Electronic Hardware

Dell/HP Servers and Servers using normal PC

spider — Mon, 03 Nov 2003 21:24:21 GMT

People paid a lot of $$ into branded servers, promising high resilence, robust and better quality. To me, the difference in these branded servers compare to normal servers using PC is merely the motherboard (dual processors), and maybe it comes raid card, comes with higher memory that's all.

So if you want cheap and high end server (dual or multiple processors), go to Sim Lim and buy the parts and built yourself ;)

Making amends with your customer

icelava — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:40:35 GMT

Many of you knew about the techsupport fiasco with my personal laptop last year; my well-working XPS (other than the annoying touchpad) was essentially converted to a laser-hot finger burner device. After so many on-site and off-site attempts, Dell gave up and waved the white flag. As compensation they offered a one-to-one replacement for my laptop, except that there were no longer red models like the special one I used. That upset me, because I like the colour of blood; it sucks not to be able to prey on human victims during day time, so having a device before my eyes that distracted me a little was needed. So I was given an option: back up my hard disk and ship back the old laptop...

Adios!

And get this baby in return...

The Dell XPS Studio 16, souped-up and superior to my M1530 in almost every manner. It sports an even larger screen at 15.6" with a HD resolution of freaking 1920x1080. Yup, it's a 16:9 aspect ratio and all ready to entertain me with unending HD video. Even the power adapter has been redesigned with a much more sensible light indicator at the cable connector instead of the adapter brick itself. Thanks for saving me the trouble of looking under my desk and risk being accused of checking out my colleagues' mini skirts.

It still features the slot-in DVD drive (disc tray??? what's that?), and a really useful self-lit keyboard. Computing in the dark is now a possibility; thanks for the productivity boost!

The keyboard does not stay permanently lit either; it lights down after a short period of inactive keyboard use to conserve energy. Keyboard commandos, however, may despair at the greater energy consumption of this feature. Up to now, I still haven't figured how to disable this altogether. But in all honesty I can't be bothered as I do not perceive it as a major energy drain. I could be wrong of course, but so far I do not suffered short battery operation.

It's a rather nice laptop, really. For entertainment. The thing is I used my old XPS as a personal mobile development workstation. This 15.6" size cannot fit into my regular laptop sling backpack, which at most could accomodate 15.4". Lugging this beast around has gotten a little more troublesome. Moreover for regular computing/work purposes I've always preferred the 16:10 aspect ratio as it provides for vertical real estate. Oddly enough, the LCD panel design covers up the ventillation slots when opened; I wonder where the thermal engineers intended the hot air to flow when the laptop is in use. Even worse, there are only measly two USB ports! Two! In this day and age when a person typically carries 45 USB devices in his pockets, two ain't gonna cut it, dude. At least offer an extension USB hub.

(UPDATE: it turns out Dell cleverly "hid" a third USB port into the right-side eSATA port. So if one is not using an eSATA disk, it is available as a USB port.)

But seriously, how can I possibly complain, correct? I essentially got an upgrade for free. On top of that, it uses web-cam facial recognition to auto-logon instead of another possible finger-burner reader. I mean, I just stand there and it recognises my ugly face and I'm in. Look mum! No typing!

Well, I didn't really want the upgrade; I was rather satisfied with the older model (which was sleek in its own right), and would have taken it happily if it weren't for the "blood loss". I think I can even live without the extra USB ports as I can deploy hubs like a dog lays mines on the sidewalk. The one thing I am rather taken aback though, was the laptop protective bag...

Yup, instead of an actual bag, Dell now come up with ingenious ways to cut hardware costs and now supplies a face towel. Either that or I heard these type of materials are great for moping the floor. Ah well, win some, lose some, as they say.

Servicing earphone audio jacks

icelava — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:36:33 GMT

Many know me to be a snobbish circumaural headphones bigot, preferring to lug the excess weight and bulk of space-helmet-looking headphones, turntables and all, to satisfy my needs for portable music. I do not compromise on my standards for noise protection, comfort, and ergonomic movement. That means a warehouse of earphones that came stock with various audio devices under my ownership, that lay as part of my "underutilised" inventory. But once in awhile, I'd get into one of those "what a waste" mood swings that makes me eye over an item, dig it out of the multiple layers of earth, and give it an operational test.

So last night, since my high-tech audio equipment is still undergoing servicing, I decided to try low-tech and dust off the stock Nokia headset. The headset is comprised of regular earphones with a short jack cable, and an extension cable that carries the clip microphone. Since these are stock equipment, the jacks are not gold-plated and have tarnished during their dormant rest for the past few millennia. These layers of metallic mucus are excellent at killing the conductivity of jack, essentially making the effort to get a balanced audio signal for all frequencies on both sides much more difficult than tuning the gain of a primitive radar. I sat there twisting and rotating the jack in the stereo port like an idiot trying to decipher an encrypted satellite porn channel; I simply could not get a balanced signal.

Then it hit me: why does the left side have greater tendency than the right side in failing to receive a good signal?

This is not the first time I encounter unbalanced problems involving the left earphone. More often I am "tuning" in order to get the left channel on par. The answer, I suspect, lies in the design of the stereo jack. The tip of the jack is the left channel. It would appear the tip is prone to connectivity misses for a deteriorated jack. Frankly if that is the case, I think a flat cylindrical jack design would have been less susceptible. Unless somebody prefers the feel of a jack with an edgy end; slides in smoother or something, I don't know.

No matter, this morning I found a real convenient solution to restoring the connectivity - simply wipe the jack with those rinse-free, alcohol hand sanitiser fluids. It managed to burn off the tarnish coat with zero stutter and static when I twisted the jack in the port. I see it certainly helps to wash up after use.

