Pulp Free

I’ve stumbled upon the next greatest need for my office. Even though I just purchased a new computer about a month ago (it’s now serving as my main VM/File server) - I just came across a picture that finally pulled my life long love of music together with my geek side:

After a bit of searching (just a few minutes actually…) I found Spotswood Custom Computers. Man… I want one! Visit their site gallery for more pictures and color combinations… Just not sure about the $500 for such a luxury… Perhaps I should put that on my wedding registry!

Today is Easter.

Yeah - I cheated. I linked to Wikipedia again. But for the second year in a row, I passed my no meat on Friday’s (except for the first Friday in which our cafeteria at work decided not to have any fish… Well, that was my excuse that afternoon. C said that I should of had a grilled cheese sandwich… grrr…) But I failed the first Friday the previous year so at least I’m consistent. The rest of the 40 days I did “good”.

Anyway - since it is Easter and we’re getting ready to have a small family celebration, I thought that I’d highlight some nice pictorial reviews of the holiday. At first I thought that this might be appropriate:

Isn’t that nice? Tulips and a little girl running through them? Or how about this:

Yeah… That’s more like it. Just like the colored Easter eggs that we made growing up… (suuuurrre you did… just like those! - BTW - if you like that, you can also grab a full view of that for your desktop… so pretty! LOL - Of course, they’re not real… they’re from digitalblasphemy.com)

However, how could I not include such basics as:

Or the brilliant:

And if I look really hard in the Internet (where all content ever created lives forever…) I’m pleasured by such gems as:

When isn’t it really about this?

Well, I started out this having fun and then threw in that religious stuff (oohhh - he’s so serious!) - No - I’m not all that serious but I think if all I did was joke about Easter less than a month before my wedding, Father Nick might have a few words to say to us!

Anyway - I’m sure there’s more, but I think I need to be swiffering the floors right now.

I chuckled to myself after ready an article called “The Ill-Fated Apple III“. The last paragraph includes quite a funny quote:

The Apple III was not a bad computer, and indeed, it was a somewhat better machine than its main competitor, the IBM PC. But it was boring. Randy Wigginston, who at age sixteen was one of Apple’s founding employees said of the Apple III, “The Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during a group orgy, and everybody had this bad headache and there’s this bastard child, and everyone says, ‘Its not mine.’” Apple users hoped for something more than incremental improvements from Apple; at the very least they expected something that would make them abandon their Apple IIs and hunger for the successor. The main legacy of the Apple III was to dampen the sense of invincibility that had arisen at Apple in its early years (Levy, 124). Along with the Lisa, the Apple III is one of the most rare of the old Apple computers still in circulation and it is highly sought after by collectors. Its short production run and curious story make it irresistible for collectors interested in Apple history.

Figuring that I was an avid Apple II user both at home and at school (I think it was around 3rd grade - Mrs. Bone’s class…) all the way up through high school - I do actually remember the Apple III… But never saw it anyplace than at the Apple store…

I, like many of you, have started moving into Microsoft Windows Vista territory now that it’s been released. I’ve tried it back when the release candidates were out just to see what was coming up. Sure looks pretty! But there wasn’t a lot more that I found personally useful. I was thankful that my MOTU UltraLite had drivers even during the Beta period. Nice work! However, I’ve slipped back to XP for my daily needs only because of what most people have found - driver and application support just isn’t there.

So this mention of Vista isn’t about the daily computing needs, it’s really about the Media Center aspect and watching HDTV via my XBOX 360 as an extender. For me it was atrocious. I couldn’t watch anything. The screen would blank, network would go bonkers and I’d see ehshell.exe at 100% CPU for (what I would consider) no reason at all! I have a pretty decent dedicated system, a P4 w/ 2GB memory and 2 TB of disk space. And besides, MCE 2005 didn’t have an issue at all… Played everything smooth as silk. That meant… ** gasp ** it’s probably networking!

So Vista changed everything under the covers with how it handles the networking stack. Fine - no big deal. Vista networking in general hadn’t been a problem so far. I could copy files back and forth between my desktop and other servers on my network without an issue (mostly - look at the bottom of the page). I was even able to push my gigabit network upwards of 58MB/second (which was pretty sweet in itself…). But there in lies the magic keyword… Gigabit.

After much searching online after including “Vista” and “Media Center” as well as “XBOX 360″ I finally discovered what seemed like my solution:

You experience poor video quality or slow performance when you use Windows Media Extender features on a home network that uses a Gigabit Ethernet switch on a Windows Vista-based computer (MS KB929707)

Basically Vista handles A/V network streaming for XBOX 360 over UDP instead of TCP as how XP does it. Doesn’t seem to be a big deal, or does it? In my case - it does. I have a 16-port gigabit router that everything in the house is connected to. However, the XBOX is 100 Mbps. So I tried the following:

Method 2: Manually enable flow control in the receive (Rx) direction

1. Click StartStart button, type ncpa.cpl in the Start Search box, and then click ncpa.cpl in the Programs list.

User Account Control permission If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.

2. Right-click the Gigabit network connection, and then click Properties.

User Account Control permission If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.

3. On the Networking tab, click Configure.
4. On the Advanced tab, click the flow control property that is in the Property box.
5. In the Value box, click the value that enables flow control in the receive (Rx) direction, and then click OK.

Well - that didn’t solve my problem. (However, it was the second option in the KB article - let’s try the first one!)

Method 1: Change the link speed to 100 Mbps Full Duplex

Yeah - I didn’t want to do that since, hey… I’m on a gig network and I need that speed! But what do you know… It worked. It worked perfectly. I almost cried a tear of joy… But 100 Mbps? I think I’d cry more if I had to go back to that speed! But it did get me thinking… “Hmm… Network related… Flow Control… I wonder…”

So all of my network cards supported Flow Control and they were all set. Let’s go look at the router!

I picked up a really nice Dell PowerConnect 2716 router about 6 months ago to replace my (POS) 8-port SMC SMCGS8 Gigabit router that was failing on some ports. Needless to say, I’ve had zero problems with it and it’s been one of the best pieces of computer gear I’ve purchased (and it’s on sale right now for less than $190!!).

Thinking that I had everything setup perfectly, I figured I probably needed to investigate a bit further on this whole flow control thing. Sure enough, opening up in the admin console and checking out the settings… What do I see? Flow Control set to Disabled. (Click image for full size…)

So with a quick switch to Auto-negotiation and flipping back my hard set 100 Mbps on the network card to Auto-negotiate (to get my lovely speed back in place… You can’t hard set gigabit connections…)

I was enjoying HDTV via Vista & my XBOX 360 without a hiccup. Since this discovery happened around midnight, I think I probably Rocky Balboa’d my hands in the air before heading upstairs and going to bed.

Mission Accomplished.

Now if somebody could just help out with my Vista to Vista odd network behavior! (I hoped that some of these fixes might help - but they didn’t… And yes - I know that it’s a different symptom all together!)