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Windows7 Media Center has some very nice features. It also adds some complications due to the recorded file formats being non-standard.

Good Stuff Working

So, the TV guide data is connected to ClearQAM channels now. Some shows have been setup to record every instance, and the media files are being dumped to a directory that I can live with, not the default. Finally, the Hauppauge 950Q remote is working and fully controlling MCE. Sometimes the system locks up, for no apparent reason. Connecting guide data with a specific QAM channel has been the most troublesome for lockups.

WTV Format? WTF?

MCE has used DVR-MS files for years now. External programs to deal with this format have been created and 3rd party media extenders that understand MCE work with this format. Not ideal, but workable if you drink all the MS koolaid. So, obviously, Microsoft has to change the format to something new and different.

Personally, I like to remove commercials from TV shows and have a fairly automatic method for accomplishing this. WTV files are completely unusable for this method, but MS provides an easy converter to change WTV into DVR-MS files. Some 3rd parties have created watcher programs to automatically perform the conversion. In the meantime, just right-click on the WTV file in Windows-Explorer and select convert to dvr-ms… as the blog states. The wtvconverter.exe program was included in Win7 32-bit Ultimate.

I’m asking for help again with my Windows7 final installation. See, Microsoft gave the 32-bit version, not the 64-bit version. This puts a wrinkle in my original plan to host Win7 on the laptop because about 0.6GB of RAM cannot be used. On a system with only 4GB, 0.6GB is a bunch, perhaps too much to waste.

The current goal is:

JeOS/Linux-Host
|____Win7-VM (MCE)
|____xubuntu-VM
|____WinXP-VM (Visio / MS-Office / Quicken)

RAM allocation plans

JeOS – 512MB

Win7 – 1GB

WinXP – 1GB

xubuntu – 1.5GB

If Media Center in Win7 doesn’t work well enough in a VM; safe to leave on 24/7 with USB support, this plan will be trashed. The QAM recording is nice. For me, it is about the recording, not the playback or other features.

There are other complications in using Win7 Media Center. The recorded file format, for example. That’s something for another story.

32-bit DVD – ouch.

So I opened the Windows7 Ultimate DVD and uncovered that it only contains the 32-bit version. After swapping the old/Vista drive with the new/Empty drive in the laptop, I elected to install Win7 even though I’d end up unable to use about 0.5GB of RAM. I wanted to give the new OS a fair chance and gain some experience. The setup was fairly easy, but dumbed down too much for my liking. I actually installed the OS to the wrong partition (280GB), wiped it and reinstalled to the other partition (30GB), that was planned for OS and Apps. Then I proceeded to setup WMC – Media Center.

Windows Media Center – ClearQAM Supported!

I’d heard that ClearQAM was supported and looked forward to using it. My cable system switched almost all channels to QAM 2 months ago. I’d hoped there was an automatic translation between QAM channels and normal cable channels so guide data can be used. I haven’t found that, if it exists. I AM recording a movie as I write this. There’s no noticeable performance hit. Nice.

Data Migration

Overnight, I copied the data and virtual machines from the older drive to the new drive, about 150GB. I split the disk into 2 partitions – C: and D: . C is for the OS and programs. D is for data and virtual machines. This config should make data backup much easier.

I dislike the whole Library BullShite that this new OS forces. I also dislike the new Explorer look and feel. Is there a way to default all Explorer views to Detailed?

VirtualBox Migration

So, after getting the new OS installed, the very first program installed was Sun’s VirtualBox. Initial attempts to migrate all the settings and virtual disks didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. However, I did get 1 VM up and running with a small amount of effort. I’ll write up the actual steps and things that didn’t work in another post. There may be another way to migrate the settings, I did retain both XML files for Vbox and for each VM, so seeing the specific differences should be easy.

The next trick is to migrate a vbox image that includes a snapshot image. I’m cautiously hopeful for a good outcome with that.

About a month ago, I tried my first curry chicken in a crock pot. Eh. However, by changing the chicken broth for coconut milk, the whole flavor changed. It is good, really good, especially for the effort involved.

• 3-5 lbs of chicken
• 1 can of coconut milk
• 2 cans of chickpeas
• 1 med onion (sliced)
• Golden Curry paste (3 chunks, crushed)

Throw everything into the crock pot, heat on high for 4 hours, service over rice. The coconut milk and curry turn into a wonderful sauce. A little pepper and/or chili may be good to spice up the flavor some. Hum, perhaps next time.

In this thought provoking article, Indian science writer Pallava Bagla provides a one-sided, trust-everyone description of red tape causing delays with US payloads on the recent Indian moon mission. In the purely scientific world, where there aren’t any political considerations and everyone in the world is good, his arguments make sense. I’d like to live in his world, but you and I don’t.

Pakistan

The US has agreements with countries other than India. Perhaps Pakistan needed assurances that India wouldn’t get any knowledge that could be turned to military use? Getting multiple countries to talk takes time, agreements take longer. Perhaps those assurances for Pakistan could be leveraged for other US desires? If India had heard the details of this, would that have condemned the India/US agreement completely?

US Export Laws

The US is a country with laws. Those laws apply (mostly) to everyone and there are very few times when the President can simply order something to occur. Agencies may be told what the outcome should be, then it is left to those agencies to find a way to get to that desired outcome, legally. I’ve seen that in my time at NASA. Sometimes bad ideas and bad science are forced onto the agency for political reasons. Sometimes the agency loses track of the political issues and jumps ahead for the science aspect, then gets pulled back. The best NASA administrators tend to be very smart scientists with good political skills. The contractors involved simply want to make money first and gain knowledge second.

Military Uses

Many space science inventions have multiple purposes: scientific, commercial and military. Many scientists only see the scientific uses. Commercial secrets also have national boundaries when those secrets have military applications. Almost everything used in space has multiple military applications. It isn’t the decision of a company to determine which secrets can be shared with foreign countries or companies. I’d like to think we (the US government and US companies) have learned from prior mistakes., but without any oversight from outside the directly engaged parties, I fear we will. BTW, I worked at a different Loral subsidiary than the one who lobbied to sell China satellite technology.

I don’t profess to understand US foreign relations with either India or Pakistan and definitely don’t understand the difficult dynamics when all three countries are involved. However, not including those concerns in the article is a disservice to readers. Calling it red tape isn’t accurate.

ISPs, Internet Service Providers, are in a tough position. They oversubscribe their networks like the phone company has been doing for 100 years. As customers use more and more of what was promised, unlimited downloads at X speed, the ISPs are getting into trouble because they don’t have enough bandwidth for everyone all the time. It is only a very few users that cause problems for the company – that’s where the new-ish abuse clauses added to your ISP agreement come in and why download limits happen. 0.5% of users fall into this abuse clause. Now, imagine your city is full of college students all using p2p and VoIP. You don’t use VoIP, but you do use p2p. Do you mind if p2p is given a lower priority so VoIP traffic can work better? Should these VoIP phone calls be given higher priority over your traffic? That’s the question of Net Neutrality.

The real issue is that prioritization often isn’t enough. When the ISP receives more traffic than they can handle, it becomes a denial of service for everyone and almost all traffic is impacted. They have 2 choices, be aggressive about closing low priority traffic (p2p) by sending RST TCP packets or let that part of their network crash. Obviously, some of you will say they need bigger pipes, but that takes months to design, then months to build and they’ve been doing that for years – it isn’t getting any better. So, do they let their network crash or be nasty to p2p traffic?

With Net Neutrality, all traffic has to be treated the same; all packets are treated with equal priority. That means that when P2P traffic ramps up, web surfing, email, VoIP, VPN traffic all need to be RST just like P2P to keep the network working. It isn’t just P2P traffic, video traffic from Hulu, Youtube, Netflix and other sources also add to the traffic. Think of all the customer phone calls to the ISP that will happen. Think of all the VoIP traffic dropped? That will create lots of calls and complaints to the FCC for action since the ISP is obviously in an agreement with the phone company to prevent VoIP providers from working. It doesn’t matter that all traffic is impacted or that the ISP is trying to reduce the impact for most of their customers. The least evil thing the ISP can do is selectively RST p2p traffic since much of that is downloading copyright material anyway. I don’t have the traffic stats, but let’s say that only 50% of p2p traffic is for copyrighted material. That’s still a bunch. BTW, I think it is much higher, perhaps 90%. There are only so many Linux users getting the latest distro legally via p2p out there. The rest is music, TV, and movies being pirated, IMHO.

This Net Neutrality thing will force ISPs to create tiers of service and lower the price for customers who accept lower tiered packages. Similarly, those users with higher traffic needs will be charged greater amounts for the privilege. I wouldn’t be surprised should all VPN access be blocked without the highest priced plan – since VPN is used for business use. I’m surprised that the big ISPs haven’t already created Full Access and Protected Access internet plans.

1. Full Access is obvious – all the internet has to offer, minus the things they already dropped like USENET.
2. Protected Access would block all inbound traffic, setup a proxy to block porn and websites that aren’t child friendly, and control which client machines can access the internet. No P2P would work, neither would VoIP or VPN. You wouldn’t be able to run any servers (which are probably illegal in your ISP contract anyway) and no game servers.
3. A further capability could be to place you behind a corporate NAT router and have corporate-like PC management. Imagine your home network as part of a huge company network with patches pushed when IT decides. It can be done today. I’ve seen companies manage over 100K users in this way. I’ve seen what happens when a virus gets in too. They shut off the network for an entire campus, perhaps 5k users, while they got control of the virus.

Some parents would pay extra for this Protected Access, even without 100% assurances that you are protected.

Full disclosure – I DO NOT work for an ISP. I have designed networks and equipment monitoring systems for an ISP.

So, is Net Neutrality a good thing when you understand these other impacts?

Learned today that you can have both Vista and Win7 copy the entire path to a file in Explorer by holding the Shift key as you right click. Now there’s a Copy as Path option. When you paste, you will get “c:\directory\path\to the entire\file.txt”, including the quotes. Nice.

Sorry, it doesn’t work in other versions (no WinXP), but there are programs that will do it. Google a little.

If you are a smart phone user AND a Linux nerd, you WANT a Nokia N900.
Here’s a very detailed review, perhaps too detailed.

The highights are:

• CDMA (tri mode) and GSM (quad mode) cellular phone with 3G data speeds
• WiFi supported
• Linux – full multitasking; listen to music, surf the web, download files, and 5 other apps at the same time, no need to close apps to do something else* take that Apple lovers
• GPS and GeoCache-ready apps
• QWERTY Keyboard take that Apple lovers
• BlueTooth
• SDHC expansion memory, easily swapped, 32GB internal plus external slot
• 800×480 screen take that Apple lovers
• 3D graphic acceleration
• 5Mpix Camera with near HD-quality video
• User swappable battery take that Apple lovers
• Plays almost any video or audio media take that Apple lovers
• 1,000s of free Linux apps – lots of software is an understatement; xterm, PDF, RDP, VNC, games, Office/Productivity, IM, RSS
• Excellent VoIP and Skype support (Ovi, Google Talk, Jabber, and SIP) take that Apple lovers
• TV-Out
• Connects to your MS-Exchange server including Calendaring
• Mozilla-based browser with Flash 9.4 support and multiple window support (# only limited by memory). The reviewer didn’t fine any web pages that didn’t work regardless of javascript, flash, or AJAX.
• Oh, and all the things you expect from a PDA – contacts, calendars, email,

The review compared the keyboard to that of another Nokia phone, but I’d like a comparison with a Blackberry QWERTY keyboard, which I consider FANTASTIC for thumb typing. I’m curious about built-in security features too, though a lock code is standard.

The only downsides to this device are:

• Data plan needed (monthly cost)
• Unclear that any subsidy will be provided by any cellular provider.
• Unlocked price – $584 on Amazon. Ouch.
• Screen size reduced from 4.1" to 3.5" so it is about the size of an iPhone.
• No voice dialing?
• Java was not shipped with the device, but it is definitely available.

I need your help deciding how to use the free Windows7 Ultimate license Microsoft gave away yesterday. I want to use it on my laptop but need some considered feedback on how would be best?

Current Laptop Config

1. 4GB of RAM – may put 8GB in later
2. 320GB disk
3. Main OS is Vista-64bit Home Premium
4. VirtualBox 3.0.6 for Virtual Machines
   1. xubuntu
   2. WinXP Pro
   3. Ubuntu
   4. OpenSolaris
   5. FreeBSD

Initial Thoughts

My initial thoughts are to

• replace Vista with Win7-64
• eventually remove my WinXP-Pro VirtualBox
• use the built-in WinXP Compatibility layer

I spend 14 hrs a day in the xubuntu VM and only boot WinXP to run Quicken, a few MS apps and access TrueCrypt data. Perhaps 3 times a week.

Questions?

1. How good is the USB support in the WinXP VM?
2. HDMI output?
3. GigE networking – WiFi networking?
4. How good is the driver compatibility for Win7-64? All-in-One Fax, printer, scanner, old Creative Xen and built-in laptop camera are the only devices I see using, in addition to normal flash and ext USB disk drives.
5. Hauppauge 950Q ClearQAM TV tuner must work.
   • Does Media Center work with this TV tuner and ClearQAM? The current MCE doesn’t.
6. Can I consider Win7-32bit at all. Does it access the full 4GB of RAM? Is an upgrade to Win7 64-bit easy?
7. TrueCrypt, MS-Visio, MS-Office 2007, and VideoRedoPlus are the only uses for Windows that I have. No gaming, er … very little gaming.

Choices

1. Run Win7 in a VM, get used to it. Decide later
2. Backup the data and VMs, repartition the disk for OS, Apps, Data, and install Win7 ??-bit as the main OS
   • 32-bit or
   • 64-bit?

Thoughts and suggestions? Did I miss an option?

I assume that google tracks everything. Any search, they track, correlate and store with my other google app, google voice, gmail data.

Scroogle is a google anonymizer. You’ll want to use a plugin to access it. Further, Scroogle supports SSL encryption here

Scroogle claims to block google cookies, delete logs and search result files within an hour. Can you trust them? Maybe not, but what are the chances they will be hacked and your data will still be there? Also, google data is just 1 request away from being used in ways you may not want, so, for me, this is less risky than using google directly.