Friday October 26, 2007

HD at home: maybe not yet

In 2002, I visited Microsoft campus for the IEEE 1394 developer conference. It was great to see engineers from Apple, Microsoft, consumer electronics companies share pure passion for technology, with no bias or self-promotion. A hippyish dude from Mitsubishi demoed his baby: a rear-projection HDTV with FireWire I/O and Java-based GUI. Returning back to California, I bought a similar Mitsubishi set and built a decent home theater around it. I also planned to extend my av1394 driver to support video streams in this format, which is slightly different from DV.

Years passed, I minimized my material possessions, the home theater is also gone (it did not turn bad movies into good movies - shocking). Yet I'd like to try out the latest HD technology without spending too much money on outdated-in-one-year crap.

I already have a widescreen Dell 2407 with HDCP support. My computer is not up to the task though: old Athlon 64, weak video card. With Socket 754 on the mobo, I can't even upgrade to a faster single core, let alone a dual core, which is pretty much a must for smooth hi-def experience. That means I need to build a new system. I used newegg.com to estimate the cost:

Gigabyte P35-based m/b	$100
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750	$200
2GB DDR2 SDRAM	$65
ASUS GeForce 8500GT 512MB HDCP Ready	$80
500GB SATA disk	$120
Case, power supply, etc	$170
Pioneer BDC-2202 Blu-ray/DVD/CD drive	$300
CyberLink PowerDVD software	$70

Plus tax and shipping, comes down to a grand total of about $1200. Quite a bit of dough, just for wows. I will have to upgrade eventually, but my old box still has some steam. Standalone Blu-ray player is about $400, but I'm hesitant to go down that road again.

I also suspect that once hooked on HD, I will want to upgrade my cable subscription, too, and that's more money down the drain. I guess for now, I'll just buy $10 worth of beer and pay a visit to a less parsimonious friend.

(2007-10-26 08:46:17.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday October 21, 2007

Too much code review?

Reportedly, gangs of geeks, disguised in bifocals and armed with sharp pencils, are breaking into various properties and furiously inspect code, sometimes all night long. I'm speculating here, but it could be those Google dudes getting out of control... Stuff like this just makes me sick. And angry. Then sick again.

Seen on Rengstorff Ave, Mountain View, CA

(2007-10-21 17:26:02.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Wednesday October 03, 2007

Kicking it Brussels-style

After 7 years of pretending to know something about I/O, I decided to see if I can pull the same trick with networking. The first project I chose to sabotage is Brussels. Project's mission can be described with a thousand words, but, the creative type that I am, I drew you a cool picture:

The first bit of code I've just contributed (here's the webrev) is mainly for the MAC services module. I added per-link property handles, which the network drivers can use like so:

    err = mac_prop_init("driver", instance, &handle);
    val = mac_prop_get_uint64(handle, "property");
    mac_prop_fini(handle);

For each plumbed link, MAC keeps a list of properties that ever entered the kernel. Pointers to these lists are stored in a hash table, using link name as a key. I also added MDB support for these data structures. The mac_proplist walker walks the hash table entries, and the mac_prop walker walks the property list, so you can say stuff like:

> ::walk mac_proplist | ::walk mac_prop | ::print mac_prop_t

Even more convenient is the new ::mac_prop dcmd (which internally uses the above walkers):

> ::help mac_prop

NAME
   mac_prop - display MAC properties of a link or all links

SYNOPSIS
   ::mac_prop [link]

ATTRIBUTES

   Target: kvm
   Module: mac
   Interface Stability: Unstable

 > ::mac_prop
            ADDR LINK             PROPERTY         SIZE VALUE
fffffffec7d80480 bge0             default_mtu      8    1500
fffffffec7d80a80 bge0             adv_autoneg_cap  1    1
 >

There wasn't an existing MDB module for MAC, so I created it too. Here's a good opportunity for other contributors to the MAC layer, hint hint, to add more MAC data structures to MDB.

(2007-10-03 16:40:52.0) Permalink