Sybreon Ones Nought

I have had my PS3 for 3 days and I think that I would like to say a few words on my early usage experience. I have updated my PS3 firmware to the latest 3.01 and it seems to be working just fine (for now at least). I have also registered my product on the PlayStation Network and gotten my account set up. This has enabled me to download and install new applications.

Another note on my LG television, the PS3 is capable of communicating with the television over CEC. Even though Sony uses Bravia Sync and LG uses SimpLink, I guess that some of the basic commands are compatible. So, my LG television can tell the PS3 to turn itself off whenever I turn the television off. Of course, I have configured this to only work if my PS3 is not actively doing something like playing a game. Otherwise, a naughty nephew can really ruin your gaming day.

Life
It is a mash of various applications that don’t seem to do anything useful. The basic Life application gives me weather information from around the world by displaying it on a beautifully rendered globe of planet earth. When I jump from one major city to another, it also displays news headlines for the day, which I can read by clicking on the specific news story. The news is culled from Google News. I was quite miffed at first when I couldn’t find Kuala Lumpur on the map. I guess that it was not built into the default configuration but after a while, it appeared. I guess that the PS3 was trying to sync and download data from the Internet.

It also includes a nice photo viewer that shows interesting heritage sites from around the world, and most importantly, it includes a folding@home client, which allows a PS3 to contribute positively to society by battling cancer and other problems that we are trying to solve using distributed computing.

Store
Loading the Store was quite time consuming. Therefore, I had ignored it at first. However, after registering my product with Sony, I was given RM5.00 credit to play around with in the store. So, I visited the Store, only to find that the games sold online were fairly decent. The prices ranged from between RM20 to RM200. Personally, I would not mind shelling out around RM50 for a game, if the game is any good. Fat Princess is retailing for RM63, which is a pretty fair price for a good game. Toying around with the store was when I noticed the FREE game demos available for download.

Needless to say, I checked out quite a number of the free downloads. The size of the downloads range from just under 100MB to more than 1GB of data. Thankfully, the PS3 is able to download the games in the background while you continue to use it in the foreground. It will also queue the downloads so that only one game is downloaded at a time. This means that the PS3 will not hog up all the available network connections at home. I have currently scheduled it to download four games worth about 2GB of data. I will leave it running overnight and through to tomorrow. I hope that a couple of them will complete by tomorrow so that I can at least experience some of the wonders of a PS3.

I have Mirror’s Edge and Infamous and two mini-games scheduled. It is high time for me to upgrade my broadband speed!

Home
Unfortunately, Home is still not available for us in Malaysia. I checked some online forums and it seems that it was available for beta testing in Malaysia a few months ago. Hopefully, this means that Sony will open up the market for Home in the near future. I would be really interested in exploring Home and meeting some gamer buddies online, vis-a-vis, so to speak.

Having stayed up almost the entire night to play around with my new PS3, I am ready to note down some initial impressions on the device.

Although my LG television claims to be able to do full-HD at 1080p, I have found that it is not quite true. It comes with three HDMI ports but only HDMI1 can do 1080p, and quite badly at that. When I plugged the PS3 into HDMI1, it worked 90% of the time but there were glitches in the graphics every few seconds. The television reports itself as capable of 1080p and the PS3 sets itself to that. I had to manually configure the PS3 to run at 1080i and now it works on all three HDMI ports. I’m not sure if this is a problem with the television or if this is a problem with the HDMI cable but since it is working now, I will not bother too much with it for now.

The PS3 that I bought came with version 2.85 firmware. As a result, I am unable to use many of the online community applications, which require an upgrade to version 3.01 firmware. I have already downloaded the latest firmware update but checking the Internet, it seems that there are bugs with the latest firmware. So, I think that I will hold-off on upgrading the firmware to version 3.01 for a while, at least until I have investigated this issue further or if I run into any stability problems with the console.

