The Victoria and Albert Museum exceeded expectations. Apart from its shear scale (5 millions objects; 8 miles of corridors) the variety of artefacts was amazing. The general theme is art and design. One particularly interesting room featured plaster and wax models of famous works of art including Michelangelo's David.

Just checked for emails from the PC parts suppliers to find Joel Spolsky's latest blog: The Perils of JavaSchool. He complains that a smaller proportion of Comp. Sci. graduates are much good at programming now that degree courses teach Java and avoid trickier stuff like pointers and recursion.

When I was recruited by IBM back in 1980, I was part way through a maths degree and had only done some recreational programming. But I like to think that the maths problems I was solving proved I could pick up programming, which turned out eventually to be the case.

Actually, it wasn't quite as straightforward as that. One of my early assignments at IBM was to write a compiler for a graphics workstation. I failed miserably as the only computation modules I did in my maths degree were rather more theoretical (e.g. programming language semantics and error correcting codes). The standard comp. sci. module on compiler writing was not on the syllabus.

But my maths degree gave me the basic problem solving skills I would need in interface design, assembly language optimisation, dump analysis, software system design, etc., once I had taken suitable courses.

So, given the turning of comp. sci. degrees to Java, maybe it's time for software companies to reconsider their hiring policies and give more credence to other non comp. sci. degrees such as maths, classics, languages, etc.

"High Society" was great fun. Some aspects of the old film were preserved: the actors who played Dexter Haven and Mike Conner resembled Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra a bit. But some aspects were changed including various lyrics such as the memorable "High So, High Soci, High Society". And there was no equivalent to Louis Armstrong's jazz band, which isn't surprising.

Earlier in the evening, one of my children had received a text message saying it was snowing back home in Winchester. So as we travelled back by train and bus, we hoped for a snow-ball fight at the other end only to find wet roads and the lightest covering of frost. Maybe we'll get snow in the next couple of months.

Well, apart from doing some shopping yesterday in the January sales, I did order the parts for the PC. So, if I've chosen badly, I'll find out before too long! The parts will take a couple of weeks to arrive, I guess, so I'll post back here with any problems I find when I start putting the machine together.

Later today we are meeting up with some other family members to see a show in London. The train route has engineering works and a bus service, so it'll take a couple of hours to get to Waterloo. We plan to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum, meet up with the others to see the Christmas lights in Regent Street, and then grab a Chinese meal before going to see "High Society" at the Shaftesbury Theatre.

So, here's the final shopping list:

• Sonata II case [spec]
  
• Intel D945PVS motherboard [spec]
  
• Intel 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 CPU [spec]
  
• Kingston 1Gb memory module
  
• Seagate 250 Mb hard drive [spec]
  
• Graphics card
  
• DVD RW drive
• Keyboard
• Optical mouse
• Amplified speakers
  
• 17" CRT monitor
  
• Operating system
  

Just checking a few details. The graphics card has to have a PCI Express interface, so the one I chose earlier with an AGP interface is no good. A suitable card from Novatech has PCI-E.

I noticed in passing that the mobo recommends a "thermally advantaged chassis". Sounds better than thermally challenged, I suppose. What about the Antec case? Well the hardware guys reckon the Sonata II, although not strictly TAC-compliant is suitable.

If we decide to get a monitor, a 17" CRT model from DABS looks ok.

A few more odds and ends to go:

• DVD RW drive
• Keyboard
• Optical mouse
• Amplified speakers
  

The book recommends Antec Sonata cases and DABS list a Sonata II case which, although a little pricey, seems to have good quality, 450W PSU, and USB ports on the front. The Antec site has specs.

A cheap Asus Asus graphics card from DABS seems to fit the bill.

A post to the book's website confirmed that Intel fans/heatsinks supplied with Intel CPUs will, as expected, match Intel motherboards.

Novatech are back from the bank holiday and confirmed that the Seagate disk is usually delivered within 3 days of ordering.

It's a beautifully crisp winter's day outside, so maybe I'll go out later. But now I need to check what kind of graphics card I need from some software we use....

Our graphics requirements seem pretty simple as the software says it needs a 32 Mb 3D card and lists a large number of chipsets, which I assume are compatible with DirectX v9.0c.

So, here's the shopping list so far:

• Intel D945PVS motherboard
• Intel 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
  
• Kingston 1Gb memory module
  
• Seagate 250 Mb hard drive (depending on availability)
  
• an operating system my family can run all their applications on (I'd prefer Linux)

The mobo's feature table says this about memory:

• Four 240-pin DDR2 SDRAM DIMM sockets
• Support for DDR2 667, DDR2 533, or DDR2 400 MHz DIMMs
• Support for up to 4 GB of system memory

The book recommend Kingston memory (among others) and
the mobo's vendor self-tested memory table lists a couple of Kingston memory modules as working ok, but I couldn't find either of them at DABS or Novatech, so I had a google and found a 1Gb module sold by Kingston.

The book has its own website, so I asked about hard disk interfaces to make sure a Seagate disk would work with an Intel mobo. Seems it will, but I now understand that SATA interfaces are Serial whereas ATA interfaces are Parallel (so why don't they call them PATA?).

I am considering buying the disk from Novatech since they seem to sell OEM operating systems cheaper than DABS and I need to buy a HDD, CPU, or some such to get the OEM deal. The above thread suggested a 7200.9 model, so I asked Novatech when they will get them in. I could pay more for a 16 Mb cache (rather than 8Mb), but I would have thought this wouldn't be much faster for non-repeated reads such as booting the sytem or loading a large application.

Better look at memory to suit the mobo next...

A 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 630 is reasonable from DABS.

Intel even provide a video showing how to fit the CPU to a motherboard, although some sparks and smoke would have held my interest better.

Perhaps all Intel heatsinks will fit all Intel mobos: who knows...

Let's start with a motherboard...

The book recommended Intel mobos and CPUs and since I have colleagues in Intel, it seemed like a reasonable choice. Parts companies like Watford Electronics don't seem to stock Intel, so I looked at DABS, which a friend once recommended.

A D945PVS costs £121 (it was $180 in Fry's, so it seems we no longer pay pounds for dollars for computer parts in the UK). It is of the modern socket 775 design and ATX form factor.

I fancy a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 (600 series is suitable for a mainstream PC according to the book), so I'll need to check that the heatsink and fan will fit the mobo. How to check this is currently a bit of a mystery...

After spending a couple of hours in Fry's during a business trip to San Francisco, I decided to build my own PC. Luckily I checked out prices in the UK and so returned to England equipped only with a copy of Building the Perfect PC.

So why bother with a blog? I needed somewhere to store the multitude of links and references that I've already accumulated. Plus maybe someone out there will find this useful.