Turn signals

Two Minutes

2010-06-01T14:08:00.001-07:00

Two minutes apart. April 22 of this year.

CoolIris - Very cool

2010-03-26T07:57:00.000-07:00

Though there's a lot to like about Adobe's Photoshop.com, the king of the online slideshow has to be cooliris.

Here's my slideshow, drawn from my Facebook gallery. Simple, elegant. Speaks for itself.

Your Next Netflix Streamer: "Everyone Says I Love You"

2009-12-31T11:51:00.000-08:00

This movie,. "Everyone Says I Love You" (1996) is another Woody Allen love poem to New York--and this time to Paris as well. Allen's films after his early comedies nearly all have some deep homage to some director. In this case, its Vincente Minelli or maybe Stanley Donnen. It is without a doubt an embrace of another American treasure, pianist, composer and arranger Dick Hyman, who worked with all the great bands of the 30s, 40s and fifties. Hyman is the driver for this romp. Indeed the main reason for watching is it is a singing/dancing musical with a delightful selection of 50s standards. Just one by Rogers and Hart, but they're all of that ilk. When characters just burst into song in a store or hospital and everyone around jumps into intricate choreography, what's not to like? There's no one in the film that actually sings well--by movie standards--but in my mind the songs are just all the more accessible.

The primary singers aren't great--just cute and fitting--but the Helen Miles Singers make up a teriffic background chorus. They and the estimable Dick Hyman's arrangements and incidental score lift every performance. Graciela Daniele is the choreographer and has fun with the numbers, even though some of the principals would be better to stand still and let the professionals dance around them. A young Ed Norton looks particularly clumsy but is still endearing.

I somehow only saw parts of it over the last dozen years and watched the whole thing last night with a smile on my face almost the whole time. Aside from Allen's usual driver-of-drama, "The heart wants what the heart wants," and his lamentable attitude that marriage is just a forever temporary convenience (he laughably says at one point, 'I'm not that guy'), the story looks at "love" from a lot of different angles--almost completely as an excuse to get to the next song.

The film features a huge name ensemble cast led by Alan Alda, Goldie Hawn and Woody Allen.
Ensemble parts by Natasha Lyonne, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Tim Roth, Ed Norton, Drew Barrymore. Billy Crudup, Itzhak & Navah Perlman, David Ogden Stiers and many others make cameos. A lot of fun, a lot of great tunes rolling around in your head afterwards.


1. Just You, Just Me - Helen Miles Singers, Ed Norton
2. My Baby Just Cares for Me - Natasha Lyonne, Helen Miles Singers, Ed Norton
3. Recurrence/I'm a Dreamer [Instrumental] - Olivia Hayman
4. Makin' Whoopee - Timothy Jerome, Helen Miles Singers
5. Venetian Scenes/I'm Thru With Love - Woody Allen
6. All My Life - Julia Roberts
7. Just You, Just Me [Salsa Version]
8. Cuddle up a Little Closer - Billy Crudup, Sanjeev Ramabhadran
9. Looking at You - Alan Alda
10. Recurrence/If I Had You [Instrumental] - Tim Roth
11. Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think) - Patrick Crenshaw, Helen Miles Singers
12. Chiquita Banana - Christy Carlson Romano
13. Hooray for Captain Spaulding/Vive le Capitaine Spaulding - Helen Miles Singers
14. I'm Thru With Love - Goldie Hawn
15. Everyone Says I Love You - Helen Miles Singers

Disc or stream? Stream or Disc?

2009-12-09T09:41:00.000-08:00

To quote myself (Rick, this is for you): "We are on the cusp of a transition matrix." Meaning, the digital convergence of the Internet, the networked television and widely available and inexpensive streaming content is nearly rivaling what we can purchase and own on optical disc.

So are we still buying movies on disks? I'm tapering off. It seems like most every movie I have (over 400) on my shelf are available on Netflix--many streaming--and Hulu, etc. And I've this pile of disks that are in the "to watch" list, which doesn't seem to get any smaller. How many of these that I have already watched will I watch again (aside from a relatively small handful of true favorites)?

It seems that more and more often I catch myself or the family watching a movie on cable or the computer and say, "We have that on disk" and am met with a shrug (even to myself).

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You can't really dismiss the streaming stuff due to quality any more. Sure, you may still have to suffer the occasional buffer/stutter but that's going to be the first of all issues resolved by the providers and hardware and network (am I leaning away from "net neutrality" here? No, but that's a different topic altogether). Even YouTube is now touting 1080p resolutions and they're providing commerical streams as well as the Niagra of amateur offerings. And it's all legal, too. Movie content owners have seen what happened to the Music industry. They're not fighting it, they're going with the flow--or trying to own the flow. If piracy is in your bent then there's an even bigger hose to drink from.

What that means for our loved Optical Discs is that when it comes to the commitment of purchase, I'm just down to the Really Big movies. Kaboom movies where you want the uncompressed sound and really optimum viewing experience (i.e., without the aforementioned apologies of buffer/stutter/compression), or in cool packaging--like the Star Trek Target disk where the disks are stored in the Saucer Section of the Enterprise!--or rare small ones that won't be available on-demand for a while (i.e., "The Wages of Fear", or early seasons of "Fringe"). A very few disc releases have good extra content disks which may or may not be available from Netflix (usually no).

And. of course, there's always the need to complete a series started long ago, before we got to this "cusp" between "own" and "use". Which brings me to the point of this ramble.

Harry Potter &THBP: buy? Netflix first and then decide? I've got the others in a mish-mash of DVD, HD-DVD (yeah, I'm that guy) and Blu-Ray. So there's the "complete the 'collection'" argument. And potentially it could be like Star Wars, where once a decade you want to pull out all the disks and re-watch them all in order. Or do I wait until juuust before The Deathly Hallows comes out in theaters for a reprise before waiting in line opening night?

As a complete aside, yes, I would like to rip all these 400 movies to my network store, but even letting them run overnight that's a year or more of very organized effort. The Ektachrome slide trays I have stacked in the family room attest to my will on such endeavors. To say nothing of the Terabytes of disk that would in fact pay for years of Netflix subscription. Ah, the trevails of the 21st century.

How cheap can a Win7 laptop be? Try $250! Schwing!

2009-11-13T09:47:00.001-08:00

I'm now using a new and rediculously cheap Acer notebook. It is an Extensa 5230-2177. I got it for $250 at BestBuy. Specs are pretty sweet, especially if you consider that this is netbook pricing for a full-service laptop:

15" screen /2.2G Celeron 900 /x64 chip and OS /2G DDR2 RAM/148G 4600 RPM HD /
3-USB ports on two hubs /a PCMCIA-II slot / 802.11n-draft 2.4G wireless /and a screen-bezel webcam.

This ain't no stripper. The "Windows Experience Score", a new metric introduced by Windows 7, is just 3.3 (on a 1-7.9 scale), but that's determined by the lowest subsystem score, not an average. The low-end is the graphics subsystem, Intel "Mobile 4" on-chip (GM45 probably, but I haven't dug in to find out for sure--Intel's chipset identification utility refuses to run in Windows 7, though they claim support). The rest of the system is snappier, 5.5 score on the CPU, 5.4 on the RAM, both respectable.

As for how this snuck out of BestBuy for $250 when lesser computers (i.e., every one of their 10" screen Netbooks by any vendor) all went for $100 more, I'm guessing this was a "pre-black-Friday" loss-leader. I found it on the BestBuy website quite by accident and they didn't have it on display when I went to the store an hour later (no online orders). I had to ask the clerk for it, and he hadn't heard of it. I told him the website said they had it in stock and he went looking. The next cheapest laptop was also an Acer, for $329--and it didn't have the specs of this one! When the clerk brought out the factory-sealed box, it was as-advertised. I suppose I was supremely lucky as today I look through all the stores in my area (6 within 50 miles) and only Marina (Salinas) is listed as having any. Perhaps they only had the one yesterday and I got it? Google it and you find folk selling it from $300 (SEA) to $400(ORL).

I can imagine it would be down into OLPC price range if you could get it w/o Win7 (Home Premium version!). It has a decidedly "Target" button feel over the MacBookPro's "Nordstrom" ergo that I've become accustomed to, but it is very serviceable. My biggest complaint is that the trackpad buttons to "mouseclick" are extremely loud. There's a big spring under them, quite obviously, and it sounds like a castanete. It's not thin, but that's only noticable if you have a crowded backpack.

iPhone development will have to move to our iMac, but I probably wasn't going to get into that anytime real soon. There are presently other fish to fry.

Some interesting notes are that the Acer came pre-installed with Adobe AIR and Acrobat.com AIR app, as well as Acrobat Reader, but it inexplicably did not have Flash pre-installed. Had to run the downloader/updater on just the second website I went to (after Google).

I should also point out that on our 2.4Ghz Athlon Phenom quad-core HTPC (see previous posts) Windows 7 is pretty snappy, but on this single-core 2.2G Celeron (512Mb L1 cache) it has some significant pauses--especially before throwing up an Aero dialog box. Its using main memory (800MB of the 2G avail) for the video, so the DMA controller has to do a lot when windows are swapping around. This machine isn't for gaming at all, though it does support DirectX 10. The expectations of the graphics system isn't high. It plays HD full-screen from Vimeo and Hulu w/o stuttering and will probably handle that even better when I replace the router with an "N-spec"
[Update 11/16: did get the "N" router as the venerable Linksys WRT54G started flaking out. More on that later, but the laptop loves it for streaming video!].

The 160G disk has only 148G formatted. But at least Acer doesn't squirrel away 10% of your HD for a system restore volume as other vendors do. I believe that a 500G upgrade will be pretty easy. However, following Markham's Computer Axoim #2: "Never buy disk storage until you need it because it will always be cheaper in the future", I'll wait until I'm down to low double-digits in free GBs before I make that purchase.

Other nits on the Acer are when you switch from battery to plug-in, it gives an Awful alert, probably not-unlike other versions of Windows have done when you're below the sleep threshold and the system is about to die on battery. My daughter's old ThinkPad did that just the other day. It sounds like an 80s Casio keyboard version of a french police siren. This is probably controlled by a setting, but I did jump when I plugged the laptop back-in after running on the battery all morning.

The battery experiment went from a first-charge (overnight, sleeping computer) indicating 100% in the tray to running on the battery with screen all the way bright, wireless activity, a 2.5" 7200rpm Hitachi USB2 disk, and a thumb drive all active. I got the 5% notice at almost exactly 2.5h after unplugging and waking-up the computer. After 10 minutes of being on the wire, the meter shows 17%, a good charge rate a 6-cell LiOn. I stopped watching after that. I'll look at it again after I've exercised the battery a little and am not using the external HD to load up the internal disk.

So color me happy. Double bonus of retail therapy win and new computer. I'll report more as it burns in. But even if it lasts just a year (the screen hinges look particularly lightweight and vulnerable)the amortization is still less than a computer that would last 3 years and cost $750, as was the case for the last laptop I bought, a Compaq.

Now what to do about Kasia (inheritor of the long-demised aforementioned Compaq), because she is once again the only one in the family laptopless. There is this Toshiba Satellite L455-S597 at Best Buy.... Ah, the problems of 21st century middle-class America.

Toshiba's new TV has a 218GFlop PS3 processor inside

2009-10-06T18:50:00.000-07:00

Full disclosure, in conjunction with new FTC regulations regarding blogging about products. Toshiba, its affiliates and subsidiaries in no way influenced this posting with an offer to give me a

CELL REGZA 55X1

LCD television set in exchange for my views on this most awesome and excellent innovation to home theater viewing. Of course, if they were to give me one, post facto, I wouldn't have to report it nor would I be required to revise this review--either up, nor down. I think you know what I'm saying, Toshiba.

But onto the facts:

First, there is a seriously awesome CPU in this TV set.

It is the Cell Processor, a new version of the one co-developed with Sony and IBM and which currently powers the PS3 for Sony and IBM's server line. Here (in Japanese) are all the details about it.

It has 218GFlops...in a TV!! Wow. Why all that power? So that it can use the 3TB (!!) of DVR storage in its external dongle to present up to 40 split-screens showing scene selections to jump right into a recording. Or up to eight simultaneous projections of video. Wow! It's like that screen in Back to the Future 2 where Marty's kid comes in and asks the TV for "Channel 34, 126, 22, 44, the music channel and the news". Oh, and one or more of those channels could be YouTube, in HD using an Opera browser co-developed with Toshiba.

I'm telling you, man, this TV just Rocks! Available in December in Japan, and not soon enough in the USA. You have got to get yourself one of these.

Okay, I'm waiting, Toshiba.

What I learned at the DMV

2009-10-02T17:23:00.000-07:00

Not me, I can't take credit for this lovely list.
A friend of mine, who is a bit of a curmudgeon but who has a keen eye for the absurd, sent this to me.

I had to go to the DMV to renew my license this year and did you know?

1) You are required to stop at a red light!

2) At 8 sided red signs that read STOP, you are required to stop.

3) You are not allowed to drive down a sidewalk.

4) Right of way rules means that the car on the right has the right-of-way even if they are turning left.

5) If slowing or stopping your car will prevent an accident, it is saver to use the brakes than honk the horn.

6) When merging onto the freeway the freeway traffic has the right of way.

7) The flashing lights on the back of a vehicle indicate a plan to turn in the direction of the flashing light. Emergency signals do not mean that you can choose at the last second.

8) If you are blind you are not allowed to drive faster than the speed limit.

9) Parking at colored curbs is not racist.

10) Do not open the driver’s side door unless it is safe to do so.

11) Don’t make gestures to other drivers.

12) If you drive faster than other traffic you will have to keep passing other cars.

13) You must use your headlights if it is dark out.

14) If you are stopped by a police officer hang up your cell phone and turn off the radio.

15) You can not be a designated driver unless there are at least 2 people in the car.

I hope that this information helps you in your day to day driving. My trip to the DMV went really well. I spent 3 hours and managed to get my picture taken for a new license. I did find a California Driver Handbook written in English of all things and read it several times as I was waiting. The people at the DMV were personable and apparently received a 15% raise this year. Most of the people at the DMV were wearing SEIU polo shirts. Some may have had an ACORN for distinguished service on their lapel. I didn’t actually see this.

Decorum, Outburst, Parry, Thrust, Riposte!

2009-09-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

Today, in a fit of pique, I decided to parry with Salon.com and take a tilt a pop culture reporting. What an utter waste of time. To prove that it is thus, I "retweet" it here, to use the vernacular.

Decorum is dead! Long live the outburst! --at Salon.com

If this article had not been published, would it have made a noise? --my letter to the Editor
(anywhere else this would just be a feedback forum, but Salon pretends to be a print rag)

Why do I waste my time reading such dreck, and then compound it by writing to rail against it? And then pile insult on injury by reposting it here, spreading the virus without a sleeve to my sneeze? Because, dear reader, without it, the interwebs would implode from the vacuum.

Parade Laps at the Monterey Historic Races

2009-09-07T15:35:00.001-07:00

Monterey Historics Porsche Club of America Parade Laps from Chris S Markham on Vimeo.

The Monterey Bay Region of the Porsche Club of America sponsored these two parade laps about the Mazda Laguna Seca Raceway during the mid-day break of the Rolex Monterey Historic Races, August 16, 2009. The video was taken from inside a 1959 Porsche 356 A Coupe. At the top of Turn 8, a Monterey County Sheriff deputy fell in behind me, with lights flashing. I really wish I had asked my Dad to turn the camera around--a once-in-a-lifetime shot being chased down The Corkscrew by a cop! There wasn't much high-speed as there were over 250 cars participating, but there was a lot of good cheer. But I couldn't help but think the motorcycle cops had it in for me....

The Maestro gets Domain Parked: One site, One story

2009-09-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

HCP Research is Dead, Long Live HCP Research.com

I'm not a total wizard at reverse lookups and ICANN records, but it appears that the former home of Harry Pellow's HCP Research, once at http://hcpresearch.com/ has been re-registered and parked on or about 15 June of 2009, the very when the previous domain registration expired. Talk on the 356Talk web forum indicated that Harry's heir, Andrew, was alerted to the lapse too late. He found out on the 25th of June. I had raised the issue on 356Talk just two days prior. The site had been sniped by that time already, nothing to be done about it.

What this means for the availability of Harry's Books and Videos remains to be seen, but it likely doesn't bode well. They're listed on Amazon.com, but fulfillment has been spotty and the CD-ROM version...well, I don't get much feedback about it aside from the occasional reference to my Amazon review. But the website is definitely gone, and there's not much hope in reclaiming it for the 356 Faithful.

There are folk who fish for expiring domain registrations. They set up robots and get email notifications when domains expire. Then they re-register and set up some skeleton site that uses some of the terms that the site used to be known for (in search engines, exploting past glories). Sometimes the new owner is hoping to just get ad click throughs, other times to squat and hold the domain hostage until the previous owner realizes the mistake of their procrastination and has to buy it back from the new registrant at above market prices.

There's part of me that's loathe to point out that the website, though parked--and now having nothing to do with HCP Research--is alive. I don't want you to click through there, and I certainly don't want you to click on any links on the page. Because it puts money in the pocket of a cybersquatter and reveals nothing to you that you couldn't have found with a google of your own.

Who Owns HCP Research Now?
There are >6300 other domains registered to this particular server--and the company that owns it has 20,000 (yes, twenty thousand) domains more, indicating that it is indeed in a parking lot.

Below is the registrant info from a "whois" lookup & below that is a decoding for the curious.

Registrant: privateregistrations.ws
Private Registrations Aktien Gesellschaft
CNR of Granby & Sharpe St.
Suite K2134
Kingstown kingstown, VC
Domain Name: HCPRESEARCH.COM

"privateregistrations.ws" = What is ".ws", I hear you ask. Why, ".ws" stands for "Web Site", doesn't it? Suuuure.

You see, .ws is the Internet country code top-level domain for Samoa. It is administered by SamoaNIC, for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Samoa.

The .ws domain is an abbreviation for “Western Samoa”, the nation’s official name when two-letter country codes were standardized in the 1970s. ICANN restricts geographic use of ".org.ws", ".gov.ws", and ".edu.ws", but all other second-level .ws domains can be sold anywhere in the world. If it matters, this particular server is located in Portland, OR. But it doesn't. Matter. Because the web host has nothing to do with the domain registration. Except for an entry in some DNS servers translating the IP number of that humming server in Oregon to "hcpresearch.com" in your web browser.

"Private Registrations Aktien Gesellschaft" = This is like saying "Incorporated", in German. So this company does Private Registrations. It's the Swiss Bank Account of domain registrations. It has more than 26 thousand, and aside from some google hits on some of the registered porn sites (no big surprise), you're not going to find out a lot about this company.

"CNR of Granby & Sharpe St." = Corner of Granby & Sharpe streets. Yeah, that's supposed to be an address. Okay, so its a small town, and maybe Granby is a small street. Well, not really.
There are major banks on this street, as well as the Finance Ministry and the Telecom Ministry.
And in the same building, at Suite K059 (ground floor, no doubt) a very interesting little company, an Internet Service Provider and the islands' largest cell service provider, named Digicel SVG Limited. But that's just a co-incidence, because this drop-box registry parker doesn't need any kind of infrastructure in St. Vincents, just the right regulatory (i.e., non-taxed) infrastructure.

"Suite K2134" = Umm... That's a lot of numbers. Its a city, but not with 20-story skyscrapers. Okay, maybe a two-story. Which means its probably a mail drop and not an office. With forwarding...or not.

"Kingstown, Kingstown VC" = Kingstown is the largest town on St. Vincent, largest island in the Grenadine islands chain, part of the Carribean Islands being just west of Barbados and north of Grenada.

You know, it is fascinating that Google Maps has no street information for this thriving metropolis. I don't mean that it doesn't have Street View. I mean...no features. But check the satellite view, its a big city, with a doc for the expected cruise ships and everything.

