June 2004 Archives

Well, its Tour de France time and the fever over here is high. Lots of bikers hanging out here. Here are some great places to look by google pagerank:

• Official TdF site. The official site. Wow, it all begins this Saturday if you can believe it! This site is great for the official results.
• Internet TdF. Sort of like fantasy baseball, predict who you think will win.
• Tour de France 2004. Got to pump the blog version of the news. A good example of how blogging fits events like this well. Note the use of both google ads and blogads as well. It's amazing that this is essentially now the #3 site above Velonews and other well known sites. The power of blogging strikes!
• Velonews. Great coverage from Velonews and format similar to the official TdF site.
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Fountain pump - Little giant model 369 - free shipping. OK, here's the power of the Internet for you. My Dad's fountain pump broke and it is one google query to find this site that has about every pump in the world.

Took a basic navigation class today and realized I'm under gadgeted on marine hardware, so here's an update:

• GPS Receiver Information, Software, and Hardware Reviews of Garmin, Lowrance, Magellan and other GPS Receivers. This is the most amazing site. I used it two years ago to pick a Magellan Sportrak Pro. Its still a very nice unit.
• Magellan Mapsend Direct Route. While it probably has the worse name in history for a product. This turns an existing Magellan GPS into a turn-by-turn car navigation unit. Pretty cool.
• Magellan Mapsend BlueNav. This is the marine software that you can load. Has chart data and tide information as well.

So where do you buy these goodies:

• Pricegrabber shows that Thenerds.net and Computers4sure carry it. There is also a host of speciality GPS "store':http://gpsinformation.net/bannerroll.htm on the net tha tyou can look at. Can't vouch for them. Although TigerGPS has a high page rank.

Magical Jelly Bean Software - Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder v1.41. A nifty utility that tells the current Windows XP product key. Useful when trying to diagnose things.

Quite a lot happening on the PC front. Intel announced their new 775 pin socket, new chipsets and new Pentium 3.6GHz. The amazing thing is that with all that technology, it ain't faster than the current generation or the Athlon 64 in many cases. That's amazing.

AMD also announced their new 939-socket family. Some slight performance improvement in the 2-5% range for the new socket. They now have dual channel ram but that doesn't seem to help much. The pricing is about the same and they did announce new 3500+ and 3800 Athlon 64s that are much faster and much pricier.

But, getting the new X800 Pro really helps. As the Motherboards.org - Video Card: Gigabyte X800 Pro Review

Scenario Walkthroughs. Alex is loving Zoo Tycoon. Its actually a hard game with lots of math required. Here are some scenario walkthroughs to help get through a game.

Lazy Man's Guide to Ogg Media (OGM Files). I've been encoding movies into the Ogg Media format (OGM). This has Xvid for the video coding and Ogg Vorbis for the audio.

A great guide.

Lookout email search for Microsoft Outlook - Lookout Software. Outlook is definitely becoming a platform. Thank goodness the object model is finally decent. This utility lets you do a google like search across all your mail.

OK, here are folks doing activations online.

• Amazon. Their big cellular store. They have incredible discounts as well because of their scale.
• Let's Talk. These guys are no. 3 google hit when you search for "cell phone" I've used them before.
• Point. The one that I use quite a bit as well. Another big provider. In Maryland.
• Karbon. They sell lots of Blackberrys. Robert Karbon is a great guy. He knows us as he was in the developer programs for Microsoft for quite a long time. A good example of someone doing speciality distribution, even small cell phone resellers can deal with activations and discounts now.

Search Amazon.com Cell Phones

textism: Refer Spamming. If I ever reinstall referrer lists, I'd use Dean's stuff plus the patch that eliminates spammers bots from Eric Goldberg.

Tom's Hardware Guide PCs & HowTo: THG's 15-Case Power Tower Round-Up - Lian Li PC-V1000: Innovative Interior. A really cool mid-tower case with an innovative design. Nice addition for that new computer I'd love to get :-)

:: w.bloggar FAQ ::. Once again, trying to figure out how to have a good too for offline blogging on the Mac since SharpMT and w.bloggar and zempt (my favorites on Windows depending on the day) don't run there.

Here are some solutions from w.bloggar:

• iBlog.
• BlogApp

I tried this thing Ecto, but on 10.2.8 had a bunch of crashes.

Tom's Hardware Guide Displays: LCD Comparison: 17" & 19" Under 20ms - Samsung SyncMaster 193P. Kind of the cutting edge right now is the new Samsung 193P. Looks good and is fast for games as well.

