I recently got a drive enclosure that allows it to be connected via eSATA or USB2. I got a nifty ExpressCard eSATA adapter for my MacBook Pro since eSATA is theoretically faster. Guess what? It is a lot faster!

A simple test of disk performance in Xbench (sure, not the best test, but it gives me something to compare) revealed that the disk got more than double the score, with several of the speeds being more than three times faster.

This is the same disk, all I did was run the "Disk Test" in Xbench then disconnected the eSATA connector from my drive enclosure, connected it up via USB and ran the same test again. Same drive, enclosure, computer; just a different cable and interface.

I expected a little performance increase, but not that much. I suppose it could be the USB chip that is a huge pig, but I saw similar numbers with a different USB to SATA adapter. Regardless what it is, no more drives on USB for me, I'm a believer in eSATA!

DVD Import 5.0 is much improved as far as keeping the audio in sync with the video on imported media. However, there are some cases that still cause DVD Import to get the audio out of sync. Never fear, there is a new Audio Processing option that lets you override the Sync.

NOTE: this feature will only help if your audio is off consistently throughout the program (which is usually the case), if it is drifting further out of sync as the imported media progresses, this will not help, you could either try guessing the middle amount of offset or find a more robust solution.

To enable this advanced feature, click on "Options..." and enable the "Adjust AV Sync" option.



Once you do that, you'll see a Sync slider under the Audio Processing area.



Unless you already know how far the sync is off (some people are good like that), you're probably thinking, "Great, so I can type in a number of milliseconds! How the heck do I figure that out short of trial and error?"

Well, there is a nifty little app that I ran across that may make your life easier! Download SyncView from http://software.sdecnet.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18. Once you have it downloaded, install it.

Now, import your DVD as you normally would.



Once it is done, try previewing it. But at the point you would have previously gotten really disappointed/angry/sad by a bad import, instead, launch SyncView. Double-click the text area to the right of the "Video:" label (1), choose the .mpg file you just imported.



If you purchase the extended version of SyncView, you can directly demultiplex the input file. If you didn't purchase it, there's an extra step. You'll need to get a separate file of audio extracted from that mpeg file. If you already have a lot of knowledge on digital video, you may already have a way to do this, otherwise, I found a free little utility called AoA Audio Extractor which lets you extract a WAV file of the audio. Once you do that, you can set the audio file by double clicking the text to the right of the "Audio:" label (2). Then, make sure you click to turn off the "Monitor audio stream" check box.

Now, the trial and error part, but it will be a lot faster than re-importing the DVD each time... adjust the "Audio Sync (msec)" (3) value by typing one in or using the arrows, when stopped, play the video again, then fine tune it until you get the correct value figured out.

Once you have that value, then simply return to DVD Import and select the closest value to the negative of the one you found you found with the "Sync" slider (i.e. if SyncView told you 224, select -224 with the slider). Import your DVD as you would normally, except for setting that slider, and the result should be a program with the audio and video in sync!

With the price of oil spiraling out of control, people are getting upset at the cost of gas which got me thinking, "why is this a big deal?"

First, oil is costing more because of many reasons, such as increased demand for oil throughout the world, the falling value of the US dollar and political turmoil in the mid-east where most of the oil comes from (right?). The value of the dollar is a problem because the price of oil is linked to the value of the dollar by OPEC. The value of oil isn't really as high as the record oil prices indicate to most of the world, foreign oil just costs more to those of us in the US that have US dollars to buy it.

Political turmoil in the oil producing areas understandably affects the price of oil. Since gas is made from oil, obviously it should cost more, right? Well, actually, over 40% of the United States' oil isn't even imported, and you have to look to number three on the list (past Canada and Mexico) to find the leading middle eastern country to provide us with oil at only 9%. It doesn't seem like gas prices should be affected by this so much in the United States, does it? But, since these factors raise the cost of oil, we can't do anything about it (except watch the profits of oil companies go through the roof).

So, gas prices are rising, they're going to keep going up, affecting the cost of air travel, transporting goods which leads to increasing the cost of goods that were transported, like our food or anything else we buy at a store, well, simply, it makes everything cost more. Even more than a stimulus check can offset!


Cost Per Gallon of gas I've bought in the past 10 years (yes, I keep track)



You get the idea, gas costs more and it sucks. I think that it is a bigger deal than that, I posit that cheap oil (read: affordable energy for transportation) is fundamental to American culture. Think about it, no other country celebrates the automobile the way we do. Whether it is car shows, racing (yes, even NASCAR), or simply the personal mobility we enjoy with a vehicle to get to work, visit friends or relatives, drive along the beach... we love our cars. It starts when we first get our license to drive, the world opens up to us. A car, truck or motorcycle equals freedom.

driving == freedom

Since 9/11, flying has become downright terrible, with the rainbow of security levels that conspire to slow you at the airport. Now, our freedom is being eroded further since it is starting to cost more to drive anywhere. People are starting to think twice about making long car trips, which doesn't seem like a big deal at first, but ultimately it means we no longer have the choice to go where we want, we no longer have the freedom we used to enjoy.

One of the solutions I heard on the radio was to reinstate the 55mph speed limit since driving slower will use less gas. This is a stupid idea! Cars are efficient (and safe) at speeds greater than 55mph these days. The roads are safer and much faster to traverse now that we have higher speed limits, we need to put an end to this nonsense.

Instead of crazy solutions, we need to focus on things that will work, such as timing traffic lights so they cause less stopping and starting. Intelligent timing for traffic lights significantly reduce how much you have to stop which leads to a safer environment for everyone, not to mention reducing your overall driving time and using less gas to accelerate after each stop.

People need to be more realistic in this country about the cars they drive. Most people don't need the huge behemoth SUVs they drive. In other countries you see a lot of diesel vehicles on the road which are much more efficient than gasoline powered vehicles. Here, there is a stigma against them from the past which makes diesel cars very unpopular, thus hard to find. More people need to drive 50mpg diesel cars, less need to drive Hummers. And the environmental impact of a car full of lead-acid batteries doesn't make the current generation of hybrid vehicles a good choice either.

Ethanol is not the answer to renewable energy, despite what you've heard. It is hard on the environment, it doesn't contain as much energy as gasoline (the cheaper cost of EA-85 gets negated since you'll get less mileage with it), and it is only cheaper because of subsidies at the cost of ruining the market for corn grown for food. We need to put more emphasis on biodiesel. Some states require a small percentage of diesel fuel to be biodiesel, this needs to increase, or even mandate 100%. Think of what could be accomplished with the misguided dollars behind ethanol.

It would be nice to reduce the number of cars on the road, but in most places public transportation is abysmal. One of the issues is the population is so sparse in the United States compared to elsewhere in the world, it is very difficult to build a system that can serve huge areas and get people where they want to go that is better than the system of roads. We do need better public transportation, but not at the cost of funding other transportation needs for expanding highways and keeping the infrastructure safe (no more collapsing bridges).

It is not too late, and there is still hope. People need to start doing their part. This November, keep some of these ideas in mind when you're casting your vote. We need more intelligent policies in Washington. We also need more education to know what what energy sources are going to help and which are going to make some lobbyist or oil tycoon more money. True oil independence is the only way to keep our freedom from withering away.

I've been working a little more on my little utility for fixing files to play on the SX servers from Tightrope Media Systems. I've added the ability to process files other than MPEG files (such as WMV or most AVI files). It will convert audio in these files as well as fix problems with the video by scaling to 720x480 and converting frame rate to 29.97. When fixing the video, it will transcode the files to the ubiquitous MPEG2 format to play on the server (so don't process files you don't want to have re-encoded).

The new version also adds the ability to read in media from a DVD. When you drag a VIDEO_TS directory (from hard disk or DVD disc) onto the utility it will parse the menu structure and give you a dialog to select any set of programs on the disc to extract. The DVD is extracted to the temporary directory and then saved to the output directory. The dialog allows you to specify a name (you can put a Cablecast Show ID in the beginning of the name) which it uses to generate a final output name.

Read More...

The worst "innovation" with automobiles in the past few years is the automatic sliding side door on mini-vans. Doors have existed for a long time and people have pretty much figured out how to use them. Then Honda (I'll blame them, since their mini-van is the first place I saw it, but I'm not sure who actually did it) came along and made the door operate by a button for "convenience". The thing is, if you use it like a normal door, you break it! If you continue pulling on the handle to open it, you start pulling against the motor and wreck it. Was it really that hard to slide a piece of metal along a track rather than introduce a whole new level of complexity that confuses normal door operators and adds a whole new level of danger for people with hands or other things that can be crushed in the magic new kind of door? The door had a standard user interface that everyone understood, don't change it!

Then, another feature which I also blame Honda for, since they all do it: the side seat belt in the rear will not work in the center seat belt receptacle! If you try to plug it in, it simply slides back out, then you have to dig into the seat to find the other receptacle that fell under the seat to try that one, assuming you didn't just give up after it first popped out. How does this feature make any sense? Someone thought "Here's a device we have that is meant to save lives if used properly, lets make it so two thirds of the rear passengers have only a 50 percent chance of being able to successfully use the device."

In response to my co-worker Brandon's recent post about his computer upgrades... and possibly a little follow-up to my previous post about the MacBook Air...

I used to have two machines in my office with a total of 6 hard disks and about 300 loud fans spinning in them. One was a desktop, running a development virtual machine and a generic office/web applications. The other was a bare-metal development box for doing hardware development.

They've been replaced with a 17" MacBook Pro. It runs my development environment in a virtual machine (which I simply copied over from the previous machine, how nice!). It also allows me to do some crazy things like plug it into our gigabit network and use optical discs. Then, I moved my hardware box into our engineering lab and connect to it via RDP when I need to access it.

The result? My office is completely silent. I can bring the MacBook home (or anywhere) and have the actual development environment from work right there, no VPN, no VNC. It's also a fully-functional computer, no sacrifices. Not to mention, I get to use MacOS!

If I don't want to bring a whole full-size MacBook Pro somewhere (like the places a MacBook Air would go), I still have the iPod Touch which does a great job of running a web browser and reading email.

One of the things I've been hearing from our support guys at Tightrope Media Systems is a lot of people have legacy content that is 44.1kHz audio that they would like to play back on their SX Server. The server, however, requires the standard DVD sample rate of 48kHz. This leaves everyone sad.

To help, I built a simple little utility that uses ffmpeg to fix the audio inside an mpeg2 file to be compatible with an SX Server. It's a little Windows app that you can run, drag a batch of files and folders onto and it will do its best to process the files to make them work on the SX.


Download FixMpeg
Read More about FixMpeg at my software site

Apple just released their super slim MacBook Air. I got to thinking, this is perfect, it's super portable, you can carry it around easily and keep in touch wirelessly from your couch, coffee shop, et c. It doesn't have the real power of a full-blown computer, so you probably would be able to do all your work on it. Instead, it is perfect to read email, browse the web, look at pictures, maybe some other stuff.

Wait? Doesn't the iPhone and/or iPod Touch already read email, browse the web, look at pictures and do a bunch of other stuff? With your data plan, it also does it at a lot more places... and it's a lot more portable and a lot cheaper.

It seems that Apple already has a mobile platform, they should focus on it. The MacBook Air is a distraction from it.

I use a Mac at home and want to have the ability to run PC software. I wish I could use only a Mac, but I still do some development on Windows and I have some weird legacy hardware that can't be put on/into the Mac but works fine on the ol' PC. Boot Camp is too disruptive and Parallels or VMWare don't let me use those strange hardware devices and they are slower than real hardware (which I already have).

For some time I've used multiple monitors and have one on the Mac, one on the PC with Synergy. That leaves me with less screen real estate for either machine and I end up using the Mac most of the time anyway.

I would just like to banish my PC to the closet without a head (monitor) and just use it over the network when I need to. VNC and remote desktop (RDP) are great for accessing the banished PC, but it obscures a lot of my beautiful Mac when I am connected. What would make it so much more seamless is having technology like VMWare's Unity or Parallels' Coherence but against a real, not a virtual, PC. I mean, they did it, it is useful, someone has probably made that, right? Not really...

I tried searching for just a rootless VNC viewer (rootless is what you call it in X windows when you don't have a background). No luck. Hmm, maybe X is the right track though, since X windows can display any client (application) on a display (server) running anywhere. Yes, I found a great thread of someone looking for just what I was on slashdot. That lead me to find a bunch of discussion by David Fraser and his XOpenWin project that was meant to capture a Window's application's display commands and translate them to be displayed on an X server (which the Mac has built in!). He, unfortunately, never got it working, but was beat to it by Sawanaka who made a wrapper using a Microsoft technology called Detours to capture the display of an application and sent it to X using the display layer from a project called PEACE from NetBSD. This project was called cygpeace. Since then, cygwin has changed a lot and has destabilized his code which hasn't been updated in a few years. I managed to get it to compile with some minor modifications to headers (especially for freetype) and removing a few function prototypes that have changed in Windows. Unfortunately it still didn't work.

After that long tale of searches, I grew sad and weary, but came to discover that Matthew Chapman had developed an open source client for the Microsoft Remote Desktop/Terminal Services protocol (RDP) called rdesktop. At least I won't have to use Microsoft's RDP client (which it turns out isn't as horrible as it used to be). Is that all the silver lining to this tale? As it happens, no, there exists a fantastic little hack contributed to the community from Cendio called SeamlessRDP. With the help of a small wrapper on the PC, you can display any application's windows to a remote X server! Perfect! It looks just as good as Coherence (you sometimes see glitches while moving things, but perfectly reasonable).

This is great, except on any normal person's Windows install you don't get unlimited RDP connections, so that means you get to run only one application remotely. Arrg, so close.

But wait! These nice fellows at Fontis have a further patch to SeamlessRDP that lets you run more than one application at once! Perfect! A real, usable solution.

I just had one issue, the domain socket they opened from the master rdesktop process had an off-by-one error in the name, this patch should fix the "not a socket" errors that would surely come up if you try this (as of January, 2008).

diff -c seamless.c ../rdesktop/seamless.c
*** seamless.c	2008-01-17 18:57:27.000000000 -0600
--- ../rdesktop/seamless.c	2008-01-11 18:17:19.000000000 -0600
***************
*** 608,614 ****
saun.sun_family = AF_UNIX;
strncpy(saun.sun_path, socket_name, sizeof(saun.sun_path));
unlink(socket_name);
! 	if (bind(sock, (struct sockaddr *) &saun, sizeof(struct
sockaddr_un)) < 0)
{
perror("Error binding to socket: bind");
exit(1);
--- 608,614 ----
saun.sun_family = AF_UNIX;
strncpy(saun.sun_path, socket_name, sizeof(saun.sun_path));
unlink(socket_name);
! 	if (bind(sock, (struct sockaddr *) &saun, strlen(saun.sun_path) +
sizeof(saun.sun_family) + 1) < 0)
{
perror("Error binding to socket: bind");
exit(1);
***************
*** 651,657 ****
/* Connect to server */
saun.sun_family = AF_UNIX;
strcpy(saun.sun_path, socket_name);
! 	len = sizeof(saun.sun_family) + strlen(saun.sun_path);
if (connect(s, (struct sockaddr *) &saun, len) < 0)
{
perror("Error connecting to socket: connect");
--- 651,657 ----
/* Connect to server */
saun.sun_family = AF_UNIX;
strcpy(saun.sun_path, socket_name);
! 	len = sizeof(saun.sun_family) + strlen(saun.sun_path) + 1;
if (connect(s, (struct sockaddr *) &saun, len) < 0)
{
perror("Error connecting to socket: connect");

The media needs to stop covering school shootings (and mall shootings like the recent one in Omaha) where someone goes and shoots a bunch of people and then commits suicide. If there was no chance to become famous by doing such a crazy thing, maybe it'd make it less glamorous.

