darrylbraaten.com

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

darryl — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:43:00 GMT

This is a very cool service. It lets you check if a site is reachable from their servers if you can't get to it.

AskTog has a new column first one in over a year

darryl — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:03:00 GMT

Apple's Flatland Aesthetic, Part1: The Mac is pretty good. It covers a lot of the difficulty I have with Apple's OSX and iPhone. Actually his second article this year, I missed the first as I only check his site every few months.

Tog doesn't publish very often but his articles are usually very good. For usability guidance I also like to read Jacob Nielsen's Alertbox articles.

Wow installed new video driver, no reboot

darryl — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 04:43:00 GMT

That was impressive.

W00t running Windows 7

darryl — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 04:39:00 GMT

The upgrade did not work, but it seems to have installed on my second drive without breaking anything there.

I seem to be upgraded

darryl — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:56:00 GMT

I think it is finished, well sometime on Saturday it finished. It would have been nice if there was some indication of progress during the upgrade. The black screen eventually went away and I could log in from the console. For a while things stopped working, but that was because the upgrade activated the Windows Firewall which I had turned off.

While it was on the black screen I could remote desktop in, do somethings, but not start stopped services unless they started on boot. At some point it activated the FW cutting off remote desktop and some things I was using, but not SQL server or IIS they survived the FW activation. Possibly their installation automatically put in the correct FW rules.

Overall the upgrade went ok, but it took a really long time. If I had the HW to spare I think it would have been better to install from scratch.

I am leaning to not finished yet. The upgrade really needs some kind of progress bar.

Things are looking ok if a bit strange, and I am unsure if the upgrade is actually complete. The strangeness is that the local console has a blank screen with only a mouse cursor, but I can remote desktop in without any problems. The machine is running at 100% CPU so something might not be finished.

Things to note when doing an upgrade from Windows 2003 to 2008. Run adprep before starting. adprep can be found on the 2008 disc. You may also need to set your Domain to be 2003 native. It seems that by default it is set to 2000 mixed. It can be changed via the AD domains and trusts program. Also make sure all the remote desktop sessions are shut down, you will not be allowed to upgrade if there are multiple people logged in.

Things that are now working yet, Apache which I use for SVN, is not starting up.

Things that are working, SQL 2005, my blog, and my site that prompted the upgrade. Once it is finished enough for the public I will publish the url, for now it is private.

Wish me luck, upgrading to Windows 2008

darryl — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:41:00 GMT

If my server is offline for awhile this is why.

The reason I am upgrading is that the new stuff I am playing with i.e. ASP.NET MVC works much better on IIS7.

                Total    Copied   Skipped  Mismatch    FAILED    Extras
     Dirs :       678       678         0         0         0         0
    Files :    218482    218482         0         0         0         0
    Bytes : 368.533 g 368.533 g         0         0         0         0
    Times :   9:41:17   9:38:01                       0:00:00   0:03:15
    Speed :            11409697 Bytes/sec.
    Speed :             652.868 MegaBytes/min.
    Ended : Wed Nov 05 01:34:50 2008

Things are getting slower as my backup drive fills up

                Total    Copied   Skipped  Mismatch    FAILED    Extras
     Dirs :     15276     15276         0         0         0         0
    Files :    138615    138615         0         0         0         0
    Bytes : 104.223 g 104.223 g         0         0         0         0
    Times :   4:34:45   4:23:13                       0:00:00   0:11:32
    Speed :             7085832 Bytes/sec.
    Speed :             405.454 MegaBytes/min.
    Ended : Wed Nov 05 13:25:40 2008

                Total    Copied   Skipped  Mismatch    FAILED    Extras
     Dirs :      2400      2400         0         0         0         0
    Files :     31959     31959         0         0         0         0
    Bytes : 114.065 g 114.065 g         0         0         0         0
    Times :   2:34:44   2:32:51                       0:00:00   0:01:53

    Speed :            13354671 Bytes/sec.
    Speed :             764.160 MegaBytes/min.

    Ended : Wed Nov 05 19:22:19 2008

New Computer with 8GB RAM

darryl — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:41:00 GMT

I jumped a little ahead and didn't wait for any price drops. Boy am I happy with my new machine it is very very fast. There have been a few minor issues with Vista 64bit but overall it has been good.

I purchased it assembled from NCIX, just used there configuration on one of the higher end machines. This way it cut down on the time needed to research individual parts.

1 x Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Dual Core Processor LGA775 3.16GHZ Wolfdale 1333FSB 6MB Retail
1 x Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro LGA775 2500RPM 45CFM
1 x EVGA Nforce 780I SLI LGA775 ATX 3PCI-E16 1PCI-E1 2PCI SATA2 RAID Sound GBLAN 1394 Motherboard
2 x Corsair XMS2 DHX TWIN2X4096-6400C4DHX 4GB DDR2 2X2GB PC2-6400 DDR2-800 CL 4-4-4-12 240PIN Memory Kit
1 x GeForce GTX 280 OEM 602MHZ 1024MB GDDR3 2.214GHZ PCI-E DVI-I
1 x Antec P182 ATX Black Mid Tower Case 4X5.25 1X3.5 6X3.5INT No PS Front USB Audio Firewire
1 x Corsair CMPSU-620HX 620W ATX Triple 12V 50A 24PIN ATX Modular Power Supply 120MM Fan
1 x Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition 64BIT DVD OEM
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1000GB 1TB SATA2 7200RPM 32MB Cache NCQ Hard Drive OEM
1 x LG GGC-H20L BLU-RAY HD-DVD Reader BD-ROM 6X HD DVD-ROM 3X DVD+-RW 16X8X6 DL 4X Black SATA Software
1 x nGear Flash Card Reader 3.5IN Internal USB Black CF/SM/SD/MMC/MS/XD 18IN Cable Seperated Connectors
1 x Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 Keyboard & Mouse USB PS2 Black OEM Single Pack
1 x Western Digital Velociraptor WD3000GLFS 300GB SATA2 10000RPM 5.5MS 16MB 3.5IN Hard Drive

StackOverflow is now live/open beta

darryl — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:32:00 GMT

Stackoverflow is now live, very cool. Getting one of your answers marked best is great.

Vista 64bit Experience

darryl — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:56:00 GMT

The Good

Lots of Memory, my regular usage is just over 4GB, so no swapping with 8GB of real RAM.
Most things work with out any issues. This is much improved over my experience trying 64 bit in beta.
Very fast file transfers, between two my two main machines I got up to 50MB a second. Drive to drive on the new machine I have gotten over 100MB a second for large files. This is probably more this being a new faster machine then 64 bit.
No problems with the games I have tried, but that hasn't been many, or for very long.

The Bad

Windows Easy Transfer doesn't work, I was trying to move things from my old machine but it just crashes
~~Windows Media Player crashes on first run, the second time you run it, it works fine. Microsoft blames nVidia and suggest new drivers, new drivers do nothing.~~New drivers released Sept 12, 2008 fixed this issue.
Edit and continue doesn't work in VS.NET for 64bit processes. On the plus side it doesn't matter to much because everything is so fast.

StackOverflow is getting pretty good

darryl — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:10:00 GMT

I got into the beta for stackoverflow.com a couple of weeks ago. I have been answering a few questions and asking a few over that time. Even with just shy of 4000 users it is a very effective place to get answers to your programming questions.

I was having trouble figuring out how to read directly from a device in .Net today so I decided to ask the question on stackoverflow. Within a few minutes I got the answer use CreateFile call in Win32, and the person helpfully linked to the MSDN article for CreateFile which had an example in it for what I wanted to do. Surprisingly the offline MSDN article for CreateFile leaves out this information. I had also forgotten that CreateFile is the master call for opening things in Win32, files, pipes, com ports, pretty much any device that moves bits around. Though it is a bit hard to find it in the help if you don't know that to open files you need to call create.

With that information I was able to create a little program to read the information I needed.

