March 2007 Archives
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March 30, 2007
Tips for the Sony Vaio VGN-UX390N
Thumb typing can be a little hard, especially when it comes to modified key strokes. Seriously, what Vista owner doesn't want to do some Win-tabbing these days? Unfortunately, both keys are on the left side. This makes it very difficult to do while still holding the UX.
The solution is to use an accessibility feature, namely "sticky keys" which is under making the keyboard easier to use. The settings in the screenshot work really well for me. I can hit <win><win><tab n times> then <win> to choose the app (same for the normal alt-tab stuff, too). Bringing up the start menu takes three <win> clicks, but you start using the mouse more or getting used to it. Being able to press <ctrl> then <shift> then <esc> one at a time to bring up the process monitor.
If you aren't going to use the Cingular modem, uninstall SmartWi. It's a memory and CPU hog. Your battery will reward you for doing so. I don't have a solution yet for using the Cingular modem without it, though. In addition, it doesn't affect overall performance much.
Use the fingerprint reader. Passwords are often difficult to type on a regular keyboard and could be nearly impossible with just thumbs. However, swiping one of your ten fingers is very easy and fast. Passwords are shared between Firefox and Internet Explorer, which is very convenient. This is my first experience with a fingerprint reader and it has been surprisingly convenient.
If you aren't using the memory stick slot and you have Vista, stick a card in for ReadyBoost use. It'll help launch times, even if you have the 32GB SSD system. It might even save battery due to less disk use. I have, or will have, a more complete post on this topic.
When using the mini plastic stand you can't have the power plugged in else it won't stand straight. However, if you put it on a book or two with the plug hanging down on the left side it will actually stand straight. Find a wood desk organizer or something taller and you can get the screen closer to your eyes.
Well, that's the short list for now. Did I miss anything?
March 29, 2007
Silly Issues With the Sony UX390N
The Sony UX is pretty nice despite it's problems that I've talked about. However, there are some very silly design choices.
For instance, when it's on the little plastic stand you can't use the bottom ports. So, what's in the bottom ports, you ask? Well, both the adapter port for the VGA dongle and the power plug! That means you can't be charging while using this stand. Oops!
More annoying, though, is the SIM card slot cover on the left side. This is uncomfortable for lengthy thumb typing. It's made worse by the fact that an EDGE modem just isn't very useful these days. Oh well, that's what the UX91 is for. :)
It would have been nice if the cameras both had covers. I've seen fingerprints on both of them. The 1.3MP camera isn't that useful for me, anyway. The front facing webcam isn't bad, though, as far as usefulness goes.
Yet another silly annoyance is that of the already small 32GB SSD a full 6-7GB is allocated for the recovery partition. Why not ship withan 8GB bootable USB key to more than double the available space, whic is under 6 GB in shipping form? Seriously, of 32GB you end up with maybe 6GB of usable space and 26GB of cruft that you may or may not need.
Although the fingerprint reader is very useful, the swipe path makes it difficult to not come in contact with the screen. Although I'm careful most of the time, there is a nasty looking smudge mark under it right now. I can see that getting worse with time or even scratching the screen if dust was on the reader.
I'm sure there are more items that are just plain silly. Hnowever, most of these one can become accustomed to (aside from lack of drive space) or work around. As I started with, this doesn't prevent the Sony UX from being a great little computer!
March 28, 2007
Installing Origami Experience on the Sony Vaio UX390N
So, I thought it would be great to try out the Origami Experience on the UX390N. Unfortunately, the dialog you see here was shown to me. How odd, as this machine is defintion quite mobile and is certainly running Vista. Apparently, though, it's not a "licensed" true "UMPC" machine. That's also apparently because it doesn't have a 7" screen (it's even smaller at 4.5"). So is this an EMPC (or XMPC) (extreme mobile PC) and thus not supported?
I found instructions at "seamonkey420 blog" on "tech-recipes.com." After following this, it installs without any issue.
It's runs full screen at 1024x600 and apps will run at whatever screen resolution you're at. That is, Origami ran at 1024x600 even while at 1024x768 while Sudoku ran at the full screen resolution. (Incidentally, the Sudoku implementation is quite good. More on that later.) The screen shot shows what I mean -- you can see part of Live Writer at the bottom with this post in it.
Origami Experience itself is like a UMPC version of Windows Media Center. I guess it might be more like Portable Media Center, but I've never seen that. The chosen set of apps isn't bad and the little quick button to the 3D switcher is fun.
A number of the links didn't work, though. The links in "Origami Experience\en-US\Shortcuts" all had the same strange issue. For instance, '%windir%\explorer.exe "http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=58443"' doesn't work.
Now, you'll probably want to have the Sony launcher button be able to launch Origami Experience instead. To do this you have to launch Vaio Central, choose Special Buttons, then in both rotation tabs change the launcher button to "Start Program" and choose Origami.
You'll now e able to launch Origami Experience with ease. With lots of personalization available for it, you can certainly make it look nice, too. It might even suffice for a reasonable entertainment console in the car -- just don't do video if it's in the front seat.
March 27, 2007
Does ReadyBoost do anything for a SSD System?
I've been trying to determine if even a relatively small memory card (512MB old, slow memory stick duo) can help system performance on a Sony UX390N (1GB RAM, 32GB SSD disk -- all flash already).
My test app was Windows Live Writer. Without the memory stick in, it loaded in about 9 seconds the first time and then 7 seconds after that. However, with the memory stick in, it still loaded at about 9 seconds the first time, but then would start to load in about 5 seconds.
