Mac Rumors“Magic”:http://www.wizards.com/magic/ has become Alex’s favorite game. I have to say, I can see why, it certainly is addicting. The fact there are so many different decks means that the games are really totally different. Pretty different from other games where they get to be more or less the same. Right now he’s a magician with the Storm Deck, but I see now there’s a site to learn more like “Londes”:http://www.londes.com/ for instance!
Cool!
Calvin’s latest stumper while playing hangman. I was totally stumped by the Kaboom word. Grace does a nice imitation of Dad’s groans as he tries to get 120 degrees of flexion.
StorageReview.com – Tiki. Now that I’ve got my hard drives lined up, I’m curious how to measure performance. For instance if I go to RAID-0, is it really worth the trouble.
The StorageReview.com FAQ at least tells you some benchmarks to avoid. Most are not great, surprising given the impact of disk on performance. Best freeware one is “h2benchw”:ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/ctsi/h2benchw.zip from c’t magazine apparently.
Well, in the last six months, I’ve lost the power supply of all three pieces of network equipment. Not their fault, but a good reminder of where the vulnerabilities are in today’s equipment. Someone at Google told me that their top two failure spots were power supplies and hard drives.
The other sad thing is that with computer component prices the way they are, it doesn’t make economic sense to replace a power supply. For instance, I have two 8-port Netgear FS-108 switches (they’ve been great), both have 5 volt 3 amp power supplies. The problem is that supplies cost $20 from Netgear and you can get a brand new box for about $40. So, what’s the sense.
Also lost the supply on my original Linksys BEF41 router. Caused it to suddenly hang. Another case, where another router is cheaper than finding a supply.
Only hope I have now is that new network equipment I’ve bought draws much less power. The new D-Link 624 and the Linksys routers for instance draw less than 1 amp (compared with 3 amps), so hopefully the supplies are less stressed also they should be cheaper to replace with a Radio Shack equivalent.
Well, I finally got my Onkyo TX-DS989 back from the shop. I shorted out the speaker cables and blew the amplifier sky high. Had to go back to the authorized service center. Anyway, to prevent this in the future, I’m using banana plugs for all my speaker cables. They won’t then just short randomly as I can lock these in. I do lose my bi-wiring as a result unless I can find banana cable y-connectors. That is, something that is a single plug on one side and two recepticles on the other. Pretty hard to find, but searching google, did find some great places to get odd cable bits:
* “Home Grown Cable”:http://www.homegrownaudio.com/index.html. These guys remind me of BetterCables before they got really big. They sell Do-it-yourself banana plugs, but no banana recepticles.
* “Radio Shack”:http://www.radioshack.com/search.asp?cookie%5Ftest=1&find=banana&SRC=1&image1.x=0&image1.y=0. It’s amazing how these guys have survived. Here are all their banana plug accessories. One cool thing they do is real-time inventory into their stores. So, you can see if you want some strange connector that such and such a location has it in stock. They have one model for “stackable”:http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=CTLG&product%5Fid=274-734 hookups and another “dual”:http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=CTLG&product%5Fid=278-308 set that might work as well.
* “Audio Gear”:http://www.audiogear.com/Audio-Adapters-Banana-Plugs.html. They have nearly every type of connector to any other connector known to man. Just no banana to two banana’s. They do have stackable banana connectors though, so you can take a bare wire, put it into the connector and then put another banana over on the top of it.
Well, we were looking at the macro figures on computer investment and so forth. The Bureau of Economic Analysis has a completely open website for reviewing this, here are some amazing things we found:
* “Computer Expenditures”:www.bea.gov/bea/dn/comp-gdp.XLS . They actually pull on in Excel format, the Excel format no less all kinds of measures of computer sales by personal consumption, private fixed investment, government spending and then of course what goes out as imports and what comes in as an import into the system.
* “Chained Dollars”:http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2000/ref_quality_adj_2742.html. There is a very complicated thing that they do that make the numbers hard to understand. They apply something called QAM (quality adjustment measurement) to these numbers. So, if some spends 10% for a computer that is 10% faster, then they say there hasn’t been any inflation. This is how they are adjusting to constant dollars (the so called chained 2000 dollars). This factor with computers is amazingly high. So using nominal dollars is probably the right way to look at things. Does say that inflation is understated and production is overstated for computers because they imput gigantic price declines (that is the assumption is that in 1980, people would have wanted to buy a mainframe, but in 2000, they would buy a PC, so price has fallen a ton, when in reality no one could have afforded a $1M mainframe).
