I want to utilise the power of the SSD even for games, however there’s not enough room to store everything. From this point of view, I want to start the core Steam app from the SSD, make it download all games to the hard drive, but then move selected games back to the SSD. This is doable by way of running symlinks, which is supported in Vista -> Win7.

Here’s the steps I’ve taken to get BFBC2 on the SSD as per the above. C:\ is SSD, d:\ is spinner (HDD). If you don’t like the directory naming then substitute your own. I made the spinner directory generic enough to capture any future symlinks, but the SSD one is a bit more specific to steamapps folder.

1. Install steam as per default to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam (64 bit windows)
2. Create folders c:\steamapps , c:\steamapps\common, d:\steam
3. Start steam, initiate download of BFBC2 (or whatever game).
4. Wait a minute or so until $steam\steamapps\common has a folder for your game. Then exit steam.
5. Move the folder c:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps to d:\steam\steamapps
6. Move the folder “D:\Steam\steamapps\common\battlefield bad company 2″ to “c:\SteamApps\common\”
7. Then rename it to “bfbc2″, just for fun.
8. Open a command prompt with admin privs (Press start, type CMD, hit shift+ctrl+enter, accept UAC prompt.).
9. Execute the following commands … (also showing results):

   C:\Windows\system32>mklink /d "c:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps" 
   "d:\steam\steamapps" (HIT ENTER!)
   symbolic link created for c:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps ===>>d:\steam\steamapps

   C:\Windows\system32>mklink /d "D:\Steam\steamapps\common\battlefield bad company 2"
   "c:\SteamApps\common\bfbc2" (HIT ENTER!)
   symbolic link created for D:\Steam\steamapps\common\battlefield bad company 2 ===>> c:\SteamApps\common\bfbc2

1. Restart steam, resume download, observe that bfbc2 folder on SSD drive is filling up now.

That’s it, I’ll have Steam starting instantly from the SSD, games that I download will automatically be saved to the HDD, however I can then move them to the SSD for performance on an as needed basis … and then back again when I am having a break from it or don’t need the performance (BFBC2 would seem to benefit greatly from SSD, as it is).

It’s probably worth checking from time to time if certain other files could benefit from being moved to / from the SSD.

The Nexus One.

The Nexus one is here, and after following the release closely  here are my notes. I own a jailbroken 3GS, and am currently wondering about making the switch to the N1. Why? I absoluteyl love my 3GS, however I’m quite keen on starting with some Android development as I quite like what I’ve seen of the platform so far – and being able to play with my own apps on the go would be a very powerful motivator.

The Google phone isn’t even available for ordering in Australia yet, so whilst pondering the question of “Would you… like to be upgraded?”, I do have some other questions and comments around the phone and its software configuration.

The following is a semi-coherent first draft of where I think it is at at the moment. I’ve launched straight at the gray areas, as the key advantages of supreme multitasking, application development openness and ability to develop apps for the platform on any type of machine (not just a Mac!) are not covered here.

History: 10/01/10 – Version 0.1 (what a cool date!).

Multitouch – what is happening?

AirMouse showing multitouch

Multitouch is the ability to use more than one digit to control aspects of the user interface (UI). It is a key element in the success of the iPhone. Apple holds a patent on MT in the US that they have not used to chase neither Palm nor HTC, whereas in Europe software patenting law is from my soft understanding of it not anywhere as strict.

Now, the situation on the Nexus One is currently

1. In the US, from what I can gather, multitouch (MT) is either:
   a) blocked entirely – both Google and Third Party (TP) apps, or:
   b) blocked for Google apps only, leaving TP devs with access to MT…. of course muddying this further is the fact that HTC’s own Hero does have MT support. HTC makes the N1 for Google…
2. Whereas in Europe, it will reportedly:
   a) be fully enabled – as simple as that? Does it mean across the OS or just in certain apps, e.g. will the keyboard let you shift-type with two fingers for all caps, such as on the iphone?

C’mon Google, this is seriously confusing to just about everyone.  The word is that MT is under consideration, but I can only see this as a serious hurdle to ensuring that Android gets a firm standardised platform upon which to unleash the devs.  An iphone or ipod developer will know that the essential basic of multitouch is available to use for anything he develops. Hopefully Google will sort things out, but as to whether we should hold our breath – just look at how long it took Apple to add a 2nd mouse button!

As a standard to rely on, MT is all over the place in Google’s camp. How can the app devs know what phone features to expect?

AMOLED Display

AMOLED: Zero backlight

My old Nokia N85′s display works great inside, but is just about hopeless outside in strong light. It can be incredibly hard to see it in the Aussie sun. As it suffered from accelerated decrepitude, when I switched to the 3GS from the N85 I was a lot happier with 3GS screen. Now, the Nexus One also features an AMOLED screen, one with a brilliant 800 x 480 resolution – how it will fare remains to be seen.

From my experience with the Nokia N810 and its 852 x 480 res, N1′s 800 x 480 will provide an amazing DPI which should make the display great for ereading etc. So as long as the daytime capabilities of the N1 are somewhat better than the N85, it should hopefully not be too much of an issue.

Applications

iTunes has a plethora apps, and I’ve spent at least a few hundred dollars there. Now, what can I expect in the apps store? As my Android owning mates haven’t made as much as a single purchase, you’d think this would be a chicken and egg scenario for app development where the developers won’t show as there’s noone to purchase the apps. (Please also ref #MT above…). Google’s own app store is not browsable without an Android phone. There are other stores available, such as Androlib … from what I’ve gathered the iPhone AppStore is miles & miles ahead, but that’s what’s expected to change for 2010.

iPhone has the solid advantage of a very common hardware platform, but from what I gather with the iPhone 4, this will also change to some extent in 2010 – when the disparity between the 3G and the coming model will in all likelyhood be pretty huge. At least the basic control mechanisms are fully standard, i.e. multitouch, which is something the Android platform is lacking.

On applications, the memory space into which apps can be installed into is severely limited on the N1. Only the first 512MB can be used. Whilst there aren’t that many games currently, the iPhone with its plethora 3D action games would instantly be in trouble  – texture files and videos require lots of space. So if the Android is ever to become a mobile gaming platform, it needs multitouch as well as ability to install appdata onto flash cards.

Tethering & Visual Voice Mail

The 3Gs offers the slickest tethering solution I’ve yet seen; in fact I’m using it now as our connection has lost line sync. With iTunes installed, it’ll come up as a LAN connection when plugged in. No pesky modem dialling required. Extremely simple to use; solid uptime and decent speeds are experienced on the Vodafone network.

Will the Nexus One offer similar simplicity??

Furthermore visual voice mail is great. Australia doesn’t have Google Voice, so will we see VVM here?

Accessories

What is accessories doing here? Well, it’s because it is a not often talked about barrier to switching. Victoria, Australia has some very strict rules regarding the operation of hand helds in a car. They need to be locked in a dedicated cradle if they are to be used at all whilst driving. Are we going to to see accessories that lets phones like the N1 coexist with the Google? Anyone in the situation of having a partner on the iPhone would instantly understand the scenario. Multiple cradles in one car is just not cool.

Hopefully some clever accessory developer will come up with a way to let multiple types of smartphones share one (charging) cradle.

Having said that, Apple’s accessory market is exploding and the amount of e.g. music docking stations such as those provided by Logitech makes it even harder to cross. We have two Logitech docks in our house and the N1 would have to miss out on all of that … unless of course someone comes up with an adapter.

In closing, I’d like to commend HTC on using the Micro USB plug in the N1; I would be able use my N85′s chargers for this, as Micro USB is the new mobile standard for charging and connecting.

That’s it for now. Updates here will be sporadic, once new info is received.

To summarise, in 2008 and 2009 it was pretty much all work – exceptional amount of work in 2008 (that followed an initial good start due to getting back into hip hop dancing) after a long period of being relatively dormant/lazy on the fitness end meant that I got quite fat, no energy to work out, and thus the evil cycle of working myself into a very unhealthy corner played out. To counter this, at the end of 2008 a first ride in the You Yang mountains with my trusted old Trek Y22 started a very strong passion for mountain bike riding which ended up with my health doing a complete 180 as I enrolled in a series of MTB races to have further motivation for my training. Along with the followed a change of diet & lifestyle, and thus 2009 became year of rejuvenation that will hopefully have set the tone for this whole new decade. At 36, health is not to be taken for granted and thus it will be an important topic to me.

HEALTH: Doing a 12 hour MTB race - Nov'09; Bright, Victoria. Temperatures around 34-35c...

This year the following topics are on my radar:

1. Follow smartphones, tablets and ebook readers – e.g. Android and Apple [mobility].
2. Programming – ColdFusion, and Java / Android programming [programming].
3. PC/Gadgets; hardware and software [tech].
4. Internet topics; e.g. Google Reader / Wave, Aussie Censorship [internet].
5. Mountain bike riding and other healthy exploits  – hopefully also hip hop/funkdancing [health].
6. Entertainment, including shows, PC gaming, HTPC [entertainment].
7. Everything else, including e.g. environmental [general]

MOBILITY HISTORY: The N85 and N810 were some of Nokia's highlights for 2008

Now, I have been blogging on funkdancer.com since 2000; whilst the older archives will stay lost, this site has never been limited to just one topic. So I will clean up the site, starting with structuring the categories list to be ordered under the master categories above. I will also ensure they’re RSS’able; thus if anyone wants to read what I write about smartphones and subscribe to my RSS feed, by limiting to selected categories they shouldn’t have to get e.g. mountainbike spam in their feedburners. I expect to refine the above list as I go along.

TECH STUFF: Waterblocking the NVIDIA 280 (XFX Extreme edition); this attempt didn't go to well...

Cheers all,
Jørgen

ps. On an admin note, I started off by upgrading WordPress to the latest #2.9.1, which was pretty painless, and I must say that I really like the updates in the user interface on the admin end.

A must have for PC Blu-ray playback is AnyDVD HD, as this will remove the incredibly annoying regional zones. Furthermore it will allow ripping your purchased BDs to hardisk for more quiet playback; the Pioneer BDC-S02 player has many nice qualities, but ultra quietness is not one of them. Furthermore, having backed up your BD, you can safely store the original out of harm’s way and instead use the back up for playback.

Unfortunately for us, that’s not the way the studios see the picture – instead they want to make it as difficult as possible for us to do this by way of DRM. (There’s little wonder why hardly anyone is using their HTPCs for Blu-rays!)

I used to be able to just point PowerDvd to the ripped directory, however at some point in the version PowerDvd 7 release history the ability to play back ripped Blu-rays from folders disappeared. I therefore stayed on the last known good version that I had. This lasted well until recently where I’d get rather annoying upgrade prompts every time I started a movie, and then the inevitable happened – a Blu-Ray version 1.1 title arrived in the house last night – namely Resident Evil: Resurrection (RE#3) – that just refused to play back.

Blu-rays on PowerDVD 8 Ultra is relaxing business… as long as you’re using AnyDVD HD!

As it just happened, PowerDVD 8 was released the same day – so I decided to splurge out for a full update. With version 8 I had no problem playing the title directly from the reader, and the quality of the Resident Evil disc was just phenomenal.

