From the Useless But Cool dept: Andrew Carol (no relation) has built a Lego Difference Engine in the fashion of Charles Babbage's original.
Due to structural limitations of Lego (plastic bricks and gears can't handle the same stresses as metal), it's a cut down version but still functional. Very cool.
And on the subject of Lego, if you've been playing with Lego Mindstorms (Lego's robotic kits), Lego have just announced Mindstorms NXT, the next generation - with a 32-bit RISC processor and a number of other significant improvements. My second childhood should be due any day now, and I'm looking forward to playing with this...
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An occasional blog recording useful URLs, observations or other random thoughts I may have from time to time...
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Network World just pointed me towards an intriguing Wooden Periodic Table of the Elements.
It's really very nicely done - check it out.
I ordered a few bits and pieces from Big Pockets last week -- a bunch of blank DVD cases, some blank printable Ritek DVD-Rs, and a set of replacement colour inkjet cartridges.
They arrived at the office on Wednesday, packaged in a large cardboard box which originally housed a B&Q white toilet bowl. I can say this with confidence, because large pictures of the toilet were printed on the side of the box.
Since I was out of the office Wednesday & Thursday, everyone else had two days to ponder what I might have been up to that required urgent replacement of a toilet bowl...
Nice to see Big Pockets are recyling where possible!
In my continuing search for ways to improve traffic flow (rather ironic, since I'm working from home these days), I came across this analysis of how small variations in departure time for the morning commute could lead to significant time savings.
Friends who commute from North Wicklow to Dublin city centre had told me that there was a narrow window in the morning when you could get a clean run into the city without too much delay - about 10 minutes after the early morning rush has subsided but before the school runs kick in. This article appears to support that theory (albeit on a different continent!)
(Of course, there are the usual Slashdot comments on the article also...)
Maybe one day, I'll actually get to put all this theory to use...
You have to hand it to Microsoft - when they localise something, they don't do it by halves. I just came across a pointer to the Welsh version of Windows XP.
The big news this week was that Smart Telecom (the largest independent Irish telecomms company) announced a new residential DSL product with some very attractive features:
As usual, there has been plenty of discussion at boards.ie about this. Most people are impressed by the high bandwidth / low cost ratio, but concerned about the miserly 128 Kb/s upstream bandwidth.
Still, at €35, I expect they'll make a killing. It will be interesting to see if and how the other ISPs beef up their offerings to make them more competitive.
People continue to find new ways to explore Google Map's public API. Today, I came across this site:
http://www.sueandpaul.com/gmapPedometer/
It lets you measure the walking (or cycling) distance between any two points in the city, simply by double-clicking all the significant direction changes along the router. Simple, but effective.
New Scientist has an interesting article about a new robot with a knack for finding its feet.
While there have previously been some impressive demonstration videos of robots from Toyota, Honda and Sony, this is the first robot I've seen that actually mimicked human like movement patterns.
You can download the 13 MB demo video here; it's rather unsettling to watch.
I just hope they have a good team working on the software...
I’ve just returned from the Consumer Electronics Show, which ran from January 8-11 in Las Vegas. This was my first time attending the largest trade show in America (2700 exhibitors, 150,000 attendees) and it was quite an experience. Over the next few days, I'll post entries about some of the more interesting products and companies I saw.
I was travelling with some colleagues, and we had four days to cover the exhibition – just as well, since it covers ten large convention halls, and conference space in several nearby hotels.
The scale of CES is hard to grasp – by lunchtime on the first day, we had cleared half of one hall and felt we were doing well – until we realised we had only cleared half of one corner of one hall!
It was time for a more aggressive approach. By planning ahead, and stepping up the pace substantially, we managed to cover about 90% of the exhibits during the first three days! This left Thursday morning for some final follow-up visits to stands, and we were all done by lunchtime, leaving the afternoon for some R&R.
The conference was well organised, with courtesy coaches between the different venues, free Internet access available in the halls (supplied by DivX), and even free international phone calls courtesy of Vonage, who had installed VoIP kiosks in the lobbies. Complimentary magazines from just about every consumer and electronics publisher you've ever heard of were also available outside the conference entrance, along with the six show guides and product directories.
While most of the halls were in the gargantuan Las Vegas Convention Center, one hall was in the Sands Expo Centre, about a mile away. (The Adult Entertainment Expo was taking place in an adjacent hall during the week, which led to an interesting mix of attendees in the areas outside the hall.)
Two products were in evidence just about everywhere this year – large high-definition LCD televisions, and digital photo frames. Even manufacturers who didn't sell photo frames were using them to display information sheets for their actual products.
There was a wide and varied selection of Windows Media Centre PC cases from assorted vendors – perhaps the most impressive (if not the most practical) were the Diamond Media Centre range from Moneual, which featured a jewel-encrusted fascia panel and control knobs at prices ranging from $30,000 to $1,000,000, they are for elite purchasers only.
While most of the larger vendors had extravagant stands with large floor areas, there were plenty of smaller stands there as well. The entry level cost for a stand is in the region of $6000-$8000 depending on location (about 2 metres x 3 metres) which is within reach for even small startups.
There were surprisingly few freebies on offer. Other than the ubiquitous carrier bags, and a few trinkets like LCD pocket torches, watch batteries, and T-shirts, pickings were slim.
One of the biggest announcements didn’t even happen at the show. Apple were running MacWorld in San Francisco during the same week, and launched their new and long-awaited iPhone, though it won't be available until June. While the industry was impressed with the product, there was plenty of scepticism about Apple's ability to break into the highly competitive cellphone market, especially with a product that costs $600! Time will tell...
Alongside the main CES convention, there were numerous seminars and panel sessions to discuss issues of interest to the consumer electronics industry. Most of these cost money to attend, but some were open to all CES participants.
The first session we attended (on Monday afternoon) was CNET's Next Big Thing, a discussion about three hot areas of debate in the industry at the moment:
Several industry panelists (including a CNET reader flown in from the UK to represent the consumer) discussed these items at length; the audience then voted electronically on how they thought things would develop in the future.
On mobile video, the verdict was: yes, there is a new and growing market for media playback on mobile devices, but access needs to become far less restrictive (both in price, and range of media available) before it will take off. Mobile video will supplement existing markets rather than replacing them.
Dynamic content like news clips, music videos, and short length TV programs are more suited to these devices than feature length movies. One panelist predicted that the production style of programs will change to match the constraints of the mobile devices – more talking heads, fewer panoramic landscapes, etc.
All reasonable points. However, the most important point was only briefly mentioned: mobile video need not be streamed. People use it to fill time when they would otherwise be bored (standing in a queue, waiting for something to complete), and it suffices to have pre-loaded content available on their mobile device; it's not a big deal if it's several days old.
With modern video codecs and ever-increasing flash capacities, it's quite feasible to store multiple movies or (more likely) TV programs on your portable device. I think this trend is just beginning to gather stream.
The panel were (eventually) united in their view that DVD wouldn’t be going away anytime soon – certainly not by 2010, as had been suggested. The tangible nature of a DVD, which makes it collectable, suitable for gifts, easy to use and distribute, etc. all combine to make it unlikely to disappear.
However, the panel did did agree that online streaming media will gain significant following as well. (No surprises there.)
I'm broadly in agreement with this view. It takes a long time for a given technology to die out; after all, there are still plenty of VHS tapes around, even though it is now difficult to buy a VHS recorder.
I also doubt we'll see broad acceptance of streamed video until most households have a fast broadband connection (where 'fast' means 10 MBps or higher, with no contention).
Digital Rights Management (DRM) was the most contenious discussion, with representation from the legal profession, movie industries, and consumers, as well as several industry observers. Everyone agreed that some sort of rights management was essential, but making it transparent enough so that consumers were not unduly restricted when they tried to use media they believed they owned was judged difficult.
Apple's ITunes was given as an example of how to make DRM straightforward, so that customers are not always even aware that any special restrictions apply.
The biggest hinderance to existing DRM technology is that it goes against the grain of what consumers are used to. If you buy a CD, you can take it to a friend's house to share with them or loan to them. You can play the same CD in your living room, your bedroom, your car, on your laptop, and anywhere else that has a CD player.
This is almost never true for media protected with DRM, especially where that media has been downloaded rather than delivered in some sort of physical packaging. While providers are entitled to protect their content, they need to find a less onerous way to do so than has currently been attempted.
I have no doubt that this problem will be solved; until then though, consumers will continue to be highly suspicious of anything resembling DRM.
CNTs are Carbon Nanotubes, a new technology that allows flatpanel screens to be constructed from what is essentially an array of thousands of tiny CRTs, each CRT representing a pixel or so.
A friend (thanks Mike) pointed me towards this company which has been experimenting in the area. Click on Demonstrations on the left to see a nifty little animated demo of their current prototype (and be sure to read the caveats as well as to why the quality isn't wonderful yet).
Why is this stuff of interest? Primarily because the potential exists to make absolutely massive screens using this technology. Plasma and LCD screens are limited in size, because they rely on a single sheet of semiconductors to make the whole screen - the technology to seamlessly stitch together multiple panels to make a bigger screen doesn't exist.
For those screen types, cost increases rapidly as the size gets larger, because it becomes more difficult to get screens with an acceptably high number of working pixels.
With CNTs, this is no longer an issue - you simply manufacture buckets of tiny screens (say 4" x 5") and stitch them together to make as big a display as you like. Tiny screens means much higher yield which in turn translates to lower prices. Plus, as a bonus, you get all the benefits of a normal CRT (bright picture, fast refresh, etc.) without the drawbacks of massive weight and depth.
Probably another year or two to go before these hit your local electronics superstore, but it can only be a matter of time.
(On the other hand, whatever happened to bubble memory?)
Eddy
A friend referred me to this website today:
http://www.mackers.com/projects/dartmaps/
It's a very cool Google Maps hack that scrapes realtime DART position info from Irish Rail's website and plots it on a Google Map of Dublin.
Be sure to zoom in - you can actually see the trains moving in realtime. Click on a train to find out its destination.
Amazing what you can do with a bit of XML, scripting and some ingenuity...
For those of you who use it, my DVD list now sports a handy search field ... enjoy.
Time for yet another mapping link:
SketchUp is a rather cool plug-in for Google Earth that allows you to add real 3D buildings to the Google Earth city view.
Check it out...
I hadn't been paying much attention to this AJAX thing, until I saw an article about it in Dr Dobbs Journal (Feb 2006).
AJAX is Asynchronous Javascript And XML, essentially a collective name for a group of technologies that together allow web pages to asynchronously interact with a remote server without losing the page context. This leads to the ability to design significantly more interactive interfaces.
The best example I've seen is the one cited in the Dr Dobbs article: Google Suggests. As you type in search keywords, a realtime display appears below showing you suggested matches for what you're typing. All the words retrieved are fetched from Google's server in realtime as you type, without you even noticing. Very cool...
Steve pointed me towards an interesting demo video showing off the capabilities of the HAL 2000 home automation system. It lets you control your home using speech commands from any room - quite impressive.
The author has an extensive discussion of the technology involved (speakers, distribution amps, microphones, etc.) along with some comments on the limitations of the system.
Startrek's onboard computer suddenly doesn't seem quite so far away...
Shortly before Christmas, one of my media drives (a 300 GB Maxtor) started to give warning signs that it was about to die -- a number of files mysteriously developed CRC errors for no apparent reason.
I downloaded Maxtor's PowerMax utility which gives the drive a once-over. PowerMax can run a 90 second test to give a quick estimate of the drive's condition, or a more thorough test that lasts several hours. In the event, it took only 10 seconds to figure out my drive was quite sick and should be sent back to Maxtor for replacement. (The drive was just over 12 months old, but to my relief, it turned out to have a three year warranty. Exactly the same drive sold in the USA comes with only a one year warranty. Go figure.)
I bought a replacement 300 GB drive to back up the data (luckily, I only lost a few files), and then kicked off Maxtor's RMA process. Conveniently, if you give them your credit card number, they will ship you the replacement drive first -- you can then use that drive's Maxtor-approved packaging to return the defective unit.
Three weeks later, Maxtor Support emailed me to say that it would be February before an exact replacement for my unit would be available, but that they'd be happy to ship me one of their new DiamondMax 10 6B300R0 models instead if that was acceptable. While RAID users might have preferred an exact replacement, I just wanted a new drive (and this one was better specced) so I told them to go ahead.
The new drive duly arrived about two weeks ago, and I decided to install it as the boot drive in my main PC; I partitioned it as a 30 GB C drive for Windows with the remaining 250 GB for my D: drive. (Yep, that's only 280 GB, but that works out as 300,647,710,720 bytes -- got to hand it to those hard drive marketing guys...)
After installation, it slowly became apparent that something wasn't quite right with my system. Simple file copies from one partition to another (and especially from firewire drives to my D: drive) seemed much slower than they should be. Worse, while this was going on, Windows would slow to a crawl - in some cases, I could see individual window elements rendering a few pixels at a time.
It took me a while to figure out the drive was the issue - for normal use, things worked fast enough. I checked the DMA settings on the drive (Windows XP has a tendency to disable DMA without telling you, if it detects errors) but it was fine. Eventually though, I noticed that HDTach 3 showed rather erratic performance - instead of the usual smooth graph, it was very choppy.
That got me thinking, and I finally decided that the culprit might be the removable drive caddies that I use in all my systems. These are only rated to ATA66, yet the new Maxtor is an ATA133 drive. A few minutes later, I'd whipped out the caddy and connected the drive directly and -- everything back to normal! I also replace my ATA66 cable with a newer ATA133 cable, which improved the HDTach results by another 10% or so.
I can only presume Windows must have been retrying like crazy before, hence the heavy CPU usage -- or possibly switching briefly to PIO mode to recover from a corrupt DMA transfer? In any case, it's good to have a system at 100% again!
Lesson learnt: adding any new hardware to a working system should always be done very carefully!
Seagate had a cute visual exhibit at CES 2007 - a typical laptop hard disk, represented as an equivalent number of CDs (assuming you only store MP3s, of course.)
Seagate's point, of course, is that you might want to think about backing up that hard disk ... and naturally, they had a product designed to do exactly that.
2004 was definitely the year of the iPod. I bought one, my brother bought one, my sister brought one, and even my Dad bought one.
Unfortunately, though, iPods sold in Europe have their maximum volume capped compared to similar US models - in fact, the maximum level is about 30% lower on the EU models.
This is apparently to comply with EU legislation. Unfortunately, because it affects line-level output as well as headphone output, it causes all sorts of problems when you use something like an iTrip or connect the iPod to your hi-fi or car radio's line-in - the iPod volume is significantly lower than that of the other equipment, so you spend a lot of time adjusting volume as you switch between your iPod and radio or CD.
There have been several hacks that attempt to overcome this by tweaking a volume compensation tag in each MP3 file you download to your iPod. However, these are not ideal - you have to remember to do it whenever you update your play list.
I finally found a utility that did what I really wanted: just remove the cap entirely. The utility is goPod and it simply adjusts a field in the firmware to indicate that capping is no longer required.
It works really well. If you have an iPod in Europe, you need this.
From the Useless But Cool dept: Andrew Carol (no relation) has built a Lego Difference Engine in the fashion of Charles Babbage's original.
Due to structural limitations of Lego (plastic bricks and gears can't handle the same stresses as metal), it's a cut down version but still functional. Very cool.
And on the subject of Lego, if you've been playing with Lego Mindstorms (Lego's robotic kits), Lego have just announced Mindstorms NXT, the next generation - with a 32-bit RISC processor and a number of other significant improvements. My second childhood should be due any day now, and I'm looking forward to playing with this...
I came across this article about RAID systems under Linux, and some of the problems that can occur.
It's interesting reading, especially the explanation as to why a single drive failure in a Linux RAID system is often also followed by a second failure before the array has had a chance to rebuild ... rather concerning, since that can effectively negate the redundancy benefit of having a RAID in the first place.
Let's hope my MegaRaid SATA150-6 controller doesn't suffer from similar problems...
Also of interest: drive manufacturers appear to be routinely making minor adjustments to the size of discs, even when the model number remains the same - this can cause problems when swapping out a dead drive, if the replacement is slightly smaller. Might be an idea to stockpile a few spare drives to have on hand which are from the same batch as your original set.
Not content with playing with World Wind (referenced in an earlier post), I see now that Keyhole are offering a commercial version of the same technology - or at least very similar technology. Google bought Keyhole last year, so they now have some mighty computing resources behind them.
Keyhole wins on ease of use (faster, less interruptions while pulling down map data, usually faster downloads courtesy of Google's impressive servers) and scope (more aerial maps of more cities) but loses a bit on general detail - planet-level maps are only down to a resolution of 1 Km or so, while World Wind gets down to 30m outside the big cities.
Also, the interface for moving around the globe seems slightly more refined with World Wind - I kept finding Ireland was upsidedown when I rotated the globe in Keyhole, and rarely had that problem with World Wind.
Keyhole is $30/year subscription (7 day free trial) and given that the maps are being continually updated, this is probably good value. Worth a look at the very least...
Update: It looks like Google have re-branded this now as Google Earth, free for personal use!
I was away last weekend at the annual ICPUG Charmouth meet, and saw a very cool demo of Nasa'a World Wind mapping tool.
It's hard to do it justice in a description, but essentially it provides a 3D interface to a world database of satellite maps, such that you can wander around the globe with your mouse, zooming in to any area to a resolution of around ~30m (and down to ~1m in some parts of the US). Generally, US detail is much better than in the rest of the world, since there are more detailed maps available for free - in Europe and elsewhere, similar maps are quite expensive.
You need a decent PC (1.5 GHz+), graphics card, and hard disk (5-10 GB for the cached data, 1 GB minimum), along with a fast Internet connection, but it's well worth it - if you haven't seen World Wind already, give it a try.
Longtime readers (assuming there are any!) may recall a story last May about a new type of flatpanel CRT using nanotubes. The demo back then was impressive from a technology viewpoint, if not something you might actually want to sit down and watch.
Well, time has marched on and these products are almost ready for market. They are now known as Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Displays; somehow, I think SEDs will turn out to be the more popular term.
At CES, Toshiba unveiled some 37" HDTV prototypes with a contrast ratio of 100,000:1 (yes, that's quite good!). They hope to have 55" production models towards the end of the year. Response time is on the order of 1 ms. Another description can be found here.
And here's a particularly enthusiastic first-hand review from one of the CES attendees, complete with photo:
Roll on Autumn...
Those clever folks at sysinternals.com have a blog entry up describing how to run Windows with no services whatsoever enabled -- a very neat trick.
The article is here and is well worth a read if you like to know what goes on under the hood on your Windows system.
Last November, New Scientist reported an interesting bit of new technology which I've just come across.
Traditionally, digital cameras have to make a trade-off between aperture size and depth of field - the more light you let in (and the better the peformance in low light), the more prone the image is to blurring.
Now researchers have come up with a way to post-process focus after image capture, by inserting a sheet of 90,000 lenses, each 125 micrometres across, between the main lens and the image sensor. The angle of each light ray hitting the sensor is recorded, as well as the intensity. This allows clever software to refocus the image afterwards where necessary.
Fasncinating concept, and no doubt we'll see some variant of it turning up in commercial products in the future.
There were lots of impressive products at CES 2007, most of which have been covered in detail elsewhere.
Here are some that impressed me but haven't received much coverage:
Buried deep within LG's massive stand was a 42" high-definition LCD screen displaying genuine 3D video. This has apparently been around for a few months, but it was the first I'd heard of it.
The effect is stunning - proper 3D with no special glasses required. As with traditional 3D displays (such as IMAX and motion simulator rides), it takes your eyes a second or two to adjust - then everything jumps into focus.
Of course, there are some limitations. The optimal viewing range is 3M-7M from the display, with a maximum viewing angle of around 30 degrees. All the video on display was computer generated; I'd have liked to see some live video as well.
The screen works by integrating 25 separate LCD panels, each of which produces a display with a very narrow viewing angle. The 25 views are positioned around the objects being viewed, so that standing in any position, your eyes will see only two views at a time (one for each eye). The panel is thicker than a normal flat panel, but not overly so - about 6-8" deep.
Capturing live video to work with this system will require some advanced cameras, since it would need to record 25 images simultaneously, each at a slightly different perspective.
Regardless, this is deeply impressive technology - some day, no doubt, all TVs will look like this.
If 3D television wasn't enough, we stumbled upon 3D sound in the form of Smyth Research's new virtual surround sound headphones. These aim to allow headphone users to experience a surround sound movie or album in all its glory, without alienating their neighbours.
While most DVD players and A/V receivers offer some form of downmixing to let you listen to surround sound movies on headphones, this new system is in a completely different class. A sensor mounted on the headphones identifies the position and orientation of the headphones in space, and the sound is adjusted accordingly.
When you turn your head to the left or right, audio coming from each speaker appears to stay at the same location within the room, rather than moving with your head as normally happens with headphones. The effect is amazing - the first time I heard it, I immediately took the headphones off to confirm that the soundtrack hadn't simply been routed back to the main speakers again.
The system we saw used an infra-red transmitter positioned above the TV to send out a reference signal which a reciever on the headphones picked up, analysed, and then transmitted back to the sound processor via the audio cable. This approach allows several headphones to be used at once in a single room.
With the infra-red solution, listeners must not turn their head more than 60 degrees away from the TV, or the effect is lost. This can be overcome using an alternate RF positioning system.
Smyth Research don't sell hardware products themselves; instead, they are licensing the technology to manufacturers for inclusion in their audio equipment. The demo we heard was using Yahama equipment; expect products to be on the market by the end of 2007.
As an aside, Smyth Research are based in Bangor, Northen Ireland - it was nice to see some Irish representation at the show. They were previously involved in the development of the DTS Surround Sound system, so their audio pedigree is well established.
A4Tech had a stand in the international section over at the Hilton, where they were showing their laser mouse that works on glass.
Most optical mice fail dismally when moving over a shiny or glass surface; not the A4Tech mouse. I spent some time playing with their demo setup, and can confirm that it worked just as well on glass as on other surfaces. A simple trick, no doubt, but extremely useful.
Apparently the mouse is already on sale in Korea - hopefully it will make it to Europe soon.
Marc Andreessen's blog today mentioned this cool demo:
This uses video goggles with a head-tracking sensor to remotely control the orientation of a camera mounted on a pilot-less plane, letting you virtually explore the heavens.
Apart from the general wow-factor of flying around the sky without ever leaving the ground, it reminded me of another piece of impressive technology I came across recently: quad-copters.
Here, a high-speed DSP is used to combine realtime feedback from gyros and sensors on position, wind direction, etc. to control four rotating blades independently allowing for stationary hovering in a wide range of conditions with no pilot input required. Great for remote video surveillance etc.
Combining these two pieces of technology seems like a perfect opportunity. Has anyone done it yet?
And a missing piece of the puzzle: even using stereo cameras to feed the video goggles, the image will still be flat since there is no way to remotely focus it (other than relying on auto-focus). Has anyone developed a set of video goggles that can track the eye's ability to focus on specific objects? Combine that with a pair of remote cameras that can track the eye's focus in that way and you could have REAL telepresence (once the latency isn't too high, of course).
Isn't it great that we live in an age where such amazing technology is affordable enough to let people devise interesting hacks in their spare time...?
I bought a Tevion 32" LCD TV from Aldi a few months back, and was intrigued by the 8-pin RJ45 connector marked 'serial' on the back panel.
I finally got around to investigating it this weekend ... the results are here...
When I had a film camera 15 years ago, I took almost no photographs with it: about one roll of film per year, on average. Then I got a digital camera, and since then I've taken a ridiculous number of photos - currently around 36,000 and climbing.
So, while I wouldn't call myself a big photography buff, I do have a passing interest in photography techniques and methods.
No doubt that's why my friend Steve sent me a link to this website, which describes Tilt-Shift photography, a style that makes normal scenes look like they are in miniature:
We're used to looking at photos where everything is in focus (to infinity) so when the depth of field is restricted, the brain is tricked into it's a model scene. The effect is quite surreal!
Check out the website mentioned above for more information.
(If that title doesn't quicken your pulse, nothing will...!)
Following on from my mention last November of the guy who was experimenting with shaping traffic flow by varying the speed of his car on slow moving highways, Michael pointed me towards this interactive traffic simulator.
I don't know if it's accurate, but it's good fun to play with...
Thanks to Kieran for pointing me towards this impressive Wii Remote hack, covered by Engadget here.
Johnny Chung Lee has done a marvellously simple hack which uses the standard Wii remote controller, plus some ballpoint pens modified to emit infra red, to convert any surface into an interactive touch-screen. With multiple pens, you can support multi-touch effects (as seen on the iPhone and iPod Touch), and previously mentioned on this blog back in March 2006.
Here's an example of his technique in use:
(Make sure you watch the video long enough to see the technique in action; it's very impressive, especially when combined with a video projector.)
Johnny's software to make all this work is free, and available here.
The US magazine Consumer Reports (similar to Which? magazine in the UK) has been in the technology news recently. As part of a comprehensive test of antivirus software packages, they commissioned a consulting company to create 5,500 new viruses to see how well market leading programs would cope.
The antivirus industry, led by McAfee, was immediately up in arms when they heard about it. Imagine the risk to society of these viruses escaping into the wild! What blatant disregard for consumer safety! And other similar scaremongering...
It only takes a little scratching below the surface to show that their concerns are, at best, misguided. The viruses created for Consumer Reports were simple modifications of existing viruses, altered so that their signature was no longer identifiable. The viruses were kept in a secure environment, and all copies were removed after testing - only a single CD remains, which is kept in a locked and secure cabinet on site.
Surprise, surprise - McAffee's package didn't do particularly well in the test; it relies heavily on a signature database to identify new threats. When viruses were still something of a novelty, this approach worked well - it often took weeks before a new virus gained notoriety, giving McAffee plenty of time to respond.