A separate matter involving the same equipment was the mystery of incomplete audio experience when I plug my fully-extended headset cable into a standard stereo port, like those on my laptops. The audio signals would be unbalanced (left again) or missing or softening of some sound frequencies, like human voices; making music sound more like instrumental karaoke tracks. No, I do not think that is the reason why there is a microphone attached to this cable.

The reason became clear when I took a closer look at the direct jack to the earphones, against the jack of the extension microphone. The latter had three division rings - four segments. A typical stereo jack should have two rings - left channel (tip), right channel, and sleeve. The microphone jack included another segment for microphone input. Makes total sense, but shows what an ignorant nut I am when it comes to basic electrical conductivity. Well at least I don't use a running toaster in the bathtub.

So the lesson is, do not plug a stereo-cum-microphone jack into a regular stereo port and expect a good audio experience. Just use another regular extension cable.

Cardinal sin of shopping

icelava — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 05:35:54 GMT

I thought it was that simple. I really did.

It has been years now. I am just so used to maxing out my 100Mbps home network. Routine file transfers stream from computer to computer at takeoff speeds of 80-99.9Mbps. It would not be far off to guess that the numerous hard disks in my possession are reaching similar levels of capacity and utilization. However, if you think that is due to the high volume of anime and songs I archive, that is only half the truth. The real issue of worry? Since I operate an usually large number of computers, backing up important data and entire drive volumes take up..... more disk space. On top of that, I operate an indefinite number of virtual machines within those physical machines. Simulating and backing up all those virtual hard disks requires..... much more disk space. I have come to a state where I am backing a drive partition that carries the back up images of other drive partitions. I probably need a better structure in my organisation of disks and drives.

So yesterday saw me peeking around Sim Lim for a new voluminous and sexy external disk. I got seduced by another type of device though - the consumer NAS. Why just an ordinary dump USB disk? I chanced upon the Linksys NAS200 - a networkable casing that plugs in two SATA disks, and two more via USB ports. With expandability up to four drives, what more can a consumer ask?

Much more, as it turned out.

Like a kid opening christmas toys, I quickly got around stripping off the packaging and fitted a disk into the first bay. It was dead simple procedure done in two minutes. Unfortunately, that was the only thing fast about this device. I soon got to experience first hand how unbelievably slow data transfers are - a whooping 3+MB/sec, which roughly equates a third of a 100Mbps pipe. Was there something wrong? Could it be due to the fact that I was transfering data from the USB disk attached to my laptop? Was it somehow due to the office M1 Huawei mobile broadband router that I was basing as a switch for this experiment? I got home and tested with similar performance.

Indeed, this product is rated to be excrutiatingly slow. The slowest in fact.

Now I think I know why it was "only" priced $220+ ($330+ with disk) against other products that span into the $1000-2500 range. But how the heck does network communication even become a performance matter in the first place? In this day and age of gigabit rates, why are we even given the opportunity to buy sub-par runners in the100Mbps lane? Even an averaged 60Mbps sustained rate would have been satisfactory. And yet, what's being released here is stunningly abysmal. Cannot even match DVD burning rates.

So it is not just a Function-over-Form debate. Sometimes we need to factor in a Speed-over-Function consideration, which is seldom detailed in the box packages the products come in. Therefore, the cardinal sin of shopping is: rushing purchase decisions based on the exciting spur of the moment. The annoying part? That I would quite easily commit the same mistake again.

Plug and Probe (for your own settings)

icelava — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 07:18:40 GMT

It sucks to be a technology enthusiast. Attempting to move quickly through progressive improvements (but practically warranted, nonetheless) in hardware is a loss-making business. Getting somebody to buy over old hardware is such a challenge, I'd probably earn more as a coolie carrying sacks of rice off the pier for the amount of time spent. The alternative then, to getting one's "money's worth" out of superceded hardware is to relegate them to other lesser areas of usage.

And so I did for my pair of unsellable Philips 190CW7CB monitors, which were replaced by high-resolution ViewSonic VX1940w last year. This pair ended up in the current office I am stationed at. One to supplement my laptop so I get dual-display goodness just like home, and the other to replace the miserable 15" monitor attached to an equally depressing Penitum4 desktop that serves as the workstation connected to the corporate network. (We are not allowed to connect our own computers to the network)

Life became good. Half way.

It was a breeze on my laptop. But for this aging desktop, there was something not quite right with its NVIDIA Geforce2 MX adapter; it simply could not recognise the monitor's native resolution of 1440x900. The latest drivers I could obtain for this venerable GPU was 93.71, circa 2006. The boundary resolutions offered were 1360x768 and 1600x900. Why would an obsolete GPU offer HD video aspect ratios of 16:9 instead of computer desktop ratios of 16:10 is completely beyond me. In the following week I was forced to to squeeze a 1600x900 signal onto a 1440x900 area of pixels. Never mind that it look skinny, the text was a mesh of blur. Still readable, thankfully, but soon proved to be the quickest way to develop migraine.

Life became bad. And Panadol quarterly net income went up.

It seemed I was doomed to destroy my eyesight faster than mangekyou sharingan users. Being mindful of all the blood my eyes were tearing out, I initially tried to update the drivers to the "Default Monitor" with Philips' definition, but Windows XP blissfully rejected it stating it could not find anything "better" than it had. Snob. What else could I do? Then the Lord opened my eyes to something that was blind to me in the past.

Custom Timings! I can tell the card to output the video signal at a rate other than the stock options! I have always been an NVIDIA customer, but now it is time to become a fanatical supporter. After much trial and error, I finally got the dang video card to output at a rate appropriate for the monitor's consumption.

So much for plug-and-play devices. Long live manual explicit tuning.

