Video @ Yahoo!

Haven't had any time to really write recently because of work and other things going on, but check out the latest change to Yahoo! Video.  It's pretty neat and reposition to take on youtube.

The world's information.

Google's traditional mission statement is to "organize the world's information." Yahoo has never been as much about organizing information as much as it is about finding information (original Yahoo portal), centralizing personal information (My Yahoo), and generating information.

Google has recently launched some pretty cool things. Even though I work for Yahoo, I don't hesitate to say it when Google launches good stuff. Good stuff is good stuff!

The world need both companies. Yahoo can generate the content and let Google organize it. ^^

Check out Google's latest toys and the new Yahoo! Homepage.

tech.yahoo.com

Aimed at helping consumers with technology, Yahoo launched http://tech.yahoo.com which is something like CNet.  It looks pretty good although they are using Flash (I tend not to like Flash) and that the layout has some bugs on my Linux-based Firefox.  Check it out.

Visual Studios Express

Microsoft has decided to permantly make their Visual Studio Express editions free from their previous "it's free if you download it within a certain time period".  I guess now it makes more sense.

XP Blue Screen

In theory, WinXP is suppose to prevent letting software crash the OS and seeing the dreaded Blue Screen of Death and overall I guess I do see less blue screens then previous versions. However, software drivers can still crash the OS which I found out recently. It took awhile before I tracked it down to a buggy network card driver. WinXP detected my Netgear FA312 ethernet card on installation and even Windows Update didn't find anything more recent drivers. However, I was starting to see random freezes and crashes to blue screen with the message: DRIVER_IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. It took me awhile before I found someone on the web mentioning that he had the same problem and it was caused by a buggy network driver.

I went to Netgear's site and downloaded the 1.8 version of the driver and so far things look better. I'm mainly writing this to remind myself that if I ever had to reinstall winxp again to not forget to update the driver.

Anime fest

Over the past two weeks, I've been doing some serious anime watching. ^^; Some of the anime were ones I've not seen before and some is just re-watching what I had already but finally got on DVD. What I've watched recently:

Samurai Deeper Kyo (full season)

Inuyasha (season 1 & 2)

Slayers

Maison Ikkoku

Marmalade Boy

Slam Dunk

Burst Angel

Slam Dunk

Slam Dunk was a huge manga in the late 80s and early 90s. If Dragon Ball was the hit of the 80s, Slam Dunk was the next huge hit. I remember seeing it everywhere, and I remember that I was skeptical about how good a manga about a Japanese high school basketball team can be. One day, I was bored and decided to rent the first two mangas and I was hooked. I eventually bought the entire series and even years later, I still enjoy going back and reading it. The anime came out around 1993 and there were some early fansubs of a few episodes and the movies (which were disappointing). At the time there weren't any LDs of the TV series so all of the fansubs were based on fairly poor VCR recordings with mono sounds!

I haven't kept up with the later fansubs, but then the domestic rights were picked up by Geneon. This weekend I picked up the first two DVDs of Slam Dunk. The anime was done very well and was exceptionally faithful to the manga even down to the art. If you read the manga, you will recognize the scenes except now they are animated. The subtitles are like close captions since it even describe emotions (i.e. "shocked gasp") and overall there weren't much extra effort put in to the DVD. There are basically 5 episodes per DVD and no chapter stops within each episode. There are no extras, no trailers, nothing. Still, the anime itself is very enjoyable and the translation is good.

For such a huge hit that it was, I'm baffled as to why Geneon does not promote this series at all. There's absolutely no mention of it on their site other then a press release and it's not listed among their offerings. Have they decided to stop releasing beyond the 4 DVDs that's out there?

Linux Desktop

I've never really used Linux as a "desktop" system. Instead it has always been a "server" where I would run web servers, database servers, file servers, etc. With the new box, I've actually connected it to my monitor using a KVM switch so for the very first time it can potentially be used as a desktop system.

Basic things such as browsing with Firefox, etc. worked out-of-the-box on Fedora Core 5, but one area that I've never used Linux for was to play video and sound. I downloaded the VLC player from rpm.livna.org (which also hosts RPM packages for ATI and Nvidia video drivers) to see how well it can play some of the media files that I have. The files played without any problems, so I was very pleased, but I haven't tried it on any Windows media files which I heard did have problem on 64bit linux.

Backing up Windows

After the painful process of reinstalling WinXP, I felt compelled to do what I can to avoid repeat doing this again in the future. I figure that what I needed was a disk imaging program to backup my windows partition so that I can just restore it without having to go through the install process again.

I've used Norton Ghost before, but the version I had wasn't very good. Setting up a bootable CD wasn't easy and it required me to go to DOS in order to backup. New versions might not need to do this.

My criteria were that it must be easy to use, can automatically backup to CD/DVDs, can easily create bootable rescue disk, and can restore the backup without Windows. I settled on True Image and tonight I tested it out. The reviews were favorable and wasn't too complicated.

My first three CDs went into the trash. I finally set the priority to "Normal" (from the default "Low") and was able to burn the backup CDs. The aborted writes before changing the setting were very annoying since there was no explanation given as to why they failed. True Image also installed an annoying animated icon in the task tray which I found to be distracting. I took out the various startup commands since I don't need to do scheduled backups on this computer. Once I changed the settings, everything worked without a hitch.

Finally, I feel like I've gotten the different boxes up-and-running.

Postgres vs Oracle

Here is an article regarding Postgres vs. Oracle from the DBA perspective. It's good to see professionals starting to look at the merits of open source database alternatives instead of just MySQL.