I thought the Vectorform application for the Surface was awesome. The following is a demo that was recorded by Channel 9 at the 2008 PDC.

Corsair recently announced the release of a new 64GB flash drives. The new 64GB USB Flash Voyager has enough capacity for a library of HD movies. This is actually more space than my laptop or my gen 1 Zune. I am assuming that the next generation of Zune and iPod flash devices will match this much needed growth in capacity.

“In addition, Corsair 64GB USB Flash Voyager drives are bootable, which means users can actually store full versions of operating systems and applications in order to quickly “re-create” the necessary software environments to troubleshoot system problems.”

Here is a full datasheet on the Corsairs Voyager line.

I have recently had issues with my AC Unit that forced me to work from home (WFH) for the duration the repairs. We have a fairly flexible policy for working from home, however, I try to limit the amount of time that I actually work from home because I am addicted to life with two monitors.

I use a T43 that automatically becomes my secondary monitor, and I use the Samsung 204b for my primary viewing pleasure (I actually like this monitor so much I purchased one for my wife). I usually position Visual Studio on my primary monitor and reserve the various communications (Live Messenger, Sametime, Outlook etc) for the secondary monitor. Throw in UltraMon to handle monitor management and you are in for a highly productive time.

Unfortunately the experience of working from home requires me to alter my work flow which is frustrating for at least the first hour. So I am advocating that everyone who wants serious productivity should petition their manager to support the 2 monitor life style at home and in the office ... good luck with that ;)

Excessive ... maybe. Productive ... absolutely!!

I was glued to the weekends political coverage on CNN, not because I was interested in a winner, but I was very interested in the touch screen (The Magic Wall) being used by the senior political analysts.

The company involved with this technology is Perceptive Pixel and CNN demonstrated some slick zoom in and out gestures, and were able to interact with things like Google maps.  I thought I was looking at Microsoft Surface at first but looks significantly bigger and of course it looks like a TV.

Unfortunately this retails for $100k so that puts it even further out of my price range than Microsoft Surface. Below is a cool demo of the technology!

I read recently of an invincible checkers-playing program call Chinook. Apparently this computer can never be beaten because a bunch of scientists sat down and literally mapped out a metric crap load of moves and combinations (39 trillion) that would lead to a tie or a win for Chinook.

What is amazing here is that it took 18 years to solve what appears to be one of the simplest board games on the planet. Do not get me wrong this is an amazing landmark for computer science, I find the topic fascinating and I always wish that I had done more with neural networks and fuzzy logic while at University.

Ultimately I feel a little sorry for all the real word games that can/will be mathematically resolved to win, lose or draw. I think it takes away from the mystery of competition. Even the success  of IBM's Deep Blue falls way short of invincibility. The complexity of chess, or should I say the variations of chess, make mapping every move almost impossible. Resolving chess "would require an effort so massive that the world’s fastest computers would need eons to play out every possible move".

"Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think." - Ambrose Bierce

I ended up purchasing the Western Digital My Book (320 gig). This has helped me stop worrying about the years and years of digital photos that my wife and I have accumulated. I have also started backing up my music ... it is truly a relief I can now officially rest easy. I guess I should consider offsite backup but there is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to backups.

I was very disappointed that Western Digital (WD) only include the basic back up software with the more expensive units. I am going to continue to use the XP back utility. I may try modifying the startup initialization file on the My Book in order to run XP backup utility automatically when I connect it. Not sure if that will work!

"All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse." - John Quincy Adams

I have just completed a week long campaign to update the standard 40Gb Western Digital hard drive in my Dimension 2400 Dell PC. A few months back I started recording at 24bits and 44.1kHz, up from 16 bit 44.1kHz so I am burning disk space at approximately twice the rate. It should have been a quick install using the Seagate Disk Wizard to copy all my current data across to my shiny new 250Gb Seagate internal drive. I got this from Best Buy, as I had a $100 gift certificate to burn, and this drive was on sale for $99.

So I complete my drive Install/Data Transfer, and it takes over 6 hours (note 6 hours) to copy the files from one hard drive to another. I plug in the new hard drive and the first thing I notice is that my beautiful 250Gb hard drive only shows 127Gb! Surely this was a mistake! However, Disk Manager confirms that I only have 127Gb. After going through the Seagate manuals apparently I need to ensure that I have all the latest Windows Service Packs available to ensure that I can enable 48 bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA) support. 48-bit LBA support enables drives to be allocated in excess of 137Gb.

It should be noted that my DAW has been disconnected from the outside world since its purchase. There is nothing more frustrating than starting to record, and then having Windows go and respond to some network activity and drop the recording mid groove. So I began the long process of updating the windows OS, and while I was there I updated Windows Media Player (I was on  version 8 I think) and IE.

So again I started the 6 hour transfer process, and wow, I have over 200 Gb spare capacity for additional recording. This story should have ended here, however, I try to play some music in WM Player and I hear clicks, pops and stutters all the way through the music. I open up SONAR (my recording software) and its doing the same thing! Pure frustration! This behavior seems related to the hard disk so I take it back to Best Buy and get a replacement and start the 6 hour transfer process ... again ... and again I get the clicks and the pops.

At this point I do not believe I can get 2 hard drives with the exact same problem so I figure it must be my EDIROL UA-1000 Audio Capture sound card. So I update the drivers for the sound card with still no luck. At this point I start grasping at straws and begin looking at Disk Read\Write stats, along with Page Fault Delta information. All in the hope that my nightmare will be over. I did a couple of Defrags and even look at what it would take to optimize the Virtual memory allocation through the Paging File (Pagefile.sys).

Then I noticed the that I had not changed the IDE cable when I put in the new drive!!! There was a change from the 40-conductor IDE cable to the 80-conductor IDE/ATA cable (picture on right). The new cable is pin compatible with the old drive and so would not present a 'square peg in a circle' situation. The old cables do, however, present a problem with signal quality and reflection. Hard drive intensive activities would be the only real way to realize that there was an issue. I think I would prefer it to not work at all!

"The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past, in order to strengthen his character thereby." - John  Milton

Just read that Seagate is getting ready to release its first 1-terabyte 3.5" hard drive the first half of this year, they already were the first to the 750 gig plateau. I hate to play the 'remember when' game, but I do remember the IT department was in flap about being able to allocate a whopping 1 Terabyte of space on a SAN. It seemed like we would never have to worry about space again. Of course a few years later we really did have to worry about space. Now a mere four years later I will able to put that capacity at home (albeit without RAID), things are moving fast.

I know in the music industry the technology has reached the point where with analogue to digital converters (24 bit 192 kHz) has equaled analog devices (the human ear can only process 20 kHz). Video cards show 90 frames/sec the human eye can process about 21 frames/sec. My Gmail account is only 7% full, yet Google generously allows the capacity to keep growing, I hardly delete anything and at some point the emails will only be useful to the Google advertising engine and not to me!

With all these human limitations we still eagerly purchase bigger, faster and better. I am officially out of the rat race myself!

I am wondering what the upper limit for personal disk space will be 1 Tbyte, 2 ... what if I wanted to store every bit of digital data ... what if I never emptied my recycle bin! I think the safe bet, the secure bet is to keep unused data for about 18 months, then say goodbye!

"Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything." - Aesop