By now however, it is so easy for would-be virus writers to develop new viruses, and variants on existing viruses, that a pure signature-based approach is no longer sufficient. A more pro-active approach is needed, that can identify virus-like behaviour and quarantine or block the affected program. Of course, there will be legitimate tools which end up looking like a virus - commercial tools can be recognised and permitted explicitly, while a mechanism can be included to allow users to grant access to other programs on an as-needed basis.
Maybe the industry should use two distinct terms - "Virus removal", for packages that can remove existing viruses which are already known to the program, and "Antivirus" for packages that can detect new virus strains and prevent infection in the first place. (Somehow, though, I can't imagine vendors thinking this is a good idea.)
Whenever Which? reviews product categories that I know well, I find myself disagreeing with their conclusions; this doesn't give me much confidence in their reviews of other products that I'm not familiar with. People I trust have made similar comments about Consumer Reports. In this case, however, they're on the side of right. More power to them...
(In case you're wondering, the top rated antivirus packages were from BitDefender and ZoneLabs. The full report is only available to subscribers.)
Here's a useful link from a friend (thanks, Kevin!)
http://www.grynx.com/index.php/projects/laptop-on-the-wall-walltop/
A nice look at the steps needed to convert that old laptop into a neat wall-mounted photo/art display.
I noticed this on a discussion board today:
One of my favorite little bits of history is the way the king of Denmark, when Denmark encompassed at least the southern parts of Sweden, assessed taxes on ships passing through the waterways between the North and Baltic Seas. Captains of ships passing through were allowed to declare the value of ship and cargo without any recourse by the taxing authorities. On the other hand, the taxing collectors were authorized to purchase said ship and cargo at the declared value if they thought it would be profitable.
I like it!
I just came across a pointer to this cute animated demo of George Bush in freefall:
http://www.yeeguy.com/freefall/
Use the mouse to drag the prez around; it's strangely addictive, and quite cool.
I found it at Viktor's Day Book (Viktor has one of the longest running MUD2 sites, among his many other accomplishments).
Does anyone remember Thrust on the Amiga? Low-gravity games are almost always fun.
Last night, I attend the monthly meeting of SAGE-IE, the Systems Administrators Guild of Ireland (old website here).
The evening's talk was on Google Apps, presented by Sam Johnston and Laurent Gasser of Microcost. I had only been peripherally aware of Google Apps, so I figured it would be a good chance to find out some more.
Sam & Laurent both gave engaging and enthusiastic presentations. Microcost is in the business of helping enterprises to move their internal services (e-mail, calendar/scheduler, collaborative document editing, etc.) to Google Apps, with the potential for both large cost savings and significant improvements in productivity.
Some random interesting titbits I took away from the evening:
Also, as an aside, Sam mentioned that Trinity College recently announced that they will be moving all student email to Gmail. He expects most other colleges to follow in their footsteps.
The presentation finished off with a look at Mike Wesch's recent Digital Ethnography video which puts a lot of the Web 2.0 stuff into context. I hadn't seen this before (though it's been creating quite a buzz), and it's well worth watching - download the 67 MB high-resolution version for the best experience.
So not everything on the Internet needs to be deadly serious. I stumbled upon Marcus Ranum's personal website today, which includes his well-worth-reading article on The Six Dumbest Ideas In Computer Security.
However, what caught my attention was his description of how to convert an obsolete satellite dish into a garden gazebo. It looks surprisingly easy (once you have the right bits and tools, of course).
Another day on the 'net, and another user falls victim to the allure of blogging their daily activities in minute detail for the benefit of those with too much free time on their hands.
No doubt, like most such exercises, the novelty will wear off after a few days and by the time you read this, won't have been updated for months. But in the meantime... enjoy!
It's amazing what you can find on the web. Today, I came across a site showing the work of a talented young artist called Akiane - check it out.
Thanks to Rocco for pointing me towards this New Scientist article on 13 Things that Do Not Make Sense.
And a Happy St Patrick's Day of course...
A friend just pointed me towards this new pen device (thanks Mike).
Ostensibly for kids, it sounds like a little piece of magic. How actually useful it might be is another question, but read the article and judge for yourself.
For more fun, check out their homepage at www.flypentop.com where you can try out the technology using a virtual pen controlled by your mouse.
Very cool.
Tdoday's edition of Jon's Radio pointed me towards an entertaining screencast which shows just how easy it is to attack a wireless network protected using WEP.
The screencast is at
http://whoppix.hackingdefined.com/Whoppix-wepcrack.html
and it's well worth a look (no audio required). WEP may be better than no security at all, but only if no one can be bothered to take the trouble to defeat it.
The Washington Post has an interesting article about a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against UltraDNS, a provider of domain name services.
It's a chilling read. If you've wondered why recently, some popular websites appear to be mysteriously offline, this may provide some of the answers.
The most unsettling bit is that there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to defend against this sort of attack.
I was looking up some info on Eircom's wall-mounted DSL splitter boxes. Opening up the box, I found "UK Reg Des No 2097942". This led me to the UK Patents website office, which turned up this design from Pressac Communications.
Browsing around Pressac's website, I came across their Structured Cabling System Installation Manual which is a really useful reference. It covers everything from cable trays, testing, fibre splicing, intra-floor wiring, termination methods, and even fire-proofing.
I didn't find the info I was looking for about the DSL splitters unfortunately, so I kept on looking. A friend is having problems with DSL line which I think are related to his Eircom Phonewatch alarm system. I wanted to understand how to connect the alarm system to his DSL splitter so that the analogue POTS signal loops through the alarm cabling while the DSL signal goes directly to the DSL socket.
After some more research, I'm fairly confident that it's just a matter of disconnecting two resistors on the PCB and looping the alarm wiring through the IDC punchdown block labelled 'alarm'. However, my searching did uncover another interesting page: DSL Nation's Inside ADSL MicroFilters page, which has pictures of the internals of a large number of DSL splitters, along with commentary. Useful reading if you're wondering why one DSL splitter is better than another.
So it happened yet again: I tried to be too clever with some manual sniping in an eBay auction, and ended up losing ... the item in question (a DVD-based Satnav system for my car) sold for a good €60 less than I was willing to pay.
My mistake? I waited until about 50 seconds before the end before placing my winning bid. Unfortunately, eBay had timed out my account, so wanted me to login again. Very unfortunately, eBay's login server (though not its main server, apparently) was running very slowly. It took 12 seconds to display the login page, another 12 seconds to process my login, another 12 seconds to accept my bid, 12 more seconds to accept my confirmation ... just in time to tell me that the auction had ended and my bid was invalid :-(
Why didn't I just bid earlier? From experience, there are always a few people waiting in the shadows to place a last minute bid and pip the highest bidder, and I didn't want to drive the price up unnecessarily. In this case, the last minute bidding went from €210 to €250, and I was willing to go to €312.
So, new strategy to avoid this extremely irritating log-in process: two minutes before the auction ends, place a minimum bid for the item in question. Also line up my maximum bid, ready to press submit. 30 seconds before the auction ends, hit Submit. I'll still get caught by eBay's annoying habit of letting users bid against themselves (what's going on there?), but for an eagerly contested item, it's worth paying an extra pound or two safety.
After several weeks of rumours, Eircom officially announced their new DSL packages today.
It's not a bad deal. All existing customers will see improvements of between 2x and 4x in total downstream bandwidth, depending on the monthly subscription. The best improvement is for Home+ users, who jump from 512 Kb/s to 2 MB/s. Smart Telecom's equivalent deal is still significantly cheaper, but offers only 128 Kb/s instead of 256 Kb/s upstream.
There was an opportunity for Eircom to also increase upstream bandwidth, but they appear not to have done so. Several people are speculating that this is to discourage business users from switching to VoIP, thus undermining Eircom's voice revenue; this could well be the case.
No discussion at all of bandwidth caps - in light of Smart Telecom's cap-free policy, Eircom may have decided to leave it be for now, privately targetting only those users that are blatantly abusing it.
Interesting times...
ENN reports that Vodafone Ireland have announced a flatrate 3G access package from 1 July.
For around €50 per month, users can enjoy up to 1 Mbps downstream Internet access while on the move, subject to a monthly cap of 5 GB of data.
This sounds like a pretty good deal, though I'm dubious as to how close to 1 Mbps your average mobile user can expect; I'd expect speeds closer to 128 Kbps. You only need to have a conversation with someone on a car phone to realise how hard the mobile network works just to keep a connection up at all.
However, I'm more interested in its potential for fixed base users, such as those in areas too remote to have traditional broadband available. Until now, the only solution for such users has been satellite, which is both expensive and awkward.
Vodafone have > 99% coverage around the country, so there is an excellent chance that almost every household will be within range of a mobile signal. It's not clear whether Vodafone need to upgrade the transmitters on each mast to support 3G access, or whether this can be accomplished by a software upgrade. If the latter, then this may finally be a cost-effective way for small businesses in remote regions to get decent Internet access.