My dream of how we _should_ be reading is nearing

icelava — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:14:01 GMT

I have a big problem. I ~~love~~ am forced to read volumes of technical books on a frequent basis. There is still a large amount of knowledge and experience that is not readily accessible from the Internet, and books are still the primary conduit for me to absorb the lessons and pains others have gone through.

And guess what? It really feels like weight-lifting blocks of wood carrying books hundreds of pages thick. Some beyond a thousand. Toss in a 3Kg laptop into my backpack and it becomes easy to guess why I have not grown much beyond five feet.

Why not subscribe to online book services and read off the web? Yes I do, in fact. My company strategically subscribes us to Books 24x7, providing us to huge library of titles from a variety of publishers. Sadly, some notable publishers are completely absent (either because of licensing disagreement or possessing their own online readership services). However, the main deal is this:

I read books while commuting.

It is not impossible, but pretty hard work to pre-surf the pages I expect to read while on the go without Internet access. Even if I do that, it is just ergonomically retarded to walk around plattering the laptop in front of me. As much as I dismiss the concept of fashion police, there are just certain activities that are simply too hardcore for me; I have not reached that Level yet. And I cannot afford to purchase a weak Tablet simply for the sake of reading; my mobile computer must have development workstation power, and carrying two machines is for bodybuilders.

A Kindle perhaps? Too small for an electronic screen. Besides, there is something (wrong?) with my brain that makes it easier for me to read deep and profound materials when it is presented on a medium that I hold in my hands, versus content emitted from a screen. Heck, neither can I annotate the stuff I read with highlighters or pencil notes on the sides. Fine for reading novels on a trip, maybe. Not so fine for focus studying of complex topics.

It is frustrating. I wish to carry many titles along with me. And I lack the herculean strength to lug my bookshelf on my back. Not that I have the time to read all of them even if I obtained Superman's powers (can Superman read at the speed of light?), but it would be so wonderful to be able to whip out that particular book for quick reference wherever I may be. Spatial and gravitational constraints really limit the amount of external knowledge I carry with me at any one time.

My dream was to hold a single sheet of paper that is really just an ultra-thin display screen, able to dynamically flip the pages through the hundreds of books I need to read. I can annotate any portion of any page however I liked, even embedding in hyperlinks. I prayed hard that this kind of technology would become mainstream within my life time.

Looks like God is seeing to it that my prayers get answered.

CES 2009. Microsoft delivers the keynote at the beginning of this year's event, and the last segment nearly brought me to tears.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/ces/keynote.aspx?initialVideo=FutureOfComputingDemocast

Now this is what I am talking about. This is the book I wish to carry to all the ends of the Earth. Books, I mean. The coming future will be a joyous time for me.

Double-Layer DVD; double worries

icelava — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 06:05:50 GMT

Another age, another round of technological discoveries. In other words, adopting new types of hardware into my household. This time round, it is moving on to use Double-Layer DVDs to archive ever-increasing content sizes. More and more DVD ISO images are appearing all around with sizes exceeding 4.38GB (do not get deceived into thinking it is 4.7GB), and using DVDShrink is usually not an option when it comes to pure data discs.

So last week I purchased my first batch of DL DVDs. These are expensive media; S$3.40 per disc; it looks like the mainstream is not entirely into DL media despite quite a span of years since it first arrived. No matter, this is not a BluRay media I have to burn, so a DL DVD is the only option. I pop a blank into my writer drive and burnt the image in as usual.

As usual? Is it safe to even assume a DL DVD works the same like a single-layer DVD? When I am in "consumer" mode, I do think so. After all, there is hardly anything written anywhere to warn otherwise. Not in the hardware documentation. Not in the software documentation. So it works the same, right?

As it turns out, yet again, things are not as straightforward as they should be. The end result was a disc that plays fine on the first layer, but at a particular timing thereafter, it stops playing. On four computers' drives. One of the drives is able to read beyond, but the video is corrupted and jittery. I inferred that was where the second layer came into play, and anything stored there was not burnt in properly. Is there some trick to double-layer burning?

How is it that I frequently walk across usage concepts that are potrayed as simple, yet full of catches and quirks? Why do I always need to meet with failures and problems on first attempt to force me into "investigator" mode; researching and studying the technologies in depth, just so I can use them properly? And please do not use the argument that one should learn not to place metals and old plastics into microwave ovens. These are tech devices; they can be smart; they can be designed to warn regular users of the ups and downs of certain decisions or usage patterns.

What was the solution out of this incident? I was advised by a friend - not some official documentation - to burn the DL disc at the slowest speed possible. Nero Express, the software that came with the drive, offered the lowest at 3.2x. That sure did the trick; finally a readable DVD. But that also means the disc rating of 8x speed is not a guarantee at all. Guess it is something like the mpg ratings of cars manufacturers like to advertise. But what if I did not have an experienced friend to tell me this? How many pages of Internet searches do I have to plough through before even finding an explanation and suggestion that is valid? How many more people in the world would have to go through the same experience of wasting a couple of expensive DVDs before finding the proper procedure to cooking up a good, well-baked disc?

Yes indeed, using technology is more akin to cooking; you have to practise and practise. Wasting plenty of eggs and flour, as well as delicacy spices and pounds of meat, before approaching something palatable to the tongue.

Digital faxing culture with Brother MFC-8440

icelava — Sat, 27 Nov 2004 05:39:40 GMT

I can see just why Hardware Mag didn't have any second thoughts about awarding this Multi-Function Centre equipment the Gold medal.

