Clay's Blog

Have you been waiting to try out Microsoft’s newest operating system, Vista? Don’t want to install Vista on your PC until you know what you are in for? Now you have options.

If you already have an install disc or are lucky enough (like me) to have access to the Enterprise Edition through our campus agreement with Microsoft, you can install Vista inside a virtual machine using Virtual PC 2007 – and now you can get VPC 2007 for free. That’s right, Microsoft is giving away their virtualization software at no cost. And if you have a machine with a Core2Duo or one of the quad core versions of the processor and a couple of gigs of RAM, you won’t notice much sluggishness at all while you test drive Vista.

My Core2Duo machine at home runs Vista in Virtual PC 2007 noticeably faster than my Alienware FX-55-based machine at work. But it’s not so slow as to be unusable in any way. So give it a try. I am planning to use my virtual Vista install to test compatibility with various video codecs and utilities that I use on a daily basis. If I find that all of my apps run well in Vista, I plan to upgrade my Core2Duo machine.

Microsoft recently hit the news circuit with an announcement of a new class of devices that feature touchscreen interfaces that allow for multiple simultaneous touchpoints. The project is called Microsoft Surface. Here’s the ZDNet story on it. And here’s a nice video of the system.

I have been following the development of multi-touch display technology for a few years. I ran into the technology at SIGGRAPH a few years ago and each year have seen major advances. The project was based at NYU and was recently spun off into a private company called Perceptive Pixel. The NYU software ran on Linux (I seem to remember).

I wonder if they will be able to get their systems to consumers at a reasonable price sooner than Microsoft. Either way, I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on one of these things.

If you haven’t seen this already, take a look. Mike Wesch at Kansas State University really boils down the ways the web has been changing over the last couple of years.

I’ve seen several articles and blog posts about solid state drives (SSD) over the last few weeks. Solid state drives use non-volatile flash memory for storage (Wikipedia article). There are many benefits to using them, including radically faster boot times and greater durability (because they have no moving parts).

Engadget has a recent post about the future of pricing for this technology. Unfortunately, though we’ll see a rapid drop in price over the next year or two, pricing does not appear to come in line with the cost of traditional hard drives anytime soon. The gap looks like it will not go below 3x the price per gigabyte of traditional hard drives even by 2010.

So I recently inherited a PowerBook G4. I had to wipe the drive and install Tiger from scratch, which ended up being a real pain in the ass because this PowerBook only has a CD drive and our copy of Tiger is on DVD. I finally got a working set of CDs to install from and got it up and running. After which I thought, why not setup Ubuntu on this machine. It’ll probably run faster than OSX Tiger on this old hardware.
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So I was working on getting a search engine setup for our new version of the Tulane Technology Services website and I went to check out how to do this with Google. I knew there was a way to do it, but I wasn’t sure what the process for getting it setup was.

As usual, when I got to Google’s customized search information, I was very pleasantly surprised not only by how easy this was to do, but all of the really cool customization and presentation features available. Check out the page for doing this at Google:

Google Co-Op – Custom Search Site

Besides an exclusivity clause, the user agreement looked reasonable. As for exclusivity, is there a real competitor to Google out there to consider? I’d say, No. So it’s not like this is currently a problem.

You can customize what sites are searched (you’re not limited to just one) and how the results are ranked. Because we are a non-profit university we qualify for Public Service Search, so there are no ads on our results pages. Very Nice. Thanks, Google!

Check out the new Technology Services site – the search is in the footer for the site.

Technology Services

So, I know some of my readers have used my original DVD ripping and encoding guide to get setup with the right software. But some of the recommendations are stale. At the very least I wanted to recommend a product to take the place of DVD Decrypter which has been abandoned by its creators under legal threats from the MPAA and their minions.

I have been using an inexpensive tool from Slysoft to help with copying DVDs. AnyDVD is a lightweight driver that removes CSS, Macrovision, and Region Codes from DVDs making them directly accessible for conversion using any encoding utility such as Nero Recode 2, 1ClickDVDCopy, and others. For $30 it is well worth the price. The application is updated frequently to keep up with new encryption/copy protection schemes used by movie studios who want to tell you where and when you can watch a DVD you have purchased. Highly recommended.

Just ran across a really cool social networking site based on one’s book collection. It’s called LibraryThing and it’s an online catalog where you can store your own personal library.But this is only the beginning. You get library quality data about the books in your collection and you can share your catalog with other users to connect with people who have similar reading habits (or dissimilar for that matter). You get a nice tag cloud for each book in your collection, a list of similar books in other fellow owner’s collections, ratings, and much more. It’s a really neat idea and will prove very useful to me.

I’ve played around with similar concepts with music CD trading called lala.com and for music listening with Last.fm and audioscrobbler.

I was also pleased to see that LibraryThing is selling CueCat barcode scanners to use to help catalog your library quickly and easily. The price is $15 which is a lot more than the original price – free. Check out my entry on the CueCat for details. And if you join LibraryThing, check out my library.

Clay’s Library

Just ran across an interesting new site that’s focused on finding information about consumer electronics equipment. It’s a nice search engine that pulls up info like product manuals, support sites, and reviews, along with links to retail sites. I did a search for my favorite piece of equipment in my media cabinet, the Philips DVP-642 DivX Certified DVD player. The top link was to the PDF of the manual online and following that a handy link to the VideoHelp.com DVD Player Forum with information on the region-free remote control hack for the player. Nice.

http://www.retrevo.com

This is a great list of those products we all love to hate, at least when we’re reminded of some of these forgettable products. Topping the list is America Online 1989-2006; AOL is such low-hanging fruit it almost seems unfair to point out its fantastic crappiness. Coming in second is another one that’s a personal favorite of mine to hate: Real Player. Real Player like its fellow wart on the ass of computing, QuickTime Player, is a virus I like to keep off my computer. Thankfully there are hacked codecs out there to replace these players for most uses. Interestingly, the CueCat barcode scanner is on the list, but there is no mention of the fact that it’s easy to convert the thing to a free barcode scanner to help with indexing all your movies, books, music, and anything else that has a barcode in your house. See my post on it for details.

Here’s the full list and the article from PC World.