(Keep in mind also that a fixed antenna should be capable of much better datarates than a purely mobile solution. And if the introductory price is €50 per month, prices can only get cheaper over time.)
From a map of Dublin to ... a map of the whole United States. But this one's Google-style.
http://maps.google.com/ is yet another cool-looking application to come out of Google Labs.
It has a funky real-time dynamic-HTML interface that lets you interactively zoom in and out of maps, drag-scroll using the mouse, and (very cool) do location-sensitive searches.
For example, if I search on 'pizza in st paul, mn' Google will jump to the St Paul, Minnesota section of the map and then highlight all the Pizza shops on the map. I can then click on individual jobs for more details, or even get directions there.
Let's hope this makes it to Ireland someday...
(If you're interesting in how they implemented the slick user interface, there's a good analysis here. Also check out this amazing satellite map of Switzerland, which has a similar interface, and this Java-based map of Ireland / Europe.)
I see Google is planning to offer free Wifi access to the residents of Mountain View (home of Google Headquarters) by entering an agreement with the city council to mount wireless access points on street lighting poles. They estimate 300-400 such devices will be enough to allow Internet access from anywhere outside a building. Access from inside a building will likely require a small external antenna.
This is an interesting idea, and it sounds as if Google plan to deploy the technology elsewhere if this initial project goes well. As they say themselves, Google can justify providing free access since it helps generate additional traffic for both Google and its advertising partners.
The city council proposal makes interesting reading, especially if you're curious about the logistical details of such an arrangement (who pays for the power, what if the city changes its mind in two years, etc.)
One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is the impact of this proposed network on exising wireless networks in the area (e.g. within buildings). They all use the same 2.4 GHz unlicensed band. No doubt there are already newsgroups getting ready to meltdown with discussion of this...
Google Maps has expanded coverage to the UK and Ireland. Not a huge amount of detail yet, but more than enough to be useful.
As with the US version of Google Maps, links are based on longitude and latitude, so they are essentially global. Here's O'Connell Street in Dublin, for example...
The technique of OS fingerprinting has been well documented. It lets you identify the operating system used by a remote host with a fair degree of certainty. Indeed, OpenBSD even supports this in its filter engine; for example, you can write a rule that assigns mail traffic from Windows machines to a lower-priority bandwidth queue than that from other machines (since such traffic is usually the result of a virus).
However, researcher Tadayoshi Kohno has come up with a much more sophisticated approach, based on measuring clock skew across TCP packets. The idea is that every machine has a slightly different skew to their internal clock, and almost all TCP stacks timestamp packets using their internal clock as a reference point. By identifying the clock skew used for a particular PC, e.g. a laptop, you can track that machine's movement as it moves around the Internet, perhaps connecting from several different countries or via different dial-up nodes.
All very ingenious, and with no end of big brother implications. Read more in this article at ZDNet Australia, or for the full technical details, check out his original research paper.
Okay, so no sign of that Networking History video reappearing on Google Video.
Here's something else instead: a video showing Multi-Touch Interaction Research.
I particularly like the application for sorting photos; very nice the way photos can be zoomed and shrunk with a simple finger gesture.
There isn't much information about the type of screen used, but it seems it can handle multiple finger presses simultaneously - I think this is vital for moving such interfaces to the level where they can be genuinely useful (rather than just convenient, as with touchscreen kiosks).
For a while, I've thought that someone should set up an Internet site to let you find the name of a piece of music you've heard. Apparently I just wasn't looking hard enough - today, I stumbled across Musipedia.org, a kind of Wikipedia for music.
My plan was that the site would allow you to enter the tune on some sort of virtual keyboard, ignoring tempo and paying attention only to the relative up and down frequency differences. It turns out that Denys Parsons proposed a similar but more robust system for encoding tunes in his 1975 book, The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes. This is now known as the Parsons Code.
Using it is pretty straightforward - just type an asterisk for the first note, then for each following note, type U if it goes up, D for Down, or R if it repeats the previous note. With three possibilities for each letter, a short sequence of just 20 notes can record more tha three billion distinct tunes. It is also not affected by errors in pitch or timing.
Once you have the Parsons Code for your tune (or at least a brief snippet), you just need a big database to search against - which is where Musipedia comes in. They only have about 30,000 tunes so far, but over time I expect this to grow. Certainly, it had no problems identifying Rossini's William Tell Overture and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi - Oh, mio babbino caro.
Marc Andreessen's always-interesting blog today talks about OpenSocial, a new standard spear-headed by Google which aims to provide a common API for embedding new web content and apps across all the main social network sites.
This is very similar to the Facebook Platform API launched a few months ago to critical acclaim, but with the significant difference that OpenSocial is an open standard which pretty much everyone else except Facebook is jumping on the bandwagon to support.
Marc's blog does a much better job of describing the benefits than I can. In a nutshell, though, it means that if you run a website that offers a useful service, you can now easily allow it to be embedded in any of the main social networking sites (LinkedIn, Friendster, Ning, etc.) by just adding some basic HTML & Javascript support.
This should be fun...
(The official Google launch is tomorrow, at which point http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial should become operational.)
My friend James was impressed by the Tilt-shift photography I mentioned in the previous post, and sent me some related material.
Seam carving is an image resizing technique which works by identifying horizontal and vertical seams with low information content and then removing them, rather than simply removing pixels according to a fixed scaling algorithm.
This means that the proportions of important items within the picture are maintained. The same technique can be adapted to increase the size of an image (especially in a single dimension) without making it look skewed. And more intriguingly, by first marking parts of the image as "low value", you can seamlessly erase elements of a picture automatically -- no Photoshop expertise required.
This YouTube video does a good job of describing it:
Not content with this, James also pointed me towards .kkrieger, a simple 3D shoot-em-up with an impressive twist: the executable size is less than 100 KB. (Yes, that's Kilobytes). The program would have easily fitted onto a standard 170 KB floppy disk from the Commdore 64 era 25 years ago!
Despite this, the game has pretty decent graphics and sound, not dissimilar to Doom, as this screenshot shows:
The amazingly small file size is achieved by generating all textures algorithmically at runtime. This leads to long, though not excessive load times.
To download the game or read more about it, visit the main .kkrieger website.
Over time, the Windows Registry accumulates dead and unused class keys, installtion keys, and other cruft which can gradually slow down the operation of your PC. If you notice the Start Menu taking longer to appear, and Explorer appears sluggish when opening files, it may be time to give the Registry a clean.
I've been looking for a good Registry cleaner for a while, and I finally found one: EasyCleaner.
Not only is it free, it also does a nice job of finding dead shortcuts, temporary files that are no longer used, abnormally large files, and plenty more. Particularly useful is the ability to find all large files and directories on a particular partition, to give you a heads up on where all your disk space has gone.
Recommended.
Having recently bought an XBox 360 to use as a Media Centre Extender with my main MCE living room PC, I was dismayed to find that my network drives were not accessible when using the extender.
A bit of research showed that this is a consequence of how the MCE Extenders connect using the Remote Desktop capability of Windows XP - mapped drive letters are only accessible under the username they are created under, and the extender has its own separate user account (usually MCX1).
Unfortunately, the password for that account is not available. However, there is a simple workaround. The original description came from Chris Lotter's Blog, but I've reproduced the important details here for easy reference.
To make mapped drives visible under Windows Media Centre Extender, you need to follow these steps:
@echo off echo Mounting remote network drives... net use m: \\192.168.100.20\MP3 /user:world\eddy.carroll mypassword net use p: \\192.168.100.20\PHOTOS /user:world\eddy.carroll mypassword net use v: \\192.168.100.20\DVD /user:world\eddy.carroll mypassword
Replace 'world' with your workgroup name, 'eddy.carroll' with your server account name, and 'mypassword' with your server account password.
You're now done. Simply disconnect and reconnect your Extender, and it should now be able to see all the media on your mapped drives.
If you use external firewire disks with your PC, you may have seen at one time or another the dreaded "Delayed Write Failure". Why does this happen?
Apparently, it's because various Firewire enclosures have problems supporting more than 128 KB in a single transfer. Depending on the Windows application software, this may or may not cause problems for you.
There is a convenient Filter driver that overcomes this problem, by telling Windows to limit transfers for a particular device to 128 KB; you can find it on the Max 128K Filter Page.
That same page also references another very useful resource, the busTRACE free utilities page. This includes a utility called 1394test which will show you whether your Firewire enclosure suffers from this problem or not, as well as other useful related utilities. The 1394test page also includes extended discussion of the whole Delayed Write issue.
Note: apparently Windows XP Service Pack 2 also includes code to limit the maximum transfer size to 128 KB -- so if you are running Service Pack 2, you may not have the problem at all.
(Thanks to Steve for pointing me towards these.)