(this isn't a technical hardware review, but more of a personal experience testimony - reviews require alot more work )

One of our customers wanted very much wanted to evolve away from the traditional methods of business faxing in order to cut down on the time spent manually fiddling with the conventional monstrosity of a fax machine they currently have as well as to save paper - why should you have to print everything faxed in only to see it, most of the time, once? And to print out thousands of sheets only to fax them out once before dumping into the trash bin?

Tech-saavy businesses who have implemented this early have long enjoyed the ease and convenience of being able to simply fax straight from the PC and their favourite software application via simply clicks to a fax utility that masquerades as your typical printer driver. However, early implementations tend to be direct-connection methodology - your MFC/AIO device typically connects to your PC's USB bus. You may be able to share your printer, but sharing fax and scan features with the rest of your colleagues are outright impossible in most models.

Introduce the Brother MFC-8440. By itself, it's really like any other AIO design. The crown (because that's what makes it king, at least for now) comes in the form of the NC-9100h optional network card. Let the MFC swallow this power-up pill and you suddenly witness its capabilities ripple throughout your office network, instead of being pathetically isolated to a single power user.

The NC-9100h add-on gives you three interfaces to configure its network capabilities and settings:
1. Standard hardware device panel.
2. Built-in web server for web browser administration.
3. SNMP for Brother GUI administration in Windows.

The settings across these three interfaces are not entirely mirrored. For example, you can't adjust the Contact and Location parameters of the device in the web interface. I suppose future revisions will change this, so you won't be caught frowning trying to locate an option that just isn't in the interface you use. Needless the say, the most painful way is the actual device panel as you struggle to input alphabets as you would frantically with SMS - even a T9 dictionary won't help if you are to input symbols, IP or email addresses.

Installation of the drivers with the supplied CD was simple enough, except the odd endless churning of the CPU by the NetScn32.exe process on the installation of the network scanner driver. This happened on the two different systems I tried, both Windows XP SP2. One doesn't have the firewall turned on. I didn't investigate this further, having simply killed the process to let the installation routine carry on.

As mentioned above, this optional network card add-on is really the bomb. In fact, i consider it essential as i really don't see the reason for buying this model unless you have networking in mind in the first place. Brother should just sell it with the Ethernet circuit board directly attached. Now that the MFC is completely visible to everybody on the network (installed with drivers), you have to option of registering your PC with it so you can do this:

1. Launch Brother's ControlCentre utility on your system. It is a listener client program.
2. Walk to the MFC to lay your intended scan material. Yes this physical chore can't be eliminated, unfortunately.
3. Cycle through the scan options on the device panel, where you can scan and send direct to your PC name registered with the device.
4. Be it a TIF image, OCR, PDF document, or other scan types, ControlCentre will pick it up and launch the appropriate program to deal with the received scan.

Alternatively, you can send the scan image to your own email address direct from the MFC, because along with the simple TCP/IP settings you also get to insert DNS, WINS, SMTP, POP3 and many more details for it to be a truly Internet node device.

That means on the fax side, you can receive and forward incoming faxes right out to another fax number, email address, or yet another MFC out in the Internet. You can also poll a POP3 mailbox to pull down emails meant to be fax jobs as well. Without actually duplicating the user manual on this, this intricate design allows you to create a neat global faxing infrastructure.

The next upgrade for dual-display configurations

icelava — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:52:10 GMT

It has been roughly over a year now since I permanently setup a dual-display workstation at home. The experience has been undeniably liberating. There is no hesitation on my part to recommend to anybody serious about getting some windowing productivity during their computing work to go with two, or even three, monitors. It is not an extravagance, really. For the price of roughly a single 30" or 24" model, one acquire two 19" or 20" displays, and get to maximise two windows. And they are not blocking each other. Unless, of course, you like maximising Notepad to a full stretch of 30 inches and get to read behind the lines and recognise the hidden meanings behind all those text.

Having said that, the past year has also been a period of tolerance for me. Why? Because the Philips 190CW7CB which I originally bought for my twin-display setup, is manufactured for a resolution of 1440x900. What's wrong with that, you ask? That is typical the resolution specified for monitors that size! And that, is exactly wrong in my eyes.

Still don't get it? Let me then lay out in the clear what I've always suspected of myself - despite being short sighted, I probably possess more cones in my foveas than a regular person. And what does that mean? I can perceive, without strain, small dot sizes. Take for example, I regularly print four A4 pages into one physical page of A4 (high printer resolutions FTW). People claim me to be insane. They cannot make out details that tiny. Even two pages into a single physical A4 can be a challenge to their eyes. Optimally its a one-to-one A4, or even better, an A4 to A3 resizing. That is just plain wastage of paper in my opinion. Eight pages on a single sheet of A4 (double side) is my way of saving the trees.

Translated to monitor terms, that means dot pitch of contemporary LCD monitors are ridiculously large. How large? My 19" Philips 190CWs have a whopping 0.285mm size. If you look closely, you cannot miss the RGB sub pixels. It had baffled me throughout the years why vendors kept dishing out such monstrous dot pitches, making me stick to CRTs (with their sweet super-fine dot pitch ratings) for a fairly long while. I was only "forced" to LCDs when I started mobile computing with laptops. I could only conclude my eyes are not normal. Now if only I had Superman's eyes to perceive X-rays too and see through clothing.... oh wait, then all I would see are just bones.

And so the tolerance broke into despair when I recently purchased the Dell XPS M1530. This sexy machine emits pixels at 1680x1050 in an entire diagonal space of, 15.4 inches - I can fit one of my 19" monitor's desktop area inside my laptop display with room to spare. I tell you, desktop LCD manufacturers, it is a total disgrace. That was clearly the last straw for me. It was time to look around for a 1680x1050 model for my desktop, to relief myself of this year-long pain. My search initially dug out the Samsung 206BW, while at 20", is larger than my current setup. But not by much. With a dot pitch of 0.258mm it certainly is much more acceptable for my eyes. The problem? It came out roughly two months after I bought this workstation last year, making it a listed but phased-out model in stores. And guess what, 20" is a past fad and a largely abandoned manufacturing process; the trend is 22" models now. Had I delayed my purchase of the workstation by two months... Swell.

