Pi Approximation Day (yesterday)

Of all the random dates already in my calender, I have just added another! The so called Pi approximation day, which I missed this year, is on the 22nd of July and is so ‘celebrated’ because it mathematically gives a close approximation (divide 22 by 7) to the true value of Pi. Oh well, this time next year (sans one day) I will make a Pi pastry and who knows what else…

Awesome geekness. Source.

Windows Media Center 2005 woes

I managed to acquire, for the price of a nice lunch, a brand new Elonex media center Artisan LX a couple of days back. I was initially very excited because up to then I had still been running my first media center was really just an experiment, built from scratch containing mostly old components I had around my place. A year and a bit on, I am firmly hooked on a PC based PVR system the cornerstone of my entertainment system. It contained an Athlon 2600+ processor with 512Mb of DDR coupled with a DVB-T Hauppage tuner and an 80Gb drive for recordings running the open source MediaPortal software. So as you can see, there was plenty of room for improvement.

This was the first time I have really had a tinker with the Windows Media Center range of Operating systems that Microsoft produce and I went in with few expectations, apart from wanting at least as comparable an experience in terms of functionality and flexibility as I have enjoyed with MediaPortal.

The first thing that struck me was how fickle Windows Media Center 2005 was, even with all the roll ups (essentially what Microsoft call Service Packs for Media Center OS) installed. Wikipedia sums up the ‘capabilities’ of WMC 2005:

‘Media Center originally had a limitation of 1 analog tuner, but was raised to 2 analog tuners with Media Center 2005. With Update Rollup 1 for Media Center 2005, support for a digital tuner was added, but an analog tuner must still be present for the digital tuner to function. With Rollup 2, up to 4 TV tuners can be configured (2 analog and 2 HDTV). All the tuners must use the same source, for example they must all be off an aerial or a set-top box using the same guide data, you cannot mix Sky Digital and DVB-T for example.’

XP Media Center really shows its age here - I do not watch any analogue transmissions, so for a Media Center to require a legacy piece of hardware just to be able to access DVB (digital) seems preposterous. But that was not the worst thing! Windows Media Center 2005 is not capable of pulling EPG data OTA (over-the-air) instead requiring an overly elaborate system that relies on a permanent, always on Internet connection. This also raises some privacy concerns as ‘anonymous’ data, which is not entirely anonymous as Microsoft asks for your postcode during set up, is fed back to Microsoft which can include recording / watching trends and general EPG usage. Hitherto my media center system has not been networked. Considering it is in the opposite corner of my house, and I do not stream my recordings or have formal media shares, I never felt the need to network it. It was nice to just have a static, secure system without any security programs or periodic updates - now security monitoring of my media center has been added to my list of digital chores.

None the less, I was determined to give it a fair go, so I added a wifi adaptor, added some plug-ins and configured everything. After spending eight hours getting everything working, playing around and testing… I went back to my custom build. Not all the problems can be put squarely at Microsoft’s feet however. Elonex declared bankruptcy shortly after launching this range and the malicious part of me can see why, if this mediacenter is the sum total of their expertise.

Whilst the case looked rather nice from the outside, the hardware and the design of the internals is what really lets it down. The only element Elonex got right was the noise (or lack thereof) - the media center barely gives out a murmur when idle due to only a since fan which is housed inside the power supply. It runs at 690rpm, which draws air over the CPU heatsink (which has four heat pipes) and directly out the side of the case. However, I stressed ‘at idle’ before for a reason. When the media center does anything the incredibly noisy hard drive starts very audibly clicking and crunching away and it completely lets the machine down.

However that’s not the worst thing about this mediacenter. Due to the fact that there is only one very slow fan the airflow in the case is restricted to circulating around the motherboard tray, the processor then out the power supply. The harddrive and PCI / AGP cards are completely neglected. This point was slammed home when the harddrive consistently reported temperatures of high 50s to 62 degrees Celsius!!! Worse still, when I idled the system, that heat didn’t dissipate. The hard drive is locked into place with a pretentious plastic locking mechanism which neither improves the accessibility of the drive bay nor decreases the vibrations from the drive. There is no thermal (or thermally viable) contact between the hard drive and the case and as such, the hard drive is left smouldering away with no way to cool down predictably with next to no drop in temperature. There is a valid point that maintaining electronic components at a set temperature prolongs their life by avoiding constantly repeating thermal differentials (i.e. heating and cooling) however the fact remains that 60+ degrees centigrade is far too hot for a hard drive. Although my brief research on this did not yield any definitive threshold, most sources agree that 50-55 degrees Centigrade is about the absolute maximum recommended operating temperature.