Today from Steve, a very useful tip I wish I'd discovered years ago:
Windows 2000 & XP machines delay as long as 30 seconds when you try to view shared files across a network because Windows is using the extra time to search the remote computer for any Scheduled Tasks.
Here's how to prevent this remote search for Scheduled Tasks. Open up the Registry and go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / Software / Microsoft / Windows / CurrentVersion / Explorer / RemoteComputer / NameSpace
Under that branch, select the key:
{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}
and delete it.
And just like that, your network shares will once more become instantly accessible. Hard to imagine why this isn't the default behaviour...
ICPUG is one of the oldest computer organisations in the UK, having recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Almost every year since around 1992, I've attended the annual ICPUG computer weekend at the Queens Armes hotel in the village of Charmouth on the Dorset coast.
I'm just back from this year's event, which was as entertaining as ever (talks ranged from helicopters to pure maths to safe-cracking in Nigeria, and there was even some computing thrown in for good measure). One of the most useful things I came away with, however, was a simple Windows XP that can dramatically improve responsiveness on many systems.
The Start menu on XP has a Documents sub-menu that conveniently lists the last 10 or so documents which have been worked on - very handy if you want to go back and edit a recent file. XP creates this menu from the most recent document shortcuts from the hidden 'Recent' folder in your User profile.
However, XP has no mechanism to automatically empty the Recent folder; instead, the more folders, files and documents you open, the more shortcuts accumulate here. On my own system, there were about 1600 shortcuts listed (including many duplicates), dating back to 2004.
Simply emptying out this folder can produce a notable improvement in response speed for things like opening new browser windows, double-clicking document files, and even opening disk folders. I tried it on my system, and the effect was immediate - it felt as fast as a brand new XP installation again.
Because the folder is hidden, the easiest way to get to it is to select Run from the Start menu, then enter:
%HOMEPATH%\Recent
as the command to run. This will open the Recent folder and you can see how many shortcuts are listed. Then a simple Select All followed by Delete will get rid of them for once and for all.
Credit for this tip must go to Brian Grainger, webmaster of the ICPUG UK site; thanks Brian!
(As a final footnote, the Queens Armes has been sold to new owners as of May 24, 2007, and I believe the name will be changing to Abbotsville or Abbotshead.)
Yesterday, my Outlook 2003 hit the 2 GB limit on its PST file, and almost caused me to lose some important email.
To make me feel better, I'm describing the circumstances here. While I doubt anyone else affected will read this before suffering the same fate, they may at least gain some comfort after the fact from knowing they are not alone...
Anyway, the scenario goes like this. Outlook 2003 has a documented 2 GB limit on PST files (i.e. your Inbox and direct sub-folders). Unlike earlier versions of Outlook, which would happily corrupt your PST file with no warning if you exceeded the 2 GB limit, Outlook 2003 now traps this and (eventually) displays an error message saying the file is full.
There are two side effects that are not so obvious. The first is relatively benign: any messages in your outbox remain there after successful transmission, because there was no room to move them to Sent Items. Thus, you mistakenly think they haven't been sent for some reason and waste time trying to send them again; the recipient often ends up with multiple copies.
The more serious bug, and the one that really annoyed me, is that when Outlook downloads new messages, it realises it has nowhere to store them ... and just throws them away. My account is configured to leave messages on the mail server for two days after download, but I expect most users stay with the default account settings, which delete messages as soon as they are downloaded. Such users would likely not even be aware that they had lost mail, since it is irretrievably gone, with no record that it even existed. Certainly, Outlook gives no indication that anything is amiss.
Because this happened to my wife a couple of months ago, I knew to check my mail server's webmail interface for lost messages, and sure enough, there were several sitting there. When I freed up space on Outlook and downloaded my mail again, it happily ignored those messages, since it considered them already fetched, even though it had discarded them at the time.
Unfortunately, I forgot to check my secondary account's webmail interface as well, so only became aware of yet more missed messages when someone followed up to see why I hadn't responded.
Come on Microsoft, how hard would it have been to do this right??
(I'd upgrade to 2007, but I can't stand the new ribbon strip.)
In an earlier entry, I mentioned the problems I had when upgrading an old ATA66 drive to a shiny new ATA133 drive. The old drive had been in an ATA66 removable disk caddy, and it didn't behave too well at ATA133.
I resolved that problem by simply uninstalling the drive caddy and connecting the new drive directly to the motherboard via a decent ATA133 cable. (HDTach still shows the performance as a little choppy, but it's not bad, averaging around 50 MBps transfer rate and peaking at 78 MBps.)
Well, I had a 120 GB drive die a few days ago, also in a caddy. Maxtor sent me a replacement, and once again, it was ATA133. Exactly the same problem as before - really bad performance, making the PC close to unusable.
I didn't want to give up another caddy, so I buckled down and did a bit of research. It's been well documented that Windows XP will drop down to PIO mode for hard disk transfers after six DMA timeouts have occurred. However, my problem was different - I suspected transfer errors (which result in a retry) rather than timeouts.
You can check which mode Windows is currently using for a drive by going into System / Hardware / Device Manager, then opening IDE / ATAPI controllers and double-clicking the Primary or Secondary IDE controller. Under Advanced Settings, you'll see the current transfer mode used for each drive.
I knew from the PIO/DMA discussions that the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ ControlSet001 \ Control \ Class \ {4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} was responsible for configuring the ATA IDE driver. However, documentation of the various fields was hard to come by. I eventually figured it out by trial and error.
This key has a Default value of "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers", which is a handy way to check you're in the right place. If you're searching for it manually, it's usually about the 10th class down in the (gigantic) list of classes from the top, so it's easy enough to locate.
Inside the key are several numbered sub-keys: 0000, 0001, 0002, etc. 0000 is for the IDE controller, 0001 and 0002 are the primary and secondary interfaces. If you have multiple IDE controllers (e.g. SATA and PATA), then there will be more than three keys here - be careful to modify the correct one! The SATA controller is usually listed before the PATA controller, but you may just need to use trial and error.
Anyway, once you have identified the correct subkey, corresponding to the interface the problematic drive is attached to, you'll see a few sub-keys:
(The same settings also exist with a Slave prefix; which set you modify depends on whether your drive is the master or slave.)
Let's look at the MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed value in more detail. This defines a 32-bit mask, allowing up to 32 options to be individually permitted or prohibited. The default value of 0xFFFFFFFF means all supported operations are permitted. By selectively turning off certain bits, we can make Windows avoid using those features. These same bits are reflected in MasterDeviceTimingMode, so that's a good place to start.
On my UDMA6 drives, MasterDeviceTimingMode was set to 0x20010, which is 0x00020010 in 8-digit hex. I also knew that 0x00002010 was UDMA2. It seemed logical that the in-between positions corresponded to UDMA3 (0x4010), UDMA4 (0x8010) and UDMA5 (0x10010). The 0x10 at the end is probably multi-word transfer, though I haven't confirmed this.
Right so. To disable, for example, UDMA5 and UDMA6 (ATA100 and ATA133 support respectively), we just need to turn off the appropriate bits in the Allowed mask. Instead of 0xFFFFFFFF, we can use 0xFFFCFFFF. All the other modes up to and including UDMA4 (ATA66) will still be allowed.
My problematic drive was attached to the secondary master IDE interface, so I went ahead and set MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed for that interface to 0xFFFCFFFF, then rebooted. Sure enough, Device Manager now shows that the drive is running UltraDMA 4 instead of UltraDMA 6. Better, the performance is now usable again, averaging around 20 MB/s transfer rate. I suspect the caddy is still introducing errors (HDTach is a bit choppy still) but it's hugely better than it was before.
This is crying out for a little applet to let you tweak the individual bits in this mask from a nice GUI. Perhaps I'll write one if I get some spare time...
If you use Photoshop for scanning images, you often need to rotate the scanned image by a degree or two to get it lined up straight (placing it straight on the scanner bed can be almost impossible).
I used to use the trial & error method of guessing a rotation amount, trying it out, then adjusting it up or down until I got something that looked right. Eventually, I figured there must be an easier way.
And of course there is: use Photoshop's Measure tool, which is a sub-menu option on the Eyedropper tool. Measure a horizontal or vertical line using this (the longer the better), then open the Rotate Canvas / Arbitary dialog and you'll find Photoshop has automatically filled in exactly the right angle for you.
This handy tip courtesy of Pixel-Techs where you can also find a detailed example, with screenshots.
My personal laptop is a Sony Vaio V505CP. It's almost five years old, but after upgrading it to 1.5 GB RAM and a 160 GB hard drive, it does a good job of running Windows Vista SP1. I use it mainly when I'm out on consulting jobs or travelling, so I don't need anything more powerful.
A month or two back, I noticed that whenever I played music, the audio would glitch every 20-30 seconds. The mouse pointer also froze briefly during the glitches. This was something new -- it was working fine after the original upgrade to Vista SP1. Today, I finally got around to investigating the cause.
