Travis Pettijohn: Blog

Last week I picked up a Cardo S-800 bluetooth headset. There are plenty of reviews on it floating around on the Internet, so I won't get into detail. I will say that it does one thing particularly well: it supports pairing and easily switching between two devices. Double-click the wheel and it's switched. I have it paired with my cell phone and my laptop, making it blindingly easy to use one headset for cell and VoIP calls. It also charges off of USB (Micro-USB, unfortunately, not Mini-USB, but at least all I have to carry is a cable and not a power brick). Highly recommended if you find yourself with a similar need.

This weekend I added a second hard drive to my Toshiba M9 laptop (in the CD-ROM bay). I then was able to install Windows Server 2008 on a second partition on the primary drive. After that was up and running, I set up Hyper-V with the goal of migrating my primary Vista installation (the one on the first partition) to a virtual machine. The process was easy enough: in the Hyper-V Manager, create a new VHD and tell it to clone a copy of the existing first hard drive. A few hours later, I now had a VHD on my second hard drive that was an exact clone of the first drive. I mounted it in a virtual machine and booted: to my surprise, there were my boot options, Server 2008 and Vista. And Vista x64 started right up (amazing it didn't blue screen during boot with all the hardware changes; also amazing, a 64-bit guest OS). But, here's the rub and the deal breaker: I couldn't install the "virtual machine additions" (I forget the correct Hyper-V term), as they aren't supported on 64-bit Vista. Performance was quite good, and I was able to share both physical CPUs inside the virtual machine. Here's to hoping they fully support 64-bit Vista as a guest!

About two weeks ago, I gutted my Media Center box and rebuilt it so that I could take advantage of optical HD media now that the format war is over.

New components:

• Motherboard: EVGA NF77 with nForce 630i and a GeForce 7150 GPU built-in. Onboard HDMI with HDCP* plus optical and coax digital out/in (respectively). Supports RAID 0/1/0+1/5.
• CPU: Intel Q6600 (Quad Core 2.4GHz).
• RAM: 4GB DDR2, 800.
• PSU: Rosewill 400W. (I needed a 24-pin and 8-pin power connectors for this new motherboard. I was sad to introduce a fan, but the one big 12cm fan is silent for all intents and purposes. Plus, the way the heat sink lies right up against it means better CPU cooling, too. I am very happy, though I didn't think I'd be.)
• Optical Media: LG Blu-ray/HD DVD ROM plus DVD/CD/RW, SATA.

Reused components:

• Hard drives: 2x160GB hard drives in RAID-0/Stripe for 320GB storage.
• Heat sink: Silverstone NT01V2. I still love this thing, and was ecstatic that it was still compatible!
• Case: Silverstone LC10 in Silver. I still love the VFD in front showing me media information. It makes it look like a real theater component, not just a hokey home-built computer.

Overall: very happy, A+ system. The motherboard/CPU combo is my best yet, and it takes about 33% CPU to play a Blu-ray title (with all four cores humming). All of the Media Center functionality moves better, too (like pulling up the guide and filtering by category, which used to strain the system, is instantaneous now). I subscribed to Netflix to, as a friend said, "have some pretties on my TV." Between Netflix and the HDHomeRun, I (finally!) have more HD content than I can consume, even with just local channels over Clear-QAM. 

HDCP

*I have to point out the importance of HDCP (if you're considering Blu-ray on Vista, take note): without it, Vista downgrades the video quality over digital outputs (like DVI or HDMI) to 480i/p. The intent is so that you can't rip a pure digital, HD, unencrypted stream of video from the wire and pirate movies. HDCP keeps the content encrypted from the source (disk/network) through the Vista video stack, out the video card and over the wire, where it's finally decrypted by the TV just in time to be displayed. This is called Protected Media Path. Further reading. If you want to play Blu-ray (or future HD formats from Hollywood), make sure your video card and display/TV support HDCP. (HD titles you download in XviD/MKV/etc aren't affected by this since they're not encrypted.)

I had a little down time this morning as I upgraded from Server 2008 RC0 to RTM. The upgrade blue-screened, so I ended up wiping the boot partition and reinstalling from scratch. A little more time consuming, unfortunately.

Hi, everyone. I'm back online after a pretty catastrophic file server crash. I built a new file server (Quad Core Q6600 (2.4GHz x4), 4GB RAM, 3x500GB hard drives in RAID 5 for 1TB storage) and then wrote a new blog engine. There's more than meets the eye to this engine, as it supports an extensible typing system at its core (I'll be able to create a Restaurant Review type with extended properties for the name, the type of cuisine and a 0-5 star rating, for example) that is strongly typed, indexable and searchable, yet transparent to the data access layer. More on that later. It also supports tagging and nicely designed URLs (courtesy of Intelligentcia's URL Rewriter). I was able to recover about half of my existing blog posts from the Live Search API's cache and Google's Cache.

Some links have changed, yet I'm doing a 301 Moved Permanently for all legacy URLs, so you're probably reading this as a result of that. Regardless: RSS. Home page (unchanged). Feels good to be back! Stop by and check out the new layout, while you're at it.

/sbin/lsraid -a /dev/md0
[dev   9,   0] /dev/md0         CD3295E2.945D4D13.7961C1FF.F79E9355 online
[dev   ?,   ?] (unknown)        00000000.00000000.00000000.00000000 missing
[dev  34,   1] /dev/hdg1        CD3295E2.945D4D13.7961C1FF.F79E9355 good

One of the hard drives on my file server is "missing." Uh oh.

Robert X. Cringley offers a theory about the Mac Mini: Apple will offer HD movie downloads a-la iTunes, and the Mini is the set-top box—complete with DVI to hook into your HDTV—to play those movies. Just like the iPod and iTunes did for music, the Mac Mini will do for movies.

I, for one, could see myself being a consumer of such a product and service. I would welcome the option of downloading movies if the cost and quality was comparable to a rental at Blockbuster. If the quality were to exceed that of Blockbuster—which HD would do until the HD DVD format war ends—it would only sweeten the deal. Does this excite anyone besides me?

Via Slashdot.

I'm in St. Charles, Illinois, at my parents' house for the week. I've been here for a few days. Since I'll be here for so long, I brought my laptop and my wireless router. I finally set it up today. It's nice being able to sit in their living room with my laptop and be on their cable modem. It's just like being in Champaign.

Today was my 23rd birthday. It was a pretty standard day. I worked, I worked out, I watched a little TV and I made dinner...nothing fancy. I released WeatherCornerAlert version 2.0 this evening...a birthday gift from me to you. I cleaned things up a little, hid one annoying exception that no one on microsoft.public.dotnet.framework could help me with. Hopefully swallowing it doesn't cause any additional problems. It should be all good. Try it out; I think you'll like it.

For a birthday present to myself, I bought a MuVo 4GB off of eBay today. It'll be great when I'm able to store over 1000 pictures on a single medium. I'm officially back to the Nikon D70 as my camera of choice. My one day flirtation with the Olympus 8080 has ended. I think the extra money is worth the advanced flexibility of the D70. The difference in resolution is really a non-issue, especially since the D70 has better image processing. Those "prosumer" cameras like the 8080 tend to do a lot of image processing in the camera. I'd much rather have that fine degree of control that Photoshop provides than have an algorithm decide at snap time. Anyway, in a week or two I'll be purchasing the camera. I'm excited!