By George Ou on
7/4/2008 8:36 PM
In an effort to build the cheapest computer I can build that plays Blu-ray DVD movies, I put the NVIDIA 7150 chipset with Intel Allendale dual-core 2.93 GHz (overclocked) test bed to work. I've already been having some problems with this inexpensive embedded NVIDIA chipset but I wanted to put it to the most challenging video load it can handle. Unfortunately, NVIDIA's 7150 integrated chipset failed miserably.
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By Justin James on
7/2/2008 4:12 PM
I (finally) wrapped up a 6 or 7 month long struggle with my video card. See, some time ago, some update or another did something... odd... with my video card (an NVidia 7600 GS, for the record, the best passively cooled, dual DVI output card I could find when I put this PC together). It started doing this "thing" where major portions of the screen would be transparent to the layer beneath. Oddly enough, it only occured when a game was running full screen. Let me tell you, it was quite odd going through Half Life 2 (I know, I am WAY behind the times) being able to see through walls if I get right next to them. In many situations, there would be some odd "snow" in areas too. To make it even more strange, the games would work fine the first time they were run after a reboot, or if I started the game in a window and then told it to run full screen. Needless to say, it really sucked.
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By George Ou on
6/26/2008 10:18 PM
 Finally I've found the one headset I've been looking for that can serve as a PC headset and a handset/mobile phone headset. I was pleasantly surprised by the Plantronics MX500i 3-in-1 VoIP Headset. I figure at an MSRP retail price of $60, it had to be good but it was even better than I though. You can actually get it for $38 including shipping.
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By Justin James on
6/25/2008 12:50 PM
I recently had the opportunity to take a look at one of Mitel’s latest devices, the 5340 IP telephone with an integrated Sun Ray 2 client. The device is part of their push towards unified telecommunications with the Mitel Unified IP client for Sun Ray. What is interesting to me about this phone is the linkages between the phone and the Sun Ray system, and the way that they have leveraged each device.
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By George Ou on
6/21/2008 11:11 AM
I bought an Optiquest Q241WB 24" LCD display after seeing how brilliant the display looked in the store at Fry's Electronics. It was obviously the only 8-bit per color LCD panel on display in the computer monitor section and it looked awesome and it was on sale for a mere $350 with a $50 rebate. I picked one up even though it was an open-box model since there were no notes warning about dead pixels and I could always return it if I didn't like it.
Well as it turns out, there were no dead pixels but all the pixels could have been dead as far as I was concerned. To my surprise, the display was NOT the same panel technology being displayed on the show floor at Fry's. This was not the brilliant 8-bit PVA LCD panel being shown but it was a typical ugly 6-bit TN LCD panel yet it came with the same model number. This is a very deceptive pract ...
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By George Ou on
6/18/2008 8:18 PM
The NVIDIA 7150 integrated graphics motherboard and chipset is giving me more problems. This is the XFX nForce 630i model MG-630i-7159 motherboard I'm testing which has a lot of potential when I overclocked an Intel Allendale to 2.93 GHz effortlessly.
I really want to love this motherboard and chipset for all its potential at an affordable price, but I still can't get S3 sleep state working and the system locks up after I wake it up and log in. I still can't get a good answer from NVIDIA nor have I heard from XFX regarding the problem. I don't know if it's the motherboard implementation or NVIDIA drivers.
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By Justin James on
6/18/2008 11:15 AM
For the last few months, I have been working with ISA Server 2006 in our corporate network. Before I got started, I purchased a copy of ISA Server 2006 Unleashed by Michael Noel, published by SAMS Publishing. I was hoping that this book would be a valuable asset in working with ISA Server, particularly since Tom Shinder has not updated his ISA Server 2004 book. This book missed the mark, and badly.
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By Justin James on
6/17/2008 8:52 PM
I love to read stuff from Microsoft Research. Say what you willa bout their shipping products, their research items are just plain fascinating, and I have learned a lot by reading their papers. I came across an item today, an interview with a guy there working on human/computer interfaces, Desney Tan. It was interesting; he talked about "wetworks" (merging the brain and the machine) fairly casually.
Now, I am all for technological progress, I am certainly no Luddite. But the idea of wetworks somehow bothers me in a weird way. Not really moral qualms, per se. But practical issues. Things like, "if my brain is wired up like this, what happen
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By George Ou on
6/16/2008 7:08 PM
It's been nearly 3 months since I departed ZDNet. I'd like to thank everyone who has helped me after getting laid off at ZDNet.com regardless of whether it led to anything or not. I'm not mentioning any names but you know who you are and I want you to know how much I appreciate your help. It's been a rough two and a half months and my friends and colleagues have made all the difference in the world.
This week, I'm proud to announce that I've officially joined Washington DC based Think Tank ITIF.org (The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
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By George Ou on
6/14/2008 6:54 AM
Thursday morning I sat on a panel at the Innovation 08 Net Neutrality event at Santa Clara University. This came right at the heals of my Brussels trip where I gave a presentation on Net Neutrality to the some members of European Parliament and various industry folks. The jet lag wasn't so bad but the bigger problem for me was missing my 6 year old daughter's first big singing solo at her school which had to be at the same time as my panel. I spent a lot of time training her so it was certainly a big disappointment for me. The jet lag certainly did have a lot to do with why this blog wasn't posted earlier yesterday.
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By George Ou on
6/14/2008 5:37 AM
Last Sunday I had a hell of a time getting my Lingo VoIP phone service to work properly. Certain phone numbers I was calling wouldn't transmit audio while I could hear sounds coming in. I had this problem before and it went away after I toggled the codec settings from G.729 to G.711 and rebooted the ATA (Analog Telephony Adapter) that came from Lingo which doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the stability of the "solution". This time no amount of toggling or reboots of the ATA or my home router which sits in front of the ATA would work.
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By Justin James on
6/13/2008 1:06 AM
I keep finding more and more places in Windows Server 2008 where I get the distinct impression that someone desparately needs to do s/Vista/Windows Server 2008/ on it (regex for "replace 'Vista' with 'Windows Server 2008'"). Everywhere I look, some part of the system is referring to itself as "Vista". These are not items being driven by the Windows version number, this is documentation and so on. It's just plain sloppy, and shame on Microsoft for releasing it in this condition.
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
6/13/2008 12:24 AM
The "on demand" recording of the Webcast I did yesterday for TechRepublic is now available. Registration is required, but it is free. I hate to admit it, but I enjoyed myself immensely, and it was great to put a voice to the names & faces of Chad Perrin and Michael Kassner. Overall, we surprisingly agreed on all of the major points that I recall, and only had a few minor
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By Justin James on
6/11/2008 10:45 AM
I know it is short notice, but I will be participating in a 1 hour Webcast today on the topic of email security. You can sign up for it at TechRepublic. Hope this isn't too short of a notice for you to listen in!
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
6/11/2008 12:35 AM
The above video makes me laugh every time I see it. Everything in it is a perfect parody of our industry... from the clueless user to the help desk worker struggling to be patient and professional, to the fact that the object under discussion is far too hard to use. We have come a long way folks, from a technical angle, but we are still in the 1970's in terms of deploying usable systems. All of the "Web 2.0", AJAX, and so on (preceded by client/server, mainframes, green screens, etc.) in the world does not make computer applications easier to use.
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By Justin James on
6/10/2008 12:49 AM
I had a pretty harsh experience tonight. I have one of Intel's server grade NICs in my ISA server at work. It has a lot of IP addresses bound to the external adapter. We updated the NIC's driver due to some odd behavior we were seeing (some of the ports were not being detected sometimes after a cold boot). Well, the installer decided to pick one of the IP addresses assigned to each port to make the primary IP address, and to drop all of the other IP addresses bound to thew adapter. So instead of the 5 minutes of downtime we expected, I got to spend an hour re-typing the critical IP addresses, and another hour tomorrow typing in the non-critical IP addresses. Let this be a warning: if you plan on updating the drivers for your Intel NIC, plan on possibly needing to re-configure it afterwards!
