Coding Horror

I enjoy my iPhone tremendously; I think it's the most important product Apple has ever created and one they were born to make. As a consumer who has waited far too long for the phone industry to get the swift kick in the ass it so richly deserved, I'm entirely on Apple's side here.

But as a software developer, I am deeply ambivalent about an Apple dominated future. Apple isn't shy about cultivating the experience around their new iOS products and the App Store. There are unusually strict, often mysterious rules around what software developers can and cannot do — at least if they want entry into the App Store. And once you're in, the rules can and will change at any time. Apple has cracked down several times already:

• Prohibiting applications that include external mechanisms for purchases
• Prohibiting applications that have sexual connotations or innuendo
• Prohibiting applications with controversial satire
• Prohibiting applications that can potentially be used for unauthorized downloads

The developers involved are contractually prevented from even discussing specifically what happened to them by the terms of the app store. Those frustrating, inconsistent, opaque App Store experiences led developers to coin parodies such as Apple's Three Laws of Developers.

• A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
• A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It is absolutely clear who is in charge when you submit an application to the App Store. Apple developers serve at the pleasure of the king.

In Apple's defense, this is done in the name of protecting the consumers from malicious, slimy, or defective applications. Sort of like Nintendo's Seal of Approval, I guess.

The court of the king is a lucrative place to be, but equally dangerous. While upgrading my iPhone to iOS 5 – an excellent upgrade, by the way – I was surprised to discover the following blurb in the feature notes:

Safari Reader displays web articles sans ads or clutter so you can read without distractions. Reading List lets you save interesting articles to peruse later [like the popular Instapaper application], while iCloud keeps your list updated across all your devices.

Apple has since changed the page, but at the time I read it, there was a direct linked reference to Instapaper, the popular "save this webpage to read later" application which Reading List is a clone of. I distinctly remember this mention, because I was shocked that they would be so open and overt about replacing a beloved third-party application. Perhaps it made Apple uncomfortable too; maybe that's why they pulled the Instapaper text and link.

If Microsoft added a feature to Windows that duplicated a popular application's functionality, developers would be screaming bloody murder and rioting in the, er, blogs and web forums. But in the Mac world, if the king deems it necessary, then so it must be.

When iOS 5 and Lion ship, Apple will show a much larger percentage of iOS-device owners that saving web pages to read later is a useful workflow and can dramatically improve the way they read.

If Reading List gets widely adopted and millions of people start saving pages for later reading, a portion of those people will be interested in upgrading to a dedicated, deluxe app and service to serve their needs better. And they’ll quickly find Instapaper in the App Store.

I've met Marco Arment, the developer of Instapaper, and I like Marco. He's even been a guest on the Stack Exchange podcast. This is a nice, optimistic interpretation, but the reality is a little scarier. I'm struggling to understand why anyone would buy Instapaper when they can click a button in Safari and have that web page delivered to any of their Macs or iOS devices for later reading via iCloud.

Ah, but wait – what about offline support? Yes, that's something only Instapaper can deliver! Or can it?

A common scenario: an Instapaper customer is stocking up an iPad for a long flight. She syncs a bunch of movies and podcasts, downloads some magazines, and buys a few new games, leaving very little free space. Right before boarding, she remembers to download the newest issue of The Economist. This causes free space to fall below the threshold that triggers the [new iOS 5 space] cleaner, which — in the background, unbeknownst to her — deletes everything that was saved in Instapaper. Later in the flight, with no internet connectivity, she goes to launch Instapaper and finds it completely empty.

That's the problem with kings, you see. Their rule is absolute law, but they can be capricious, erratic, and impulsive. If you're lucky enough to live under the rule of a fair and generous king, then you'll do well. But historically speaking, monarchies have proven to be … unreliable.

