Wintertime And The Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy

As if I didn’t have enough distractions already, I picked up one of the new slimmer PS2s yesterday and wow, this thing is *tiny*:
Slim PS2
(That white blob is my way-overexposed hand.)

This is actually the first real console I’ve had since the original NES. I know the Xbox has technically better specs and graphics and so forth, but in the console world the raw performance specs have never really seemed to matter all that much. Video game history is littered with systems that were technically superior spec-wise, but still colossal failures. It’s more a matter of what titles there are to choose from and what style of games you enjoy, and the PS2 library will fit me better, I think.

And I also picked up a handful of games, of course. Gran Turismo 3, since I haven’t played a decent driving game since Pod. Katamari Damacy, which proves that the Japanese have been smoking something pretty potent lately. FFX and the first .hack to check out the current console RPG scene.

And of course, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Because life isn’t complete until you’ve beaten an enemy gang member to death with a giant purple dildo.

The Final Piece

I also finally got the replacement video card I had been waiting for, and now I can say that the PVR is truly complete. The TV-Out works fine, with no colour problems, and there was even an unexpected performance boost. The old card didn’t support the XvMC library for the Nvidia drivers but this one does, and CPU usage during playback dropped from 80-90% down to 45-60%, making playback smooth even with other stuff going on in the background.

Now at last I can just sit back in the easy chair with the remote and treat it like just another appliance, and not just a tacked-on feature of the computer. Even if it really is…

No Photos Please

The new iPods are out and…I don’t particularly care. I don’t really feel the need to carry a ton of photos around, and although the black look of the U2 edition *sounded* intriguing, the red click wheel is just too horribly ugly to me.

This now makes me even more tempted to pick up one of the regular 4G iPods though, now that I know it’s not likely to be imminently obsoleted by something vastly better. It’s down to either that or the iRiver hard drive player, and although the iRiver has a couple more features, it’s still slightly more expensive and the iPod/iTunes integration is a big plus and iTMS will be coming to Canada soon…

Not Yet Feeling The Burn

Yay, my DVD burner drive arrived today. Except that I don’t have any videos properly DVD formatted for burning yet. Or any discs to burn them to. Or any software to burn them with, since it’s an OEM drive… I think I was expecting to do my burning in Linux, like I did with all my CD burning, but then I wiped the system and didn’t reinstall Linux…

Oh well, it’ll get sorted out in time, and I needed a new CD drive anyway. My old HP 9900ci was getting flaky — it couldn’t even reinstall Battlefield 1942 without randomly failing partway through, so I had to mount the discs on the Linux server, copy the files over, and install them all straight from the hard drive.

I wound up getting a dual-layer-burning drive anyway, even though I wasn’t specifically holding out for one. The dual-layer media’s still expensive right now but should hopefully drop, this drive got great reviews, and it was still dirt cheap at just over $100 CDN, so what the hell.

And I don’t even have enough space for my existing DVD collection… :-P

Forgot About The Brakes

When I went to upgrade my server to the 2.6.9 kernel (which it turns out I can’t use at the moment anyway for other reasons), I discovered that I still had some debugging options enabled in my current kernel config, from a problem I had over a year ago. OOPS.

I wouldn’t have expected it to make *that* much of a difference, but after recompiling 2.6.7 without them set I can now play back recordings in MythTV at full speed, using around 80% CPU. It still stutters slightly whenever something else kicks in, like a web server hit, but it’s still a vast improvement.

Now I just have to solve the frigging B&W video problem. Hopefully a new-but-cheap GeForce 4 that’s on the way will fix that…

The Obscurity Of Fame

“In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.”

An interesting interview with Neal Stephenson. I’m working my way through Cryptonomicon, and although it’s slow going, it’s still pretty interesting. It’s not really so much about cryptography itself (there are no silly “oh no, he’s only 13 bits away from breaking the asymmetric vault key on the RS/6000!” scenes) as it is about scenarios where it’s a subtle influencing factor, in wartime and business, and the kinds of people (proto-geeks, if you will) you might find involved.

Stripping Down

Although my earlier attempt at quietening my gaming system failed miserably, it’s finally now one tenth as noisy as it was before. It’s still not exactly complete silence, but it’s like an empty library in comparison to what it used to be.

How did I do it? It was rather simple, actually — I just ripped two of the three hard drives out. One of them had been acting up lately, going through bursts where it would suddenly power down and back up again. No data had been lost, but I don’t really trust it anymore. The other one was an ancient 12G drive, and the only reason it was even still in there was because it was the boot drive and removing it would have required reinstalling all of the OSes, which is moot now.

Plus, removing the drives removed the need for a couple power splitters and one IDE cable, so the cabling isn’t quite so chaotic inside. I also discovered that I was using a 40-pin cable on the remaining drive, so switching in an 80-pin cable should get it up to full speed. The video card doesn’t have to split its power with a drive anymore, which will hopefully help with some strange video driver crashes. And without the other drives, there will be less heat generated. Ripping out all this stuff has made the system the quietest, coolest, and most stable it’s been in years. Damn, I should have done this a long time ago…

Of course, now I have to reinstall everything and I’m about 40G shorter on space (with 100 left), but I can live with that. I just won’t reinstall Linux on it, which hadn’t been getting much use anyway. I also won’t both reinstalling Win98SE, since pretty much everything I have works under XP now, and the few that didn’t (Pod, Daggerfall) aren’t too important anymore.

The New Sound

Out of all of my systems, one of the components that I’ve upgraded the *least* over the last 11 years is the sound card. I first got an SB16 way back in the mid-’90s and continued to use it alone until a couple years ago, when the lack of ISA slots in a new motherboard forced an upgrade to an SBLive. Even then, the SB16 continued to live on in my server box. The sound card is just one of those parts that I never really felt an urgent need to upgrade. It produces sound…what more do I need? Whereas the clarity of a new video card’s higher resolutions or the speed of a new processor are easy to appreciate, the subtleties of a different sound are harder to quantify to a tone-deaf musical ignoramus like me.

Nonetheless, upgrade time has come again and a shiny new Audigy 2 ZS has kicked the SBLive out and down the hand-me-down chain into the server box. The reasons are somewhat more practical than audible, though: the old SB16 in the server box was simply annoying the hell out of me.
Continue reading “The New Sound”

Not You Again

InstallShield rears its ugly head once again. There’s a new version of one of our products, so of course I have to go back and update all the version numbers, filenames, etc…

That’s easy enough, except that when I went to save all the changes and export them back to text files for source control, I got the dreaded “87: Error in exporting tables” message. I had run into this error on Server 2003, but everything had been fine when I did changes under XP. Except that apparently XP SP2 broke InstallShield 8. Sigh…

Fortunately there’s a workaround using a tool called ORCA from Microsoft. All I had to do was load the InstallShield project in ORCA, delete a table that’s causing the problem, and resave the project. Except that when I tried to select the table, ORCA crashed…

AAAAAAUGGGHHH.