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
6/9/2008 5:16 PM
I installed Windows Server 2008 Standard in a VMWare Server VM today. Before I installed the VMWare tools, it did not recognize the NIC. Well, that obnoxious "why your PC doesn't work right" wizrd came up a bit later... and as you can see in the screenshot, it seems to think that I am using Windows Vista! Obviously, someone needs to go through the database and change the problem summaries; the full description had a more generic, "your version of Windows..." message.
J.Ja
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By George Ou on
6/8/2008 1:55 PM
Just getting reading to make a long journey to Brussels to meet European Parliament regarding Network Management and Net Neutrality for a panel discussion on the morning of June 11th.
Then on Thursday morning on June 12th, I'll be attending a panel hosted by MAP at de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University at 10:00 AM Pacific. Richard Bennett has more details here.
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By George Ou on
6/6/2008 9:44 AM
The Intel Atom on 945 chipset motherboards have arrived (thanks to my friend Max for the tip) and they're quite affordable! $77 with shipping in stock here. This should make an awesome embedded device or home server since the power consumption is so incredibly low.
This is a 4W TDP 45nm CPU that averages under a watt idle. The only thing that disappoints me is the big honking heat sink and fan on the GPU/chipset while the CPU takes a ti ...
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By George Ou on
6/6/2008 7:21 AM
I'm just building a new PC with using an Intel E2200 "Allendale" Core 2 2.2 GHz processor on an XFX nForce 630i model MG-630i-7159 motherboard. This is a very similar configuration to my $400 computer build list. Just for the heck of it I changed the FSB from 800 MHz to 1064 MHz using stock voltage and the next thing I know I'm running at 2.93 GHz.
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By George Ou on
6/5/2008 10:37 PM
In my last article on "Why BitTorrent causes so much latency and how to fix it", I talked a little about packet sizes and some people asked me what the optimum packet size for maximum throughput is on a DSL broadband connection.
In this article I'm going to show you how to optimize your DSL broadband connection in Windows by optimizing the MTU size to work for a Jumbo Frame capable Local Area Network and a DSL PPPoE broadband connection.
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By Justin James on
6/5/2008 9:58 PM
So I finally got my FreeBSD machine up & running. I spent all of last night updating all of the installed packages (all to get PHP working right) now that it compiles correctly. And then, I decided to go for broke, and upgrade from FreeBSD 6.3 to FreeBSD 7.0. Immediately before I started, I made backups of everything but I did not test those backups to see if they were good. From the italics, you can see where this story is headed.
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By Justin James on
6/5/2008 2:04 PM
Last night I re-learned an important lesson for the zillionth-time: check everything when it comes to system problems!
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By George Ou on
5/31/2008 4:54 PM
Anyone VoIP or online gamer who has a roommate or a family member who uses BitTorrent (or any P2P application) knows what a nightmare it is when BitTorrent is in use. The ping (round trip latency) goes through the roof and it stays there making VoIP packets drop out and game play impossible. I've personally experienced this and many of my friends have experienced it.
Now I've done a detailed study of how BitTorrent has significantly more impact on latency than other applications operating at the same throughput. I also explore potential ways to fix the problem.
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By Justin James on
5/29/2008 12:49 AM
So, after literally dozens of man-hours trying to get the VPN working in ISA Server 2006, the end culprit turned out to be... my fat fingers. When I entered the IP address for the domain controller in a "Computer" network entity (which I later added to the network groups used by access rulles), I typed it in wrong. As a result, traffic to/from the docmain controller didn't go through in the cases where the rules should have judged it based on that incorrectly typed IP address and not some other criteria.
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