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.IO;
using Microsoft.Win32.SafeHandles;
namespace ReadFromDevice
{
    public class DeviceStream : Stream, IDisposable
    {
        public const short FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL = 0x80;
        public const short INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE = -1;
        public const uint GENERIC_READ = 0x80000000;
        public const uint GENERIC_WRITE = 0x40000000;
        public const uint CREATE_NEW = 1;
        public const uint CREATE_ALWAYS = 2;
        public const uint OPEN_EXISTING = 3;
        // Use interop to call the CreateFile function.
        // For more information about CreateFile,
        // see the unmanaged MSDN reference library.
        [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
        private static extern IntPtr CreateFile(string lpFileName, uint dwDesiredAccess,
          uint dwShareMode, IntPtr lpSecurityAttributes, uint dwCreationDisposition,
          uint dwFlagsAndAttributes, IntPtr hTemplateFile);
        [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
        private static extern bool ReadFile(
            IntPtr hFile,                        // handle to file
            byte[] lpBuffer,                // data buffer
            int nNumberOfBytesToRead,        // number of bytes to read
            ref int lpNumberOfBytesRead,    // number of bytes read
            IntPtr lpOverlapped
            //
            // ref OVERLAPPED lpOverlapped        // overlapped buffer
            );
        private SafeFileHandle handleValue = null;
        private FileStream _fs = null;
        public DeviceStream(string device)
        {
            Load(device);
        }
        private void Load(string Path)
        {
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(Path))
            {
                throw new ArgumentNullException("Path");
            }
            // Try to open the file.
            IntPtr ptr = CreateFile(Path, GENERIC_READ, 0, IntPtr.Zero, OPEN_EXISTING, 0, IntPtr.Zero);
            handleValue = new SafeFileHandle(ptr, true);
            _fs = new FileStream(handleValue, FileAccess.Read);
            // If the handle is invalid,
            // get the last Win32 error 
            // and throw a Win32Exception.
            if (handleValue.IsInvalid)
            {
                Marshal.ThrowExceptionForHR(Marshal.GetHRForLastWin32Error());
            }
        }
        public override bool CanRead
        {
            get { return true; }
        }
        public override bool CanSeek
        {
            get { return false; }
        }
        public override bool CanWrite
        {
            get { return false; }
        }
        public override void Flush()
        {
            return;
        }
        public override long Length
        {
            get { return -1; }
        }
        public override long Position
        {
            get
            {
                throw new NotImplementedException();
            }
            set
            {
                throw new NotImplementedException();
            }
        }
        /// <summary>
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="buffer">An array of bytes. When this method returns,

 the buffer contains the specified byte array with the values between offset and 
        /// (offset + count - 1) replaced by the bytes read from the current source. </param>
        /// <param name="offset">The zero-based byte offset in buffer at which to begin storing the

