tempest in a teacup

I got a Gamebridge off someone at work last week.

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a device that plugs into your consoles’ regular composite/S-video cables and transmits the signal to your PC via USB, letting you either play your consoles on your PC monitor (which it does terribly, by the way) or capture screenshots and video from your console games (something for which it is far better suited). It doesn’t seem to do component, but I don’t own a PS3 or Xbox 360, so I have no problems with that limitation.

I hooked it up just now, and captured a sample video from King of Fighters XI.

Not a dazzling show of my combo skills, but it does prove that the device works pretty well.

Now I need to think of a way in which I can actually use this thing. I’ve got a few tentative ideas, but I need to figure out how feasible they are.

From time to time, when faced with a question about industrial development in Singapore, someone will trot out the predictable line “What do you mean we don't have any successful private home-grown MNCs? Look at Creative!”

Never before in my life have I felt more like punching that hypothetical person in the face.

Creative is not what I would call a “successful” MNC by any means – while their sound cards were good once upon a time, and they were one of the pioneers in hardware-based positional audio, they completely missed the boat when it came to integrated audio (something they're belated trying to make up for), and have been utterly flattened by Apple in the digital audio player space in spite of having been one of the first companies to enter the market. Their practice of disabling card features in software so they can force people to “upgrade” for better features (and suing people who try to make up for their lacklustre drivers) is pretty reprehensible. And of course, their drivers have sucked for a long time, and often come packaged with useless bloatware. Their failure to perform is most evident, of course, in their quarterly results, where performance has been abysmal for years on end.

So where am I going with all of this? Well, I have a Creative sound card. An X-fi XtremeGamer, to be exact. And I'm not sure that it was a good buy.

The first warning signs that I had made a bad purchase were when I tried to play Sam & Max Episode 104: Abe Lincoln Must Die! (which is awesome, by the way, if you like point and click adventure games) on it. The audio would periodically hiss or play back way too fast, which was a major issue for a game that focuses a lot on funny dialogue. It turned out this was an as-yet unresolved issue with the X-fi. More recently, after installing the latest driver, any WAV or MP3 files I play have the same issue. Even when my MP3s manage to play correctly, they're interrupted by intermittent popping and hissing. I'm really glad I backed up all my favourite tracks to my new 8GB Sansa e280 (which I seem to have forgotten to mention on this blog) or I would be even more mad right now.

A few Google searches suggests this is an issue with X-Fi cards ONLY on nVidia chipsets (due to PCI bus behaviour), which is of course not at all what I wanted to hear.

I'm going to try a reinstall to see if it fixes anything, and failing that I'm getting rid of it and switching to my onboard sound chip.

EDIT: Looks like the reinstall fixed something…I saw a whole bunch of registry entries get deleted and re-added while I was running the setup program.

YOU WIN THIS ROUND, CREATIVE! D:<

As you might have guessed from the title, this is another geekspeak-heavy post. I’ll try and make it digestible for the less technically inclined, as usual :p

This past week I took part in a course at work, meant to help Amazon employees understand Amazon Web Services (Click here if you don't know what those are). They’re basically a bunch of services that we vend to software developers to use in building applications. Examples of this are the Simple Storage Service (or S3) which is a simple data store which charges users based on how much space they use. There’s also the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which is a service that lets developers purchase computing time to perform tasks that they can’t do with the resources that they already have (like, say, running complex operations on data sets). In any case, as part of the course, we had to build something using the services that we sell, without access to the internal tools that make our lives easier.

I teamed up with a friend from my team, and we set to work building a system that would allow people to search for MP3 downloads on the Amazon.com MP3 store (shameless plug!) using the lyrics from the song instead of the title or artist name. We did get it working successfully (about half an hour before the deadline), and presented it to the entire class. At the end an award was given out for the best project.

We didn’t win, but it didn’t bother me that much, mainly because of something else I found out from one of the facilitators of the course. Apparently, while testing our code over the weekend, we generated so much traffic to one of the services that the engineer who was on call for the service that week got paged, and had to figure out who or what was creating so many requests to the service.

