Logo by Tom Purves

4:44 PM
More WinCE 1.0 blowouts
This time it's the Compaq C140 at $99 from Office Depot.  The C140 is a 4MB model with backlighting so it's a good deal, no doubt about it.  I hear some places still have them in stock.  Also, one post said this:

Just call PCMall 1-800-555-Mall and ask them to match Office Depot's
Price of $99. They did and shipping was $7.00 with no tax. I just got
mine this morning and I did not even have to leave the house. If they
are out, just try someone else who has it and will match.

I highly recommend picking one up.  I use my MobilePro all the time now to write things in class or read or write stuff on the road.  Actually, I could use backlighting, so maybe I'll switch out my MobilePro for one of these.

Netscape and system instability
I've spoken to several of my friends about this and we seem to have a minor consensus here.  Netscape is a major cause of system instability in Win95 systems.  Especially version 4.0 or higher.  In NT it crashes quite a bit and lord knows what it does to 95 because I don't see those errors in 95, which probably means it's doing something bad that 95 can't catch.  I haven't used Netscape for at least a month or two now but I suspect things haven't changed.

11:44 PM
I'm back
I decided to jet off to New York for a couple of days with my friends where I got my butt kicked pretty thoroughly at MSH vs. SF.  We also bought a copy of X-Men vs. SF for the Saturn, which I may take the time to review...the speed of the game is surprisingly fast and it seems most, if not all, of the animation is in there. Load times are incredibly fast compared to previous Capcom efforts.  I think Capcom might have made the game a little choppy to prevent slowdown, though.

12:38 PM
Promise FastTrak
Oh yeah, from initial reports it seems as if this drive controller does live up to the hype...nearly doubling disk throughput without the crappy prices that you have to pay for SCSI.  Since EIDE drives are so inexpensive compared to SCSI drives, it looks extremely attractive if you want high performance without taking the SCSI plunge.   I'm not sure how well this thing works out with NT or alternative operating systems, but offhand I wouldn't expect any problem.  It's still IDE though, so heavy CPU load can be a problem.

12:06 PM
Starcraft preview at OGR
A new preview of StarCraft is at OGR.  It's surprisingly long and is the first real information I've seen about the game in a while.  Definitely worth a look.  It looks like StarCraft isn't going to make it out before the end of the year to me, because they are definitely cutting it close.  They may just decide not to play balance it completely and patch the game as issues arise from the public.

Quantum's new SSD drives
Wow, take a look at this!  I've seen them before, of course, but never on the front page of a major drive manufacturer.  SSD drives (Solid State Disks) are basically drives that store data in RAM, not on disk platters.  Obviously this makes them way faster than your typical hard drive.  Do a little reading.   It seems to me that even Ultra SCSI-3 isn't up to the performance of these drives...perhaps a new type of interface is needed?  Slower than main memory, but faster than typical drive controllers.

Quantum's SSD page

12:20 AM
MobileNews for WinCE available
A trial version of the first and apparently only newsreader for WinCE is now available for download.  I'm going to echo what others have said...this thing is really only useful if it reads news offline.  The whole point of the WinCE is to carry it everywhere, so... 

http://www.bsquare.com/development/download/bMobileNews.htm

10:22 PM
Video CD made
Well...I made it, it's cool.  What can I say?  Anyhow, I tried to make it the first time and the program immediately gave me an error when I tried to write the CD out in Disc-at-Once mode.  Fine, so I tried making a disc image from the layout and writing that out in Disc-at-Once.  Same error, even though I'm positive my drive does Disc-at-Once.

Video CD Creator does some pretty stupid stuff when it creates a disc image.  It seems as if it creates the image in its temp directory, then copies it to the destination.   So you basically need double the size of a CD-ROM to make a disc image on your local drive instead of just one.

I went back to the layout and picked Track-at-Once.  That seemed to work fine, until I got to the very end of the disc.  The program said it had finished recording, so I waited a few seconds and hit the eject button.  All of a sudden the recording light came on.  Uh-oh!  The disc popped out after a few seconds.  I tried it and it was totally useless.

The second time I switched CD-R brands to HP and redid it in track-at-once mode.   And I left for a good while so that it could finish whatever it was doing.   This time the CD turned out fine.  I'm not sure what was wrong the first time.

