October 2006 Archives
Zune. I finally got to play with a Zune media player. I am very impressed, I own all the generations of iPod, but this device is clearly a step up in terms of innovation. I can confirm that the enthusiasm in some of the earlier reports have good grounds. I have had many gadgets, but in the past two years except for the PSP nothing could really excite me, the Zune however is different at so many levels. Even the physical feel is different. The UI is different; the zooming effect gives a new dimension to the device. Most importantly the device “integrates” seamlessly with other players, with services, with your computers, with your xbox. I have immediately preordered
Foxit. I have started to replace acrobat with the Foxit PDF reader 2.0. I am sick and tired of Acrobat’s long load time and the ever annoying download/upgrade pop-under window that locks up your UI. Foxit is small and fast and simple to use.
Oppo DVD player. I have a beautiful Panasonic 42” HDTV. I bought the best dvd player from Panasonic to go with it, with all the up-conversion features and it is excellent. Annoyingly it appears to be almost the only modern dvd player that does not have some secret code to turn it into a region free player. You can mail-order a one-time remote from the UK to accomplish this, but after paying $40 nothing appear in my mailbox. I replaced the player with an Oppo OPDV971H, which is nothing short of amazing. In all the customer reviews it consistently rank as the best DVD player among the up-conversion players, which is miraculous given the high-end competition. It is very, very good and it plays any kind of disc you feed it. And it was easy to convert to region free…
GPlay. I have had my G-Play media player for a year now and it functions well as the HDTV hard disk for my TV. It is slightly bigger than the 2.5” disk inside and plays most common formats as component video HDTV and digital audio through optical. The navigation software is mediocre and the remote sucks. But I continue to use it as it is the most convenient way to get Divx and Xvid to play in HDTV. You take the disk to your computer, load it up with the various mpeg4 formats (or even dvd-iso) and the display is excellent. I’ll continue to use it until Microsoft gets their act together and allows the media center connected to the Xbox 360 to play other formats than WM.
Thermaltake Silent Boost. Two years ago I built my home server and added two massive coolers which took me a lot of effort to get installed. In the end they cooled well but were very noisy. Recently the motherboard started to give me some problems and I decided to do a little bit of an upgrade. The new board is a Tyan Thunder K8DS pro which has fewer features than the K8W it replaces, but I don’t really need audio and fancy AGP 8x Pro slots for this machine. The processors are the cheapest dual core Opterons (265) and for the rest (memory, disks, everything stayed the same). Now of course I had to decide whether to put the massive cooling towers back on; instead I decided to go with the Thermaltake Silent Boost RX K8, they are not the super coolers but are indeed very silent. They work well: SuperPi hardly raises they termperature without the idea that an airplane is taking off. The box runs 64bit Vista so I get the new fancy Vista Mediacenter through the Xbox.
Jaguar XK Series. No I did not buy a Jaguar XK8 (would like to though). In the wikicars article on this wonderful machine is a story on some unexpected innovation. It appears that most accidents where humans hit the bonnet, it causes severe injury because the person actually connects with the engine block through the soft bonnet metal. From the article:
Jaguar's innovation is to have sensors in the front bumper that determine if a pedestrian has indeed been struck and this then triggers two pyrotechnical charges that instantaneously lift the bonnet, providing extra distance between engine and head. In effect, the bonnet becomes the exterior equivalent of an airbag: The hood's sheet metal may not be as soft, but it's much more accommodating than a big lump of V8
Wow.
Carbonado is an extensible, high performance persistence abstraction layer for Java applications, providing a relational view to the underlying persistence technology. Persistence can be provided by a JDBC accessible SQL relational database, or it can be a BDB. It can also be fully replicated between the two.
Even if the backing database is not SQL based, Carbonado still supports many of the core features found in any kind of relational database. It supports queries, joins, indexes, and it performs query optimization. When used in this way, Carbonado is not merely a layer to a relational database, it is the relational database. SQL is not a requirement for implementing relational databases.
The Amazon engineers who collaborated on developing Carbonado over time received feedback that there was a lot of interest in the developer community outside of Amazon for this technology. We decided to release this software through an open source process for other developers to use, improve and extend.
Congratulation to Brian and his close collaborators for developing excellent technology and putting in the work to make it publicly available and to Don, Ryan and Stephanie for navigating all the legal and other obstacles to make this a reality.
Jeremy Zawodny has some interesting calculations on the absolute cost advantage of using S3 for your home backup server. For me however the most compelling argument is later in his posting when he mentions the administrative cost of running a highly available home server.
I recently lost 2 disks in my home raid setup rendering the 1 TB data store useless. It looked like a controller failure that corrupted the disks and the response of the vendor was it was my own fault as I hadn’t kept track of the firmware releases for the controller. One moment you are thinking you have great home setup, next moment you are in deep trouble. All because you didn’t subscribe to all the bulletins for the different components in your server. There is just too much to do in administrating your own servers to guarantee that they actually have the reliability you need.
My backups into S3 are of those files that would seriously affect our personal life if we would permanently lose them: address books, emails, letters, family photos, etc. Jeremy’s posting touches on that it is actually cheaper to do this with S3 but I would have done this even if it was more expensive given that it is just not worth the headache worrying about when your home server will fail next…