I tend to agree with Marco that this is, in the big scheme of things, a minor technical problem. A private application cache not subject to iCloud syncing and space limitations would fix it. But it speaks volumes that Marco – a dedicated subject of the king – apparently had no idea this change was coming until it was on top of him. It's negatively impacting his Instapaper business and his customers. It's also concerning that this issue wasn't resolved or at least raised as a serious concern during the lengthy iOS 5 beta. Perhaps Apple's legendary secrecy is to blame. I honestly don't know.

As a consumer, I like that Apple is perfectly willing to throw its software developers under a bus to protect me (or, more cynically, Apple itself). But as a software developer, I'm not sure I can cope with that and I am unlikely to ever develop anything for an iOS device as a result. If you choose to deliver software in the Apple ecosystem, this is simply the tradeoff you've chosen to make. Apple developers serve at the pleasure of the king.

When Joel Spolsky and I set out to design the Stack Exchange Q&A engine in 2008 – then known as Stack Overflow – we borrowed liberally and unapologetically from any online system that we felt worked. Some of our notable influences included:

• Reddit and Digg voting
• Xbox 360 achievements
• Wikipedia editing
• eBay karma
• Blogs and blog comments
• Classic web bulletin boards

All these elements were folded up into the Stack Exchange Q&A engine, so that we might help people create useful artifacts on the internet while learning with and among their peers. You know the old adage that good artists copy, great artists steal? That quote is impossible to source, but it means we were repurposing these elements we liked.

So, what do Picasso and T.S. Eliot mean? They say, in the briefest of terms: take old work to a new place. Steal the Google site, strip down what works (fast load, nonexistent graphics, small quirky changes that delight) and use the parts on your own site. Look at the curve of a Coke Bottle and create a beautiful landscape painting with it. Take the hairline pinstriping on the side of somebody’s car, reimagine it on your print job. Find inspiration in the world you live in, where nothing is truly new so that everything has the potential to be innovative.

Unfortunately, the elements we liked were often buried in mounds of stuff that we ... sort of hated. So extracting just the good parts and removing the rest was part of the mission. If you're lucky enough to have a convenient villain to position yourself against, that might be all you need.

Traditional web bulletin board systems have a design that was apparently permanently frozen in place circa 2001 along with Windows XP. Consider this typical forum thread.

Here is the actual information from that forum thread.

Based on the original size of those screenshots, only 18 percent of that forum thread page is content. The other 82 percent is lost to signatures, avatars, UI doohickeys, and other web forum frippery that has somehow become accepted as "the way things are done". I regularly participate in several expert niche bulletin boards of various types today, and they're all built the same way. Nobody complains.

But they should.

This is the status quo that we're up against. Yes, we fixed it for programmers with Stack Overflow, but why stop there? We want to liberate all the brilliant experts stuck in these horrible Soviet-era concrete block housing forums all over the web. We'd like to introduce them to the focused, no-nonsense Stack Exchange Way, a beautiful silo of pure Q&A signal without all the associated web forum gunk.

There's only one teeny-tiny obstacle in our way. As a great programmer I worked with once said:

It's the damn users. They've ruined every program I've ever created.

Every web forum is the way it is because users wanted it that way. Yes, the design of the forum software certainly influences behavior, but the classic 2001-era web forum paradigm assumed that what users wanted made sense for the rest of the larger internet. As it turns out, groups are their own worst enemy. What groups want, and what the rest of the world needs, are often two very different things. Random discussion is fine for entertainment, but it's not particularly useful, nor does it tend to generate the kind of artifacts that will be relevant a few years from now like Wikipedia does. So then the problem becomes how do you encourage groups to do what's best for the world rather than their own specific, selfish needs?

When I looked at this problem, I felt I knew the answer. But there wasn't a word for it in 2008. Now there is: Gamification.

Gamification is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. […] Gamification works by … taking advantage of humans' psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.

I had no idea this Wikipedia article even existed until a few months ago, but we are featured prominently in it. It is true that all our stolen ideas about reputation systems, achievements, identity, and vote scoring are in place specifically to encourage the adoption of the brave new no-nonsense, all-signal Stack Exchange Q&A model. Without those incentive systems, when left to their own devices, what you get is … well, every forum ever created. Broken by design.

