12th May 2006, 04:21 pm
Stéphanie will move up here in less than two weeks time, so we’ve started looking for a new PC for her. It’s easier to buy a new than transporting the old one from Switzerland to Denmark.
Because we want to be cool and hip we’re looking for a SFF PC, a so-called small form factor PC. It’s those nice little boxes pioneered by Shuttle (they apparently call them XPC now). The system will not be used for games, but for office work, photo editing, etc. I’m thinking something like this:
SSF: Shuttle SD11G5 — 3,500 DKK ($600). This box includes a motherboard with integrated graphics card and a sound card.
CPU: Pentium M 730 1.6 GHz — 900 DKK ($155). Nice ultra-cool CPU that consumes a maximum of 27W under full load. It should be fairly fast too.
RAM: 2 GiB Dual DDR II SDRAM — 1,000 DKK ($170). I don’t care so much about the brand, but Stéphanie says that size matters :-)
HDD: Samsung SpinPoint P120 SP2514N 250 GB — 600 DKK ($100). I have two of these already and I’m quite satisfied with them. Silent PC Review recommends them too for their quiet operation.
DVD: Burner for ±RW — 300 DKK ($50). Again I don’t really care as long as it can read and write on all the silly plus and minus formats.
LCD: Samsung SyncMaster 204B — 4,000 DKK ($685). I hope this is a good 20 inch LCD monitor… I think it looks good and I’ve read positive comments about it, but I would very much like your input on this! So please leave a comment if you have any experience with this monitor or know about another good monitor in the same price range.
Please note how I managed to find three letter acronyms for all the components :-)
If you know of other good SFF systems then let me know! I like the Pentium M based system because it is low noise (when the computer has to be right there on the table it has to be quiet). But maybe this isn’t necessary? Tell us what you think.
2nd May 2006, 11:56 pm
I visited Svend today at my old dormitory, [Skejbygård][]. This was to retrieve a table plate I had stored there while I was in Switzerland. I was glad to see that it was still in good shape.
But that was not the most interesting thing I saw there — Svend showed me a video about Second Life which looked really facinating. I have never seen something like this! Second Life is a vast online world where anybody can join and live, well…, a second virtual life.
To make this interesting, everybody can develop their own stuff. What is different from other such places is that you own your creations, and so you can start selling them to others. You can build 3D objects and script their behaviour, so people have created anything from moon rockets (that launch up into the air with flames and all…) to guns to artificially intelligent clown fish (think Nemo…).
There are now more than 200,000 residents in Second Life, and they are trading those virtual items like mad — a certain anshe Chung currently holds virtual land for some 250,000 US dollars! They explain in the movie how a software developer in some poor country makes half of his income in Second Life…
This whole idea is crazy and fantastic at the same time! :-) It will be very interesting to see where this leads…
30th April 2006, 01:04 pm
I just saw a post on the Enlightenment mailinglist with a link to this page. There you will find a movie showcasing something they call multi-touch interfaces: touch screens where you can move multiple mouse cursors simultanously.
That gives you the ability to have an interface very much like what we saw in Minority Report where you can drag, scale, and rotate your photos with the touch of your fingers. I think it looks incredibly cool!
24th April 2006, 10:18 pm
Having just commented on Janus’ comment about overflows in C#, I went to the kitchen to pour me a cup of apple juice. The bottle was almost empty so I poured out all of it. The result was this nice colorful view:

Maybe you can already see that the cup is full, very full infact! Here’s a close-up made at an angle almost level with the water:

I love the way the water curves instead of staying flat like water normally does :-) I also like the colors, I think this site needs some colors after all the long-winded discussions about C#…
23rd April 2006, 10:56 am
Yesterday I made a small five-minute movie with my camera to show Stéphanie around in our new appartment (which she hasn’t seen since she’s still in Switzerland). I thought the movie was small, but what is small in terms to minutes and seconds quickly becomes very large in terms to bits and bytes.
And as we all know: size does matter :-) (I’ve always wanted to include that in one of my posts…)
Seriously, size does matter, especially if you plan on sending the movie to someone. The five minutes of 640×480 MPEG movie weighted in with a whopping 114 MiB. With an upstream bandwidth of only 256 Kb/s (and here is really is Kb/s and not Kib/s since network equiptment don’t follow the binary units) it would take at least an hour to transfer the movie.
So what do you do? You bring our your mencoder and resize it. That was surpricingly easy to do:
mencoder a.mpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -vop scale=320:240 -oac copy -o b.mpg
That did the trick for me, converting a.mpg
into b.mpg
which was only 23 MiB. The new movie has about a quarter of the pixels in the old one, and the size reduction fits nicely with that. I guess I could have squizzed it some more by compressing it harder, but I have not investigated how to do that.