4Getting started

In this sec­tion I dis­cuss the ba­sics needed be­fore start­ing to code the web­site. This is start­ing from scratch stuff; I even go through in­stalling the text ed­i­tor and how to con­fig­ure it.

Be­fore we start, I should per­haps ex­plain what equip­ment I used to code the web­site; this isn’t par­tic­u­larly im­por­tant and any PC or Mac can be used to con­fig­ure a web­site.

How­ever, it does ex­plain why all the screen shots are from Win­dows ap­pli­ca­tions and not from a Mac.

I am by pro­fes­sion, a Char­tered Elec­tri­cal En­gi­neer (there’s not many of us left now) and I spend most of my time build­ing and cod­ing var­i­ous types of con­trol sys­tem. These con­trol sys­tems are made by many dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers—Siemens, Rock­well, ABB, Schnei­der &c.—and they all have dif­fer­ent pro­gram­ming pack­ages and lan­guages; they do how­ever, have one thing in com­mon:

They all use Win­dows^†1

En­gi­neer­ing lives pretty much ex­clu­sively in a Win­dows en­vi­ron­ment; so I use Win­dows too.

I do have a Mac Pro (the one that looks like a wastepa­per bas­ket) and I like the hard­ware; Apple makes re­ally good kit. I par­tic­u­larly liked their 27" Thun­der­bolt dis­plays (now dis­con­tin­ued, sadly). I don’t how­ever like their soft­ware much and I’m not a fan of Mac OS; I know many of you will think me a philis­tine for say­ing so (please don’t email me, I’m en­ti­tled to my opin­ion)—but, I’ve tried it and it just doesn’t feel like a grown up op­er­at­ing sys­tem to me.

So I’m a Win­dows man; there it is—al­though Mi­crosoft is doing every­thing pos­si­ble to make me re­think this with Win­dows 10 —Mi­crosoft. Stop. Just stop chang­ing my de­fault apps back to Edge and Groove (what­ever that is) and those other abom­i­na­tions you call soft­ware.

†1		There were some (well one) that used UNIX—but that’s long gone. Some even (until very recently) used CP/M—Just goes to show, if something works engineers are very reluctant to change it—you should see what we put in satellites, it ain’t new.

So this is the kit I’m using: I have a PC work­sta­tion made by Scan Com­put­ers and a Dell lap­top. If I’m at my desk, I use the work­sta­tion; oth­er­wise it’s the lap­top.

These are both fairly pow­er­ful ma­chines (I use a lot of vir­tual ma­chines), they have the fol­low­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tions:

This is an over­clocked Scan Com­put­ers: 3xs x99 carbon fluid gl sli sys­tem with the fol­low­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tion:

• Intel core i7 6800K

• 32 GB DDR4 3000 MHz RAM

• 512 MB Sam­sung 950 M.2 SSD pri­mary hard drive

• 1 TB Intel 540 SSD sec­ondary hard drive

• 2 × GTX 1070 8 GB graph­ics cards (SLI con­fig­u­ra­tion)

• 2 × 27" ASUS PG279Q mon­i­tors (2560×1440)

• Win­dows 7 Pro SP1 op­er­at­ing sys­tem

It’s also got eerie white fluid run­ning round it and more flash­ing LEDs than I’m com­fort­able with—it’s very quiet though (but not as quiet as the Mac Pro).

This is a dell xps 5510 with the fol­low­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tion:

• Intel core i7 6700HQ

• 32 GB DDR4 2133 MHz RAM

• 1 TB M.2 SSD hard drive

• 3840×2160 touch screen

• 2 x 27" Apple Thun­der­bolt mon­i­tors (2560×1400)

• Win­dows 10 Pro op­er­at­ing sys­tem

I gen­er­ally pre­fer to use two 27" mon­i­tors with a res­o­lu­tion of 2560×1440 pix­els; this seems like a nice size to my eyes; I even scale the 4K dis­play on the lap­top to give the same ef­fec­tive res­o­lu­tion (al­though this is a bit small on a 15" lap­top).

If I use the lap­top at a desk I plug it into the two 27" Apple Thun­der­bolt mon­i­tors (my favourite mon­i­tors by a long way). I use a Thun­der­bolt 3 (USB C type) to Thun­der­bolt 2 adap­tor to con­nect the mon­i­tors to the Dell (I was a bit scep­ti­cal about this at first, but it works very well; I use a StarTech.com tbt3tbtadap adap­tor. apple have also in­tro­duced a sim­i­lar adap­tor, this is cheaper but I haven’t used it so can’t com­ment—the re­views are a bit mixed though^†2†3).

†2		I have now tried the Apple Thunderbolt 3 (USB C type) to Thunderbolt 2 adaptor and it didn’t work with the Dell—there is no Windows driver for it. This is a shame because it is quite a nice device, very small and reasonably priced at £29 instead of £100 for the StarTech adaptor—MG December 2016.
†3		After a bit of buggering about updating the BIOS and the Intel Thunderbolt driver to the latest versions (I think it was the Thunderbolt firmware that needed updating, I used the Dell intel Thunderbolt 3 Firmware Update, from their support page here), I eventually got the Apple adaptor working with the Dell. It seems to be just as good as the StarTech adaptor, the price is now £49—MG July 2018.

I don’t like Win­dows 10. I don’t like the way it up­dates, I don’t like the way it changes my de­fault set­tings, I don’t like the way I have to click twice where in Win­dows 7 it was one click, I don’t like the way it han­dles high res­o­lu­tion dis­plays (this is some­thing that Mac OS does do bet­ter), I don’t like the de­fault metro apps (or what­ever they’re called these days), I don’t like the way it deletes old dri­vers with­out ask­ing, I don’t like the way it thinks it knows bet­ter than me. I just don’t like it.

I’m sure this is why my Dad fought in the war—to pro­tect my gen­er­a­tion from this kind of dic­ta­tor­ship.

I pre­fer Win­dow 7 and this is why my work­sta­tion is run­ning it (Mi­crosoft are sup­port­ing it till 2020 so they’ve got time to come up with some­thing bet­ter than Win­dows 10). I’m even think­ing about re­in­stalling it on the lap­top.

I’m also stick­ing with Mi­crosoft Of­fice 2010. This I think was the best ver­sion; the later ones (2013, 2016 or Of­fice 365) are a bit “shouty” and flash (I don’t like the fact that they use cap­i­tal let­ters in the rib­bon tabs—yes, I re­ally am a grumpy old man and I don’t like the an­i­ma­tions—Excel, I’m talk­ing about you here). These later ver­sions also suf­fer from the Win­dows 10 prob­lem of need­ing extra clicks to get to the same point as the 2010 ver­sion.

In short—like my fa­ther be­fore me and as my daugh­ters well know—I blame the younger gen­er­a­tion.

I think I’ll stop now.