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:

• 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

So what is a DLNA media server you ask? The DLNA is a consortium of companies which sponsor a UPnP media server system. Programs such as Windows Media Connect, Nero HomeShow, Myth TV, and Xbox Media Center all support this protocol. Basically it's a way to stream media from one system and play it back on another.

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

For those of you unfamiliar with the MPEG 4 spec you'll know MPEG4-SP as some very low bitrate mobile version of MPEG4, and MPEG4-AVC as h.264 . The problem with this is that I have very few h.264 media files. Most of my movies (that aren't just ISOs) are in the MPEG4-ASP format, also known as Xvid, or Divx. Of course this "Advanced Simple Profile" isn't supported directly by the PS 3 so I can't watch most of my videos.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Vista + XP + Hibernate = Dead Computer

Well it finally happened, dual booting Vista and XP has now hosed my desktop. It appears that at one point when I was using XP it got hibernated instead of properly shutdown. Turns out that if you do anything to XP's disk when it is busy hibernating, such as run a program from the disk it doesn't wake up very well.

Rather it boots, then explorer just keeps restarting every 10 seconds until you shutdown. But that's not all! If you manage to shut the system down during a brief moment when explorer is up it marks all your disk as dirty. Then on the next boot it runs chkdsk, which somehow goes through your OS file system and does some magic. So that when XP tries to boot again you're left with a mouse cursor, and a giant black desktop until force a restart. Ohh did I mention that safemode also gives you a giant black desktop?

Well at least XP didn't eat Vista so my computer isn't totally dead. Only Vista is a giant dog on system resources and so doing anything, like gaming really sucks on it. I guess it's about time I reinstalled XP 64 anyway. I just hadn't planned on doing a big backup/reinstall this week.

I might as well throw this out there. Should I bother putting XP back on or should I switch my desktop over to Linux?

Reasons to use Linux:

• Works well as a desktop
• Could maybe actually do work related to my research on Linux
• Can play UT 2004
• Not Windows

Reasons to use Windows:

• I can play games other than UT 2004
• Desktop is primarily used for gaming
• Really all I can think of is I like gaming