with them all at once. I also like the idea of getting the most out of my hardware with an installation that only has what it needs installed and running. The problem is that I don't think given the current set of tools available, that you can have both of these at the same time. I'm not saying that the performance of a VM is woeful (far from it), but until I can't notice a difference between playing a game in or out of a VM, I'll probably end up sticking with a normal install.

VMs are great for test environments (reverting to a pre-test state is a two-click process), they're great for persistance of entire operating system state for easy use on multiple machines, and they're even free now thanks to VMware!

Even with all those positives, I think I'd still prefer to stick to a standard OS install for the main operating system and development environment, with VMs as test environments. I would have RAID in each of my machines with shared drives that are backed up over night so that data and more than a day old isn't lost.

At the end of the day, it's down to the user or the copmany to choose what they think fits best for their scenario. I think in Dan's case, he was particularly unlucky. Even if I was in his shoes, I'd stick to what I've just described in the previous paragraph.

What would you guys do? Do you think your company has a strategy that gives you good coverage? I'd like to hear what procedures you guys have in place to cover for this - and I'm sure Dan would like to as well!

PS. For those who care, the title of this blog post should translate to "Recovering from a dead computer".