Just when I was about to give up, one shop assistant recommended me to consider ViewSonic's VX1940w. A no-frills products, at a great bargain price, only that it is currently the only 19" model in the market featuring 1680x1050. A sizzling dot pitch of 0.243mm.

God sent.

But I did not buy immediately though. The dot pitch and resolution are irresistable, but having been bitten recently I took some precautionary checks. Reviews and opinions are mixed - while practically everybody praised the high resolution (guess I am not alone after all), image and colour quality aren't meeting the expectations of some. Decision point - when you cannot have the best of both worlds, you have to pick the factor more important/useful to you.

Working, not playing, in a higher resolution and finer pitch, has more practical value here. After all, I have another complete computer just for entertainment use, so why should I complain.

Another $584 down this month on top of other costly expenses. Am I happy now? Somewhat. Am I suffering? Not anymore.

Too much DDR 400 RAM lowers gear to 333MHz

icelava — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:45:24 GMT

We consumers never learn this lesson well, no matter how many times we get bitten.

Always read the fine print.

I bought an additional pair of DDR-400 memory modules for an old gaming PC a couple of days back. It was not state of the art technology when I bought it in May 2006, but I did not need much to play World of Warcraft. By maxing it up to 4x 512MB I now have a comfortable 2GB of RAM for most of my gaming needs. I thought it would be that simple.

On boot up I immediately noticed the BIOS reporting 2GB cycling at 333MHz. If I operate with only a pair of modules, the RAM rightfully runs its advertised 400MHz double-data rate. Plug in all four, it dumbs down the frequency (read: speed).

WTF?

I consulted the motherboard manual and to my horror, read some very blatant tabular facts that if all four slots are fitted with double-sided modules, the end frequency clocks down to 333MHz. Thankfully, within the hour I was able to locate some suggestions on how to resolve the issue - manually set explicit settings in the BIOS instead of letting it decide in Auto. Going by past explanations in other places, each side of a memory module is considered a bank. So even though one slot is taken, a double-sided stick constitutes two banks. Apparently, AMD-based motherboards have for a very long time sported some limitation in the number of banks (threshold 6) it can handle at higher speeds. Exceed the threshold, and it is deemed unsafe and unstable as it struggles to synchornize the signals between all the memory banks. Testing my PC at 400MHz with 3DMark06 and Company of Heroes however, did not reveal any weakness, much to my relief.

In all my years of using DDR-266 RAM I have never encountered or read about such issues, so this totally broke my concept of "RAM speeds as advertised". Ouch. I was caught off guard. How much more for the layman user?

UPDATE 4 Jan 08: for a game that is more computationally and memory intensive, I would have expected Company of Heroes to bomb. It did not, but World of Warcraft occasionally does. And it crashes with an irritating screeching sound. Ouch. Having defaulted it back to 333MHz I have not experienced any crash ever since. Damn.

Mobile phone designers - go outdoors and get a suntan

icelava — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 10:10:42 GMT

Following the demise of my very first Microsoft mobile phone, and three days of compassionate leave, I decided it was time to wipe the tears and continue to live on. It's time to forget the days of old and look ahead to the future of new toys.

The problem is, the phone ruptured at approximately 1 year 3 months after purchase (there was a one-month period inbetween when i sent it in for servicing as well), and there're still around two months before my mobile plan is up for renewal, which gets me a S$400 discount for the current Dopod model. I needed a lifeline in the mean time, or I could just remain uncontactable during this stretch.

And here is a wonderful example of a luxury technology turned critical for life/work productivity. Can you imagine reverting back to twenty years ago and just relying on land line phones? In fact, during that weekend I was without a mobile phone, it dawned onto me just how few public phones are left in this nation.

Working in an MNC with frequently travelling colleagues across the region has its perks. I have a Thai colleague who is making a side line making available to us the nifty and nimble I-Mobile 310 (watch video), so I thought it would serve as a good stand-in until I got a "real" phone. I was fortunate enough to have a colleague give up his unit for my sake so I don't have to wait another fornight before our Thai "dealer" returns to mainland for more goods. Probably means the company intends to call me during the weekend....

Sleek and shiny, everybody is talking about the phone (since just about every alternate person in the company has ordered one) and I have not heard anybody talk bad about it. Well yesterday I discovered, by sheer chance, possibly the biggest flaw of the phone; the entire casing turns into a capsule mirror the moment I walk outdoors. That's right the plastic surface is built with reflective material, including the area around the LCD panel. The amount of light the sun provides outside overwhelms the puny power output of the LCD. Probably needs a halogen lamp to make it visible in broad daylight.

So the usefulness of the phone outdoors extends to teeth checking, and with good potential as a morse code mirror to signal overflying rescue aircraft should I ever get stranded on a lost island. All these without being able to see the phone interface, until I drop the book I carry on my other hand so I can cover it up as though there are students around me copying my model exam answers.

Guess the I-Mobile designers figured funky people who listen to MP3 on-the-go do not venture into the sunlight.

4GB memory hole: the new 640KB limit is upon us

icelava — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 04:27:31 GMT

Us software developers are in a perpetual dire state for more RAM. We can never get enough of it. As soon as we plug in new RAM module, the usual suspects - Visual Studio, SQL Server/Management Studio, ASP.NET runtime hosts, Outlook, Virtual Server/Virtual PC, browsers - swifty scoop up every new bead of rice available and say, "thank you, can I now have a second helping." Heck, even the combined memory consumption of three IMs I run (MSN Messenger, Skype, GTalk) can peak close to 100MB.