 data read from the current stream. </param>
        /// <param name="count">The maximum number of bytes to be read from the current stream.</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public override int Read(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count)
        {
            int BytesRead =0;
            var BufBytes = new byte[count];
            if (!ReadFile(handleValue.DangerousGetHandle(), BufBytes, count, ref BytesRead, IntPtr.Zero))
            {
                Marshal.ThrowExceptionForHR(Marshal.GetHRForLastWin32Error());
            }
            for (int i = 0; i < BytesRead; i++)
            {
                buffer[offset + i] = BufBytes;
            }
            return BytesRead;
        }
        public override int ReadByte()
        {
            int BytesRead = 0;
            var lpBuffer = new byte[1];
            if (!ReadFile(
            handleValue.DangerousGetHandle(),                        // handle to file
            lpBuffer,                // data buffer
            1,        // number of bytes to read
            ref BytesRead,    // number of bytes read
            IntPtr.Zero
            ))
            { Marshal.ThrowExceptionForHR(Marshal.GetHRForLastWin32Error()); ;}
            return lpBuffer[0];
        }
        public override long Seek(long offset, SeekOrigin origin)
        {
            throw new NotImplementedException();
        }
        public override void SetLength(long value)
        {
            throw new NotImplementedException();
        }
        public override void Write(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count)
        {
            throw new NotImplementedException();
        }
        public override void Close()
        {
            handleValue.Close();
            handleValue.Dispose();
            handleValue = null;
            base.Close();
        }
        private bool disposed = false;
        new void Dispose()
        {
            Dispose(true);
            base.Dispose();
            GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
        }
        private new void Dispose(bool disposing)
        {
            // Check to see if Dispose has already been called.
            if (!this.disposed)
            {
                if (disposing)
                {
                    if (handleValue != null)
                    {
                        _fs.Dispose();
                        handleValue.Close();
                        handleValue.Dispose();
                        handleValue = null;
                    }
                }
                // Note disposing has been done.
                disposed = true;
            }
        }
    }
}
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
namespace ReadFromDevice
{
    class Program
    {
        private const int MB = 1024*1024;
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var reader = new BinaryReader(new DeviceStream(@"\\.\PhysicalDrive3"));
            var writer = new BinaryWriter(new FileStream(@"g:\test.dat", FileMode.Create));
            var buffer = new byte[MB];
            int count;
            int loopcount=0;
            try{
                while((count=reader.Read(buffer,0,MB))>0)
                {
                    writer.Write(buffer,0,count);
                    System.Console.Write('.');
                    if(loopcount%100==0)
                    {
                        System.Console.WriteLine();
                        System.Console.WriteLine("100MB written");
                        writer.Flush();
                    }
                    loopcount++;
                }
            }
            catch(Exception e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
            }
            reader.Close();
            writer.Flush();
            writer.Close();
        }
        
    }
}

DD-WRT v24 SP1 is very cool

darryl — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:54:00 GMT

I just upgraded from v23 SP2 to the new v24 SP1 firmware from dd-wrt. I am hoping my internet connection is more stable with the new release, since I moved I have been having intermittent issues where the connection drops for a few seconds throughout the day. Dd-wrt doesn't seem to produce comprehensive release notes so here is my list of things I like in the new version.

MAC address are linked to the IEEE vendor search so you can click on a MAC address and find the vendor of the Ethernet card.
There is now a bandwidth monitor with a very cool scrolling graph, three graphs actually LAN, WAN & wireless.
Active IP Connections now has a popup that lists all the connections. It would be nicer if you could sort by connection type, all the stale connections are not so interesting.
There is a traffic counter for the wan link, in the last 32 minutes I have downloaded 8MB and uploaded 1MB of stuff. And a bit more in the picture.

That is all the flashy stuff they added. Other things that I am interested in that look improved are VPN support, and hopefully a fix for my mysterious network issues. My ISP says no issue on their end, not that they are trust worthy in that regard. And I can't really phone them up when the connection goes down because it would be back up before I would be able to get through to anyone. So I am crossing my fingers that the problem is on my end and therefore fixable.

Trying hard to justify a new computer

darryl — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:10:00 GMT

Going over my receipts for the last year in preparation for doing my taxes I realized I haven't upgraded my computer in a couple of years. My current machine is almost 4 years old, but since I first bought it I have upgraded the CPU and video card. The CPU is a AMD 4400+ and can't really be upgraded again since AMD changed the chip socket since after I bought my motherboard. My video card is a 7950 GX2 which I went a little overboard on when I bought it, I wanted one a couple models down but it was the only one actually purchasable when I was shopping.

Looking at what is out now, nVidia has their new GTX 280 cards at the high end, but Tom's Hardware doesn't have it in their GPU comparison chart yet they are missing the prior 9000 series cards also. My current card is still fast compared to the other cards on the chart. It is also really hard to make direct comparisons as all the review sites always use the latest hardware when looking at video cards, even the resolutions tested are now going up, the old standard was 1024x768 but most monitors now support much higher resolutions, I currently run everything at 1920x1200 for example. Making even manual comparisons between the 7950gx2 from the chart and the latest gtx 280 review impossible.