This is completely non-scientific but it shows that it can help out even if the main hard disk is already rather fast -- in this case, it's fully solid state so it's a similar form. I'm guessing that the responsiveness boost here comes from the fact that Vista can read from both at once without saturating the higher levels of bus bandwidth.
It sits flush in the machine, so there is no reason for me to not have it in (unless I find it hurts the battery life by continually moving the cache around -- it used 50% processor for over a minute to load up the cache right after insert). A faster one might do even more good, too. It seems to only write at about 2-3MB/sec and doesn't appear to read much faster than that.
March 26, 2007
Sprint's Flipper: The Upstage
As expected,this is the two sided Samsung handset+. The design leaves some questions, though. Sure, it's new and novel. Is it useful, though?
The front screen doesn't look big enough to run applications. However, the rear screen doesn't have a keypad for entering any dato in to it. So what is one supposed to do? Can you not do email? Play games that need to digit pad? Use shortcut keys when browsing?
Maybe it will support the Bluetooth HID to help out. That would at least be something.
As a music and video phone, though, it might be relateively nice since you end up with a larger screen than you would have otherwise. It's probably more useful than the LG Chocolate on Verizon where the keys are very difficult to accurately hit and not accidentally hit since they aren't physical keys.
Only time will tell if this design works or not. Certainly the simplicity of a candy bar for just phone calls is nice, too. I like that about my Verizon VX9800 (The V). How many people really use all that many applications, anyway? This might be ideal for the person who just wants a phone and a media player in one.
Initial Issues with the Sony UX390N
So, the main problem I've run across is quite simply the sheer amount of cruft the Sony installs on it to begin with. I'm not just talking about trial versions of software, either. Trials of Norton, Corel, Naptser, Quickbooks, Office Live, Office 2007, MobiTV, Cingular, and plenty of other preinstalled links and installers are a nice gesture -- but shouldn't they lower costs since they are basically paid advertisements?
In addition to all of that cruft, there a ton of crufty things running. Counting only those with Sony on in the "Programs and Features" control panel, we find 33 different things installed! Seriously, though, as a light weight machine in all asspects, shouldn't it be fairly stripped down? This is after removing SmartWi, too, as I gave up trying to make it not eat the processor for lunch and, by definition, greatly reduce the battery life. Although now I've found that SmartWi may have actually been required to turn on the Cingular modem. Oops.
Speaking of SmartWi, it turns out that it only really hurt battery life. It apparently ran its processes as low priority services. That means that after uninstalling it didn't improve performance noticably. There is still a lot to remove, though, that will at least free up some memory for Vista to do it's stuff.
Speaking of performance testing, it has proven a little harder than I had hoped. PCMark05 Basic only runs at 1024x768 and fails a number of tests when running at 1024x600. I'll have to run it on an external monitor. 3DMark03 won't install. 3DMark06 is huge, but I got it installed and running for some amusingly low numbers.
In fact, so far, all of the numbers have been lower than what I've seen elsewhere. I can't figure out what's up with the GMA 950. It's reporting that it can only go up to 1400x1050 resolution, yet even with 64MB of shared memory it should be able to do higher. Also odd is that the benchmark tools report that it's using 32MB or less. I don't know if it's dynamic or not. A lot of Mac forums shows that when it has it's full amount of RAM that it can perform up to twice as fast.
For all the problems, though, it's still a really nice device.
March 23, 2007
Sony Vaio VGN-UX390N: In The House!
Even before I finished writing yesterdays post about the performance of various micro PCs, I picked up a Sony Vaio VGN-UX390N to try out. Naturally, I finished up the post yesterday with it. It's an absolutely wonderful device.
However, there is one critical problem that I have to solve before I can really dive in to test it and put it through it's paces. Sony ships their laptops that have WLAN and WWAN connections with something called SmartWi. Supposedly, this is to "seamlessly" transition between WiFi and cellular networks. However, right after a boot -- and never stopping after that -- the various processes that make up this application suite -- and there are eight of them that show up in the process list -- all are using varying bits of processor from about 1% to 20% in the case of "PowerManager.exe."
This means that at any given time the CPU usage is hanging out at around 40-50% -- without doing anything! That will seriously harm performance so I have to solve that first. From doing some searches, there are at least a few other people that experience this problem. Since I do want to give the Cingular stuff a trial since they offer 30 days free, I figure I probably need the application to work for the best experience, but maybe not.
So, until that is solved, I won't be doing any benchmarks or other forms of testing.
March 22, 2007
Micro PC Performance
So, I've been trying to figure out the relative performance of the very small machines, and I don't just mean UMPCs. This has proved surprisingly difficult. It seems very few people really care about this.
There are only a few machines I'm interested in seeing the relative performance. However, even across these machines there are only really a couple of different hard drive specifications and a couple of different processors that these machines use. Most use a 30GB or 40GB 4200 RPM disk and a Core Solo at 1.2GHz or 1.33Ghz. Some also use a Celeron processor or a Via C7-M type processor.
Although these may behave differently given difference in the rest of the system components, the only way I've found to make it easy to compare all of them is by gathering performance metrics of the various components and piecing them together. Those pieces are going to be here, of course.