Yes, we have ulterior motives, but let me explain why I think gaming elements are not tacked on to the Stack Exchange Q&A engine, but a natural and essential element of the design from day one.

Learning is (supposed to be) fun

I've had this concept in my head way before the web emerged, long before anyone coined the term "Gamification" in 2010. In fact, I'd trace my inspiration for this all the way back to 1983.

For programmers, everything we know is pretty much guaranteed to be obsolete in 10 years if we're lucky, and 5 years if we aren't. It's changing all the time. The field of programming is almost by definition one of constant learning. Programming is supposed to be fun – and it is, if you're doing it right. Nobody taught me that better than the Beagle Bros on my Apple II. Why can't learning in every other subject matter be just as enjoyable?

Games are learning aids

There's a long, rich history of programmers as gamers. Oftentimes, the whole reason we became programmers in the first place is because we wanted to move beyond being a mere player and change the game, control it, modify its parameters, maybe even create our own games.

We used games to learn how to program. To a programmer, a game is a perfectly natural introduction to real programming problems. I'd posit that any field can use games as an introduction to the subject matter – and as a reinforcement to learning.

Games help people work toward a goal

It's something of a revelation to me that solid game design can defeat the Greater Internet F**kwad Theory. Two great examples of this are Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. Both games are more than ten years old, but they're still actively being played right now, by tens of thousands of people, all anonymous … and playing as cohesive teams!

The game's objectives and rules are all cleverly constructed to make working together the most effective way to win. None of these players know each other; the design of the game forces players to work together, whether they want to or not. It is quite literally impossible to win as a single lone wolf.

I haven't ever quite come out and said it this way, but … I played a lot of Counter-Strike from 1998 to 2001, and Stack Overflow is in many ways my personal Counter-Strike. It is a programmer in Brazil learning alongside a programmer in New Jersey. Not because they're friends – but because they both love programming. The design of Stack Overflow makes helping your fellow programmers the most effective way to "win" and advance the craft of software development together.

And I say we all win when that happens, no matter which profession we're talking about.

I feel a little responsible for "Gamification", since we're often cited as an example (even, much to my chagrin, on Wikipedia). I wanted to clear up exactly why we made those choices, and specifically that all the gaming elements are there in service of a higher purpose. I play the Stack Exchange game happily alongside everyone else, collecting reputation and badges and rank and upvotes, and I am proud to do so, because I believe it ultimately helps me become more knowledgeable and a better communicator while also improving the very fabric of the web for everyone. I hope you feel the same way.

(If you'd like to learn more about the current state of Gamification, I highly recommend Sebastian Deterding's page, and specifically his Meaningful Play: Getting Gamification Right presentation.)

Perhaps you've seen this recent XKCD about password choice?

It prompted a spirited debate – even on our very own Security Stack Exchange – about the merits of the argument presented there. Now, to be clear, I'm completely on Randall's side here; I'm all for passphrases over passwords, and I have been for years.

But this is merely one symptom of a much larger disease: identity on the internet. Every time you touch a website that actually cares who the heck you are – and this is an increasingly large list of sites as the web matures – you have to, sigh, "log in". And logging in inevitably requires you to create a username and a password. Over and over and over and over. And, oh by the way, you'll be logging in again each and every time on every browser and every computer and every device you own. It's a great system. And by "great" I mean fracking terrible.

This isn't just tedious busywork for us, the poor web users, it's also downright dangerous as I explained in The Dirty Truth About Web Passwords. It's a near-impossible problem, an intractable Gordian Knot. So I'm going to answer one comic with another.

The problem is not choosing better passwords for the dozens or hundreds of web sites we have to log in. The problem is passwords.

Thus, the only real cure to the disease of identity on the web is to get rid of passwords altogether.

Yes, you read that correctly. But "Jeff", you might say, "how can we possibly log in to websites without our beloved, mile-long list of site-specific usernames and passwords?" I'm so glad you asked! Try to make time in your busy schedule of account and password creation to read a few more paragraphs into this post and I'll attempt to explain my crazy scheme.

We could use our internet driver's license and log in to a particular website using our existing Google, Facebook, Twitter, or OpenID credentials. This works, but it assumes a lot; is the website enlightened enough to accept third party logins, or is there a political agenda (or delusions of grandeur) preventing them from recognizing any form of identity other than their own? To be fair, accepting third party identity is hard and undeniably adds complexity. There are a million ways to get it wrong, and only a handful of sites that get it right. I like to think Stack Exchange is one of the websites that gets this right, but I'll fully acknowledge that it is challenging to get there. Unfortunately, the path of least resistance for web identity leads inexorably to one sad, depressing, dysfunctional place:

Yep. Get used to it. Username. Password. For every single website you'll ever visit. On every single device you'll ever own. Forever. Until the end of time. Oh God.

Lately I've begun to hope there might be a viable solution, even outside the third-party logins I've championed for the last 3 years. A way of absolving users of username and password selection. Like Alexander's solution to the Gordian Knot, it might be a bit scary in its … absolutism. But anything has to be better than the unspeakable terror of a million logins on a million different websites on a million different devices. Right? Right?

(Warning, Extreme Hand Waviness Ahead: while I do honestly believe the techniques described below would work, I am glossing over many of the technical implementation details. This is absolutely not intended to be a spec but an "I Have a Dream" outline. Feel free to help me clarify and expand on the necessary details by blogging a more technical plan for this in any form you like.)

Imagine, if you will, visiting a new website and deciding you'd like to create an account there. You click the "Create New Account" link and then …

• The website presents a secure account creation page decorated with specific meta tags that indicate this page supports automated account creation with a standard(ish) set of user info HTML form fields.
• The browser, seeing these meta tags in the page, does not present the page to the user but retrieves the user's standard information fields like name, email address, etcetera from some form of secure https cloud storage, and readies them. The browser will also automatically select a completely random, cryptographically secure password for the new account.
• The browser must, unfortunately, prompt the user with a confirm dialog containing a CAPTCHA at this point to ensure that the signup process isn't being scripted in any way, and that a real human being actually wants to create an account on this website. While we're there, we might as well confirm the identity data we're about to send to the website (though hopefully the defaults should suffice). Once confirmed, the user credentials and password will be sent to the site and stored securely in the cloud.
• The website redirects the newly created account to an appropriate page.

There may be some more information that the browser (or the site) needs to ask the user for in there somewhere. But account creation is a one-time event, and in the typical case where you're signing up for some simple website, your preferred defaults should suffice. Caveats aside, look what we have wrought: you clicked "Create New Account", completed a single captcha and clicked OK – now you're logged in to your brand new account on any website.

Once you have an account, it's even simpler. Imagine clicking the "Sign In" link, and then …

• The website presents a secure login page decorated with specific meta tags that indicate this page supports automated login with a standard set of username and password HTML form fields.
• The browser, seeing these meta tags in the page, does not present the page to the user but retrieves the user's credentials from some form of secure https cloud storage, and sends them to the site.
• The site receives the credentials via https, validates them, and returns a valid login cookie to the browser.
• The browser redirects the now logged-in user to the page they originally wanted to see as a logged in user.

From the perspective of this weary citizen of the web, at least, a miracle just happened. You clicked "Sign In", and you're immediately signed in without having to look at a single stinking username and password field!

Seems like magic, yes? Gotta be a catch, yes? Well, there is. Two catches, to be precise.

1. Web browsers will have to be rewritten to understand basic identity protocols. I suppose it could be a browser plugin as well, but I'd rest a lot easier knowing basic identity protocols are officially "baked in" to the browser and supported by the Powers That Be, perhaps even as accepted W3C standards. And yes, you will need to log in to your browser at a minimum.
2. You have to trust "The Cloud" at least a little. There has to be some trusted, secure location on the internet for all your usernames, passwords, and basic identity information to reside. Otherwise this scheme can't possibly work, because how would you log in from your (insert favorite device name here) if it has no access to the secret, hidden list of account information and automagically generated secure passwords created on your behalf?

