I saw this over on the STREAM website.
It's yet another perspective on the importance of caching to software performance.
I saw this over on the STREAM website.
It's yet another perspective on the importance of caching to software performance.
Nikon has just announced its intent to discontinue production of most of its non-Digital cameras. In a digital world, this isn't too suprising, but for someone who grew up with Nikon film cameras, it's a bittersweet thing.
One notable thing about the announcement is that it also includes lenses for large format cameras and enlargers. These are both low volume but highly significant markets. Large format cameras are view cameras, cameras that offer incredible control over perspective as well as the ability to use very large film for very high resolution. A large format camera might have 80 times the negative size of a 35mm SLR: in digital terms that is roughly equivalent to 80 times the number of pixels. Large format cameras are what Ansel Adams used and represent the very highest performance film cameras. If there was one area where film was likely to offer unique value over digital, this was it.
My wife and I recently bought a TiVo Series2 for ourselves, as well as a second one as a gift for my parents. Both are set up to use WiFi as their connection to the TiVo home office. Both were a pain in the !#$#@ to set up for WiFi.
As you might expect, WiFi on the TiVo is a huge boon: not only can the TiVo download scheduling information without being connected to the phone, it can also communicate with PC's on your local network. TiVo provides a program that runs on your PC, TiVo desktop, that allows it to share MP3 files and pictures with the TiVo box itself. With that setup, you can play MP3's over your TV (or stereo) and browse digital pictures using your TiVo remote control. It's a wonderful, wonderful feature.
The dark cloud around this silver lining is the fact that the design of the TiVo box makes it difficult to find a WiFi adapater that actually works with the TiVo. There is no Ethernet port on the back of the TiVO, so you have to use a USB WiFi adapter to connecte it to the network. Maybe its the fact that TiVo runs Linux, but for whatever reason the TiVo is very, very picky about which WiFi adapters work and which don't. Fortunantly, they provide a list of supported adapters: read it (all of it), live it, love it. TiVo has also started selling their own adapter, which might be the simplest way to get started. It's not even all that expensive ($50).
The other thing to be aware of is that the TiVo boxes that are currently shipping (eg: both of the ones we bought in the last few months) are running TiVo OS version 5.x, and the WiFi adpaters we used weren't supported until version 7.2.1. I don't know why they're shipping TiVo's with OS's that are 2 major revisions out of date, but there it is: you need to update your brand new TiVo to get current WiFi support. To get the new update, you need to have your TiVo wired into the Phone as part of the initial startup. TiVo will download the OS update when it connects to the home office (you can explicitly ask it to connect, which seems to work for triggering the update). Once you get the updated firmware, you can set up the networking, axe the phone line, and bring your TiVo's connectivity out of the early-90's.
Once set up, WiFi seems to work very reliably: we haven't had any trouble. The only real remaining issue we're working through is that my wife uses a VPN to log into her work on the same PC we're using to run the TiVo desktop server. (Can you see where this is going?) Of course when the VPN is up it keeps the TiVo from seeing TiVo desktop and accesing our MP3 files. There are a couple approaches to solve this, but haven't done anything about it yet.
One more thing: the TiVo Series 3, announced today, has 10/100Base-T Ethernet on the back panel. Now there's a good reason not to pick the TiVo $300 "Lifetime of the box" service plan.
I was roaming through the computer section of the University of Pennsylvania bookstore and ran across Pentium Chronicles, a 2006 book talking about experiences designing the P6 processor core used in the Pentium Pro, II, III, and Centrino. The author, Robert P. Collwell, was basically made employee number 1 on the P6 program when he was hired into Intel and given the assignment to "double the performance of the P5 on the same process." Of course, now, 15 years after that fateful assignment, it's pretty clear how influential the design produced by that program has been: it gave Intel a presence in the server and workstation markets, and it's still overshadowing its immediate sucessor, the Pentium4. Even if the project hadn't been that successful, the first 20% of Dr. Collwell's book has me convinved that it'd have been an interesting read anyway.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Kerry Nietz's book, FoxTales. As much as Pentium Chronicles was the view from the top, the perspective of a very senior architect at Intel on a huge, industry-wide project, FoxTales is the opposite: the perspective of a fresh out of school programmer working on his first niche market shrink wrapped software package. If anything, that means it's much more likely to be relevant to people with the time to read this blog: it certainly brought back memories of the first years of my career.
The best thing about both of these books is that they are both cheap and short. You can probably read them both for <$50 and 10-20 hours of time, all of which would be well spent.