Deve’s Blog

The times are now ripe. The “format war” has been won by the Blu Ray, to the detriment of the HD-DVD. HD TVs prices are not insanse anymore (a couple of years ago I saw a Full HD TV with a 10.000 euros price tag!). Sky finally offered its My Sky in HD version. But everything began from the old amplifier, which decided to die on us, so it was worth it to buy a new one that already supported the new HD audio formats.

And the time of the upgrade came…

Full HD 50 inches Samsung plasma TV, with little gems like the USB port to directly play DivX and MP4.

Panasonic Blu Ray player, BD Live 2.0 compatible (I think those features are BS, but it does have them anyway).

Onkyo A/V Receiver, with support for Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master Audio (yeah, let’s break down the walls with subwoofer thuds!).

And my Sky HD decoder; it’s true that the HD channels aren’t many at the moment, but even just the basketball games or the occasional movie or documentary on National Geographic are worth it…

Needless to say, Blu Rays show off the best of this upgrade… In particular, among the first discs I bought, Die Hard 4 and Transformers are something spectacular… if the difference between VHS and DVD was huge, the one between DVD and Blu Ray looks to me even more abysmal, maybe because it wasn’t easy to think that the already solid DVD could be so clearly surpassed…

To sum it up: awesome!
(Even more so because the old 42 inches plasma TV is now wall mounted in front of my bed… )

As a good nerd, I couldn’t avoid taking a look at Google’s new browser, the by now famous Chrome.
After finding, by chance, the news of it’s announcement by comic I got curious; here you can find the comic itself, which is really well crafted. The various opinions and explanations undoubtedly point out a very careful vision of the current features of the Web, but I wasn’t expecting anything less from Google.

Testing it on the field, Chrome responds very well. I didn’t surf around more than half an hour, but the speed (both in loading the program and loading the pages) is excellent, easily faster than Firefox 3. Of course, Chrome has the advantage of being very “feature light”, but at the moment it’s second to none in raw speed.
The interface is absolutely minimal, but you don’t really feel like anything important is missing; sure, some Firefox extensions you’re used too won’t be there, but I’m quite confident that, given time, considering the fact that the project is 100% open source, similar plugins will be programmed for Chrome, too.

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“How is it you aren’t writing even one post during this 4-days long holiday?!”. Well, first of all I kinda worked from home on Friday. And secondly, it was formatting time!

The ancient custom of the periodical Format C: dates back to the dawn of the computer age, and tends to take place at the same time as spring cleaning (and indeed the wood of my [real] desktop saw the light again just a few days ago )…
Well, I don’t think people still uses the real “format c:”, there are more refined ways… anyway, as could be expected, the scheduled formatting didn’t go smoothly, so I spent a couple of days on it, formatting probably 5 times. But it’s ok. Now I’m 70% operational (still several programs to install and configure, but the base is there), and I lost my Audigy 2 on the way, as it had started to tragically crackle and pop during games. I thought it was a driver matter, but I found no way. Now I physically removed it and am using the on-board audio (and I have to say I can’t really tell the difference… but of course, I can’t even tell the difference between a CD and an MP3).

So no posts… be patient…

It all began near the end of 2003. I installed Jedi Academy (JA) on my PC and began playing. The single player was funny, although less charismatic then its predecessor Jedi Outcast because of the main character (an anonymous academy student compared to Kyle Katarn? Please…).
But why not trying it online? With a saber staff (”staffa” for friends), the double bladed light saber used by Darth Maul (who was the undisputed source of the best fights in Star Wars movies).
So I began working my saber on a few servers. For some reason I can’t quite recall I played on a network of US servers who kept track of stats and rankings, wihtout realizing that a 200 ms ping was quite tragic for reaction times and playability… Still, I wasn’t doing too bad. My first master, if so I can say, was LoI-Fate, who taught me the basics and a few particular techniques to use the saber staff.
Slowly I began joining the Italian NGI servers, where thanks to my glorious Fastweb connection I managed to have 0 ping (and everyone kept asking me if I owned the server :asd:)! I definitely noticed the difference, I could play way better, and I also began duelling with and getting to know some Italian players, so I permanently moved on those servers.
After improving a bit I was noticed by a couple of clans, but in particular by a bunch of jerks dressed up as Sith :rotfl:, who were accidentally the strongest Italian JA clan: =RS=, Renegade Sith.

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I found this awesome 24 parody, and I just had to link it… What would have happened in 24, the famous TV series, had it been set in 1994? How would have Jack Bauer managed to keep going without PDAs and satellites?

“Something’s wrong, Nina, it’s been too long… … … … … PAGE HIM!”

It’s a really well produced video that hits the target, and having used the technology of that period it really cracks me up… But it also makes you think, it’s incredible how much we’ve progressed in ten years or so: how could I forget those dot-matrix printers, and the damned paper-with-holes-to-the-side-and-carbon-paper-inside? And the joyful sound of the 56k (or 33.6!) modem, that we had learnt by heart! I still remember I was almost touched when they finally activated my Fastweb DSL line… eh, good times… :asd.