Identity is fundamental to the modern internet; more and more websites need to know something about who you are to work. The current status quo of thousands of websites with thousands of differing ideas about identity and passwords and account information is beyond broken. We want – no, we demand – that the browser understand and standardize identity the same way it does HTML and CSS. Maybe it's crazy, but I dream of the day when I never need to see another password field in my browser ever again.

I hope you can too.

I'm not into self-help. I don't buy self-help books, I don't read productivity blogs, and I certainly don't subscribe to self-proclaimed self-help guru newsletters. Reading someone else's advice on the rather generic concept of helping yourself always struck me as a particularly misguided idea.

Apparently I'm not the only person to reach this conclusion, either.

I spent two years reading all the self-help books I could find. As of a year ago, I had read 340 self-help books. Because I’m insane.

My conclusion from all that reading?

95% of self-help books are complete bullshit.

To be clear, I am all for self-improvement. Reading books, blogs, and newsletters by people who have accomplished great things is a fine way to research your own path in life. But these people, however famous and important they may be, are not going to help you.

Unfortunately that's not the answer he wanted. To him, my answer [that nobody was going to help him become successful] was really discouraging. To me, if I was receiving that answer from someone else, it would be really encouraging.

I like being reminded that nobody's going to help me - that it's all up to me. It puts my focus back on the things I can control - not waiting for outside circumstances.

Take it from The Ultimate Productivity Blog:

Reading self-help advice from other people, however well-intentioned, is no substitute for getting your own damn work done. The sooner you come to terms with this, the better off you'll be.

Get out there and do stuff because you fundamentally enjoy it and because it makes you better. As a writer, as an analyst, as a techie, whatever. Learn to love practicing the fundamentals and do it better each time. Over time, quality does lead to success, but you have to be patient. Really patient. Turns out, "overnight" success takes years. Maybe even decades. This is not a sprint, it's a marathon. Plan accordingly.

For example, I don't care if anyone reads what I write here. I'm writing to satisfy myself first and foremost. If others read it and benefit from it, fantastic -- that's a welcome side effect. If I worry about who is reading, why they're reading, or if anyone is even reading at all, I'd be too paralyzed to write! That'd be the least productive outcome of all.

That's not to say that some introspection about the nature of your work isn't useful. It is. Even the weary self-help student I quoted above concluded that 5% of self-help advice surprisingly wasn't bullshit. The one book he recommended without hesitation? 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot.

Despite my deep reservations about the genre, I ordered this book based on his recommendation and a number of credible references to it I noticed on the Skeptic Stack Exchange.

Why does this self-help book work when so many others fail? In a word, science! The author goes out of his way to find actual published scientific research documenting specific ways we can make small changes in our behavior to produce better outcomes for ourselves and those around us. It's powerful stuff, and the book is full of great, research backed insights like this one:

A group of participants were asked to select a negative experience. One group of participants were then asked to have a long chat with a supportive experimenter about the event, while a second group were invited to chat about a far more mundane topic - a typical day.

Participants who had spent time talking about their traumatic event thought the chat had been helpful. However, the various questionnaires told a very different story. In reality the chat had no significant impact at all. They might just as well have been chatting about a typical day.

In several studies, participants who have experienced a traumatic event have been encouraged to spend just a few minutes each day writing in a diary-type account of their deepest thoughts and feelings about it. For example, in one study participants who had just been made redundant were asked to reflect upon their deepest thoughts and feelings about their job loss, including how it had affected both their personal and professional lives. Although these types of exercises were both speedy and simple, the results revealed a remarkable boost in their psychological and physical well-being, including a reduction in health problems and an increase in self-esteem and happiness.

