After restarting my steam client tonight, I got the new Team Fortress 2 update with the new map, Goldrush and the medic achievements. I thought it would take a while to download, but I was able to get 250kbs download speed. Can’t wait to play with the new updates
Well, I have successfully completed my 2nd Lotusphere as of about a week ago. Overall, it was a success. This being my second year, I knew a little bit more how things work, and got to go to a few more things this year. Also, I didn’t spend that much time in the product showcase so I didn’t have a million emails and voicemails from all these vendors I will never work with, but I ended up with 5 or 6 new t-shirts. I also was able to utilize my evenings a little better this year, and had plans almost every night. I feel like I learned quite a few things, some of which I’ve already used in one of my projects, and I really want to start using a framework for helping with development. I was also impressed with IBM’s commitment to Lotus and what they are planning to do in the future. They are really putting a great deal of resources in making their products work better by using all the technology we have today. Just some resources that I wanted to point out. I really like what Nathan Freeman did with his hair. Check out his blog at http://www.lotus911.com/nathan/escape.nsf Also, Rich Waters framework, Ext.nd is coming along well and is great for those who want to web enable their apps extremely quickly. Check out his work at http://www.rich-waters.com/blog/ Well thats all for now, and I look forward to what Lotus surprises us with next year.
Here are a few options to optimize playback so you do not use 100% cpu. I have found these too dramatically help performance on my systems. You may need to tweak a few of these to your liking depending on your system setup.
First off, the biggest thing to turn on is XvMC.
The next things are to manually edit your xorg.conf with nvidia optimizations.
With these changes, you should have your HD playback running with about half the cpu it did prior to turning these settings on, try tweaking with other settings and let me know if you have anymore from your own experiences that may be helpful.
I finally took a leap and got rid of my old 98 Ford Contour. It had been a good little car, but was costing me a lot to maintain. I happened to be at a dealer looking at a Nissan Altima, but they were unable to get pricing where I wanted. Then it came up that they have a 2001 Lincoln LS loaded and in good shape. They gave me a great deal on it so I purchased it instead. It doesn’t get great gas mileage, but it is an awesome car. I will include a picture and some more specs later.
Just saw that schedules direct hit their second milestone and those of you who signed up for the 3 month plan at $15 now gets 6 months for that price. The next goal is to get enough members to get the pricing down to $20 a year. Good Luck and thanks for all the hard work guys. Without it, my MythTV box would be useless.
I learned from my boss today that in the Notes User Group Meeting in Cincinnati yesterday, it was brought up that running an SSL cert on your domino server will cause about a 25% performance decrease and since we have been seeing some performance issues, we are now looking to offload that to either our router or some other way. I personally attended the Notes User Group in Columbus yesterday and I would have to say the I was a little disappointed in the turnout of only about 10 people, but the presentations were very good. We had a presentation of ProcessIt by Teamwork Solutions, a IBM rep talking about Notes 8 and composite apps, and finally Rich Waters showing off Ext.nd and what they done recently and I would have to say that the framework is making great process and I look forward to seeing what those guys come up with in the near future. Hopefully a stable release so I can use it in my production apps at work. Right now I can only play with it in test mode.
Well even though I’m not a fan of the big ten network, I jumped aboard so I could watch the Ohio State Buckeyes first home football game on TV. Originally I had planned to switch to DirecTv whom I had scheduled to come out the Sat morning of the game, but then on Thursday a few days before, my cable company, Insight picked up the station so I decided to cancel the DirecTv and stay with Insight for the time being. I’m now fighting with Insight to enable the serial port on the Digital Set Top box, a motorola DCT-2224 so I can change the channels with MythTv, but they refuse. I think I’ll probably end up going the IR emitter way even though its not that reliable.
Well as some of you know about over here in the midwest part of the United States is that greed has moved not only from the NFL, but over to college football as well. This year, games that used to be broadcast regionally over ABC have now been moved to a new network called the Big Ten Network. Now every Ohio State game that is not nationally broadcast can only be found on the big ten network. This also applies to men’s basketball as well. So as for right now, the only provider in my area that will have the big ten network is DirecTV. The big ten network is charging an enormous amount of $1.10 per subscriber and wants it part of the basic cable package therefore the cable companies have to pay that for each subscriber which all of my local providers were unwilling to do. So as for me, I’ve decided to make the switch to DirecTV so I can get all the games, but it poses a problem with my simple MythTv setup. I now only have a limited number of feeds available for my myth box and also need to be able to handle changing the channel. This project is in the works and I hope to be able to document step by step what I did to get it working.
For those of you who use MythTV for their DVR got some exciting news this last day or two. Schedules Direct just released the pricing of $15 / 3 months to start out, but after they get a lot of subscribers, they hope to get pricing down to $20/year. I know its not free, but I could gladly pay $20/year once they get it all worked out. I’m just glad those guys have been able to get something together so we can continue to use MythTV. Check out their website at www.schedulesdirect.com for more information as the time gets closer to the Sept 1st deadline.