BTW, the best program bar none to make disc images and the like is CDR Win/DAO from Goldenhawk Technology.

Oof
I had a paper that I didn't start until 1:00 last night.  I was up until 6:30 finishing it up.  I woke up at 9:30 and finished it off at 10:30.   Then I had these dudes working on the heater in my room for god knows how long.   It didn't matter to me, I passed out after I got back.  By the way, there was a huge sale on 8.7GB Ultra-Wide SCSI Micropolis drives at Onsale.  497 of 'em!   You'd think that at that quantity somebody would get a low bid in, but nope, it started at $99 and got to a low of $379.  It was looking attractive for a while, though.  Considering the reliability of Micropolis drives (not a compliment) and the iffy warranty (since Micropolis is bankrupt), it's not that great a deal.  I saw some freak bid $599 for all 497 drives...as you would expect, that was totally fake, so they had to extend the bid time.

Incoming non-interactive demo
The graphics in this game look built for 3D for the ground up.  It's definitely worth a look.  A word of advice, the setup is totally broken.  What I did was copy a _setup.dll from another program installation to the Incoming demo installation and that worked just fine.  I couldn't find a way to exit the program either, short of trying to kill it.  Seems rushed, but, like I said, it's worth a look.

ftp://ftp.pczone.co.uk/pub/pczone/incoming.zip

2:37 PM
Making the Video CD
Easy CD Creator is generating the VCD as I write this.  I hope everything goes ok.  I spliced the beginning of the EP copy of Episode 2 with the SP copy that I had (which was missing a few seconds of the beginning).  NLE video editing is awesome...the cut is totally seamless.  Unfortunately, the tapes are of such differing quality that it is obvious that somehow the quality of the video and sound vastly improves after the cut.  The problem with encoding MPEG's in Xing is really annoying me too, I basically have to baby the system for each clip I need to run off.   I encountered the error again after encoding one, waiting for a while, and starting another one, so the problem must just be something with the driver, not how fast Xing is switching from a finished clip to a new one.

Winstone 98/Winbench 98
I just received my copies of these benchmarks in the mail.  Depending on how large they are, I may post them for download.  I can't wait to get some test results, and compare them with the ones at PC Magazine.  I've noticed, by the way, that despite the fact that I have a nice fast SCSI drive, performance still degrades horribly when I have two applications doing heavy disk access at once, probably becuase of the amount of seeking that has to be done.  This is why I'm considering moving my swap file to my IDE drive even though it's slower.

Jay Leno & South Park
There was a special South Park segment that was done just for the Jay Leno show that aired on Thursday or Friday night.  It's going to be rebroadcast tonight on Comedy Central during a showing of Crocodile Dundee.  Definite tape material!

1:10 PM
Making the Video CD
I almost have the files ready to burn.  What I've been doing is simply capturing each section between commercial breaks, clipping the ends with Premiere, rebooting into NT to edit the audio with Sound Forge from Sonic Foundry, and heading back into 95 to do the compression to Video CD/MPEG format.  Sound Forge is an excellent package and the only editor I've played with so far that lets me edit the sound in AVI's without having to export and import the soundtrack.  What I've been doing is simple, just doing automatic DC offset and noise reduction to remove tape hiss.  For some reason, this really bangs on my system and disk access almost brings everything to a halt.  Sound Forge is truly excellent, but if you actually want to buy the thing, the application is around $350!  That's NOT with the Noise Reduction plug-in, either.  Luckily, there are demos available from them by FTP.

Premiere hasn't done anything to change my opinion of its stability.  It still crashes just as much.  Some of this might be the fault of the Rainbow Runner...I'm getting the impression that its drivers aren't particularly stable either...specifically on initialization and deinitialization. Xing MPEG Encoder has a serious problem trying to encode the RR MJPEG AVI's to MPEG in series...it appears that when it ends one and begins the next, it does it so fast that it gives the RR problems.

I'm still missing a third episode captured in SP that I can use to make a decent capture.  I actually have a third one on tape but I missed the first few seconds of that episode.  It seems like everybody I can locate with a tape of South Park tapes in EP.  Argh!   I don't understand these people.