It should not be too wild a prediction to state that 32-bit computing will still persist for a long time, even for software developers. How soon do you think companies will invest in 64-bit workstations for employees?. That means, 32-bit machines (your PC and mine) will be limited to at most 4GB of RAM in the years to come, and supposing the laptops issued to us can even accept 4GB.

But you know what, it is actually tougher than that. Because we have less than 4GB of memory available, thanks to some bright idea on how to design the x86 architecture, hardware devices have their addresses mapped to the high-end range of the same exact address space used to designate physical RAM locations. That causes the top range of RAM to simply disappear without a trace. Wow. I read that article just two weeks too late. To my shock and horror, I saw the reality confirmed with my home-based Dell Poweredge SC430, which was earlier topped up to 4GB. Windows reported 3.63GB available. I am supposedly one of the "lucky" ones to make it to that amount; other reports have claimed as low as 3.2GB.

In the following weeks I started looking around for more information on PAE - Physical Adression Extension - the technology that allows the additional memory to be mapped beyond the 4GB range. This is the implementation that allows industrial-strength servers address in excess of 8-64GB of RAM. Unfortunately to my despair, PAE is a "takes two hands to clap" technology - the motherboard must properly support 36-bit memory addressing as per Intel specifications, and the operating system must be specficially written to take advantage of PAE.

The OS that I ran on this server was Windows Server 2003 Standard. While it seems to show PAE is enabled (implicitly activated with DEP), the full 4GB is not available. Conflicting reports all around the Internet make it difficult to ascertain if Win2003 Standard indeed can reclaim the hidden RAM, but in the end I concluded with the following documents

Operating Systems and PAE Support
Physical Address Extension - PAE Memory and Windows

that Win2003 Standard is indeed, as others have claimed, limited to address a max physical range of 4GB. Even if the motherboard maps the remaining memory above 4GB and makes it available, it does not bother to see it.

The alternative then is to upgrade to Enterprise edition. This being a development server, I already had many setups running on top of it, so it took me a fair bit of preparation to backup as well as properly slipstream SP2 (which just came out back then) in order to upgrade from SP1. The eventual upgrade was relatively smooth (only real problem was IE7 reverting back to IE6 after upgrade), but the core issue driving all these activities maintained status quo. 3.62GB RAM still.

Remember me mentioning "two hands to clap"? It turns out that Dell's budget SC range did in fact go for the budget way of addressing - only 32bits. The extra 4 bits are not taken care of.

Dell systems with 4GB of memory show less memory in Microsoft® Windows®.
Why does my operating system display less than the 4GB of memory I have installed on my system?

The moral of the story? If you want to use 4GB of RAM, make sure your OS and motherboard support 8GB. The irony.

Designers are _selfish_ people

icelava — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 02:48:53 GMT

or else how would they continually produce hardware that have simply no consideration for its forseeable neighbouring devices?

This year's MVP gift is an assortment of leatherizer executive items, a hard-case gift box, containing a laser pointer pen, name card holder, and the 1GB thumb drive picture above.

Elegant to look at, no doubt. But to know just about every system has USB ports aligned very close like sardines in a can, and then to dismiss all that in the name of aesthetics and make a USB device in the likes of a fat arrogant king that demands the "peasants" be gotten rid of in his presence. So not only does the drive refuse to share space with neighbouring connectors horizontally, it also haughtily takes up vertical real estate.

What a selfish prick.

This is why books like these sell so well.

Quad Core CPUs and Diminishing Returns: where the real problem lies

icelava — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 08:57:07 GMT

Jeff Atwood had some ramblings a couple months back about the diminishing returns of inserting more and more cores into desktop CPUs. It is true that applications not written with a multi-threaded model will not be gaining any performance gain in itself other than having the OS push competing processes to other cores to gain a true multi-tasking environment. In fact, the slack afforded to allow one wayward process to "hijack" a core by spinning 100% in an endless loop is going to prove very useful - programs in the future are going to be just as buggy as they are now and in the past - other cores should still be able to carry on like a bomber with an engine shot out.

However, such is marketing hype that we tend to narrow down on the current "component of the year" and lose awareness of the system at large. One commenter, Gustavo Duarte, wisely points out my sentiments:

There is of course the issue of how much of a bottleneck the CPU is in the first place.

Disk I/O, RAM I/O, and various latencies are more and more the real bottleneck. Especially for desktop systems, where we often have 1 process running and 30 others sleeping, without much chance of parallelizing work.

Yes, there are applications that truly demand raw processing horsepower, let us not deny that. But the biggest problem with desktop systems, past and present and fhe future to come, has always been all the other slower components that make up the desktop computer. In my lifetime of computer usage, the moments when the system slows due to extremely CPU utilization versus the CPU waiting for the disk to load the necessary data into memory (or swapping out) is an very, very low ratio.

More often than not, like a kungfu master tapping his toes waiting for his disciples to get prepared and smacking them down with a single blow when they do come, the CPU is not doing much other than to wait for the necessary instructions and data to come.

This is most pronounced by the component with moving parts: the hard disk. Today's disks are getting faster and faster indeed. But compared to processors, they are turtles and snails. The bulk of system slowdowns are easily associated with the hard disk LED blazing away, as they struggle like an underpaid coolie carrying bags of rice by order of the supervisor (CPU) who does not move as much. This only gets horribly disproportionate as the inverse-pyramid pattern gets wider: more fast components served by less slow components.

Just how many people will buy quad or oct core CPUs in the future? And how many out of those will buy more than one hard disk? The tech saavy among us may know this and wisely purchase one or two additional disks to maximise disk I/O, but the layman consumer is unlikely to bother with that, and simply choose the biggest TB (terabyte) disk the vendor has to offer and break it into multiple volume partitions. Besides that, until disk sizes continue to shrink and fuel cells make their way into laptops for energy endurance, we should not expect laptops to generally feature two internal disks by default.

Will we see some kind of duo spindle disks or self-contained RAID technology emerging? Since I do not follow the hardware landscape as actively now, I don't know at this point. But I know the disk industry has alot of catching up to do.

How fast do you type? A visual indicator

icelava — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 04:38:09 GMT

Let a hamster show you just how fast you are with your typing.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10/04/usb_hamster_wheel/

Mind your memory

icelava — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 06:18:42 GMT

And once again some of the pettiest of issues come back to trouble me and prevent me from accomplishing the simplest of tasks, granting me hours of frustration and absolute zero pleasure.

I couldn't even install World of Warcraft on my desktop PC.

It would seemingly have the CPU raging full throttle while processing the file terrain.MPQ. Forever. Searching around the Internet, I found similar woes that all seem to hint at a common issue: RAM. People were reporting success after re-positioning or removing certain memory modules.

Oh and I knew that way too well. The RAM position combo on my desktop server has to be just right for the motherboard to even boot up. The many wasted days I have spent on this machine....

Well, I did buy a new slab of 512MB to boost this desktop of mine to 1GB a few weeks back. But it had been operating peacefully with the existing twin 256MB pieces up until I tried to install the World of Warcraft. (They are all Kingston PC2100 CL2.5 for your info) Guess indeed nothing like a monster game to truly stress and test the stability of your system to the max. Fine, I plugged all memory modules out from their original positions:

Bank 0: 256MB
Bank 1: 256MB
Bank 2: 512MB
Bank 3: none

And set them as (theoretically speaking, they can be positioned anywhere, unlike the designs of old that required sequential paired droppings. And jumpers to boot.)

Bank 0: 512MB
Bank 1: none
Bank 2: 256MB
Bank 3: 256MB

Now here's when all the interesting sparks and smoke started flying. First start up into Windows showed my network card was unplugged. No it was not. Nevermind I replug the network cable and it went into a perpertual drunked state trying to establish DHCP. And since my keyboard/mouse (hooked on via a PS2-USB converter because my PS2 ports are toast) was not detected no matter how many times I replug, I forced a hard reset.

Next up? The critical services.exe terminates abnormally on startup and state it has to shut down the system. But never does on expiry of the countdown. Another hard reset. The next few times have random items crashing (e.g. explorer.exe) before the system automatically decides to reset itself, saving me the trouble of a manual reset. How thoughtful....

Out went the pair of 256MB modules and I (finally) got a bootable and eventless Windows. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the game installation goes beyond terrain.MPQ and prompted me for following discs.

What can you draw from these? More evidence that RAM is the most sensitive, fussy, and uncooperative of computer components. Always consider running through the permutations that the RAM modules and motherboard slots offer you - such immense fun with mathematics.

i _hate_ USB

icelava — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 03:59:55 GMT

Don't get me wrong, i think the notion of USB is a really wonderful thing for humankind who use computers and electronic devices in conjuction with each other. Being really a universal interface it becomes extremely convenient to just plug a device in, install drivers if necessary, and have the OS making near immediate use of the device's functionality. Sweet.

What is not sweet, but terribly bitter is the physical design of the USB port. So awful that I am motivated to write this complaint in the middle of work. And it is not just this particular laptop I am working with right now, but all machines under my possession that featured at least one USB port.

USB ports and connectors due to the design of their oh-so-sexy rectangular shape are inherently not secure. They deterriorate way too fast, getting way too susceptible to accidental nudges, loosening way too easy. That means disconnection of devices follow. Extend this connection to a USB hub and a multiplication factor enters the formula for excessive mental pain.

Computer hardware designers need to learn a lesson or two from console game platform designers and make connector shapes that are reliably secure. Not force us to light a whole motherboard in petrol out of frustration.

Need a luminary mouse pad?

icelava — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 09:07:27 GMT

With the advent of optical mice, mouse pads have lost much of their usefulness. Of course, there are those with materials that maximise the reflection from optical lenses and provide optimal feedback and resolution. But I am not a professional gamer.

So what would make me buy a mouse pad? Ok, ok, I did not buy it per se. One of the nice things about being an MVP is a US$150 voucher for shopping Microsoft's eCompanyStore. This year they were offering something in their Cool New Stuff category:

Complete with 4 USB 2.0 ports. About time I discarded that cheap USB 2.0 hub with a terribly loose USB connector cable.

WM5 phones: sync to oblivion

icelava — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 13:38:21 GMT

Now i know what is the number one weakness for Windows Mobile 5 phones: a perpetual unresponsive wait for ActiveSync to complete its job, whatever that job may be, when the data cable to the PC is disturbed (aka loosened momentarily).

Instead of reinitialising everything over, it appears ActiveSync tries to be "macho" about it and attempts to act resilient. I am sorry, but you are not going to impress me and win my heart old boy, when you choke and stall in such pretentious display and actually require my help to resuscitate you with a power cycle.

Head to head: Dopod 818 Pro versus O2 Atom

icelava — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 12:29:55 GMT

Hardly a "professional" review by any measure. But it just so happened that over the same weekend I accquired my Dopod 818 Pro, a team colleague bought its rival model, the O2 Atom. So the following Monday brought the entire development team's work to a halt as everybody took turns to pit the devices against each other in the feature-list colosseum. And so the summary of this chance experience.

