Digital Rants

Our white moomoo Koi still looks a bit sickly... I wonder should I isolate it again and bomblast with some more broad spectrum antibotics.

Gotta give He/she credit for being such a fighter! But it still seems weak... Appetite is still there though. Hope there's no permanent damage coz it has really beautiful colours.

The unluckiest guy in the world no more.. You had your share of bad luck, but you prevailed. Kudos...

Oh, give your sidekick a whack, I know you're being polite in his home race.. But why did you allow him to rant on about Massa's button? Is that what he thinks Massa is? Relying on a button?

Agreed! Give him a button, and take away all the downforce. See how he likes it. Not a kid, but behaving exactly like one.

All the micro expressions he exhibit when he said something, reminds me of that show "Lie to me".. That's a lie, yup that's a lie, yup that's another lie..

One of the harddisks in my RAID has developed a bad block. It's from the old My World device. Think I got a bad batch or do these hard disks really die just straight out of warranty?

Doing a bad block scan now. Fingers crossed I don't have to RMA this.

I've read about this regarding the N7700, bad blocks seem to develop very quickly on this machine? Will wait and see how it goes.

Update: And the bad block disappeared. Probably it has been relocated.

Folks don't know this but I'm a great fan of Masterchef... Esp Chris.. Coz I think he has a purpose and a clear goal. In the elimination round between him and Andre.. I so want Andre to leave the show as he is more a game player and not a chef.

LOL'ed when he said curry leaf then tried to retrack and said cardamom. And his angst when Chris played the game and throw him off by saying that same ingredient. Pure gold!

And curry powder? Oh my god, to say that on national television... All I know is eat, and I know there's no such thing as curry powder.

Good show... Worth watching.

So I am piping digital audio from my motherboard to the video card, and a single HDMI cable now carries both video and audio (Requires ALSA 1.0.20 to get digital out working). With that success I'm really looking forward to get bitstream audio working. Unfortunately I think my motherboard can't do it. Don't think 2 pins (SPDIF and ground) has enough bandwidth to carry 7.1 LPCM? Although there's always a chance bitstream audio could work.

And I googled and found the Asustek Xonar.

The good news is this card is partially supported in Linux now. But the all important digital output isn't working yet. In time this will be supported, but can it bitstream digital audio I wonder? At ~$350 this is a very expensive card to get, but it does have some shielding, and with recent gained knowledge I think that's a good thing to have (snake oil?). Another important question is how will HDCP fit in the over picture?

At ~$350 this card is cheaper than my first AWE64 audio card. But in this day and age, $350 for an audio card is overkill . Oh why can't they make this card any cheaper?

Further research and I found some motherboard's onboard audio might work, e.g.

1. Realtek ALC889
2. Realtek ALC885
3. VIA Vinyl HD VT1818s, and
4. VIA Vinyl HD VT1828s

Now onboard audio will be a cheaper solution, but my HTPC motherboard is using the VIA VT1708B chip.. So no luck there. Had I know this earlier I would have spend a bit more and get a motherboard with the above chips right out the box. I hate finding new things after the fact. Lucky my $88 isn't wasted, because really who gives a damn about content protection?

Will try to find a video with HD audio soon and test if good old S/PDIF format has enough bandwidth to bitstream. It's unlikely but maybe it will work. After all it's carried over HDMI (unlikely though )...

Edit: Later that day. Downloaded a 60mb sample from the Internet. Can't seem to bitstream with xine or mplayer.

First time Wikipedia has let me down. While researching chipsets, Wikipedia's page told me G31 don't do VTx.

I struggled over that but decided the feature is not worth $100 cold hard cash. Turns out it's wrong. The motherboard I have has this option "Vanderpool" in the CPU section of the bios. And enabling that should do it.

And sure enough, when I look at /proc/cpuinfo, I see that it is in fact enabled! And my new Pentium E6300 supports VT-x too. Woot! All systems go then, I just might be able to get a virtual machine up and running to play PC games.

In a not so happy note, it seems the USB ports 5+ pins are always hot. The USB card reader power light is always on, and no amount of BIOS tweaking can turn it off (even tried disabling USB altogether). There are no jumpers to set, everything is in the BIOS, and I tried everything. This means that I cannot use the iMON VFD to turn on the machine physically. What a PITA... If anybody has figured out a solution to this, please tell me. I'm dying to know.

So I got new parts for my lounge room HTPC last week, they are:

1. 450W "Corsair" HX-450 ATX Modular Power Supply
2. Pentium E6300
3. Palit GF 9500GT PCI-E 1GB 128-bit DDR2
4. Asus P5KPL-1600

I guess my previous blog on this subject matter isn't detailed enough. So I'm expanding.

Read more »

Link: http://business.watoday.com.au/business/cba-ends-netbank-turmoil-20090706-da18.html

I wonder if CBA outsources it's Netbank stuffs to overseas. I'm guessing it is because IBM is involved.

Now if that assumption is true, I wonder if outsourcing is causing more harm than good. How widespread is the outsourcing phenomenon, and what sorts of savings are we talking about?

Will outsourcing save money in the short term, but becomes a PITA in the long term? What kind of risks are to be managed here?

I wonder....