(It’s so much easier to find funny titles in Italian in these cases… just literally translate from the English and there you go… while in English I should try to come up with something smart and witty… which I won’t, so there you have a very standard title :sisi:)

Between a holiday post and the other, I think it’s a good idea to point out Facebook, a social utility I recently joined, as many of my Contiki travel mates are using it, and it’s a great way to keep in touch even from the other side of the world. Facebook reminds a bit of MySpace, but it’s much better, aesthetically “cleaner”, with much more privacy, with a lot of basic features which simplify keeping in touch and finding “friends of my friends who are my friends”, and the possibility to add tons of extra applications. It’s not blogging oriented, and that’s why my “base of operations” will still be this blog; and it allows to upload an unlimited number of photos, but it resizes them (to the unusual 603×453 resolution… :look:), so my pics will stay on the unbeatable Flickr, but I’ll probably put some there, too. In general, you’ll find me there too (just look for first and last name), and I suggest you join it ’cause it’s very nice, you can join the networks of your uni or your workplace (although for work, LinkedIn is probably more professional, but it looked so serious…), etc. etc.

Take a look here and try this genial game… read the instructions and the quick start first, otherwise it won’t be very clear, but to sum it up you have to lay down some defensive turrets to kill a bunch of monsters, who come in waves, before they reach the other side of the screen. THe turrets have different features and costs, can be upgraded, and most importantly can be deployed to create a forced path (the longest the better of course) for the monsters…

I’ve been playing at the medium setting and got a 3800 or so high score, dying with two waves left before the 49th and last one… I could spend hours on it…

No, it has nothing to do with potatoes or anything… I just replaced my two old Parallel ATA hard disks with two new Serial ATA…

What happened is that on Tuesday, after a resume from standby, the PC restarted by itself after a while. Since then, only blue screens after a few seconds from starting Windows. The guilty: nvatabus.sys, which is the nVidia IDE driver. Well, I tried removing the two HDs and indeed Windows worked fine… so I tried to reinstall the driver, to replace the nVidia driver with a generic Microsoft one, but to no avail… There was a point where the disks weren’t even seen by the BIOS.

Fortunately, with a nice recovery CD I created some time ago using Reatogo (a customization of BartPE, which essentially allows to start up a CD version of Windows XP, with all the most important functionalities and programs), I managed to access all the data. Actually I think there was no hardware failure at all (even if the fact that the disks are not recognized by the BIOS is weird), but just a Windows mess-up (something similar had already happened to me, after all).

Anyway, to be on the safe side, I ordered and installed two cool 250 GB Seagate 7200.10 on Bow.it, for a total of 142 euros (in that capacity range the HDs are really cheap now), so I caught the occasion to get some more space… 100 GB of RAID 1 partition rather than 40 (useful now that we got a new camcorder… precious videos to keep safe), 200 GB RAID 0 partition rather than 100 (the benchmark scored a cool 118 MB/s, rather than the old 75 and especially the 98 of a 10K rpm Raptor), and what’s left is 60 GB rather than 50. So now on the PC I have three Serial ATA HDs, a Serial ATA DVD recorder and only the other DVD recorder is an old Parallel…

I think it’s time, after several days of doing nothing, that I review Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (which definitely contributed to these days…). Long awaited sequel to the C&C saga, it looked a lot promising even after the first images and info: after Red Alert 2, funny but very short, and after generals, nice but similarly short and, more importantly, without a serious plot and verve, we’re back to the charismatic Tiberium universe (the now almost mithological green crystal which fell from the sky and… no, it’s not Kryptonite :|). The facing sides will always be GDI and NOD (Kane’s comeback was expected and very appreciated), but this time there’s also a third faction: the Scrin, more or less the creators of Tiberium, which they use to slowly infest planets, preparing them for their invasion…

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Like Palpatine… better than Palpatine! I finally got my hands on a brutal XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB XXX…

For those who have no idea of what I’m talking about, this is a video card. XFX is the card brand, that is a producer which is especially known because it offers factory overclocked cards, that are obviously covered by warranty (instead if someone overclocks his own card the warranty is invalidated [by the way: if I took my card, overclocked, then it started working badly and breaking, then I set the clock back to the default, and asked for a substitution, how would they know that I have overclocked? I've always wondered this...]). GeForce 8800 GTS is the graphic processor (GPU) model, produced by nVidia; the 8800 line (in particular the GTX versione) at the moment is the undisputed dominator of the market as far as power goes, waiting for a reply by AMD/ATI. 320 MB is the onboard memory, while XXX is the particular XFX model, indicating extreme overclocking.

320 megs might seem too few, as the most powerful cards tend to have 512, 640 (the standard 8800 GTS) or even 768 (the 8800 GTX); actually, the power of the overclocked GPU compensates for this limit, so much that the performances of this card are equivalent or superior to those of a standard 8800 GTS 640MB, at least up to the 1600×1200 resolution. As I’m not playing on a plasma 1920×1080 TV this was a great choice for the performance to price ratio: a 8800 GTX can cost 6-700 euros, a 8800 GTS 640 maybe 4-500, while I spend less than 300 (actually this was a bargain price through wheeling and dealing, it actually costs a bit more).

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