Couple this practically zero thermal conduction with a lack of airflow and you have a recipie for a very short hard drive life. Even worse, this thermal issue was not limited to HDD, the south-bridge and GFX heatsinks were equally poorly cooled and get unpleasantly hot to the touch.

Worst of all, it is just slow. CpuID and the BIOS disagreed with each other about the exact Intel processor that powers the system. I believe it to be either an Intel Pentium 4 530 (at 3.06Ghz) or a Celeron D 345. There is no way the much older Athlon 2600+ processor with the same RAM should be out performing this setup and yet it does so without breaking a sweat.

All in all, very disappointing. A remarkable demonstration of technical ignorance on the part of Elonex. But hey, I didn’t pay for it and now I have an extra DVB-T tuner back in my original, self built machine.

Design (cosmetic) : 8/10 - Pleasing, with a nice Hi-fi look.

Design (technical) : 2/10 - Poor components poorly arranged.

Cooling : 6/10 - Great CPU and powersupply cooling, but everything else is woefully neglected.

Acoustics : 6/10 - Silent until it has to touch the harddrive, still a good effort though

Connectivity : 8/10 - Lots of connectors for digital Audio and Video

Capacity : 5/10 - 200Gb harddrive with a portion taken for recovery. I wouldn’t trust it though and by modern standards it is rather anemic.

Overall : 2/10 - Great for free, if I paid anything for it I would have been annoyed.

DoD:Source - Play for free this weekend!

This weekend you can play Day of Defeat Source for free via Steam, it corresponds to the launch of the Palermo services across steam which greatly adds to the platform by adding unlock-able achievements for each game. So what is Day of Defeat I hear you ask? It started out as a FPS mod using the original half life engine and was set in the second world war era. What initially distinguished this game from other stand-alone games and mods of the same and similar genres at the time was how thought out it was. Rather then blindly killing the enemy, to win the round you had to capture (or destroy) strategic points as well as blindly killing the enemy. In essence, it was a slower paced Counter Strike with a lot more emphasis on teamwork and strategy.

I have not played DoD for a number of years which is surprising given the fact I have been playing it since Beta 2 and had a waypointing site dedicated to the mod. Back then it was a damn good ‘rough round the edges’ community mod with a lots of promise and bags of potential.

Beta 3.0 was released and everyone celebrated. It built on the strengths of the first betas- tweaking and balancing them as well as adding new features. For a while nothing happened, we all were content playing beta 3.0 and listening to rumours of the ever elusive beta 4.0. Then, in my opinion, it all started going wrong. The mod team struck a deal with Valve and the mod became a commercial game. Beta 4.0 was actually released as version 1.0. It was highly polished and improved, as one would expect from Valve’s backing. Unfortunately it also had a boat load of issues in particular 56k dial-up gamers (yes there still were a fair few back in 2002/2003) were hit hard with very poor gaming experiences for no tangible reason.

At this point I walked away from Day of Defeat, life was complicated at the time and I was about to start Uni so I didn’t have much time for gaming. So, today I eagerly launched DoD:Source which I had preloaded a few days earlier… and was sadly disappointed.

The game itself is largely unchanged apart from being Source-ified which is both good and bad. It was nice to know most of the maps already, despite their new and frighteningly stunning clarity, as well as the basic classes and the useful routes / camping spots etc. What irked me is that the game itself had been dumbed down somewhat. Features which, at the time, differentiated DoD from other Mods such as bleeding, slow paced objective based gameplay and side weapon differentiation were either dropped or drastically tweaked.

What I find inexcusable however is that many of the old problems still linger. Despite the servers I have played on today having between 4 and 16 players the game frequently juddered and lagged particularly during explosions. The hitbox issue, allegedly solved in Day of Defeat, also reappears with some rather odd damage and hit patterns which can be very frustrating. What is even more peculiar, the game designers have appeared to have focused on beautifying the graphical side of the game considerably, adding odd looking ‘film grain’ effects as well as a kill cam with ‘Press F5 for snapshot’ and other useless ‘features’. Some of these additions are almost pretentious in the flashy way they are implemented especially given how inconsistent the effort appears to have been across other aspects of the game.

