I now have my own domain and my blog can now be found at http://blog.jthon.com/.
Enjoy.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Monday, July 23, 2007
Housing Found
I spent this last weekend out in the Bay area looking for an apartment. I was unpleasantly surprised to find housing had gone up about 20% since I did a brief survey about 6 months ago. One Bedroom apartments out there now start around $1,250 a month for a "decent" apartment. I found a few places similar to the worst Madison has to offer to students for ONLY $1,095 or so a month. On the other end of the spectrum are the "luxury" apartments aka new which run from $1,600 to over $2,000 a month for a one bedroom.
I've decided to go with a place which had a 850 square foot 1 bedroom for "only" $1,325 a month. As this complex only does month to month leases at least I have some flexibility to move if I find someplace else. As two and three bedroom apartments only cost a couple hundred more than a one bedroom, if I find a roommate I can always move into such a place to save some cash. Now I get to start the fun process of coordinating a move of my "room of junk", and car to CA.
I've decided to go with a place which had a 850 square foot 1 bedroom for "only" $1,325 a month. As this complex only does month to month leases at least I have some flexibility to move if I find someplace else. As two and three bedroom apartments only cost a couple hundred more than a one bedroom, if I find a roommate I can always move into such a place to save some cash. Now I get to start the fun process of coordinating a move of my "room of junk", and car to CA.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Done with school
As of last week I've officially turned in my Thesis and finished my Masters degree. Now I have about two months off and then I start working full time. So far during my break I've been working on turning my Masters Thesis into a paper to be submitted to a conference, and relaxing a bit back at home.
Of the two the relaxing is the harder task as some members of my family think one shouldn't have freetime. As this is my last break before I start work full time I don't really want to do anything but sit around, read, play video games, watch movies, golf, and do whatever outside.
Of the two the relaxing is the harder task as some members of my family think one shouldn't have freetime. As this is my last break before I start work full time I don't really want to do anything but sit around, read, play video games, watch movies, golf, and do whatever outside.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Disney, why do you hate consumers?
So I bought the new Pirates of the Carribean: The curse of the Black Pearl Blu-ray this last week. I just popped it in to watch it only to find out Disney has decided this new hi-def format needs to work just like their childrens DVD's. So what's this mean for the consumer. Previews, lots of previews before the movie. Did I mention that you cannot use the menu, or pop-up menu features to skip them?
At least Disney still let me use next chapter, so after pressing R1 about 20 times I finally got to the movie's top menu. Does anyone know why Disney makes their movies do this to you? Just about every other Blu-ray I've played so far drops you right to a menu after a very short Blu-ray trailer. The only other movie I saw with any more extensive previews let you hit menu to skip them at least.
All Disney's managed to accomplish is to ensure that I don't bother buying another movie from them again. I'm so much better off just finding whatever I want from them and downloading it. At least this way I don't have to deal with all their stupid previews.
At least Disney still let me use next chapter, so after pressing R1 about 20 times I finally got to the movie's top menu. Does anyone know why Disney makes their movies do this to you? Just about every other Blu-ray I've played so far drops you right to a menu after a very short Blu-ray trailer. The only other movie I saw with any more extensive previews let you hit menu to skip them at least.
All Disney's managed to accomplish is to ensure that I don't bother buying another movie from them again. I'm so much better off just finding whatever I want from them and downloading it. At least this way I don't have to deal with all their stupid previews.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Playstation 3 Just Got Better
As of this morning Sony released a new minor PS 3 Firmware, upgrading the PS 3 to version 1.80. While the increment was minor it packed a few new features including:
What's this mean for the PS 3? I can stream movies over the network to it just like with my haxx0red Xbox. That's right the PS 3 is now a media center device you can use to for listening to streamed music, and watching streamed videos! The only downside of the whole thing is PS 3's limited support for different file formats. For some reason the PS 3 only supports the following video formats:
Luckily I purchased Nero 6 a couple years ago and it comes with a Nero HomeShow which can do on the fly transcoding of some videos. As I'm using this as my Media Server it can transcode all my Xvid files to MPEG2 on the fly. The only downside is that for most Xvid files this doesn't look good as the Xvid source is to low of a bitrate/resolution which doesn't transcode very well on the fly. In any case the better encoded stuff still looks pretty good, and while it's not quite as pretty as the Xbox it's good enough for most things (then again I'm not testing my Xbox on a 1080i capable display). Now I just need to find myself a good transcoding Linux server so I setup a Linux file server.
- 1080p output scaling for DVDs
- 1080i/p output scaling for PS1 and PS 2 games (yes that's hi-def PS 2)
- Support for DLNA media servers
What's this mean for the PS 3? I can stream movies over the network to it just like with my haxx0red Xbox. That's right the PS 3 is now a media center device you can use to for listening to streamed music, and watching streamed videos! The only downside of the whole thing is PS 3's limited support for different file formats. For some reason the PS 3 only supports the following video formats:
- MPEG4-SP
- MPEG4-AVC
- MPEG2
Luckily I purchased Nero 6 a couple years ago and it comes with a Nero HomeShow which can do on the fly transcoding of some videos. As I'm using this as my Media Server it can transcode all my Xvid files to MPEG2 on the fly. The only downside is that for most Xvid files this doesn't look good as the Xvid source is to low of a bitrate/resolution which doesn't transcode very well on the fly. In any case the better encoded stuff still looks pretty good, and while it's not quite as pretty as the Xbox it's good enough for most things (then again I'm not testing my Xbox on a 1080i capable display). Now I just need to find myself a good transcoding Linux server so I setup a Linux file server.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Looking for a Domain Name
Since I'm soon to be completely done with school (silly Thesis). Because of this I'll be losing the wisc.edu address that I've been using for the last SIX years. Rather than send everything to gmail I'd like to get myself a domain name for e-mail and hosting. The problem is that most of the good names are already taken.
So I ask this dear readers, do you have any suggestions on a domain name I might register?
So I ask this dear readers, do you have any suggestions on a domain name I might register?
VIM why didn't I use you before
I've been doing quite a bit of file editing at the command line recently. Rather than using the my good old standby editor pico, I've been forcing myself to use vim for the last 6 months. After doing a bunch of command line editing recently I think it's finally paid off. Plus, I recently discovered a new trick!
Those of you who may be familiar with this little program know a search and replace can be conducted using the following command :
%s/thing to find/thing to replace/g
Usually when I do this there's something in my editing buffer I want to search for and replace so I dutifully retype what I want to search for and replace and hit enter. Then realize oops typo, and have to hit u to undo and repeat the process.
Now I've finally learned how to paste into the command buffer. Simply start your command, then when you want to paste type ctrl-r then hit " to paste the last thing you yanked. Even better you can paste from any of the numbered or named vi registers. For example you can yank something into the a" register by typing a"y rather than just hitting y. Now when you use ctrl-r hit a and bam your thing in a gets pasted into place.
You can combine this with any of the 26 a-z registers to juggle up to 26 things at once! BTW, to paste normally from the special registers you just type x"p where x is your register name (a in previous example).
The only downside of my newfound vim skills is that I now find myself typing :w in Word to try and save my work.
Those of you who may be familiar with this little program know a search and replace can be conducted using the following command :
%s/thing to find/thing to replace/g
Usually when I do this there's something in my editing buffer I want to search for and replace so I dutifully retype what I want to search for and replace and hit enter. Then realize oops typo, and have to hit u to undo and repeat the process.
Now I've finally learned how to paste into the command buffer. Simply start your command, then when you want to paste type ctrl-r then hit " to paste the last thing you yanked. Even better you can paste from any of the numbered or named vi registers. For example you can yank something into the a" register by typing a"y rather than just hitting y. Now when you use ctrl-r hit a and bam your thing in a gets pasted into place.
You can combine this with any of the 26 a-z registers to juggle up to 26 things at once! BTW, to paste normally from the special registers you just type x"p where x is your register name (a in previous example).
The only downside of my newfound vim skills is that I now find myself typing :w in Word to try and save my work.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Vista why are you so slow?
So I ended up putting XP x64 back on my desktop as I wasn't ready to go Linux full time yet (I should probably test duel-booting + games). I did find some amazing things out. When I said Vista was dog slow in my last post, I didn't quite capture how slow. See a fresh cruftless xp install flys on my hardware. We're talking 15 seconds from post to desktop.
Running WoW I'm seeing a solid 60 FPS while running around even in Shattrath or Ironforge. As a comparison Vista liked to average 20 FPS in the same areas. That's right I go from a nice solidly playable framerate to 20 FPS by switching from the ohh so slow 64 bit XP, to the horrible bloat that is Vista 32 bit (yes 32 bit Vista == slower than 64 bit XP).
What I'd really like to run on my desktop is OS X except that only works on Apple systems. Unfortunately they don't have an non-uber workstation tower, and even in that case they don't support the latest graphics cards. I really wish Apple would just sell Tiger as a separate product and let it work on other hardware. At that point I think MS would be crushed.
Running WoW I'm seeing a solid 60 FPS while running around even in Shattrath or Ironforge. As a comparison Vista liked to average 20 FPS in the same areas. That's right I go from a nice solidly playable framerate to 20 FPS by switching from the ohh so slow 64 bit XP, to the horrible bloat that is Vista 32 bit (yes 32 bit Vista == slower than 64 bit XP).
What I'd really like to run on my desktop is OS X except that only works on Apple systems. Unfortunately they don't have an non-uber workstation tower, and even in that case they don't support the latest graphics cards. I really wish Apple would just sell Tiger as a separate product and let it work on other hardware. At that point I think MS would be crushed.
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