Manipulators
To really try harder to append to this blog.
I have some things to say, I just can’t guarantee they’d actually be interesting. At this point, right now, I have to eat breakfast… so I will try to come back and write about magnificent ideas that also cannot be fully realized due to some shortsightedness or other limitations.
Such as: The Shuffle Shuffle.
Yeah… you’ll see it here first…. all I have to do is follow up on this article.
So I was reading about the Sony XL1 Vaio HTPC system and my mind started to fill up with ideas for the IEEE-1394 200 disc changer DVD+-RW burner. Well, that and lamentations for Sony’s amazing lack of vision beyond the narrow compartments they segregate everything into…
The very first thoughts were why in the world didn’t Sony go all out, and have the XL1 system configurable on the web so one could make it the ultimate base for high-end home theater/gaming… the ability to buy it with over 1TB of HD space, extra tuners, additional changers, a better gaming graphics card… even at $3k – $4k it’d be more capable and half the price of things out in the high-end market…
But then the IT guy in me started thinking about the possibilities of automated burning of 900GB (DVD-R) to 1.7TB (DVD+R DL) on a format everybody already has the hardware to read…
In the VFX/Entertainment world the clients often want all the data from their project once it completes (probably common to other industries as well…) but they never have the same backup tape infrastructure and it seems wasteful (and not entirely reliable) to permanently use an external hard drive for that kind of thing. But with the right software a system based on a 200 disk DVD+-RW changer could really be something.
All it needs is for Sony (or somebody else) to sell the changer or a similar one plus some fairly simple software that optimizes the files to fit as much as possible on each disk then catalogs the location of each file and burns that database plus basic software to read the database onto a CD-R when the set is complete (actually I think Roxio or somebody like that already pretty much has this software). Or you could go a little more complex and write the data in such a way that you keep data parity, so if a disk is unreadable down the road you’re still covered (though in this case you’d have to use the software for the restore itself). Another thing the software could be used for is compression, at the low-end the tape backup formats assume 50% compression rates, so that’s “up to 3.4TB”! (That’s on DVD+R DL disks, per disk price doesn’t sound as bad now, does it?) Or, since we’re starting with Sony hardware we can use their pie-in-the-sky AIT assumptions “up to 5.1TB”!!
So for $80 (200 X $0.40) you’d have a 900GB (/1.8TB/2.7TB) archive on DVD-R disks, that’s about the price of a single 160-200GB (native) SDLT or LTO cartridge, but everybody could read the archive with hardware they’ve already got. Also seems like this kind of thing would be a great solution for Sarbanes-Oxley requirements…
The only thing it could use, other then the software, is maybe a way to automatically LightScribe (normally a technology I don’t care for, but perfect for this) the disks so they come out labeled.
Why doesn’t this exist already? Or does it (just jacked up in price beyond all reason)? The pieces are out there, somebody just needs to polish the interface, package it all up nicely and let the market know it’s available.
ifconfig is the magic way to get some ipconfig-like info such as addresses, but you have to send messages to the DHCP client daemon to release/renew/etc… dhcpcd
And a program called Cygwin for the PC would allow it to accept an Xwindows forward.
I don’t yet know what the hell is wrong with my dual 600. The ram passed both RST and memtest86, FC4 installed fine again from a new DVD which passed mediacheck… and crashed as soon as it started up after install. Gotta check CPU fans, maybe update the BIOS and try a beefier power supply…
But the two to four minutes I used Fedora Core 4 I liked it! Grr…
Eventually Bit Torrent sped up some and I finished getting Core 4, but it still took most of the day…
Installed it, and it seemed to run faster plus up2date worked.
Didn’t try nvidia drivers yet. In fact I’m having trouble finding the graphical control panel that told me the IP of eth0 or the one that let me pick which generic graphics card I’m using, in KDE at least.
Was still looking when it crashed… I may have some bad RAM (came up w/half the amount on reset… grr… not too surprising given it’s scrounged RAM from at least 3 different vendors, though it worked fine in Win2k and the last Linux install…). Even with my driver fiddling that was the first I’d seen a crash, especially a hard-lock.
I’ll play with it more tomorrow. Sleep now, though Ram Stress Test (I should probably switch to memX86 or whatever it’s called) will probably wake me up beeping the PC speaker in the next room to tell me stick #3 has problems…
So I think I’m actually making some progress, currently using Fedora Core 4 test 2. Yesterday I connected through RDP to my XP laptop then SSHed back to the Linux box… pretty cool. Eventually I want to figure out how to either have the Linux box serve an RDP session or better yet access an Xforward session from the PC and do it the other way around, all graphical.
My desire for graphical interfaces is of course something of a problem, everything in Linux is console based and installing things makes one wonder… how’d this OS ever get off the ground?
With some help from Google I used YUM to update Firefox, but I’ve thus far failed entirely to switch to the nvidia graphics drivers. Downloaded them, read the file, a bit mystified as to how I’m supposed to quit Xserve… changed the runlevel to 3 which closes X but… no console underneath, just the status from boot showing which services passed loading… grr. Did it through SSH with the box still in run level 3, even edited the X config file as instructed in the nVidia readme, then X can’t start (at least it makes a new config file after a couple failed loads).
So these are the questions I have so far:
1) Shouldn’t a dual PIII 600 with 1GB of RAM run well? It’s not molasses but it’s certainly not snappy… there’s lag before running even the simplest utils in either gnome or KDE. How much would the nvidia drivers help with that?
2) How do a I get a shell in runlevel 3 (or less)? I do get one eventually in the ‘X failed to run’ mode, but when I just change runlevel all I get is the screen about the services loaded.
3) How many things aren’t working because I’m using this test release? I figured a ‘test 2′ or 3 would be equivalent to an MS RC2, but maybe it’s not even as well tested as an MS Beta2…? Is this the reason that the nvidia driver will not install or that up2date seems entirely useless? (Yum will connect, and I used it to update YUM and up2date, but up2date still won’t connect.)
4) How does one at least find out (or maybe go as far as setting) the IP address in the command line? I tried netstat, but if it does tell you IPs it doesn’t tell you DHCP assigned ones that I can find. Basically looking for the equiv. of ipconfig /all
And one final, not entirely Linux question, WTF is the point of BitTorrent when it’s only downloading the test 3 DVD .iso at 5 to 75 Kb/s??
–Update: Working on downloading the full Fedora Core 4 which was released today (Fedora keeps their release scheduals…), but BitTorrent’s even less impressive on a 5Mb/5Mb dedicated fiber line… So far: nada.
So, this H.264 (ADV) codec kicks much butt. Unfortunately, top-end computers can barely play the coveted 1920×1080 resolution movies that this codec wants us to push. ATI is putting H.264 accelleration on their newer graphics cards. This rules. http://news.designtechnica.com/article7543.html
Mitsubishi (and others, I’m sure), is making a “pocket projector.” A tiny video projector, good for creating a 10-15 inch image–using LEDs. They aren’t sure what the market might be for these, but this is the kind of thing that needs to be released, and people will flock to it. Or–my brain came up with this idea–a semi-portable gaming system that has the projector built into it as part of the console.
A while ago I bought a Colorvision Spyder2Pro and I even recommended it to several people. It had dual monitor support (finally) and while time consuming seemed to produce consistent results.
The other day I was calibrating a dual monitor setup and one of the two came out distinctly blue. I tried several passes, updating drivers, etc, same thing. Contacted Colorvision and they said ” Windows does not support duel [sic] monitor calibration using duelhead [sic] video cards two separate cards are required.” I pointed out that it worked fine before, that their ‘profile chooser’ software seems made to deal with any Windows problems with that setup, and that in the right mode the nVidia drivers treat the monitors separately, didn’t get a reply. So I tried single monitor mode as well…
And I noticed something interesting… of three NEC FE991SB monitors (the most expensive 19″ one could buy at Fry’s for a while) two came out obviously blue, one comes out normal. Far more interesting though is that the Spyder2Pro gives no indication that anything is wrong with the calibration of the blue ones.
Contacting Colorvision again, their wonder “support” tells me to try the latest driver (I’d of course included in my initial email that I’d already upgraded to the latest drivers) and that “Should this not work the product can be returned to place of purchase for a refund.”. Keeping in mind I bought it maybe six months ago that seems rather incorrect, but more importantly, does any part of this exchange sound correct for a product that has “Pro” in the name?
Further, almost all modern multi-monitor pro workstation setups are driving both monitors off the same card, even in SLI… so not only is calling it Pro a red herring, so are the pictures of it being used with dual monitors in any modern setup.
Assuming I’m not getting any better support from Colorvision, what’s a good resource to find out more about color calibration and what are my options?
I know many places still use Minolta color meters, but my concern there is that you connect the monitor to the color meter, so there’s no way to check that nothing is being overlaid on the output (or that the output is right in the first place) and that it doesn’t really make dual monitors ‘match’ (which the Colorvision *used* to) and that never inspires confidence that things are right, plus they don’t provide any useful way to set brightness/contrast to a standard.
Here’s a copy of what I just sent to Apple about some complaints with Tiger 10.4. Nothing too major, and I didn’t go full-geek on this. More of a “Layman+” approach.
3 things I’ve noticed that aren’t working correctly.
1)Once in a while, the OS asks me to identify the keyboard I am using. I try to go through the process with my Apple Wireless, but it reports that this is the wrong keyboard (the attached keyboard rather than the one it wants me to identify–which it’s not the attached keyboard), and then the App hangs until I Cmd-Q it.
2) Syncing my address book with .Mac doesn’t work.
3) DNG support is really cool! But…DNGs created from my camera’s output do not work. I have an Olympus E20, and I convert the files via Adobe’s DNG Converter. Also, iPhoto DESPERATELY needs to share this DNG support.