View Larger Map

But you can't look up street addresses in Google Maps for this island. Hmmm.

So, as you would expect with anything Internet-shady, this is pretty well obfuscated, and unless I wanted to do a Neal Stephenson "Hacker Tourist" kind of thing, I don't think I'll ever find the bottom of this rabbit hole.

Gone, but is anything really gone on the internet?
That's not the end of this tale. privateregistrations.ws just has the "now" of HCP Research (and probably the future, too). But it doesn't have the past. That's available from The Internet Archive, which is just really a fantastic and under-rated resource. While google updates its cached web pages often, and now it reflects the "new look " of (nee) HCP Research, the Internet Archive has all the old pages that were developed and published by Harry Pellow.

To be very safe about it, I've snarfed off a copy of his Stories and Quizzes into PDF, which I can't publish here due to copyright, but they may be available in the future on the 356 Registsry website.

Here are the Internet Archive links to the Maestro's Stories from the old HCP Research Website. And the Maestro's Quizzes, too. All copyrighted by Harry Pellow, All Rights Reserved, Aktien Gesellschaft et al., not withstanding.

Long Live HCP Research, indeed.

Wireless A/V Audio is 7.1, uses new 5.1-5.8Ghz band

2009-09-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

Reported on TWICE, an A/V marketing newsletter, manufacturer Focus Enhancements will debut a "Summit" multichannel wireless-audio technology for direct-to-customer release via distributor Aperion Audio in Q2 of '10.

The Summit line transmits uncompressed 48kHz/24-bit PCM over the air, using FEC, and uses the 5.1-5.8GHz U-NII band. The 23 channels in that band are non-overlapping and are an ITU standard for unlicensed use not interfering with the 802.11a/n wireless-network band.

Focus plans to upgrade the technology to deliver 96kbps PCM audio over the air in mid-2010.

Other features are spread-spectrum OFDM modulation, four-antenna tuning, dynamic frequency selection (automatic channel hopping), up to 10ms of interpolation to fill in dropped packets, and automatic speaker discovery and channel assignment for easy setup.

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The King of Pop is dead, long live the King

2009-06-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

10:38 AM mdk: Haven't been this sad since Britney shaved her hair.

10:38 AM csm: Because Cameron Diaz shaved hers in the tear-jerker "My Sister's Keeper" opening this weekend?

10:39 AM csm: Because Miley Cyrus said MJ was her inspiration?

10:39 AM csm: Because we'll never know where the other glove was now?

10:39 AM csm: Because Farah's posters will now be much more expensive?

10:40 AM csm: Because Farah and Ryan O'Neil never tied the knot before she died because she couldn't, as he requested of her, "Get out of that bed and get married"?

10:40 AM csm: Because now Neverland will have to become a museum and the sleep-overs we dreamed of in our youth will never happen?

10:41 AM csm: Because now Elvis will get a chance to punch MJ in the face for marrying his daughter?

10:41 AM csm: Because you'll have to get a refund for your tickets to the British shows?

10:42 AM csm: Because now, when you show up to work in a black sequined hat, short socks and one glove people will cry instead of smile?

10:42 AM csm: Because all that money spent on moonwalking lessons is wasted? Wasted, dammit! Wasted!!

10:43 AM csm: Because now a Charlie's Angel's reunion is as distant as a Beatles reunion?

10:43 AM csm: Because now Tito will have to sing "I'll be There" and it, somehow, just won't be the same?

10:44 AM csm: Because celebrities die in 3s, and with Ed MacMahon, Farrah, and MJ...Pauly Shore lives another day?

10:45 AM csm: Because Liz Taylor has added another soul to her devil's keychain of the dead and undead?

10:45 AM csm: Because we'll never know who Billy Jean's lover really was? (It was Quincy, it was always Quincy.)

10:47 AM csm: Because we'll be forced to watch interminable "Remembering Michael" shows ranging from Ellen to Oprah to primetime and even into late night?

10:47 AM csm: Because you just know Saturday Night Live is going to "go there". And it will be too soon. Way, way, too soon.

10:48 AM csm: Because Will Smith will have to play the "old MJ" in the biopic and his son will have to play "young MJ", and Jada Pinkett-Smith will be Janet and that will all be so wrong?

10:49 AM mdk: Don't make fun of the King of Pop!

10:49 AM mdk: Not today!

10:49 AM csm: The King of Pop is dead, long live the New King of Pop: http://www.tmz.com/2009/05/11/eminem-the-new-king-of-pop/

We're Outnumbered, 2:1, not Counting the Microwave

2009-06-18T14:11:00.000-07:00

There are no CRTs in our house any longer. A few months ago I took the last ones to the electronics recycling center. Couldn't give away a 17" CRT on craigslist nor freecycle.

Actually, that's not quite true. There is one old G3 iMac DV/SE that is unplugged and on the floor waiting for a data dump (next to a Kodak slide projector, waiting for same). Nonetheless, even discounting the comatose iMac, I count the blinkers and the breathers and "we" are outnumbered. Our home has a 2:1 computer/human ratio. That is, if you do count smart phones and do not count the Roomba robot (nor DVR, MP3 players, Amana, Kenmore, et al.). Include anything with a microchip in the census and, well, that war was lost a decade ago, I'm sure. Today that would include picture frames and light bulbs in addition to clock radios and automobiles.

Back to the things with keyboards/pads, and I note that in the Great Platform War we're divided on our systems 3/3 PC v. Mac. It tips 4/3 to the Mac if you count my iPhone as the Youngest One's Samsung smart phone is neither. Cheryl & I have our Macs from work, and we've a flat-panel iMac (largely unused) in the family room. The third Win platform (apart from the girls' laptops) is the Media PC hooked to the big screen for movies and gaming (aka The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player), which is now running Win7 RC.

The shift to LCDs over CRTs was over before everyone in the house went to the blissful portability of a laptop. We also have 3 additional desktop PCs and their LCD screens unplugged and unused. While the girls shifted over to their laptops fairly readily, I believe it was the gradual decay of the desktop PCs--driven perhaps by malware?--that caused, one day, the switch to be left off. That, and unless you're gaming, or doing video-editing, there really isn't anything a laptop can't do that a desktop can't. Maybe the Youngest One would launch Hulu onto her 19" LCD desktop screen--but that's really a question of usable distance v. using the laptop's 5" smaller screen.

Three standalone inkjet printers tethered to those desktops and a flatbed scanner were replaced by one multifunction network printer last Xmas. You know, as I ponder it, the desktop as a USB printer host may have been the true anchor for those machines. Up until the network printer came online we were almost a "one person, one printer" household. I'd leave one desktop in the family room on with a shared USB printer, but the girls each had their own. Multiple printers, unless they're specialized (e.g., for photo printing, large format, duplex, etc.) aren't really economical. Especially if the host PC has to be on for them to work. Wireless network printing is the only way to fly.

As long as I'm describing the compute devices that don't have keyboards, I suppose I must include the Linksys/Cicsco NAS, with 2TB store--seemed like a good idea at the time, but has turned out to be a struggle. It doesn't appear that you can yet go DIY on a cheap NAS unless you hack the onboard linux kernel. Seems you only get a decent OS out of the box when you spend >$1k. The management UI is okay, but it just doesn't appear on the network from most devices. Interestingly, Win7 Media Player sees the media server library just fine, but Win 7 Media Center does not. Yep. Same machine, same network, same vendor. Different apps behaving differently.
From other Win systems or the Macs, only the FTP is available. The SMB/Wins hosts don't respond.

The sturdy WRT54G Wireless router has been serving yeoman duty, but is getting a bit long in the tooth. With Hulu in wide use in the house, and Netflix on Demand, the laptops and Media PC really need wireless-N. But what's surprising to me is that we have to have 10 ports open (and no, haters, the default "admin" is not the logon :^P ). The aforementioned laptops + Media PC + iMac, two smart phones w/wifi, our wireless "barn cam", and the printer. We had the barn cam port-forwarded to a DDNS server while the baby lambs were in the barn, but its been silent for a while. I'll have to set it up as a weathercam or something until it is next pressed into nursery duty.

I Hadn't done that kind of inventory in a while; I never would have guessed at that topology even five years ago. While we don't have exotic tech like a head-end 19" rack for our NAS, the need is also obviated by a reliance on wireless. There's a total of maybe 6' of Cat-5 in the whole house. I keep a spare line hanging off the router encase I need to reconfig, and the NAS is on a hardline as well.

Amazingly, the tech support load is low. Everyone is largely self-sufficient (the wireless/LAN printer driver addition to all computers was the most recent Big Change). That may be because I'm less available (or interested) in jumping into the fray when a small issue arises. And 7+ years with WinXP and OS/X breeds familiarity to the quirks and reset paths. The NAS is more a long-term project at this point as I return to poke at it when I think of it. I sometimes unplug it just because the fan is loud. Router or cable bridge reboots are rare.

Indeed, the only time all that tech causes me concern is when I get up at night for a glass of water and see all the LEDs blinking at me from various shelves and tables. The slow throb of an Apple notebook heartbeat light while it is asleep is kinda creepy. I've always said that as long as they have plugs, we'll still be in-control. Recharge over a wireless network? Not in my house. And if I ever hear the Roomba start up in the middle of the night on its own... Hmm. Maybe I'll put the wireless web cam to watching the Roomba in its dock. Just in case.

Don't Count Cadillac Out Yet

2009-06-09T11:35:00.000-07:00

A friend tipped me to a pretty negative blog post about the Cadillac CTS Wagon, due to go on sale as a '10 model at the end of summer. It has been on sale in Europe, and Cadillac was going to bring it to the USA.

What started off in an email thread among friends really became a referendum on Cadillac and its role in the "GM Reinvention" world.

My friend wrote in the email thread, "I really, really wish GM would take Cadillac more in the direction of the Audis, Mercs, and BMWs of the world, but I think they are too afraid. And that's a shame, but I won't give up on them."

I submit that is Cadillac's answer to that wish:

Grudge Match: Cadillac CTS-V vs BMW M5 vs Mercedes Benz C63 | Sports | SPIKE.com

Some see Cadillac's current position in the world market against the European luxo-sports lines half-empty, I see half-full. I think they are exactly aiming Caddy at the luxo-euros. This wagon is another example. Their halo car, the XLR, isn't a luxo-sedan, it is a two-seater, CLK and XJR in its sights (w/o BMWs Z8, you might ask them where they are, and wither Audi?).

And they competed at LeMans for a few years in LMP1 (though perhaps w/o enough guts to continue to lose to Audi--as everyone else did). And on of the most notable concept cars in recent years, the Cien, was a supercar beast. Perhaps the only exception in the Caddy line is the DTS. But you just don't walk away from all the fleet-luxo and old-school US money market. You'd be just as crazy to tell Benz to stop making limos. OTOH, perhaps they should make those into Buicks and break clean with some of the old brand identity. I'll take your point about oldsters in the Caddy ranks and I'll posit that the problem isn't in GM marketing per se, but in the old dealer network for Caddy. They're doing the frontline marketing and it may be that's where the polyester-and-gold walks in the door. And salesmen tuned to that audience may not know how to pitch a bimmer-class car.

I think Jaguar had a similar problem; they're only just coming out from under that "old wool and lace" market (for their sedans).

Here's a like anecdote: when we bought our Jimmy Suburban from Moore Buick/GM in Los Gatos, the guy who served us was a Buick salesman. He talked to us more about the interior and ammenities than the seating and pulling capacity, though those criteria were the first things out of our mouth. Unlike when we went to the Santa Cruz Dodge dealer, where the trucks were across the street from the Nissans and VWs and Dodge cars. That guy could talk locking hubs all afternoon.

A Caddy dealer experience that is more like BMW may be what's needed. Because they do have the cars:

And let's not forget a young man named "Andy Pilgrim" and what he did for Cadillac for a couple years in the Speed GT Challenge. Beat the sox off my favorite driver, Randy Pobst who pedaled an RS6 around the same circuits.

As far as the suspension settings/choices, that may be the Old Dealer effect I mentioned above. You can't blame Caddy for the option boxes their customers check, or for building what people are buying. But back to the specifics of that blog. What Banovsky wrote is that Caddy is suffering from having customers that it doesn't want, so it shouldn't make cars for them. Instead, it should make cars for a different market and try to woo them. And this market shouldn't be performance luxury sedans but hybrids and diesels and brand-badged Volts. Oh, wait, they're doing all those.

Well, maybe. Turns out in this climate that all the cards haven't hit the table. GM may quit on the diesel for Cadillac in europe (a huuuge mistake, IMHO):

You can chip at Caddy; there's certainly a lot of grist for the mill. I just object to poor automotive journalism because it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to actually make some good points (as you can see here :^> ). Instead, Banovsky is just setting up straw men to knock them down, and wrap it in a snarky New Englander finger-and-tongue wag.

Just read his summary: "The CTS Wagon....has been borne from misguided market research."

Wrong. They're competing successfully with this car in Europe, it is made in the USA, we export it, and it is a platform that could be a Voltwagen or use the Chevy/Escalade hybrid electro-trans. What's not to like about that? If they only sell 30k in the USA this year (and Banovsky never sees one in a parking lot while he's antiquing) then remember this: Porsche sells fewer Cayennes than that in the USA and those sales are what kept Porsche in the black.

Further, if that market can be drummed up then we're poised to go, rather than saying, "Gee, when all those folk stopped buying LX500s and M-class Mercs, why didn't we have something in the wagon segment they're all flocking to now?" That's how you lead. You get your troops in the right spot prior to the assault. I don't think it is wrong at all. I think its pretty smart. And actually, Banovsky makes a pretty good case for it in his own writing, if you can just stick to the facts and pitch the "Yankee common sense".

2009-05-20T16:39:00.001-07:00

Casablanca in Blu

2009-02-11T17:19:00.000-08:00

In one of my recent trips along the HD Movie aisle at Fry's Electronics store I noticed a Blu-Ray edition of Casablanca. It was tagged the "Ultimate Collector's Edition" and was full of frivolity, including a "passport holder", "luggage tag" (really...) and photo books, cards, etc. And more etc. Okay. However, the reason d'etre for this collection was the Blu-Ray transfer of the movie itself. So checkbox #1: you've got to have the movie. And why not? Casablanca is one of my favorite movies--and for whom is it not? It is Number 11 on IMDB's Top 250, and near the AFI's Top 100 list. Interestingly, Casablanca is the most represented film in the AFI's ballot for "Top 100 Best Movie Quotes". It is mentioned seven times! Here's one, a classic, #2 on the list.

Okay, I don't have to sell you on the movie. Checkbox #2 is, however, "Do you have it already?"

Well, yes, of course I do. I have two. One on VHS. And another on DVD. So now its time to pony up for the Blu-Ray, right?

But all those "Ultimate" goodies commanded a premium price. I don't really need or particularly want all that hoo-ha. What I was pondering as I held the box in the stores was this: would the Blu-Ray bring out that much more out of a 57-year-old print?

Amazon thinks so, they have a sales pitch video for it. Seven hours of extras, yeah, yeah. But the 2" web preview doesn't really let me know if it is really going to look and sound that much better. Don't get me wrong. If I didn't already have the DVD, I'd be on it like Captain Renault on Ugarte. But I do already have the DVD, and I also have a very good Toshiba A30 HD-DVD player with an excellent 1080p up-converter. Of course it would be good, but the question for me was, "would it be that much better?"

I'm at the point where I'm going to buy almost all new movies in Blu-Ray, I'll get closeouts I don't already have in HD-DVD because they're cheap, and I'll still shop the closeout bins for DVDs for relatively recent movies--because the transfers upconvert very well. For special movies, some "kaboom" flix or a special effects blockbuster or anything Pixar, I'll probably duplicate a DVD I already have in Blu-Ray. I mean (and I think I've asked this before), can you really have too many copies of 2001: A Space Oddesey? The answer is no.

But for movies I already have, on DVD, the bar is a bit higher. That's my point. I love Casablanca and it will probably be a go-to movie on many rainy nights in the future. But isn't the DVD pretty good? I've always thought it was.

The experience which lures me to wanting more was one of a few years ago (December 19, 2004 to be exact) when the City of San Jose reopened the California Theater, on South First Street. I'll save all the info I have on the California, nee, Fox movie house, for another post. On that one particular night my mom, my sister and I went to see Casablanca there. Courtesy of the David Packard Foundation. There was a newsreel (FDR, Churchill and Stalin in Casablanca!), a Bugs Bunny cartoon which featured "As Time Goes By" and some live organ music. All that culminating in a wonderful print delivered on a brand-new screen with state of the art projection and sound. It was sublime.

Could I get closer to that at home? I'm just talking degrees here, of course I don't have the kind of home theater setup that would rival the California. Or even the local cineplex shoebox. So discretion prevailed that day at Fry's and I put the box (and all of its "etc"s) back on the shelf. To be quite Candid about it, if it were just the disk, and the asking was $25 rather than $70, I probably wouldn't have thought twice. But I've got to be somewhat discreet with my video upgrade expenditures. There may be 50 candidate films in my collection I could replace in DVD with Blu-Ray. That's well more than a thousand dollar outlay for something I already posses.

But then the fates came to me. A co-worker had the Casablanca Blu-Ray and loaned it to me. Heaven! Better than that, because as the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player and the HD-DVD upscaler are on separate HDMI inputs, I would be able to do a true back-back compare of the two disks.

And here, dear reader are my results. I don't have the time nor chops to present this comparison in a format akin to Tom's Hardware or other sites which do this for a living. I can also say that if you want someone else's textual analysis of the new release, there are plenty of reviews on the web. What you're going to get here is my amateur visual comparisons. Because that's what its all about, baby. Which one is better when you slot the disk and turn down the lights. No exotic measurements or tuning to the "nth" degree of output. This is a seat-of-the-couch evaluation. What's the best picture for your buck.

You can skip the next couple of paragraphs if you like; it is all about the technical bits.

The TV is a Samsung 46" LCD with 1080p, flourescent backlight and 15k:1 contrast ratio. A couple years old, but still very nice. Its got the shiny, not matte screen, great for films. The settings are out of the box, "Standard" (not "Movie") and with contrast and brightness settings in the middle. Color settings don't matter a whole lot here, but there was no color casting to the B&W print that I could see in either the DVD nor BLU-Ray. Feeding the DVD-side is the aforementioned Toshiba A30. In the Blu-Ray's corner is the SSBRP, which is an LG player driving an NVIDIA PureVideo^® HD engine off an Asus M3N-HT Deluxe/HDMI Hybrid SLI motherboard. The player software is CyberLink's Power DVD 7. I took screen shots by hand with my Canon S5-IS at the widest zoom, fixed 1/60sec exposure with ambinent room (i.e., LCD backlight) lighting.

Sound output from the Toshiba is HDMI to the TV set, wheras on the Blu-Ray the sound is optical S/PDIF out to the Sony home theater reciever and its theater-in-the-box speakers. I should say right now that the audio was very obviously better, but the differences between the outputs make the comparisons difficult. From other reviews I understand that the sound hasn't been remastered, and that it was still in Mono, but it was clear and bright on both the DVD and the Blu-Ray. Not enough difference there for an upgrade repurchase.

So what were the visuals like? From the opening credits, the improvement in the transfer was apparent.

The text on the background map was much more legible and the drop shadow behind the title was clear and made the text pop with depth as was certainly originally intended.

After the narrative introduction with the model globe showing the route to Casablanca--there is this establishing shot of where our story takes place. Although it is actually a matte painting with an composite of the sky, the minaret, and a little figure walking the parapet. The figure is actually quite blurry and the Blu-Ray magnifies this, but this is decades before ILM mattes. I didn't give the minaret much space on the Blu-Ray side in the above mash-up, but you can click through on the links below and see the obvious differences.

Note especially the dynamic range in the sky as well as crispness in the minaret roof shadows. Truth be told, I didn't know the cityscape was a matte painting until I saw the Blu-Ray for the first time and could pause the picture. You can't do that at the movie theater! I should have known though as all the airport scenes (except the arrival of Major Strasser) are all mattes and models.

As nearly the entire movie takes place inside Rick's Cafe American, we skip ahead to the first musical number, where Sam leads the bar in a rousing rendition of "Knock On Wood". Here, in the busy background, you can see the depth of the lighting, the slight push to the contrast, but most of all the crispness of line and brightness. The DVD looks positively muddy by comparison. This wasn't just the camera or the brightness of the TV (though the latter could be adjusted to achieve some better parity, I suppose). The Blu-Ray just pops. This indeed does remind me of my night with Casablanca on the big screen at the California Theater.

With a crisper print details abound. I thought it was just wonderful that the extra at Sam's right arm was playing in the scene. You could see her facial expression as Sam runs his hand through his hair. Never saw that before!

For this shot of Rick, where he denies the Deutsche Bank representative access to the gaming tables, I didn't get the Canon in exactly the same spot between switching inputs. So the images are slightly different sizes. Rather than introduce artifacts by scaling in Photoshop, I decided to put them side-by-side here. Which is a better presentation of all the differences anyway. Look at the tile on the wall, and the pattern from the lightshade and shadows (the film is full of such rich lighting details). Notice the individual chess pieces and the shadows on their left sides in the Blu-Ray.

And most of all, notice Bogie's wonderful mug. The scar on his lip was clearly visible as were the pupils of his eyes. You might give the nod to the DVD's dynamic range when it comes to Bogie's forehead, however. Those famous brow wrinkles are just a little deeper, his face just a little wearier. I should mention that these are not frame-by-frame time-code matches in these pictures, so Bogie's brow might actually be a bit more relaxed. I just used the pause buttons and my eye to freeze the pictures, flipping back and forth on the HDMI inputs until I got a reasonable match.

If there is anything that the DVD's flatter contrast provides, it is that there might be a hint of a white-on-white stripe in Rick's dinner jacket (a Gasbarri of Rome, made for the movie for Bogie). But then again, that might be a moiré pattern introduced by the DVD transfer, the upscaling to 1080p for the DVD to the TV set or from the CMOS chip in the Canon camera I used for the caputre. I didn't notice it anywhere else.

Even if that is the case, everything else in the scene--the sets, the decor, the costumes and most of all the facial expressions, all pop with new clarity.

At Ilsa's introduction, where she asks Captain Renault about Sam at the piano, there is this exquisite close-up of Ingrid Bergman. Even with the soft-focus and halo lighting treatment by Arthur Edeson's crew, the Blu-Ray punches out detail. Though the contrast line just at her neck & hairline is lost, that might in fact demonstrate this transfer was taken right up to the edge of what is possible for the contrast ratio of video--or at least of my LCD screen. Who knows, the contrast gradient might be better on an LED-lit or Plasma screen? The grain introduced by the earlier transfer, subsequent scalings and computer intervention by the Toshiba is reduced in the Blu-Ray The lighting is made more uniform, and the removal of the sepia-like cast means the Blu-Ray image is very near like a publicity still.

I should mention that the reddish "bursts" on the upper and right edges aren't in the print, that's my halogen spot room lighting reflecting off the TV screen. In the larger files you can see curtain reflections as well. Mea culpa. This is my first time shooting off the TV screen.

Though I watched a little bit more of the movie (I had to stay in for that quote, "You played it for her, Sam you can play it for me!") I was ready to shut it down after the first half hour, return my borrowed copy and get one of my own, leather passport case and all. Truly and absolutely worth it.

I'm convinced: a great transfer makes a great movie....wonderful.

DVD list

2009-01-22T18:53:00.001-08:00

This isn't really so much for y'all, but for me. Its an easy place to go to glance at movies & TV shows on disk that I have. The full list is here, on Blist, and its viewable by the public (if you have a Blist account), but its nice they offer an embed.

DVD List
DVD List
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From the ones that are listed "Blu-Ray", those are the ones I haven't watched yet, because of the continued inoperation of the Stone Soup Blue Ray Player. Stay tuned for more on that story, as I move from Vista to Windows 7 Beta. Woot!

Soup Blu-Ray Player: Chapter Two - Vista x64

2009-01-05T23:23:00.000-08:00

It was last year that I started the saga of The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player. I'll not recap, but give a catch-up: the Media-PC is about to, I'm afraid, be the recipient of its third Vista OS install. In trying once again to fix the Logitech MX Bluetooth keyboard's driver, the SoundMax HDMI-accessible driver was blown away. The machine doesn't see that the device exists. The Windows "native" drivers for the "HD Sound" won't install. So the SSBRP is, once again, rendered rather useless. Because there really aren't all that many silent movies released in Blu-Ray and though I can and do enjoy foriegn films with subtitles, I miss the music, sound-effects--and after-all, what's a sub-woofer without any woof?

How did I get to this state? Did the SSBRP ever work at all? Oh, yes. It worked. Gloriously. Beautifully. Not-quite-perfect-but-quite-serviceably-thank-you. Just the other night my son Chad, and his fiancee, Heather, were visiting from Las Vegas and Chad had brought along his Blu-Ray copy of The Incredible Hulk. We all watched it, and the "making of" special feature and I was quite happy. Prior to that I'd watched "Dark Knight", "Wanted" and "IJatTotCS", all in Blu-Ray. This going back to November when I'd finally straightened out the driver mess that I've come to understand is, inevitably, unfailingly, but quite regularly fallibly, Vista.

Could my life have been easier had I decided to go with Vista-32, the more direct decendant of XP? Surely. But I had a terabyte drive, the idea of multi-gigabyte video files and more addressable RAM than you could throw a pointer at. And I had four cores of 64-bit capable processor! Why would I leave all that on the table in the name of compatability and stability!!? Bah! Take me straightaway to the Bleeding Edge, Jenkins, and don't spare the cycles! Or sectors. Whatever. The point being that this was going to be a New Computer. I'd tried Ubuntu and though it was nice, we agreed to remain friends and talk occasionally, but well, it just wasn't mature enough for a lasting, committed relationship based on movie viewing (Hardy Heron, we'll always have DivX). So it had to be Vista, and what is it they say? In for a penny? Yeah. I went for eight bucks worth. Sixty four bits, to be punny about it.

One would like to think that an operating system produced by the Worlds Largest Vendor of said-same, and Richest Company, etc., and one that was mature by at least eighteen months, would be pretty well shaken-out, right? I mean, by the time Windows Millennium came around, Windows 98 had been around that long, right? And it was good enough so that "ME" was really a mistake to leave tried-and-true '98 for. The ME was the "wait for XP" edition. So I guess what has happened is that Vista, despite being eons in development is really the "ME" of the 21st century. Folk are clinging to their XP until, what's it called, "Seven"? Comes out. Seven. That's got cachet up the yin-yang, baby! Riiiight. But I digress.

An Endless Vista

Vista 64 should, by all rights, have vendor support and community support and lots of high-version drivers and software and devices and...and...and.... Well. It does have a lot of community support. It has to. One wonders if a course in being a Linux geek and having to figure all that out with the help of the fine Ubuntu User's Forum is a prerequisite for installing Vista x64 onto one's system. Let me tell you, friend. It couldn't hurt.

At the first attempt at living with Vista (now, in 2009, aka, "C:\Windows.old") I installed into a clean system. With no nVidia nor Asus nor LG (Blu-Ray) drivers. I was smart enough not to install the AirLink300 Wi-Fi card. Its XP drivers were nothing to sing home about (some of the worst Chinglish documentation and software strings I've seen since Epson manuals of the mid-80s), and so I wasn't pinning any hopes on finding Vx64 drivers. But I didn't need it, because the Comcast modem, with its loverly 8Mbps was just an RJ45 cable and a WRT54G 10/100 port away.

The initial install was fine. I tip that to the 'geers at nVidia and Asus, and to the fact that its pretty hard to get a reference VGA driver wrong. But props also to the fact that the onboard HDMI output worked from the get-go. But there wasn't any sound. 'Salright, I'm just warming up. More stones for the soup were to come. Registration occurred, nagging diminished, and I even managed to find my way through the very first layers of the onion that is Vista Security. I was able to turn off the nagware that is Vista's User Authorization Control (UAC). This is an absolute necessity when you're a safe and knowledgeable user installing vendor-provided software (i.e., you're not practicing unsafe warez). Otherwise, at each CD, at each setup.exe, you'll be asked, "Do you really, REALLLY want to do that, huh? Do ya? Do ya? Huh?" Or dialogs to that effect.

That the default for video and Human Interface Devices (HID--that's keyboard and mouse to you and me) worked out of the Vista DVD install was great. Because the Asus and nVidia softwares need an operating system to go against. So you can switch out of "800x600" mode and up to glorious 1080p (1920 x 1080 x 32bit) mode on that deliciously big screen. And so you can use the northbridge and southbridge chips for sound, and for the exotic bits that came with this motherboard, the "Hybrid SLI" mode--HDMI out through the motherboard connector from both the PCI-e MSI 9800GTX+ and ALSO the digital sound out from the LG Blu-Ray player.

Oh, yeah. I could taste it.

But what does any geek worth his salt do when he first puts together a new system? Install the CDs that came in the box? HEEELL, no! You go on the net and download the latest! And true to form, even though the motherboard was a scant four months old, there were updates to be had, and nVidia can be counted upon to have a Detonator set that's at least a rev newer than anything that has to make it all the way through a manufacturing chain--and that isn't even the Beta stuff!

So I started in with v178.xx (an old v151.xx was on the disk) and flashed the MB Bios and grabbed the latest MB drivers and... hmm. Some of the stuff wasn't quite right. Should I reinstall this one? Re-do the order? Maybe the Beta software.....hold on there, cowboy! This ain't your first rodeo. Put your professional hat on and start approaching this like an engineer and not a kid who's read too much Extreeeme PC. So I got out a fresh page of quadrille and started Keeping Records of All Changes.

To make a long (very looong) story short, the magic moment came when I applied sufficient discipline to change only one thing at a time and started with the software that came in the box. The magic pieces of which were the Connextant drivers which enabled the glorious HD sound out through the HDMI connector.

All Was Right With the World (or, Mmmm, Good Soup!)

The LG Blu-Ray disk came with a software bundle, and in it was a DVD player that supported Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The only thing was...it didn't respond to mouse inputs. The Play and Stop buttons worked okay, but the in-menu controls didn't (like, "scene selection" and "special features". You know, trivial stuff). But the controls responded to the keyboard. Would an upgrade from the (perhaps crippled?) version work? I don't know, because they wanted $90 for the upgrade ("special pricing for LG Blu-Ray owners!" Uh. yeah. thanks.) At $120 for the player and $90 for the software, I could have easily bought a standalone Blu-Ray player. It was starting to look like that was going to be the best solution, and the SSBRP was going to be relegated to a gaming platform only.

But it did work to play HD disks. And using the keyboard wasn't horribly inconvenient. And besides, when one day I got a universal remote for the PC, maybe that stone would somehow make the soup the complete and satisfying meal it should be with the full adult minimum daily requirements of Niacin and Iron.

And so, we watched the Iron Man Blu-Ray in HD in all its glory! It was wonderful. And wanting is not always more satisfying than having. Although, in retrospect, having once had makes wanting once again an even more covetous state. But at that time, I had seen the future, and it was good in 1080p.

And then I got cocky.

To really get the best effect of Windows Media Center (WMC), you need to have a tuner, right in the computer. Someday soon all content will be by TCP/IP or some other IP variant [insert Net Neutrality plug here] but there's still a lot of broadcast and cablecast content that needs to be deplexed into channels. So I got myself another stone for the soup pot. A Pinnacle PCTV HD card was (I thought) a good buy. Maybe it was a good buy because it was about to be a discontinued item: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16815144018

But it was HD, and Pinnacle was a good name. There were Beta Vx64 drivers available. I told you I was cocky.

Unfortunately, when the software installed, it put a virtual shim into the sound driver stack. Makes sense, you have to output the sound the card receives to the computer output. But it totally busted the state-of-the-art HDMI and Hybrid-SLI driver stack. Undo, uninstall, reinstall, nothing worked. I tried registry edits with some clever GUID searches, but...Vista ain't exactly XP. The end-result was a non-functioning sound system. The system didn't recognize that there was any sound hardware installed for the drivers to work against--indeed even for the drivers to select the right hardware profile.

I might have continued fighting with this, but for one other problem. The Logitech Bluetooth MX keyboard and mouse combo. I installed their approved Setpoint ver 4.60 drivers for Vx64, but on launching the interface, there were only "help" and "update" tabs. The functional tabs that allow you to change mouse and keyboard settings simply weren't there. Shortly after my trials, Logitech tech support put up a note on how to maybe fix this problem--but it wasn't available then, and to discuss it now would be getting way ahead of my tale.

So I had no sound and a keyboard that was working but had some glitches. Like none of the multimedia keys worked. Okay, that's not entirely true; the volume wheel did work--but you wouldn't know, because of the motherboard sound problem. And more irritatingly, the spacebar launched WinMail. Really. The space bar. I don't know how that ever came to be a default keyboard macro, but imagine. Imagine typing in a path. Like, oh, "Program Files". Or a tech support question on the Logitech forum. I had to resort to using the mouse to select a space, then copy it to the clipboard, then use Ctrl-V instead of the space bar as I was composing. One slip and bang! WinMail in the foreground. I got good at "space Alt-F4 Alt-Tab Ctrl-V" key combos to correct my well-trained fingers. But you know, that's not really a skill that you want to get into muscle memory.

So after a few days, and with the release of Indiana Jones staring at me on the calendar, I capitulated. I did a reinstall.

Take Two: The Right Order

The second install was fairly straightforward. The only thing was that I didn't want to do a destructive install because I had all this downloaded driver content and installed programs (I had managed to get Halo going for a short campaign before audio meltdown). I had a hundred-odd megabytes of stuff on there. Now the sane thing to do would be to run a backup out to the NAS. After all, I have this old Buffalo system that has a couple hunnert Gigs. And it has another hunnert or so gigs attached to it via USB. All accessible through WINS. But wait! That would just be too darned easy for this project. The WINS it seems is the oldest implementation, going back to NT 3.x. Which is incompatible with more recent NTs and apparently Vista is "right out". Even following their techsupport suggestion of setting some flag for compatability from "2" down to "1" then to "0" still wouldn't allow my Vista to see the drive by browsing. I could get to the FTP server just fine, but no mounts. Credentials didn't match. I remember something from work about passing cleartext credentials in WinNT 3.x, but ye gods that was a long time ago and besides, I couldn't find it in my email archives. Anyway, it looked like I could manually xmit
and restore via FTP, or nuke it, or....just leave it where it was!

No reason to re-download it all again. I mean, I had a TERABYTE, bro! Wide open spaces. The plains as seen from the western banks of the Mississippi. So I did a non-destructive reinstall, and Vista handled that quite gracefully. "C:\" became "C:\windows.old". Think about that for a moment, and you'll see its a nice trick. The root partition stays the same, but everything is moved to within a subdir on that disk. In reality, its a couple of MBR pointers and away you go!

So score one for Vista. Minus a hundred for me having to reinstall in the first place. Or, rather, second place.

After the second installation, it was pretty straightforward to get all the drivers installed in the right order, following a plan I developed from re-reading my notebook on the first pass. So then I had a working baseline. The Pinnacle card was out. That will have to be revisited later. Maybe never, now that I see it is discontinued. Sigh. But the hybrid SLI and the HDMI sound were working again and channeling the Blu-Ray player properly. Plus I got the Logitech Momo Force Feedback Steering Wheel with Paddle Shifters working. So that was a big plus!

What do do when you have a stable system? Make a backup! I already knew the NAS was out of the question--put it on the list of future Stones to acquire, a NAS with more emphasis on the "A"-able. Making a backup to the same drive wasn't allowed. I wasn't about to try my years-old copy of Partition Magic in order to make a "D:\" drive on part of the unused "C:\" (besides potentially throwing the LG Blu-Ray into uncharted "E:\" territory). So the alternative was to make a full backup using DVDs. I'd even pop for the dual-layer.

But wait, it couldn't be that simple, could it? Of course not. Because the first time you make a "complete" backup on Vista, it wants to make a complete disk image. And in my case that meant an image of the couple-hundred gigabytes of "C:\Windows.old". Nevermind that I only wanted a small part of that, "C:\Windows.old\Users\Chris\Downloads". It wanted all or nothing. It told me to get 24 DVDs ready. Oh, no. Not me, brother. I'd already on more than one occasion had a "backup set" on 5.25" floppy disk (and later on 2.88Mb 3.5" disks) from "Fastback". Remember the cheetah on the box? Nothing speedy about it when you're trying to do a recovery and the entire index is on the last disk.

Please insert disk 48 of 50... Press Any Key.
Disk Unreadable. Abort, Retry, Continue?

So once again I decided to swing without a net, fly without a parachute, bathe without a raincoat...ahem. You get the picture. No backup, damn the torpedoes! Besides. I had a very workable system now, why would I want to do anything at the system level that would upset the applecart?

Indeed the system worked well for IJatKotCS, despite still not being able to use the mouse to navigate. And so I started in on buying Blu-Rays and setting them to be my preferred medium on Netflix. Nice. I wasn't quite ready to retire the Toshiba HD-DVD/DVD player, but the Ol' Vista box did have the ability to handle the whole shootin' match. Plus gaming. Yeah, baby. The Stone Soup was tastin' mighty good.

So it was with no surprise that after this holiday break, after watching Chad's copy of The Incredible Hulk on the SSBRP, after setting up print drivers to the family's new Epson Artisan 800 multifunction printer, and after moving the whole setup off the RJ45 tether to a nice Linksys/Cisco Wireless-N interface and into the family room (to make room for the Christmas tree, but we're going to leave it where it is), that I decided to tackle that keyboard problem again. Because, you know, that an FPS game uses to jump almost all the time, and though I could remap, the fingers already know that is jump. Launching WinMail in the middle of a tight Half Life Episode I session when you need to avoid some headcrab just isn't any fun.

Besides, Logitech now had ver 4.70 up on the website; I had reported the problem with the tabs, they had a technote on how to get past the issue and it had to come my way, didn't it?

Didn't it just have to work out for me eventually?

Stay tuned for the Entree course on the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player dining experience.

Lesson from the 80s: backup, backup, backup

2008-11-30T15:01:00.000-08:00

You know what I'm talking about. The topic which makes everyone who owns a computer nervous. They look at the floor, the wall, a meek grin creeps up their face, they favor you with a non-commital shrug. It is the data equivalent of flossing. It is preventative, proscribed and yet frequently inconvenient or more time-consuming than you want to commit when you're in a hurry. I'm talking about data backups.

Why is it that most people don't have a rigorous method to be able to recover anything they've ever written, shot, videoed, installed or downloaded? We all put a pretty high price on our financial records, our family photos--nearly all our intellectual effort these days. We all know we should have backups, and most of us have suffered the pain of losing something. I'm not talking about the last bit of typing before the last Ctrl-S, but a Real Loss of a Significant Amount of Irreplaceable Data. So why do most people just not have a plan? Is it like earthquake insurance in CA? Too expensive and complicated if you ever have to rebuild? Is it like a structured weight-loss program? Necessary for good health and peace of mind, but, in practice takes too much discipline? Something you'll start after the holidays? "I'll start backing up everything when I get a new computer and have to move all my data anyway."

