Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

A few days ago I was emailed by someone who had a few questions about upgrading an old laptop they’ve had for several years. They were very certain that they needed a larger hard drive but had heard of “RAM” (Random Access Memory) and didn’t know if it was something different or the same as a “hard drive”. This is a common mistake many make. To help remedy mistakes like this I like to create simple analogies to help explain how a computer works so they are easier to understand. In this particular case I like to use the human body for comparison.

So let’s imagine that instead of a computer we were talking about the human body.  The parts between the human body and computers that would roughly equal each other would be:

CPU = The math-crunching part of your brain.

RAM = Your short term memory.  Stuff in here is being thought about right now and is instantly available to the CPU if needed.

Hard Drive = Not so much a part of your brain as it is a thick book being held in your hand.  Like a book, it requires you to actually LOOK at it to get information out of it, which requires you to also use your other hand to thumb through its thousands of pages and use a pencil and eraser to add or remove information from it; lots of physical hand movement going on here.  It is similar to your own long-term memory.  Information stays here after you shut the computer off or go to sleep, but takes longer to recall and longer to write into than RAM.

For reference, here is a short video showing off the inside of a hard drive while it is working.  Think about the book and your hands thumbing through and writing/erasing pages while watching this video:

In computers, RAM consists of little chips that do not contain any moving parts but can store information temporarily while the computer is powered on.  Data can be read from and written into RAM in a matter of nanoseconds at rates as fast as or faster than a gigabyte per second, primarily because there are no moving parts, just like the CPU (or the human brain).  In a very real way, RAM and the CPU are like different parts of a brain that work in concert to produce results quickly.

When a computer is told to load a program, it has to copy that program it into RAM for later use.  In the human body, “loading a program” would be kind of like opening that thick book I mentioned earlier to a chapter like, oh I don’t know, “Chess:  Instructions and Rules.”  If you can remember all the instructions and rules right after reading them for the first time, then you can play the game without any need to stop and read the manual every time it’s your turn.   Likewise, if a computer is able to load a program into RAM completely, then it won’t have much need to access the hard drive after it’s been loaded.

In the old days, if you didn’t have enough RAM to load your software into, it simply wouldn’t run at all.  This isn’t true these days because modern operating systems use a feature called “Virtual Memory” (or “swap space”) where free space on the hard drive is used as a sort of simulated fake RAM.  This would be kind of like taking that book, turning it to the back where the pages are blank, and taking notes… a LOT of notes.  This leads to the dreaded hard drive “grind” (that sound you hear when the hard drives is constantly doing something; that KRRRRRRRR sound) where the hard drive is so overwhelmed with reading and writing information that the entire system slows to a crawl while it waits for the hard drive to finish whatever it’s doing.  In humans, this would be kind of like trying to do taxes for 20 corporations at the same time; you’d practically wish you were dead.

Fortunately, RAM can be easily upgraded and these days it’s one of the most economic ways to improve your computers performance and postpone its obsolescence.   With more RAM, your computer can load larger, more complex programs and relieve your hard drive from the daunting task of pretending to be RAM.

I had a major streak of creative energy after lifting weights earlier today and made this in about 5 hours time.  It’s a work in progress.  It’s easily in there with the Psytrance genre.  Enjoy!

Some of you might know me to be a bit of a Linux geek who is a sucker for the open-source philosophy and culture.  It sure is a beautiful thing in the world of computers; using software that’s free of charge and free to modify because a bunch of people decided to give it away to the public and do whatever they want with it.   This has worked out VERY well for Linux since it began, with bored programmers using the Internet as a global workbench to approach and tinker with any software they wanted and the best results would come to the surface as a new standard, often with no money changing hands.

It’s difficult for most people to imagine doing something like this because we don’t know a thing about computer source code.  We sort of have a foggy idea about it and could boil it down to “a list of instructions for a computer to follow” and add that those instructions can be edited and improved upon by anyone.  Any description more complex than that and it starts to sound like Greek… but for this post, it’s good enough.