So, we didn’t win, but we did cause some poor guy to get paged over the weekend.

Sometimes, it’s the little things in life that matter. :D

I came across this interesting article at Slashdot a while ago (warning, link contains technobabble. I'll do my best to explain it below)

One thing that has become a big issue in the past year or so in the tech world is the problem of “net neutrality” – i.e. that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally. This has become a particularly acute issue over the last few months, with Comcast's practice of filtering peer-to-peer traffic (like BitTorrent) becoming perhaps the best-known recent incident. The argument put forth by those who support ISPs' right to control what goes through their networks suggest that the explosion of services like BitTorrent, streaming video and HD content in recent years means that today's ISPs are unable to meet capacity demands, and thus should use whatever means necessary to prevent bandwidth needs from spiralling out of control. Some have even suggested that ISPs should shape traffic in order to prevent people from swapping files over P2P illegally.

There is some element of truth to this argument, if only because broadband infrastructure in the US is in a woeful state – The FCC's definition of “broadband” is data services above 200Kbps. As a point of reference, I had a 256Kbps ADSL line in Singapore…nine years ago. There are plans afoot to raise the bottom bound to 768kbps but this still doesn't resolve the major infrastructure and cost issues with getting quality broadband access in the US – people in Asia and Europe are much better off. So I say that if ISPs find themselves in a capacity constraint situation, they probably have themselves to blame for not investing in infrastructure while they had the chance.

Well, at least, until I read the article above. It claims that the capacity constraint brought upon by the advent of P2P services can be relieved not by legislation or political wrangling, but by good old network engineering.

The article should be a good enough summary for the techies who might be reading this, but let me attempt to explain it for the less technically-inclined.

At the bottom of the problem is the protocol used to handle the majority of the Internet's traffic, the Transmission Control Protocol or TCP (Just like how a real-life protocol dictates how two humans might interact, a networking protocol is a description of how two computers can communicate over a network). Just about all traffic that requires reliable delivery from one endpoint to another uses TCP, and this includes a lot of P2P services like BitTorrent. The article suggests that TCP's built-in congestion control mechanism – i.e. the safeguards put in place to ensure that the networks aren't flooded with TCP packets – is inherently biased in favour of traffic similar to that generated by P2P applications. This is for a couple of reasons:

1. P2P applications use multiple connections, and thus aren't constrained by TCP's congestion controls
2. P2P applications transmit data continuously over long periods of time, while other applications like HTTP (web pages) and e-mail tend to use “burst” or intermittent tranmission

The combination of these two factors means that P2P traffic tends to “crowd out” regular TCP traffic on most networks (probably not on your home PC, since TCP congestion management focuses on upstream transmissions rather than downstream, but this would certainly be an issue for an ISP).

The immediate solution proposed by the article (or rather by a researcher at BT) is to change the TCP protocol to weight applications that use fewer connections more heavily, so that they don't get drowned out by P2P traffic. P2P transmission speed will take a hit while other applications use burst tranmission, but will recover once they're done. There are a few other, longer-term solutions discussed as well, but the main thing the article reinforced for me was that this should be treated as an engineering problem, nothing more. It can't be legislated away.

It also casts a somewhat different light on ISPs, in that they really shouldn't be subject to the vitriol they are these days. This resonates with me to an extent, in that as owners of a network, they're obliged to do whatever they can to prevent traffic from exploding. However, I still think that filtering is really only a short-term solution at best. I'd say it's better to invest in better infrastructure and long-term technical fixes (like the one discussed in the article, whether or not it ends up being feasible) than trying to stop a leaking dam from bursting.

It looks like apart from the EDGE network, Apple has more or less dealt with all the problems I had with the iPhone in one stroke. On top of that, proper Exchange support will be quite handy for keeping track of my work e-mail.

I guess I might pick one up when I decide to change my cellphone plan.

Click here to find out how

I thought it might have been funny if the Pakistan government's blocking of Youtube had caused yesterday's outage (the site was unavailable for pretty much half the day)…I guess I was closer to the truth than I realised.