Weird, Freaky, and Beautiful at the Same Time

Found while browsing the Times for financial news.

HTPC Blues

This Thanksgiving break, I decided to head home to set up my family’s HTPC, which had been recently down for “repairs” due to my installing new hard drives. There are two of them – a 250 GB refurbished WD drive that was sent to me for warranty on my old drive that failed and a 160 GB Seagate scavenged from previous PCs. The chassis is the remnants of a Dell Vostro 200 slim tower and the rest is a mix of some scavenged parts. All in all, it has the following specs: Celeron E1200 (1.6 Ghz, 512kb Cache) bought for free with an Amazon gift card, 1 GB DDR2 667 MHz RAM from the Vostro 200, the same Foxconn G33 motherboard complete with an integrated Intel 3100 GMA video card, and a DVD-ROM drive from the Vostro 200. When I bought it last spring, it cost $499 from Dell Deals and came with a C2D E4500 and a 20in LCD monitor. A pretty sweet deal at the time! The computer connects to the HDTV (Sony Bravia) via a VGA cable and an analog audio cable; it is fast enough to play HD (720p) video.

My parents, being computer-challenged, need some form of windows, so to minimize my support time, I first tried to install Windows XP and immediately ran into a problem with the bios settings for the SATA controller. In IDE mode, the cd would not load, and in RAID mode, the SATA drives were not recognized. The only recourse was to move the computer to Vista.

On Vista, I wanted to keep things simple by presenting only two partitions, one for the system and one for media files made by combining the two drives in RAID-0. Luckily for me, the onboard Intel Matrix RAID can do this and abstract away the number and type of underlying disks. By default though, the motherboard only supports RAID-1, which provides data redundancy but not the increased storage space I want.

Some shrews googling later, I found a few links that described how to install a hacked Dell bios that allows the onboard Intel Matrix RAID to support RAID-0, which is the mode I wanted to use for the partition storing media files. However, when I tried to flash the bios to the hacked one, I was greeted by a message that I couldn’t flash to the same version. Doh! The next step was to create a boot disk (from Windows or from Linux) and to flash from DOS. This worked, but I spent a few nerve-racking minutes at a dark screen with copious red block letters warning me not to unplug the power.

Well, it turns out that Matrix RAID isn’t much to speak of. It’s a fake RAID card that presents a single drive using a dumb controller without much of hardware RAID’s benefits. All split writes/reads are offloaded to the CPU in this implementation. The cynic in me thought that Intel did this on purpose to find some use for the abundance of CPU power we have these days. Matrix RAID’s main failing isn’t the high CPU consumption during data transfers; it’s its inability to recognize two unequally-sized drives in RAID-0. This means that I could only see 320 GB (2 x 160 GB, the smallest drive). The rest of the space on the 250 GB drive apparently would go to waste. *sigh* Linux md-raid doesn’t have this limitation!

There was one more thing to try – pure Vista software RAID. Both XP and Vista on certain versions (I know Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate do this for sure) intrinsically support striping a volume across two block devices. However, when I tried to do this from Disk Management in the control panel by converting to dynamic disks, I got an error message saying that the operation could not be completed. Apparently, a few people have encountered this error before, but there is no fix in the wild. *shrug* Another senseless regression from XP that makes Vista so unusable.

Rather than try to convert my parents to Linux, I decided to just keep Vista on the larger drive and have three distinct simple partitions; perhaps my parents can split the storage of TV shows and movies.

Typealyzer Meme

Typealyzer says:

ISTJ – The Duty Fulfillers

The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.

The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work in their own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.

Roundup: Blogs I Read

Reflective of my varied interests:

Greg Mankiw’s Blog: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
Phoronix: http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php” title=”Phoronix”/>
DistroWatch.com: Packages: http://distrowatch.com/news/dwp.xml
DistroWatch.com: News: http://distrowatch.com/news/dw.xml
DailyTech News Feed: http://www.anandtech.com/rss/newsfeed.aspx
AnandTech Article Channel: http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx
Slashdot: http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot
/home/liquidat: http://liquidat.wordpress.com/feed/
Niniane’s Blog: http://niniane.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
Fear The Fin: http://www.fearthefin.com/rss/
News Tom’s Hardware US: http://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/rss2/tom-s-hardware-us,18-1.xml
byte sized: http://dragonwarden.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
VirtualBlog: http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/rss.xml
Linux Today: http://www.linuxtoday.com/biglt.rss
OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/files/recent.xml
DesktopLinux.com: http://www.desktoplinux.com/backend/headlines.rss
NotebookReview.com: http://www.notebookreview.com/rss.xml
KernelTrap: http://kerneltrap.org/node/feed
Project Syndicate: http://www.project-syndicate.org/ps.rss
polishlinux.org: http://feeds.feedburner.com/polishlinux_org
Coding Horror: http://feeds.feedburner.com/codinghorror/
Ah Yes, Medical School: http://ahyesmedschool.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Universe Today: http://www.universetoday.com/universetoday.xml
Planet KDE: http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml
Outside The Beltway: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OTB
Miguel de Icaza: http://tirania.org/blog/miguel.rss2
Celettu’s Weblog: http://celettu.wordpress.com/feed/
sh0dan // VoxPod: http://sh0dan.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Diary Of An x264 Developer: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?feed=rss2
FP Passport: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/feed
naked capitalism: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
Right-Thinking from the Left Coast: http://right-thinking.com/index.php/weblog/rss_2.0/
Swing State Project: http://www.swingstateproject.com//rss/rss2.xml
GotWoot?: http://www.gotwoot.net/?feed=rss2
Dispatches from Purple America: http://dispatchesfrompurpleamerica.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Electoral-vote.com: http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/RSS/index.rss” title=”Electoral-vote.com”/>
SCOTUSblog: http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/feed/

Reactions to Jesse Helms’s Death

At age 86, Jesse Helms, the longtime senator from North Carolina, passed away on the 4th of July. Though we grieve for his family, we must also contend with his legacy. And what precisely is that? Many people in the media have thoughts:

Undoubtedly, Helms was a controversial figure, one who embodied along with Strom Thurmond the ideals and values of the Old South. This is in contrast to New South politicians like Robert Byrd who have moved on from overtly racist language (but not thought, as Trent Lott and George Allen demonstrated). Personally, I think the strong social conservative nature of the modern Republican Party is alienating to much of the populace. They should focus on publicizing and abiding by their fiscal conservativism if they want to win mainstream voters. The feeling of exclusion is offensive not only to the growing numbers of minorities in the US, but also to mainstream centrist whites.

Take the following quote from OTB:

I started calling myself a conservative because I was proud to be associated with the ideas and politics of people like Barry Goldwater. I stopped calling myself a conservative when the title became too closely associated with assholes like Helms. Good riddance.

- FanOfBarry

My favourite quote:

Jesse Helms’ legacy is one of hatred, homophobia and racism. Although not its intent, that legacy has made our community stronger and more able to forcefully respond to bigotry and prejudice. As a community, we are more committed than ever to securing full equality for all GLBT people.

— Joe Solmonese, president of the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign.

Intel Atom Performance Comparison

Even since Intel released its Silverthorne project as the Atom, I have been salivating at finally picking up a small, cool, light desktop that is a cheap and versatile performer. Why do I need a power-guzzling Core 2 Duo when everyday tasks don’t need something more powerful than a Pentium III? I know because I have run XP on a 866 MHz P3 and thought the experience sufficient for the internet, music, office, and basic 4+ year old games(AOE2, Starcraft, Rise of Nations, Rome Total War). Since we passed the gigahertz threshold, I’ve been asking why the regular PC user needs anything more powerful? Sure, if you’re a gamer or a video ripping fanatic, you’ll need all the power you can get, but really for basic office tasks, is the Atom up to the task?

Since I do not own an Atom, I thought that the best way to do a comparison is to find which old CPU is the most comparable to the Atom. In terms of transistor count, the Athlon XP at 37.5 million and Willamette P4 at 42 million were good initial guesses for appropriate counterparts to the Atom, standing at 47 million. Benchmarks were few and far between, but I did dig up the following:

Tomshardware says that the Atom with HT passes PCMark05 with a score of 1478. Not bad. How does the Athlon XP compare? Well, the Athlon XP 1800+ with a score of 1497 came close. On the Intel side, the Celeron (Willamette edition) 2 GHz scoring 1449 was the closest comparison.

The verdict? Having owned an Athlon XP 1800+ and having played with a friend’s P4 @ 2 GHz, I can confidently say that all users with basic requirements (office, internet, email, music, basic video playback, and light gaming) can get by fine with an Atom CPU. Watch out, Intel. Don’t be caught cannibalizing your own products!

Now I am interested in whether the Atom is capable of playing 1080p x264 video, which is typical of most anime fansub encodes these days. If it can handle that, I’m sold on selling off my existing desktops and replacing them with Atom-based machines.

The Orgiastic Future of Green Lights?

We can’t do anything to change yesterday. Instead, let’s strive to change tomorrow.

History will vindicate me, and I will write history.