I count myself amongst the "most". I have a vague collection of external disks, thumb drives, optical media backups, online accounts. None of which are used in a cohesive plan which allows for recovery. I have, for example, some in-car video of a track day at Laguna Seca in 2006, my first time driving my Porsche on a race track. Tens of gigabytes of raw and edited files, as I recall. Maybe 30GB. I have it somewhere. At least, I hope I do. I don't really know where. DVD-R? External USB? Bare IDE drive in that stack over there? On one of the kids' computers? A little-used "E:\" partition somewhere? Not being able to recover from a backup is as bad as not having one at all. Its funny that I can reach onto a shelf and pick out one of more than 300 DVDs or one of more than a thousand books in my home, but finding any/all of my own electronic data--which should by all accounts be easier, not harder, is just not that easy at all. The most eggregious is really the perhaps 200 (don't even know exactly, really) collection of self-burnt CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs in a number of racks and shelves in the family room. The best I can say is that I know which rack to grab and throw out the window first in the event of a fire, but I can't really say that everything I most want is on those particular disks. I have a paper label pack, an ink-jet printer, a program that does labels. I even have LightScribe and a stack of blank (and expensive) LightScribe DVDs. Yet most of the disks are labeled with a marker. Too brief and too cryptic. "Downstairs computer, misc docs, pics, Disney trip, MP3s, 11-04". Um, okay.

It is amazing to me that here we are in the 21st century--nearly a decade in-- moreover we're 40 years into the Personal Computer information revolution, and "backups" aren't a thing of the past. Of course I don't mean not having backups, but I mean not having to jump through hoops to create, manage and use backups. That's what I mean by "backup". The "Fastback" or "Ghost" or other kind of managed backup process plus software. And I mean for the home, not the Small-to-Medium Business. Dell, IBM, all the big names are falling over themselves to service that market.

There have been some really interesting and relevant products in this arena, but it really should just "happen". I guess the closest thing to this ideal is Apple's Time Machine. But when you start thinking about real disaster recovery--I'm talking about your laptop going missing from your car or your home (God forbid) be flattened by some effect of man or nature--you need something more than just a hidden cache of files on the same disk.

Like flossing (if you don't do it already, regularly, by habit or discipline) you only hear about data backups or recovery from your professional care representative--like when you're suffering other effects of not doing it. As when you talk to the Apple Genius Bar about recovering from a hard disk crash. We recently got the soft admonition, after the hard disk was replaced under warranty, to perhaps talk to a data recovery specialist. We might get a quote on scraping any remaining data from the otherwise useless hunk of metal now residing in the antistat bag in our hands. Or learn to live with the lost data. Kinda like hearing you need to go see the periodontist for a root planing. Ugh.

But that event, no matter that it happened recently to not just one laptop but two in the space of one day (it was a very sad day at the Markham home), is in the past and I took it as a slap in the face to look toward the future. Fool me once, etc.

Some day (its always "some day", isn't it, with technology. Man's vision exceeds his grasp), we will have all our stuff in some variation of The Cloud. It may not look at all like The Cloud that is out there now, but I mean, pedantically, "off-site, anywhere-accessible, store". There's certainly a lot of work in this area, which maybe I'll ponder in a later post. But there are plenty of others pontificating about using Google Mail as a hard drive or any of the other umpty-dozen startups with whom you can trust your data in small-gigabyte chunks. Hopefully they'll still be around after their round two funding dries up. Hopefully your data will still be around. But I digress.

It is time to revisit the home NAS. What we currently have is an ancient Buffalo 160GB system, with FTP and WINS sharing, but rather poor implementations of both. It supports an external USB drive or a very short list of printers on its one port. One disk, no RAID. The web management interface is poor. It has been a sometimes network backup tool but mostly it is off. I can't say for sure, but I believe that a folder delete through the web interface led to a large data loss. User error, sure, but due to an oblique interface. To be fair to Buffalo, it was their first offering, and it appears (from the language of the user manual) that it was an OEM'ed import. So kudos to Buffalo for getting out ahead on the home/SOHO NAS, but bad on me for being on the bleeding edge.

That was at least five years ago. With the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP) cum media-PC running the living room, I've decided to revisit the backup and warm-store issue. We need a place for all the computers in the house to be automatically backed-up as well as for file sharing (beyond the 1TB the SSBRP offers for music, pictures & video.

Buying a NAS means buying hard disks. Some day in the future, when we're all wearing spandex jackets and driving flying cars, we'll either have everything digital we own or use in The Cloud or on a Solid State Disk. Until that shining day (2012, maybe) we'll be using the tried-and-true (but still fragile) spinning platter magnetic store Winchester Hard Disk Drive (HDD).

Markham's two rules for purchasing HDD space are simple:

Rule 1: Never buy disk until you can use it, because empty disk is flushing money. Disks always get cheaper and bigger.

Rule 2: There are two price points to keep in your pocket when shopping for Disk: $0.10/GB for internal (bare) drives, and $0.15/GB for external drives. By these metrics, a "good deal" (at this writing--the price points slip by a penny or two regularly) is $100/TB for a bare drive.

But these two Rules work against each other. That's because the bigger the drive, the cheaper the per-GB cost, up to a point. Size increases with technology, so the biggest drives are the newest drives which aren't the cheapest drives. So there's a saddle point in effect at all times, which moves up in drive space over time as the saddle moves down on the price axis. For example, NewEgg currently has a 1TB drive for $0.10/GB--right at the Rule 1 Price Point--and a 3TB drive (!!) for ~$0.08/GB.

And of course, with the bigger size drive, even at cheaper $/GB at the saddle point, there is a bigger total outlay. Which is where Rule 1 kicks in: Don't buy the bigger disk until you can use it. So you may end up paying a penny or more per GB for a smaller disk, but it more likely you'll actually spend that penny on storing your data rather than just heating up your enclosure.

I may have to ammend Rule 1. Do I need 2TB (1TB in RAID/5 format) of disk? No. Do I want a terabyte of striped NAS always-on backup!? You bet I do!

This may be my new NAS RAID 2TB RAID0/1 for $220 This is ~$0.11/GB, well under the External Drive Price Point and very close to the Bare Internal Drive Price Point!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101091

Or there's this from Buy.com:
http://www.buy.com/prod/cavalry-2tb-hard-drive-dual-interface-usb-2-0-esata-raid-external-hard/q/loc/101/206461304.html

I saw a similar at the Apple store last night for $500 and this is $100 off MacMall pricing and $30 off Buy.com

It is eSata, which the StoneSoup BluRay Play (SSBRP) supports. That does mean leaving the SSBRP on all the time, but it has some good pwr mgmt capabilities. I just have to make sure that it doesn't go completely to sleep overnight. Or test waking up the SSBRP over the network via one of the laptops with an external shared drive access (e.g., a nightly automatic backup).

All this is being driven by two (count-em! two!) catastrophic laptop HDD failures on the same day at our house Monday.

First Cheryl's laptop started issuing the "click of death" for no reason other than she uses it 18h a day. It required a disk replacement at the Apple Store (under warranty) and ~5mos of her work was lost.

Then, hours later, Karey knocked my laptop that she was using off the arm of a recliner. The case was chipped but ThinkPads of that era have an HDD shock detector. Apparently it isn't fast enough or they don't do their accelerometer tests from higher than 24". Because she asked me that evening, "It says, 'A fatal hard disk error has occured. Press CTL-ALT-DEL to restart.' I did but it keeps saying that. What should I do?" This wasn't even the BSoD, it was the Black Screen
ROM alert that You're Screwed. I spent several hours running the Windows Recovery Console off the XP install disk, and CHKDSK (wow...1982 flashback) showed, "irrecoverable errors". Swell.

So the question for me, currently, is one of interface. Choose the eSata disk, leave the SSBRP on 24x7 but have all the Windows networking stack and file sharing at my fingertips, or Choose the true NAS, gigabyte interface and a lower power footprint than the eSata host--but with an unknown quantity in the form of the web browser user interface and access control? I may have to try both and return the loser.

The important thing is to get a backup system in place, and this is the first step. After that: software.

Other spaces, other uses

2008-11-27T09:38:00.000-08:00

Kaisa introduced me to Deviant Art a few years ago. Lots of great art there. I've had a poem in my drafts folder here since October, but this space isn't really right for it. So I made my first submission to Deviant Art today. I used my nom de guerre, "cesium356". Okay, that's actually my gamer name, but it seems like no one in the ultra-hip deviantart world uses their real name. Artists, gotta love 'em.

Stone Soup Blu-Ray -- Part 3: Windows 7 rescues us from Vista

2008-11-04T10:22:00.000-08:00

The second installation of Vista was attempted with a bit more clarity, aforethought of planning. The entire desired software stack was present and the end-goal of the system was understood.

It is important to know where you're going before you start out. Sure, you can just go for the journey, but some trips are better with a destination in mind. To wit, The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP), after much mission creep, was determined to have to meet this RFP:

Vista Media Center
- Netflix add-in
Blu-Ray Player
- Being able to play Blu-Ray and HD disks with the sound through the HDMI connection
- Being able to connect the PCM-optical output of the motherboard to the home theater system and have the Blu-Ray play through it.
- 1080p, full-screen, w/o skipping, artifacts
1080p Gaming (Steam Support)
- Having a network connection that can sustain GB downloads of game content
- Support for the Logitech Momo steering wheel setup (incl. drivers!)
- Being able to play reasonably recent driving games: GTR, Race '07 at full-resolution and with the knobs turned up to 11 (e.g. 4xAA, 8XAF, water details, long-distance rendering, etc.)
Hulu, Adobe Media Player, et al.
- Having a network connection that can stream HD w/o skipping or pausing.
- Audio and Video capable of said-same.
- Did I mention that the network connection was now wireless?
- Something you wouldn't think you would have to mention is that this sometimes web-browsing involves typing. So the keyboard has to work.
Modest goals, no? Well...it's Vista. So we'll see.

The networking was ably handled by Comcast, as described in a previous post. In this incarnation, the system was moved from the living room to the family room. Nominally, this was to make room for the Christmas Tree, but removing the boob tube from the calm social setting of our living room has turned out to be an important permanent change for the positive. For example, I'm spending my evening writing this for y'all rather than watching another episode of "That 70's Show".

The point about Comcast being that because most of the computing happens in the living room and adjacent bedrooms, I decided to leave the wireless router upstairs (erm, our house is on a hill, therefore topsy-turvy with the upstairs being the entry and living area and the downstairs is a family room and bedroom). This also leaves the antennas well-placed for wireless connection to the now-famous "Lamb Cam" (subject of a future post). But the SSBRP loses its hardwire 8-megabit/sec connection to the world. Theoretically, switching to a 802.11g network shouldn't slow it down any, but there's these walls and floors and air in-between now.

So the one update to the hardware of the system from Part 2 was the addition of an 802.11x card. I chose Linksys/Cisco because 1.) Their drivers are good 2.) The AirLink 300N I had didn't work with Vista64 in another computer and 3.) I was tired of saving a couple bucks on a 2nd tier brand only to burn that savings in hours and hours of configuration nightmares. True to form, the Linksys worked out of the box. QED.

So once again, armed this time with a Windows 7 Beta DVD, I moved the existing C:\Windows.old directory to C:\Windows.oldest to allow Windows 7 to do its non-destructive trick. Someday I may reclaim the couple hundred Gigs I have as a double-archive of a useless Vista x64 install, but for now, it's forward and damn the disk space!

I'm not going to recount how pleasantly uneventful the Win 7 install was. This is broadly known, now 5 weeks into the Microsoft Beta for the new Operating System. What you may not know is that this Beta has a Nexus-6 feature. It times out. In August of this year 2009, my fresh installation which I will undoubtedly become reliant if not completely dependent upon (despite warnings about "not using it for production purposes") will on promise from Microsoft, become inoperable. Aauugh! The sweet promise and the real sweetness ripped out of my hands in the heat of summer? Ah, but perhaps not. Here's something that I'm betting almost all of you don't know: according to a friend-of-a-friend who works for Microsoft, you will be able to purchase a copy of Windows 7 before this beta expires. So none of that "in 2010" stuff. That's just the MS PR machine trying to avoid a Vista version 2.0 catastrophe. You know, like how they promised us Vista in 2004 or something and it was a long time coming after that. This time they're playing their cards close to their chest. But I have to tell you that the way Windows 7 Beta is being installed all over the place, displacing Vista in almost all occasions, Microsoft could release this Beta as-is for money and it would be an improvement.

So proceeding carefully from my clean, clean install of Windows 7, I first installed the Asus motherboard drivers from their "all-in-one" CD that came in the Box. This includes the nVidia v15.11 southbridge driver and the v168.something Detonator. Several revs back from most recent. But tested with this board! So caution, caution this time around. I got the Hybrid SLI working and the HDMI Sound. The Linksys drivers went in as expected, slick. Updates were now possible from Microsoft and from the other vendors (though I already had everything in C:\windows.old\install). The LG Blu-Ray firmware was still the latest and the default cdrom.sys picked it out and the Cyberlink DVD 7 bundle hooked up.

The SSBRP was back in business! I went back to my Netflix queue and switched my default media back to Blu-Ray. I popped in my copy of The Fifth Element and enjoyed.

But there were still a couple of wrinkles. The Logitech MX keyboard was still, infuriatingly, sending an "open mail" shortcut every time the spacebar was pressed. Win 7 doesn't have bundled email though (thanks, EU!) and so it merely gripes about trying to launch a DLL. A modal dialog that requires dismissal and which will open multiple times and swallow follow-on spacebars, but marginally better. But it only feels good because the hurting is less than with Vista, not because it is gone.

I enabled the audio device (new in Win 7) and could send the audio out to both the HDMI and the S/PDIF optical out concurrently. Which you can't really do because there's about a 1/4 sec delay difference between the two channels and it sounds like you've enabled "hall echo". But you can turn one or the other device's output down and it sounds just fine. Optical for the Blu-Ray and HDMI for the video games. Sooo niiice.

So back to that Logitech keyboard. I got fed up, so I decided to install my Gear Head 2.4Ghz wireless keyboard. Purchased for another computer (the predecessor and antecedent of the SSBRP) I hadn't tried it before because the driver stack looked a little sketchy. Indeed I never tried it for Vista x64. But what the hell!! All the caution, caution went out the window (pun intended) with the hubris that came from a good soaking of audio/video streams by the Blu-Ray player. Dammit, I wanted to have it all and that meant a good keyboard, too!

Now I've shopped a lot of other keyboards, and they all come up short. Either they're Bluetooth and have good range but they're fru-fru or they're IR and have crummy range. Neither are cheap. But by "fru-fru" I mean with matte aluminum and other HTPC upscale presentation features and upwards of $100. For a friggen keyboard! I wanted the WebTV keyboard. Laptop compact but with Bluetooth for the range. And no more that $60. Less than $40 would be ideal. Guess what? Doesn't exist. Hear that Logitech? You can't win in the living room unless you have a plain wireless keyboard that doesn't belong in the MoMA but has the range to reach from the couch to the screen.

But I already had the GearHead keyboard, and I had the hubris working for (against) me, so I gave it a try. Worked fine. But, um, the Blu-Ray stopped working.

I mean, not at all. The device disappeared. Trying to load the cdrom.sys interactively, I could only get the "no appropriate hardware detected" message. Which was bull because it was just working with that driver!! Auugh! What had I done!!?

Lots of uninstalls and reinstalls and trying the Vista x64 version and trying to reinstall the LG software that came on the disk.....nothing.

One of the culprits here is the lack of an uninstall for default drivers. The guids come from MS and once they're in your registry, there's no way to back them out w/o going to manual methods. You can disable them in the device manager, but that doesn't remove their registry entries. So when you reinstall....you basically have the same thing over again. I understand why it is done this way--it has a high likelihood of success and is hard to break. But when the defaults don't work for you...well, you're kinda screwed.

Unless, that is, you happen to trip onto a solution via Google. I got onto a Win 7 board, and someone there posted a Vista solution link and that person remembered something he had done back in 2003 with there being "upper filters" and "lower filters" to the CD-ROM driver guid. Remove those, specifically, manually, and all will be right with the world. And I did, and it was and I really couldn't believe it for a while. Real shock that a one-liner edit in a number of profiles in the Registry really could revive the Blu-Ray.

So for now I'm back to the original Logitech. I tried another IR Logitech wireless on loan, but it didn't work any better. So I took my lumps, but I have my SSBRP back and as long as I don't try to use the keyboard for, I dunno...writing? I'm fine. I just have to remap the "Jump" key in a bunch of games to something different. Like "R", which is next to "E" for "Use". Run-Jump is still possible, if not easy, but the Reload has to be mapped to CTRL or something. I'll get it, eventually. Half-Life 2, Episode One was a fun do-over and even better w/everything turned up to 11.

The Logitech Momo wheel drivers installed w/o error and the force feedback on the wheel works fine. Over the holiday break I was able to turn four laps at the Nürburgring in GT/R and it was pretty damned cool doing it on the big screen with a proper wheel and pedals.

The Hulu and Adobe Media Player content work famously. The 3-cable 802.11n antenna that came with the Linksys adapter is excellent and there are no dropouts due to streaming faults.

The goals for the system are largely all met. With the exception of the keyboard (not a trivial problem but also without a trivial solution, but with a 90% workaround) every RFP item was met and mostly spectacularly.

The SSBRP is alive, I've watched a number of movies with Cyberlink 7, I've had no problems other than the aforementioned mouse-menu button interface and I was even able to do a fairly good (if I do say so myself) compare between the DVD version and the Blu-Ray version of Casablanca. So it really is in use. Confident? I picked up Boondock Saints director's cut and The "20th Anniversary Edition" (oof) Adventures of Baron Munchausen (sale: Fry's $12.99) DVD replacement. I've watched Wall-E and Wanted and the gluttony of HD movies from the Stone Soup Blu Ray Player can continue unabated.

Now if it only had some help booting faster and accessing programs faster. Like maybe a Phenom 2 chip and a SAS-RAID-10 system built on 15k rpm drives? But that would mean (for "reasonably" priced HDs) moving the installed software to the "warm store" SATA disk mapped to the "D:" drive. Naaaah! I'll keep it as it is for now. Maybe I'll add a Harmony Remote, but that's a different story altogether.

Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player

2008-11-03T20:53:00.000-08:00

[Credit to the title and concept goes to my good friend Michael. Thanks for that and again for listening to the original tale of creep, recounted here.]

It always begins with The Wanting

Ever since I made the wrong choice in the HD video disc format wars of the first part of the 21st century, I realized that some time in the future I'd have to find a means to switch horses, to get a Blu-Ray player and hence a method to continue to get HD disc content, at least until such time as the Internets pipes are big enough to handle on-demand HD to all comers. Since I'd already bought an HD-DVD player, and wasn't about to toss my couple-dozen HD-DVD disks, I wasn't really inclined to just up and buy a Blu-Ray player. I had an alternative plan brewing in the back of my mind all summer. All the plan needed was a catalyst.

Last month, as we tooled around Costco during a lunch break, my buddy Michael picked up the new Iron Man movie, on Blu-Ray. He'd been waiting for it to come out and to be able to watch it in the high-definition format. Of course, he also needed a Blu-Ray player to go with. With some (very little) urging by me, he picked up a Sony which at Costco comes with an HDMI cable. It was quite a deal at $279 before tax. Michael hadn't made the wrong turn down the HD disc aisle that I had made months ago, so it was a substantial but not painful choice for him.

And then there's my son Chad & his fiancee Heather in Las Vegas. Chad's always been a gamer, so for him the Blu-Ray was just a feature of a gaming system he was going to have anyway. The system was around $400. And that's with a full PS3 gaming rig attached.

I mention the prices of the options that Michael and Chad chose; it is important for this story. I was sure that I could come up with a Blu-Ray drive for less by upgrading the Media PC I already had. I knew, from previous shopping, that one could get a Blu-Ray player add-in for a computer for well less than $200.

I was also intent to upgrade the Media PC (aka a Home Theater PC, HTPC) to be able to see high-definition streamed video off the internet. That requirement came from the family. We had tried to watch episodes of House which were on Hulu, but which stuttered and sound-delayed on our current HTPC. So I had an inkling that this would be more than just an optical drive swap, but I didn't know how much more.

And continues with The Having

The first component to be upgraded was the optical disk. It was a DVD-R/+RW which lacked only Blu-Ray to keep its place in the New Scheme. My first (of what would turn out to be many) trips to Fry's had me leaving with a combo LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player. The sticker was $199, but the shelf price was $169 and at the register it rung up at $139. Big score! This was going to be the cheapest Blu-Ray player, ever. It would leave me with many tens of dollars with which to re-purchase much of my existing DVD collection. After all, how many copies of 2001: A Space Oddesey is too many?

Now, I didn't actually need the HD-DVD capacity, as I have a fine Toshiba A35 player which should serve until, well, who knows but it isn't completely antiquated yet; I just received a new software update in the mail the other day. I do, however, think the LG combo player is a coup, because it will allow me to someday retire one box from the media presentation stack in the living room. But not right away. The thing about the Toshiba? It works.

I had my Blu-Ray player to read Blu-Ray discs (which I didn't have yet), but I also knew that what would really make the Blu-Ray player "taste better" (you're catching the Stone Soup bit now) would be to upgrade the graphics card. The existing card was an nVidia 7600GS. Which was fine at the time--the time being when my son Chad put the computer together. That would have been about 2006, after he entered UCSC, and then traded it for a much more convenient and dorm-friendly laptop. Chad gifted it to me some time after that and by mid-2008, the seven-thousand nVidia card series based on the "G73" chip was getting a bit long in the tooth. What I saw this computer really had going for it was that it was PCIe-capable. The 7600 could have been an AGP bus card, but this one wasn't, it was PCIe which meant the motherboard was up to an upgrade to the most modern of GPUs.

So after not a small amount of shopping around to find that price-performance sweet spot, I settled on a 9800GTX+ from my favorite on-line vendor, NewEgg. The MSI version was a great deal and the card's specs were awesome. All I needed to do was to drop that puppy into the HTPC with the LG Blu-Ray player and I'd be watching Iron Man in Blu-Ray format. Not only that, but the 9800GTX+, with its "G92" chipset--while not quite up to the latest-and-greatest two hundred series from nVidia--is completely capable of playing all the latest games: Crysis, Far Cry 2, BioShock, etc. My old standards Half-Life 2 (and Portal--I love Portal) could be turned up to Eleven. And then there were the driving games. The latest SimBin driving games, Race'07 and GTR Evolution couldn't really be driven at full 1080p by the 7600 with its GS shaders and small memory footprint. But it would sing with the 512MB of memory on the 9800GTX+. $149 after a rebate. But look at all the "flavor" it will add to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray and HTPC..and Gaming computer.

Then I started looking at the processor, a 2.0GHz Sempron. Single core. Ugh. Not hardly enough to smoothly run all that 1080p 24hz DTS-HD audio goodness. The current HTPC wasn't even socket AM2, so we were at a dead-end. But Fry's to the rescue! As it turned out, while I was there for an HD-DVD sale (totally different story), I was tipped to one of Fry's typically very good motherboard/CPU combos. In this case, I got an Asus M3N-HT HDMI/Deluxe motherboard, with a quad core AMD Phenom 9550. That's a 2.2GHz chip, not a big bump from the Sempron, but with four cores, obviously. A big, big jump up from the Sempron.

The Phenom CPU is great, but the motherboard is superb. It runs the brand-new 780a chipset, which has a new nVidia feature, "Hybrid SLI". This allows an on-board graphics processor, (in the case of this mobo an 8-thousand-ish spec GPU) sharing system RAM to SLI with a short list of PCIe graphics cards. And guess what's on the list? That's right! My newly acquired 9800GTX+! Woo-hoo, the soup was really heating up. I was getting a real SLI rig for gaming! W00t! And at the price of only one GPU card! Plus, the other salient feature of the Hybrid SLI which is really perfect for systems like mine--part HTPC and part gaming rig--is that when you use softare to switch to using the on-board GPU only, the PCIe slot is turned off. As in completely off, draws no power, runs no fan. And everyone knows those tiny GPU fans are noisy.

And as if that weren't enough, if you couldn't tell by the name of the mobo, it has native HDMI out. Perfect for the HTPC-out to our living room 46" LCD 1080p Samsung, and it uses the RealTek onboard 7.1 Audio without any SPDIF jumpers to get HD audio out of the HDMI. A very nice board.

Now CPU prices fall notoriously fast, especially lately as we're into another drop into the 45mm die processes. So an early-October smokin' deal may not sound as good in early November, but its a merry-go-round. You grab ahold of something as it goes by and get on. Besides, the opportunity return in having it now, rather than waiting for the price to go down is..well, in the case of a new Blu-Ray player, worth it. Or so I thought. The two hundred dollars bundled price meant the CPU was practically free. I hedged my bet with a store warranty, giving me a little bit of overclocking insurance and obsolescence insurance for another $30.

The Stone Soup Blu-Ray player was really starting to take shape now. But, um, of course the new Mobo takes DDR2 dual-channel memory. Wow, I hadn't bought DIMM memory in a long time. It is tuned now for gamers, the mobo BIOS settings allow all kinds of soft tuning for timings and they even have their own heat sinks. My wallet hardly felt the $70 (after rebate) for the four Gigabytes of Dual Channel Corsair XMS memory in two matched 2GB sticks. The motherboard can take 8GB, and I'd read how if you have a huuuuge amount of RAM you can set your swap partition to zero size and your computer will really scream. But this socket AM2+ motherboard can't set more than two memory sticks into dual channel mode. If you put in more, it will slow the d/c memory down to the slower single channel mode. So more is faster disk-wise, but slower speed wise.

Which sent me down the path of thinking about the disk. A 10k RPM Raptor was out of the question. This was going to be an HTPC and so it had to be quiet. Indeed, one of the things I didn't like about the current HTPC was that the disk was loud. Or maybe it was a case fan in front of the disk. Whatever. It was of 160GB capacity, which just doesn't seem like very much these days. Especially since I figured I could use this upgrade, when the TV set wasn't on, as our home NAS. The new motherboard was RAID-capable, after all. So a bit more mission creep was added to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player. But I wasn't going to introduce that right away. One of Markham's Maxims of Personal Computing (apologies to Jerry Pournelle) is "Never buy disk capacity that you can't use right away, because it will always be cheaper by the time your disk fills up." So I bought a little insurance, on the high side of the "sweet spot", which was, at that time, the 750GB disk. Instead I got a Seagate 1TB disk, at a very nice $150. That's $0.15/GB, which is well under my $.20/GB classification of a "good deal". Later I'll get another TB disk and setup the RAID mirror. Then it will be ready for the family photos, Music and home movies.

I was ready to add all these "extras" to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player and get about the business of actually using my new upgrades in the HTPC, but I ran into my first sticking point. The Asus mobo is ATX. I didn't check beforehand to find out that my current HTPC is micro-ATX. She won't fit! So that led to another few shopping trips and a dalliance with a Zalman HTPC case and other esoterica. These HTPC cases are expensive. Like an empty metal box will set you back more Benjamins than an entire Home Theater in a Box rig--and I'm pretty sure they're made up of the same metals. So that bit of kit was a bit too spicy for this Stone Soup. Instead I settled on a Antec Sonta III upright mid-tower case. It has a nice piano finish that matches the Samsung LCD screen quite well and has sound insulation and other HTPC-ish features. Plus it came with a great Antec P/S. Price was $103--less than I would have paid for an add-in power supply.

So let's recap what's in the Blu-Ray HTPC "upgrade":

$103 new case w/new power supply
$200 new motherboard
and new CPU
$ 70 new memory
$139 new optical drive (the Blu-Ray, remember?)
$150 new winchester drive
$150 new graphics card
$ 16 an HDMI cable
------
$828 That's a lot of stones in that soup pot!

And the OS. Vista? I had an extra license laying around. Its legit, it just didn't cost me anything.

What's missing? Oh. Networking. This turns out to be the next "long pole" in our current HTPC setup. It uses an Airlink 300 wireless card. Its "N" protocol, but though slogging through an Ubuntu driver setup was not completely painful, I knew that it would be nothing compared to getting that card to work with Vista Ultimate. So I decided it was time to get a speed upgrade and hard-wire the WAN ethernet into the motherboard port. No wireless for the HTPC.

So that introduced two new ingredients into the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player: Comcast cable to replace the ATT&T DSL and the aforementioned Windows Vista Ultimate operating system. Why the Vista "UE"? Because it comes with Windows Media Player for Vista. Which is where I want this PC to spend most of its waking time. I had dallied with the MythPC interface in Ubuntu, but never really got it so that it was more (or, rather "less") than a nerd's delight. To be candid, it wasn't ready for prime-time, which was when my family would be using it to watch TV!

The six-fold bump in speed from the cable networking over the DSL was as-advertised and I'll never go back. The setup wasn't completely smooth--but I'm getting ahead of myself. All the ingredients were there and ready to go together.

Assembly day was round about October 11th, as I recall. The hardware assembly was mostly straightforward, with a few Memory settings that needed some tuning. After shuffling the parts in and then out, I realized that the old HTPC was completely intact and so still is. I'll find a use for it or donate it, paying it forward as Chad did for me a year or so ago. And the base Vista OS went in along with the Asus drivers on the included CD, so picture (Hybrid SLI mode) and sound (through the HDMI with an nVidia driver) were available forthwith.

But I didn't have a Blu-Ray disk to try it out with! I couldn't wait when Michael bought his, so Iron Man was going to be the last DVD that I'd ever have to upsample. But that didn't solve my Blu-Ray test problem. So instead I used my Matrix HD-DVD disk to try out the new HTPC. It played well--after I allowed the LG player to update itself and allowed the bundled HD-DVD software player to update itself as well. Which required the networking to work, and that wasn't exactly smooth sailing.

So is this a happily-ever-after story? Of course not. This is the end of but the first chapter of my tale. What is to come, you might ask. Imagine if, in the original Stone Soup story, the soldiers got the villagers to throw all the goodies into the pot, but they didn't have a ladle or the bowls leaked, or the fire under the pot wouldn't stay lit? Pretty frustrating and everyone is still hungry, eh?

My Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player's story will contine in the next entry.

Pre-Ignition Catalytic Converter or C.R.A.P.?

2008-09-15T18:45:00.000-07:00

It is unbelievable to me how the unscrupulous will take advantage of people and lie to try to sell something. It is only slightly less unbelievable to me that enough people are duped by their schemes that new schemes are cooked-up by these sociopaths.

Of late, it is the new ways to improve gas mileage. The Vornado, the XXX and now, the leader in the category of "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with Bull$#!t! A recent addition to the art form of the latter has come upon the internet scene. I'm talking about the "PICC" or "Pre-Ignition Catalytic Converter.

Here's their website. Check it out. Put your critical-observer visor on and turn your skeptic shield up to "full"! Open it in a new browser tab or window so you can go back and forth between it and my re-information (as opposed to their disinformation!) critique.

This is Absolutely too good to be true.

I hardly know where to start to refute all these claims, but I'll start at the top.
They say,

"What if we could turn the gases you are throwing away via
your exhaust into added mileage and power for your vehicle?"

Well, there are lots of ways of doing that. A turbocharger. A supercharger. They use the kinetic energy in those gases imparted by the engine's "pumping action". A catalytic converter does
take large gas molecules and "turn them into smaller particles" (which is what happens when you burn something). They're burned in the catalytic converter, not the tailpipe. And the result is fewer "large gas molecules" and particulates are released. Somewhat "less exhaust", because some of it is converted in burning to more heat. But there is very little unburned gasoline molecules (distinct from gas, i.e., molecules in a gaseous state) in your exhaust to begin with. Dump a bunch of gasoline molecules into a catalytic converter and you quickly ruin it. They're made to deal with trace amounts, making them even more...trace. The point being, you're creating some more heat outside the engine--where it can do work--but not much. And not much compared to the heat that pours out of the exhaust manifold or is circulated out through the water and/or oil cooling system through fans and radiators. If the PICC was claiming to be able to use the excess heat that your car produces---then they'd have something! But that's not what they're claiming.

How about that in-car gasoline "cracker"? You could, I suppose "crack" formulated gasoline. If you were to try something like this--and it would have to be by some other mechanism than what is described on the PICC site, perhaps involving a catalytic reactor (that isn't driven by waste heat as your exhaust catalytic converter is--maybe Citgo has one they're not using--you might (or maybe not, my long-chain butyl chem is a bit rusty) create some energy. But the backyard mechanic really shouldn't attempt to "crack" formulated gasoline. Really, the best gasoline cracker you have is your car's engine. It does a really good job of "cracking" all the BTUs, or heat-energy out of that gas.

Chevron and Shell have done their very best to make gasoline clean burning and high octane for the price. There's admittedly little bit of competition in the market place, but there is enough so that one company just cannot afford to leave NINE TIMES the efficiency on the table. "I'll buy ABC Gas, theirs is so much worse than XYZ gas!" And if you think all the gas companies are doing it, to what end? Participate in some conspiracy to make you consume more gas? Pass up the 100MPG carburetor from the GM "vault" please!

What's next on PICC's list of BS? Well, converting a liquid to a "plasma" could only effectively be done with the magnetic resources and heat resources of, oh, THE SUN! Or, if the "liquid" in question was, maybe, LIQUID HELIUM!! Then you might be able to get transitory plasma signatures in this very weird super-state of matter. But room temperature liquids? Good luck, Einstein (or should I say..Bose-Einstein? Heh. Physics joke.)

Nearly all industrial plasmas (TV sets, fluorescent tubes, those cool "lightning globes") are created by introducing electrons into a gas, not a liquid, where it is MUUCH easier to dislodge other electrons to create the plasma at low energy levels. Output of this electron interaction with the plasma is...photons!

You're not going to be able to turn your gas-burner into Star Trek's Plasma Drive with a little box.

Then there's the final claim in the second main paragraph, "...the gasoline you pay for goes further and the exhaust is so negligible that it hardly registers." Okay, bunky. Pull out your last smog check certificate (for those of you unlucky enough not to drive a classic car that is exempt). Look at the numbers. We're talking "parts" (meaning measurable particles--usually in the micron range) per MILLION. Sometimes, on the most modern and "SULEV" or "P-ZERO" rated cars, many of the numbers are already practically zero. One part in a hundred million. I think that goes to "hardly registers" without the intervention of a PICC. Your nose is a sensitive machine, and you can sometimes smell exhaust--more when the engine is old, or cold, or needs a tune-up. But most of what you feel is carbon dioxide (C02)that is really hot. Guess what? Aside from the heat, it is really, really hard to "crack" energy out of CO2. The sun does it. Plants do it, but it takes them a long time...oh, and the sun, too. C02 is your major greenhouse gas, and there are a whole bunch of smart people trying to figure out what to do with it. Burying it in the ground is a more feasible option than burning it in your car. Really.

What about their claims for increases in efficiency? On the face of it, look at the counterfactual to those claims. There just isn't 9X the energy available in the gasoline over what our cars burn now to "crack" out of it! Think of how inefficient your engine would have to be to only be able to extract 1/9 of the energy available in the gasoline-- and that it would some how be available to be merely "broken down" or "cracked from" the fuel to be used. Here are some fuels and their BTU stores. You'd be better off burning a pound of coal than a gallon of gasoline (10% of 125K BTUs) in your car if gasoline internal combustion engines were as inefficient as these guys claim.

Looks like, if anything, they should be starting with diesels as there's more energy in #2 fuel oil than in gasoline. But there aren't as many truckers as there are desperate people with 80's cars and '08 gas bills.

As to their test of a V8 318ci engine running at 50% load for an hour at 3,000rpm. That is equivalent to a "van...traveling up a 30 degree incline for one hour"? This is Wonder Woman's Invisible Van? How much does this "van" weigh? Where does that fit into the calculations? An engine floating up a hill on its own doesn't have to pull much weight. Even so, 200mpg, or their claim of 2 pounds of gasoline per hour is absurd.

Okay, I've been throwing a lot of arrows. Here's my concrete calculation using their meager data posing as engineering, if not science.

1. Three thousand RPM in a V8 engine, is 24,000 ignition cycles per minute. Or one million, four hundred forty thousand ignition cycles per hour.
2. In that hour, they claim 2 pounds of gasoline used. That's 907 grams.
3. Dividing those 1.44 million sparks into those 907 grams of gasoline, that's 0.00063g of gasoline per spark. Wow. That's a really small number. Sixty three hundred thousandths of a gram.
4. Hmm.. Or about 2 parts in a MILLION per GRAM! You know, that's less than the amount left over in the exhaust? Wow. These guys are good. They're not just getting all the energy out of the exhaust, they're getting more energy than is in the exhaust! Maybe its nuclear. wow.

1. Okay, that last was a bit snarky and unscientific. Back on the beam, we check our table of energy in gasoline, and have to do some more math to convert teir BTUs from 125k/gal to something per gram. That's a volumetric gallon, and our fuel gram is a weight. So it depends on the density of gasoline. Assuming 60 degrees F., these folk in England tell us that's 737.22 kg/cu.m or 0.073722 grams per ml.
2. (Getting there, bear with me.) A gallon is 3,785.41178 ml. So a ml of gas has 0.0302832942
BTUs of energy.

Multiply that by #2 results and you get, out of each spark in that super-dooper
(de-dooper-de-booper!) engine, 0.00223254502 BTUs of energy. Let's round, okay? I'll be REALLY generous and round to twenty-three ten-thousandths.

My friends, you're going to have to take my word for it (but I'm happy to continue down this rabbit hole) that 23/10,000 of a BTU is about 1.2 ft/lbs of energy. To frame it another way, a horsepower is approximately 2,544 BTUs an hour (they did this for an hour). A horsepower is thirty three thousand ft-lbs/min. Or 500 (more or less--we can start really rounding now) ft-lbs/hour. A Chrysler 318 engine has nominally 180hp, but can make much more. We're interested in economy, so that's a good starting point. So that's 9,000 ft-lbs/hr.

What did we calculate? 1.2ft/lbs? But a 318 cubic inch engine should be making FOUR THOUSAND TIMES that amount of energy. Basically, the light wouldn't stay on in the engine. It couldn't get out of its own way, even tethered to an invisible van! It can't be done. There isn't enough raw energy in 2 lbs of gasoline to run a V8 motor at 3,000rpm for an hour. You'd need something that would get you a 4,500% improvement on efficiency. Can't be done. QED.

Then they ask a real relevent question:

"What does this Mean To You?"

Here's what it means: this website and their claims are snake-oil. They're trying to hide it in pseudo science meaningless graphs and "testimonials" and mumbo-jumbo. BTW, I love how none of their mechanics quotes actually have names attached to them. I wonder if an ASE-certified mechanic could lose their license if they really put up something like this? More likely, the quotes were just made-up. I hate to think certified mechanics would be trying to pawn this crap off on their customers.

Here's a good one.

"we believe...you will be evaporating fuel out of
your tank faster than you are using it for your travel."

Uh. Meaning...you "believe" that you're going to eat a hole in the bottom of my gas tank with your crappy "covalizer" agent? Or, in a more mundane interpretation of "believe", that you
actually have no facts nor evidence to back up your idea, so your claim can only be a "belief".

And on that "covalizer". Wow, they should just trademark that name. Someone is going to want to buy that from them when we are all driving electric cars. I mean, "engergizer" is taken, so you've got to have something that sounds scientific.

The videos on this site are really just too absurd to take on point-by-point. Just suffice to say when they say things like, "mechanically, it is just like your car engine", they're not lying--COMPLETELY. What they're using is a Sterling engine. Which has some mechanical similarity with your car engine--and about the same mechanically as a 1900 train engine. A sterling engine will make mechanical energy out of anything that will burn and has enough water to make steam. That's why they're in use in the third world. Low-grade fuel sources and you can still make power and it won't ruin the engine. It'll be hell to clean up afterwards, but it can be done.

We won't even go into why they put this absurd video on this PICC site. I didn't see a demo of any of the products (okay, I could only stand it until 5:30) wearing a tie or being in a garage doesn't make you an expert nor a mechanical nor fuel engineer. More evidence of snake oil.
Oh, and water injection into engines for cooling has been done for a long time. No magic, but that doesn't mean you'll get the same power as if you were running 100% gas, rather than 60% gas and 40% water. I'm guessing you'll get something like 62-63% of the energy.

Perhaps the only "real" thing on their website is the "HAFC Optimizer". Sure. I could probably make one of these--or at least buy it somewhere else on the internet. It could very well be a module that remaps your ignition and injection. Most people who get these use them to get more power (and attendant LESS gas mileage) out of their performance cars or work trucks. It's not hard to do, as the manufacturers have to balance between fuel mileage targets and the market place of horsepower and speed claims. But the "UCSA" (Mitchell Enterprises of Clovis, CA) will probably set it up to put the car's computer into super-lean-almost-knocking mode all the time. Better gas mileage, sure, for a while. Because a super-lean firing will destroy your car's power and destroy your engine in no time.

But I concede you might see some percentage (maybe even double-digits, if your car is out of tune) increase enough to be sold on their snake oil and to spread the word for them. They'll be long gone by the time your engine goes, "KA-BLAMMO!"

What about that evil catalytic converter that the auto industry was forced to put (thoughtlessly) downstream of your engine's combustion, rather than upstream where the smart people of PICC would put it?

Maybe the converter used to do a great deal to combat smog, but its role has been reduced, though not eliminated. It is still an important step, the last one, to destroy all the smog left in the exhaust gas as possible. The catalytic converter of 1971, around when they were widely introduced, was grossly inefficient compared to today. Today there is so little non-combusted material due to hyper-efficient combustion chambers (VVT, hemispheric chambers, multiple valves, multiple spark) that catalytic converters can be the last link in an emissions control chain to put out "SULEV" emissions. Which is practically zero. As low as 0.1g per mile. Less than
1/2 oz. of NOx per 100 miles!!! See this EPA chart on outputs from different "classes" of vehicles.

There is some great wastes on Internal Combustion Engines. Some inefficiencies that someone (not likely the UCSA) will figure out how to exploit. For instance, figure out how you can retrieve the up to 50% of engine energy wasted as heat, and turn that into kinetic energy. Then you've really got something! Maybe a stirling engine run off steam created by the excess heat generated by the gas motor? Just an idea . That many have had.

Other charlatains, other pitches.

These aren't the only guys that are trying to separate people from their money faster than their right foot which is attached to the gas tank which is attached to their wallet.

There was this article in the paper the other day about some guy in Pleasanton who was putting some wires in a PVC pipe, along with a cathode and an anode and some attachment plumbing. About $30 in materials. Then you hook one end to your car's alternator, the other to the air inlet and fill it with water.

"The first time I use Pelligrino. After that, you can use your Aquafina bottled water." Actual quote. Sheesh.

The purpose of this contraption was to create (or should I say, "crack"!) hydrogen and oxygen out of the water in the pipe and feed it to your car's engine as "mixing gases". Too bad the second law of thermodynamics says that the energy needed to produce the electricity at the alternator to convert the water to gas will greatly exceed the energy you could get out of that same engine by feeding the gas back into it.

They are charging $1,000 each for these things and claimed they had sold 2,000 units.

P.T. Barnum was right. Don't be another one.

However, to be fair, I should point out that if the engine is inefficient, as in a DOT test on "older diesel engines", you might get some increased burn efficiencies out of oxygen injection. Four to seven percent in their tests. Good, but not hardly enough to spend $1000.00 on. If you were spending $20,000 on gas, maybe.

I think I'll wait for a real fuel cell. It uses gas, but zero emissions as it uses the _energy_ created in the fuel cell, not the gases directly to run an electric motor. There's a lot of interest in cars and technology using this idea.

It is very much worth investigating the real thing. Real science. Real applications. Not pseudo-science, wild claims and "see how you can become a dealer" marketing schemes.

To quote a wise friend of mine, "Check your tire pressures and add a pound or two. You'll save more gas than any of these stupid gadgets!"

Last of the Air-Cooled Porsches DO command a premium

2008-09-11T17:38:00.000-07:00

Tipped recently to the Craigslist Index site, I couldn't resist taking a look at how my favorite car's stats are doing. And here's the graph they so generously provide:

The label appears elsewhere on their page, but this is for "Make: Porsche". I love this graph. My current favorite Porsche (besides my own Legs) is the 1996-98 911. Cognescenti know this car as the "993", the internal project number for the car. The 993 was also made in 1995, the changeover model year from the previous "964" project. But that '95 911 has slightly less HP do mostly to intake manifold changes. No surprise, Porsche is known for Continuous Process (and Product) Improvement.

So look at the graph. I don't think Craigslist has that bump in the Avg. Price for the 1997 Porsche because its my favorite. And the slight dip in the 96 and 98 relative to the typical aging trend is interesting, too, eh? The 1999 911 was a new model, the "996", and it had some growing pains which explains the further drop in Avg. Price even though the volume trends up.

What is happening for 1997 is that I'm not the only one who claims that year/model Porsche as the favorite. But there's one more deeper thing going on here, which might explain the 1996 price drop and the big volume pop in the same year.

Of course there's a relationship between volume (availability) and price, but I think it has to do with the introduction of the Boxster (986) model that year, sold in 1996 as a 1997. The Boxster was a cheaper car, and as it has had benefit of Continous Process Improvement as well, the first cars are relatively less-powerful, less comforatable, less-reliable and therefore...cheaper! Which, blows the curve, as they say, for the 911 prices.

The relatively lower pool of cars for sale for the 1997 year (as reported to Craigslist), and the commensurate raise in price, shows that the demand is up, the availablity is down--fewer lovers of the car putting their baby on the block and so the price jumps.

The 1998 drop comes from the fact that there was very little 993 production for that year. It was a "short" year, with Porsche wanting to introduce the brand-new 996 model. Volume is up because the 1998 996 sold very well, but price is down because the new 996 suffered many of the teething pains that the 986 did in its maiden year. But all is well with Porsche, as the trend is up-up-up since then.

Putting aside the absolutely ghastly depreciation hit these cars take in their first year (look at the 2008-2007 cliff), I see an interesting trend in the most recent years. 2005-2006 price spikes, but volume drops. That would be the introduction of the next 911, the Projekt "997" car.

Not enough samples for 2009 cars--I presume the drop is due to "lease escapes" and the economy. Two Thousand Nine is another year for the 997, but there are Very Significant Product Improvements in '09, and it will be interesting to see this graph in a year.

In the meantime, it doesn't look good for the shoppers of 1997 Porsche 993s. Lucky sellers, though.

Car Week

2008-08-17T00:19:00.000-07:00

It is Monterey, where else? Thanks to Greg Wootton, I was able to see the last few races on Saturday. I'll have some pictures to post soon. But as I was browsing today's 356Talk posts, I was led to a slideshow of the Pebble Beach Concours Tour, a driving event for entrants in The Concours. There are no points awarded for the tour, but in case of a tie, a tour participation could break it.
But that's not why I'm writing about it here. The reason is Porsche decided first to enter 356-001 into the PB Concours Preservation class, and then, to add honey to the cracker, entered it into the tour!! Charles Rollins of Bench Racing.com posted this most excellent gallery.

"The Tour" Pebble Beach Concours Driving Event

I really can't top this with my own pictures, but I'll post them as soon as I'm done drooling over Charles' shots.

Ferrari Precedes the PreHistorics

2008-08-11T12:15:00.001-07:00

During Monterey's internationally famous Car Week (August 11-17) the "best kept secret" (one it seems which everyone already knows about) is actually a prelude, a rehearsal, that has been open to the public for years, but little talked about outside the outer rings of the Inner Circles. I'm talking about a non-event which has come to be called by locals as the "Pre-Historics". No, its not racing by Fred Flintstone and Barney rubble, it is literally the arrival, staging and practice races for the Big Event, the Monterey Historic Races. I don't need to say that the Historics is a must-see-in-your-lifetime event for any car buff. You already know that. But what you don't know is that the weekend before The Historics, all the big trucks hosting the "arrive and drive" museum pieces and many of the individual entrants arrive to sort out their cars.

What you get in this "dress rehearsal" is 80% of the show, at %5 of the cost and only 1% of the crowds. The reason for this apparent anomaly during what can be a very costy car vacation (3-day tickets run $145) to the Historics run is that there is no event. Its just practice. The Laguna Seca track is within a Monterey County Park. Open to the public. So you pay your $6/car parking fee and you've got a literal front-row seat. Or turn 3 seat. Or corkscrew seat.

Up until this year (no idea what may happen in years hence) you also had full access to the paddocks. Paddock access is one of the great lures to The Historics. You can walk up and peer right into the cockpit of millions of dollars and decades of history worth of racing cars. The cars trundle through on their way to and from the grid around your knees. The smells and sounds are right there. Engine covers open, wheels off. If you're a car tech geek it is nothing less than pornography.

This Year, a pre-Game Show: Ferrari

Sadly, this year, the Ferrari North America "had the track for the weekend" as we were told by many yellow-shirted "Hospitality" guides (all of which looked like they were daylighting from their bar bouncer jobs). One had to have pre-registered with the Ferrari Club to get the appropriate badging and wristbands to raise one above the hoi polloi. Or you had to be on a "driver's list". Meaning a Historics registrant had to have put you on the equiv of a nightclub "guest list" in advance. It would appear that our impromptu tour of the automotive eye candy was at an end.

With the Ferrari Club holding court, and my friends in the 356 Club having not arrived, we were relegated to outside the paddock fencing. It was a small loss, as the entire track, including all the grandstands, the souvenir store and even the track burger grill were open to us. And by "us" I'm talking about several hundred (not thousands--hundreds) of spectators. Most of whom were there to watch the Ferrari club.

Not Impressed by Ferraris? Try this out.

While I appreciate Ferrari, I'm not a fan. They are, to me, unapproachable. I may feel different after my first million (I once read that the average Ferarri owner has a net work of about $5 million--but I wonder about the standard deviation from that figure), but there's just nothing middle class about Ferrari. I can, from the middle class, approach a car that retails at $100k, but to consider $250k and above is to say that my retirement and family's need to eat, oh, and our medical insurance, are all secondary to the siren lure of the Maranello 12cyl. Seeing them in the parking lots left me.....ehhh? I saw a Nissan GTR, my first in-the-wild spotting of this distinctly middle class supercar. That was worth two pictures. The '85 Testarossa and the '06 Scaglietti which bookended the Nissan barely rated a second look.

That said, you cannot be unimpressed by Ferarris on the racetrack. They put on a pretty good show when they're moving, and then there's the sound. Have to admit, there's nothing like it. I'm not seduced by the Siren's lure, but it does turn my head. For our entertainment, there were two heats of a cup race that appeared to be run by a flock of F430 Stradale. I call them a flock because they were much to civilized to be called a "swarm". I expected them to be both buzzier and louder. The sound restriction (92db) was lifted for the weekend, but these cars sounded like they could roll down Highway 1--their clear race livery withstanding.

Above you see a Ferrari pace car leading a couple other Ferrari into the corkscrew. My favorite of this flock of F430s was the one painted in Wyler Gulf-like colors, compleat with a Porsche 908/03 "flounder" spyder arrow (Targia Florio paint scheme). Compare Dan Watkins' reproduction 430 paint with the original 908/03 from a bit north of the Scuderia:

Next up were the very impressive Ferrari Enzo FXX race-prepared models. The FXX is Ferrari's top of the top-of-the-line Enzo series. It is a very exclusive club, numbering only 30, whose members include none other than Michael Schumacher hisself.

So imagine our surprise to find not an Enzo, but SIX! Enzo FXX models on the track and racing at song. Quite a treat. Below is a PhotoShop Express album of the nineteen pictures I took of these spectacular cars.

ﾠ

But that's not all.
Like a multi-gazillion dollar Ginzu commercial, the Ferrari kept coming. After another Challenge round which was unfortunately greatly abbreviated by a number of full-course cautions, on lap one and lap seven, a spectacle that could top even the mighty Enzo FXX took the course. What is at the very top, the pinnacle of the Scuderia food chain? Why, the F1 cars, of course. I was only able to identify two of the three "F1 Corse Clienti" cars. They were F2002 models, Vodaphone livery. They were fast, and gloriously pitched.

The below picture is by Andrew Wong and is very nice. Click the image to go to Andrew's Flickr album of the event.

After that, the Ferrari were done. Oh, there was another round of the "FXX Program", but as one of our party remarked over hamburgers consumed at the outside of the 3-4 chute, "Oh, we're having lunch and there go some Ferrari FXXes. Ah, but we've seen that before, so we'll just keep on with our lunch." And it was rather like that. After seeing the F1 cars, even the quite amazing FXX is slightly mundane. Perhaps that's the alure. Perhaps when you're driving a Ferrari, every other car is slightly mundane. Perhaps some day I'll find out if that's true. Perhaps I hope I don't.

The Speed of Obscurity

2008-06-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

Mac OS X has, in its disk utilities, a disk formatting tool. Interestingly, it has the facility to do a "Secure Erase" 7-pass option that claims to meet DoD requirements.

I inherited an external drive that I'm going to use for my "Time Machine" (another Mac OS X tool, for on-going incremental backups) volume. Because the drive came from someone else and clearly had some of their business-sensitive data on it, I decided to exercise this Secure Erase option.

It is a 2003, USB-2, 7200 RPM Maxtor 5000LE disk with 81GB of total capacity.

The utility is estimating this wipe (x7) and format operation will take seven hours. As a point of comparison, I set up a Win 2003 Server yesterday, with a 200GB internal disk. Formatting from blank to NTFS (default 4k sectors) took about 20 minutes (un-timed, but it was about that).

I have to guess that because the Apple secure wipe does write random bits to the disk, that there's considerable traffic over the USB--enough to absolutely fill the disk seven times. To get 'er done in 7hours, the Mac will have to spit/read 12GB/Hr, or 200MB/m or or 17.3Mb/sec. This is at the high-end of the "Full Speed" 12Mb/s for USB 1.1/2.0 spec (but well below the 480Mb/s for "Hi-Speed").

Which makes me think that the Apple & Maxtor USB implementations are very good, or, more likely, that the utility has done space/spec math on the USB xfer rate and posted that as the time estimate to be able to finish formatting the disk.

Maybe I'll get some "Hi-Speed" out of the Mac interface. The Maxtor specs say the 5000LE supports it, and the disk is 7200, as printed on the case, regardless of what the PC Magazine article says about only the 120G versions having the higher-speed spindle.

Ah! I just glanced over and whilst writing this post, the timer has fallen to an estimated 6hrs remaining for this task. Faster than spec, indeed.

P2P begets C2C

2008-05-30T11:49:00.000-07:00

The next step in automotive control is coming, and a sign of it shows up in the product of a small Mt. View company named Dash. Dash has been selling on Amazon.com since the end of March. Their first product, a GPS unit that has C2C (Car to Car) communication capacity. The C2C is actually buffered through the company's central servers which aggregate location and speed data and send that back in terms of traffic updates. This is more immediate and accurate than getting feedback filtered through municipal traffic sensors. Getting info from the municipal sensors is called "C2I", or Car to Infrastructure. That's part-and-parcel of what the US calls "Vehicle Safety Communication", or VSC, which is nowhere as cool as "C2C".

I spoke with a company representative last year before the product went public. She said that the C2C wouldn't be part of the initial product, but would be built-in and once there was a critical mass a software update could be delivered to allow C2C and/or C2I functionality to be rolled out.

Though the Dash has some high hurdles to overcome in that there needs to be a critical mass of C2C-enabled cars for a lot of it to work to its potential. Less so for C2I--much like a "Flash Pass" it could be sold by municipalities as a premium commuter service and increase ROI for C2I's infrastructure-side improvements, to build a cycle of improvements.

How you get to that critical mass is beyond my ken, but Dash told me that their exit strategy was to sell this to a car manufacturer, or, if they had interest from more than one, to license it to many, and become like EDS. Do that and hey'll have a big enough network. Of course, On-Star and the european consortium "EURCAR" is working on a similar agenda, and they've chosen to call their initiatve C2C. They're cleary the cool kids on the block (which includes Audi, BMW, Damlier, VW, Fiat, and Renault--notice the absence of The Big 3 and Nippon Co's?)

One of the first things to work out is the spectrum on which all this will happen, right now they're talking about the 802.xx technology in the 5.8Ghz, at the high end of that. But of course it has to be unfettered, not-noisy, and relatively secure (more potential for mischief than hacking an ATC center).

The thing about this initiative and the potential hinted at by The Dash is that I believe the future of accident avoidance and really the next phase in automotive control (now that we have ABS, ESP,PASV, TCS, lane-change notice and auto-parking) in C2C is direct communication to alert surrounding cars to lane changes, braking, erratic steering as well as general traffic speed for congestion alert. Enabled with nearest-neighbor information, the car can know in advance of its position when another car is planning to change lanes or is slowing--without the driver having to notice lights, guage deceleration rates, move their foot, etc.

If MB has a brake system that will buy you a 1/4 sec. by "pre-positioning" its brake pads when you lift off the throttle immediately, imagine what gains you could get by electronic inter-car communcation. Take the slow wetware out of the loop. Um, that's you and me, pal. First enabled for freeway/highway travel and filtering down to urban traffic, there are difficult but not insurmountable problems to solve, but it is clearly imaginable at this point. For rural and suburban roads the challenges are harder. We'll leave that for now in the hands of the DARPA Challenge folks. Handling anything, anywhere, anytime from behind the wheel is currently a job for the slower but much more adaptable wetware between our ears.

If we invest in some relatively small additions to C2I infrastructure in urban settings, the car could know well in advance when lights will change, speed limits, etc. Add that up and you really have the makings of great efficiencies in auto traffic and not just safety.

[above image from the Renault presentation "Avoidance and Action in a C2C Network". ]

Coming Into an Intersection Near You
Imagine for a second that all cars were equipped with C2C. Or, in the closer future, imagine that a majority do. You're overlooking a major traffic intersection (don't know why, but I'm thinking of DeAnza Blvd. and Stevens Creek Blvd. Let the Apple employees be the lab rats). It's about 9am on a weekday and traffic is pretty heavy. At some moment, without drama, the C2I detects that all cars within 500yds of the intersection are C2C equipped [unequipped cars can be "ratted out" to the intersection by their equipped neighboring vehicles. "I can see you, but I can't hear you!"]. At a synergistic moment, the traffic lights begin to blink all their colors in all directions, alerting drivers to the upcoming thrill ride. At the edges, all pedestrians and cyclists are signalled to stop. Inside the cars, the C2C system alerts each driver, "Automatic intersection ahead, yield control to me in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1....I have control of your car. Control will be returned to you shortly. Listen for the countdown."

The car can take on the very simple task of steering a little on approach to keep in-lane stability. This is much simpler than the auto-parking mechanism of Lexus and others. Carnegie Mellon and Stanford have been running cars around their campus on autonomous control for years now--well-defined lanes, low speeds, no traffic. Lane change attempts are suppressed. Remember, that all the cars have "immediate radius destination" signals being sent out, so early moves into turn lanes and lane adjustments for speed (slow to the right, enforced by the cars themselves! Heaven!) have already been made. Then every car gets locked into a steady state on approach to keep the real time planning as simple as possible, Drivers basically don't have control over their pedals.

In all directions at the same time and all the cars just go through the intersection without any drama.

The cars interleave themselves with as little slowing as possible; the system creating the following distances necessary to get all the cars through the intersection in a basket weave. Little wasted gas, low chances of accident. It is Atari Frogger on a grand scale and everyone makes it across.
As non-equipped cars approach the intersection, it goes back into human-interface mode, the signals go back to normal, the audience of appreciative pedestrians whistle their awe...and maybe the whole thing happens again in a few minutes.

It occurs to me that perhaps motorcycles will be the most difficult to bring into this fold. But that's an off-the-cuff observation and would need more thought. This would be fun software to work on, bordering on "AI". Certainly some "hive think" and "emergent behavior" aspects of it.

When could this happen? Within 20 years, easily. Within my lifetime, certainly.

Other resources.

http://archive.thestandard.com/internetnews/000765.php

Acronymicon

2008-05-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

I don't think I made it to be the first on the web with this, but the new Indiana Jones movie, "Indiana Jones and the Cave of the Crystal Skull" is a mouthful. So I condensed it to the acronym: IJatCotCS. Google it. Anyone besides me? I have to say though, that IJATCOTCS is either an acronym for a joint DEA/FBI operation, or a new JAVA/CSS conversion API. Or something from the Pentagon. Yep. That's it. It's a Pentagon acronym. Trebly-embedded. Which reminds me. Is it really true that "JAVA" stands for "Just Another Vacuous Acronym"? If it doesn't it should.

Dancing With the Stars, courtesy of Jib-Jab

2008-05-20T23:17:00.000-07:00

You remember "This Land is Your Land" from the '04 Presidential election. Do you think those guys over at Jib-Jab have been asleep since then? They haven't and here's the proof. Nominated for one of the best Flash applications on the 'net.

Smart NAS<->USB Copies

2008-05-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

I was looking at NAS solutions again today, as 1TB drives external get to my arbitrary but magic pricepoint of <$0.25/GB, and found this nice LaCie item.

What surprised me was buried in the comment by the second reviewer. He wrote:

"Also I had another USB external drive that I wanted to copy the data from to the NAS so I connected it directly to the NAS and mapped both drives on my laptop (which is wireless) to do a copy and it ran super slow, for some reason it did not just copy from drive to drive but it was transferring across my wireless."

Wow.
This is why we need basic computer "science" (really, a practicum that isn't focused on using apps) as a part of the general education. More English education needed to combat run-on sentences is also indicated in this case--but I digress.

Looking deeper into his situation and confusion, wouldn't it be cool to have devices smart enough to figure out what this user wanted (and expected) to do? I.e., the computer looks at the source and destination targets and sees that they're on the same IP and so hands them (maybe the source drive) a signal to check for routing optimizations, which might include looking for all USB hosts and clients for some matching target credential.

Or in this particular case, couldn't the NAS figure out what is going on, since it is receiving both the source and target destinations and spoof the client computer into thinking that the transfer is beginning, continuing and then ending as long as it takes to make the USB xfer? The user gets all the "flying folder" feedback (or spinning beachball for you Mac'ers) and for the appropriate time whilst the USB does its thing.

If Cisco and Comcast can spoof to interrupt Torrent copies, it can't be that hard to sniff this out. And for that matter, if the NAS kernel is Linux (as it surely is), couldn't you stuff some iptables rules that would handle this "feature"? Allowing this could be as easy as a feature in the web interface that, on detecting a USB drive, enables a checkbox that says, "allow disk-to-disk copies between by networked clients"? Defaulted to "on", of course. You might want the files to fly through your CPU/OS stack, because you might have antivirus checks to apply, Google desktop, or other benevolent (or, yes, malevolent) spyware to apply. Hmm... off by default then?

Surely I'm not the first to have thought of this (sm).

InterNeutrality on the Internet

2008-04-24T09:32:00.000-07:00

I followed some of the recent talks about net neutrality, the spin on that which has been called "ISP transparency" and what appears to be the outcome and current FCC thinking as recently expressed by the chairman.

It occurs to me that we're at real risk of the Internet continuing to develop like our national highway system, our power grid and our health care system, all of which are teetering on the cusp between maximum capacity and breaking down. The capacity problems are about peak load and a small population taking advantage of the lack of controls. I could draw some parallels but many should seem obvious: poor drivers equate to health-maintenance-by-emergency-room use equate to torrent spams equate to air conditioners in uninsulated buildings. To be able to even have discussion about "neutrality" (i.e., sustainable systems for all users), we need to address root abuses on both sides: provider and consumer.

Any neutrality regulation also has to take on applications which will attempt to maximize their own utilization without regard to total availability. Yes, one could argue that it is not the domain of the application engineer to control that, but then you've put the onus back on the ISP for balance. Consider the ways that our highways have developed, with every individual deciding when and where they will drive and the concomitant traffic jams that occur. Out power grids suffer the same demand load balancing problems. We have clear examples of how a complete hands-off policy doesn't maximize our resource investment. So "net neutrality" should not be cover for hamstringing net management just as it shouldn't be cover for ISPs who are also content providers (e.g. Comcast) to be able to provide preferential treatment for their own revenue enhancements (e.g., video on demand).

This is a deep problem, and heavy hands by regulation is the most likely potential cause to exacerbate the problem. Too much, too soon is a real hazard. A working group study to find a "neutral" (to coin a phrase) balance between technical and social demands.

In the meantime, the FCC and congress both would find their time better spent to make sure that the access needs of the populace are met before slicing up bandwidth for the privileged. TV box subsidies are fine, but how about "lifeline" data access for all, much as voice access is subsidized for the poor and fixed-income elderly. That would be true "net egalitarianism", a step beyond "neutrality".

Language is magic

2008-04-22T11:47:00.000-07:00

In an interview on the Evolution of (Computer) Languages, Bjarne Stroustrup states,

"Any language that can express all that is needed for a wide range of application areas could be considered unnecessarily complex for any given application, but it must cope with an essentially unbounded set of applications."

I was immediately struck by the similarity to Arthur C. Clarke's axiom:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Clarke's is the superset, but Stroustrup explains why it is difficult to figure out entirely how language works.

Suspension of Disbelief

2008-04-11T07:23:00.000-07:00

I listened to much of the recent Petraeus testimony to the House Armed Services Committee. Mostly on the radio to and from work and during a lull in my afternoon. It was largely as expected, posturing and political puppet shows from the committee on both sides of the aisle and the general and ambassador tap-dancing and trying not to be caught having someone else mis-characterize their own statements.

I'm not going to agree nor disagree in this posting with the policies or current actions nor future actions--it is easy to see that this is a very complex issue and neither "stay the course" nor "bring them home" bumper sticker slogans can translate into those actions with success for the Iraqi people. In short, my opinion since "Mission Accomplished" has been aligned with former Secretary of State Colin Powell: "You broke it, you bought it." We've an obligation to get out of a sovereign nation as quick as we can, but without leaving vast numbers (thousands, tens of thousands) of innocents at risk of genocide, religocide, or to be driven from their homes or in a new war with Iran--and other crimes against humanity which are currently held at bay by our military presence. How and when we are able to leave without such horrific outcomes--it is clear to me from both the testimony and Committee questions--is that no one knows. We have a lot to figure out there.

Of course others have differing opinions, and one phrase in the disagreements expressed in the hearing stood out. Senator Clinton said that it would require a "willing suspension of disbelief" to accept the claim that the "surge" was working. That stuck with me. The concept behind that phrase is familiar to anyone who has studied film or literature. Suspension of disbelief is the essence of fiction. It is the contract a writer or filmmaker creates with an audience to require that the audience leaves some aspect of their critical thinking at the door, in essence to "believe" what the author is saying. If you suspend disbelief, you are believing. Not to understand as a scientist would, but to accept as truth without deep questioning about the veracity of all aspects of the story.

The premise behind the phrase is that we are skeptics in our natural, presumably intellectual, discourse. That we should bring to all encounters a presumption of disbelief--not harsh nor pejorative, but critical. Critical in the intellectual sense of the word, not in the casual, emotionally-charged sense that seems to pervade many aspects of culture--especially inter-generational communication. (How to express a critical posture without alienating the person you're engaged with is a topic for many other essays.) We generally do interact with new encounters skeptically, critically, with disbelief. Because we want to understand and see how what we're encountering fits in best with what we already know.

With literature, we don't have to have it "fit in best" with our accepted reality. We begin with a premise of fantasy, of an imagined place that has some familiarity with our shared reality, but not exactly. We accept that the author is going to take us on a journey where the fantastic or unexplained may happen. We don't pick at the edges, we relax our judgment--our active participation in judging the veracity--in order to what? For what reason would we not want to understand completely and know the truth of what is being presented to us? To be entertained. In the movie Galaxy Quest an alien race has no such facility, they accept that their Sci-Fi entertainers really have all the technology and power needed to do what the screen fiction presents to them.

So back to the Senator and the phrase as used in the hearing. I couldn't tell whether it was a sardonic remark. I would hope that it was. But under the sardony, there is a presumption: that we--the consumers of the reports of this administration and of their appointees' testimony--do indeed come to engage news and information with the same mindset with which we engage entertainment. It is easy to suspend disbelief--unraveled, that means it is easy to believe.

To believe is to accept without criticism. In our culture which has to contend with on a daily basis the challenges of a secular government and a spectrum of religions, we tend to ascribe "belief" to the realm of the spiritual, the religious. But belief has a strong component in all aspects of our engagement with the world. Philosophically, it is not possible to completely "know" anything. At some point one must "believe" that the authority on a topic--be it teacher, book or wikipedia--is correct, knows some level of detail more than we do. That's the essence of authority. But belief (in secular matters) should not be absolute, there should always be a measure of criticism available to any argument. And that is the essence of knowledge and learning.

What we as citizens are often faced with is the messages of our leaders and public servants (a label that politicians would be well-served to remember as part of their job description) which come through the same media as our entertainment. So we must always have our disbelief active, and only suspend it when we know that we're engaged to be entertained. If entertainment is not the intent, we should always have a "willing disbelief". Suspension should be reserved for a special relationships with authors and artists, and never with politicians nor generals.

My Next(XT) Platform

2008-03-24T11:02:00.000-07:00

This is a remote blog post. I'm using Adobe's Buzzword for a lot of writing now and then post results to Adobe's Share (in Beta) will probably be posting more lengthy essays through that medium. And it will encourage viral adoption of Buzzword. And that's a good thing for me, because I work in the division at Adobe that is responsible for this fine, fine product.

Read about my latest computer upgrade here.

I agree with the Fool: stop the Wall Street madness

2008-03-24T10:59:00.000-07:00

The Motley Fool is absolutely right.
Ben Bernanke: put the pen down and step away from the desk.

Its a tough pill to swallow, and there are some dominoes to fall, but at the risk of sounding like a cold-hearted republican, I'm aligned with this view.

I do think there needs to be a safety net of some kind for those folk who were sold sub-prime loans even when they would have qualified for fixed--yes, people should go into these things opened-eyed and do their homework, but I know that I've paid more for, say, a car than I really needed to because of a good salesman at the other side of the table (and, in the interest of full disclosure, I know that I've done this more than once).

But those (relatively few) folk who were paying $400 a month to buy a house and now their payments are $600 and they just don't have an extra $200/mo, I think that the securities made up of these....lets call them what they are...junk bonds, which are no longer liquid have to be treated at their market value. And if there are investment banks that need to be turned inside-out because they over-invested in these relative to their risk (even if they didn't know the risk--the bond insurance companies should certainly have known) then so be it.

Will there be some cascade? Was there in Silicon Valley in '00? Yep. Did the Fed come to our aid and prop up our economy at the end of a similar bubble? Nope. Does Wall Street deserve any more consideration because they trade in money rather than bits? Nope.

PPS> Full, full, disclosure: I hold a 7/1 adjustable. My reset is four years out. If I can get a good fixed rate in the next 12 months--I'm going to jump on it.
fixed soon because of this mess and Bernanke dropping the prime to 0.0% then I will.

Of Bits and Grit

2007-09-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Kirk wrote in Infoweek yesterday,

"In just three years, the bytes of data generated by digital cameras, mobile phones, businesses IT systems, and devices will equal the number of grains of sand on the world's beaches."

His reference is the IDC White Paper (PDF): "The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010", published March of this year. The report itself-- though an absolutely fascinating read--makes no mentions of sand nor beaches. What it does name is an estimated 988 exabytes of digital information will be "created captured and replicated" in the year 2010. This is a sixfold increase from the amount of similar data calculated for 2006.

So how does Mr. Kirk make the leap from this abstract information measure to the real and concrete aggregate (puns intended) of grains of sand? His calculations for this number and therefore the comparison are not presented in his article. So I must intercede with my own:

The size of a grain of sand is 0.25mm (range of .0125 to .25mm, I choose the larger for a lower total #)
The shape is cubic for 1 grain of sand (for efficient packing, raises the number by x2 perhaps against a fractal packing of 1.2 to 1.4 space factor over the 1.0 of the cube)
There are 1.5 million kilometers of shoreline (not all sand, but okay, presume 90% are)
It is 50 meters from waterline avg for a "beach" at low tide (that's a WAG if I ever heard one. The "breadth" of a beach is also a fractal measure.)
The beach consists of the first 1 meter depth of sand (the deeper you go, generally the rockier the sand becomes, but there is still sand in most places at 1 meter, so this is Very conservative, perhaps by a factor of five or more.)

With the above suppositions we calculate to: 4.8 x 10^21 grains of sand. In binary storage terms, that's about 4.8 ZB or "zettabytes"). Remove the wiggle room I gave myself in the WAG for shoreline percentage of sand and for packing of grains and you're still in the 4.0 ZB range.

So based on my admittedly gross calculations of sand grains, Mr. Kirk is off by a factor of 41. A small factor, one might consider, but when you're in the exabyte range, it adds up pretty quickly. Especially since the IDC whitepaper says that the rate is "sixfold between '06 and '10". With a linear growth rate (which is very likely wrong, it is probably log), the 4.8ZB figure won't be reached for 21 more years afterwards. Even with Log rates of increase, it would be nine years later, or 2019 when we'd have bit-to-grain veridical veraciousness.

So how could the Infoweek article be so far off the mark in this punchy but inaccurate lead to the article? The difference is obviously in the calculation for number of grains of sand. I've laid out my suppositions here. But what of Mr. Kirk? A quick Google on the question at hand and we can see that Mr. Kirk undoubtedly was "Feeling Lucky" and picked his "grains of sand" measure from the University of Hawaii (UofH) web page. The results given here co-incide nicely with the exabyte figure from the IDC paper.

But I don't accept the UofH presumptions, and therefore reject the results. Compare the reasoning of UofH--which is obviously concerned with methods and not results for this specific scientific quandry--to the methods described above. Massively different estimates in all dimensions on the UofH page leads to a number of 7.5 x 10^18, a number "close enough" for mister Kirk to correlate to the information space data in the IDC paper.

I conclude accepting the UofH values without criticism as sloppy research. Their example was used to show methods and so less that rigorous methods were used to determine the inputs to the calculation. I stand by my estimates, which were independently (cough) arrived at within a similar discussion which tries to map number of stars in the universe to these same grains of sand (I'm beginning to think that Blake's meme, mapping sand to the size of big things, like the Universe, has truly escaped the farm).

Other calculations support my findings with an 18% similarity (3.2 x 10^21), so I feel I'm on solid ground. Well, as solid as shifting sands and fractal coastlines can be.

Discussion

Of course, the real question (provided to me by my friend and colleague Michael Ellard) is this: When we get to the saddle point of sand and data, how much memory (computer chip) space will be necessary to create/store all that data?

I don't have the answer, but I can consider the problem.

The size of the store =>
size of the chip =>
size of the die =>
number of die on a silicon wafer =>
size of the silicon wafer =>
number of grains of sand to make all those wafers.

And is there a saddle point there? At which point will all the grains of sand of all the beaches of the world intersect with the need for computer chips to store all the information we are creating.

At that point, the entire world will be the computer.
And the answer will be: 42.
Q.E.D.

iDon't need an iPhone

2007-08-06T17:02:00.000-07:00

Yet another "cute" iPhone blog title. Sorry for that.
I'm going to chime in with MHO on the iPhone. Because that's what blogs are for, of course.
I was amused some friends waited in line for it on the first day. For 12 hours. Only to get just a 3 hour jump in use. Yes, on the people who didn't wait in line but just walked in before store closing and picked one up. Same price, no special deal. The line thing would have been worth it (I suppose) if there had been the kind of distribution problems that seem to always beset the console gaming industry. I guess Apple is just better at volume production than Nintendo? Or distribution? Or the boxes were smaller so they could fit more on the trucks?

But I digress.

I checked out the iPhone, in-person, the First Day (well, ,+1, the First Full Day). I hefted and touched and web-surfed with a co-worker's, and then again, and perused other features, later at the iStore. It is certainly an impressive piece of kit, but it would have to be more open than it is to really be a PDA (or laptop replacement). Which it isn't being touted as--except that it could be...almost.

Or it would need to be in the price range of my $100ish RAZR 3X. For the price, it really just doesn't do enough, as surprising as that sounds. Rather enough of what I would want, or enough more than I already have. The $300 delta is too much a premium to be able to find my playlists easier or zoom in on pictures. 802.11 and web browsing is interesting, but maybe only painless enough (repeated café logins with the virtual keyboard? no thanks!) when city-wide wifi is finally done. If I'm at home I'll use my laptop for real surfing, and if I'm at work...sorry! Have to log into the VPN and I'm just not of the Crackberry generation. Using the stylus with my Handspring was painful enough to tap through the keyboard (hey, what happened to the Newton's handwriting recongition software? Slap that onto the iPhone and now you're getting closer!). I don't "text", and I barely talk enough on the cell to really have to carry one around. I let my full-sized qwerty do my talking any my full-size Firefox do my browsing, thank you.

That's not to say I can't imagine an iPhone or some other multifunction device that I would want to have. Merely the presence of OS/X behind the iPhone is soooo tantalizing. But there needs to be more convergence. To review:

Home convergence = big screen + video storage + DVR + game + 2-way (windowed web browsing) + one remote :^)

Portable convergence = cell phone + music player + GPS + eBook reader + 2-way + really, really good voice recognition or some kinda better keyboarding for my finger size.

The thing that gives me hope this convergence will happen and the fruit on this branch of the technology tree will ripen is that almost everything on the wishlist for laptops 15 years ago you can now get for well less than $1000. Maybe not the 12h battery, but almost. So I use my desk computer for the bigger screens (2 of 'em), but I really, really could use my laptop for everything, work & play. So I expect to say the same thing about my future laptop and some future iPophoVidder.

But not yet.
Unless...it were about $100. Just wait until AT&T gets their rebate fingers on this in a handful of months from now....

The Far(ther) Flung Future
What would be really cool is just a "mesh" of personal products. Your bluetooth earbud(s) talk to your phone when it is in range, and your laptop's or desktop's or home media center's music/video inventory when you're near those things (or they stream through your phone, I don't care how it works!). Your phone doesn't have to come out of your pocket unless you want to look at the screen to know where you are, or to use it as a remote for your laptop (mouse/pointer) or to push/get media content from some other device in your mesh. You could ask for your phone screen to pick up whatever video media content you're streaming and keep it going as you walk to the fridge, but IMHO, that's what a "pause" button is for.

Digression: When I was younger I didn't want to put down my paperback for anything, but I rarely get that deeply engaged anymore. A pause button for video works fine for me.

And, finally, big screens are sooo good now (really, 1080p I didn't have on my desktop workstation monitor 10 years ago!) you can really read text (appropriately driven). So an eBook interface would be cool, there, too. I may not read Harry Potter in the living room with the family ("Dad! Go Back! I wasn't done with that page yet!"), but I can see reading in bed getting a whole lot more comfortable. I could use my iPhone to advance the pages or select chapters, or even serve the book's display to my bedroom LCD display's 802.11 or Bluetooth receiver.