- Sony Vaio UX1XN, 32GB SSD:
- Vista Experience: CPU-2.9, RAM-4.3, Gfx-3.2, Game-2.7, Disk-5.2
- PCMark05: 1636
- Fujitsu Lifebook:
- Super Pi: 2m 07s
- PCMark05: 1152
- Vista Experience: CPU-2.7, RAM-4.3, Gfx-2.0, Game-2.8, Disk-3.4
- Sony Vaio G1:
- 3DMark03: 689
- Samsung Q1P SSD:
- 3DMark03: 906
- OQO 02:
- MobileMark05: 69 ("Half that of the UX180P")
- VIA C7-M:
- Sandra 2005 SSE2: 1223
- Sandra 2005 FPU: 534
- Sony Vaio TX5XN:
- Vista Experience: CPU-2.9, RAM-4.2, Gfx-2.0, Game-2.7, Disk-3.9
- PCMark05: 1508
- Ubiquio 701 UMPC:
- PCMark05: 517
- FlipStart E-1001S
- SuperPI: 2m 42s
- PCMark05: 1286
Still, after all of the (which, needless to say, wasn't extremely fast to find), there are still a ton of holes. Unfortunately, so far, the results are so scattered that extrapolating information is likely going to have an even higher margin of error. However, I may still go through the exercise for fun and post it up here.
One example of the oddities are the Vista Experience scores. Above, we have them for three different GMA 950 machines and two of three show a 2.0 but the first one shows a 3.2, which raises the overall score substantially.
Another point, too, is the screen resolution. A lower resolution with the same performance video will actually be a better experience for the user. However, we don't know if the Vista Experience numbers are normalized to screen size or not.
Additionally, there seems to be pretty good bit of information for most of the Intel line, but very little information for anything based on a C7-M. The few numbers I did find are pretty bad, too. This isn't a good sign for quite a few of the micro PCs currently out there.
So, I guess I'll be revisiting all of this soon if I can figure out some information...
Sources
- Fujitsu Lifebook P7230 (Core Solo U1400 1.2GHz, 60GB 4200rpm, Intel GMA950)
- Sony Vaio UX1XN (Core Solo U1500 1.33GHz, 32GB SSD, Intel GMA 950)
- Sony Vaio VGN-UX390N (Core Solo U1500 1.33GHz, 32GB SSD, Intel GMA 950)
- Samsung Q1 (Celeron M 353 0.9GHz, 40GB, Intel GMA900)
- Samsung Q1P (Pentium M ULV 1.0GHz, 32GB SSD, Intel GMS 915?)
- OQO 02 (XP), OQO 02 (Vista), OQO 02 (VIA C7M ULV 1.5GHz, 60GB 4200rpm, VIA VX700)
- PC Magazine Comparison of Sony, Toshiba, and OQO
- Sony Vaio G1 (Core Solo U1400 1.2GHz, 80GB 4200rpm, Intel GMA950)
- VIA C7-M Benchmarks
- Sisoft Sandra XI.SP1a (2007.4) Internal processor numbers
- Sony Vaio TX5XN (Core Solo U1500, 100GB ?rpm, Intel GMA950 ?)
- Ubiquio 701 UMPC (VIA C7M 1.0Ghz, 40GB 5400rpm, S3 UniChrome Pro)
- FlipStart E-1001S, Gaming on FlipStart (Pentium M 1.0GHz ULV, 30GB 4200rpm, Intel GMA 950)
March 21, 2007
Sprint's Ambassador Program
So, it looks like Sprint's program is still going and about to go in to Phase III. They must be having pretty good success with the program if they are keeping it going for another six months.
I don't know much more about it at this point. However, I'll be sure to share if I do hear more. ;)
Programs like this are pretty interesting, though. On the one hand, they serve the purpose of having a directory study group. On the other hand, they also have a potential way of gathering a bunch of discussion and blogging around the community (this here post is a case in point).
I've heard things about Verizon having a similar program, but I haven't really seen any details on that. Anyone know of any other companies (cellular operators or not) doing similar, fairly wide, study programs? (As opposed to closed door focus groups and the like.)
March 20, 2007
Supreme Commander: Fun Diversion
So, over the weekend I got to try out the Supreme Commander demo. It was created by the same person who created Total Annihilation back in 1997. TA was great back then. It was the first true 3D RTS. It was also a lot of fun because it wasn't just another Command and Conquer. Sure, as an RTS, it had all of the familiar elements but it also never became very popular. I liked it because of the novelty.
So, when I saw that the same person had created Supreme Commander, I was immediately interested. I was hoping that maybe there was something new and unusual. Chris Taylor hasn't disappointed on this.
First, the game actually leverages multi-core machines. Some people have shown that it doesn't use all cores at 100%, but it certainly can use more than one. It also has an advanced 3D engine for wonderful graphics. I was hoping it would work well on our 2560x1600 display at full resolution and it does! Leveraging our 7950GX2 and our QX6700 to good effect, the play is quite smooth in the demo, even with hundreds of units running around.
Trying to switch to split screen, though, at that resolution does slow things down. Maybe when we can get a couple of 8800GTXs or an integrated dual card we can try that again. In any case, that's a novel new mode that I'd love to try out. We don't have two monitors on that machine, so I can't try out the dual monitor mode, but I would imagine it would also get a bit slow.
As an RTS, the development is pretty standard. Build things that can build more things. Build your defenses well to save your units and build lots of units. At least, that's how it went on easy mode. Reports show that the harder levels are actually quite good and don't run in to the same sort of problems other RTS's have had in the past (e.g. things like pre-made attack plans that if you withstand the AI just goes to sleep and never rebuilds).
Most of the controls are wonderfully simple and intuitive. There are some things that I couldn't figure out from the key layout. For instance, I couldn't figure out how to get a transport to automatically ferry units. I had to load them and choose their target each time. That was annoying. I also had trouble with loading some units in.
