Category Archives: IT

Video and Voice communication over the ‘net

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With Kristin in the Philippines voice and video communication over the internet has become more interesting and important.  Before she left, I snagged a couple of Logitech webcams so that we would be able to see each other during the time she was away.  This would be working out much better if her hotel would actually have their internet service up…

That said, Skype seems to be the defacto software for free video calling.  Last night, Sean and I ran through different products through the ringer to determine which would offer the best voice or video quality.  The software tested was the most recent version of Skype, Steam (voice only)  and Google Voice through Google chat.

One of the most interesting discoveries of the evening was how CPU bound we were in terms of quality.  My test machine was a three year old laptop that has a single core Sempron 3400+ (2.0ghz and 128k of L2 cache), one gig of ram and Windows 7 Pro.  The video quality would immediately and very noticeably degrade if I tried to *anything* but use the communication application as the CPU was running near or at 100% when ever the camera was in use.  Any dual core setup should remedy this performance issue.

First, we tried to do voice chat over Steam.  This was a disaster.  Sean and I have extensively used Steam before to do voice chatting, but for some reason last night was not the night for it.  It was crackly and very near non-functional.    We’ll have to investigate why the performance was so horrible, maybe it had something to do with using a webcam instead of a dedicated microphone? Grade: D-

Next up was trusty Skype.  This worked easily and well, call quality was sharp along with video quality.  I was able to give Sean a tour of our freshly re-floored and painted future office.  The only issue was how big of a CPU hog it was, making using any other applications notably decrease voice and video quality.  Grade: A-

Lastly we fired up Google Voice over google chat.  The installation and configuration of this application is easier and quicker than Skype given that it is a browser plugin.  It is linked to from within the Google chat application that appears on the left sidebar when signed into gmail.  Sadly, the performance hit enabling video over Google Voice turned my video into a slideshow and so overwhelmed the poor laptop that voice dropped as well.  I know the CPU in the laptop isn’t a beast, but it is a 2ghz semi-modern CPU and skype offered decently quality with full functionality on the same processor.  Google Voice is one of those perpetual Beta apps that Google releases so a lack of polish and tuning can probably be expected.  Still, it basically didn’t work.  Grade: C-

Well, that’s it.  As Sean suggested, I’ll likely be moving a PC upstairs to take the laptops spot.  That should remedy the performance issues and I will post some follow up thoughts once that is complete.

–Nat

Good Customer Service, I guess…

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This May, Sean and I made our annual(ish) pilgrimage to Fry’s Electronics in Chicago.  If you haven’t been to one, these places are the mecca of consumer electronics.  Huge walls dedicated to motherboards, CPUs and RAM are on one side, TVs on another, console and software on the other and host of awesome goodness sandwiched in between.   I think Sean and I spent a solid eight hours there over two days – unlike Menards, there is a good reason that this place has a cafe.

That said, neither of us were really shopping for anything in particular when we went there.  I came back with some speakers, a case, and a card reader.  The case is still in the garage (I will use it soon, I promise…) and the card reader has been working really well.   Now, the speakers are what I am having an issue with.  I bought them at Fry’s because they seemed like a solid deal.  I’ve always like Altec Lansing in the sub-$100 level category for PC speakers as I believe(d) they consistently provided better sound and longevity for the money.   These be the guys in question:

Click for the big pic...

Click for the big pic...

Inexpensive, yet decent speakers for use in the office that is going to get done someday.  They should have fit the bill nicely.  Well, to be honest I should have done a little more research.  As you can see they are no longer for sale at NewEgg and there are a lot of bad reviews that mention the defect, like the one here…

Click for the big pic...

Click for the big pic...

My set, as with many of the reviewers, got *horrible* interference unless I held my hand on the control knob.  Well, come to find out they neglected to magentically shield that component and anything and everything that emitted crap would interrupt it.   This makes them unusable around computers, which is awkward given they are computer speakers.  I finally gave in and called Altec Lansing as they have no way of submitting issues online.

*Waited on hold for 15 minutes+”

Guy: “Hello, thanks for calling Altec Lansing, how may I help you?”