Looking at Tom's CPU charts comparing my 4400+ to the E8500 Intel processors it looks like things are looking up. Most of the benchmarks show the current generation of CPU's having double or more the performance of the 4400+, and the 4400+ they are using is a slightly better version then the one I have, or at least it has the new socket. PC Mark CPU for example the 4400 rates 4531 and the E8500 gets 8103, almost double. But for the Windows Experience Index the 4400 rates 5.2 and the E8500 5.9. On my actual machine I get 5.0 for the 4400+. Processor and memory are my two lowest scores at 5.0.

One irony is while I focus on video cards quite a bit while shopping for a new computer is that I don't really play games on my desktop anymore. A little playing around with Age of Conan, and I will probably play Spore when it comes out in Sept. But it is really more of a work machine. It might also be time to try ATI cards again I have had bad experiences with them in the past and have found nVidia to support their cards much better. I don't know if things have changed since AMD bought them a couple of years ago. The Radeon HD 4870 compares quite well to the GTX 280 and is much cheaper, about the same prices as the GTX 260.

One thing I will do for sure with a new machine is run a 64bit install of Vista, my current machine has 3G of memory not all of it is usable as my video card takes up 1G of address space on it's own. With 64bit Vista I will be able to have 4G or more of memory and have the machine use it all. Most of the time memory is not an issue but if I need to run a virtual machine to play around with stuff it is. I have been using my server for VM's but it only has 2G of memory which limits my VM memory size a lot. When playing around with Commerce Server 2008 it likes 1G on its own for example.

Most of my research was done on www.tomshardware.com I also like www.anandtech.com but their site is really slow and www.extremetech.com.

I will look at things in another three months or so and see if I can put together a machine I like for under $2000, pricing out everything I would like seems to be hitting between 2200-2600 right now. Three months might give me another CPU or GPU generation to evaluation also.

Unit Testing with Linq to Sql

darryl — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:02:00 GMT

I am working on a small personal project to learn some new things. One my objectives is to follow the test first methodology. Something I just discovered was using SQLExpress to dynamically create databases on the fly, which makes setting up unit tests really easy. You can provide a connection string to a local database create it and add any data required for testing. When you are finished just delete the database.

Using Nunit you can structure your tests in a couple of ways, you can have a setup per class, or you can do setup per test. This is accomplished with the TestFixtureSetUp, and SetUp attributes respectively. When doing setup you should also do clean up, this is done via TestFixtureTearDown, and TearDown.
private CollectionsDataContext db = null; [TestFixtureSetUp] public void SetupTests() { db = new CollectionsDataContext(Utilities.CollectionDb); if(db.DatabaseExists()) db.DeleteDatabase(); db.CreateDatabase(); var user = new aspnet_User { ApplicationId = System.Guid.NewGuid(), UserId = System.Guid.NewGuid(), UserName = "TestUser", LastActivityDate = DateTime.Now, LoweredUserName = "testuser" }; db.aspnet_Users.InsertOnSubmit(user); db.SubmitChanges(); } [TestFixtureTearDown] public void Cleanup() { db.DeleteDatabase(); } [Test] public void GetUser() { var user = from u in db.aspnet_Users select u; foreach (var user1 in user) { Assert.AreSame("TestUser",user1.UserName); } }

One thing not to do is delete the database from the file system, it will then be in never never land. Using the Linq DeleteDatabase method removed the files from removed the files from the file system.

The database location is pulled from the app.config which currently looks like this for the Nunit tests.
<connectionStrings> <add name="CollectionLib.Properties.Settings.CollectionsConnectionString" connectionString="e:\temp\collections2.mdf" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> </connectionStrings>
In the actual application it will point to a database on a server.

Integrated Testing with NUnit; Resharper or TestMatrix

darryl — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:07:00 GMT

Update: I decided to go with Resharper. It is just a bit slicker then TestMatrix, and I decided the refactoring tools are worth more then the profiling tools in TestMatrix.

For some reason if you have the Architects version of Visual Studio you are not allowed to write unit tests with Visual Studio. I guess Microsoft things that Architects shouldn't test the code they write. On one of my past projects I used both Nunit, and the Microsoft test framework. The Microsoft framework is not as large as Nunit, but it looks like it does everything that I need. But because it is currently unavailable to me I am using Nunit for a new project I am starting.

One thing that I don't like about Nunit is does not have any Visual Studio integration by default. This makes it rather tedious to use. Previously I have used a free version of JetBrains Resharper to get around this. JetBrains doesn't seem to offer the free version anymore. Resharper does a bunch of other things in addition to running unit tests, actually unit tests seems to be one of its minor features. Resharper costs $199. Looking around the net for other solutions one that came up the most was TestMatrix by ExactMagic, actually what comes up is TestRunner, TestMatrix is the most resent version, it clocks in at $129.

My decision now is between, Resharper a refactoring, best practice enforcing tool, or a dedicated unit testing plugin, that does a little profiling and code coverage.

Resharper Pros
Full Refactoring tool
Suggests best practices for you to follow
Run individual tests from an icon in the coding window.
Will run tests marked ignore if you explicitly run them.
Resharper Cons
The old version anyway slowed VS down a lot. Not sure about the new version yet.
Profiling is a $199 add on.

TestMatrix Pros
Code coverage
Profiling is included
Nice visual around tests showing their success or failure.
TestMatrix Cons
Can not manually run tests marked ignore
No in editor icons for running tests

Decisions decisions, resharper is very cool. I like being able to run individual tests even if they are marked ignore. Though this is probably not a best practice, I tend to write utilize these as debug entry points that do something I wouldn't normally do in a test. TestMatrix has profiling, something I really like, but there are free profilers out there that give pretty good results(Nprof).

I have a few days on the free trials and will add pros and cons and I find them.

The power of + and how it can mess you up

darryl — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:21:00 GMT

One really handy feature on cell phones is that you can prefix the country code with + and the phone will dial the number for you correctly for local calls and long distance. i.e. to call me you would start with +1604… 1 being the country code for Canada.

One of my friends was updating his new number on my cell phone a while ago, he missed entering the country code, resulting in the area code of 250 being the country code. What county is 250? Rwanda. So I must have woken up some poor guy in Rwanda trying to get a hold of my friend later that day. Luckily Fido has per second billing so it didn't cost me too much.

Moral of the story, double check phone numbers that someone else updates in your phone.

I am now on twitter

darryl — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:46:00 GMT

Thought I would try it out to see what all the fuss is over. Still seems kind of lame to me.

http://twitter.com/darryl42

Getting a Liquor license

darryl — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:01:00 GMT

I should have started chronicling this from the beginning. Time line to date.

Feb & March, decide we should get a liquor license, including surveying customers.
March get Serving it Rite certification, if you own more then 10% of a restaurant you need one.
April fill in all the paperwork, send it in.
Late April find out because the lease isn't in the company name we can't "prove" that is our location.
May 1, phone lawyers in Kelowna to figure out how to change the lease
May 2nd deliver paperwork to the lawyer to begin work, estimated to take 3-5 hours of billable time
May 27th wondering if we should have used a different lawyer.
May 27th Lawyer finished, waiting for landlord to sign new lease papers
June 12th Landlord signed new lease after extorting $700 for doing so
June 16th Cheque cashed
June 19th Lease faxed to person who will look at it.

With any luck we will have the license just in time for the fall rush, oh wait there is no fall rush.

Getting Rid of Books is hard

darryl — Sun, 25 May 2008 05:06:00 GMT

Do I really need:

Turbo Assembler 3.0
The X Window System Programming and Applications with XT
X Window Applications Programming
Using X
PC Interrupts
and many more

I don't think I have looked at any of them in over 10 years, they are almost books historical record now.

Oh well off to the trash.

GT 5: Prologue

darryl — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:06:00 GMT

I bought GT5: Prologue last week, what a disappointment. There has been a lot of cries on the interwebs that it was just a demo an not worth purchasing, usually citing the limited number of tracks (6)and cars (60+). Which are in fact smaller numbers of cars and tracks from other GT games, but that didn't bother me to much, the demo from last year had a couple cars and one track. What I never noticed in any of the reviews or name calling was that GT5: Prologue is missing the one thing that makes a GT game a GT game, there is no tuning.