My favorite new feature though is how it handles the campaign. Traditionally, the first few levels or so of a campaign would be very small maps introducing you to new units. If you spent any time building up or doing defense you'd likely soon learn that the current mission was over with and you'd have to start all over very soon. Sure, that's good practice for the early build-up stages, but can also feel like a waste of time.
In Supreme Commander you do start with a small map but instead of ending the mission your map is expanded with a new goal to meet. In the first mission, this happened quite a few more times than I expected it to. This meant that all of my early over-buildup didn't go to waste. In fact, it was often not enough for later goals in the mission.
The only downside to this is that you really have no idea how long a mission will last since they keep expanding. This led me to end up playing much longer per mission than I had anticipated. In the second mission, I was supposed to be done after an hour but instead took two and half hours! Whoops...
I'd consider buying it if I had more time to play games. However, I think I want to find time to play through the missions on the hardest level first to see if the solo missions can be challenging enough for using good, tactical building rather than just swarming. If that is the case, I might give it a shot.
March 19, 2007
Journey to Beijing: In Retrospect
Alright, so this is a little silly since we never left the airport on our way from South Africa to Beijing, China. However, the travel time was a good chunk of our trip and is still quite memorable in part because of the length and in part because we have no pictures. (Sounds ironic, huh?)
We left South Africa many days after we had planned on leaving. Our travel changes only included the times of the tickets and not the route. So, our first hop dropped us back in to the Johannesburg airport. We didn't spend much time there and I hardly remember it.
Not long after, we were off on a decent length flight to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Here, we spent about 12 hours waiting for our next flight. We didn't have to leave the secure section of the airport and we decided not to. As it turns out, this was in the middle of the day and Ramadan had just started. Our guide books told us that the most likely place to find food would be in the Chinatown section. Well, see, we were headed off to China anyway, so we decided to go get some slept -- we had already been up a long time.
There was a transit hotel in the security section that rented by the hour, although mostly in four hour blocks. I forget if we stayed four or six hours, but it went very fast and only marginally helped our fatigue -- but we did get to shower, which was nice.
After that, we headed out in to the great KLIA which, like any modern airport, is basically a shopping mall. This proved to be entertaining so we went around looking at things and grabbed a couple of trinkets and ended up with some of the local money.
Our next flight was quite short since it was just going to Thailand. We landed and proceeded to have the next eight hours to wonder around the Bangkok airport. This was not quite as good of an experience as KLIA since we had to exit security, pay the taxes, etc. Then, we couldn't check in right away so we had to make do for a couple of hours on the external section of the airport, which didn't have quite so many shops to kill some time. However, we saw plenty of the military presence we had heard about.
The coup, as it turned out, was mostly non-violent and we probably would have been fine had we not changed our plans. However, there were a few issues that made us very glad we did change our plans. First, banks and ATM's were closed the first few days, so money would have been a problem. Many other shops and sights were also closed. Finally, the weather was absolutely terrible the whole time we would have been there. We didn't leave the airport because the middle of the airport had a very large enclosed courtyard where we could see the massive amounts of wind and rain, even though it was protected on all sides by a many-story building.
Our next flight to Beijing was a bit longer, at over five hours, but that wasn't the interesting part. This turned out to be what felt like a very budget flight. The plane was noticeably old and hadn't been retrofitted with new seats or signage. It still had ash trays on the seats and other signs. This was also a flight between two non-English speaking countries and with a destination that is relatively rare for English speakers. That didn't prevent them from speaking in English on the announcements, when there were some. The rest of the flight was uneventful and we got some needed rest.
I recall choosing the local breakfast rather than the western breakfast that didn't look all that good. As it turns out, it was this huge thing of rice porridge that was both quite good and very filling. I say it was good mostly because I like rice and it can be spiced up some. It was relatively bland, though, but after being in transit (including driving to the airport in South Africa) for over 40 hours, food was food.
We landed and had a decent drive in front of us to our hotel. That's another story, though.
March 16, 2007
South Africa: In Retrospect
We left our friends in Kenya when we headed off to South Africa. They were to spend another few days there and then head either to South Africa or back home. We weren't to meet up with them again, so the rest of our trip would be just us.
I was probably most impressed with South Africa. We were originally only going to be there a few nights to do some wine tasting, see some of the area, and go shark diving. That got extended due to last minute notice of the coup in Thailand and the media black-out while we had to make our decision.
I have a number of good memories from South Africa. We had this great little VW car that had an amenity list that included seat belts and head lights. It had no air bags, no radio, no fuel injection, and pretty much nothing else that you might find in a car these days. And yet, it was a brand new car, although certainly not legal in the US.
Our meal at the top of a hill had a fantastic view and lots of really good meats and foods to eat. It was a bit cold and windy, but it certainly was memorable. I was a little surprised at how empty the restaurant was, but it was a weeknight and not anywhere near town. It looked like it could serve really large functions.
Our drive over to the coast took us through a great pass that was scenic and rocky in much the same way that my drive over Highway 17 in scenic and full of redwoods. It wasn't all that much higher or longer of a pass, either, especially if compared to taking Highway 9, instead.
The coast I recall as being absolutely wonderful and very much like our own coast here in central California. The coast road is windy with lots of great views. Every stopping point has a view south of vast openness of water filled with whales and dolphins. Our own view occasionally has a whale; we've seen one while we've been here, but we've never seen a dolphin from the coast.
