I am planning to install MediaWiki for my site www.istaysharp.net. This way I can easily add/update content, because currently the site is static, and that's thre reason why it's not updated frequently.

It was planned for this evening to update www.istaysharp.net, but a new version has been released of MediaWiki, version 1.6.1. I hope the upgrade will go smooth and that my code will still work :)

One other interesting point, is that apparently there is an experimental support for connecting to an Oracle database (read release notes). Are there any plans for supporting MS SQL Server 2000? If so, please let me know!!!

LAME is a very popular LGPL MP3 encoder. For a long time LAME version 3.90.X was recommended, now version 3.97b has been released. This version uses the -V setting, with a value from 0 (highest) till 9 (lowest) quality in VBR. More details about these settings can be found here.

Instead of lossy compressions like MP3, there are also losless codecs like FLAC (Free Losless Audio Coded). No quality is lost, but the file size is much bigger. Here are some results in applying the above settings on a regular audio cd:

Setting	File size	Remark
WAV	721 MB	losless, uncompressed
FLAC	405 MB	losless, level 9 (highest)
LAME -b 320	163 MB	lossy, CBR 320, highest possible quality
LAME -V 0	105 MB	lossy, VBR
LAME -V 0 --vbr-new	102 MB	lossy, VBR but another algorithm (better quality and smaller)

You can assume that with the settings used here you cannot distinguish the mp3 from the original cd. A very good resource about audio, codecs and tests is Hydrogenaudio . This graph gives a nice relationship between the file size and audio quality for the LAME encoder.  Between V0 and CBR320 setting, you see the file size increases by 50%, whereas the quality does not increase as much as that.

Recently I purchased a new computer and I wanted to setup a RAID5 on 4x SATA Western Digital 200GB's. The motherboard is from Asus, the A8N SLI Deluxe which has 2 SATA controllers, the Silicon Image 3114R and NForce4. I also purchased a WD Raptor as boot disk which is connected to the NVRaid because it supports NCQ and the SI3114R not.

First of all I wanted to test if my raptor was faster than a normal 7200 rpm HD. And thankfully this was the case, it was about 10MB/s faster.

RAPTOR 74GB

7200RPM 200GB

After that I tested some RAID (0, 1, 10) configurations on the SI3114 controller. One thing was clear, that mirroring on the SI3114 isn't optimized for reading, it's even a little bit slower than reading from a single disk. This has also been confirmed in a review (images are broken) from xbitlabs, where they also conclude that it doesn't have any optimizations for mirrored arrays, but focuses on RAID0. As you can see from the benchmarks there is no performance gain in RAID 1 (left below image) against a single disk (right up image), and RAID10 performs like a RAID0.

RAID 1 STRIPE 64

RAID 10 STRIPE 64

So, the SI3114 was not an option for me. Then I looked for setting up a software raid in Windows XP. Yes indeed, you can build a RAID 5 in Windows XP after doing a little hack . For more information check out the article at tomshardware named Using WindowsXP to Make RAID 5 Happen.

Here I did a benchmark with a stripe size of 0.5 (default) and 64K. As you can see this gives a big difference.

RAID 5 STRIPE 0.5

RAID 5 STRIPE 64

From the benchmarks with default stripe size I conclude that the read performance of RAID5 is about the same compared to a single disk, but the write performance is about the half of a single disk. This solution did not satisfy for me, because the performance is not what I expected, consumes CPU and I don't like the idea that I had to enable it by hacking some DLLs in Windows and there were some issues with Service Pack 2.

Therefore I concluded to buy a PCI-Express SATA Raid controller, namely the Areca 1220. The Areca RAID controllers perform very well and include all the RAID features you need. A very detailed review with a lot of benchmarks can be found here.

The ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe does have 2x 8xPCI-Express ports, which can be used for example for one VGA card and a RAID card, it doesn't need to be 2 VGA cards. To be sure I sended an email to Asus to ask if the Areca controller is compatible with the motherboard. The Areca stand at CeBIT told me they sended controllers to different manufactors (Asus, MSI, etc.) to test the compatibility and will update the 'Compatibility list' on the website.

UPDATE:

Until now it's not yet possible to combine for example one VGA and one RAID card in an SLI Motherboard, it's a BIOS issue.

So, I hope getting more news soon

This weekend I visited CeBIT. It was a long trip due to road works and heavy rain, but it was worthwhile. There was a lot of people, but thankfully CeBIT at the Messegeländer in Hannover has about 30 halls. In one of the first halls, there was an exclusive car from Bugatti. Surprisingly there was no pricing indicated 

I think it was at the expo from AOpen that a couple of case-mods were shown. One of the most original one was certainly this one:

One of the manufactors that i didn't want to miss was Asus. For me there were 2 things that caught my attention: the new A8N SLI Premium which is the succesor of the A8N SLI Deluxe and of course a DUAL Geforce 6800 Ultra on one board. As you can see the board is huge and I don't think it will fit on every motherboard and/or case, but it's still a prototype of course.

One of the things I focused on, was SATA PCI-Express RAID cards because I am planning to buy one for my system. The most well known RAID card in this category at this very moment is Areca, who were present too. The card that I am planning to buy is the ARC-1220 with 8x SATA ports.

HighPoint showed also their latest products and in particular the RocketRaid 2320, which is an 8 channels PCI-Express to SATA II host adapter. The new products are included in the product guide that I took from the stand at CeBIT. The products they showed are listed here.

I also went to 3Ware, and they told to me that the PCI-Express RAID cards will be released by November of this year.

It was a long weekend, and I spent most of the time in the car but it was fun and interesting. See you at CeBIT 2006

More info can be found here.

This is really a dream for every programmer & gamer... The Grand Canyon Monitors

Sony Ericsson announced today the P910 smartphone, more information about the release can be found here.
A review about the P910 smartphone can be found at My-Symbian.com.

The first opening key note was very entertaining and refreshing. There was an introduction of the team services in VS.NET, a demo with 3d-glasses on a 64-bit platform, a promising project called SkyServer.org, announce of the Express edition of VS.NET, and many other things.

It's very well organized, everybody at TechEd receives a login where you can check your email, surf on the internet, you receive a bag with a huge set of goodies and documentation, etc.

I just returned from a session of FABRIQ which can be downloaded on GotDotNet and it's a very nice messaging architecture that can be interesting on the project I am currently working on. So, be prepared Tom, Franco and Peter when I come back to Belgium :)

Now we are going to eat something...

greetz from A'dam

This weekend I visited CeBIT 2004 at Hannover and as usual there was a lot to see. It was a trip of about 450 KM but we had no traffic problems, although there were a lot of road works. We slept in the hotel Montana Lauenau which was perfectly in order and was on the road to Hannover. Finding parking at CeBIT was far from easy, practically all parkings where full but we did find one for only 5 euro for the whole day!

One of the things I have seen a lot at CeBIT were usb-sticks (one seen of 1GB) and mp3 players in all kinds of formats and capacity. An original idea was Lubic where you can create your own PC case with components, like you do with Lego. It goes from an Airplane to a Giraffe, for example:

SOHOTANK Stackable External Box from the company Stardom was exacly what I was searching for. It has a very nice design and it's easily expandable. They offer also RAID solutions!