Now  imagine you took this model of open-participation and applied it to music production, doing it all on the Internet.  You’re a musician, you play an instrument or have a singing talent and want to find other musicians who share your musical taste.  This is difficult to do in the real world, especially if you’re stuck in Kansas like me.  Sure, it’s easy to find a Kareoke machine on any given night if you look hard enough but finding good, original, local musicians is hard.  So the next best thing is to go online and (in a way that’s reminiscent of posting personal ads looking for a significant other) post your own creations/recordings to be judged by others… perhaps even loved by others, modified by others, built upon by others until eventually the little tune or melody you started with turns into a fleshed out composition that sounds very professional.

This is exactly the kind of situation I’ve found myself in during the last 3 weeks after I did some searching on google for “online music collaboration” and discovered Kompoz.com and indabamusic.com.

I signed up for both at the same time and uploaded the same music (three songs of my own) to both sites.  All I had to do after that was sit back and wait for others to possibly like my music and wish to add something to it, or not.  Over on Kompoz, in a matter of just 2 or 3 hours, a fellow from Latvia named Nikitt had uploaded a new guitar track to one of my songs on Kompoz.  Within a few days after that I was getting emails from people wanting to perform lyrics to the track.    A few days later, another astonishing guitar track was added by a dude from Florida who calls himself Grumpy.  And in all this time, none of the tracks I uploaded to Indaba got even a hint of attention or interest from anybody.  So either they think my music sucks over at that website or (more likely) the user interface for indaba is a mess that makes it difficult for bored musicians to find new projects.  So  maybe Indaba would work for you but it certainly didn’t work for me.

But enough about Indaba failing me.  Kompoz on the other hand has really bolstered my dream of writing a lot of good music.  It’s just so much easier to be able to upload something and for someone else to come along and add an idea to it.  It really is a lot of fun; I would tell my fiance Kristin that it’s like Christmas every day because you never know what you’re going to get.  This happens in part because some of the people who use the site live on the other side of the planet and leave stuff online while you’re asleep and when you wake up you might be surprised to find new recordings uploaded or at least some productive comments.

So this is what I’ve been doing with some of my spare time lately and just wanted to share.  You can check out my Kompoz profile and projects by clicking here.  If you happen to be a musician I encourage you to join Kompoz.com with a free membership, but if you’re serious about music production it pays to get a premium membership for $50 a year so you can exchange high quality WAV files and even publish music for commercial release and get royalties out of it.

So about 90 seconds ago I learned about this website and knew I had to write a quick blog about it.  The site is called Ninite Easy PC Setup.  This is a website that allows you to download multiple popular Windows applications, from web browsers to anti-virus software, and install them all at once!!  This is a HUGE, HUGE time saver.

You look through their selection of software, check off the programs you want and it will create a custom bundle from your selection and wrap it all into one easy install package for you to download.  When you run the installer, it installs all the apps, one by one, automatically without user intervention and without any spam “extras” that might come along with some of them (like browser toolbars that do more harm than good).

Check it out at www.ninite.com

Back to regular font land now, I just wanted to add instructions for Windows and Ubuntu users on how to install this font.

If you are a Windows user, all you have to do is copy the TTF file into your c:\windows\fonts folder and that should be it.

If you use Ubuntu, save the file to your desktop.  Then right-click on it and click “Open With Font Viewer”.  This will pop up:

Unlike my window, yours will have a “Install” button in the lower right corner for you to click on.  Just click Install and you’re all done.

gksu nautilus /usr/share/fonts/truetype

I got a call today from someone who was in need of help with their Power Mac G5 computer.  The problem they were having was the system would power up, the famous startup chime sound effect would play but there would be no video displayed on the monitor.  As far as the monitor was concerned the computer was still off as the power light on it would remain amber instead of turn green.  Unfortunately you don’t get Mac-oriented training in most technical institutes so I didn’t know exactly how to approach the problem.  Is it hardware?  Is it software?  It was time to call for reinforcements!