The jackass penguins were really quite fun. You walk on boardwalk over their area while they are right under and around you. The only thing separating you from them is a fence with fairly narrow slats. These slats are too narrow for a foot but not too narrow for a penguins beak. I got pecked by one!
Naturally, one of our strongest memories was sitting in our hotel watching TV within about 18 hours of our flight to Thailand. Flipping through the stations, we saw mention of a coup in Thailand! There wasn't much information about it and while we were watching for more information we got word that Thailand had cut off media communications from inside the country. That meant we wouldn't learn any more about it. So, we quickly contacted our travel agent, had our flights moved, and contacted a place Laurie had stayed in her first trip to South Africa, Phantom Forest eco-lodge in Knysna. All of our changes went off without a hitch and instead of heading to the airport the next day, we drove farther our towards Knysna.
This turned out to be convenient since our shark diving trip had been cancelled and possibly pushed off to a date when we wouldn't be in the country because of rough weather. So, we got to stay at the wonderful Phantom Forest that will be my best memory of there. The huts are on a steep hill and partially up in trees. It makes for a very private, very in-the-forest feel. It was very pleasant and truly wonderful.
Our shark diving trip turned out to be shark watching, which still got me seasick. The waters were still filled with silt and had maybe a foot or two visibility. People who did go in the water couldn't see anything where we could see all of the action from the top deck. It was really quite something! I hope to go back sometime and actually get in the water with the sharks. (Hopefully when I go back I'll have figured out my motion sickness issues.)
After our wonderful time in South Africa, we were off for a long journey to Beijing.
March 15, 2007
Lending Me A Hand: My Library
I keep checking books out of the library that I've already read.
Does this happen to you?
I swear, it's clear that a book blurb is not enough to remind me whether or not I read a book. All those damn Dirk Bitt books by Clive Cussler involve treasure hunts and international espionage and I stupidly did not glance to see what the man was doing on the last page of the book and if THAT sounded familiar, because its generally the only part of this book series that is remotely unique. Don't ask me why I read this stuff.
Covers change, new editions come out, and often the hardcover version of a book looks nothing like a mass market or trade paperback does. Still, the something that drew me to the book still lurks, drawing me back again. Until I get home and chapter 2 is sounding rather familiar.
Too familiar.
So this is what I want: I want to be able to request a super library card. Yes, I'm even willing to pay for it. I want this library card to store a simple history of the books I've checked out. This way, it's private (I have the only copy, like some of these mobile medical record ideas). Ideally, the librarian COULD warn me at the library when I'm about to check out a book I've already checked out before, but that's all the data that would be transited OUT of the card, other than the little stuff they already have on them for the library's use.
At home, I would be able to read this card and keep my own bloody records if I like.
Ok, so this smacks of going overboard and a hacky workaround for what should be much more straightforward. This is not really what I want. Frankly, all I really want is for the library to be able to broadcast, to me, with my permission, some simple data, ideally in the form of an RSS feed that I am responsible for storing (the library cannot be responsible for keeping lendee histories for space and privacy reasons) but even an email would work (I can strip it myself and make my feed).
Hmm. But this doesn't solve the fact that only part of my reading material comes from the library. The rest comes from friends, Amazon.com, eBay, etc. So what now?
Ok, I revise my previous idea. I clearly need a little mobile app that can scan/take in ISBNs and other book barcodes. It means I have to scan my books twice (the library card for checkout, but myself for my list) but it does allow me to add any book I have in my possession. Maybe some cute little ratings, dates, etc. Output: again, the RSS feed would be sufficient. Like the netflix feeds they let you do.
Yet another mobile idea I will never get around to, but would like to have. Any takers?
Subliminal Messages as New Technology: A Frightening Thought!
There was a recent article in the Korean Times about a new technology that puts an inaudible sound sequence in games that can help break the addiction. As stated, this is standard subliminal messaging.
They have been doing studies and have found it works really well. Previous studies have shown to be effective enough to cause various countries to ban the use in advertising and marketing from 1958 through 1972, where it is still banned in the US, Canada, UK, and other countries.
No effects appear to have ever truly been repeatable, but enough evidence has been put forth that it has caused numerous public outcries against the practice, too.
Sure, the Korean's have a good use for it.
``Game users can’t recognize the sounds. But their subconscious is aware of them and the chances are high they will quit playing,’’ the 35-year-old Yun said. ``Tests tell us the sounds work.’’
Xtive, which was established in 2005, spent about a year to create the sound sequence geared toward addressing the concern that Korean teenagers spend too much time playing computer games.
However, if it doesn't stop at curbing game play addictions, it could be a real problem. In fact, given the way a lot of games play, even standard advertising in games could often flash so fast that it becomes, effectively, subliminal.
It seems like it's an old enough technique for, at minimum, giving familiarity to a word or image, that a whole new issue could be opening up within the industry. It's probably nothing for concern just yet, but something to look for in the fine print on games not made within the US. ;)
March 14, 2007
Found a Fix for the MTEntryNext Tag
In the latest version of MovableType, 3.34, and a few of the earlier versions, the MTEntryNext tag was broken on dynamic archive templates. The fix was relatively simple, too.
In the mt/php/lib directory, you'll find lots of PHP scripts for Smarty replacement tags. The block.MTEntryNext.php file configures the arguments to fetch_entries and assigns them to the $args variable as an array. The value of lastn should not be set to 1. That limits the entire set of entries to just the last 1, so the result is always the last one, which is always the most recent post.
So, for the longest time, all of my individual entries have had a link to the main page, the previous article, and my most recent article. Commenting this line out (with "//") has fixed this issue. Hopefully Six Apart will have this resolved in the next version.
