““Thank you,” said Himmler, who found the Windows file management system a diabolical confoundment. And they accuse me of crimes against humanity, he thought as he settled himself in at his desk. Wilhelm Gates, you are a beast, and your family will pay.”
— John Birmingham, Final Impact
Popularity: 25% [?]
The Age reports that the Government is prepared to reduce the performance requirements for the rail network operators, on the grounds that increased patronage makes it harder to achieve on-time requirements.
There’s some truth to that, but the real game is almost certainly rigging things so that the performance statistics look better prior to the next State election, at which point we can expect the ALP to be making a lot of noise about how things are “better”, when in reality they are probably worse.
Public transport in Melbourne is a mess and it’s only going to get worse. I don’t know — or particularly care — what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not another $8 billion on freeways. Not unless it’s a special bus-only freeway…
Popularity: 28% [?]
Not sure when this happened, but I’ve just noticed it a few minutes ago and haven’t seen any announcements in the press or from Apple: the iTunes Australian store now has a TV Shows section.
The range of content is pretty small: a few shows each from ABC (US), ABC (Australia), Nine, Disney, and MTV. But it’s a nice start.
Now, if only there was some way to at least use fansubs with iTunes-purchased video content. Or, y’know, subtitles included.
Popularity: 33% [?]
Looking around for information on getting the VMware Server 2.0 beta running on Ubuntu Server 8.04 — I find it best to look online to see if people are having trouble before I waste time trying to make something work — I saw a fair few complaints about performance not being very good.
Well, I’m not quite sure what those people were talking about. I’ve set it up with a Windows XP VM on a machine that had previously been running Windows XP and as a test I hit it with my usual DVD-to-AppleTV process: rip to disk with DVD Decrypter, convert to XviD with AutoGK, convert subtitles using SubRip.
It’s been a little bit slower than the same stuff running natively, but not significantly so. I don’t have numbers — I forgot to collect stats before nuking the native XP install — but it’s doing the DVD->XviD at ~real-time, which isn’t a whole lot slower than when there was no VMware in the middle.
I’m happy enough with this, particularly given that this is batch processing — fire off a whole heap and forget about it — and that this is a beta with debug code.
Incidentally, I did try using dvd::rip from the Ubuntu packages, but the cluster support is failing — the final “put all the bits together” step barfs claiming there’s no video stream — and while I can indeed do transcodes one-at-a-time without using the cluster stuff, there’s no batch support without it. So while that would probably be faster, life is too short.
Popularity: 49% [?]
The new laptop arrived on Tuesday. Life events (sick dog) rather took the shine off the new-toy-lust, but that’s OK.
To recap, this is a Dell XPS M1530, T9300 CPU, 4GB RAM, GF8600MGT video. Essentially a 15″ desktop-replacement type system, about as grunty a GPU as you’re going to get in a laptop without paying crazy money for an Alienware machine.
So far so good. It’s running Vista Ultimate (I’d have been happy with Home Premium, but I opted for the red one, and that comes with Ultimate) with the VMware Server beta handling a Ubuntu VM for work-stuff.
Overall it’s been nice and stable, performing about as expected. I’m a bit leery of running it with the lid closed — it’s hooked up to a 19″ LCD most of the time — as it gets a bit toasty, but having reorganised the computer room a bit it isn’t really a problem to leave it open at the back of the desk.
Also rather enjoying the new version of Opera. This plus Privoxy has become my “default” web browsing environment, with Firefox and IE available where necessary. An Opera addon to load the current page in IE or Firefox — rather like the equivalent for Firefox — would be nice, though.
Despite concern that working with this as a mobile machine wouldn’t really be viable with my crappy vision, it’s been OK so far. I’ve got fonts turned up a bit in Vista, and typically run PuTTY, eReader, and Opera with monster fonts as well. Since that covers most of my non-gaming use it’s been OK.
Overall, pretty happy with the purchase. It’s no Macbook Pro, style-wise, and the disk is a little loud, but it does appear to Just Work and it’s not what I’d call bad looking.
Popularity: 25% [?]
We have a decent wodge of credit with Amazon (a friend paying us back for some stuff) but not much idea what to do with it. Our original plan — pre-orders of Spore and Wrath of the Lich King have gone out the window as they only want to send the former via priority courier (costs US$40!) and they won’t ship the latter out of the US…
(Yes, yes, we could probably do the relay thing, but the point of a pre-order for WotLK would be to have it on launch day, so…)
Now thinking maybe all six seasons of Scrubs, but that doesn’t account for all of it.