This is not to say the game is not fun to play and you can currently buy it for $4.99 (half price until the free play period expires) which is an absolute bargain, but I still think beta Day of Defeat 3.0 was the best version to date. I may have to fire it up with some sturmbots at some stage.

Graphics : 6.5/10 - Good but mostly thanks to the engine and sloppy in places.

Sound : 6 / 10 - Reasonable, but not earth-shattering - somehow feels less meaty than before.

Gameplay : 7 / 10 - Same classic DoD, but a little dumbed down and sadly nothing to distinguish it from other modern games.

Difficulty : 7 / 10 - Shallow learning curve and a wide range of players out there.

Overall : 66/100

Worth playing, but won’t keep you occupied for long.

We don’t go to Ravenholm

VALVe released Half life 2 to a salavating world back in 2004. Gamers jumped on the game and its new engine called Source, a fork from GoldSrc which powered the original Half Life and was itself based on the original Quake. Unusually, I am going to get to the point very early in a post - I thought Half Life 2 was great. It was slick, beautifully polished and combined action, horror and character development with VALVe’s unique humour.

I do not wish to say much more about the original game, instead I want to talk about the episodic spin offs that were ment to continue the story line. Half Life 2 left us on a bit of a cliff hanger which was both exciting and disappointing. Luckily, VALVe made good their promises of a continuation which would be “worth the wait.” This was the rather obviously named Half Life 2: Episode 1 which I reviewed on my old site. Again, cutting to the point - I loved the first episode with the usual spectacular visuals and wonderfully choreographed character development we have come to expect. Apart from a little bit of “backwards and forwards”-ing and the fact the game was brutally short (I completed it in a 4 hour sitting on hard) it was an orgy of explosive action mixed with a deep undercurrent of forboding.

What the hell happened next?! Episode two has been out since late 2007 and despite promising a lot of new and exciting features such as massively destructable structures and ‘non-linear’ gameplay, I am yet to play it. Today again I watched the preview videos and felt excited by what was on offer, so why is it I have yet to play or am undecided on whether I want to play episode two? It is 2008 now, four years since the original game was released. Whilst technologically the engine (and therefore the games) have improved in many aspects, it still borrows from the tired wardrobe of the original games. We have the same MP7 and combine rifles, still we have the same equipment and still we have almost the same textures. VALVe seem to have missed the point of episodic gaming:

1) More installments with a greater, developing story line

2) Reduced cost of each installment

3) Reduced time between releases (6 to 9 months at most)

4) Something new and exciting in each new installment.

Whilst they have succeeded in point one and two, they are by no means successful at points 3 and 4. Episode two (and likely the final installment when it is released) feel a bit like a poor theatre company who are stuck with the same actors and same (now) limp faded props and dresses from show to show - trying to recreate a medieval scene one week and a futuristic dystopia the next - all from the same props!

I don’t like ranting like this about a company who has given me so many hours of enjoyment, but by the same token I (and everyone else) had the right to expect more. How hard would it have been to replace the MP7 with a G36 carried by shock Combine forces just outside the city to add little bit of spice? Adding new aliens and expanding story lines are welcome additions, but if the player has the same old tool set, it detracts from the larger changes. Had this game been released a year earlier it would have been a different story, but now I have little enthusiasm for it.

I will try and play it at some point, if I am wrong I will happily put it in writing

Battlestar Galactica - Season 4 Act 2

I can’t believe SciFi / Sky One went ahead with their plans to shelve the second part of the final season until 2009! Bah! Like a crazed junky, I am left clamoring for my BSG-fix - especially with the way the mid-season finale left things!

Anyway, despite being quite frustrated - here is a trailer for the final part of season four which goes a long way to rebuilding my excitement for the last segment, although interestingly, there is talk of another feature length film being considered.

The Simpsons meet CTF

Randomly came across this great map for Quake 3. Its an excellent remake of the Simpson home for all your fragging needs. The level of detail is astonishing, from the excellent textural work to the scale that says 230 pounds when stepped on. Genius

Another Vista Oddity

Remember the classic Win9x / NT / XP Windows themes? Of course you do, many including me are still running such operating systems. One of the largest differences between these old themes and the new Vista Aero theme (apart from transparency effects and desktop compositing) is the lack of a control icon in some dialogs and Windows. This in itself is unremarkable, after all, new theme, new design right? Wrong.