In a normal GT game the first thing you do after buying your first car is to go a put a chip in it or change the exhaust, usually the two cheapest things you can do to add more horse power to your car. In GT5:Prologue there is no purchasing of parts, it is just an arcade racer.

Once you get through the main game, levels C, B, and A the end credits roll and the S class opens up. On the S class races there is a tuning menu that lets you change the HP and weight of your car from a single screen. But this is just so you can try and get your car to match the other cars in the race, rather then build some obscene monstrosity with 1000HP and no brakes, which is where all the fun is.

One review I read said that the average winnings per race was only 30k, which means it takes a lot of time to get the money required for all the specific cars you need. This isn't actually correct, the average per race is closer to 10k, only the S class races give you 30K, which you can only get to once you are finished. Probably the best race is one with a 7.5k pot since you can win it in under a 1:10. But it is pretty hard to win so normally it is 5k a run. Rerunning races is very quick so there is minimal downtime to do it again. There might be a couple of races that make more money if you are a better driver then I am, but when you are grinding cash easy races are the best.

What is there is entertaining if you like driving games. The online races seem to work ok, there is a nifty feature where if you are out of control your car phases out as to not mess up other drivers which fixes most of the griefing that can happen in a racing game. But keep in mind it is more of an arcade racer then the prior GT games. Which makes the inclusion of an arcade mode even strange since they are the exact same races as the normal races you just don't get any money for winning.

HD OTA Experiment

darryl — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:34:00 GMT

Rumor has it that Shaw heavily compresses the HD channels making them look horrible whenever there are any scenes with motion. I had heard that there are some HD channels available over the air (OTA) in Vancouver, if I can receive any of them they should look better then what Shaw provides in theory.

Step one of the experiment, Google research. Google proved to be not very encouraging. Most of the things I found were from a few years ago, and being downtown there is a high chance that I will not get anything.

Step two, is my TV able to receive OTA HD signals. I figured it was since it is pretty new, but most of the digital TV stuff on the web is for the US. After digging up the manual I was able to determine that it probably could receive OTA HD signals. The acronym to look for seems to be ATSC, Advanced Television Systems Committee.

Step three, get an antenna. Radio Shack, sorry The Source, seems to be the only place selling antennas. I picked up an amplified antenna which the salesman assured me would be no better then plain rabbit ears. He almost had me convinced I would not getting any reception downtown and suggested I get cable instead.

Once I had all the pieces in place it was time to see if I could get anything. First hurdle to overcome, the cable from the antenna was to short setting the antenna directly in front of the TV didn't seem like a good idea. Luckily I had an old splitter and some extra cables, using the splitter also allowed me to hookup the digital and the old style antenna jacks at the same time. The second problem, no reception, after carefully reading the TV manual another time it was found that to enable digital reception you must hit the D/A button on the remote. Success I can receive CBC OTA.

Now to see if it looks any different then the CBC feed on Shaw. This afternoon there was just some talk show both the Shaw feed and the OTA feed looked about the same. The OTA feed drops out ever so often, I think this may be because I am getting the signal via a bounce from another building, as according for an forum post I found the transmitter is in the opposite direction from where I have the antenna pointed.

So if you live downtown you might be able to get at least once OTA HD channel. It was an interesting experiment, now I just need to decide if I want to keep the antenna or return it. It might be worth while to wait for movie to come on, or something else with a bit of movement and see if motion is handled better. One last comment, the amplifier on the antenna does seem to work I need to have it turned all the way up to receive anything.

Note to Self: exec sp_change_users_login

darryl — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:31:00 GMT

Why SQL Server doesn't do this automaticly escapes me. If you ever restore a database you end up with a bunch of users in your database, and a bunch of users defined on your database server (well only if they were already on the server). But they are broken half users.

Invaribly I spend half an hour trying to remember the name of the stored procedure that fixes this up when ever I restore a database.

This post is so I can find it quicker.

