My new dev box arrived last Friday. It's a Dell Precision T5400 with the following spec:

Intel Xeon E5450 Quad Core 3Ghz
12Gb Quad Channel ECC Memory
2 x 73Gb 15,000RPM SAS drives
2 x NVidia Quadro FX1700 Dual Head Graphics
1 x 150Gb 10,000RPM SATA drive

The motherboard sports two CPU sockets but only one is populated (for now). I installed Vista 64 bit and all seems well so far. I've got most of my work/dev stuff installed (Office 2007, VS05, VS08 etc) and it seems real zippy. The Vista performance score (4.8) is let down a bit by the Quadro FX cards (scored 4.8/5.3) because the 1700's aren't intended as balls out graphics boards.

That said the Vista Aero GUI is snappy and fast and Eve runs as well as it does on my laptop which has a GeForce 8600M GT. I'll maybe upgrade to an 8800 or better on pay day.

I do quite a lot of development and testing inside a number of virtual machine builds and MS have been nice enough to allow Virtual Server 2005 R2 run on Vista. This means I'll be able to take advantage of all those CPU cores which I don't think Virtual PC could do (correct me if I'm wrong).

I also got myself another 24" Dell TFT (2408FPW) to match my existing 2405FPW, although 2405 looks a bit tired now compared to the new screen. That said it's still way better than the old setup where I was running a 20" 1680 x 1050 TFT next to the 2405. I now have a grand total of 3800 x 1200 in desktop real estate which is nice.

Anyway, here's some gratuitous (blurry) hardware pr0n for you to gaze upon:

1. Back of machine with the drive carrier in the stowed position -

2. Drive carrier flipped out in maintenance position-

3. CPU cooler (bottom) and spare socket -

4. Memory (12 Gb). Has to be the heaviest memory I've ever run with what with all the heat sinks. FB memory runs pretty damn hot -

5. The memory gets a fan all to itself. If you trip the chassis intrusion switch this fan spools up and sounds like 747 on take-off. Under normal use it's pretty quiet and gently wafts the hot air out the rear grill.

6. Two NVidia Quadro FX1700's and the PERC 6/i SAS controller -

If you want understand the background behind Iran's some what caustic relationship with the west, and in particular America and Britain, then I recommend you read 'All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror' by Stephen Kinzer. It's a fairly detailed account of the 1953 plot by the CIA and the British to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran, which then lead to 25 years of dictatorship and repression under the Shah. The culmination of these fateful events lead Iran to the 1979 revolution and the rest is history.

A fascinating: 8/10

In case you've had your head in the sand for the past few days, there's a two day strike by the Unite members who work at the Ineos refinery in Grangemouth. The strike is over Ineos making changes to the pension scheme, and you can find out more about the dispute from both sides here and here.

The BBC opened a 'Have Your Say' about the strike and the impact of possible fuel shortages. As usual, HYS brings out the best and the worst in folk, but there are some choice comments that made me laugh out loud or spit my tea out over the keyboard:

"I've thought ahead and have been buying all the frozen sweet corn from the supermarkets to put in my tank (its not a real tank by the way). The manual says I can use bio fuels and its tax free, so I'm quids in"

"I don't recommend this bio fuel nonsense, since I started using it the car is running really badly!! and now there's a terrible smell I can only describe as reminiscent of someone having eaten fire-lighters in a cinema"

"Is this strike a threat to national security? If so why haven't the Army occupied the plant?
scottow, norwich
Indeed, the first thing novice soldiers learn is how to operate an oil refinery..."

"I was doing fine till I read the Daily Mail and then I had to go out and fill up my tank and all the spare containers I have. If only Mrs Thatcher was in charge, she knew how to deal with strikers. And these workers fussing over their pensions, they should be glad that they have got a job"

A personal favourite:

"No problems yet, plenty of fuel in the pumps.
The real story is that the treasury will lose £25m per day from the closure of the forties pipeline. This amounts to over £9bn per year! And that's only one third of the output.
Can the whingers in the South now please stop moaning about subsidising Scotland, it appears to be the other way round."