Everybody knows the Atom has a smaller form factor. And by a glance, it really does look shorter. But, when one carefully matches them up, the difference is fairly little and neligible for the most part. Only those who clasp vernier callipers in their hands would probably make a fuss out of it. However, it was noted the O2 was slightly thicker as well, plus actually being heavier than the 818 Pro. The last point was something that truly amazed me; given the design decision to use finger-print retaining plastic as its casing to reduce weight, I was expecting it to be significantly lighter than the metal-encased 818 Pro.

As opposed to the 818 Pro's SD card slot, the Atom's expansion storage option is mini-SD, meaning extra space is at a premium. For my colleague to have purchased her 512MB card at 80% the cost of my 1GB card, I have serious doubts over the economic viability of the mini-SD form. That aside, I regularly face the problem of my PDA losing awareness of the presence of my SD card; it cannot be detected no matter how many times i re-slot it. Only a power cycle can revive the connection. So is that a hardware or OS issue?

I was not bothered to test this out intensively (since I do not have Japanese blood in my veins), so I left it to my colleagues to take snapshots around the office with both (2M-pixel) cameras. The majority seemed to prefer the captures of the 818 Pro, potraying more colours more natural with the actual environment. However, i think they were relying too much on the LCD display of the devices themselves to make judgement calls. To "objectively" gauge they should have viewed the images via a "neutral" display, like another laptop. No trials were done for video recording, however.

Regarding video playback, here comes an interesting issue. For quick and easy playback without hunting for the various codecs to work with the Windows Mobile version of Media Player, my colleague recommended The Core PocketPC media player which operates with its own package of codecs. Hers played highly animated videos smoothly enough, but when it came to my device, it was a slideshow experience. Is this where the difference in CPU speeds now truly matter?

Apparently not. On further investigation, we found that my device lacked any evidence of a DirectDraw video renderer that TCPMP could make use of, which was the renderer used by my colleague's Atom. Even playback by another colleague's Palm Treo with the Palm version of TCPMP was ok. So until I find out more about this DirectDraw mystery, I will not enjoy this device as a video player. (Oh well, i did not buy this PDA to watch videos.)

Coming to the aural dimension, the 818 Pro's loudspeaker produces vibrations with more clarity. Now the funny part is the Atom comes with two speakers by the sides (818 Pro only has one at the back, near the camera lens), but I am not too sure how many people can find an optimal position to appreciate the stereo output. While I did not test the Atom, the 818 Pro lives true to the reviews of others who claimed voice reception for phone calls are not up to par.

On a separate note for the operating system alone, I found little, as a user, to appreciate over Windows Mobile 5. Irritatingly, programs still cannot be closed directly; shutting them down via the Running Programs tab in the Memory Settings is still necessary. When looking at the list of enhancements for WinMob5, one can probably rejoice if one is a developer given the slew of new possibilities opened up for development. But it terms of usability for the user, it still roughly remains the same.

MP3 radio right in the car

icelava — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 01:55:40 GMT

I couldn't write about this during the ASPInsiders summit because the network in the Microsoft Dev labs prevented FTP uploads out to external servers. Well now I can back home, and I just have to comment on this lovely device they gave us during the summit :

Just what is it? Ever had that yearning that your car's audio system could play MP3 music files? I mainly ride a motorcycle, so I don't follow car technologies but figured at this stage of time somebody already have implemented CD/DVD readers that can handle data discs and codecs for various music formats. But, if yours is a "traditional" design, grab that piece and insert a USB thumb drive loaded with your favourite MP3s. Then plug it into your cigarette lighter socket, adjust the frequency, and tune your car radio to that channel and boom!

Live MP3 radio right in your car.

Genius.

How to place your surround speakers

icelava — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 03:39:12 GMT

Should I be posting this to the Omnifarious forum, since it largely covers the physiological properties of our ears? Oh what the heck, since it concerns placement of your audio equipment, here it lives.

I have no home theatre and audio system. However I do have surround speakers for some PCs, which I have for years been positioning the two rare speakers slighting behind the sides of the seat, rather than behind. I could not really explain it, but the sound was much more "complete" and wholesome with depth, be it playing a game or watching a movie. It was as though there were "gaps" in the audio experience if I placed them behind me.

This mystery which I was never quite interested in finding out has been explained in layman terms. So, that's what it's all about.

Just how much simpler must computing hardware get?

icelava — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 01:50:04 GMT

Heck a whole lot more, so it seems.

I think I am going insane pretty soon, for I am required to press the power button to switch on the PC so my mother can use it.

Yes! Casing designers and manufacturers have gotta make it unmistakably obvious with blindling floodlights and blasting sirens to indicate an operating PC, for my mother is helpless and disabled seeing a blank monitor and silent chassis.

Somebody shoot me. Please.

Check out these cool geek stuff

Gibby — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 10:26:55 GMT

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000430055334

Laptop designers: humans have hands by their _sides_

icelava — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 14:03:05 GMT

I believe computers, and by evolutionary extension - laptops, are designed to be used by homo sapiens. You know, that annoying species of hairless apes.

So judging by the anatomy of the intended users, why can designers think it is ok to place insertion slots and jacks all by the sides? When those are the places where people tend to put their hands, mice, notes???

I am sorry but perhaps I don't possess the 30" wide shoulders that would have me spreading my array of equipment in reasonable distance. And then also requiring me to buy a new desk altogether.

I know real estate is at a premium when it comes to laptop chassis designs. But. Please. Keep the sides clean. Be smart like some and fit rarely accessed features like media drives, and know how to take full advantage of the front panel.

Or, are there any technical challenges in situating jacks and ports in a diagonal fashion?