But what about it’s idle hours, days? Can the price/performance ratio be improved on this investment?

Absolutely.

CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, a development platform offering the high performance parallel computing power of the GPU for other applications.

Brilliant developers who created the vReveal software – for example -, use it to speed up video processing, more that 2x (measured on my Nvidia 8800 vs. the Intel Core Duo 3Gz core).

vReveal offers one-click video corrections for just about anything you can imagine, including shake reduction, denoise, sharpening, auto contrast, brightness and white balance, deinterlace. If you process your own home videos, it is a must to evaluate.

How lucky I am to have made the decision that I kept the original video capture files of dozens of my old videotapes. Now, it is a matter of a few nights – with batch processing – to reprocess those capture files.

• After the first few days I was wondering why is that I rather open a web browser in the Mac OS rather than on Windows, when I was browsing Flickr photos with my Deep Dive application. Then I did a side by side comparison on the very same monitor, left half of the screen the Windows browser, right half of the screen the VM and in that Safari. Although I did not do any color calibration – in neither OS -, the colors of the same web page look absolutely more brilliant in Safari.
• I can clearly see some of the Windows 7 ideas coming from the Mac, nothing wrong with that, it really made Windows better.
• A bit strange that the Mac OS makers never in their life needed to jump to the “top of the page” or “bottom of page”, the Home / End keys were totally missed. This must be something like Chinese people and the fork You can set the mouse scroll speed very high and that is a fairly good alternative solution for me.
• I enjoy the nice and user friendly look of the Mac OS, but I do occasionally miss totally obvious functionality. Let me give you an example. Go to iTunes listing of Internet radio stations. There are hundreds with their names and descriptions. There IS a finder box in the upper right corner of the page. But, God knows why, you can not search for a radio station by name or keywords.
• Takes a little time to get used to the fact that the menus are always located on the top of the page – this is really a great idea to save screen-real-estate, no one needs more than one menu at a time. Similarly, it takes time to get used to that the red “close this window” button is not identical to Command key + Q.

Overall Mac OS X is amazing, thanks to virtualization one can have the best of both worlds.

Can be done. Not my wisdom, but this post probably gives you a good compilation of the necessary steps – and saves a day of your precious life

Prerequisites: You have the Mac OS X DVD or the equivalent .dmg image and you have VMWare Workstation 7 running on your PC.

Installation steps:

1. Convert the .dmg image to .iso format. There are various tools you can use, UltraISO is one of the possibilities.
2. You need to convince VMWare to let you create an OS X machine. Thanks to Albert Nietsnie who posted his tool on the insanelymac.com forum, you can use macosx_guest_vmware_7.tar.gz.
3. Create a new VM and mount the OS X .img file in it’s virtual DVD drive.
4. Go through the whole installation process, run the additional OS updates.
5. At this point you will probably notice 5 problems: video, audio, mouse, time synchronization and file sharing with the host … as usual with these VM images. The video may default to 1024×768 (depending on your video card, I have Nvidia), there is no sound, and the mouse pointer althou it works, it may occasionally disappear. Let’s fix these.
6. For the audio, download and install – in the Mac OS – EnsoniqAudioPCI_1.0.2_for_SnowLeopard.mpkg.tar.gz from sourceforge. This will give your Mac sound.
7. For the video, download and install – in the Mac OS – VMsvga2_v1.2.2_Common_Installer.pkg from sourceforge. This will give your Mac a variety of display resolutions to choose from.
8. To address the occasionally disappearing mouse pointer, I disabled the power management functions in OS X, the I edited the .vmx text file – located in the folder where your virtual image is. Add this line
   mks.noHostCursor = “TRUE”
9. Lastly for file sharing and time synchronization you need VMWare Tools. Download VMWare Fusion 3.1, then from the .dmg disk image you can extract VMWare Tools for Darwin. That package you can install in your OS X virtual machine. The little catch here is that installing the package is only step one, it installs a darwin.iso image for you. Now, click on this .iso, that will offer you the intallation of VMWare Tools. Reboot. Go to the command line, navigate to the VMWare Tools folder and you can see a vmware-tools-cli (command line) configuration tool. If, for example, you want to enable time sychronization, then type
   vmware-tools-cli timesync enable
   For other configuration options, use the help option.

If you are using a dynamically sized virtual hard disk for OS X, it is recommended that you do a defragmentation in VMWare after the install, you will need to shut down the virtual machine first.

If your audio is choppy, then check these 2 things:

• set the same sample rate in your host machine audio card configuration and in the OS X MIDI Audio settings
• in iTunes preferences, change the buffer size. Depending on your Internet connection speed you can experiment whether smaller or larger buffer works best.
• if you have a router with QoS functionality, it may improve your streaming audio/video experience.

