Kevin Marshall's Epic Work Blog for Awesome People

Kevin the Coder is a maverick. Almost like a team of mavericks.
in

April 2006 - Posts

CLibrary Update
So it has been awhile since my last post.  I've been busy working on the windows mobile 5 development and it's been a challenge.  Way harder to work with than I originally aniticipated.  Anyway, one of my other side projects made an appearance on Coding4Fun.  Due to a lack of time and a case of ADD on my part, a co-worker, Yousif,  has taken over development of CLibrary which he promptly renamed iComics.  I admit, it's catchier than my original name.  He's starting to post about it on his blog over here.  I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but he showed me a demo and he's done an impressive job of adding new features and improving the usuability.  Check it out!
Posted: Apr 23 2006, 03:46 PM by kmarshall | with no comments
More Virtual pc fun on the Mac Mini with Parallels Workstation
The mac mini was feeling a little left out, so I thought I'd go with a double post monday.  I'm a little leary of desecrating my Mac with a win xp dual boot just so I can use Quicken.  I know there is quicken for the mac, but have you ever used that program?  Amazingly terrible.  How hard is it to make a Mac version of a PC program? Mac Quicken joins Lotus Notes in the pantheon of terrible software.

Anyway virtual pc doesn't work on Macintels yet, but luckily a new program Parallels Workstation does.  It's  hypervisor software that supports Intel’s Virtualization Technology “VT” architecture.  It looks alot like virtual pc, the only difference is that performance is about 10K times better.  Mac virtual pc was almost unusable.  Granted it was emulating x86 architecture on a PowerPC, but Parellels is  rediculous.  It's way faster than using virtual pc on my laptop.  I have no benchmarks.  Who has time for benchmarking when I have DVDs to copy?  I highly recommend you try out the beta.  The full version is a bargain at only $49.
Posted: Apr 10 2006, 09:29 PM by kmarshall | with no comments
Filed under:
Mac Mini and h.264
At first I was excitied about h.264.  Excellant compression and small file sizes.  Halfway to building my digital Alexandria and having all my DVDs copied onto a NAS device.  Good stuff.  Until it took 18hrs to compress on my P4 laptop.  At that rate MegaBlu-HD 2.0 Discs will be out and I'll have to start all over.  That was until I put my mac mini on dvd compression duty.  Huge difference with the dual core machine crunching away on those DVDs.  I get about 80fps with my Mac mini while ripping the Matrix.  Although I only got 35 on the Thomas Crown Affair (possibly the best movie ever)

One problem is that it doesn't seem to keep the 5.1 soundtrack. Although that may be an issue with quicktime.  I'll have to try that out with VLC later and see if it works.

So what's the best setting?  I have no idea.  I'm sure you can find an 80 page thread on AVS forums arguing about it.

The calculation I have seen used the most is:
bit rate = Q * resolution * frame rate where Q = .15.

So,
 16x9 NTSC Film: 0.15 * 720*400 * 23.976 = 1011kbps
4:3 NTSC Film: 0.15 * 640*480 * 23.976 = 1078kbps
4:3 NTSC: 0.15 * 640*480 * 29.97 = 1348kbps

That gets to about 1GB per movie or less.  I did Thomas Crown Affair at 1500kbps and it looks awesome.

Once, handbrake supports 5.1 sound I'll have all 7 my DVDs available on my terrabyte NAS.  I mean who has time to get up and load a DVD into the player?  Its the 21st century, i shouldn't have to move that much.
Posted: Apr 10 2006, 09:09 PM by kmarshall | with no comments
Filed under:
Offically Booting WinXp on a Mac
Apple offically released BootCamp today for dual booting WinXP and OSX on an Intel MacBook Pro.  So torn on this one.  I'd hate to see a nice apple laptop defiled with a win xp gui, but on the other hand now I can use a Mac as my work pc.  These are the things that keep me up at night.  An amazing year for Macs though.  Even some people have been disappointed by apple releases lately, it's an impressive feat to switch CPU platforms and have your hardware running your chief competitor's OS within 6 months.  It'll even boot Vista before it's released.

