Category: Tech

New York’s finest

Sir Tim Rice is getting closer to Massachusetts in his American Pie series on BBC Radio 2. This week he’s on New York, and after rattling off a long list of great American songwriters, who does he open with? The Ramones!

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Feb/TimRiceAmericanPieNY.mp3|titles=Tim Rice’s American Pie: New York]

Tech note: I recorded that audio clip using Wavosaur, set up to monitor the Realtek High Definition Audio Stereo Mix device. As with using Windows Live Movie Maker to capture video, there’s a lot of misinformation about the Realtek stereo mixer, which doesn’t appear by default in Windows 7. There was even some speculation that it’s gone because Realtek was concerned about Digital Rights Management. Without the mixer you can’t record audio while it’s playing on the sound card but, no, there’s no conspiracy. The mix device does appear in Windows 7, if you know the trick.

A bad day to get a good computer

Most of yesterday was not good. I fell very ill, very fast in the morning, and you don’t want the details. By the time my new computer was delivered, about 4:30 in the afternoon, I was sufficiently recovered to try getting it working, assuming it didn’t give me any trouble; and, thankfully, it didn’t. I installed the cards taken from the old computer, started Windows 7 Professional, it found drivers for the cards, and everything worked. After that, only 117 security updates were needed to make the system ready. I’ll install Service Pack 1 when it’s released to the public on the 22nd.

My only complaint about the new system — an Acer Veriton M275-UD7600W — is that the CPU is an Intel E7600, which is a dual-core processor. I noticed the difference in performance when testing multi-threaded MP4 encoding with WinFF. The quad-core Q6600 on the now-dead Dell Inspiron could process over 140 frames per second. The E7600 managed only 80 fps.

But the good news is, I had no trouble capturing video to run the test. Before getting the system I had read about complaints that Windows Live Movie Maker doesn’t have a capture option. Not true, at least with my video capture board. As seen in the screen shot, it’s listed as a webcam. In fact, Windows Live Movie Maker works much better than XP Movie Maker, which sometimes had audio/video sync problems and frequently locked up on me. Here’s the test video I caught in a single take.

[media id=231 width=512 height=408]

Techno geekery

Here’s the scene on the all-season porch. MSNBC is on the venerable Sony 32XBR100, with captions on, and I’m reading those while the sound comes from Pandora on the Roku player, which is a p-in-p box in the corner. The song is John Lennon’s “Nobody Told Me.” Cutting to commercials, the caption for a Nissan spot says, “Mama told me there’d be days like this,” timed perfectly at a moment when Lennon sings, “Nobody told me there’d be days like these.” Not a big deal, but it was fun, and what else am I going to do while waiting for the new computer to be delivered?

Coming up Acers

Knowing that you can’t stand the suspense of waiting to find out what my new desktop computer will be, I’ve already ordered one. It’s an Acer Veriton M275 E7600, and having soured on Dell, it will be the third Acer computer in the house.

Ugly box, eh? It’s intended to be a business computer, and that’s why it interests me, because it has Windows 7 Professional (64-bit), which is $80 more retail than Windows 7 Home Premium, but $100 more when ordering it as part of a customized Dell configuration. I’m fairly confident the 500 GB hard drive from the Dell Inspiron is still good, and the new computer also has a 500 gig disk, so I’m hoping to use Windows RAID 1 mirroring. I vaguely recall there are hassles when doing this on a C: drive, but I’ll either figure it out or add the second disk as a D: drive.

My external Western Digital USB drive has hardware RAID 1 mirroring. Unfortunately, it appears that WD has discontinued their Mirror Edition drives, but fortunately Amazon still has some, so I grabbed one.

Inspiron 530 (2008-2011)

My primary computer, a Dell Inspiron 530, purchased in April, 2008, is dead. Motherboard problem. Won’t even come out of POST (Power-On Self-Test). Guess I won’t be updating it to Windows 7 after all! Until I decide on a replacement, the little Acer Aspire One netbook keeps rockin’ on, and for heavier-duty stuff like scanning and editing audio/video I can use the old Dell Optiplex GX-260 that’s been idle since Eric got his Acer laptop last August.

RIP DEC

Digital Equipment Corporation is long gone. It was bought by Compaq, which in turn was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. But as long as DEC founder Ken Olsen was alive, the legendary Massachusetts minicomputer company wasn’t truly dead. Now Olsen is gone, leaving behind a legacy that is both classic and curious.

For years, DEC was second only to IBM (albeit a distant second), and its influence here in Massachusetts can’t be overstated. The so-called Massachusetts Miracle of the 1980’s was led by Ken Olsen and Digital, and the idea that DEC could disappear almost overnight was unthinkable; but like Prime, DG (Data General), and Wang, DEC was swept away by the rapid move business and industry made from minicomputers to microcomputers. Massachusetts endured a grueling recession in the first half of the 1990’s that was ended thanks to the Internet revolution.

Olsen left DEC but, unlike Steve Jobs, he never returned to the company he created. Once or twice Olsen was featured in the Boston Globe, saying he had an idea he was developing, but nothing came of it. For all practical purposes, Olsen was retired. One of the noteworthy things that Olsen did was to hire Bob Taylor in 1983, just as the Massachusetts Miracle was about to kick off. Taylor had left Xerox PARC, where he managed the development of a few innovations, including the Graphical User Interface, LASER printers, and Ethernet, and that was after his years managing the creation of a little thing called the Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet.