mouldy.org

I've put together a Google calender with various races and events that I'm interested in.

It mostly contains short adventure races and longer mountain bike races, along with a few running and orienteering events.

To see it, use the XML feed, ICAL file, or web page.

I've just released the first version of Background Check Antivirus.

BCA is a little project that I've been working on in my spare time. It's a free virus scanner for Windows that uses ClamAV engine.

The whole point of it is that it does its job without bothering you. It'll scan without slowing down your computer; it won't eat up the battery life on your laptop, and it'll update signatures without telling you. It just does it thing and leaves you to get on with your work.

Knuth said, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil".

I've been working on a little virus scanner project in my spare time. I'd been designing it so that it could be spread across multiprocessors for a performance boost.

A few months ago, I read a blog post estimating that for every core you add to a system, you could expect a 'measly' 30% extra application performance. But extrapolated out to a 32 core system, this is a huge increase, which led to all sorts of "wow" and "ooh" and "this is the second coming of computing". Nevermind that CPU performance is just one factor in your total application performance, and often not even a significant one.

For some reason, my new laptop didn't come with a DVI port. What can be done about this situation? I'd like to be able to run a large LCD like the Apple/Dell 24" or 30" monitors - which are becoming remarkably cheap.

USB video

There are various USB to VGA adapters floating around; they're based on the PLX NET2280 part, which is a USB-to-PCI bridge. I'm guessing that that's coupled to a cheap video chip.

Unsurprisingly, people complain about laggy performance. I think that with some work, decent performance could be obtained - even with the 40MB/sec constraint on the NETS2280 chip, there should be enough bandwidth to provide good framerates.

So I got a Dell XPS M1210 to replace an ageing Inspiron 4100. I've had it for about a week now.

Things I liked

• The keyboard feels great. I especially like the Page Up/Page Down placement.
• The screen is absolutely gorgeous.
• Delivery was very fast - I ordered on a Sunday, and had it in my hands on Monday week. Five business days.
• The touchpad is very well placed for thumb-mousing - it's placed and sized very well. I doubt that this is intentional, but it works well for me.
• Performance is great. I very rarely have to wait for anything.
• 3D acceleration is pretty good. Most current games will run adequately.
• Very clean audio. Most laptops have quite a bit of noise - particularly when you use the Ethernet or wireless - but the M1210 is excellent.
• There are USB ports on both sides of the machine.
• The power cable is nice and heavy; it doesn't look like it'll break if it's flexed a lot.
• The case is smooth, well-assembled and doesn't flex excessively.
• The CPU fan is quiet, even at full power.
• Heat from the machine is well-distributed; the Inspiron 4100 used the base as part of the CPU heatsink, which meant it got pretty hot. Nothing on the M1210 gets particularly hot.
• The dual headphone outputs are handy. They can be reconfigured to give surround sound if you're that way inclined.
• The internal speakers sound pretty good. They can be muted independently of the headphone socket, which is nice for a work environment.
• The wireless LAN is fast enough that I haven't plugged in the network cable since initial configuration.

Things that could be improved

• There's an annoying whistling noise when running on the power adapter. It's very high-pitched - right on the edge of my perception. It was very noticeable to begin with, but after a week I'm deaf to it.
• There's no DVI. I desperately want to connect a 24" widescreen LCD to this thing. Why isn't the mini-DVI port on MacBooks and Sony laptops standard? I did consider this before purchasing, but found nothing that I liked that came with DVI.
• There's a lot of wasted space around the screen. It looks like they've sized the machine to be as small as possible while fitting the selected keyboard. The next panel size up probably didn't fit.
• The screen is a bit too small. I wouldn't want to be using it all day - which makes the lack of DVI a bit more annoying.
• The camera is lame in low light - which is pretty much anything indoors.
• Dell's website is a little deceptive; there's an Audigy upgrade which many people believe is for hardware. It's actually a software driver. At least it's only $18 wasted.
• The audio socket placement is really dumb. It's on the front edge of the machine - right in your stomach or leg or workspace.
• There's only one set of buttons on the touchpad.
• The power adapter is pretty heavy - lightweight 65W adapters have been around for years. It is pleasantly cheap, though.
• Like most consumer equipment, the blue LEDs are too bright. They're a bit distracting. You only need a fraction of a milliamp to run them as indicators!
• The battery life is pretty lame. I got the 6-cell battery - performance and weight were my priorities. I've spent maybe half an hour running off batteries, but so far it looks like the battery life will be about 2.5 hours for normal 2D, word processing and development.
• There's no TravelLite module for the DVD drive. It only weighs 200 grams, but I don't need it most of the time. On the Inspiron 4100, it's a handy place to carry cables.
• There's no dock. I can't be bothered unplugging and replugging everything every time I move the machine.
• Somehow, there's no gigabit LAN. For some reason that only comes on Dell's business machines, where I'd least need it.
• There's no legacy ports. This isn't surprising, and I welcome the change - but my GPS still runs on RS232 serial, and I use the parallel port for electronics stuff.
• It won't balance on its edge. I use that all of the time to watch videos while lying in bed! I need to prop it up with something now.
• The media shortcut keys are difficult to use. I prefer the old system where Fn was used to remap existing keyboard keys. There's no way to know which button will do what without looking at them, and that's too slow for me.
• There's no attenuation on the headphone output, so you need to turn the system volume down between the lowest setting and zero (with the keyboard). If you use the Creative drivers, you can't even do that, because they don't let up/down control the volume. iPod earphones are OK, but the supplied earphones are way too sensitive. You just can't turn it down far enough.

Overall, I'm quite pleased.

For a long time, I've maintained that I took two useful subjects during my four-year university education: a data structures course, and the subject where I met a future employer.

What could be done to improve this situation? How could university study be made more relevant?

Formal study is a bit like cross-training for a sport. It'll be beneficial, no doubt, but the best training will be to play the sport itself. The best way to become a good coder is going to be to get lots of practice coding; formal education should simply guide you and give you the benefit of experience. Hence, theory, best practices, and lots of homework.

Chapter 1: Getting rich is easy! You're so smart for buying my book. And you have such pretty eyes.

Chapter 2: Wow, look at the big numbers! Compound interest did that!

Chapter 3-5: Work 12-hour days and be a subservient whore. You're guaranteed to triple your income in a year!

Chapter 6: If you start your own business, the cash will roll in. Except when it doesn't. But it will for you!

Chapter 7: Everyone makes money off real estate. Especially with a rent/purchase price ratio that's two orders of magnitude out.