Yes, it can run Linux, and I tested it with Centos 5.

To start with the conclusion of the exercise, you can make it work, but if you are serious about virtualization, you better use VMWare. And I suggest that not only you run your Linux under VMWare, but also import the XP Mode virtual drive into VMWare and run XP Mode there.

Speed, smoothness, ease of use, and emulated functionality of the peripherial devices – most importantly video and audio – are on the side of the more mature and robust VMWare solution.

Some people do not have VMWare thou, and for their benefits here are some lessons learnt to make CentOS run in Virtual PC.

When installing CentOS, the graphical installer may want to switch to 24 bit color depth, that for me meant unreadable display. The S3 video card emulation with just a few megabytes of emulated video ram can not handle that.

Install Linux with this command

linux vesa=800×600 depth=16

Once installed, you will notice problems such as using the mouse in the X11 window, the functionality of the middle mouse wheel and system time being out of synch.

You can use these 3 kernel parameters, either adding manually when the kernel boots up, or later by editing the /boot/grub/grub.conf file:

i8042.noloop psmouse.proto=imps clock=pit

These three parameters address the above mentioned three problems respectively.

When it comes to screen resolution, you will feel the limitation of the emulated video RAM, the largest screen size I was able to set is 1280×720.

Wedding melody

Windows 7 brings back the same feeling as Windows 3.1 when I installed that in the early 90s.

I was a hardcore XP fan for years, completely skipped Vista – did not even spend a single minute with that. Windows 7 completely surprised me with it’s beauty, ease of use, and lots of built in tools, features that you previously had to install from 3rd parties. From the compatibility perspective 95+% of the apps I use run well on Windows 7, for the few exceptions I am glad to have the built in virtual XP. What’s more, if you want you can also install a virtual Linux on the Microsoft Virtual PC platform.

One potential problem may be some of my older games that I like, but I have not had enough time to test those.

Well done, Microsoft!

Egy harci, stratégiai játékban helytálló vezért említeni, de vajon valóban hadvezérről van itt szó? Nem.

Kezdetekben, a sakk indiai eredeti formájában, egy a királyt támogató férfi alak, az úgynevezett vizier állt azon a helyen. A 10. század környékén jelenik meg egy női alak a táblán, a királynő. Ez a figura ekkor még erőtlen, csupán egyet léphet azt is csak átlósan.

A vizier szó vagy ennek változatai mai napig megmaradtak a sakkban a perzsa, török és magyar nyelvben.

A mai modern és erős sakk királynőt a spanyol Izabella királynőről mintázták.

Izabelláról mellesleg azt is tudni kell hogy ő nemcsak egy erős világuralmat hozott létre Spanyolországból miután Ferdinánddal való házassága után egyesítette a spanyol királyságokat, hogy útjára küldte Kolombuszt, hanem azt is hogy az ő uralma alatt hozták létre a spanyol inkvizíciót, amely számos konvertált zsidó pusztulásához, bebörtönzéséhez vagy száműzetéséhez vezetett.

To prevent being locked out of your home computer you can install the brilliant program called TrueIP. This program not only tells you the true, external IP address but it can monitor a change and e-mail you the new one. Alternative methods include FTP, even a TrueIP server account where you can login and view the IP.

However, as of today this program is not fully compatible with Windows 7. It runs, but you can not make configuration changes – such as entering the notification e-mail address. I contacted the author asking a port to Windows 7, but in the meantime here is a workaround for you.

Go to your User folder in Windows 7, and under the hidden AppData folder (couple levels down)  you will find the configuration file for this app called user.config. This is a text file in XML format, edit the values and at next run the app will use the new configuration settings.

If you are a little more adventurous you can even run it automatically when Windows starts, for that you need to edit the registry, add the program under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.

When things do not work, one thinks of all possibilities, could it be that my capture card is faulty, do I have the correct driver, is there a conflict with my other TV capture device or drivers, is my software version up to date … or maybe too new and I need to go back to an older version.

Here is my configuration:

Video capture card, Chinese kinda no-name based on Philips SAA 7130 or 713x if you wish. Virtualdub software capturing PAL S-Video at full resolution.

The symptoms:

Swithing to the VFW device in Overlay mode, I get the full resolution video feed into Virtualdub, but I am unable to capture. It says “No video source”.
Switching to the WDM device (still in Overlay mode), the system freezes and only seem to work up tp 720×288 – half the lines of full frame.

The lesson learnt:

Do not use Overlay! Change to Preview mode. The reason is a DMA limitation for interleaved video, explained in detail on the Virtualdub web site.

I’m glad to present you the song Endless Summer. Enjoy, and feedback is welcome!

The .ogg music file format can be played with Firefox browser, Winamp and a variety of other music players.