Now that my knee is better, time to start thinking about a great mountain bike. Some things have changed, but here's a quick review of bikes I've looked at:

• Intense Spyder XVP Reviews, Specs and Shopping. The Intense Spyder has gotten incredible reviews. Main issue though is wearing out bearings. Many complaints on mtbreview.com of bearings dying. Not good.
• Santa Cruz Blur. Super popular bike. Has that virtual pivot point that's been so talked about. A trail bike (not a cross country racer like the Intense). So its not really light, but has a great ride.
• Specialized Epic Comp. A couple of different lines of Epics, but this one is just $2K (the Intense is $2K for the frame alone!). The cool one to get is the S-Works Epic.
• Intense 5.5 EVP. The 2 pound heavier but has 2 inches more travel version of the Spyder. No bearing problems reported so far.

Here's a list of key components. Again, its an update since 2003 when I last look at this:

• Progressive Fifth Element. Folks seem to like the performance on mtbr.com, but aren't sure about its reliability. Unclear what is going on, but some complaints about seals blowing and losing air. Folks really don't like hte Air version though. Even though it is lighter, seems to have great realiability problems. Seems that the valve core is weak, so when you try to pump the shock up, you blow it.
• Manitou Swinger SPV. Similar to the Progressive, this has a progressive release. It's the Progressive design, but lighter. There are two versions a three-way which is lighter for cross-country mainly (275 grams) and a 4-way which is heavier duty and which you can even use for freeriding.

Tom's Hardware and Anandtech both report on the new socket 939 newcastle core chips shipping. Here's a summary of performance:

• The Athlon64 3500+ at 2.2 GHz and 512 kB L2 cache probably is the most attractive new processor. With an initial price of around $500, it is more expensive than the Pentium 4 at 3.4 GHz. In exchange, it will beat Intel's top-of-the-line model in the majority of gaming and multimedia benchmarks except for video encoding.
• Anandtech socket comparison. We did not expect large improvements in performance as Athlon 64 moved from 754 to 939. Since we have found the performance of the Dual-Channel Socket 940 and the Single-Channel 754 to be close when they ran the same speed with the same cache, it was already clear the Athlon 64 was not an architecture that was starved for memory bandwidth like the 'deep-pipes' Pentium 4 design. When P4 went dual-channel the performance improvement was dramatic. Athlon 64 shows more modest increases in performance, but that performance increase is still real and measurable with the 754 1-5% slower than 939 depending on benchmark.
• Athlon 2600+ Coming. AMD will introduce a 1.6GHz part at some point soon. If its based on the latest CG stepping, it could overclock to 2.4-2.5GHz and be a great overclocking buy.
• Xbitlabs Comparison. Echoes the results of the Anandtech review. Also points out that you have to be careful about getting memory that works in the "1T" configuration. The requirements are pretty specific. Its a big deal in that it increase memory bandwidth by 25% if you get the right memory modules. Overclocking is low for the 3500+ and 3800+ (2.2 and 2.4GHz respectively), with the new CG stepping, clock rate tops out at about 2.5GHz
• Right Memory, Right Motherboard for socket 754. Exhaustive test of many motherboards and many memory chips for Athlon 64. It shows a complex table of compatibility. You do have to be careful in choosing a board that lets you run double-sided DDR memory. The MSI K8N Neo did particularly well and is a new nForce3 250 Gb chipset so has all the latest features.

Net, net, there aren't great performance differences between the 754 and 939, so it comes down to pricing. Interesting to see how much the cheaper 2800+ can overclock to on the 754.

At retail, newegg.com athlon 64 list show the new Athlon 64s in the Socket 939 are finally here. Here are some prices from newegg that show you get about 5% performance increase going from a $404 3400+ to a 480 3500+. Not great, but a big deal for gamers I guess.

Right now, I'd say at these price levels, the 754 probably remains a good deal particularly the 3200+ overclocked to 2.4GHz, but that should change post introduction pricing.

As you can see based on this, the old Clawhammer (original Athlon 64) cores don't look too bad in price. There is a real premium for the 2.4 GHz versions. Reports are that you can overclock the Clawhammer 2.0 GHz up to 2.4 GHz, but not sure yet whether the new Newcastles can overclock even more. In any case at these prices, more of enthusiast line for now.

Not clear when Motherboards for 939s ship are in stock either.