What I find the most annoying at the pump is fluctuations from day to day. This morning one station was $0.20 higher across the street from another on my way to work. What I think we need is a statewide gas price to reduce the volatility at the pumps. It is ridiculous to have the prices go up or down $0.20 in one day or if you drive 5 miles down the road.

Every major sporting event like the Olympics is full of scandal around participants' performance-enhancing drug usage. We should stop this paranoia surrounding using these drugs and rather embrace it. There should be a second version of the Olympics that allows performance-enhancing drugs, body augmentation, cybernetic implants, et c.

Olympic athletes have made many sacrifices to participate, why not allow the ones that want to risk a bit more to use a technology and human invention to allow them to take that extra step.

All the tech gadgets people have these days all have their unique adapter that plug into the wall and then have a big wall-wart and then some DC power that goes into your gadget. Instead of this myriad of AC->DC converters, houses should have a central DC converter, and then along the normal AC outlets, there should be a common style 12VDC connector that devices can all accept and, if necessary, convert to a different DC voltage.

And while everyone is rewiring, there is another whole-house distribution system they should add. More and more devices (tivo, computers, etc.) have their own active cooling system. A house should be built with a central cooling system, like a reverse central vacuum, that pushes out cold air to sockets that are positioned around the house. The sockets could have an input and output, so the air would flow in a circuit, and the main cooling unit could run as needed. A proper system could be designed to run, or augment, your refrigerator and central air conditioning, as well as eliminate noise in devices in your house.

A significant amount of traffic on the roads is due to people going somewhere to get something (as opposed to someone or to get somewhere). The internet has lead to the ability to shop at home, and simply wait for the things to be delivered - even groceries. However, there is still someone who drives out to deliver the items, and thus using the roads, and increasing traffic.

In the show Futurama, people travel around the city in tubes, which is not that crazy, banks use tubes to send canisters to the drive-through all the time. In a large scale tube system, one could use knowledge of internet routing to make efficient routes for packets to travel.

If one were to start a service that replaces FedEx, UPS and the postal service with a network of tubes, capable of near-instantly delivering packages, it could potentially reduce a lot of road traffic. One not need about making the tubes safe for people to travel inside, nor roomy enough for them either.

In our wonderful world of technology, free software or open source software have pervaded our computers, whether you have linux running as your OS or Firefox as your web browser (which you definitely should have, btw).

It seems that this abundance of free software has lead to a strange phenomenon where all consumer of software no longer consider any software to be of any value.

With the profusion of the wonderfully unstable technology of cell phones, it is all too frequent to have the other party in a phone conversation disappear. This event is promptly followed by a series of reconnect attempts by both parties that continue to both get busy signals, until one gets lucky, or the other gives up. I hereby propose that the standard protocol for this event is for the party who originated the initial call is the one to redial, and the other party should just wait for several minutes before attempting to call so that the line is left open.

How come every time I search on google to find the answer to a question that obviously has been asked before the only matches I get are in forums that have someone asking the same question, and never are there any answers posted? Either there are no answers, or some overzealous moderator has come in and removed the answer saying that it belongs in another area on the forum, with no link to help find it. There needs to be a way to rank the results so that web forums with actual responses are before ones with no replies, maybe make a standard <meta> tag that has a reply count that forums can implement.

Whilst we endure the last week of being inundated with last minute campaign ads as we near the presidential election this year, I had a few thoughts.

We have a large amount of voter apathy in this country. For weeks we've heard who will win each of the items we're supposed to vote for on November 2nd. Polls that are cited in the media give us the impression that, despite what they tell you, your vote doesn't count. Secondly, the electoral college can decide a president without agreeing with the popular vote. Even the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq have and will have the right to vote directly for their leader.

On the other hand, I recall our governor election here in Minnesota in 1998 when Jesse Ventura won the election, something no one expected.