I appears Windows Vista Aero still has an invisible icon in the top left hand corner of the window. Windows without control icons like Windows Explorer still have this invisible area where, if clicked (or double clicked) will react. Try it yourself!

Of course this is not particularly useful. We have not been double clicking control icons to close windows since the days of Windows 3.x, even still I find it amusing that the functionality remains if only to support the legacy themes that can be used in Windows Vista.

The Problem with Outsourcing (or Dell’s Outsourcing)

Well, with any luck I have got my laptop problem sorted now. Although my excitement has been tempered moderately by being on my fourth (!!) HP dv2799 in two weeks. Still, fingers crossed this one won’t fail after a few days Prior to buying this laptop, I did a fair amount of research and digging around to see what I could get and for what price. I was quite taken with a Dell XPS laptop, the M1530. However, with all the horror stories I had heard about Dell, I thought I would put them to the test first, this and I had some questions I genuinely wanted answered before I considered going ahead with my purchase.

I have to say, Dell did a sterling job - if their intention was to make me reconsider my purchase. Having both called them up and spoken to a Customer Care representative online I was surprised at how clueless the people I spoke to where.

Admittedly, the questions I was asking were fairly technical, but instead of checking or asking someone, I was fobbed off with ridiculous answers. I decided to share my experience of the online chat with Dell’s Sourabh Bhattacharya. (I am assuming this is him on Facebook.)

I wanted to share the experience partly as a warning to others and partly for the comedy value in the responses. It also turns out I am not the only one who has had frustrating chats with this agent.

10:42:45        System      System
You are now being connected to an agent. Thank you for using Dell Chat
10:42:45        System      System
Connected with Sourabh_Bhattacharya
10:42:55        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
Thank you for contacting Dell Sales Chat. My name is Sourabh, your Sales Advisor.
10:43:00        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
In order to help you better, May I have your telephone number and email address, if the session ends I will contact you and help you further.
10:43:01        Customer      Konrad
Hi there
10:43:24        Customer      Konrad
I am looking to buy a m1530, I have a couple of technical questions not covered by the site
10:43:53        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
Hi Konrad
10:43:53        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
sure
10:43:56        Customer      Konrad
I do not wish to give out my telephone or email address at this time.
10:44:00        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
please go head
10:44:03        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
No Problem
10:44:12        Customer      Konrad
now, when customising the xps m1530, there are a number of options
10:44:27        Customer      Konrad
the faster hdd (7200 rpm) are they SATA 150 or IDE?
10:44:45        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
Yes.
10:44:59        Customer      Konrad
which one - SATA or IDE?
10:45:55        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
SATA
10:46:43        Customer      Konrad
ok, cool. Next question, the RAM. As per default, 2Gb is selected which runs in dual channel mode. If I upgrade to 3Gb (2Gb+1Gb) will it still run in dual channel mode or be reduced to single channel?
10:47:10        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
Yes it will still run in Dual Channel Mode
10:47:48        Customer      Konrad
what command timing does the RAM use when shipped? 2T or 1T?
10:48:57        Customer      Konrad
Hang on, on your site it says “Note: In order to get dual channel bandwidth capability, both slots must contain memory modules and they must be of the same size and configuration” If I go for the 3Gb configuration, then the modules will not be the same size?!
10:49:50        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
Yes, it will be of the same size
10:50:12        Customer      Konrad
but it wont it will be 1×2gb and 1×1gb
10:50:45        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
doesn’t matter. because the slots inside are of same size
10:51:00        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
and it is made for DDR2 RAM only
10:53:07        Customer      Konrad
the slots will not be the same size if populated with a total of 3gb of memory
10:53:16        Customer      Konrad
you can’t get 2x 1.5gb ram sticks
10:53:47        Customer      Konrad
Ok so what happens if I buy the laptop and it is not in dual channel mode? Can I send it back?
10:54:51        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
it will be of same size, however the there are different Modules inside the RAM card which are more compact and increases the capacity
10:55:58        Agent      Sourabh_Bhattacharya
for the first 7 days, you will have the return policy to return it back
10:56:06        Customer      Konrad
I am not talking about the physical dimensions of the ram module, I am talking about the memory chips on the ram module.
10:56:13        Customer      Konrad
Ok, thanks for your “help.”

