These last days I’ve seen quite a few articles on the ‘net mentioning MySpace’s recent “Data Availability” program which will make them share data with, among others, Yahoo and Twitter. This revelation is often mentioned alongside DataPortability, a framework for combining information from different social networking sites. I’m all for solutions like this; I love the thought of having data being accessible from everywhere (as long as it’s in a controlled manner). Not that I see much point in it, myself - I can easily add what’s needed manually to the few social networking sites I’m active on. But I love the idea.
One problem is that this is yet another attempt at creating an open standard that can be used by anyone and everyone. I’m sure that DataPortability thinks that it’s special and unique and brings something new into the disarrayed online world…but I’m also sure that OpenSocial feels the same way, just as FriendFeed and who knows how many others. Looking at DataPortability’s FAQ page it seems that they are aware of the problem of constantly re-inventing new standards; they want to use existing standards effectively instead. …But in a controlled manner. According to their recommendations. …Which sounds like they are trying to impose a standard, after all. One good thing about DataPortability is the fact that they won’t try to make a centralized storage point for all data - unlike FriendFeed, which sounds like utter bollocks.
Anyway, good luck to all of them, and I’m not stupid enough to look a gift horse in the mouth: if DataPortability (or some other standard) becomes a wide-spread way of sharing data I’ll definitely look into how I could use it in upcoming projects. For example…Spandex Force 2. I could imagine some cool uses such as importing personal information into the game, accessing photos that can be converted into an in-game avatar pic, or sharing pictures of impressive victories. Amongst other things.
I suspect that this could even be used for cross-game character data. It’s the old utopian dream that fanboys have yearned about for years and years: imagine that you’re playing an RPG and that you’re pretty fond of Mr. Fagball (as your character might be called). Then you want to play another RPG - or even a game of a completely different genre - and you could now have the option of using Mr. Fagball in that game as well! Yayness! Of course, it would probably work like utter crap if it was implemented badly, but I could imagine that static character traits could be shared even though game-specific data isn’t.
For example, if Mr. Fagball is a character in an RPG his STR stat might be at 16. Even if this would be possible to translate into strength in a strategy game, it might be completely ludicrous - the strategy game could become totally broken. However, if the RPG game stored information about Mr. Fagball’s pot-bellied appearance, that could (possibly) be of use in the strategy game as well. Like a cross-platform Mii. Except that this sharing wouldn’t have to stop at mere appearance; if data was gathered through social sites as well, personal information could be utilized by the game in order to make an uncannily scary experience.
“Give it up, Moop-Gleez! Your evil plans are brought to an end!”
“So, Mr. Fagball… You have come to destroy me? I think not - I know your weakness! You made out with Patrick’s sister last weekend, and if you don’t throw down your sword right now I’ll e-mail him and tell!”
“NOOOOO!”
The title of this post should be taken with a truckload of salt: as far as I know there’s no way to boot a complete Linux distribution in one second. But it seems that General Software has developed a BIOS that can boot to LILO in one second - and that’s not bad at all! Basically, all the unnecessary things are skipped, such as waiting for the video card to load its firmware, detect devices, and so on. This enables the BIOS to boot incredibly quickly.
But heey… Wait a minute. If the hard disk isn’t detected yet, how can the bootloader start the OS?
Being both lazy and philosophically-minded I’ll try to speculate about the answer to that. My guess would be that all data that would be detected by a normal BIOS has to be hard-coded one way or another; the BIOS data has to be manually entered, or possibly the BIOS has a “detect everything now and then save the config” mode that’s not always run. That’s actually pretty neat…for embedded systems. It sounds completely useless for desktop environments where you change keyboards and mice and video cards and electrical pets (what?!) every now and then. But since the article mentions the medical device market, I’d wager that this isn’t a big deal for the target devices.
In fact, I wonder if this kind of optimized BIOS couldn’t be of value to a other embedded devices like home gateways and such as well.
But hey again, wait another minute or two. The slow boot times of home gateways is probably due to slow flash reading times rather than a second or two on the BIOS level. In fact, come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a BIOS on these devices. So, it seems like this optimized BIOS is only relevant to embedded devices of specific architectures - of which maybe the aforementioned medical devices belong. But what about non-embedded devices? Wouldn’t this improved BIOS be useful for desktop computers too?
Short answer: meh.
Longer answer: don’t think so.
Full answer: in all probability, optimizing the BIOS would result in minimal boot time improvements. Detecting new devices and loading the video firmware doesn’t take all that long - the biggest culprit is loading the actual OS itself.
But, and this is a big but, the article also mentions how they increase the Vista loading time from 74 seconds to 24 by adding a UDMA-capable driver to the BIOS. I don’t really see how they can group these two BIOS improvements into the same article - they seem to deal with wildly different things! Stripping the BIOS of unnecessary checks is quite different to adding a driver that increases efficiency a lot; the former isn’t very useful in most cases, but the second is incredibly useful!
And that got me thinking… The BIOS is often the bottleneck; wouldn’t it stand to reason to evolve a BIOS as much as possible to make the OS faster? If adding a UDMA driver speeds up the boot process by 300%, isn’t that the way to go for other bottlenecks as well - add improvements at the lowest level?
Oh wait. What this would end up as sounds suspiciously like a microkernel. I wonder if there’ll ever be a hybrid BIOS/microkernel.
In a PC World article today it’s mentioned that Vista still has major incompatibility problems nine months after release. Brothers’ multi-function printers don’t work correctly, it’s not possible to fax over the Internet, Photoshop CS2 won’t work - and so on. I don’t care particularly since I don’t plan on upgrading to Vista for a year anyway, but it’s still interesting information. But the most interesting thing wasn’t the article itself, but the comments it received on a Swedish magazine site which summarized the PC World article. The usual bitching and moaning occurred: “Vista is slow” (I bet it is, so don’t use it), “Use Linux instead” (no thanks), “XP is better” (agreed, actually), “Vista is still in beta” (no it’s not; it’s just badly implemented) and on and on and on.
Then, all of the sudden, comes an interesting exchange of comments:
“Apple changes architecture with less problems than MS changes Word format!”
“There’s a difference between changing architecture for 4% of the users compared to changing something for 95%. If you’re using Apple you’re stuck with Macintosh - it’s a simple task to write drivers for such a narrow range of hardware.”
“[Inane comment snippet snipped] Well, I’d rather be locked in by Apple than shut out by Microsoft.”
I found that last comment very interesting because it reflects my own view about Microsoft and Linux: I’d rather be locked in with this proprietary OS and have all the functionality and programs I need, compared to use Linux. In theory I like Linux - Open Source is appealing, Ubuntu and that ilk looks pretty nifty, I love the customizability, and so on. But for my uses Windows XP beats all and any Linux distribution hands down, because I feel shut out from Linux.
All metaphors and similes break down eventually if you examine the objects in question close enough, and so does my simile between the Apple/MS and MS/Linux situation. I’m generalizing horribly, but one could view things this way:
Mac: Small user base, small set of proprietary programs, low customizability.
Windows: Large user base, large set of proprietary programs, low customizability.
Linux: Small user base, large set of open programs, great customizability.
I can hear the outrage of Linux/Mac users. “What about stability, what about look and feel, what about this and that!” All good points, I’m sure, but since I’m trying to come to a conclusion instead of complicating things up even further I’ll disregard all of those things.
Now, looking at my small summary of the OSs, what can we observe?
First, that Mac users might have a stronger feeling of community compared to Windows users due to the smaller set of users and programs. This would be an excellent reason to feel shut out by Windows. But - to show where my simile above crashes and burns horribly - there really is no similar case between Windows and Linux. And to confuse things even further, I like Mac OS X but I feel shut out by that as well! If I extrapolate even further from these facts I eventually come to this little list:
- Mac users feel alienated from Windows.
- Windows users feel alienated from Linux.
- Windows users feel alienated from Mac.
- Mac users probably feel alienated from Linux too.
- Just as Linux users probably feel alienated from Windows and Mac.
What’s the conclusion, then? That OS debates eventually break down into territorial pissings and a case of liking what you’re used to - especially the programs you’re familiar with - so it’s bloody ridiculous to even try to be objective.
“Hey, what about all the examples of people who’ve abandoned Windows for Linux or Mac?”
