Computer Research

Try out TweetGrid.com

February 19, 2009 on 12:15 pm | In General | Comments Off

If you love Twitter and if you use desktop tools to keep on top of Tweets, then you should give Tweetgrid.com a try. It has a new interface since I last tried it and now you can perform most of all the functions that you can normally do from famous desktop based tools TweetDeck.

I loved how I can now just forward a tweet in my email from within the browser. You can also save your configured tweet grid as a bookmark or share it to friends. Awesome tool. It deserves to be the web tool of the week.

#webtool

Some pain are only understood and felt when it gets to you (People laid off)

February 19, 2009 on 11:26 am | In General | Comments Off

Some pain are truly understood and felt when it touches you. With this market conditions and other factors, you hear people getting fired/laid off/sacked etc. every day and you hearing people talking about it everywhere.

I can truly say that I left the impact today when I heard, and then saw people's reaction to the news that they were laid off in my office today. I am still working there for now but I was speechless.I will be seeing many people whom I have worked with last one year go tomorrow. It's was hard for me to say anything as nothing was going to console them or for that matter sooth my pain. I have seen people let go before from my team, but it was never felt this way.

What have you done in such scenarios? Apart from helping them in any possible way that you can (like checking your sources if they have an opening etc., helping them packup etc.) what else can you help them with?

But I am optimistic, and believe that whatever happens, is for good. I am sure they will find a better position somewhere else and they will grow in this process.

Good Luck to all such people who have lost positions in this condition and please share how you coped with it or how you helped somebody else cope during this period.

Velocity Micro CineMagix Grand Theater

February 19, 2009 on 8:04 am | In Computer | Comments Off

I have been unhappy with how much we are paying for cable.  Comcast charges $15/month for each HD DVR.  We have two of these.  In addition to the rental charge for the box, they charge $7/month to bring a cable jack to each room. I was interested in finding a way that I could save money, and still have access to my content in those rooms.

I have been using Vista Media Center on my Mac mini for a while, and like it.  I was using the Mac mini mainly only for watching our movies, with MyMovies.  I wanted to get a home theater PC that has CableCard slots to record TV. This setup would be a replacement for our Series3 to watch TV/movies on our main TV.  Then we would use Media Center extenders to watch live/recorded TV or movies on the other TVs.

It was hard to find companies that made home theater PCs that have support internal CableCard and are in a form factor that works with other audio/video components.  I narrowed my choices to the Velocity Micro CineMagix Grand Theater and the Orkoro Media Systems OMS-CX100.

I went with the CineMagix Grand Theater.  I ordered it with 2 cable cards, a quad core processor, GeForce 9800 GTX and only a singe hard drive configuration.  I went with the single drive configuration, as I figured that  it would reduce heat.  Also, if I needed more space, it is available on our Windows Home Server.

When it arrived, the first thing that I noticed was that the packaging was very nice.  The computer was very well packed. The case is very sturdy, the computer weighs about 50 lbs. I also opened it up, and the routing of the wires is very neat. Velocity Micro also included a nice binder for all of the paperwork.  

Here are some photos from the inside of the case. 

Connecting it to my setup was pretty easy.  I  removed the Mac mini, and replaced it with the CineMagix Grand Theater.  I am using a DVI to HDMI cable, and optical audio cable.  I just had to run through the Windows Vista setup.

I was able to remove the CableCards from the Series3 and insert them into the PC, and call Comcast to have them re-pair them.  It took about 30 minutes on the phone for them to configure the cards.

I did encounter some problems though.

• The built-in IR receiver doesn't support the way that Media Center does text entry.  Media Center uses a T-9 like text entry mechanism (i.e. press "2" three times for the 'c' character.) Every press of the numeric keypad, adds a new letter.  Velocity Micro included a second media center remote and USB IR receiver.  If I use the USB IR receiver, everything works fine.
• I was getting BSOD while in the Media Center menus.  The message said something like "Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed".  I replaced the Nvidia card with an ATI Radeon HD 4670 .  Once I did that, the BSOD stopped. (Though the card is louder than the GeForce card.
• The other problem was that if I stopped playing video, the video card would be disabled.  The only way to get video back was to reboot the computer.  I believe that the HDCP handshake is being lost and the CableCard is telling the Video card to disable video out. I found that if I set the the display to turn off after 5 minute, there isn't a problem.  If video is playing, or I am using the remote, the display doesn't turn off.  Otherwise, it will be turned off, but can easily be resumed.

We also have a Linksys DMA2200 media center. This works perfectly to play live TV and recorded content.

So far I am very happy with this for watching TV.  I do want to figure out how to display important information on the built-in LCD display.  Currently it only displays the current time.  I would love it if it would display the titles of the programs that are being recorded.

Google Sync and Google Apps Domains

February 19, 2009 on 6:27 am | In Computer | Comments Off

In this post, I mentioned that I was having problems synchronizing with multiple calendars on my Google Apps calendar.  A few days ago I tried this again, and was able to get this to work .  On the m.google.com/sync page, there is a link to use if you are setting this up for a Google Apps hosted domain.

Now that I have this working, I have no need for NuevaSync or MobileMe.

New: 250,000 Shareable Sketches

February 16, 2009 on 3:34 pm | In Technology, Internet | Comments Off

Today Niko, Dominik and I are releasing Sketchory.com. The site features over 250,000 sketches which you can share (e.g. by copying or embedding) using a Creative Commons license. This license includes commercial sharing, so you could even, say, create a book out of sketches (with a maximum of 1000 images), or remix the drawings to create new stuff, and so on.

Technically, the work of the site is roughly split into the three areas of Flash (Dominik Schmid), Amazon EC2/S3 scaling preparation (Nikolai Kordulla), and PHP/concept (that's me). Where do all the sketches come from? The answer is Sketch Swap, which Dominik and I created 3 years ago. At Sketch Swap, the idea is simple – you draw a sketch, hit the Swap button, and get a sketch back. Over the years, the site received so many often really, really cool sketches that we felt we had to do something with them outside the one-by-one swapping. We hope you enjoy the result and look for your feedback! We also hope you can help with tagging, because right now many images aren't tagged yet so they won't be found with the search engine.

On that note, thanks to everyone who created drawings at Sketch Swap so far, and thanks to Uclue.com for helping with early tagging.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: New: 250,000 Shareable Sketches | Comments]

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