Now we're talking.

As long as I don't get interrupted by a phone call.

Interact 10 ways: cool photographic art on the web

2007-08-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

There's nothing I can say that will make the experience of the Flash applications on this website any cooler, so you just have to check them out for yourself. Give yourself some time. If it isn't obvious at first, take the time to figure it out. Then take more time to really immerse yourself. Totally worth it.

Interact 10 Ways.

Awesome.

Chiming in on HD-DVD v. Blu Ray. The "format wars" won't be "won" by the actions of anyone who really cares.

2007-07-26T13:27:00.000-07:00

At the root, the only ones who care if there is actually an HD-DVD versus Blu Ray format war are those who've taken sides already and are really worried that they've made the wrong choice--or worse, feel the need to make others see that the choice they made for themselves is The Right Choice for everyone else. This is the bane of the early adopter. So in the first few months I can see their angst. Because an overwhelming tide (I'm thinking MS-DOS versus CP/M) will just crush the opposition and early capitulation before large capital investment is a likely reality.

But we're past that point in history now. The war, if you can characterize it as such, would have to be of type trench. As in "down in the trenches" or "an entrenched position". They're both in for the long fight. Both sides claim better numbers, in actual and in trends than the other. More units, by geo, in title sales, in number of committed studios providing content, by user rentals, etc., etc. To cut to the chase here, I strongly believe that both formats will be here for a while.
More about what "a while" is, below. But lets dig into the arguments in this "war". A little battlefield analysis, if you will.

Posts on Cnet Reviews makes me wonder if the Blockbuster Blu-Ray rental numbers are because people had PS3 w/players and realized, "Hey! I can play a movie on this, let's go rent one." Versus a person who buys a standalone player with the idea they'll be building a library. For Blockbuster it doesn't matter, they just need to stay on the trends and offer the right rentals for their customers, but for those who are trying to look into their crystal balls and figure out the future of Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, it does matter how PS/3s are counted. Which is to say, as long as (or if ever) game console owners buy a significant % of movies as standalone player buyers, then the whole "which is better" discussion for Xbox360 v. PS3, has to be a part of this one. I suppose what may eventually drive which standalone HD disk player I buy will be what game player I buy. If there's a game on the PS3 or on XBox360 I REALLY want to play (GT-5 or Halo-3?) I might pick up that console--and it doesn't make sense to get it without the highly-subsized HD disk player. But then, after having it, possesion will be a great reason to buy the other format in a standalone player! So PS3 sales might drive HD-DVD player sales! What a crazy world.

Another tack in the battlefield is to focus on the formats and relative merits of each. There's the size argument. Blu-Ray holds more--but riposte: HD-DVD 2 or 4-layer can hold more or both DVD and an HD version on the same disk. As for me, size doesn't matter (no jokes, please). I don't look at a movie title and see how much free space is left-over on the disk. The movie producers aren't going to edit their films for the theater with disk space in mind. And Lucas and Scorcese might care if their 7.1 had to be thunked down to mere 5.1, but few consumers will. What percentage of DVDs still play out of two speakers? VHS has had to deal with limited length, as does DVD, as will any capacity media. Pournelle's rule: Content grows to exceed capacity. Corners will be cut, compromises will be made, few will notice. Do I care if an HD disk also has DVD on it? Maybe, if my old DVD player will play that disk and I haven't bought an HD-DVD player yet, and there's some other compelling reason to get the HD version given that I don't have the player yet.

I do agree with some arguments made about 2nd disks and extra content. I agree in that they are valid observations: HD-DVDs will probably have to (for a while) bundle a second piece of media for extra features to not skimp on the sound and encoding possibilities for the main feature. But I disagree that that is a liability in the war. Already in the current DVD titles there are single disk movie-only versions and multi-disk special editions for a few $ more. Some of this has to do with Wal-Tar-Cost-mart wanting to keep that $15.99 price point. Some of it has to do with Blockbuster and Netflix shipping one disk or two. At some point in the future this won't be an issue, but I'll return to that later.

Quality is an issue to many early adopters, those who believe their purchases and opinions might sway the tide, but we're just climbing to the middle of the adoption curve and they and the long tail that follows is who the market will pay attention to. Look at DVD Superbit sales or other high-quality encodings. They don't outsell the other versions. I guess I'd pick the high quality version of a DVD if it were near the same price, but I wouldn't pay a lot more for the difference, because generally I don't notice the difference! You have to watch these versions side-by-side or look at screen captures to notice the differences. Ditto 5.1 v. 7.1 Dolby Tru-Dolby or 1.3HDMI SuperDooperDoolby-THX-whatever.

Perhaps a better comparison would be between Pan-Scan and widescreen editions (when on separate disks). Both are available at the same price. The choice by the discriminating consumer is always for the "higher quality" widescreen (fidelity to the original). But I bet many fullscreen titles still outsell widescreen because of perceived value. Parents want Bambi to fill the screen, and don't care about the director's vision for framing. Nor the audio quality, for that matter (portable, or in-car DVD players, anyone?). Early adopters of HD players will cringe, but they've already demonstrated their interest in the higher quality format, so they're not representative of The Great Unwashed Indiscriminate Viewer. A super-size fast food meal doesn't sell because it is better, after all.

Consider the generally mediocre quality of digital music. The biggest seller (via iTunes) isn't the best quality. Mediocre digital music sells because of price and availability, irrespective of the rants of cognescenti who'd only listen to a ripped CD if it was in lossless .wav format (only to be trumped by vinyl-draggers and tube amplifier snobs).

So if, and I think we can all agree on this, volume will ultimately be the self-reinforcing feedback in the market, then it won't be number of disks or features or two more channels of sound or lossless versus lossy. It will come down to price and availability. Availability of the players, and Cost-Wal-Tar-co are going to have a lot to do with that. And availability of the titles. So far, I'm seeing that the titles I would replace in my DVD collection are on HD-DVD, but that's just my past tastes showing. Of the new titles coming out, it is a pretty even split, and that's too bad for me. Because after all, all said and done, its really about the movies you want to watch and having something to watch them on.

My gut is that neither of these formats is going to go away. Seems to be plenty of room for three game consoles. Seems to be plenty of room for iMacs and PCs to be in the market. Cell phone technologies, iTunes and MP3s. The world is big enough and there are enough consumers now that it doesn't have to boil down to one standard. One may grow to be bigger (due to price and availability, not specifications), but the other will still be around. Uh, unless Sony quits altogether, that is. Hmmm... where would we be if they had just stuck it out on the Betamax thing?

And to further put the idea that the format "wars" are going to result in a winner, consider what happens if both get supplanted? Does anyone really think that either of these formats will last a "long time"? Certainly not as long as DVD, nor even VHS. Because we all know that network capacity is growing and magnetic disk prices are falling much faster than the optical disk formats can change. Sony and MS both know this. As does Comcast and AT&T. Media questions will drop out of the picture in a few years and then we really can have a debate about encoding and compression and quality as effect delivery times. Watch it realtime, starting Right Now, in LowDef, or let it start streaming to store and your cell phone will ring when you can start watching it. Or you can call your microwave back and tell it to go ahead and start the popcorn.

So the prescription is to buy one or the other for The Now, or at some price, to get some specific content, or features, or quality, or fewer disks, or whatever floats your boat, and enjoy! Because just like my 8-track player, and my VHS deck, and my SNES, they'll all be relegated to the recycler (or to the grandkids room) well before their usefulness has run out to make room for The Next Big Deal.

How many online forum group members does it take to change a lightbulb?

2007-07-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

Compliments of joke-of-the-day.com :

How many online forum group members does it take to change a lightbulb?

1 to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been changed.

14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently.

7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs.

27 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs.

53 to flame the spell checkers.

41 to correct spelling/grammar flames.

6 to argue over whether it's "lightbulb" or "light bulb"...another 6 to condemn those 6 as anal-retentive

2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is "lamp".

15 know-it-alls who claim *they* were in the industry, and that "light bulb" is perfectly correct.

156 to email the participant's ISPs complaining that they are in violation of their "acceptable use policy".

109 to post that this group is not about light bulbs and to please take this discussion to a lightbulb group

203 to demand that cross posting to hardware forum, off-topic forum, and lightbulb group about changing light bulbs be stopped.

111 to defend the posting to this group saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts *are* relevant to this group.

306 to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best for this technique, and what brands are faulty.

27 to post URL's where one can see examples of different light bulbs.

14 to post that the URL's were posted incorrectly and then post the corrected URL's.

3 to post about links they found from the URL's that are relevant to this group which makes light bulbs relevant to this group.

33 to link all posts to date, quote them in their entirety including all headers and signatures, and add "Me too".

12 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handle the light bulb controversy.

19 to quote the "Me too's" to say "Me three".

4 to suggest that posters request the light bulb FAQ.

44 to ask what is a "FAQ".

4 to say "didn't we go through this already a short time ago?"

143 to say "do a Google search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs".

1 forum lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start it all over again....

Bluetooth Stereo Headsets

2007-07-02T15:45:00.000-07:00

My new phone, a Motorola V3xx, purchased a week before all this iPhone mania, supports A2DP for stereo listening over Bluetooth, so I went shopping for some stereo headphones. There is additional opportunity for techie satisfaction here as I've been pondering for months--if not years--the prospect of wireless headphones for my home theater. I often like to watch old movies late into the night, or just catch John Stewart before turning in. In either case, the television is on much later that everyone else in the house's bedtimes. So not only would I need a Bluetooth headset for pairing with the music-phone, but also a transceiver to act as a base for the home theater receiver output.

I started with Fry's, to get a sense of what was out there, to be able to look at the size of the thing and some instant comparison pricing. My list of features is essentially what I named above, but of course it would be great to also have phone answering features. Now I don't get a lot of calls, fewer if everyone who ever calls me is within the house, and fewer still if they're asleep. But I occasionally work at home, forwarding my office phone to my cell. Working at home is a great time to listen to music, streamed from the home theater or from the laptop. Being able to hear an incoming call is pretty important in that situation.

There were a few interesting models of stereo bluetooth headsets with microphones on the shelves at Fry's.
One was Plantronics Pulsar 590A: enabling anything with a 3.5mm jack (iPod, home theater headphone jack). The price was $90 less than that shown on the Plantronics site. This comes with a bluetooth "hockey puck" transeiver, for plugging into line-out devices, a Bluetooth bridge, as it were.

There's also a little confusion over the downline model for Plantronics, the Pulsar 590E. It isn't clear if it is the same

headset as the 590A, but simply without the transceiver. As it is going for $77, that appears to be a big discount.

On the other hand, the Motorola Data Sheet describes the "590 Line" and the only call-out is that the "E" doesn't

come with the transceiver. So I'm inclined to believe that "E" is for economy--no transceiver.

It appears the hockey puck is battery powered, the data sheet says nothing specific about charging the hockey puck or a power supply for same. I couldn't find in the data sheet if the transceiver has recharge capability, or if it just holds batteries. Without a plug-in solution, it wouldn't be good for home theater. I also wonder about having to re-pair with the puck. If it is battery-powered then it probably has a temporary pairing profile.

The Plantronics one looked like it had the best phone support as it had an extendable boom mike to put the microphone right at your lips rather than a bud hanging lower.

And then there's the Motorola HT820, which was considerably cheaper, $90, but again no transceiver. Motorola does have one, the DC800, which goes for about $65. This puts the two together above the Plantronics bundle.

I almost got--but then didn't get--the Motorola, because Fry's didn't have the "Home Stereo Adapter", DC800.

This is the combo that I want, so I can use my bluetooth headset for watching TV at night in silence.

I've confirmed that the DC800 has a power supply, so it is good for the home theater.

I found a bundle on Amazon that makes the pair $133, which is about $15 more than the Plantronics 590A bundle.

What I couldn't tell at the store (and I haven't read the data at the links above) is if you can use these headsets for "chat" mode on a PC, that is, does the bluetooth headset shim both the Windows microphone driver as well as the headphone driver.

I also read a review on Amazon of the Motorola set that there is a delay if used during gaming or watching

video (0.5 sec is a lot). I don't know if that applies to all Bluetooth headsets, but this would be a deal-killer for me

I'd go insane if lip-sync were out on all television/movies I watch.

Naturally this all assumes your PC has bluetooth. Or you'll need yet another dongle, maybe the PC850 by Motorola.

Others that I saw at Frys:

This Jabra model, for $110, or $40 less than the Plantronics 590A, but no transeiver.

There was a Creative Labs CB8100, but it was headphones only with no voice/call support and pretty pricey.

The MOTOROKR S9 was also available, about the same price as the other call-enabled headsets, but it has

this behind-the-head+earbud design that I'm not sure I could hang with. Hard to tell where the microphone would

be, but there isn't anything forward of the ear, so it can't be that good. I think it also has worse battery life. If you

like in-ear buds rather than over-ear cups, this might be better.

Another very-lightweight, on-ear, behind-head configuration was the Nokia BH-501:

This uses the standard Nokia AC3 charger--I must have 1/2 dozen of those for various phones over the years.

Then there was one Motorola (model I forgot) which looked like a typical 1-ear "borg" Bluetooth earpiece, but then it

had another one, smaller, in the same box. I assume it xmitted wirelessly between the two halves. The obvious

benefit here is that you could use the one-earpiece for driving or when the headset would be inapropriate. What

wasn't obvious was: recharging, delay between units, battery life. These may be old stock (and therefore not A2DP)

because they're not even listed on Motorola's site. They're kind of like this Jabra set. But I'm pretty sure there was no wire between the units (or some damn clever and intentionally deceptive packaging). Though this one looks like the second plugs into the first, so you can still have that one-ear configuration.

Going even smaller, there are lanyard+earbud models from a couple of manufacturers. Sony Ericsson has these.

Jabra has this one, the BT320s. Very interesting, you can use your own earbuds (probably wouldn't power bigger drivers) with it. So if you like the feel of your in-ear Shures or other $100 earbuds, you can keep them. You'd pair it with this transceiver. And here's one that pairs with your phone, but plugs directly into your music source (and has longer battery life). Okay, that last one was a bit off-topic, because it isn't really a wireless headset anymore, just a phone set inlined with some wired earbuds.

So it seems there are lots of choices; this would be an area where it would be great to be able to try them out

for sound quality, latency, and fit/feel. I'll probably start with the Motorolas as the sweet spot in features (transceiver

station, durable design) and price.

New Corralaries to Murphy's Laws

2007-06-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

New Corralaries to Murphy's Law:

Remember: Murphy was an optimist!

Law of Mechanical Repair: After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch. Corralaries: your cell phone will ring or you'll have to pee.

Law of the Workshop: Any tool, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.
Corralary: Any fastener, when dropped, will land in/under: a.) an inaccessible crack or hole, b.) deep dirt or rocks that are the same size/color as the fastener c.) if working on a motor, into the motor. d.) if working on a boat, into the water. e.) if working on a plane, somewhere into the cowling where it will cause a loud rattle once airborne.

Law of Probability: The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act.
Inverse Corralary: There will be no one around to witness some brilliant act that you'll never be able to reproduce in a thousand years.

Law of the Telephone: If you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal.
Corralary: When you get a new phone number, you will realize you transposed two numbers only after you've given out the wrong number to everyone.

Law of the Alibi: If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the very next morning you will have a flat tire.
School Excuse Corralary: Unexcused absences will be more than the number of possible relatives' funerals.

Law of the Bath: When the body is fully immersed in water, the telephone rings.
Shower Corralary: When needing shampoo, you will find only conditioner. And vice-versa.

Law of Close Encounters: The probability of meeting someone you know increases when you are with someone you don't want to be seen with.
Corralary: The closer the person you know is to your spouse, the more attractive the person you're with will be.

Law of the Result: When you try to prove to someone that a machine won't work, it will.
Corralary: Until they leave.

Law of the Plug: You will always have one less outlet within reach than you have plugs.
Corralary: You will always have one less port available than you have peripherals.
2nd Corralary: You will always be short one type of A/V connector and you will always have one type of connector that you will never use. Between which there will be no adapter.

Law of the Fax: When faxing out a multi-page contract, all pages will go through unattended, except for the signature page.
Corralary: When receiving a fax, all pages will come through fine, but you'll run out of paper on the signature page.

Law of Biomechanics: The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach.
Corralary: The severity of the skin blemish is directly proportional to the proximity of the public event.
2nd Corralary: And proportional to the visibility of said blemish.

Law of the Theatre: At any event, the people whose seats are furthest from the aisle arrive last.
Corralary: And they'll have noisy children.
2nd Corralary: And their seats are right next to you.

Law of Coffee: If you take cream or sugar, the proportions will be exactly right at the moment the server refills your cup.
Corralary: As soon as your coffee is the right temperature, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold.

Law of Starbucks: When you're in a hurry and want just a drip, the person in front of you is buying for everyone in their office.
Corralary: And they'll buy the last of your favorite pastry in the case.

Law of the Barrista: The likelihood that your drink order will be wrong is directly proportional to how soon you need to be somewhere else.

Law of Lockers: If there are only two people in a locker room, they will have adjacent lockers.
Corralary: And your neighbor will be a senior citizen with no sense of modesty.

Law of Logical Argument: Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about.
Corralary: The less the person understands what they're saying, the more vehemently they will expound upon it.

Law of Lost Shoes: The more shoes one has, the more likely that no match will be found--of the type and color that matches the outfit you're wearing. Pairs of all other colors and types will be everywhere.
Corralary: If the shoe fits, it's ugly.

Law of Replacement Products: As soon as you find a product that you really like, they will stop making it.
Corralary: When replaced under warranty, an indentical model will not be available. Unless you didn't really like that model to begin with.
2nd Corralary: For electronic/computer components, the likelihood that the replacement unit will be functionally identical is inversely proportional to both the critical aspect of the component in a system (video board, memory, tuner/receiver) and its expense to replace/upgrade. See also corralaries of "Law of the Plug".

Damned Pepsi

2007-02-01T20:34:00.000-08:00

I just saw the new Pepsi commercial, where the Pepsi ball jumps off the can and in giant form pinballs around San Francisco. Pretty funny, really, and with a catchy tune. Where have I heard this before? "Sam bam blew moi...?" Oh yeah! The Damned had a little song, the english version had the chorus, "Jetboy, Jet Girl". Did Pepsi listen to the english version before they used the French version in the commercial? The lyrics are not exactly Pepsi Generation material.. Or maybe they are in the SF demographic?
The video wasn't up on the Pepsi website as I write this, but it may be soon. Unless they get flooded with calls from french-literate parents who tipped to it during the recent Smallville episode. Interestingly, the music in this version up on YouTube isn't the same. Different geo, different music? It is definitely different; I have it on my DVR and watched it twice. Maybe someone will post the US version.

Intro and Scherzo

2007-01-21T21:53:00.000-08:00

This piece of internet flotsam is just a place to record my brittle mind musings. The flit across the consciousness, of the kind probably better not voiced aloud and so finds a perfect place in the blogosphere.

To wit: Marry a 802.11b/g/n receiver and one of those snap-together scale aircraft that you can get from either England or Korea, and fly your toy connected to the nearest wi-fi hotspot. The four-axis controller goes to your PC (laptop, practically) via bluetooth or simple wired usb.

You can tell where I'm going with this: if the aeroplane can host a nose-camera, then you don't even need to be near the takeoff/landing zone, other than for crash recovery and refueling.

What would someone do with this? Other than be 1.) a nuisance to traffic 2.) a brownshirt for the DHS or 3.) an uber-nerd with hacker cred as soon as the video stream is posted to a Tube site. I have no idea. I don't plan on actually making one of these. That's too much work. It's Just An Idea(tm).

Stay tuned to this channel for other brain blurps. At least if I write them down I can stop thinking about them.