not42

This article really shows why buyers should be considering suppliers that are not Intel only providers such as Dell.

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=paxville&page=1&cookie%5Ftest=1

The review puts Intels latest offering against AMDs, and the results are quite amazing. Rather than Intel pulling ahead in some benchmarks, AMD blows away the competition, providing much more efficient, higher performing servers for lower prices.

If I was Dell, I would really be thinking about my choices at the moment… corporate IT will look at reviews like this and see the savings.

You just have to love it when a big corporation (Microsoft) that wants to sell services (Mappoint), just has no concept of what the world wants.

I just tried to sign up for a developer account for access to the Mappoint Web Services, but on visiting their website I just get a raw aspx error page! Contacting their support staff and they say”

“It is only compatible with IE 6.0 and once IE 7.0 is released it will be compatible with that as well.

MPNET”

Wonderful. I told you that myself. No care or thought about fixing it? Or perhaps changing the error message to an error page listing compatibility etc.

They don’t deserve an application being written that uses their services if that’s their attitude. Doesn’t look good when a product that claims to provide ‘web services’ can’t even provide a W3C compliant signup web site.

Having been an Azureus user for a long time, probably back before most people had even heard of it, I have enjoyed using Azureus with the comfort that it is the best Bittorrent client out there. Featurewise it has always been way ahead of the pack, and while some people complain about performance, on my PC it used to take virtually no CPU time, although I’ll admit the Java runtime does enjoy using memory.

Last week I discovered a new client that has changed my views on what is the best for me. utorrent. utorrent is tiny. My first download was 96k. 96k! For that, you get something that looks just like Azureus, works like Azureus, but is about 100th of the size. In use, it uses just 6MB of RAM. Total. And CPU-wise it uses basically nothing too. Most impressive.

When I first used it, while I was really impressed, it was still missing a key feature essential for me - DHT. DHT is a distributed database which means that if a torrent tracker is down, your client can still find other people with the file to share with. Version 1.2 added that feature, and that was the catalyst for my change.

I think that for some, Azureus will still have a permanent home. Azureus is highly extendable, with many plug-ins available to enhance it. utorrent doesn’t do that, so if you love your peer blocker, or rss feed checker, then stick with Azureus for now, however if you have a slow PC that struggles to run Azureus, or if you just want a good, small client that covers the core functionality, then you may want to check out utorrent now.

I’ve been using Blockbuster online now for a few months, and it’s now time to put down my experiences.

I signed up to the free trial period and was happy with the delivery time of 2 days to get my DVDs. The DVDs arrived in little protective envelopes which I thought were really neat. You open them, tear off the flap with your address on it and then have the ability to close and re-post them back to Blockbuster. Very painless. Whoever came up with that envelope design was thinking clearly that day.

The DVDs are, well, the same DVDs that you’d get at your local store. You don’t get the cases; instead the DVDs are in a protective sleeve like you get with PC CDs sometimes. Functional.

You manage your DVD selection through an online account, and DVDs are queued up by you in order of delivery preference. More on that later. When you pop your DVD back in the post and Blockbuster receives it, then they should send the next item from the list.

Then the circle continues, and the customer is always happy. Right? Well not quite. I’ve had several issues with the service which I’ll list here:

DVD Quality

Unfortunately I’ve had several DVDs that arrived with scratches on them and of course it’s only halfway through a good movie that you get interrupted and your viewing pleasure is broken. Blockbuster does have a facility in your online account to report the DVD as broken, but I can’t believe they don’t do a visual check before sending them out in the first place. Some have had serious gouges in them.

Turnaround time

The time it takes the DVD to get back from you to Blockbuster and then back again is very important. Say it takes 1 day to travel in the mail both ways. Then it will take 4 days before it returns to you: the day mailed, day received at Blockbuster (who then appears to process it overnight), day mailed, and the day received back by you.

Rarely does it take 4 days though. This week I mailed my DVDs at 5am Monday. On Thursday they finally were ‘received’ by Blockbuster (you get an email telling you that). They may send out the new DVDs today, but more often they go tomorrow and so it will be around a week’s turnaround before I get them back, enabling 4 watches under their ‘unlimited’ plan each month. Now under their ‘limited’ plans you only get 4 rentals… not sure on the gain here. I guess it depends on where you live as to how long the mail takes, but I’d expect same day dispatch of new DVDs when the old are received.

Pricing

A couple of months back Blockbuster raised their prices. My plan went from 14.99 to 17.99, with the ‘benefit’ of receiving a free ex-rental movie to own every month. Sadly though the selection of ‘free’ DVDs is listed on the coupons provided, and they are (a) generally rubbish you’d never want anyway, and (b) never available to have. So basically it was just a price hike. I still think it’s reasonable a good price for this general service, if it just worked a little better.

Coupons

Each month you receive 2 or 3 free coupons through your online account to enable you to rent DVDs for free from your local store. This actually works well. It allows you to fill gaps when they’ve not returned DVDs, or if you suddenly get the urge to rent something else. You do have to be a member of your local store though for some reason.

Queue

The DVD distribution is managed via your Q. This is a system that lets you select which DVDs you want delivered and to prioritize them in order of delivery preference. Neat idea. However I’ve had one DVD sat at the top of my Q for the last 3 deliveries. It shows available but for some reason they’re not sending it which is annoying because it’s the last DVD of a multi-DVD series of Alias, and I need to see the last few episodes!

Summary

I quite like Blockbuster online. It is value for money. For the price of a couple of movie tickets you can get ‘unlimited’ rentals. However you have to be prepared to be patient with delivery times, accept that it’s not really ‘unlimited’, and have some reserve plans in place for when the DVDs don’t play.

Yesterday I had another play with Linux. I had put Fedora Core 4 on my PC as a second boot item a while back, and so when we had a power outage, my PC booted back into linux instead of Windows. As I had been listening to some music before the outage, I thought I’d just try and play it from Linux instead. After all, what can be simpler than listening to a few music files?

My first challenge was seeing the files. They were located on an NTFS partition, but I yum’d the correct module, mounted the partition and bingo, could see my files.

I knew the sound card was running under FC4, which was good because my Dell PC has some weird ADI Soundmax IC and it used to output the sound through the wrong outputs. Since FC3 though, sound has worked out of the box.

I decided to put a shortcut to my music directory onto the desktop. This is not as easy as it sounds. There is no ‘create shortcut’, no ‘link’ that works, and dragging the folder icon to the desktop tried to copy or move the files. Interestingly move didn’t complain that I was moving from a Read Only mounted volume. I did eventually work out that SHIFT-CTL drag would create a link (I think!), but it would have been so much easier if there was a right-click menu option.

Anyways, back to playing the files. Playing the files was actually not really the issue, the issue is really my pleasure in listening to them. My PC is attached to some Altec Lansing speakers which include a bass woofer. To make this sound good, I normally have to bottom out the low frequencies on an EQ to drop out a lot of the bass, otherwise the music booms a lot.

XMMS: My music is a mix of OGG, MP3 and iTunes AAC (unprotected). XMMS would play all these formats once I yum’d for xmms-aac. Unfortunately the equalizer wouldn’t work except for MP3 files.

Rhythmbox: Would play the files, but there is no equalizer.

Helixplayer: Claimed unknown format.

Xine: Would play the files, but there is no equalizer. Xine also ‘jumped’ music when I was doing other stuff. Like opening a folder view was too intensive for it!!

mplayer: This actually opened the files, but the GUI is really clunky and non-standard. The playlist editor needs some serious work. I eventually got the equalizer working, but turning that on made the volume much quieter than usual.

At this point I gave up, booted into Windows and bathed in quality sound.

When you can’t even enjoy playing music files from Linux, there can be no doubt Microsoft has nothing to fear from Linux on the desktop.

Young man Murphy applied for an engineering position at an Irish firm based in Dublin. An American applied for the same job and both applicants having the same qualifications were asked to take a test by the Department manager.

Upon completion of the test both men only missed one of the questions. The manager went to Murphy and said, “Thank you for your interest, but we’ve decided to give the American the job.”

Murphy: “And why would you be doing that? We both got 9 questions correct. This being Ireland and me being Irish I should get the job!”

Manager: “We have made our decision not on the correct answers, but on the question you missed.”

Murphy: “And just how would one incorrect answer be better than the other?”

Manager: “Simple. The American put down on question # 5, ‘I don’t know.’ You put down ‘Neither do I.’”

These days I often use someone elses PC, only to immediately notice that something is wrong with it. Typically you click on Internet Explorer, do one search and think Spyware. This can be caused by popups appearing, slow response or other indicators that are often subjective. Cleaning up these PCs can take sometime, however there are plenty of free things out there to help.

On the spyware front, if you already have spyware installed, or don’t know if you have spyware installed, then first run this:

http://www.trendmicro.com/spyware-scan/

Then make sure you run the WindowsUpdate feature to get all the Microsoft security updates.

Windows Update

NOTE: If Windows Update makes you reboot your computer, run Windows Update again and again until it shows that there are no more updates to install.

Load the Microsoft antispyware software:

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

There are other Anti-spyware packages around that you can use instead of the Microsoft Antispyware. To date I’ve not found one program that finds and cleans everything, so here are a couple more you can try:

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/

Most importantly, get a good anti-virus software too. You can do a free scan now from here:

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

But long term you need something installed that auto-updates and protects your email. These programmes are free, but I’ve not sure how good they are:

http://free.grisoft.com
http://www.free-av.com/

Personally I haven’t found an anti-virus package that I like 100%. PC World has a review/rating here:

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,124475,00.asp

On the firewall front, you can use the XP SP2 built in firewall, however ZoneAlarm is also pretty good and is free, and offers extra protection:

http://www.zonelabs.com
Free download here.

Three years ago when I arrived in Atlanta, the price of a gallon of gas was below $1. Nice. Since then it has continued to grow more expensive, not long ago hitting $2, and now $2.5. This site shows a pretty graph, along with the locations of the cheapest gas around:

http://www.atlantagasprices.com/retail_price_chart.aspx

Currently people are betting on it hitting $3 by the end of the year, which sounds and feels painful, but I have a feeling is only the start. As a commodity item, demand is growing quickly in countries like China and India, and this impacts the rest of the world in a big way, as supply is not growing at the same pace. Given that supply is ultimately limited, things will only get worse too.

Now is the time for countries to invest in alternative power sources - primarily Nuclear, with supporting Solar/Wind/Wave. If we wait, we will have some painful years ahead.

Found this on the web. Must remember these hints when my aims in life include world domination.

Switch to Linux

An interesting new name. Spotted this around and it made me laugh:

‘ctrl-alt-del’ will now be known as : ‘hasta la vista’