Wii Mote Head tracking

darryl — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 18:46:00 GMT

If you don't read Penny Arcade you may have missing this. It is pretty cool. I playing around with it a little. If you don't want to move your senor bar as he suggests, just multiply things by -1 to flip things around and use the remote instead. The default Vista Bluetooth drivers work with the Wii remote so there is no need to use the suggested third party Bluetooth stack.

HD is way to complicated

darryl — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:25:00 GMT

[Update] Just found a nice article that explains things a little more clearly then I did. I still have the same conclusion, support for the new audio formats sucks.

Now that I own a PS3 I was thinking about upgrading my receiver to one that supported the new audio formats available on HD disks.

Getting the video right for HD is hard enough, most display manufactures are not exactly forthright about the real capabilities of their displays lots or marketing material will reference 1080i/p when the set can't do those formats. Audio is way more difficult, there are 7 different audio codes that HD-DVD and Blu-ray support. Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS-HD High Resolution, Linear PCM, Dolby True HD, and DTS-HD Master Audio.

Andy Pennell wrote an interesting article on how audio works for HD DVD, specifically he shows how the add-on for the 360 works. The 360 player doesn't support the new audio formats directly instead the player transcodes the audio to WMA Pro, DTS, or Dolby Digital. Andy considers WMA Pro to be the best format. My current receiver supports DTS and Dolby Digital, I am currently using DTS. Reading the avsforum HD DVD audio faq was only more confusing, some of the new formats can be sent via HDMI, but only in a limited format that drops some of the audio. If you actually have a standalone player it looks like the best way is to use the analog outputs.

I could not find equivalent information on the PS3 handling of the new audio formats. There are two articles (1, 2) on engadgetHD that is complaining about lack support for True HD. I am currently using the S/PDIF out on the PS3 to run audio to my receiver, what the PS3 is doing is unknown.

This was originally going to be a list of receivers I would consider buying, but with my current playback gear, PS3 & 360 add-on it doesn't make any sense to upgrade my receiver. The HD audio formats are currently a real mess.

PS3 First Impressions

darryl — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 21:10:00 GMT

My no Sony products stance has had one minor hiccup as I purchased a 80G PS3 the other day. So far I have played MotorStorm (ok) watched Pixar shorts (Blu-ray), Resident Evil: Extinction (Blu-ray), and The Namesake (DVD). I bought it primarily for playing Blu-ray disks as I was tired of seeing things released on Blu-ray instead of HD-DVD and standard def is starting to bug me, and the PS3 is the best Blu-ray player out currently,

Blu-ray playback is great, looks about the same as HD-DVD playback on my 360. The PS3 is hooked up via HDMI running 1080P to my TV where the 360 just has component out running 1080i.

DVD playback is great the scalier made The Namesake look very good, what I really liked it is detected the non-widescreen content and pillar boxed it. This is the first player I have seen that does not stretch 4:3 content when played on a 16:9 TV.

Things that I don't like about the PS3:

It is rather large and doesn't fit where I wanted to put it under my TV.
I had to buy a HDMI cable as it doesn't ship with one
The USB cable for charging the controller is way too short.
The on screen keyboard is random, sometimes it is qwerty, sometimes telephone keys.
It didn't support the encryption I was using on my Wifi.
It hides the HEX key for WEP making it hard to check what you are typing.
After downloading a demo you need to install them to play.
There are still no games I want to buy for the PS3.
No IR sensor so I can't use my remote with it.

Things I like:

DVD playback is very good, better then the Xbox.
Cheap Blu-ray player
Best Blu-ray player (1.1 Blu-ray support, potentially 2.0 support)
Shiny black.
Less noisy then my 360.
Pretty flexible playing video pictures, music.

Things that may bug me in the future:

Doesn't not handle all the Blu-ray audio formats. If it did I would need a new stereo so not important currently.

How to open locked luggage

darryl — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 23:12:00 GMT

How to open locked luggage. A very useful little video that shows how to open up a three tumbler combo lock. As it turns out there is a little mark you can see when the wheel is at the correct number.