For those in a hurry: the culprit was NDIS.SYS, the network driver. Simply turning off the built-in wireless adapter (easily done with a switch on the front of the Sony's case) made the glitch go away. I can live with this for now, since I rarely use wireless and stream music at the same time; normally, I leave the wireless enabled all the time, just in case I might need it, but it's not a big deal to turn it off.
So how did I figure this out? Here are the steps I followed, including dead ends (the journey is often as interesting as the destination).
My first port of call was Windows Task Manager. I usually start here, simply because Task Manager is standard on every Windows PC. In this case, it showed a big CPU spike whenever the glitch occurred, but unfortunately, Task Manager itself froze during the glitch so I couldn't identify what process was responsible.
The next tool to try was Process Explorer from SysInternals, a wonderful tool for all kinds of system probing. It includes a dummy task entry for DPC (Deferred Procedure Calls) and so I could see that during glitches, DPC was particularly active, responsible for almost all the additional CPU usage.
Deferred Procedure Calls are used whenever a process needs to make a system call, but the system is busy doing something important like handling an interrupt. The system call is queued until the interrupt completes, and all outstanding calls are then executed in sequence -- hence the brief jump in CPU activity.
Some Googling brought me to a handy tool called DPC Latency Checker, which graphs DPC usage over time. Using this confirmed the theory:
The red peaks indicate unusually long DPC latencies, which will cause system problems. Unfortunately, the checker didn't tell me the cause of these, but I knew it was probably a badly written device driver. The checker's website suggested using Microsoft's RATTv3 developer tool to identify the culprit.
I hadn't come across RATTv3 before, but it's very useful -- if you're running Windows XP, that is. It records the latency of each and every device driver's interrupt calls, correlated over time, and identifies the bad ones for you. Unfortunately, it doesn't work too well under Vista.
Back to Google, where I found a thread suggesting Microsoft's new Performance Toolkit as a good Vista alternative. This does everything RATTv3 can do, and a lot more besides.
One thing to watch out for: after installing the toolkit, all the files end up in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit". I suggest copying them to C:\XPerf for convenience, since the installation folder is not added to the system path automatically.
After installing, you can begin a new capture by opening a command prompt in the toolkit folder and typing:
xperf -on DiagEasy
to begin tracing. Then let the system run for a minute or two, until the glitch has occurred. Next, turn off tracing and convert the results to a file suitable for viewing:
xperf -d trace.etl
Finally, view the accumulated results:
xperf trace.etl
Pretty easy! Doing this produced a summary page with a ton of detail, most of which I didn't need (CPU usage, disk i/o, etc.) The thing I was interested in was DPC activity, which it showed as a graph like this:
The peaks in the graph show unexpectedly high DPC levels. By selecting one of those peaks and right-clicking, I was able to display a summary of all the driver activity that had contributed to the peak:
From this, it was clear that NDIS.SYS was the culprit, with a worst-case latency of more than 200 ms. (I repeated the test several times to confirm this, and it was consistently in top place.)
So mystery solved. From here, it was an easy step to try disabling the network adapters to see if that fixed things -- and turning off the wirless adapter did the trick.
So when I have a chance, I'll upgrade my wireless driver and hopefully that will sort it out permanently. For now, though, I'm just glad to have properly working audio again.
Thanks to Steve for pointing me towards this Microsoft presentation showing Vista's speech recognition and generation capabilities.
With Vista, there may finally be a good reason to start using speech to interact with your PC. Of course, a good microphone will be essential. Well worth a look anyway.
I recently came across an article at security website Dark Reading which explains why Vista isn't written in .NET.
There are a few different reasons given, but the main one is that Microsoft have a lot of hardcore C++ OS programmers who didn't want to switch to C#. Because C# is type-safe, it's a lot harder to do some of the standard C tricks of peeking and poking memory locations, tweaking bits in registers, etc.
This is a shame, because while that type checking can be frustrating at times, it does give an awful lot of protection from malicious coding techniques. Given the rate at which Microsoft publishes Windows Security Updates, you'd have thought they'd be very keen to adapt a more secure computing environment.
Another reason given was performance: since .NET code is pseudo-interpreted, it is not as efficient as native C/C++ code. That's a red herring though - my experience with .NET has been that it runs more than fast enough for almost anything you're likely to do with it. Like any environment, you can easily write bad code that runs like a dog; you can also write good code that runs very fast indeed.
And as if to prove my point, the current non-.NET betas of Vista run incredibly slowly, at least on my Athlon 2400 system with 1 GB RAM and a very fast Radeon graphics card. Intel must be rubbing their hands with glee...
I use Winamp as my default MP3 player for Internet Explorer. Every now and again, Apple's Quicktime player seems to hijack the file association, so that when I download MP3 files off the web, they play using the Quicktime embedded media player (which I dislike).
None of the obvious ways of undoing this hijacking seemed to work. Today, however, I came across a method that does work:
Simple when you know how...
I've been using Windows Vista for a few months now, and am still finding that for every nice new feature I like, there is a change of behaviour or missing element that I dislike just as much. Ah, progress...
Last night, however, I encountered a new bug which is both minor and infuriating: the ability to select multiple files in Windows Explorer vanished. Using the mouse to drag-out a selection box, holding down Shift or Control, and even trying to choose Select All from the Edit menu are all disabled. It's hard to describe just how annoying it is not to have this simple capability.
It turns out this is a well known Vista bug, first reported back in the Vista Beta days, and there are three solutions. Two are well-documented, the third is much more difficult to find. Naturally, the third solution was the one that I needed.
For convenience, here they are (in order of simplicity).
1. Go into Tools -> Folder Options -> Views and choose Reset Folders (also available under "Organise -> Folder & Search Options". You may need to do this from within multiple Explorer Windows before it finally works.
2. Alternatively, run RegEdit and delete all keys under this one:
HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell
(i.e. Bags, BagsMRU, and MuiCache) in their entirety. Do this with no Windows Explorer windows open; ideally, with Windows Explorer killed in Process Manager before you delete the keys.
3. When neither of the above two methods works, run this FixSingleSelect VBScript and it will sort it out - at least, it did for me.
I'm frankly stunned that Microsoft have (a) allowed a bug with such wide-spread impact to make it through to final release, and (b) not issued a patch to address the problem.
For the past month, I've been upgrading the hard disk on a friend's Compaq ProLiant ML-370 server (first generation). I finally completed the job on Friday.
Why so long? Surely a hard drive upgrade is a five minute job? Well usually, yes. However, Compaq have gone to some trouble to make it difficult.
The old server had two 18 GB UltraSCSI drives, and had run out of space. The plan was to add a cheap, large IDE drive to provide additional data storage, while retaining the SCSI drives for Windows 2000 and Microsoft Exchange Server. Thus, a 160 GB Maxtor IDE drive was purchased.
First problem: the ProLiant has an internal IDE interface, but it does not support hard drives! The BIOS actually says this when you try to configure it - or it would if there was a BIOS, which there isn't. Instead, you have to download a four floppy disk System Configuration Utility from Compaq's website. In this day and age, even finding four working floppy disks (not to mention a working floppy drive, in a server that has been actively sucking in dust for almost five years) is a challenge in itself.
(Later on, I discovered you can also download the SmartStart 5.50 CD to do the same thing; there are later versions available but they don't support the ML-370 G1).
Anyway, ignoring what the BIOS said, I connected the IDE drive to the internal IDE interface and booted up. Windows found the drive okay, decided to limit it to 137 GB capacity (despite running SP4, and enabling the enhancement to support 48-bit LBA addressing). No matter, we could live with 137 GB.
What we couldn't live with was the speed - appallingly slow, and with 100% CPU utilisation whenever the drive was accessed. A quick visit to Device Manager confirmed that the interface was running in PIO mode - Programmed I/O - rather than using UltraDMA which is much, much faster. Apparently this is one of the limitations of the Compaq IDE interface (and probably the reason why they don't support IDE drives).
Next bright idea: add an internal PCI IDE card. A cheap ITE 8212 non-RAID card was duly ordered and installed, and the card's onboard BIOS had no problem detecting all 160 GB of the drive -- great! "Non-system disk or disk error" -- not so great!
I couldn't find any way to tell the IDE card's BIOS (or the Compaq System Configuration Utility) to avoid trying to boot off the attached IDE drive. There is a boot priority order, but this ignores plug-in IDE cards and only pays attention to the onboard SCSI and IDE controllers. Upgrading the Compaq system Flash to the latest supported version didn't help matters.
Next step: disable the IDE controller card entirely in the SCU and let Windows 2000's Plug & Play mechanism configure it instead. For a while, it looked like this would work: Windows correctly detected the card and installed the latest drivers, which I had downloaded from their website. However, it point blank refused to find any drives attached to the card. (I knew the drive was there since the BIOS had correctly spotted it earlier.)