Since this was an issue in the Smart replacement tag, it only affect dynamic templates and not statically published templates. And no, I didn't discover this on my own. I don't have that much time on my hands. ;) This forum posting at Six Apart's site helped out.
March 13, 2007
Kenya: In Retrospect
Following the post on Egypt, I'll be talking about some of the major items that I remember about Kenya, both good and bad. Six months is a relatively long time for remembering details, but they stick around longer on particularly special events.
Many of my best memories still come from the Mara Bush Camp. It was our first stop and our most rugged one, too. It's a real, moving camp that gets set up in a different location yearly. There was no power to speak of in the tents, except for a battery to keep some LED bulbs powered for night use. This probably helped give it some lasting impact.
At the end of the day, we often all gathered in a lounge in the dining tent (there were some power plugs there) and all had either Tusker or Amarula. It was one of the few times during the day that we could actually just relax. Outside of that, we were usually out and about taking pictures and roaming around on the dirt roads, keeping an eye out for critters. This turned out to be particularly tiring. That's part of why there weren't daily blog entries from that time.
During one of our outings, we had a great encounter with a number of baby lion cubs. There were lots of other vehicles around, but that didn't seem to bother any of the lions. They pride had various lions about to watch for food and threat, but the vehicles clearly weren't considered a threat. They walked right in the middle of the autos and even very close to us. They were so amazingly cute. Laurie got some great pictures and we may have even gotten some good video (sure, it's been 6 months, but that doesn't mean we've had time to go through all of our media).
After the Mara Bush Camp, we headed over to Fig Tree, which wasn't far away and allowed us similar routes during our drives. Sitting in the tree patio drinking Tusker, avoiding the monkeys, and watching animals out on the plains are my main memories here. In fact, I almost forgot about them before I went looking through the pictures again.
After we left the Masai Mara, we stayed in Amboseli. My main memories of here were of lots of elephants and mosquitos. It was very odd that our previous camp, which was right on a river, had no mosquitos but in a permanent structure, there were tons of mosquitos. We got to see lots of elephants, including many baby elephants.
Our next adventure was a high-speed convoy between Amboseli and Tsavo. Supposedly, there had been previous conflict in the area which led to a weapons build-up. We weren't allowed to leave Amboseli without being part of the convoy. For most people, this wasn't a problem since they weren't driving themselves. We, however, were the only people who were self-driving. Although it was worth it and no one bothered us about it, it wasn't normal.
The drive itself was uneventful until we missed our turn-off to Finch Hatton's and got ourselves in to some sharp volcanic rock that we could have avoided. This gave us a flat that we had to deal with at the gate. Some people tried to help us with the jack, but it wasn't until someone came up that was familiar with how to fix a dust-caked one that we got it working. It worked as we thought, but being front mounted it got the brunt of the dust and thus got all muddle up. Everyone was very helpful though and gave us better directions to backtrack and get in to Finch Hatton's.
Finch Hatton's itself was absolutely wonderful and is probably my best memory of the whole trip even though we were there alone. It was certainly the best place that we stayed. Our tent was right over a water hole with lots of hippos and crocs. We're hoping to return soon. ;)
The final memory, which still lingers on many of our bags, was the massive amount of dust that was kicked up in many areas. Even with all of the windows and hatches closed, the car would not seal and would fill with dust that got all over and inside of absolutely everything, including out lungs. We can see the color of the dust on many of our bags still. It was truly permeating.
Unlike our feeling for Egypt, where even now we don't want to go back, we've been wanting to go back to Kenya since. That said, we never truly felt all that well while we were there. We were taking all the various medications and such, but whether it was from different food, too much dust, general fatigue, or something worse, we were always not feeling quite right. Maybe next time we go we can spend longer to get more adjusted to the climate and food.
March 12, 2007
Egypt: In Retrospect
It's been six months since we took our honeymoon around the world, going through Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, airports in Malaysia and Thailand, and China. Overall, the trip was absolutely great. We tried to blog through the whole trip, but a number of things got in our way, not the least of which was simply fatigue after keeping busy all day.
The farther away you get from a memory, the more those memories seem to consolidate on just a few moments in time. This time in September, we'd already left Egypt and were in Kenya.
I thought I would share some of my strong, lasting memories of Egypt and perhaps along with a new picture or two. That doesn't mean I'm going to go over everything I remember, but just some of the big, important items. Laurie has also posted her memories of the Egypt part of our trip on her blog, Naturally Speaking.
My main memory of our visit was that everything was very dirty and dusty. 
And by dirt, I mean that there was garbage everywhere, in particular, in the streets and where one walked. This was particularly notable in the markets where you literally had to walk on refuse while looking up out of the throng of people at old, crumbling buildings that look like they would collapse at any moment. The waterways, although covered in filth, also had many egrets in them, as can be seen here.
Also, don't trust what anyone says on the streets. We got convinced to go off in one direction, only to find out they just wanted our money for a camel or horse ride. We didn't want to comply, so they sent us further along only to find out we (supposedly) weren't supposed to be there. On our way back out, guards and others were cracking looks and probably laughing. It was not a pleasant experience but we fully learned that flat-out lies were expected. (And that's isn't of the misleading type of, "Buy this, best quality, real," that we would become so familiar with at the other end of our journey.)
Within the Citadel, I happened across the filthiest restroom I'd ever seen. It was also probably the oldest. Scary, too, was the fact that locals were filling up their water bottles. From the looks of it, it would have been safer to fill up a water bottle from a puddle in an overcrowded cow pasture. I didn't have any small notes on me at the time, so the tip I gave to the attendant was a bit larger than normal (by about 20x), but was barely $2 US. After he realized what it was, he came running out when I was already 100 feet away or so thanking me profusely.