If they were used to Windows and knew how to use it properly there wouldn’t be a cause for them to switch.
“But I knew this guy who had used Windows for ten years and then fell in love with Linux! Doesn’t that invalidate your comment above?”
I doubt that he used Windows properly then - I’m betting that he forced himself to use tools he didn’t like.
“Programs are irrelevant! There are always applications with equal functionality on all platforms, so anyone can cross over to a new OS without any problems.”
Use your GIMP if you like it. I don’t, though!
So there.
On a Swedish IT news site there are a few interesting headlines; one of which is that Sweden is “best” in Europe at using the Internet. (Link; beware - it’s in Swedish.) First of all, let me object to the word best. Let’s see. What constructive criticism could I conjure against that use…? Maybe…the fact that it’s complete and utter bollocks! Best is a marvellous word for quantifiable comparisons within a clearly measurable area, but in what way is Internet use a measurable area? And what exactly would “best” imply? That we’re best in Europe at finding warez? That we waste time on the Internet instead of working? That we know how to write good Google keywords? The phrase is completely ridiculous and says nothing at all.
And on the note of Google, there is another headline at the same site: Why Google is Making Us Dumber. Basically, that article insists that Googling stuff makes us dumber; for instance we no longer do conversion arithmetic by hand (or by head, rather) - instead we use Google features for those kinds of things. Well, let’s see if I remember my logic classes; I’ll try to make a modus ponens situation out of this. But I’ll leave out the predicate logic.
If P then Q, where P = “increased Google use” and Q = “getting dumber.” And I’ll introduce R = “increased Internet use” as well, and state the intuitive hypothesis that if R then P. Then we have the following:
(R -> P) AND R
-> P
(P -> Q) AND P
-> Q
Thus, Swedes are getting dumber. If you trust strange logic and strange articles you read on the ‘net, that is.
I won’t really waste any time on disputing the “Google makes you stupid” claim - it’s clearly ridiculous and a prime example of backward-thinking. The same was said when calculators were invented. “Oh no, the kids won’t learn how to do simple arithmetic anymore now that they have a machine for it.” Granted, I expect that kids today can’t do simple arithmetic, so I guess this example sucks. Still, I’m convinced that the productivity gains from automating simple tasks vastly oughtweighs the small setbacks in basic knowledge.
But wait, there’s more! I have yet another point to this little blog post. Some people might have read my little rant about coffee, in which I claimed that coffee was the cause of major wars. I received some interesting (IRL) feedback to that; most who commented on the post were confused and didn’t really see the point of it. That’s okay, ’cause I was planning on bringing up the point later - like now. In the coffee post I claimed, for example, that coffee was the cause of the War of the Golden Stool. That was complete and utter rubbish. Just as all the other coffee-related anecdotes in the post. Have you guessed the common thread through this blog entry by now? No? Okay, I’ll continue.
The post sounded confident and it was backed by enough facts to make it believable; no one really cared to question my claims since the topic was dull, but I have seen many search entries for the War of the Golden Stool that led to my site. I keep imagining that some kids have used my lies as interesting anecdotes in their schoolwork, and that a few teachers are scratching their heads in confusion right now. I hope that both those teachers and those kids have learned a valuable lesson about using things on the Internet as resources for their essays. There’s basically no guarantee that anything you read on the net is true, regardless of the imagined authenticity.
This goes for the article about Google making people dumber as well: it’s a personal opinion backed by no facts. It doesn’t matter that a major Swedish IT news portal picked it up - it’s just as much rubbish regardless of who thinks that it might be valid.
Today I browsed through various news articles and noticed that Apple are considering to incorporate more flash memory into its products. Subnotebooks will have it, and analysts speculate that the iPod brand will go cold turkey on HDDs and go for flash instead in a while. Also, Samsung have released flash hybrid HDDs. Flash seems to be mighty popular right now!
This got me thinking. It’s a well-known fact that flash memory has a limited amount of rewrites. A common number to throw around is a hundred thousand rewrites. Reading up on the issue a little shows that things aren’t really that simple… A hundred thousand rewrites seems to be a fictional number that someone conjured as a vague average: instead, what matters is the number of erase-write cycles. These number a whopping million rather than a hundred thousand; however, the mapping between erase-write cycles and rewrites isn’t that simple.
There are two types of flash memory: NOR and NAND. NOR flash memory is slow and expensive, but it has a full address interface which allows random access to any location. It’s basically comparable to normal RAM in that aspect. Apparently, it’s often used for BIOS and firmware for embedded consumer products. This type of flash was used in Compact Flash earlier, but later scrapped for the cheaper NAND. NAND also has faster erase and write times and longer endurance, and is used in most products these days. (In fact, I can’t see any reason that NOR is better for BIOSes or firmware. There’s nothing in the nature of those products that requre random access; it must be a typo in Wikipedia.) This type of flash is the one that has a million promised erase-write cycles.
But, and this is a big but: NAND only addresses memory sequentially. There’s no random access, so if you want to - say - read address 0×00ffc you have to read the entire block that contains that address…and the same goes when you want to write something down. In other words, large files will span several blocks and require several erase-write cycles. The last bit is what makes me sit up and take notice.
It’s also interesting to read what Samsung wrote a while ago:
The hybrid hard drive prototype uses 1 Gigabit OneNAND Flash as both the write buffer and boot buffer. In the hybrid write mode, the mechanical drive is spun down for the majority of the time, while data is written to the Flash write buffer. When the write buffer is filled, the rotating drive spins and the data from the write buffer is written to the hard drive.
Is it just me or does this seem rather ineffective, considering that HDDs have a relatively long lifetime - probably longer than the flash’s amount of rewrites. What happens if the flash gives in prior to the HDD? Is the write buffer required or can the hybrid HDD be used as a normal HDD after the flash has croaked? I hope the latter, but I fear that the functions are relatively hard-wired; HDD lifetime expectancy will probably drop, in other words. I know that people talk about switching all your hard drives every third year or so, but seriously, how many do that? I have hard drives that are probably older than some of you who read this. (At least the spambots; I’m sure that I have older HDDs than them.) I do not want a trend where life expectancy is dropping in favour of non-movable parts.
But then again, flash firmware have this neat thing called wear levelling:
This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors. This technique is called wear levelling.
I can only assume that similar techniques are implemented for the hybrid HDDs, and that the very nature of using the flash as a write cache rather than random access media will cause the wear to be level. Still, balancing out the wear doesn’t cover the fact that erase-write cycles are pretty limited. I wonder how many blocks are accessed per day in normal computer use; speculating about life expectancy would be much easier if I had some real numbers to mess with rather than throwing up vague ideas that “HDDs last longer than flash.”
It’s strange, really: I’ve been working with flash-based embedded systems for a while, but I never had a grasp of the hardware involved. It’s probably a good thing to read up on things now and then.
I’m sure that you have heard of Killer, the ridiculously expensive and capable new network interface card that supposedly not only can reduce your gaming ping times, but also increases the FPS of your games. At first I was highly sceptical just like everyone else, but reading up on the issue showed that Bigfoot Networks, developers of the NIC, aren’t just trying to fool stupid gamers out of their hard-earned dough. Read the FAQ on the webpage, for example; they are fully aware of the fact that the biggest culprit when it comes to latency is the Internet itself - they’re simply trying to lower the local host OS’s delays. Oh, and the IGN review shows that it indeed provides some positive effects.
When I first saw the card I scoffed and harumffed and did all kinds of weird noises, but thinking about it, it does make sense in a strange way. The normal procedure for network traffic is (quite simplified) that an application sends data over a socket, which transports the data to the OS’s network stack, which in turns connects to a device driver that in turn exchanges signals with the port, and finally sends some data. The NIC card then receives this data, and handles to low-and-dirty layer 1 and layer 2 Ethernet details. Or something along those lines. Layer 2 (MAC address level) might be handled in the device driver instead.
The Killer card - which I incidentally feel like calling the Killer kard in a Mortal Kombat-like bout of silliness - instead has a massive 400 MHz CPU, runs Linux, and actually replaces the device drivers of your OS to something especially designed to work faster with Killer. I assume that the card also has a simple priority queue which prioritizes connectionless (UDP) traffic, which is what is used by games most of the time.
“But what about lowering the FPS,” you ask. Well, at least I did. This also makes sense, given that the main game loop waits for the sockets. If the device driver can respond faster, the control might be passed back to the game quicker - I guess. Somehow this feels like a stupid explanation, though. And wouldn’t that be taken care of by a separate thread for the network handling, these days when multi-core CPUs are all the rage? Anyway, IGN’s results seem to indicate that the FPS does increase a smidgen.
All in all, I think that this might be a decent toy for rich kids who must increase their performance by all means. But it’s mostly useless for all other kinds of network traffic, in my opinion.
However, something that struck me was the fact that the Killer card can run applications of its own. An example of this is a bittorrent client that downloads files to an external hard disk connected to the Killer card’s USB port. Yes, it has a USB port as well. This example sounds like a completely useless idea to me. But something that’s all the rage now is all the talk of physics in games; couldn’t the Killer card’s CPU be put to use for physics calculations? Sure, it’s just 400 MHz, but I’m sure that general non-critical calculations could be performed autonomously from the rest of the game.
And couldn’t this extra CPU be used for other activities as well? In fact, there seems to be external CPUs in many plug-in cards these days: graphics cards, physics cards, network cards, maybe sound cards. If there could be a standardized way for using external CPUs, I’m sure that most demanding applications could receive quite a boost - without the hassle of proprietary solutions. A generalized API for utilizing external CPUs. Too bad that it’ll never happen.
Bitter and stressed after a semi-busy work week I get home and check my paycheck specification. Praise the Lord: my expenses from the recent London trip will get paid back this month. In other words, I’m stinking filthy rich for a while (compared to my usual self which mostly just encompasses two of those three).
Now, what to do with my newfound fortune? Find some well-deserving charities? Travel around the world? Buy prostitutes and beer? Nope, none of that. My plan is as follows:
- Buy a new computer.
- Take a weekend cruise to Finland.
- Finally get a vacation; I’m thinking of going to Egypt or Cyprus for a week. If I go to Egypt I’ll make sure to visit Spitfire Bar. Apparently, this bar is the inspiration for Pratchett’s Broken/Mended Drum in the Discworld series. I tried to explain my fascination with this old soldier bar to some friends of mine. The bastards just stared blankly at me when I accidentally said something along the lines of: “Just imagine! You enter this run-down solder-infested hellhole… Everywhere around you are tough-as-nails soldiers.” I might have said something about bulging muscles as well. They kindly suggested that this might have some Freudian undertones, and that my closet door isn’t completely shut. Bah!
Anyway, I’m ridiculously enthusiastic about point number one. I seriously feel excited at the thought of buying some new hardware, putting it together, installing a dual-boot XP/Vista machine, trying out new games and applications and whatnot, and so on. In fact - this may sound a bit kinky - I think that the excitement is similar to sexual arousal. No, not physical arousal. I don’t experience anything protuberating in the lower abdominal area, of course. But the desire for new computer components is a bit disturbing, and probably matches the expectations of bedding a lass in intensity.
This reminds me of an amusing anecdote back when I was living in a “student corridor.” (If you’re wondering why I don’t say dorm, it’s…well…because it’s not a dorm room. A student room here isn’t located on campus, for one thing, and it’s a complete 20 square meter flat with a shower and bathroom of its own. There’s a kitchen-and-TV-area which is shared by eight students in a corridor, though.) I was waiting for a delivery of new hardware; I think it was a graphics card (Geforce 2 MX) and a harddrive. My neighbour was also expecting new hardware, and we happened to receive our packages the very same day. Giddy like schoolboys (which we technically were), we skipped up the stairs to our corridor, grinning like morons all the time. This neighbour had a girl over, and she sighed at the sight of us:
“Computer nerds! Here’s a cute girl, but all you care about is your new toys! Do you really have your priorities straight?”
Of course we gave her sharp glances and told her to shut up - the computer components might have gotten upset otherwise. We cradled the hardware comfortingly for fifteen minutes anyway, just to be sure.
And now I’m thinking of going through this time of excitement again. This is the preliminary list of what I’m getting:
- Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13 GHz. It’s not the best performance money can buy, but I think it’s pretty decent for the money.
- Asus P5B motherboard. I like Asus, and this one has pretty much everything I could need except for firewire. But I really don’t have anything using firewire right now.
- 2 GB of PC6400 DDR2 RAM.
- MSI GeForce 7900GT Passive Cooling 256Mb. There are more impressive graphics cards available, but I’m fond of the idea of passive cooling on a pretty-high-end card.
- Antec Case Perfomance One P180B. Looks pretty okay, and apparently it has good cooling capabilities. Might be useful with a passive graphics card.
- Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum. Most motherboards have built-in audio, but the latency for MIDI keyboards is horrible, and they’re just 16 bit (I think). This one comes with a remote as well!
And the rest of the small stuff that aren’t quite as important. Now, I’m sure someone started to wonder why I’m just getting good stuff instead of the best if I’m - to quote myself - stinky filthy rich. Well, I lied about that last part. I can afford this, but if I spend any more I’ll have to eat gruel for a month…or cut down on my alcohol consumption. Not gonna happen.
Considering the items above and with a budget along those lines: do you think that this is a decent computer setup? Can you suggest any alternative components? The things I’m most concerned with are the three Ps: price, performance and pnoise.
Yesterday I was reading up a bit on what I’ve missed these last few weeks when I’ve been preoccupied; this included some blogs, some news sites, some forums and so on. I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing particularly exciting happens when I’m away. Anyway, one amusing thing I found was a thread on the Indiegamer forums: in short I can sum it up with “people generally don’t care about what you say unless they know you, or if you offer some evidence that your experiences matter.” This got me thinking about one of the main ideas of this li’l blog o’mine: I gladly flaunt my ideas and my opinions, but I want to keep my professional life completely separate from the blog.
Of course some things are apparent: I work with software development; I have an interest in WLAN technology; I do some low-level programming. And so on. But the rest ought to remain secret. Why?
One possible answer could be that I don’t want my employers to read my musings. That’s one of the things brought up in this meta-blog entry named Blogging Vs. Your Career. The blog mentions a lot more, and goes on to quote a list of dos and don’ts from Intuit’s Scott K. Wilder. Some of these are rather amusing - for example:
Do not post anything you would be embarrassed to see on the front page of the Wall Street Journal
Well. I honestly can’t say that I’ve seen all that many blog posts that look like they belong in the Wall Street Journal. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of blogs have nothing to do in a printed paper - because they’re written by laymen for laymen, and most of the time also by subjective laymen for bored laymen looking for a way to waste five minutes. That’s why we have this wonderful brand of people called journalists who write the printed articles instead.
Anyhoo, the reason I found the blog entry at all was through this blog that I saw on Technorati. I really don’t know what to make of aforementioned blog entry. This Dan Farber kindly quotes the Your Career post…but offers no additional information. No comments; no opinions; nothing more than a brief summary.
Why? Why did he post it at all? In theory, this post o’mine contains nothing new either - it’s all a rehash of other people’s thoughts covered with my generic opinions. But I make an attempt to have an opinion at least. What the hell? A blog entry that consists of 80% (give or take 20%) quotes from another one? I don’t get this compulsive repetition.
But I digress. To sum things up: no, I don’t keep quiet of my work details because of any fear of my employers; I’m relatively confident that I can stand for everything I write. There’s a much greater risk at stake: something that’s also mentioned in the list of dos and don’ts:
Do not post confidential client data
It’s not like I work for the NSA or anything, but I’d feel horrible if I accidentally posted confidential information that led to any kind of problem. And that’s way easier done than one can imagine. A nurse in Sweden recently posted about a patient on an online forum. Of course she tried to make him anonymous: she didn’t mention any names and so on. But the age, the location and the disease was enough for another forum member to guess who it was - which in turn led to a whole truckful of excrement for the nurse in question, once this leak of confidential data was brought to the hospital’s knowledge.
A year ago I accidentally gave out classified information to one person; I’ll be damned if I make the same mistake twice - and on a public blog for that matter!
I just recalled that Windows 98 and Me are no longer supported by Microsoft. This reminded me of my media PC troubles I had recently. What I wanted was a small and good-looking PC that should be able to stream movie files and music to the TV. I guess the easy way would have been to buy a fully-fledged media PC somewhere. That would probably have been the smart choice as well - just buy the machine and get everything pre-installed. Too bad that I’ve never been smart.
