Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

Apple’s huge WWDC was today, and the Steve Jobs speech, while devoid of any new hardware, was fairly interesting in that it heralded the announcements of two huge features for OS X 10.5.

A new Desktop was nice to see, considering Apple’s effectively had the same Desktop UI since OS X 10.0. The improvements to the Dock look pretty interesting, although I’m unsure if I like the “curved” Stacks feature so far.

The new Finder, though, is a welcome item. There are a few minor performance problems with the current iteration browsing network drives and navigating folders. Ideally this will be fixed with the new sidebar implementation.

I also had the chance to try out the Safari 3 beta on my PC today. The download size was decently small, and it seems to use a similar amount of RAM to Firefox. The page rendering speed, though, is like Apple claimed - blisteringly fast. Memory usage always seems to be a problem with several of the “OS X on Windows” applications, but as long as the program doesn’t persistently chew up more over time, I’d rather have snappy performance when the browser is the active window at the expense of some system resources.

Speaking of RAM, I’ve already hit the hardware limit for my MacBook of 2GB, and I’m eyeing the new Santa Rosa-based MacBook Pro systems because they can go up to 4GB. I’ve also hit the 2GB sweet spot for my main PC workstation, and while I’d love to go to 4GB and see what happens for performance, Windows is only going to allocate 3.5GB of that at most. My typical usage is generally under 1GB, but I haven’t been firing up Eclipse on my home system lately.

I also installed the newest iteration of the WRT54G (revision 8.0) since my existing WRT54GS v1.1 decided to drop a port. When Linksys routers lose a LAN port, generally it means that their time routing packets is over with. The new model has less onboard memory and apparently is less tolerant of third-party firmware, but the official stuff seems to do 90% of what I want. The LED blink rate is also slightly faster. I’ll have to run a few further tests with BitTorrent and some other network intensive applications and compare performance.

As a result of the new router, I’m going to try and get my FTP and HTTP servers up and running again. It’s useful to point people to e98.homeip.net/files in case there’s an image, MP3 file or ZIP archive needing to be transferred without incurring the wrath of MSN/Windows Live Messenger’s god-awful file transfer system.

I also intend to write a post sometime this week about my new consulting venture with Dave and Warren called EdgeLink Consulting. We’re just in the initial stages of setting things up, but basically it’ll give any computer repairs I do more of an official standing.

In any event, rebooting for Safari 3 on the Mac… why is this needed on the Mac and not on the PC?

Since the wonderful Xbox 360 will likely never have support for Matroska video containers, commonly known as “x264″ files, I ended up building myself a Media Center PC that hooks up to the Sony KF-42E200A over a DVI to HDMI cable. Relevant statistics:

• Core 2 Duo E4300, 1.8GHz per core
• Asus P5B Socket 775 motherboard
• 2GB DDR2-800 RAM
• Spare Seagate SATA 7200.7 120GB drive
• GeForce 7800 GT rescued from workstation
• Media Center 2005 remote

If I had to do it over again, here’s what I’d change - which mostly would involve spending more money:

• Go with a P5B-E motherboard, which has a better chipset than the P5B vanilla
• Get at least an E6600 CPU for 1080p content (I might swap my desktop chip out)
• Consider going with a newer SATA drive, but not necessarily a Raptor (Raptors are loud)
• Instead of the 7800GT, go with a passively-cooled 8500GT or 8600GT, which offloads H.264 content decoding to the GPU. I’ve just bought an 8500GT that satisfies this condition, so we’ll see what happens when I swap things in.
• Install a sound card that has native optical out ports - the motherboard has “HD Audio” and said optical out works, but I’m not sure if I’m getting all the quality I can.

HD is a beautiful thing to behold compared to standard definition. You definitely need at least a PC monitor or HDTV to appreciate it, but I watched Sin City today and it really benefits from the format. Facial features, zoomed shots, and high-quality action sequences are all a feast for the eyes. It won’t improve the quality of a subpar film, but it gives a significantly incremental bump to the marginal action flicks. You can really appreciate the film for the cinematic effects and techniques; American Psycho has some great scenes in which background events are much more noticeable.

When 300 comes out on whatever format it’s scheduled for, that’ll be a sight to behold.

As for software, that’s an interesting choice. I’ve found Vista’s Media Center to be a worthy piece of software, even though it’s only been installed for a few days. More on that in another post.