Computer Technology

Last Updated 17 Nov 07
Copyright 2007 by Stephen Vermeulen

For keeping up to date with the latest industry news and reviews of PC hardware these are the sites I keep returning to:

Slashdot has lots of odd information, plus tends to do quite a bit with space and general science news.
AnandTech good PC hardware site, has a running digest of whats new on many other similar sites
The Register good for general industry wide gossip, rumors and innuendo
Storage Review good for comparitive reviews of hard drives, cdroms and DVDs. Has a very useful searchable performance database, allowing you to compare todays new drive with your old clunker and weep!
CDR-Info is all about CDR and related technologies and software
X-bit Labs for reviews and news
Adrian's Rojak Pot has a number of nice references for BIOS, RAID and a collection of reviews
The Linux Daily News portal site
AMDBoard focuses on the various AMD based motherboards
Motherboards.org has quite a good assortment of reviews (not just on motherboards)
EverythingUSB.com focuses on USB news and information

These pages focus on various computer topics of interest to me.

Computer Security, firewalls, NAT and various threat related articals
Backing up PCs, this is just not as easy as it should be
Building and upgrading PCs, useful links relating to parts, operating systems and FAQs
DVR Building, notes on building a digitial video recorder (also called a PVR)
Web Pads, demand without supply?
The Palm Pilot, probably the most usable of all the palm sized devices
SVG - the new standard for Structured Vector Graphics
Linux information
Python information
Java information
XP and Win2K information
Web Site and Web Server information
Notes on computer networking
USB devices

Remote Access Computing

VNC is a very useful piece of software (now supported by RealVNC) that allows you to control one computer from another's desktop. It is free, source code is available, it is quite small and is available on many platforms. It also allows you to control a PC from a UNIX box or visa versa. In fact you could even access your PC's desktop from a PalmPilot (since the Pilot's screen is so much smaller that the average PC this is really a technical curiosity, but it works and may occasionally be useful). In fact, this software is a lot like Norton's PC-Anywhere except its free and works many places Norton's will not. Another project called TightVNC exists (reviewed here) that is working to improve VNC's performance over bandwidth limited connections. Here's a simple "macro" capability for automating a VNC session. Recently (1 Feb 01) a web based service from GoToMyPC.com to do this has also shown up. It appears that webex and Control-F1 also have similar technologies. vncrec is a tool to record VNC server sessions as a movie. CamStudio is another package that can be used for capturing screen sequences. A guide to capturing a screen sequence and saving it as flash using vnc2swf, there is another guide to this here which also mentions using the Windows Media Encoder package to do the same thing (but producing larger files). Here is another guide, this time using pyvnc2swf on a Linux system.

ThinkNic is a diskless workstation aimed at the internet terminal niche. For US$199.00 and no more fees it sounds rather interesting. Here is an artical on using these to run some form of Linux.

Notebooks

Here are some reviews of notebooks etc. that have caught my eye:

NEC Versa UltraLite, is transmeta 600MHz powered and only 1" think, yet still has a 1024x768 pixel display
A very slim and light model from Sharp, but pretty poor for expansion.

Manufacturers

Epson, the best photographic quality inkjet printers
Canon, also mkes very good photo quality printers, in 2002 these started to rival the Epson units and have surpassed Epson in speed and possibly also in quality of output.

Software

CD-R IsoBuster freeware
RecordNow MAX CD burning software that includes DVD capability
WinOnCD CD burner now owned by Roxio
Easy CD Creator 5 burner software from Roxio
CD Recordable FAQ
Cross Platform Packaging softare
Python for the Palm Pilot
A book called Thinking In Python is online
a comparision of some RDBMS products
NewTech Infosystems makes CD burner and backup software
FAX software from SmithMicro
The Watcomm C++ and FORTRAN compilers are going open source
Arkeia has network backup softwarefor mixed Unix/Windows networks
WinImage is a disk imager for floppies (and other disks) rather like the old DMS from Amiga days
TinyApps.org trys to publicise small (i.e. floppy disk sized) apps for the PC
Wolfram Research the authors of Mathematica, its not cheap but may save you a big head ache. I wonder if they wouldn't sell a lot more of these if they had a more "normal" price for the software?
Globe Productive is a office productivity suite that started on BeOS and is now being ported to Windows, hopefully it can free us from Microsoft'c increadible bloat-wear. Its reviewed here by Ars Technica, and has been Slashdotted here. It has a very attractive "family license" which lets you install it on all your computers at home and evenon you machine at work! According to this Slashdot artical it is going to be GPL licensed.
ThinkFree Office is another low-cost alternative to Microsoft Office.
SOT Office 2002 is another alternative to Microsoft Office
And Star Office has just reached 6.0
And OpenOffice is reviewed here
AbiWord is a free word processor with more of what Word or WordPerfect have to offer
Geodesic makes some software development support tools (like Great Circle) that look for memory leaks and such. We recently had very good success with this package at work, in fact we turned to it when Purify consistently failed to work. If you are writing complex software that is programmed in multiple languages (ours uses C++, FORTRAN and JAVA) and interacts with an object database (such as ObjectStore) this might be worth a try. I have used a similar tool from Rational Software called Purify, though over the years this has got harder and harder to run (probably because the program we are running it on has got bigger and bigger). GlowCode also makes a package for code profiling and leak detection that sounds promising, and it is a lot more reasonably priced than Purify and GreatCiricle. If you are doing development with Java, then OptimizeIt is an excellent tool to have. This was written by VMGear and later picked up by Borland. This Slashdot artical also includes some freeware memory leak references, such as this page which has further references.
Netswitcher is a handy tool for laptops (low cost too) that will reconfigure the network settings for you when you move a laptop from one network to another.
BZFlag is an open sourced, free, multiplayer tank shoot-em-up game
GNU Radio, implements tuning and decoding of signals in software
CD Anywhere, from VCOM, allows one to load CDROM images onto a hard drive and then run them as if the CDROM was inserted into a drive.
Free Byte has a convenient list of the various free paint programs that are available currently.
The XEmacs programmer's text editor
DMS - a Dead Man's Switch for your PC
MAME the arcade game emulator project
Spheres of Chaos and Streamer from Iain McLeod
Eclipse is a generic Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
An XWindows server for Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP using Cygwin
The Cygwin project brings a UNIX API to Windows, which allows easy porting of UNIX tools
The POV-Ray raytracer program

Books

T1 A Survival Guide - a book review

Misc

Wireless access points, searchable database
Phillips has demonstrated running the FireWire protocol over an ethernet connection, in this case over the wireless LAN 802.11a and the slower speed 802.11b. So does someone make a FireWire card that has CAT-5 ethernet cable connectors on the back of it? Or is this software available to route the FireWire packets from one machine to another, say from your computer room to your home theatre room?
The Media Box project, to make a PC into a TV-accessible multuimedia component
The DiVX project
This project is reverse engineering the Creative Nomad Jukebox's USB protocol
Our user's group used to order a lot of blank floppy discs from Princetondisc back in the darkages when 3.5 inch floppy discs were a new thing!
Sharp is going to push Linux on its Zaurus PDAs in an attempt to win some ground from Palm
a new version of DSL is in development
PaceBlade looks like it might be a nice, light, portable PC
Cappuccino, a very compact (about the size of a thick CDROM drive) PC, also discussed on slashdot
PacificRoot and SuperRoot are alternative top level DNS providers
Microtech Ltd. has a dynamic DNS service. So does Deerfield.com called dns2go.
is there any group out there hacking the Ceiva digital photo frame? Here's a recent request for home-made picture frames. Digi-Frame Inc. makes some nice looking digital frames.
This artical has reviews of a lot of different devices that use embedded Linux to perform their magic
How to build your own rack mounted systems
OmniCluster slot-server cards are a full PC on a PCI card that you can add into an existing PC, perhaps you want to add a dedicated web server box, but don't want the full overhead of another PC...
An MP3 player with CompactFlast type 2 (i.e. MicroDrive) compatibility.
An MP3 player for the car from Denison Audio Systems that you get to buy the hard drive for separately
A portable MP3 player that uses 8cm CDR disks.
Snapstream PVR stuff. Building the Godzilla of PVRs with Snapstream, discussed here on Slashdot. This also mentions that Snapstream has been designed to make use of multiprocessor systems.
e.Digital makes some interesting MP3 players (including MicroDrive capability) and small digital voice recorders.
some new compression systems that might make their way into MP3 players
A timeline of the Microsoft trial
A low cost (well more affordable anyway) digitizer you can attach to an existing whiteboard to make it into a smartboard, bring those important meeting doodles right into your computer! Of course now you can get 2Mega pixel digicams for less than this price, why bother?
VDSL has been demonstated to run at up to 50Mbps, wonder when this will start to appear in use (10-Mar-02)
7 Years of Graphics, an artical that looks back over the last (crazy) 7 years of developments in the PC graphics card industry.
Addonics has a range of add-on type products for computers, including USB based stuff, removable hard drive racks, mobile CDRW solutions, and adapters to read a variety of flash memory devices (CF, SD, SM, Memory stick...)
Insurance for computers, for home and office
Another 100GB optical disk announced (well reached the "it works in the lab" stage - 20-May-02)
How much RAM can a PC have? Now and in the future, and is Microsoft going to charge you more to use it?
If you need to test your ADSL link to see what sort of upload and download speeds you get then try this tester.
On July 23, 2005 the Amiga turned 20 years old (it was show publically for the first time on July 23, 1985).
AmigaOS 4.0 has been released, but the AmigaOne platform is not currently available for it to run. In Apr'07 it was announced that two new Amiga desktop machines were being developed to run this new OS.
Oct'07 Amiga Inc. is talking about their OS 5 product, for 4th quarter of 2007.

Vendors

Computer Geeks will ship out of the USA
Alberta Computer Warehouse is a local dealer in downtown Calgary, Canada
IC Computers is a local dealer in downtown Calgary, Canada
Caltech Computer Centre is a local dealer in downtown Calgary, Canada
Macrotronics is a local dealer in north east Calgary, Canada
Memory Express is a local dealer in south Calgary, Canada
OEM Depot is a local dealer in south Calgary, Canada
London Drugs sells a lot of camera and computer stuff
Retro Systems specializes in computer recycling
The Laptop Depot has used laptops, desktops and monitors in Calgary
Future Shop is a big electronics dealer in Canada (a great place for DVDs too) who have reasonable selection of computer parts and peripherials
CompuSmart is a computer dealer in Canada
Staples is an office supply store chain in Canada that has a pretty good selection of computer stuff
A&B Sound has some computer and portable electronics
oemdepot.com is a local dealer in Calgary
Mediasonic is in British Columbia
TigerDirect.ca is the Canadian branch of TigerDirect.com, they have lots of stuff (including hard to find cables...)
Comp-U-Plus has a good general inventory
Softmagic.ca has a good selection of computer parts
Insight.ca has good tape prices
NewEgg, has a rather slow web server
NCIX.com is based in Vancouver Canada
NewType Computer Workshop (NTCW) is also in the Vancouver area, they carry some mini-ITX motherboards
Silicon Alley Computers, are based in New York state.
1Click2Computers.com, is a Canadian vendor of computer components
DirectCanada.com, is another Canadain source of computer components

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