Someone with a bit of sense pointing out the obvious:

"I wonder how many here complaining about people trying to protect their pensions are Civil Servants?"

Then there's the looney fringe:

"Bring back Maggie, she would know how to deal with this lot. Holding a country to ransom put you lot in the same league as Mugabe."

"here come the scotish argo again over the uk people(the war between us have finish long ago)
if i was the goverment i sack them all and bring in the immargants worker they do the work with out moining
so have another think my scottish friends fuel for thought
d, preston

What language is this?"

"Selfish or stupid call me what you will, I have purposely gone out today and filled my vehicles up with the hope of making this problem worse. "

"I drive a very expensive car which uses a lot of fuel. It is a luxury car of which I am very proud. I may have to think twice before driving to the shops because of fuel costs. I don't want to sell it because it is such a head turner. If fuel prices go up much more I may have to take the bus instead. I am disgusted that Labour has so little time for the motorist. I feel persecuted. This fuel crisis could end in ignominy for me. What is an oil plant? We have a castor oil plant on the patio."

"I went to fill my gallon can for the lawnmower as I do once a month at my local filling station - I'm known to all the staff - and was told I can't because they're not allowing anyone to fill cans.
Well that's *all* of my future custom lost then - even if it means I have to go 10 miles to the next station."

"Here on Rockall Island we have no Petrol so fill out tanks with Petrels instead which are more than abundent and untaxed (albeit we pay no taxes here anyhow).
Failing that I hear budgies are going cheep on the mainland.Mr James T Haddock, Rockall Island (Scotland), United Kingdom"

And Finally:

"It wouldn't be a proper Labour government without the country grinding to a halt at least once."

"If I had to live and work in Grangemouth I'd want a very good pension, too. What else is there to look forward to there?"

The Execution Channel is a strange and compelling read with the most bizarre ending which bites you in the ass in the last seven or eight pages. It reads like a modern day spy thriller (ala Wolstencroft) but in typical KM fashion reality is shifted half a notch to the left; Gore won the 2000 Presidential elections, a different pair of towers were collapsed on September 11th 2001 and the familiar is somewhat unfamiliar. I'm also quite pleased I read this after reading The New Cold War by Edward Lucas because the book extrapolates a possible and plausible near future depiction of political interplay between France, the UK, Scotland, the US and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation). Martin probably sums up the book far better than I can, but the last eight pages definitely left me with a 'WTF!?' look on my face.

A great romp at 7/10.

Yeah I know it's old news, but being able to step into and debug the .NET Framework source code really does rock my world. I had a customer today who was getting a FileIOPermission exception caused by code like this:

FileInfo fi = new FileInfo(uploadedFile.PostedFile.FileName); // Exception thrown here
string fileExt = fi.Extension.ToLower();

He was creating a FileInfo object just to get at the file extension of a file he was uploading in ASP.NET, he should really have been using Path.GetExtension(string filename) instead, but that's by the by.

Anyhow I was pretty certain as to the cause of the issue, and he explained that this all worked fine on his machine, which I guessed was running at full trust, whereas we operate ASP.NET in partial trust. I suspected that because he was just passing the filename and not a full path, a path was being pre-pended with some location that he had no rights to access i.e. the location where the w3wp.exe is launched from.

Enter .NET Framework Reference source....after some minor fiddling about it was quite neat to be able to step right into the FileInfo constructor and confirm my suspicions:

The call to Path.GetFullPathInternal(filename) returns a fully qualified path to C:\windows\system32\inetsrv which is where the app pool worker process exe resides.  A FileIOPermission Demand is requested for Read access to this file which of course fails because we configure the FileIOPermission Read/Write/Append and PathDiscovery properties as $AppDir$ only.

Prior to this capability I'd have disassembled mscorlib and manually walked through the code to see what was going on, no big hassle, but just being able to step through the code and skip stuff I didn't really need to read and see it 'living' during execution is totally neat.

Nice one MS.