* “Capacity Utliization”:
* “Acronyms”:http://www.acronymfinder.com/. There are boatload of acronyms in all the BEA data. Acronum Finder is a great way to figure out SAAR means Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate
OK, my favorite quote from Sun Tzu and the right summary for a marketing playbook in his “conclusion”:http://www.sonshi.com/sun3.html
Generally in warfare:
If ten times the enemy’s strength, surround them;
if five times, attack them;
if double, divide them;
if equal, be able to fight them;
if fewer, be able to evade them;
if weaker, be able to avoid them. ?
OK, in two of my installations, I have the system disk on E and the data on C. Kind of inconvenient since the other three are the other way. The disk partitions are also the wrong size, so I need to reinstall on C drive and then shrink the C and enlarge the E.
While you can buy Partition Magic for about $40 to do this, that seems kind of a lot for two one-time operations. Here are some freeware alternatives from “Linux Rulez”:http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html#example
* “System Rescue CD”:http://www.sysresccd.org/. This is a dedicated Linux bootable CD that has partition management on it, a ghost/drive-image utility and various file system tools. Perfect for rescuing and resizing. I tried it on my Shuttle SS-51G. It booted, but wasn’t stable in the graphics mode for qparted unfortunately. Easy to use though. I think this is because I’m using an oddball SiS motherboard graphics controller.
* “Knoppix”:http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html. This bootable Cd runs Linux and has a copy of QTparted on it. This one is stable. Hard as heck to actually get to qparted. You have to figure out a root password (Start/Knoppix/Root sheel), then type passwd and create a root password. Then choose Start/Run as Different User and type in qparted. Main problem is that it doesn’t seem to see my disks.
* “Diskdrake”:http://www.mandrakelinux.com/diskdrake/. Based on Mandrake Linux distribution, it is a utlity that lets you create, delete, format and resize NTFS partitions in the latest Mandrake release. It is a little strange, but you essentially startup as though you are going to install Mandrake, use the disk partition utility and then escape out of the install.
* “Linux-NTFS”:http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/. This is an open source project that adds NTFS partitions to Linux. They have a utility called ntfsresize to do this. Most of the stuff in the examples is based on this.
* “QTparted”:http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/. This is an open source version of partitioning software. It is also Linux software, so best gotten in a Linux distribution.
Well back to work. The ACL tear sure hurt for three weeks and I have to admit I was completely zonked out. Amazing what I spewed on this blog, so I take it all back. Now that I’m back with 1,000 email messages, this whole spam thing has taken on a new urgency. I’ve been using an iMac as my main machine and Entourage for accessing Exchange. The base spam filter in it doesn’t seem to work worth a darn, so I’m off to search for add-ons. There aren’t many for the Mac. Here are some observations.
* Mac Mail. The mail that comes with jaguar actually has a Bayesian spam filter in it. It reads IMAP which is great but not the rest of Exchange so to use it I’d have to use Entourage for calendar and contacts and Mac mail for the rest. A nice UI though as usual.
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The Furrygoat Experience: HDTV Goodness. _Hat tip to John Ludwig_
Here’s the latest listing of HDTV channels in Seattle. I watched the NBA All-star pre-game on ESPN. Wow, was that clear. Also, InHD is not bad as demo stuff. Main issue is that KOMO-4 in particular seems to have an audio sync problem. Funny lags.
See “Titan TV”:http://www.titantv.com/ttv/home/HDTVUpdate.aspx for program times.
* Channel 100 Mariners
* Channel 104 KOMO-4 (ABC)
* Channel 105 KING-5 (NBC)
* Channel 106 KONG-6
* Channel 108 KCTS (PBS)
* Channel 113 Q13 (FOX)
* Channel 114 WB22 (WB)
* Channel 173 ESPN-HD
* Channel 549 HBO HDTV
* Channel 574 Showtime HD
* Channel 664 InHD1
* Channel 665 InHD2
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