With the help of a friend of mine who happens to use a G5 for graphics design work on a daily basis we began troubleshooting this machine.  Going off of Apple’s official troubleshooting pages we tried holding Command-Apple-P-R at boot in an attempt to reset the PRAM (which is similar to a PC’s CMOS) but for some reason it would never reset, or at least we never heard the second chime sound indicating a reset.

Ultimately the thing that did the trick was unplugging the systems power cord, opening the case up, removing the dual-fan assembly that’s in front of the RAM slots and pressing the PMU Reset button located on the “logic board” ONCE!  The ONCE part of this was stressed as pressing it more than once could potentially turn the system a trendy looking boat anchor.

When the system was powered back up there was no video for a moment and then the OS finally started to boot.  I shut the system down,  turned it back on and it still worked.  So I had considered this a finished job and decided to shutdown and take the computer back to it’s owner.  Well, then things got strange all over again.

With the system back under the desk in its original location, reconnecting the USB cables for the printer, keyboard and mouse to the computer and pressing the power button I was greeted to a chime, the grey-on-grey Apple boot-splash screen but that was it.  No whirly-circle busy animation, no hard drive activity, nothing.  So I forced the power off and waited before retrying again.  Suddenly we were back to square one with no video on screen.

I decided to see if hitting the PMU reset would help here so I unplugged the system, opened the case, pressed the button and shut it back up.  That didn’t work.  Finally I unplugged everything from the system except the keyboard and the power and turned it on again.  The system finally booted up to the desktop.  I shut it down and reattached the printer and the networking cable while the system was powered off.  For some reason this had an effect on the computers ability to boot up because it didn’t want to show video once again.  I pulled everything but the keyboard one more time, powered it up and it booted all the way up once more.  While the computer was on I reattached all the USB cables as they were, which produced no problems, shut the computer down, and finally upon powering it back up it successfully booted all the way.

So, we have a very interesting glitch here with Apple’s Power Mac G5 machines.  It would seem that if you have the system powered off and you attach certain devices via USB while the system is off, it gets confused when you first turn it on.  Perhaps the PRAM keeps an inventory of USB devices and where they are plugged in that throws a fit if anything on those ports change while it’s off.  Well, that’s what I think.  It’s only a theory.  Alternatively there might have been something going on with the printer; perhaps some funky USB-to-LPT converter wasn’t declaring itself properly.All that I know is the best thing to try if you have this kind of problem is to unplug the machine and all cables attached, hit the PMU reset ONCE, plug the power and keyboard only back in and then press the power button with your fingers crossed.

This reminds me of a PC that my fiances father owned that had a PCI USB port expansion card in it to add 3 more ports to the back of the PC.  You had to plug USB devices in before turning the computer on or they wouldn’t be detected by Windows.  Kind of the opposite of what’s going with this Mac.  I’m sure fixing something like that would be a matter of a firmware update for the card itself but there wasn’t one available when I checked, nor were any updates available for Mac OS today.  Anyway, it was a learning experience for me; its not too often you get a chance to attempt fixing a Mac hardware problem.

I have my M-Audio and Yamaha keyboards hooked up and ready for me to bang out some tunes yet haven’t brought myself to move forward on previous tracks I’ve started work on.  However, I have stumbled across some really neat music someone else made.  I discovered it while watching this video of an ant-shaped robot:

After sifting through the comments for another video by the same robot-building guru I found out that the song in this video is called “Parks On Fire” by Trifonic.

I’ve just purchased their deluxe digital copy of two of their CDs for 8 dollars.  You can stream/preview the whole thing with this little jukebox I’ve embedded here.  If you enjoy it, show your support for an independent musical group and buy their album!

This tutorial will show you how to setup a program called PS3mediaserver which will allow you to share your multimedia files with your PlayStation 3 over a local area network.

Commands and links mentioned:

• sudo apt-get install mencoder ffmpeg mplayer vlc ubuntu-restricted-extras
• http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/downloads/list

This tutorial will show you how to share a folder in Ubuntu with a Windows virtual machine running inside Virtualbox. Make the video full-screen to enjoy it in HD quality.