Instead, I searched long and hard for nice components; I looked at chassis for weeks, and internal components for twice as long. “Should it be big enough to support PCI cards? Should I go for a Pentium M?” And on and on. I finally decided on this particular configuration:
- VIA EPIA MII Mini-ITX motherboard. This is a damn sexy piece of equipment: it has a 1 GHz CPU, built-in graphic card with MPEG2 decoding and TV-out, built-in audio, a PCI slot, and a PCMCIA slot.
- Silverstone LC-06. Another sexy thing; I love the sleek look of this case. It’s an ITX case that has room for a 3.5″ hard drive and a full-size DVD-ROM. Yay! No need to go for expensive ones.
- Logitech LX7 Cordless Optical Mouse. I don’t want more remotes, and a mouse is much better, in my opinion. This mouse looks damn nice as well, so I don’t mind having it on my living room table.
- In addition to this, I was planning to have a 3,5″ HD, PCMCIA WLAN card and a DVD-ROM.
Things didn’t really proceed as planned. First of all, I had an old Netgear WG111 WLAN USB dongle, so I used that one instead; it’s supported by almost every operating system known to man. Secondly, after assembing everything, I noticed that the EPIA’s CPU fan wasn’t as quiet as I’d hoped. No bother, but still not quiet. This made me reconsider the HD, and I started looking for alternatives.
Booting everything off a Compact Flash card seemed like a better idea! I got myself a 1 GB Compact Flash chip and a cheap CF -> IDE converter that supported boot, and I thought I was cooking. Turns out that this adapter is designed to plug straight into the IDE slot. Do you think that there was room for that in the LC-06 case? Hell no. And have you ever tried to find an extension IDE cable? I know that there are places in the US that sell these, but they are completely unavailable in Sweden! Seriously. Impossible to get. I ended up having to make one myself with some help from the hardware-oriented people at work.
Now comes the troublesome part. In my tests with the HD I had used Windows XP SP2 together with the Media Portal media portal and Media Player Classic. I loved the GUI and it worked like a charm. But lo and behold! Since I only had 1 GB of flash, I couldn’t install Windows XP on it. I read about a way to do it anyway: first installing it to a HD, shrinking the installation to ~800 MB, making the HD partition 1 GB large, and then cloning it to the Compact Flash. I’m sure that this is possible in theory, but if you feel like trying this yourself: don’t bother. You might get it to work, but I failed after many long hours of trying to get the cloned flash installation to boot up properly. It seems to depend way too much on what kind of IDE adapter you have, and similar things. Make sure you buy at least 2 GB of flash, and install the OS directly to the flash instead.
So, I couldn’t use Windows XP. And guess what? Media Portal demands Windows XP. For fun, I installed Windows 98 and got it up and running. (This is where this blog entry’s first line starts to get relevant!) It worked like it should; but what I had forgotten was that “like it should” is a relative term, and Windows 98 is very aged today! It may have been my Netgear dongle, but the OS crashed and lost the connection and everything sucked worse than a Thai hooker! Totally unacceptable; after this I have complete understanding for Microsoft’s dropping Windows 98 support.
I started looking around for alternatives to Media Portal and Windows XP, and GeeXBoX looked extremely promising. A minimal Linux distribution with a complete media player, a great interface and whatnot. It looked marvellous, and worked well - except for the fact that there is no mouse support. I really don’t want a remote, so this was right out. I tried a couple of other distributions using MythTV, but not a single one of these could be installed on just 1 GB. Huh? I thought Linux was supposed to be small and compact and all that. This just gives more fuel to my opinion that Linux stuff all too often is bloated due to all the dependencies.
Well, of course the same is true for Windows programs. Media Portal requires .NET and all kinds of stuff.
Anyway, I ended up installing Windows 2000 on the Compact Flash; it’s a nice middle road, and it’s stable enough. I do miss Media Portal, but I’m sure that I’ll find another good media portal project sooner or later - or maybe I’ll get a 2 or 4 GB Compact Flash card. In the mean time I’ll probably write my own lightweight interface - at heart I am a DIY guy after all!
