Chaucery Blog

Three of the four things I was waiting for now exist, so it's time for another list of technology that I know is coming, but I want now.

• Lighting LEDs, because they're longer lasting, cooler and less sensitive to shocks than the archaic incandescent light bulb


• Low power high-performance PCs. Some new Pentium 4 CPUs consume over 100 watts of power. My second PC is an AMD K6-II 400, which has less than a tenth of the performance of the Pentium 4, but is entirely sufficient for my needs. It consumes about 15 watts. However, there are not many companies selling lower power, and thus lower performance PCs. Along with the advances in performance, there has been an associated increase in performance per watt, so lower power higher performance computers than in the past are now possible . The AMD Geode processor, for example, uses about 1 watt, but still has one quarter the performance of a Pentium 4. I'd rush out to buy a small silent PC based on a Geode (silent, because no cooling fans are required), but it's only being sold in exorbitantly-priced thin-client applications.


• Wireless USB, which is designed to be completely compatible with existing wired USB. It's due in early 2006. I would use this to connect my PC, in my study, to the PVR in my lounge about 10m away. I currently have to lug my PVR over to the PC when I want to connect them. There are odd expensive WiFi contraptions that currently exist for this, but Wireless USB dongles promise to be much cheaper and much more straightforward to use.


• Slingbox or Sony's LocationFree TV in Australia or the UK, and using DVB-T (terrestrial digital TV) - the Sony one assuming they give me a reason to stop my boycott of all their products. These high-tech solutions to watching TV remotely, even across borders, may be rendered obsolete before they become popular by television networks offering their programmes directly on the internet. The BBC and some US networks are well advanced in their beta and actual product offerings.

Posted by James at 11:58 AM | Permalink

This is a rough diagram of which manufacturers produce which cars. Most of the details are from Cars! Cars! Cars!, with additional information and fact checking from the Wikipedia. Where a car and its manufacturer share a name the car name is omitted.

I did want to include some indication of the relative sizes of the companies, perhaps by market value, spurred by the news that Toyota is now worth more than GM and Ford together. However, I couldn't find a good source for this data.

Although I'm not a major automobile buff, if any major changes come into my peripheral vision I shall attempt to keep this chart up to date.

Update 28 Nov, 2005: I now use dotted lines to indicate partial ownership.

Update 15 Dec, 2005: I suspect that some of my ownership designations are inconsistent, due to my lack of knowledge. For example, I have shown Toyota as part owner of Fuji Heavy Industries, which makes Subaru. In contrast, I depict General Motors as part owner of Isuzu directly, because I don't know if it's actually owned indirectly through another company. Still, I don't think it detracts from the whole.

Update 28 May, 2006: Added Porsche's partial ownership of VW (as of late 2005).

Update 27 Nov, 2007: Split DaimlerChrysler. Moved partial ownership of Isuzu from GM to Toyota and Mitsubishi. Gave Aston Martin its independence.

Posted by James at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been noted that OpenOffice 2.0 is slow to start. One of the tricks that is used to keep users from being too annoyed whilst they wait it to start is to show a progress bar, which gives a visual indication of how long the user will have to wait. In fact, users prefer a longer wait with a progress bar than a slightly shorter wait without the progress bar.

In OpenOffice's case, on my computer at least, the progress bar is decidedly useless. When I start any of the OpenOffice programs, the progress bar pops up and reaches 100% in under half a second. It then stays in that state for another 8 seconds until the program has fully loaded. Whilst I believe that 8 seconds is a long time to wait for a simple program to load on a fast computer, an improvement in the relation between the progress bar and what is actually happening will go a long way to improving the end-user experience.

Posted by James at 5:47 PM | Permalink

Google have diversified from being just a search engine to now offer many services. Of their products that perform functions that I am interested in, these are the ones that I have switched to, and why I switched. They are roughly in order of when they were released by Google.

Posted by James at 12:54 PM | Permalink

An aspect that is sometimes overlooked amongst all the other reasons why DRM is bad for consumers is their built-in obsolescence. In the ongoing Sony BMG rootkit kerfuffle Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure's director of antivirus research, made the interesting note that:

installing the Sony program on a machine running Windows Vista -- the beta version of Windows' next iteration -- "breaks the operating system spectacularly".

The only DRM CD that I ever purchased, Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, states that it is designed to be compatible with "PCs with OS Windows 95, Pentium 2 233MHz, 64MB RAM of higher". Whilst later Windows versions are often designed to be compatible with old software, there are no guarantees. Certainly, the recently released 64bit versions of WIndows are by hardware necessity less backwardly compatible than previous version. With each new version of Windows, the chances of DRM CDs continuing to work lessens. In some cases, such as with Sony's XCP system in Windows Vista, the result will be a "spectacular crash".

In the small print at the bottom of the Hail to the Thief CD case is the note: "For futher information http://copycontrol.emi.com.au". This address redirects to the main EMI Australia web site, which contains no copy control information as far as I could see. After all, the CD is two years old - how long should they be expected to maintain customer support for it? Will they continue to update the software required to decipher their DRM for future software versions?

My study contains a whole bookshelf of DOS-era PC games. Although they are all on obsolete 5 1/4" floppy disks, only those with DRM (or copy-protection, as it was then called) are unplayable today. That is because I was able to copy those without DRM from their original floppies to CD, and later to DVD. To play those games trapped on their original disks I would have to hope that I could find hacked versions on the internet.

DRM is intimately tied in with the technology of its time. It's raison d'être is directly opposed to its continuing existence, and thus it is inherently unsuitable for media that people expect to last a lifetime. In its current form, it is barely as useful as the ill-fated DIVX psuedo-DVD.

Posted by James at 7:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After learning about skyboxes for the first time only a few days ago, I decided it would be a useful addition to my 3D fractal generator FractalPeaks. Rather than controlling a fractal hovering in space, the skybox would be an easy way of surrounding the fractal with a realistic world. After following the great Microsoft Beginning Game Development tutorial I had a functional skybox, but I wanted higher quality original graphics.

In addition to Terragen, which is a great free program for generating skybox textures, you can download prepared texture collections specifically for skyboxes. DirectX is happy with both .tga and .jpg file types; I used the latter because they are smaller.

One thing to watch out for is the appearance of seams at the edge of the skybox textures. I didn't have a problem with the original sample, but one I downloaded had some pretty ugly borders. After trying the recommended procedure of setting the texture clamping, which in Managed DirectX is done like this:

device.SamplerState[0].AddressU = TextureAddress.Clamp;

device.SetSamplerState(0, Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D.SamplerStageStates.AddressU, 3);

I then thought of resizing my textures from their original 768x768 to a power of 2 that computers seem to like so much. At 512x512 the seams were completely gone. It doesn't look too much worse, so that's a pretty good outcome. After reading a bit more about textures, I believe that this problem usually only occurs with older cards. As I want my software to be usable by everyone I'll make sure to keep an eye on this in future.

Posted by James at 10:55 PM | Permalink

After my last foray into the world of DirectX I didn't continue with doing much work in that area. I've been inspired to try playing with it again with the recent release of version 2 of the .Net Framework, and the associated free release of Microsoft's Visual Studio Express tools. The development IDEs weren't going to be free, but Microsoft have had a benevolent change of heart, releasing them free for the next year.

In addition to this shiny new development environment, Microsoft have been busy putting up some great new tutorials for people getting started with Managed DirectX coding at their Coding4Fun site. All in all, they're doing a good job of enticing new programmers to try their wares, which means more fine software being produced for all of us.

Posted by James at 2:24 PM | Permalink