BootCamp's driver cd also includes WinXP drivers for:
  • graphics
  • networking
  • audio
  • AirPort wireless
  • Bluetooth
  • the Eject key (on Apple keyboards)
  • brightness control for built-in displays
 
Posted: Apr 05 2006, 07:20 PM by kmarshall | with no comments
Filed under:
Improving Virtual PC /Server Perfomance
Here's a random collection of tips I have for improving Virtual PCs /Servers performance (in no particular order of performance gain)

  • Run the virtual machine on a drive other than the physical drive of the host OS.  (Ok, I lied, this is definately the biggest performance increase.  Last time I built a demo app for a Microsoft launch event, I forgot to copy the vhd to a new drive..ooops....still haunts me every time I use VPC)
  • Add 48TB of RAM...or at least 1.5GB so you can get 768MB on the VPC.  WinVPCs are hungry little processes.
  • Defrag the Host OS
  • Defrag/Compress the VPC (Defragging surprsingly seems to make a difference)
    • Defrag the drive on your guest OS
    • With the guest OS running, go to the configuration page for your guest OS and edit your CD/DVD configuration
    • Capture the following ISO file which is now included as part of the default installation:  C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Server\Virtual Machine Additions\Precompact.iso
    • The CD will autorun, and you will be prompted to prepare you disk for compaction
    • Shut down your guest OS, and run "Virtual Disks" > "Inspect" > "Compact virtual hard disk"
  • Defrag the Host OS again (hey, it can't hurt to defrag all the time)
  • Exclude the VHDs from your virusscan software
  • Disable unused services in the VPC (who needs the help service anyway?)
  • Disable GUI effects
    • Right-click My Computer and select Properties
    • Under the Advanced tab, click the "Settings" button
      under the Performance section
    • Under the Visual Effects tab, select the radio box
      for "Adjust for best performance"
    • Click "OK" out of the dialogs
  • Disable Hardware Acceleration
    • Right-click on the desktop and select "Properties"
    • On the Settings tab, click the "Advanced" button
    • Under the Troubleshoot tab, drag the
      Hardware acceleration slider all the way to the left
    • Click "OK" out of the dialogs
  • Try this VPC optimized theme to squeeze out some extra performance
  • Adjust Virtual Memory Size to have the same initial and max sizes
  • Use fixed disks instead of dynamic disks
  • If its still too slow, use VMWare
Posted: Apr 05 2006, 04:43 PM by kmarshall | with 3 comment(s)
Filed under:
Thought of the Day
Individually shrinkwrapped toothpicks, is there a bigger F U to mother nature?
Posted: Apr 05 2006, 02:54 PM by kmarshall | with no comments
Free Virtual Server 2005
MS is now giving away Virtual Server 2005 for free.  Although I've always felt that VMWare performed a little better, its hard to justify buying software when there is a perfectly good free alternative.  If you are VMWare, you gotta be concerned by this.  I mean you make 1 product.  Actually 3 products which basically do the same thing.  And MS even supports Linux guest OSes now.  So you lose that selling point.  I remember seeing the VMWare booth at TechEd 2005 Europe when MS announced they were giving away free copies of Virtual Server to all attendeees. That was entertaining.  Now this. What a kick to the junk.  
Posted: Apr 04 2006, 08:53 AM by kmarshall | with no comments
Filed under:
Easy AJAX for the lazy programmer
I've been playing with the new Atlas release lately and it's definately impressive. In the furture, I plan on posting some cool things I have learned or maybe I'll post my top 10 Favorite Cobol keywords.  You just never know what will come out of 10K monkeys.  Satistically speaking, I'm bound to write something good if I keep posting. But in the meantime, who has the time to AJAXify their website?  Here is a cool little trick for the lazy, add the follwing lines to the head of your ASPX page.

<META http-equiv="Page-Enter" content="blendTrans(Duration=0.1)">
<META http-equiv="Page-Exit" content="blendTrans(Duration=0.1)">

Now when the page loads it'll have a nice AJAX-like refresh.  blendTrans gets rid of the postback flicker and content that has changed blends nicely in.  This only works in IE though, so for those firefox users viewing your site, it looks like you'll have to put in more than 30 seconds of work and add some real ajax.
Posted: Apr 01 2006, 04:17 PM by kmarshall | with no comments
Filed under: