AlexHopmann.com

AMD (formerly ATI) introduced their new line of video cards today. The HD 2900 looks interesting and its supposed to have very good video support but at the moment I’m leaning towards the NVidia 2600GTS for the media center machine. The AMD cards have even more disgusting huge power requirements than the top of the line NVidia cards and that doesn’t suggest a good chance of silent (no-fan) versions of the cards. Also none of the reviews had any data on media performance- apparently the drivers are crappy enough at the moment they couldn’t even get that stuff to work.

Its really sad that it still appears to be a race to the bottom for driver stability.

In other news, NewEgg now has the 1TB Hitachi drive. Of course they are charging $599 for it at the moment which is $200 over the recommended retail price, so its still in a holding pattern. Plus, the Seagate one sounds like it will be really nice too.

I’m still looking for a better way to manage my music collection. I currently have several copies of my collection on a server in my house. All the music I buy on CD I rip to WMA-lossless, and I also get a fair amount of high-bitrate MP3 files from eMusic. These files tend to be fairly large so I like to transcode them into 3 other directory trees- one with WMA variable bitrate that is about 192kbps, one with WMA variable bitrate that is around 64kbps for small capacity mobile devices like my phone, and a last directory with 128kbps MP3s for devices that don’t like WMA.

Currently I use the “Windows Audio Converter” that was part of the XP Plus Pack to do the conversion. It lets me specify a source directory, destination directory and audio configuration and it goes off and converts the whole thing (skipping already converted files). The only problems with this scheme is that this is only a GUI-based app and I’d really prefer a command line version that I can script and trigger automatically every day. So far I’ve been unsuccessful finding anything that meets this goal so email me if you know of something or leave a note in the comments.

I’ve been posting over on the Launch21 blog about the CouponLooker vertical-search engine that I’ve been doing for Judy’s Book. Interesting stuff- this is one of the more fun projects I’ve done in a while. I suppose I should be embarrassed to admit that I did about zero research into how search is supposed to be done. Still, the results seem pretty good and its fun to share some of the techniques that I’ve developed so far.

On another front I’m interested in tracking the evolution of hard-drive prices. Here are the current top price/performance figures for 3.5″ drives-

400GB = $97 = $.243/GB
500GB = $119 = $.238/GB
750GB = $240 = $.32/GB
1000GB= $413 = $.31/GB

500GB is still the sweet-spot. The 1TB drives aren’t really available yet so the 750GB drives are still priced at the “highest capacity available” premium. I’d expect once the 1TB drives become easily available the 750GB drives should drop quite a bit quickly.

My electric Smoker has been busted and with BBQ season approaching I’m getting more and more motivated to fix it. Kurt who is a BBQ pro recommends the Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker/Smoker as the only way to go for hassle free good results. Who am I to argue with an expert? Hopefully mine will arrive by Friday.

There is also a site that has all the info in the world about cooking with these- http://virtualweberbullet.com.

Kat and I are planning on making a Clafoutis tonight- here is a recipe from Williams Sonoma.

Cherry Clafoutis
4 eggs, separated
2/3 cup sugar
6 Tbs all-purpose flour
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 lb fresh cherries, pitted or 1/2 lb frozen cherries, thawed and drained.
1/2 tsp. lemon zest
Pistachio ice cream for serving

Preheat oven to 375F. Butter large rectangular baking dish.

In large bowl, combine egg yokes and 1/3 cup sugar; beat with handheld mixer on medium-high speed untill ribbons form, about 8 minutes. Add four, vanilla and cream. Reduce speed to low; beat until completely blended, stopping mixer occasionally to scrape down sides of bowl.

In small bowl, using handheld whisk, beat egg whites and salt about 30 seconds. Add whites to batter; beat with mixer on low speed until incorporated, 1-2 minutes.

Preheat, prepared baking dish in oven for 4-5 minutes. In bowl, stir together cherries, 1/3 cup sugar and zest. Remove pan from oven. Pour in cherries; top with batter. Bake until clafoutis is set in middle, 30-35 minutes. Serve warm with pistachio ice cream. Serves 6-8.

I’ve been waiting for the 3.5″ 1TB and the 2.5″ 160GB 7200RPM drives to come out for it seems like 6 months. They were both announced ages ago and I keep checking the online stores and nothing. Sometimes it seems like new technology comes at a dizzying pace, sometimes it just takes forever.

Meanwhile I’m also still waiting for those new ATI (/AMD) video card announcements so I can decide if the 8600GTS is the right upgrade for my media center or if ATI has something worth considering.

There are lots of write ups out and around about the new AMD Phenom CPUs. One thing I can’t really tell- they mention that some of the CPUs work in the “AM2+” socket. What’s the relationship between the AM2+ and the AM2. Since I just bought an AM2-based system I’d love to know.

I wish these CPU guys wouldn’t be so confusing…

I’ve had the new Canon TX1 out of its box for all of an hour now so this is a very quick set of first impressions. When people see it their first reaction is that its a video camera. Its interesting that this form factor looks like video camera first and people are surprised that its a capable still-photo camera too.

First a couple of reactions about the form factor. This is a little bit of a disappointment. Because the camera is so small you only have room for about two fingers to hold it under the lens. The power button is in a weird spot on the side and much worse the trigger is in a weird spot on the top. To shoot still photos I need to hold it with what feels like a very unnatural grip. For shooting movies the controls feel a bit better since the record button is on the back right where your thumb would be and so is the wide angle/telephoto toggle.

Overall still photo quality seems good. Low light seems a bit better than my previous camera (Canon SD550) although still far from even acceptable. There is a special indoor mode that helped a bit more too. The test photos I took were much better in terms of reduced bluring- the image stabalization seems to be working really well (or maybe that is some placebo effect). I did have a problem using the zoom indoors with it not focusing correctly.

There is a new super-macro mode that lets you focus from 0-10cm. I took a couple of test shots with this and it is pretty damn awesome. Should be great for some of the flower and food photos that I like to take.

I shot a couple of test movies and the results looked pretty great. I bought a 8GB flash card for $60 from NewEgg but its the slow kind so in the HD mode I can only shoot about 30 seconds before it quits. Unlike the old camera it at least gives you a nice display of how close you are getting to running out of buffer.
At maximum quality settings I can get a bit more than 27 minutes of HD video onto one flash card and the bandwidth is high enough that as far as I can tell Windows Media Player couldn’t keep up with the 30fps on my laptop (Core Duo 2ghz). At least so far I tend to not shoot video for more than small clips so the size shouldn’t be an issue, although I do wonder if 32GB SDHC cards will be out soon.

The Silverlight announcements at MIX this week are pretty exciting. I’d been doing a bunch of work in WPF/E (the old name for Silverlight) and the new release seems like some solid progress.

One of the most interesting parts of the announcement is the support for a mini-CLR that runs .NET code anywhere Silverlight runs. It appears to have a very limited set of the framework libraries. Given that the install is only 4MB this isn’t a surprise. But my big question is how will interop work between the .NET and Javascript work.

One of the bigger problems we had with Avalon (WPF) meeting the needs of web developers is that we changed the app model all around. You weren’t serving dynamic script from the server, the app had to be compiled and use web-services or something to talk back to the server. WPF/E was interesting because you could use some of the same graphic capabilities while sticking with a conventional Javascript coding model.

If Silverlight supports good Javascript / .NET interop you could have the best of both worlds. Build controls, etc, in .NET where the cleaner programming model and better performance helps. And script the logic and flow of your app in Javascript using conventional web tools. I haven’t had a chance to dig into the new release but it looks promising.

I’ve also got my fingers crossed for an announcement of linux support. I can think of about 5 or 6 projects that could use Silverlight if there were support for running on linux.

I just got a notice from Amazon that they shipped my Canon TX1 today. I’ll be reporting back tomorrow on my experiences with it in the flesh…