The results left psychologists with something of a mystery. Why would talking about a traumatic experience have almost no effect but writing about it yield such significant benefits? From a psychological perspective, talking and writing are very different. Talking can often be somewhat unstructured, disorganized, even chaotic. In contrast, writing encourages the creation of a story line and structure that help people make sense of what has happened and work towards a solution. In short, talking can add to a sense of confusion, but writing provides a more systematic, solution-based approach.

Therefore, the real world change you would make based on this advice – the proverbial 59 seconds on the book jacket – is to avoid talking through traumatic experiences in favor of writing about them. Not because some self-help guru said so, but because the published research data tells us that talking doesn't work and writing does. Not exactly intuitive, since talking through our problems with a friend always feels like the right thing to do, but I have certainly documented many times over the value of writing through a problem.

59 Seconds is so good, in fact, it has rekindled my hopes that our new Stack Exchange Productivity Q&A can work. I'd love for our productivity site to be founded on a scientific basis, and not the blind cult of personality I've come to expect from the self-help industry.

Remember, nobody's going to help you … except science, and if you're willing to put in the required elbow grease each and every day – yourself.

I've had more or less the same PC, with various updates, since 2007. I've written about most of it here:

• Building a PC, Part I: Minimal boot
• Building a PC, Part II: Burn in
• Building a PC, Part III: Overclocking
• Building a PC, Part IV: Now It's Your Turn
• Building a PC, Part V: Upgrading
• Building a PC, Part VI: Rebuilding

While the advice in those original articles is still quite sound, my old 2007 era case was feeling mighty creaky. I needed a new chassis. I also wanted a motherboard that supported native 6 Gbps SATA for the latest generation of SSDs that truly benefit from them. The buzz around the Sandy Bridge based Core i7-2600k was nearly deafening, and I've fallen completely in love with my last HTPC build based on the same technology. (Oh, and even if you already read that article, read it again because I added new PicoPSU and case information that takes it from awesome to sublime – on the order of 17 watts idle!)

So I decided it was time to build myself a nice Sandy Bridge system. What I ended up with is easily the best case and motherboard combination I've ever laid hands on. Read on!

I cut out a lot of the initial research work by relying on my old, dear friends at Tech Report and their current workstation recommendations:

• Asus P8Z68-V Pro $220
• Corsair Vengeance 16 GB kit $155
• Core i7-2600K $315

As for the case, I was impressed by the Tech Report review of the Corsair 600T, which even comes in a heart-stopping pseudo stormtrooper white. WANT.

When it comes to power supplies, I'm crazy about efficiency, and fortunately there are now lots of so-called "80 Plus Gold" PSUs out there now, offering a staggering 90% efficiency under most loads. Power supply efficiency is important, because the rest of that heat is dumped back into your case. The less efficient your PSU, the more heat buildup you'll have under load. I chose the Seasonic X-760 – which, when bench tested, indeed delivered the promised 90% efficiency – but any high quality 80 Plus Gold model will generally do.

The CPU (and possibly, depending on your tastes, the video card) is the biggest heat generator inside your PC. The better and more efficient the CPU cooler, the quieter your whole system can be. This also affects how much you can overclock. I chose the Thermalright Venomous-X Silent Edition on the basis of it being the current top dog for efficiency, and because it had a simple mounting system. Large coolers can be a real bear to install. And did I mention it comes with an especially quiet fan out of the box, too?

Once I had all the parts in hand, it was a simple matter of building it up, as documented in my previous post series. I adore this Corsair case; it is an absolute joy to work in. Everything in it is cleverly designed, from the rear cable routing area with rubber grommets all over the place for easily passing cables back and forth, to the tool-less 2.5" and 3.5" bays, to the super easily removable side panels. It's like they read a giant list of all my prior complaints with every PC case I've ever used and fixed every. single. last. one of them.

