YouTube is having a serious problem, but I can’t find anybody talking about it. Videos definitely aren’t streaming on my site, or on others, but they’re working on some. Weird.
Follow-up: OK, it’s half an hour later and YouTube is working again. Now I can post what I wanted.
Japan moved about 8 feet, and the Earth’s axis has been tilted by about 6.5 inches, changing the speed of the planet’s rotation and shortening the day by 1.8 millionths of a second. But as horrible as this earthquake is, even upgraded to magnitude 9.0 it’s only the fourth most powerful in my lifetime.
We’ve been planning to buy a new Honda CRV sometime before September. Our ’02 CRV was made in Japan, and not to be petty in my concern about the earthquake, I was nevertheless worried that it would affect the supply. But according to Honda, CRV production is now done mostly in the U.S.
I’m running 64-bit Windows 7 SP1 — the latest and greatest desktop/laptop OS from Microsoft. All security updates are in place, and I use Microsoft Security Essentials. Yesterday I was reading a Google blog and, as I sometimes do for fun, I was giving the “Next Blog” link a few spins. And what happened? I landed on a page that made McAfee Site Advisor go crazy with warnings. Firefox was obviously being redirected to a bad place and then, before I could do anything, Security Essentials chimed in with warnings. I killed Firefox, then immediately rolled the system back to the last restore point. After restarting Windows I ran a scan and it came up clean.
This is where I get off the train. I’m giving up on Windows ever being secure, and I have no confidence that sticking with legitimate sites offers any assurance of safety (yes, I know Google can’t police every blog it hosts). So I’m typing this using Firefox, on Ubuntu Linux 10.10, that’s running inside of a VMware Player virtual machine. If anything bad happens in my comfort zone here, I’ll blow away the virtual machine and create new one from the Ubuntu ISO file.
By the way, I registered my little site with McAfee, and to the extent that WordPress and the plugins I use are safe, and if Bluehost isn’t harboring anything bad, the site is clean, and you won’t find any ads here either, of course.
Follow-up: And now I’m running Jolicloud, a custom version of Linux 2.6 in another virtual machine. Cool beans, to borrow an expression used by a friend of mine.
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.
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]