Me:”Hi.  My name is Nat and I have an issue with my speakers, they are model VS2421 and they”

Guy:”Yes, they are not magnetically shielded.”

Me:”Yeah, in order to use them I have to keep my hand on the control or”

Guy:”Cover it with tin foil.”

Me:”…”

Guy:”I need you to give me a little information, then we’ll send you a new upgraded set once you have shipped yours in.”

Me:”Free upgrade?”

Guy:”Yes, free.  I’ll just need some information…”

Of course this issue is so well known that the guy recognized the model number of the speakers and just decided to upgrade me to the $50 speakers in the same line that are shielded (VS2621 for the curious out there.) Yet, Fry’s still sells them.  That’s bogus – it’ll probably cost me $15 to ship the darn things because they are so heavy, which is normally a good thing in PC speakers.

I can’t decide who is at fault here, Altec Lansing or Fry’s.  One thing is for sure; unless these new speakers are *nice* I am taking a break on buying Altec Lansing products.

–Nat

AMD launches new video cards…

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…and continues to offer better value than nvidia across the board at normal prices.

The new 5750 and 5770 launched today are lined up against the 4830 and 4850, respectively.  It looks like they are about half the die size of the 4850/70 which means that AMD will be making a healthy profit on them if they get the same prices (or more, like they are currently) for the 5 series cards.  I would expect that within six months we’ll see the 5770 at $149 and the 5750 at $99 which will completely replace the 4xxx series.   If the line up for the cards moves to 5750/$99-$119, 5770/$149, 5850/$249, 5870/$349 which makes sense, that leaves a pretty glaring hole in the lineup.  Makes you wonder if we’ll see a 5830 type card packing DDR3 at the $200 price point.  That would probably make a lot of sense.

It will also be very interesting to see what the 5600 series cards are going to look like next year, but with price points and performance levels being covered it is hard to believe there will be more than two 56xx series cards available, something with ddrd2/3 and a 64 bit interface with a slower core and a speedier part with ddr3 and 128 bit interface.  My guess is the core will be basically half  of the 5750, which would follow the trend AMD is setting as that part is half of the 5850.  The weird things that that AMD is still talking like they are going to launch four lines of cards (and this is the second launch wave)- does that mean an uber-low end or are they referring to inevitable x2 launches?  Time will tell 🙂

With the x2 launches we might see the 5850 drop to $225 and the 5870 drop to $325, which would also help AMD close the gap they have at the $200 and $300 price points.  That would leave precious few places for Nvidia to make an impact unless the really drop the prices on their GTX260+ line of cards  and even then the AMD cards hold the distinction of being DX11.  While that is probably a check box at this point of time that will have limited if any relevance in the future, if the cards from both chip makers perform equivalently it would be a safer bet to take the newest card with the most features which again leaves Nvidia at a disadvantage.

–Nat

WSUS is up and working!

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The last straw was confiuring the 2008 R2 server to act like it was on a home network and not a public one.  I think that allowed the some relaxed firewall rules.  As soon as  I did that and logged back into my XP test box some 17 updates were downloaded and ready to be installed.

 

After a few hours of effort, at least it doesn something...

After a few hours of effort, at least it does something...

Being the cool guy I am, I skipped reading any documentation and jumped right to the adding roles in 2008, which is really too darn easy.  That downloaded and installed WSUS 3.0 SP2, I believe and installed IIS as well.  The only piece that needed to be added manually was the 2008 report viewer.  After figuring out how to manipulate windows upate settings in the local GPO settings byrunning  gpoedit.msc and navigating to computer configuration, administrative templates, windows configuration, windows updates and setting the intranet server I was good to go.  There is a command to manually check for updates that I didn’t have to use: wuauclt.exe /detectnow  which could be very handy…

Now I need to figure out how to get it to work with Windows 7 and Vista and I’ll be set.  After that I’ll need to look at fixing DNS – basically I need to add something from my DHCP server  so that leases including a dns suffix, like atlas.xxxx for which I can make my DNS servers authoritative.  It would be cake if I had a domain but running Windows Home Server complicates that a bit…

