I bought a Drobo a short while ago, along with a DroboShare and two terabyte disks. A few of my friends and colleagues with similar storage needs were curious about the Drobo, and specifically it’s power usage. I used a simple plug-based energy monitor to measure the watts consumed under a few scenarios.

My setup is as follows:

	- Drobo base unit;
	- DroboShare NAS;
	- Two one-terrabyte Western Digital [WD10EADS Caviar Green](http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=559) Disks.

Here’s the stats: |Activity |Power Draw (Watts) | Idle (with fans spun down) | 15—17 | Streaming MP3s over network | 22—26 | Streaming film over network | 25—30 | Writing data from network | 26—27, with occasional spikes to 30

After an unfortunate liquid-based incident, my MacBook always needs to be connected to a power source. This requirement means it now lives under the television as a media centre. After trying Frontrow and Boxee, I’ve settled on Plex as my 10-foot interface.

Both Plex and Boxee are based on XBMC, meaning they have a mature, powerful base to build on. Both Plex and Boxee work reasonably smoothly on my first-gen Intel MacBook, but Plex won out because its mac-only outlook means it integrates a little better and I don’t need Boxee’s sharing features, so they just got in the way. If you’re on the look out for a media centre interface, I’d recommend trying them both out. I didn’t try “raw” XBMC in the end.

GEdit is the basic text editor which comes with Gnome. For languages like Ruby and Python, I tend to prefer a decent text editor over an IDE. Perhaps soon an IDE will offer enough helpful features for me to get over the bloated feeling I get using one, like Eclipse and Netbeans have for Java. For now, however, I quite often find myself in a stripped down text editor.

When I was writing the Google App Engine version of dx13, I chose to use GEdit on Ubuntu. Whilst I’m moderately skilled with VIM, I like GEdit’s simplicity. I needed to make a few tweaks to the default set up—a different colour scheme, an extra syntax highlighter and a few plugins—but the end result was very comfortable to work in. Here’s a peek:

A hidden gift in the ASP.NET MVC framework is the addition of more flexible routing into the ASP.NET world view. While it may first appear to be MVC-only, it’s in fact quite easy to bring it into old style “WebForms” ASP.NET projects.

Before ASP.NET MVC, that is in the land of WebForms, it was hard to produce nice URLs using ASP.NET. This was because routing within ASP.NET was based on one of two things:

Over the past three days I’ve been bringing my C# skills up to date by reading C# in Depth, which I’ve found to be a good description of both how to use and the reasoning and mechanisms behind the new features of C# versions 2 and 3. Whilst I had reasonable experience of C#2 and a passing knowledge of C#3, after reading the book I feel more confident in using the features.