As you can see, I eventually got a bit fed up and decided to terminate the session. The above is completely unedited and as it transpired. Never before have I had an argument about the dimensions of RAM modules. *rolls eyes*

Of continuing Tuesdays…

Yes, granted the title to this post makes no sense and basically relates to nothing, but I thought it set up this post rather well. You see, this is just a brief post to apologise for the less than usual frequency of my updates in the last couple of weeks. Its been a bit of a busy time so I have slightly taken my finger off of the pulse of the various industries I follow. Since the majority of my posts are reactionary commentaries or rants or how-tos it follows I have not been writing much.

Also, the much vaunted laptop (dv2799) I bought a couple of weeks ago has now had to be swapped a third time!! The first time it had a strange RAM corruption problem in the GFX RAM and the second laptop I received had a poorly constructed USB header which shorted the whole thing out. *sigh*. Still third time lucky I hope, its a lovely laptop, its just a shame it is let down by dubious quality control at Hewlett Packard’s end.

So, stay tuned, I have by no means lost interest in my blog! For now, I leave you with the comedy genius of Simon Amstell.

Choosing your next PC’s Operating System (the 64bit fiasco)

I am in the process of building a new gaming PC. Well, I should come clean, I have been in the process for almost 5 months now - I am mostly decided on the specifications but minor incompatibilities / annoyances cause me to stall. When this happens, real life typically takes over and by the time I look at my ‘final’ specification again, I normally rip it up and start from scratch due to new hardware being released or price drops. *exhale* I am finally on the verge of finalising the specification, the only things still holding me back are the graphics card (after news of ATi’s 4xx0 series) and the amount of RAM to put into my machine. The latter is heavily influenced by the Operating System I plan to run.

There are two crucial elements to any computer system which must work in harmony, the software and the hardware. Whilst this hardly an earth shattering announcement, I never cease to be amazed at the backlash in the form of blog / forum posts from people who forget this. Realistically when building (or buying) your next Gaming PC at the moment your choices are limited to Windows XP or Vista. Both Linux and Mac OSX suffer from platform compatibility issues with major new games and whilst the former enjoys fair server support for online gaming, neither really has much traction in the desktop gaming market.

The difference between Vista and XP is far more than cosmetic, whilst many are quick to criticise Vista for a number of reasons, I am actually a fan of Microsoft’s latest Operating System for a variety of reasons. Sure, it is feature-poor compared to initial designs and has it’s own annoyances, but the number of extra features and advances make it decisively the better Operating System. There is a caveat, for Vista to run comfortably for gaming purposes needs at least 1 Gb of RAM for itself. This on its own is no big deal - RAM is extraordinarily cheap at the moment, however the issue of platform (32bit/64bit) is now rearing its ugly head.

64 bit computing is nothing new, infact AMD processors have had 64bit extensions (called x86-64) for a number of years since the K8 platform back in 2003. Intel did not catch up (despite starting earlier than AMD) and produce viable 64bit chips until the Pentum 6xx series (late 2004), having stumbled initially with their IA64(T) specification developed for their Itanium platform.

Given this was four years ago, why are we not all running on 64bit XP or Vista? The answer is simple, in the same way that driver support initially crippled Vista’s adoption, 64bit drivers are fairly few and far between. What this means, is a lot less hardware will run properly under a 64bit Operating System. Given this situation, why do we even care about 64 bit computing? Why is it not relegated to high end computing and server farms? Mathematics.

Unfortunately, with a 32 bit Operating System, there is a mathematical limitation to the amount of memory the system can address. At most, Vista (or XP) in 32bit will only address 4Gb of total RAM. This includes both the graphics card and the main system memory. This brings my point about Vista comfortably using one Gb of RAM all by itself to sharp focus. Whilst Yes, the price of RAM is cheap there is something about me that dislikes buying 4Gb of RAM (to enable dual channel mode) only to have a quarter of it not accessible by the system. I wrote about this in detail in a previous post.

So what is the solution? Whilst I am huge fan of Vista (and have recently bought a Vista laptop) I do not think it is suitable for desktop gaming. With Windows XP, I have had fairly bloated a driver / runtime loaded installs using no more than 300Mb of RAM which realistically enables most PC gamers to get away with 2Gb of system RAM with no perceptible loss in gaming performance. This unfortunately would not be the case for a similar system running Vista and as such, unfortunately scuttles Vista for this market in my humble opinion.