The end result is what you see here:

There are some significant tweaks visible in the above picture that I do recommend:

• Use tin snips to remove the rear exhaust grill. We don't need it back there, and the exhaust airflow is critical. Fan grills affect low-speed fan airflow more than you'd think:

  Wire grills also have an effect: ~20%. This was checked with an anemometer on several different fans of 80, 92 and 120mm size, at full and lower speeds. The airflow reduction went as high as 24% but it was never below 19%. At 12V, the reduction in airflow with most fans will be relatively harmless, though there is an increase in turbulence noise (audible to me). But at the low airflow rates SPCR members run fans, I think the airflow reduction is significant.

• Install a 140mm rear exhaust fan. The Noctua NF-P14 is expensive at $25 but is cleverly designed to give you 140mm of super-quiet fan in the space a 120mm fan would normally take. It just barely fits in the rear exhaust fan slot with a little nudging. But it does fit; it's the beige fan in the above picture. It also comes with its own speed reducers and accessories.
  
  

• Use fan speed reducers on all the fans. The case has two 200mm fans, and the 140mm fan we're adding. I couldn't get the Asus motherboard's "QFan" fan control system to work, as it seems to require 4-pin fans, and all the ones I had (including the ones that came with the case) are 3-pin. While I do prefer dynamic, temperature based control when I can get it, the next best thing is to use hardware to slow down the fans. I like the Zalman-ZM-RC56 resistor connector as the simplest solution, but it's getting hard to find for some reason. The Zalman Fan Mate 2 will also work, and allows you to individually adjust the speed of each fan. The case also has a built in fan controller – that's the knob you see on the front top – but I found it too limited in range for my purposes.
  
  

• Add acoustic foam to taste. Between inexpensive eggcrate foam and thin, adhesive backed open-cell foam, you can easily reduce that last 10-20% of fan noise to a very pleasant white noise. It works well in the areas pictured, and also on the interior of the side panel "facing" the fans. See item 6 in my Building a Quiet PC post for details.

And then, of course, the overclockening. What kind of geek would I be if I didn't attempt to turn this baby up to 11? This is another area where Sandy Bridge is a revelation: so long as you buy one of the blessed "K" series processors, overclocking is as simple as setting the multiplier to the desired value. It is ridiculously simple. And my results, for once, were immediately as good as the ones everyone else was crowing about: 4.4 GHz totally stable!

(beware: there is one nasty little issue with the Asus motherboard's auto-overclock feature. The PLL Overvoltage setting, which auto-overclock "helpfully" enables, completely bollixes up resuming from sleep. Just turn it off, and all is well. I don't even want to tell you how long it took me to figure that one out.)

The total package with a nice SSD delivers a near-perfect Windows Experience score:

I won't lie to you. This is not a compact build. It's big! Those roomy side areas come at a cost, and that makes it a very wide case. But that's to be expected for a desktop powerhouse machine. And since my last case lasted me from 2007-2011, I'll happily accept a little bulk for something that's easy to work on and upgrade over time.

It's a fantastic new reboot of my system, and I didn't expect to be this excited about the final result. This is not merely an incremental improvement over what I had, it's much quieter, easier to work on, and when overclocked to 4.4 GHz, noticeably faster too. (I do slightly mourn the loss of 8 GB of RAM, but I'll survive.)

In this build, I already had hard drives, DVD drive, a sound card, and so forth … but for completeness' sake I'll list everything here if you want to mirror this setup. Realize that some of this comes down to personal taste, so I'm just listing what I recommend. Feel free to change anything out, and bear in mind that Sandy Bridge has decent default onboard video as well.

• Asus P8Z68-V Pro $220
• Corsair Vengeance 16 GB RAM $155
• Core i7-2600K CPU $315
• Corsair 600T Special Edition case $170
• Corsair 850w 80 Plus Gold PSU $170
• Thermalright Venomous-X Silent Edition CPU heatsink $75
• Vertex 3 240 GB SSD $500
• WD Caviar Green 3 TB HDD $170
• Noctua Ultra Silent 140mm Fan NF-P14 FLX $25
• Radeon 6850 triple monitor capable video card $170

Remember, if you can put together a LEGO kit, you can build this totally sweet PC for yourself, too. Good luck and happy building!