Moving from one issue to another, I guess.  At least we finished the laminate flooring in the office today so I can mark down at least one real accomplishment 🙂

–Nat

Messing with Widgets, installing WSUS

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Do you see that cool looking “Linkedin” badge over there?  Yeah, well, when I added it all of my widgets were reset in WordPress.  What’s a widget, you ask?  A widget is what you see over there as the archives, calendar, meta, etc.  All gone!  Hopefully it is close to how it was but that was quite annoying.  I thought it was going to be a straight up plugin like the google analytics thing and add it at the bottom of the page or something.  Glad it was easy to resolve.

Since I took the trouble, go check out my Linked in profile and write a recommendation for me if you have a few minutes 😉

Another challenge I took up today was configuring WSUS for the local network here.  I am tired of constantly getting prompted to install updates!  I plan on scheduling a once a month forced push and reboot so that I don’t have to deal with that annoyance anymore.  It should also speed up bringing newbuilds (especially XP) online.  This has so far led to me to the fact that my DNS is still pretty much half baked and to really get it done right I need to setup DHCP on a server and stop trusting my router.  The cool gigabit wireless-n router doesn’t allow for any DHCP configuration.  I really need to make sure I can flip it all the way into bridged mode…  I’ll be sharing more about the WSUS adventure as I have it.  Right now the server 2008 R2 VM I setup to host it is tanking the WAN and itself trying to build down what I can only guess is several gigs of updates and service packs.

–Nat

iPhone gets features I’ve never used on my BB

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So, over at Dailytech (my once a day news resource) they have pointed out that the iPhone is getting support for Google Voice.   Reading through the article, it talks about how long Blackberries have had this support, even on AT&T.  I thought about that for a while… I have an AT&T Blackberry.  A nice, shiny, top of the line Bold which has wifi and the whole bit.  Could I not be using VOIP and Google Voice right now?

Well, I would try but Google Voice is currently invite only which is quite the bummer.  As soon as I either mooch an invite or they open it back up, I’ll be signing up and seeing how it works.

Oh yeah, I guess the iPhones can now send MMS’s despite the ape-like intelligence of iPhone owners.  Congrats.  I just sent my first one ever from my Blackberry to commemorate the occasion.  Again, congratulations.  I know you fought hard to get it.

–Nat

QAM tuning in Windows 7 with Comcast

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I finally gave into the siren call of clear QAM tuning on Windows 7 here in the Twin Cities north metro.  Our TV pulls in the clear QAM signals without issue for all of our local channels so it stood to reason any tuner capable of clear QAM would give the same result.

Clear QAM is great because it (an unencrypted digital TV signal, both regular and high definition rebroadcasts of local channels) comes into the house over the cable and not over the air.  I have long used Over The Air (OTA) tuning to DVR high definition content but this is incredibly finicky in any type of inclement weather.  The final straw was missing the entire Vikings vs. ‘Niners game because it was windy and that messed up the reception on the OTA.  As many of you have probably experienced so far, OTA digital TV sucks sometimes because it doesn’t degrade, it just goes away.

Recently, NewEgg ran a great deal on the Hauppauge HVR-1250 and I couldn’t resist picking one up to try.  I am glad to report that it works as advertised and was really easy to install.  I installed the newest drivers from Hauppage’s website and their softmce software and was good to go after running the TV setup again.  I then went through the four channels that matter, the high def versions of CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC and “split” them – making the OTA and QAM channels both showup in the guide so that we can explicitly choose which one to use at a given time.  Probably took about an hour of effort overall, but I highly recommend it.  The quality is pretty decent and it is obviously much more reliable than the OTA reception.

One item of note is that my system was able to capture two HD recordings at once (while time shifting and watching one) and it isn’t too beefy – an OS hard drive and a capture hard drive, a 2.3ghz dual core AMD processor, 2GB of Ram and Windows 7 Professional on a decent AMD motherboard with integrated graphics.

Finally, the fact that it is PCIe was a  configuration life saver.  My Hauppauge HVR-1600 is PCI, so is the wireless-n card I have.  That left me with only PCIe slots to fill  and precious few reasonably priced options.  Thanks Hauppauge 🙂

–Nat

Yellow Bricks Blogs

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Seems like I keep coming back to this guys as great sources of content.  This is a great blog entry about getting esxi4 running in workstation without sacrificing all of your ram to it: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/05/08/running-vsphere-within-workstation-will-take-up-a-lot-of-memory/

I need to build another box to be a secondary virtualization box at home, I think.   It would be interesting to see if I can get esx4 up in VMware Server 2.  I’ve got two boxes that have 8GB of ram each in them right now, one of them being my VMware Server box and the other one being my main box.  I really don’t need 8GB there, although I think turning my main box into another server platform and buying some new stuff to replace it is going to be tough to get by Kristin 😉

That link sure looks like a pretty WordPress Permalink though, doesn’t it 😉

–Nat

Windows Server 2000, where art thou?

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Working with a couple Server 2000 boxes that just recently became VM’s the lack of RDP  just became a bigger hassle as the only way to access them is to use root in the VI client.  So, now I needed to setup Terminal Services on these boxes in administration mode.  Easy, right?  Until you realize that you need the CD/.iso to install it, that is.

So, I logged onto my handy Tech Net account and guess what?  You can download 3.11 with workgroups but not any flavor of 2000.  How great is that?

I looked through the local trove of Windows CD’s, no luck.  Searched on our admin file share, no luck.  Looked longingly at the dead HD that had my personal .iso collection on it.  And finally, a coworker scrounged one up out of their desk.  Way more trouble that it needed to be!  I’ll update the post with how my TS enabling goes…

It went just as described, but it takes a reboot to enable.  Dammit.  Going to schedule it now…

Hah – so if you read that documentation I linked to you’ll see that it relies on shutdown.exe – which happens to be part of the Windows Server 2000 Resource Kit.  Neither of which are available for download from Microsoft.  I pulled it from a 2003 server though and scheduled it up.  We’ll see what happens!

–Nat

Moving to “pretty permalinks” and adding Google Analytics

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Sitting at the kitchen table last night, I got tempted and hit the “change permalinks” button that is on the page where you create and edit your blog posts.  It worked out pretty well, I thought.  Then I tried to view my post – *bam* – every link on this site had been broken.  It took me twenty minutes of frantic searching that allowed me to find not only numerous plugins for WordPress that allow for redirection when you change your permalink layout, but the “permalink” options hidden under “settings” on the Dashboard page.  Sigh, crisis averted.

But now I really want to get back to those pretty permalinks.  If you click on the title of this blog entry, you’ll see it takes you www.teamjuchems.com/?p=178.  That’s lame when you consider it could be something cool like www.teamjuchems.com/2009/09/pretty-permalink-google-analytics (how much more awesome is that! ;))  This also allows your site to score better when indexed by Google, Bing, etc.  Anyway, it is a little more involved than just hitting that “Change Permalinks” button.  The only major task from that list that I have gotten done is to enable mod_rewrite in Apache, done via webmin.   I am not quite sure how to do the other bits, but I am guessing I will learn shortly.  The nice thing about self hosting this blog is that I am root and therefore can do everything myself and not hope that a provider will let me mess with settings.  Instant gratification (and site hosing) for the win.

Next up was getting Google Analytics tied into this site.  This was really easy, use your gmail account to login to www.google.com/analytics and get your ID.  Install and activate one of the numerous plugins that add the code for you (the one I used had been installed some 500,000 times, which is the highest number on a plugin that I have seen so far) and plug in that ID number.  Wait until Google crawls your site and its done.   And now I can see if people actually come to this site 😉

Finally, I realized that before making major changes (permalinks, new plugins, etc.) I need to make a backup of what I have.   I have sunk too much time into this little adventure to let it get messed up by a stupid mistake I make.  At some point I might even build up a test system which is some scary IT thinking following me home…

–Nat