AlexHopmann.com

I’ll be writing up a detailed report from the Sasquatch Festival 2007 shortly. To get going though, a teaser of some pictures from the Hold Steady’s rocking set early on Saturday- I feel like this sequence of photos of Craig Finn show a bit of the energy of their live show-

Also- the Canon TX1 was mostly working really well at the show. I’ll post a bunch of more pictures later, but with daylight the zoom let me take some really great photos from pretty far off. Its still pretty rough shooting at night even with stage-lights but I haven’t heard of any camera that is actually great for that. All in all I think I shot about 8GB of photos and video (I’m sure 90% of the space is the video since only 490 total files). I’m even getting more used to the strange ergonomics when shooting photos, although the placement of the power button is still horrible.

Sapphire is shipping the Silent HD 2600 XT which is a passively cooled video card that is a candidate for the media-center box up against the NVidia 8600GTS from Gigabyte. I would love to see some benchmark comparisons between these two cards. No word yet on pricing for the Sapphire card.

One advantage of the Sapphire- apparently its available in a 512MB version which for high resolution displays (like the 24″ and 30″ LCDs I use rather than conventional TVs) might turn out to be useful.

Part of the main motivation for writing a blog is to help myself remember all those key things for sometime later. Like that list of critical utilities it takes to keep Vista happy running on a MacBook. The bad news is I blew it and now I’m rebuilding my MacBook drive and I can’t remember some of the key stuff I had installed.

One key utility is SharpKeys. SharpKeys lets you remap keys on your keyboard in Windows. So for example the Mac doesn’t have the equivalent of the Windows “del” key- its delete is like the Windows backspace key. So I’ve used SharpKeys to map the enter key that I don’t use much to Del.

The other utility is Apple Mouse Utility. Apple Mouse lets you use the control key to right click when running Windows to get around the lack of a two-button mouse on the MacBook.

I’ll try to document more here as I go along.

While visiting the Verizon store to get my phone fixed the other day I noticed a little sign about the Motorola T605 Automotive system. As far as I can tell this is something I would install in my car that would let me do hands-free phone calls + play music from my phone in my car through the car speakers. This could be just about perfect. Apparently you can only get it from Circuit City and it wasn’t listing anywhere on the Circuit City web-site so its not clear if its out yet.

My car is fixed.
My phone is fixed (2nd try for Verizon to get it right).
My MacBook is working. They still need to fix the top of the case, but I’ll give it a .8 since its working.
Airplane is still in the shop- should be done on Wednesday.

More thoughts on the Apple Store experience. I suspect the whole experience would be a bit of a different situation if my warranty had expired. I saw a guy in the store with an older iBook G4 with a dead 60gb hard drive and they were quoting him like $350 to replace it. This is a $60 part. But back to me- my warranty is still good. No hassles. I had read about some people having issues with Apple replacing their case when they had the same cracking as mine, but not even the slightest issue. EXACTLY how it should be for a premium product like this, yet not sufficiently common.

The replacement hard-drive for my MacBook was in. They partitioned it for me so it was all ready for my boot-camp install. And it was all updated with all the latest patches. None of that “I just bought a new PC from Dell so I get to run Windows Update for the next 2 hours” experience. Keep in mind that the Mac has 100% the same thing if you install the OS yourself, but in this situation Apple took care of it for me. The replacement top-case wasn’t there yet so it took them 30 minutes to figure out how to let me take the MacBook home even though only half of the repairs were done. But they figured it out and everything is good.

I stumbled upon a thread that suggests using CalendarData to add holidays to your Windows Vista Calendar. It is always cool to find some unsolicited posts about something you built.

Intel introduced the new 3-series chipsets today. The usual sites have some good write-up. Looks like I’m going to want to hold out until the X38 comes out in Q3 for my desktop machine although the P35 should be fine for the media-center box. It will also be interesting to see how the G35 turns out (shipping also in Q3)- whether the video decode acceleration will be good enough to run a really good media center vs. using a GF8600GTS. I’ll likely still be going for the NVidia card- Intel’s integrated video has come a long way but its still going to be miles away from a discrete card.

One key improvement to me is that the RAID-1 support is supposed to be much better. With the new board things like boot time are supposed to be much better under RAID-1, which makes that more of an attractive option for me.

There are some cool looking Asus motherboards that have lots of heat-pipe cooling for the chipsets, etc.

Yesterday I came up to my MacBook which was running Vista under bootcamp and something was acting really strange. I managed to shut it down, although that took probably 30 minutes. Then I was greeted with the joyful experience of it not successfully booting- each time partway through the boot process it would restart. Restore last known good configuration didn’t help, safe mode didn’t help. I was pretty sure something was wrong with the disk.

So I tried to boot into my Mac OS partition. No luck. I grabbed a Mac install disk and booted it to get to the Disk Utility. It wouldn’t do any repair on the NTFS partition (no surprise) but it tried to repair the Mac partition. The first time it took about 20 minutes before it decided that it failed and after that it failed quickly. Given this I decided I probably had a bad disk and looked into my warranty options.

My warranty was still valid and I looked for a place to contact Apple support online. I hate talking to people on the phone if I can help it. No such luck, but they did mention you can bring it in to the “Genius Bar” at a local Apple store. This sounded like an interesting option so I signed up for an appointment the next day (today).

One note on the appointment sign-up. This was a very well executed web app. It would have let me sign in with my Apple ID, but it was also happy to let me proceed without signing up for an ID by putting in my name and email address. The whole process was very light-weight and easy and is a model for good web-design when you want to not scare away users with a heavy-weight process.

This morning I brought my machine in and checked in at the bar. I had to wait a couple of minutes but no big deal. The guy who helped me quickly took my feedback that I was a professional software developer (they need to gauge the technical level of their audience) but was still able to be helpful with troubleshooting things that I hadn’t thought of. It did remind me how rusty my Mac skills have gotten. I can imagine a more frustrating experience if you warranty / AppleCare has expired, but the no arguments, we are just going to fix everything and work through your problems with a real live person is easily worth the $200 premium you pay for most Macs.

I remember being skeptical about the Apple Store concept when they first rolled it out, but its yet another thing that have executed exceedingly well (ok, I don’t get any points for being the first or even the 100th to observe this). The only real flaw in the support experience is that they don’t really officially support Windows on the machine. To be honest, given the overall “cool” factor of their hardware and this experience, if they could really officially support Windows (which they might with the next OS release once BootCamp is official), their climb from 3-6% market-share would probably jump to 15%+. To be clear I mean really support Windows- pre-install it and have the genius-bar guys help you with your Windows issues on Apple hardware (with no attitude about how much better it would be if you had just stuck to Mac OS / how everything is Microsoft’s fault).

Even more importantly that 15% market-share would represent solidly capturing the high-end of the market. They would be able to do it maintaining their $100-$400 extra price point, and signing people up for multi-year service contracts at rates that Dell would kill to capture.

I get that fully, 100% supporting Windows is a big challenge on multiple levels for any company, and its harder for some cultural reasons at Apple. But doubling (or more) your revenue strikes me as the sort of reward that would make taking that on worth every bit of the effort.

Back to my poor sick hard-drive. I’m currently installing MacOS on an external USB drive to try to recover the data from my Windows partition and determine for sure if the disk is hardware damaged or just a serious software issue that the Mac repair utility couldn’t fix. Getting the Mac OS installer to install on the external USB drive was a bit of a challenge. This article on booting from USB drives from my good friends at Tidbits gave me the info I needed to figure it out. The problem is there are different master-boot records and the default ones that the Disk Utility put down didn’t meet the OS Installer’s specs and it wouldn’t explain what the problem was- it just said it wouldn’t install on that disk because you can’t boot from it. The one trick was that in the Disk Utility I was selecting the partition and not the disk itself. When you select the partition you don’t get the necessary partition tab with the options button you need. Click on the disk itself and all is well.

My airplane is in the shop…

My car is in the shop…

My MacBook is about to be in the shop (HD appears to have failed)…

Please, no more!

I just discovered an article on Tom’s Hardware that compares the NVidia vs ATI (AMD) video decode quality . Unfortunately although it was just back in January its based on the previous generation GPUs so the results are fairly obsolete already. Hopefully they will update it soon for the new GPUs.

I took some video with my Canon TX1 flying back from Bend yesterday and have seen an interesting implication of the advances in video technology- when I shoot with the 720p (highest quality) video settings I can’t play it back on any of my computers without dropping frames. So this stuff does matter.

Another aspect is that the configuration of how all this video stuff works together on a given machine is a total mess. There are all these different encoding formats and codecs and its almost impossible to tell which is being used where. I’d love to discover a good utility that lets me easily-

1) Check a video file and tell me what it really is. What video codec, what enclosure type and what bit-rates are all the pieces.

2) Check a machine and tell me what codecs are installed and help me figure out which will be used by Windows Media Player, Media Center, etc. Also make sure that all the right “enable hardware acceleration” settings are on- as the Tom’s Hardware article points out these are sometimes disabled by default which is really strange.