As for the PS3, I did not buy any games yet. So, I have primarily been using it to stream videos onto the television as a HTPC device. I would have to say that the built-in up-scaler for the PS3 works very nicely. Most of the videos that I have been streaming, are standard-definition videos that need to be up-scaled onto high-definition. In fact, from a distance, it looks very nice and from up close, the graininess looks somewhat akin to BD movies. The colours look bright too and needless to say, the frame-rates are high enough to make the videos look smooth. As for full-HD videos, they are extremely crisp and play smoothly, unlike on a PC.

However, my PS3 comes with a Region 3 DVD coding and hence, I am unable to play most of my DVD collection (which are mainly region 1 or 2). That is a minor issue as I fully intend to transcode my entire DVD collection onto a digital format, something that can be streamed onto the PS3. For the moment, I have most of it figured out except for how to get subtitles to work. There are no problems with English movies but for some of my Japanese/Korean DVDs, I would need to find a way to insert sub-titles into the media.

A final note about the games – they are a bloody rip-off in Malaysia. I went shopping for some games today and found that in all cases, the prices of the games in Malaysia were 200% of their equivalent prices online. For the price of a single game in Malaysia, it is possible to get two of the same game online. This applies to all the major games including Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto 4 and what nots. Thankfully, there is no region protection for PS3 games and I would be able to purchase the games online and have them delivered to Malaysia. I will try to do that soon.

Sony Malaysia is a bloody rip-off. According to the Sony Centre, the price of the new 120Gb PS3 Slim is RM1299 only if it is bought with an accompanying PS3 game at full price. So, I walked off in a huff and went over to Best Denki, which was selling the same model at the same price, without the need to buy an accompanying game. On top of that, I got a free t-shirt and PlayStation brolly. Sony Malaysia is a rip-off!

This is a video of a device built using a 12MHz, 8-bit microprocessor – the AVR. It is a very impressive demonstration of what can be accomplished on very little computing power. With a 100MHz 32-bit microprocessor like the AEMB, it should be possible to do even more wonders. Interesting. I think that some of my ideas for the third generation AEMB would make it a very compelling device for various applications. The magic is in the software.

Being a system administrator for computing infrastructure at home, on the cheap, has its advantages. I have learned many valuable lessons, some of which are being put to practice at work (where possible). You see, unlike a system admin for a large corporation, an el-cheapo system admin has more constraints to work with. I thought that I would share some lessons learned from my own experience.

Lesson 1: Network storage needs to be fast.

I am using a NAS system at home to store all my media as well as my system backup images. It is the primary back-end storage at home. It is currently running on a 533MHz VIA system with 256Mb of RAM and it has to handle software RAID as well as OTFE without any hardware acceleration. As a result, it gets hammered most of the time and slows to a noticeable crawl.

My plan is to upgrade my NAS to a multi-core system with at least four SATA drives attached and hardware accelerated crypto if possible. I have the plan of adding storage to the network in the future. I could either get a powerful machine with lots of expansion capabilities or add multiple lesser NAS machines onto the network in the future. I favour the latter for redundancy purposes.

Lesson 2: Wifi interference sucks.

Wifi is a solution to a lot of problems, but it is not a solution to network up a home – at least not when you need anything more than 1Mbps. It is a cheap and easy way of connecting all the machines at home as long as you do not need reliable and fast transfer speeds (like when you are streaming a movie off a NAS). In my area, there are at least six other home Wifi networks and they clash with each other every evening when everyone comes home.

My plan is to add in a HomePlug system or extend the existing wired network for video streaming purposes. Wifi is fine for Internet surfing as that is intermittent. Also, nothing beats the speed of wired ethernet. I may want to upgrade my home network to a giga-bit one.

Lesson 3: Virtualisation is a life-saver.

I have to add that due to the el-cheapo nature of my setup, virtualisation is a must. Also, as I am only using a 400Mhz VIA machine with 256Mb of RAM as the host node for almost a dozen virtual machines, I have had to learn to optimise and shrink things down so that the system does not run out of resources and crash. That said, I am starting to feel the slowness of the systems as I continue to add more and more virtual machines in.

My plan is to purchase a new machine with the capability of running Xen as a virtualisation solution. That will open up a whole new world of para-virtualisation to me. This machine will probably be multi-core, 64-bit, supporting hardware virtualisation, and loaded up with gobs of RAM. If my NAS is fast enough, I can mount the virtual hard-drives off the NAS either as NFS shares or iSCSI.

Lesson 4: Power outlets are a premium.

For some reason, houses do not come with a lot of power outlets. Furthermore, it is prudent to avoid overloading any existing outlets. For obvious reasons, I cannot power a bunch of devices off the same outlet as the one powering my water heater. Same goes with the kettle, washing machine and fridge. In addition, the outlets are not all located in a central location. So, it would be useful to distribute the computing infrastructure throughout the house.

My plan is to re-organise my home computing infrastructure so that it uses up more power outlets. I have a hidden power outlet behind a shelf that is only being used to charge batteries. I could feasibly power up my server setup and store the servers in the shelf itself. I need to find a way to hide all the cable runs. I guess that it is time to visit Ace Hardware.

The new PS3 slim has been launched in Malaysia and I can say that the launch package is a big let-down. According to the Sony website, the launch package is priced at RM1399 and includes a free game, a second controller and a special t-shirt. While I can appreciate the free game, I cannot appreciate the second controller as most of the good PS3 titles are single-player titles anyway and I most certainly have no use for a free t-shirt. At RM1399, that is a whole US$100 more than what people are paying for in the states. In fact, it is the same price as in the UK but they have a better package deal.

Personally, I feel that this is a massive let-down by Sony Malaysia. The direct US$ pricing should only be RM1099. Charging an extra RM300 is a rip-off considering the fact that the states has sales taxes levied while we are free of taxes in Malaysia. In fact, the UK price includes a 17% VAT and is still cheaper than our Malaysian price. Boo! Rip-off! I just don’t understand why the price of consumer electronics products are so expensive in Malaysia, when compared to their prices overseas. The games are so expensive and the consoles are more expensive too. Now, I am seriously considering importing a unit in. The only risk would be on the warranty.

Alternatively, I should consider getting the older 80GB EU model, which has PS2 backwards-compatibility for the same price. That way, I would be able to play PS2 games on it as well. Just something to consider. Another alternative would be to investigate the bundles at one of the smaller game stores in KL that still bring in import units from Hong Kong. When I previously asked, they were bundling the 120Gb slim with two games. I already see the 250Gb version in their stores.

Karmic Koala was officially released a couple of days ago and I did not miss my opportunity to upgrade all my Kubuntu machines to it. However, my upgrade path was frought with peril and I felt that I should probably chronicle some of the lessons learned, for future reference.

My troubles started when I was unable to request a free CD from ShipIt because I had already exceeded my quota. So, I proceeded to download the alternate ISO image. Unfortunately, I had trouble with the burned media. I ended up burning 3 CDs from the image only to have 3 dodgy disks. One disk was good enough to at least go through the first stages of the installation with only a few files missing. This was when I discovered that the Debian installer could be tricked into using a ISO image loaded on a USB stick. All I had to do was to mount the ISO image under /cdrom for the first stage of the installation and then mount it under /target/cdrom for the latter stage of the installation. In fact, this was much faster than installing it using a CD.

Lesson 1: Do not use old CD-R media. I have since bought myself a 1.8″ DVD-RW media that I will use for all future kubuntu ISO image burns.

Next, I had problems with my home user files. I use the default ecryptfs to encrypt my entire home partition. For some reason, someone decided that the encryption keys should be stored in /var instead of /home, which it currently does. Since I had reformatted my entire root directory, which held everything other than the home directories, the encryption keys were totally lost (and so were my files). So, I had to spend my entire Saturday restoring my home directory from my backup. Thankfully, I backed up my entire home directory just before re-installing my laptop.

Lesson 2: Always back up my files before doing anything invasive like upgrading the operating system.

As for the new Kubuntu, I have been very happy with the upgraded user interface and utilities. Great job!