After much googling, and reading discussion threads from others who had tried and failed to get an IDE drive going in a ProLiant, I was almost ready to give up. However, there was one thing left to try: a different IDE controller card.
After a little research, I came across the MRI RAID IDE Controller which is based on a Silicon Image/CMD SiI0680 chipset, rather than ITE. After it arrived, I swapped out the ITE card for the new one, disabled it in the SCU, and once again let Windows Plug & Play figure it out.
And this time ... it worked! CMD's IDE drivers must be a bit more robust/adaptable than the ITE drivers, since it had no trouble at all detecting the hard disk. Better yet, it recognised the full 160 GB of drive space.
Compaq have always made PCs that were almost but not quite completely compatible with normal PCs. While the ProLiant series have many fine attributes, incidents such as this help explain why I will never, ever, buy a Compaq server myself.
Ever feel like you're in an endless rut of work-eat-sleep-work-eat-sleep, with not much time for anything else?
Here's a good article that provides some useful perspective (courtesty of www.stumptous.com).
During the week, I received what purported to be a legitimate email from Eircom.net Sales. Surprisingly, it arrived at my business address, which is not registered with Eircom.
On closer analysis, it had several hallmarks of a spam phishing expedition:
(A common tactic with spammers is to offer an unsubscribe link in the hope that unhappy recipients will follow it, thus confirming that the email address is read by a real human. That email address can then be sold to other spam merchants for a significant premium over unverified email addresses.)
Although I knew they wouldn't be able to do anything about it, I figured Eircom.net might be interested to know that someone was sending out emails on their behalf, so I forwarded a copy of the offending email to abuse@eircom.net.
Rather annoyingly, this resulted in an automated reply telling me to report the problem using http://support.eircom.net/abuse/ instead. I wouldn't have minded, except that page didn't give enough space to report the problem in as much detail as I'd have liked. Still, I did my best.
Imagine my surprise when a day or so later, I received a message back from Eircom Support telling me that in fact, the message was completely legitimate. 12hs.com is apparently Twelve Horses, a direct marketing company that Eircom have employed.
And the subject of this direct marketing? Eircom were promoting their new secure business email service.
Here's a beautifully done Flash animation. No further info necessary...
(Update: The old link broke, probably due to bandwidth overload; the one listed above is now working again.)
Not everything needs to be about bits and bytes. I recently came across a guy called Julian Beever who does absolutely incredible pavement drawings. Here's a sample (used without permission ... sorry):
You can see some more examples of his work here...
How does the eye perceive colour? Probably a little differently than you thought. Context is everything, as the following link shows:
http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/colourPerception/colourPerception.html
This may no longer be available from September 2005, so I've taken the liberty of reproducing it here:
The centre section of each structure is exactly the same colour, even though one looks grey and one looks yellow. If you don't believe me, copy the image to your favourite paint program and check out the RGB values.
A friend just sent me a map to his house using a website I hadn't seen before: http://www.dto-journeyplanner.ie/
It's quite neat - essentially, a route planner for walking or cycling around Dublin. It recognised the name of my old employer and also the name of the house where I grew up, about six miles away, and had no problem plotting a route from one to the other.
Particularly handy for emailing directions to visitors not so familiar with Dublin.
Hurray! Someone has developed a digital PVR called GBPVR which works with the Hauppauge MediaMVP (of which I still have a few kicking around).
I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but it looks very promising so far.
Silly link of the day: Guess the Google
I see the BBC have an online version of the original Infocom Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy adventure - excellent!
The movie version is due out in May; I don't have high hopes, but you never know...
Okay, so this is a bit lazy - someone pointed me towards Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing as a good documentary on the origins of computer networking, but I don't have time to watch it just now. Bookmarking such things is a little hit & miss, so I'm recording it here instead...
Update: The link no longer seems to be operational; it was originally referenced from here.
Here's an interesting article about Interactive fiction, i.e. the old-style text-based adventure games popular in the 80's and 90's. If you remember playing any Infocom titles, you'll find this a good read.
Happy 2006!
I just came across another useful Irish site offering recent aerial photos. They seem to be better resolution than the current Google Maps and Google Earth offerings.
These ones are at MyHome, though I presume they are originally sourced from Mapflow, as with most Irish aerial maps.
With so much online media (video & audio) available over the web, it's easy to twist things to produce new effects.
Atmo's Johan Söderberg has lip-synced some of the most hated and loved people in history to some of the most hated and loved songs of all times, and the clips are here. Click on the Read my lips picture to get a sample.
This one is my favourite...
Jon Stokes from ArsTechnica has a good article on Intel's recently announced Terascale 80-core processor.
When you have so much processing power available, how do you make best use of it? One way is to treat it as a virtual server room, and run virtual machines on each core. For example, a heavily trafficed website, which is traditionally spread across multiple web & database servers, could be hosted completely on a single piece of silicon, with corresponding cost and power savings (especially power).
Then there's the problem of how to keep such a fast chip adequately supplied with data, to ensure it doesn't spend too much idle time waiting for new packets to arrive. There are some hints that Intel may be about to announce on-chip optical support.
I doubt we'll see this technology on the desktop any time soon (though you never know), but in an era where datacentres are routinely sucking up megawatts of power, it's useful to have a potential glimpse of a future where the entire room may be reduced to a single server cabinet.
(Let's ignore storage, for now...)
Edward Tufte's series of books on visualisation are essential reading for anyone interested in how to clearly present complex (or not so complex) data in a way that is quickly understandable.
I just stumbled upon another Tufte innovation - Sparklines. I'm not sure if he's invented these, or is just coining the phrase, but in any case the article is well worth a read.
http://ondras.praha12.net/sql/demo/ has a demo of a SQL Designer written purely in Javascript (or, more likely, AJAX - Asynchronous Javascript And XML). Whatever, it's very impressive!
Good news! All the free utilities from SysInternals.com are now available as a single convenient download here:
Download SysInternals Suite [7.2 MB]
As you may or may not know, SysInternals was a website run by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. Founded in 1996, it was the place to go for useful Windows utilities that did "hard" things - registry snooping, file monitoring, Rootkit detecters, etc.
For most IT professionals, utilities like Process Explorer, RegMon and FileMon have long been indispensable parts of their computer toolkit. (I have particular interest in the latter, since it performs a similar function to my own SnoopDos utility from 1989).
A few months ago, SysInternals was bought by Microsoft; Mark and Bryce are now working for Bill. One of the immediate changes was that all the utilities are now hosted on Microsoft's website. A less visible change is that tools no longer come with source code. This is a huge blow to those of us who use the SysInternals tools as reference examples for a wide variety of programming techniques - for example, how to create virtual device drivers that can be installed without a reboot (greatly simplifying the installation process). Luckily, you can still find copies of the original source archives if you know where to look, though I expect that won't last long.
The SysInternals tools are also exemplars of efficient coding, with executables sizes typically in the 100-500K range. In a world of ever-more-bloated programs, it's nice to know that there are still people out there who care about such things.
It remains to be seen whether the ethos behind the SysInternals tools will change significantly as a result of the Microsoft takeover. I hope not, but the first worrying signs are already apparent. The removal of Linux versions of some tools is also a shame (though not a surprise).
In the meantime though, I salute Mark and Bryce for 10 years of supreme contribution to the Windows community. If you haven't already downloaded the SysInternals Suite, do it now!
Thanks to Conor for this interesting interview with Bill Yeager, the author of the first network router.
(Surprise, surprise ... Cisco didn't write it all themselves.)
Tiddly Wiki is one of the coolest little hacks I've seen in a while.
Essentially, a Wiki that is completely contained within a single HTML file, including edit support. This lets you edit it locally without requiring a web server etc. Very cool.
(Thanks to Matija for the reference.)
At the risk of turning into yet another blog that does nothing but list interesting links, I couldn't resist the Top Ten Timewasting Sites list...
For better or worse, I find the whole topic of traffic flow management strangely interesting. So, I was delighted to stumble upon William Beaty's article describing Physics For Bored Commuters, which describes ways you can influence the stop-go nature of cars in heavy traffic, once you are aware of the underlying processes at work.
Looking forward to trying it next time I'm caught in a jam...
(And if you enjoyed that article, you'll also enjoy this one.)
Following my continuing fascination with online mapping, a friend pointed me towards AsciiMaps.com - it has to be seen to be believed!
Thanks Con!
Following on from HTMLWiki, I see Dan Bricklin's latest project is something called WikiCalc. (You may recall that Dan Bricklin was responsible for the original Visacalc spreadsheet, which helped kickstart sales of the Apple II computer many years ago.)
WikiCalc is a type of Wiki that deals with structured data which can include calculation elements - calendars, etc for example. It looks interesting!
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