Time was I’d have had absolutely no trouble just buying $1000 worth of CDs in a single batch. Clearly things have changed!
Popularity: 27% [?]
When they say “webrick is crap, use mongrel” they really do mean it. Webrick is enough to do a little basic testing to satisfy yourself that this tool might be useful to you, but once you’ve got even 50 machines talking to it, it starts failing all over the place.
Takes extra work to set up mongrel, but TFM is pretty much spot-on in this respect.
Also: don’t bother running puppetd as a daemon. Run it from cron with “–onetime –splay” instead. Hell, have it set up its own crontab entry:
cron {puppetd:
command => "puppetd --onetime --splay",
user => root,
minute => [ 15, 45]
}
Use modules. Use them from the very start. They really do make life easier, and if you use them from the start then you don’t have that awkward period when you’ve got 50+ machines using an old un-modular configuration and now you have to very carefully migrate them all.
(i.e., don’t be an idiot, do what I say, not what I did!)
Popularity: 23% [?]
I grabbed this combo Firewire/USB2 enclosure earlier in the week, and am quite happy to recommend it.
Complete doddle to fit the “old” 300GB Maxtor drive I had sitting around, keeps it reasonably cool when running, not especially noisy, and when hooked up to a G5 iMac via Firewire it “felt” faster than the internal disk.
Of course now it’s mostly full and I’m going to have to do a bit of a shuffle when the laptop arrives, as it really should be formatted as NTFS but the iMac doesn’t speak that natively. Thus it’s FAT32 for now.
At least the laptop also has Firewire, so it ought to be pretty speedy. 7200RPM disk attached via FW400, probably faster than the 5400RPM SATA disk fitted internally, so really a good thing to be able to have 2GB+ files on.
Popularity: 21% [?]
Dell have already shipped clifford. Estimated delivery date is still the 18th, but I wouldn’t be completely surprised to have it sooner than that.
(clifford is an XPS M1530 in red, T9300 CPU, 4GB RAM, 320GB disk, 256MB GF8600M GT GPU. Pretty much a desktop replacement system.)
I’ve ordered an external enclosure for the 300GB PATA disk in the old gaspode (the house server we barely use any more). With that hooked up to clifford via Firewire it may well be faster than the interal disk (7200rpm Firewire vs 5400rpm SATA), will do very nicely for storing all our video/etc, much of which is synced down to the AppleTV anyway.
If I can get mt-daapd playing nice on the AppleTV (and by all accounts it’s a doddle) then the only thing left here that requires an “always-on” computer is the overnight EPG/favourites upload on the Topfield. Which will be moot in a few months when we get TiVo.
This leads to the very-appealing prospect of my only needing one computer for my own stuff, plus one for my partner. This will be replacing three machines (G5 iMac, Core2Duo desktop, Athlon psuedo-server) with one little laptop that’ll sleep at nights unless I’ve got video jobs to run.
I expect this will lead to a fairly significant electricity saving. Which makes me a happy bunny.
The only change I might think about is getting one of those consumer-grade NAS units. The D-Link DNS323 looks like a reasonable choice at AU$300 plus disks. That’d stay on 24×7, but it’d be the only thing that did.
Backups? We use Jungle Disk for our documents/photos/etc — the stuff we’d be really unhappy to lose — and music is synced down to the AppleTV so we’ve automatically got two copies of everything there. Video, well, if I ever fill that 300GB disk (possible, but meh) then we’ll have more than we can copy to the AppleTV, so there’s some exposure there, but really, who cares? Most of it we’ll only ever watch once anyway, this is more about simply having a library of stuff available when we want it, none of it is irreplacable.
I’ve been working for a few days now using Mandriva under VirtualBox on WindowsXP as a “paid work” environment. This lets me use things like iTunes while also being able to have a UNIXy work environment. So far so good, and I think that’ll work out nicely in the longer term. Best of both worlds, effectively, with no great compromise required on either side.
Popularity: 32% [?]
3G iPhone at a reasonable price, nice I suppose, might consider it in 18 months when the current contract is up, but otherwise quite happy with my Sony-Ericsson phone. At least the price is now sensible. It’ll be interesting to see what (if any) data bundles the Australian telcos come up with.
MobileMe might be interesting, it depends whether/how they implement things like calendar/contacts sharing. If they get that right — no indication at all in the currently-available documentation, such as it is — then it could be quite a decent option for small businesses/nonprofits who need that sort of functionality but simply cannot justify a full hosted Exchange service.
But it does rather feel like something where they should be bundling a year of service with an iPhone purchase.
Popularity: 20% [?]