A while after that, we got to hear the call to prayer while overlooking the city. That was an absolutely amazing experience. The sound and enormity of it was profound. It's just not possible to miss the right times with that sort of announcement. Naturally, off in two directions groups of pyramids could be seen through the haze, too, which just added to the mood of the view.
The last impression was the absolute chaos at the airport on the way out. I wrote about that before, so I won't go in to much detail now. Suffice it to say, if there had been a panic from real or a false threat, people would have died. It could have been from being knocked over and trampled during a brief break in the crowd wide enough to fall in to. It could have been from one of those metal luggage carts being dropped, since they would be handed over people's heads when they were in the way. It didn't help that there were absolutely no other white people in sight. We felt very out of place and a bit disturbed by the whole experience.
However, it should be noted, that the people who actually did work there were actually all nice. Sure, they had to deal with the chaos, but we never had any problems with them giving us a hard time, either going through the entrance security, checking our bags, checking our passports, or even at the gate security where Laurie kept setting off the metal detector. (Eventually they let her through after asking if she had a knife or gun because they couldn't wand her because they had no female staff. I suspect if that had happened here and no female was available for "wanding" she would have been held until someone was found.)
Those are my main memories that help remind me that if we ever do go back to Egypt we'll skip out on Cairo and head off to the other sites. Hopefully they'll be a little more official and organized than the pyramids. I'm not counting on that, though.
March 9, 2007
Of Google Sitemaps and PageRank
So, a few weeks ago I noticed that the Google PageRank on my site dropped to zero for some reason. It used to hover around 3 or 4. I'm not sure what happened, but it hasn't recovered since. I still get plenty of links from Google searches and the other search engines. The site is pretty much fully indexed, according to the Google Webmaster Tools. However, according to those same tools, no site links to mine. I know this is false because even a Google search turns up pages that link to mine and my logs show plenty of links from real external sites (with positive PageRank values, too). Yet, doing the "link:www.kf6nvr.net" search reports nothing while the links tool does show external links. This is all very odd. Even my wife's site has links to mine.
I decided to do a Google Sitemap, in the hopes that this would help. However, I didn't really want to spend the time to create one by hand. I looked around briefly and found an index template for MovableType that would work well for creating a sitemap that would link to all of the individual archives, category pages, and date archives. This is exactly what I was looking for.
I gave Google a link to it via the Google Webmaster tools, rather than go about it through a ping. That way I could see if Google thought it was a valid sitemap and see when it downloaded it, etc. It's unclear what effect, if any, this will have since this blog is fairly well internally linked and Google has probably crawled it already. However, this is also an experiment for my wife's site where she has found some pages that don't come up with any results at all (as in, terms only on one page don't come up in the Google sitesearch).
I also noticed that the Google toolbar had different PageRank results as some of the calculator sites out there. That is, on at least one page of this site it showed a 4 pagerank while multiple online tools showed 0. I'll have to watch for changes in either of them.
In the end, this may or may not help out either site. I don't particularly care since it's the traffic numbers that matter more than the specific ranking numbers. Besides, it's mostly just a personal blog where I get to ramble on like this to no one.
March 8, 2007
ElasticLive: A Comparison to Native EC2
So, there's this service out there called ElasticLive, run by enomaly. At first, it looked like competition to Amazon EC2, but then I saw how they were wording their services and it didn't take long to realize that they are reselling Amazon EC2 services. Amazon EC2 is already rather easy to use, so I am curious as to what they offer over Amazon EC2.
For starters, for their dedicated grid machine they charge 25 cents per hour, 45 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth, and 25 cents per gigabyte a month for storage. However, they include 1000 GB of bandwidth and 160GB of storage in this pricing. Let's compare, shall we?
For someone maximizing the account, ElasticLive will be losing about $115 a month. Even with 160GB of storage, bandwidth only has to average below about 425GB, though, and they make money. Then, again, above about 1250GB of bandwidth they'll start making money again. So, for the consumer, it's only cheaper if you're in that middle-ground.
However, they offer fractional virtual servers (likely a VM system within a VM). For 5 cents an hour, you get a system with 20GB storage, 200MB RAM, and 60GB of bandwidth for the month. Given the normal system has 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB of space, this gives about 8 virtual machines per, uh, virtual machine. Let's compare this, shall we?
- A full Amazon EC2 native AMI with same transfer and storage: $88.04
- 1 ElasticLive fractional: $36.52
- 8 ElasticLive fractional: $292.19
- Amazon EC2 with 8x transfer and 8x storage: $193.04
Here, we can see the consumer that just needs something small and simple can save some money, especially if they don't need much space or bandwidth. They can get many of the Amazon EC2 advantages but at a lower cost because ElasticLive is helping divide the resources out. Assuming they can get 8 instances on one AMI, they'd be making money with only 5 or 6 fully used fractional grid machines.
It would also seem that ElasticLive offers some basic AMIs that can be used as part of their service, including access to server configuration tools like cPanel and Plesk. It's an interesting idea, for sure. However, it seems to have a fairly narrow window of use to the consumer, unless their provisioning tools are very easy to use compared to something like the EC2 UI plugin for Firefox. Although it's a common thing to do, I'm not sure about the prospects of building a business off of the fact the most consumers don't fully use what they pay for. I'd also be curious if someone could access their personal AMIs in their own AWS account for the fractional stuff or not.
One service that they do offer that is interesting is the ElasticDNS service for dynamic DNS for Amazon EC2 users. I'll have to check that out a bit more...
March 7, 2007
iPod Connector for Accord Hybrid Radio
Very shortly after getting my Honda Accord Hybrid, I got a module that provides a true iPod connector to the 
radio as well as a separate auxiliary audio input. The module I added is the USA Spec iPod Interface. Although this wasn't terribly cheap, it seemed to fit a need. Namely, I'd be able to plug-in my iPod, control it from the car stereo (even the wheel), and have it charge.
Installation was easier than I had expected, although pulling out snapped in pieces is always a challenge in will power. The piece around the center console really looked and felt like it was going to break before it just snapped out. I also goofed and pulled out the rubber insert in the "not-an-ashtray" compartment when the whole plastic piece came out (if I recall correctly).
After pulling the center junk box out, I was able to get in behind the radio without pulling it out. The fit was tight, but once I got the cable connected and the XM cable reconnected, I was able to keep some wires behind some of the small supports inside so it was nice and tidy. I zip tied up the auxiliary input, for the time being, as I wasn't quite ready to drill a hole in the plastic to have the second input (for a phone music player or the likes).
At first, I wanted to get the iPod connecter into the center elbow rest console. This would have required a bit more drilling than I wanted to do. Eventually, I found an easy opening in to the glove box area, which is also convenient because it can be locked and is easily accessible by the passenger (although the center storage would have been accessible by even the back seat).
Feature-wise, the unit has two modes. One is a smart mode that only uses a few specifically named playlists, but where you have slightly more control via the car's stereo controls. This mode does not allow the iPod controls to be used. The other mode, which is my preferred mode, allows the iPod controls to be used and anything to be played. When in a playlist, the next and previous buttons work, but that's about it. These can work for fast forwarding, too, which is convenient.
Now, the unit is not without problems. If a song isn't currently being played when it's plugged in, the unit starts playing the first song on the unit -- regardless of what you're doing with the iPod. If the unit is actually in play mode when you plug it in, it'll go to pause mode so you have to press play again. Personally, I choose what I want to play first, start it, put it in pause, and then plug it in -- at least when I can remember to do so.
If the playback stops at the end of a single song or playlist and then you turn the radio off or change to a radio station, the interface sends the play/pause signal (apparently) because you'll see it start to play. That's a bit annoying. When I still had XM service, this would cause a little bit of the iPod audio to bleed in with it, too. Of course, you can just reach over and pause the iPod, but it's a bit annoying.
Also, occasionally, if switching back and forth between the radio and iPod, occasionally it won't reconnect even when turning the radio completely off. On a few occasions, this has required powering the entire car down and back up to "fix." Although annoying, this is quite rare.
It's quite nice to always have my iPod charged. I listen to it for 40 minutes to and from work each day. Given the battery life of the newest 5.5Gen iPod Videos, this basically means I never have to specifically plug it in to anything to charge.
Overall, I found the USA Spec iPod Interface to be worth the money on my Honda Accord Hybrid. The installation was easy enough and the convenience of a full, single connector for power, controls, and audio is hard to beat. In addition, the auxiliary input may come in handy some day, too.
March 6, 2007
The Cost of Amazon EC2 P2V of an Existing Server
So, let's say that you have an existing server that you'd like to migrate to Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) by using their physical to virtual (P2V) tool. The question is, how much will this cost you for the initial Amazon Machine Image (AMI) upload to Amazon Simple Storage Server (S3)? And then, how much will it cost to continue to run on EC2?
The basic equation is relatively simple. We'll go with an example, first. Let's say you've got a server that's currently using 40GB of storage. That will need to be packaged into an AMI. Although there may be some compression (?) we'll assuming there isn't. Uploading 40GB to S3 will cost 20 cents a gigabyte, or eight dollars (the costs are all in US dollars). After that, you'll be paying 15 cents a gigabyte per month to store this AMI or $6 per month plus bandwidth. If you were using about 100GB a month of bandwidth, you'll be paying an addition $20 a month for that. That's a total of $26 per month plus the cost of the instance at about $73 per month. So, you'd then be paying about $99 per month.
However, if you just want to bring up your server in the cloud for a few hours to run some tests or experiments with different configurations, you'd only pay $8 to get it up there and then for the AMI time.
There is one caveat, though. Make sure that you aren't going to be charged by your current host for the upload. Also, you need enough room on your current physical machine to make a mirror of it.
In my case, I'm thinking about splitting a single physical server into two servers. One that will remain the physical server and one that will be hosted with EC2. This would increase costs, of course, but it creates a better logical separation between certain uses of the machine.
My other use case is to test a yum-based OS upgrade since I can't really upgrade any other way - aside from imaging a slightly newer OS on to the box and reconfiguring everything. However, I noticed the following in one of the FAQs:
Can I use my own kernel?
Not at present.
I'm not entirely sure what that means given that people have published many AMIs with many different version of Linux which I didn't think would be using the exact same kernel.
Finally, along the cost lines, don't forget about your time. That has value to you and/or your company. To summarize the formula, you've got:
One Time Cost:
(20 cents * GBServer) + (current host cost to upload) + (your time to prep upload) + (your time to convert to S3 store for persistence)
Monthly Costs:
($73 per server) + (15 cents * GBServer) + (20 cents * bandwidthGB)
Sure, most of this is obvious. The largest unknown, though, would be the time to convert servers over to have data persist outside of the AMI. This c