More programs are making use of multi cores now that they are being programed or reprogrammed to do so. Only a few games currently make use of multiple cores but Nero Vision and Windows Movie Maker (vista version) both make use of multiple cores reducing video transcoding time dramatically.
Converting a 90 minute movie from .avi to dvd format used to take about 45 minutes on a 3ghz single core processor, but on this 2.4ghz quad core machine it now only takes about 16 minutes to convert the video.
I’ve created a web spider and sent it on a crawl for specific pieces of information. I will update this blog with the findings in a month or so once it has analyzed enough data. The current crawl rate is quite slow, but should improve as I make tweaks to the code.
I purchased a copy of Adobe’s “Creative Suite 3 Web Premium” today, but I did so via the Adobe US store rather than the UK store and saved £604/$1209 by doing so.
Adobe sell the product for $1599 on the US site coming in $1,209 cheaper than the UK store list price of £1404.02 ($2,808). Even without VAT (UK Tax) the product is £1,195 ($2,390) from the UK store, a $790 premium over the US price.
You will need a US credit card / billing address to purchase from the US store.
I’m sure if Adobe ever comment on the matter they will come up with something along the lines of “UK support costs…..”. Well I don’t know about any of you, but I have never in my life called any sort of software technical support line.
Shame on Adobe for charging Brits nearly twice the amount that they charge people in the US.
If you are using an encryption program like TrueCrypt to keep your hard drive data encrypted, you should power down your PC when ever it is not being used.
A recent video, by researchers at Princeton, demonstrates how an attacker can recover the contents of RAM from a running machine, or even one that has only been shut down for a short period of time. If you have your encrypted drives mounted at the time of the physical attack then the encryption key can most likely be recovered from the memory image.
People, including most experts, previously believed that RAM instantly lost all of it’s data when power was removed. This appears to not be the case with most DDR RAM, with memory taking a few seconds to several minutes to fade away.
Check out the video below for more information and a demonstration of the attack. Be sure to put your RAM modules through your shredder if you suspect an imminent physical attack.
I couldn’t figure out what the issue was for a little while, I tried running the rsync command several times and entered the password when prompted. Unfortunately the error message provided (code 5) didn’t really help. It turned out that I had CAPS LOCK on and the password I was entering was incorrect. Silly mistake, but hopefully this will save someone searching for this rsync error some time.
The MacBook Air, “the world’s thinnest notebook”, was announced by Steve Jobs today. He boasted that at its thickest point it is only 0.76 inches across.
The unit has a 13.3″ lcd monitor, a full sized keyboard, 2gig ram, 802.11n networking, webcam, dual core processor, and a choice of a regular or solid state hard drive. Quite an accomplishment! But where is the optical (cd/dvd) drive? There isn’t one! So it is not really fair to call it the world’s thinnest notebook as it doesn’t have all the components that most other notebooks have.
Still, if you don’t need to watch dvds on your laptop, and you’re happy renting films from itunes (as Steve would like), then it looks like a great little unit.
UPDATE Jan 17th 2008: The original embedded player has been restored and is now working again.
A lot of people have been messaging me about this, and I’m sorry to hear about it.
It seems as though ZVUE, in their infinite wisdom, have disabled the embedded videos on Putfile. They have been replaced with what looks like an embedded player, but clicking on it will take you to the Putfile site instead. If that is ok with you then thats great just leave the code as it is and people will be directed to the video on Putfile when they click it rather than viewing it on your site, myspace, ebay, or wherever you had embedded it.
I’ve not been working with ZVUE (who purchased Putfile) since the later part of last year, so if you would like to complain please open a support ticket or contact them through Zvue.com.
I’m sad to say, but it certainly is true, that Putfile simply doesn’t measure up to the competition anymore. ZVUE seem to be focusing on adding music videos and redesigning (cluttering) the site rather than adding any much needed core features (ftp upload, upload progress bar, friends, groups, message boards).
If you’re looking for a new video and/or photo host I’ve started using Flickr.com for photos and Dailymotion.com for videos both of which work really well.
Below is an example of the now defunct Putfile embedded player:
If, like me, you have various computers or servers which need to be online 24/7 but aren’t always using their full CPU power then consider donating your spare CPU power to a collaborative computing project for the greater good of mankind, such as Folding@Home.
Folding@home is a distributed-computing project run by a team at Stanford University who are exploring how proteins fold and unfold in order to carry out their functions within the body. When these proteins fold or unfold incorrectly abnormalities and diseases, such as cancer, may occur. By simulating the folding of various proteins in billions of different ways researchers hope to learn more about such problems and how to rectify them.
The Folding@home client is available for both Windows and Linux, currently supporting single cores with the beta and next version out supporting multiple processing cores. I actually like the single core support as it means that I can have the fold@home process only maxing out one core and the other core left untouched for use by other server processes.
The picture below shows the usage on two different servers, the first being a dual core 3ghz server and the other being a single core 400mhz server. Note that as the process only utilizes IDLE cpu time, it won’t battle with other processes for CPU time, it will only use as much CPU power that is not currently needed.
Sign up on the site to create your own username and/or team. The idea being that teams can compete against each other in providing the most cpu work time and users can compete within their teams. If you would like, feel free to join my team 95202.
You will need to judge for yourself but in my opinion it is probably not worth leaving a machine on solely for this purpose as the environmental impact would probably outweigh the benefits. This is of course a great thing to do if you already have servers that need to be online 24/7 but don’t make full use of their cpu power.
“Instant messaging (IM) is an increasingly popular mode of communication on the Internet. Although it is used for personal and private conversations, it is not at all a private medium. Not only are all of the messages unencrypted and unauthenticated, but they are all routedthrough a central server, forming a convenient interception point for an attacker. Users would benefit from being able to have truly private conversations over IM, combining the features of encryption, authentication, deniability, and forward secrecy, while working within their existing IM infrastructure.
In this talk, I will discuss “Off-the-Record Messaging” (OTR), a widely used software tool for secure and private instant messaging. I will outline the properties of Useful Security and Privacy Technologies that motivated OTR’s design, compare it to other IM security mechanisms, and talk about its ongoing development directions.“
Leopard is the new OSX 10.5 operating system for Mac. Recently released, although much delayed due to the iPhone launch, and now distributed with all new Macs. I don’t own a Mac but would be interested in testing Leopard out for video editing.
Here is a video tour of the new Leopard operating system:
