The average download speed in the US is 5288 kbps and 4066 kbps in Canada (from Speedtest.net May 1, 2008 21:30 PDT).

Plugging these numbers into a Download Calculator gives these results:

The download file size of a movie through iTunes is not available to me at present. Nor is the pixel count to be able to properly compare these maximum DVD and Blu-ray file sizes with iTunes. I would hazard a guess that if you buy a movie from iTunes, you will get lower quality than you would get if you bought the DVD or Blu-ray. Those still watching TV on standard definition TV sets likely won’t notice or care that the quality is lower. Those who’ve made the investment in high definition equipment of any sort aren’t going to like what they get. Hopefully Apple has a good refund policy….

Once I’m done typing this message I will attempt to post it to my blog at http://www.brianlang.ca.

I’m including a photo of my son Joseph picking what he wants to eat for supper. Just to see how Google Docs handles it.

Update: Well, Google did it’s job – kind of. Missing from the Publish to blog feature is the Blog Post Title. Something Needs To Be Done! Otherwise I will have to come here and edit every post anyway. What’s the point in using an external editor if I have to come here and edit after the fact. Why not just start here and write the post here in the first place. Or in me email software which is – oh – Gmail? I could post a blog post via email with a title, why not from Google Docs?

Other than that, it looks OK. Google Docs will even let me un-publish a post, edit it and publish it again. There’s also a re-publish option, but I didn’t try that today.

I’ve switched the UI from Windows Vista Aero to Windows Vista Basic which freed up a lot of memory and processing power. It seems my 2.4 GHz Celeron isn’t up to the task of running the Aero interface. I do have a 256 MB video card and 768 MB of main memory. It appears that more main memory is a requirement. Based on the performance I’ve seen so far, I would not recommend running this system on a Celeron processor, or with any less than 256 MB video memory (on a dedicated graphics processor card) and 1GB main memory. It would be far better to run with 2GB main memory.

As I write this, I’m using Firefox (with four tabs open), FileZilla (doing a online file deletion task), Picasa (beta) (indexing my photos and uploading photos to Picasa Web), and one Windows Explorer Window. Windows Task Manager is showing 51 running processes, CPU fluctuating between 50% and 90%, and a Commit Charge of 913 / 1809M. Biggest memory users are Picasa and Firefox. I think a memory upgrade may be in order.

Monday – Oilers vs Carolina hockey game starts. I Browsed MS blogs while the Oilers lose the game.
Found a possible solution – copy the entire contents of the Windows Vista DVD to hard disk and install from there. Did the copy; ran the install; SUCCESS! I’m running on Windows Vista Ultimate (Beta 2) right now. Took about 2.5 hours to install on my system.

The install process gives you a clean install with a Windows.old folder with the complete contents of your old installation. No files or settings or software is copied over for you. If you want the old stuff – copy it back. Software needs to be re-installed. I’m now in the process of getting myself back up to snuff.

Software/drivers automatically installed:
HP printer/scanner driver – haven’t tried it yet

Software downloaded and installed so far:
Flash Player
NVIDIA GeForce drivers (video card) – still might be some quirks with this
Firefox
Win2PDF
iTunes + Quicktime

Next up:
Microsoft Office System 2007 Beta 2
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
QuickBooks
TSW WebCoder
Ulead PhotoImpact
Google’s Picasa
Corel Print House 4 (I don’t have high hopes for this as it was written for Win 98)
HP Camera drivers
iPod drivers
VPN driver

Probably take me a few days to get everything up and running. I’ll try to keep you posted.

This time I got an error copying files to my computer. I’ll give it one more try and see what happens.

Before I even considered updating to Vista, I ran the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor which found no impediments to installing Vista.

Here’s my base system specs:

• Intel Celeron 2.4GHz
• 768 MB RAM
• 230 MB Disk (useful space) in two partitions
• DVD burner
• CD burner
• NVIDIA GeForce FX5500 (256MB memory)
• 10/100 Network card

And my peripherals:

• Logitech wheel mouse
• Microsoft multimedia keyboard
• HP PSC 1510 (printer/scanner/copier)
• HP Photosmart 935 camera

Here’s what I encountered during the install process. I apologize if the steps are out of order at all.

• First off I made sure to copy my files to a separate partition on my hard drive.
• Then I popped in the DVD and started the installation.
• The first screen asked me to check with Microsoft to download the latest installation file. The installer took a while to find the file (busy server at Microsoft I think), but once it did, the download was very quick. The installer then quit and restarted.
• Next, the installer continued with the Collection information step. During this phase, it identified three pieces of software that I had to remove before it would continue. I had to un-install McAfee Security Center (and by extension my McAfee anti-virus software), Windows Defender, and Real Player. I had to close the installer; the installer gave no option to go back and repeat this phase. I went to bed at this point and started again this morning.
• Next I removed the required software and restarted the computer (Anti-virus software required a reboot to un-install).
• I then restarted the install process, and re-downloaded the installation file. No further warnings appeared, and installation proceeded.
• The next stage was to select which type of installation I wanted to do. I chose to do an Upgrade Install as I didn’t want to have to re-install all my software. The only other option was to do a custom install which apparently would’ve allowed me to choose to do a clean install as well as disk options (partitions, formatting, etc…). I didn’t examine the options at all, so I can’t comment on what’s down that path.
• The Upgrading Windows window then sat on my screen for quite a while. There are five steps to the process as follows:
  • Copying Windows files – copies files from the DVD – would appear to be limited to the speed of your DVD drive and the IDE bus.
  • Gathering Files – DVD activity seems to be non-existant; disk activity is variable. It took a long time at 91% and a very, very long time at 99% before proceeding.
  • Expanding Files
  • Installing features and updates
  • Completing upgrade
• Installation failed sometime in the last three steps. I heard the PC reboot at least twice but wasn’t sitting watching it. I’m going to attempt to do a clean install now. Will start another post to display the results of that attempt.

Or something like that.

What I ended up doing was this:
Format C:\
Re-Install Windows XP
Re-Install All Software.

Fortunately I have two hard drives and I could use the second for backup. I don’t recommend this if you don’t have any way to do your backups.

Not the best solution in the world, but whatever. It worked.

I just watched a slide show of photos from one of my recent hiking trips while playing music from my computer. Very nice now that it works.

I am using Apple’s iTunes software to manage my music collection because my wife has an iPod. I’ve shared the music collection between us using information gleaned from a post on marius.org. I have turned off iTunes “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” feature and am organizing the music manually in a Genre -> Artist -> Album hierarchy. I’ve left the “Copy files to iTunes music folder…” option selected. So iTunes creates an Artist -> Album folder for me when I import it. Then I manually file the music where it should be. Then I remove the album from iTunes. Then I re-add the moved folder to iTunes. It’s a bit convoluted, but it does what I want it to.

Things to keep in mind to get Media Connect working with Windows XP:
1. File names – make sure you don’t have any illegal characters in them. Make sure these don’t appear in the Song Title, Album, Artist and file name for any music files you want to use. For the record they are these characters: / \ : ; * ? ” <> | I’m not sure if this is critical, but I did have some files with these characters in those fields which I then removed.
2. Share only those folders of media content that you actually want on the XBox 360. I have re-sorted my music collection into Genre sub-folders, and only shared those folders that I want to play through the XBox 360. Makes for a shorter boot time for the PC too as every time you re-boot, Windows Media Connect parses the list of files in the folders being shared.

Hopefully this information helps someone else someday. If it does, please post a comment to let me know!

I’ve decided to create all my digital music files in MP3 format so that I can use my XBox 360 to stream the music from my PC through my sound system. The XBox 360 will not read AAC files, which had been my first choice. So I’ve now started ripping all my CD’s into MP3 format at 192 kbps with iTunes. The benefit of MP3 files is that they’re widely supported. The biggest drawback is that they’re not the best format out there. There’s much debate over what is the best format, but I’m not going into that here. I settled on MP3 mainly for the compatibility reason.

I wanted to set up Apple’s iTunes software to allow myself and my wife to share one music library instead of each having our own (possibly with disk-space wasting duplicates). The Sharing option within iTunes 6.0.1.3 only works across the network, and does not look for other shared directories on the same computer, so that didn’t work. A quick search on Google found a post on marius.org that provided exactly what I wanted. The instructions allowed me to move my music library to a central directory, and then let any users set up on my computer to have access to that music. Once I get my new hard drive, I will have to re-link the junctions to a new directory, but that’s not a big deal (read the link I provided if you’re confused by all this).

Are 32GB memory cards too big or too small? One 32GB memory card would hold more photos that I take on an average hiking trip, or more than I took on my two week summer vacation this year but my entire collection would quickly grow beyond the capacity of one card. One card would hold my entire collection of digital music and all the documents I’ve ever produced or saved. But as I fill the cards, I would ultimately start worrying about physically losing them, or worry about them failing. How does one protect against loss of a memory card?

How about replacing hard disks in computers with memory cards instead? Can it be done? How fast would Windows XP boot from a memory card instead of from a hard disk. Would it be reliable enough? I would like to see someone produce an expandable array of 32GB memory cards at a price point equivalent to a similar size hard disk. A lot of new computers these days come with a 160GB hard disk. Why not replace that with a 5 card array of memory cards? I don’t think there’s any technical limitation preventing manufacturers from this goal. There may be economic limitations (ie. cards too expensive to compete with a hard disk) but given enough time the price of electronic components always drops. Computers could be built with the operating system on its own memory card. When you want to upgrade the OS, you just replace the card. All your documents would be safe on their own cards. Add another card to hold all the software you use. It could be done. Will anyone actually produce such a system? Who will take up the challenge and commercialize it?

Wired News has an interesting article on distributed computing with a twist. Why not put to use all the spare computing cycles that game consoles generate? Given that the current XBox is a 733 MHz machine, and the XBox 360 is supposed to have 3 3.25 GHz CPUs, you’re looking at over 13 times more processing power than the original. And given that most XBoxes are connected to the internet full time, why not process data in a distributed computing grid?