However version 8 still refused to play back Blu-ray rips (DVDs ripped in the exact same manner were fine), so today I set to figure out how to play back my BD backups. To cut the story short, I would

1. Rip the BD to a single ISO file with the UDF 2.5 file system using the great freeware tool ImgBurn. Having the latest version of AnyDVD HD installed ensured that copy protection was removed (it will also take care of BD+), however some are recommending not to have it enabled to preserve the originalty of the drive. Whatever works would be to go here. IMGBURN is free and can be used to convert an existing AnyDVD HD backup.
2. Mount the image using an appropriate program. Whilst Daemon tools would do the job, I instead ofted for the latest beta (available from the forums) of SlySoft’s Virtual CloneDrive which includes BD support. The nice thing about CloneDrive is that it keeps a list of the most recently mounted images on the right click of the drive letter, thus making it easy to change discs.
3. Simply play back the movie from PowerDVD after the iso file has been mounted. AnyDVD should be enabled if the disc was ripped without AnyDVD being enabled.

Having run a Vista Blu-ray HD HTPC for 6 months now, I welcome this point of stability in terms of my software setup. A newly purchased Western Digital GreenPower 1TB drive makes for storing every single BD I’ve so far purchased, with room to grow!

However, the following still concerns me:

1. There’s STILL no Vista Media Centre integration. I have to leave Media Centre (exit full screen mode) and then start PowerDVD to view Blu-rays. Plus of course the whole business of mounting images if playing a backup. This is a significant reduction of user friendliness and I really have to ask, what is the story here? My Pioneer BD player came with a OEM version that had a plugin to enable BD playback through Media Centre, however it was restricted to stereo only (as if ANYONE at this stage would buy a BD player in a HTPC and not have a full surround setup – we are talking about early adopters here, not early majority or even late majority).
2. Not that my 10 year old Rotel preamplifier supports it, but there’s still no way out outputting TrueHD sound from a HTPC. Whilst PowerDVD now is better grounded for it, the hardware for outputting sound via HDMI is not there. Hopefully this will change in the short to medium term future.

I will blog a description of my HTPC later; for now, in short, what you need for Blu-ray playback is PowerDVD 8 Ultra, at US$99, and AnyDVD HD at €79. Whilst this is a fair amount of money, and there’s probably many ways to get PowerDVD, I strongly urge anyone using AnyDVD to purchase this as the work Slysoft do is absolutely essential to the viability of the HTPC as a Blu-ray playback platform.

Without Slysoft’s brilliant work we’d be left in shambles; I for one congratulate them for their efforts.

One issue was that the maintenance mode plugin didn’t let me go to upgrade.php, so I simply renamed the plugin directory and I was fine.

The interface has undergone a huge change, the dashboard looks complete different with a much cleaner look.

In particular, image uploading has massively improved – and I’m sure I’ll find many more things to enjoy. In fact, for a much better write up, read Technosailer’s write up.

For any users of the Yichi Resurrection theme; if you had it working on the previous version (2.3) it works fine in the new.

I finally found Yichi’s Resurrection – which is fast performing and very beautiful. A couple of things were broken due to it not being a WP2.3 template, however when I got rid of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin and replaced it with Reciprocity’s Configurable Tag Cloud – things were much better.

I also set up a twitter account, which looks like an interesting thingie – I will see how I go with it, on top of Facebook, Google Talk and other places to set my current status.

A little background might be in order:

I used to be very fit before and immediately after moving to Australia. Dancing, gym, climbing, and the like. Finally finding the partner of my life priorities changed, but after several years of slacking off I started paying the price. Bad back, decreased cardio/strength, you name it. So when seeing the availability of classes in a convenient spot (between home and work), I thought it was time to go back to the basics.

Boy, what a reality check… The difference between 2008 and 2002 is that I have gotten very slow, added several kilograms of “beer muscle” and have lost a lot of processing power in the CPU department – all of which are critical requirements for performing a hip hop dance routine! However, getting back into it, whilst a great challenge, will be good fun and also a very good character development task.

Having had back problems, I am starting to realize how much street dancing develops the core. Just about every move offers twists that exercise the core strength in one way or another; in fact, after a few weeks I have just about zero pain (except for being completely buggered after almost every session, especially the next day). I realise that not having danced for so long must have meant that my core strength went straight down together with the rest of my once quite-above-average physique.

Looking ahead, I am envisaging several weeks of getting slightly less crap at it every week. MMA is a great place, with a very positive vibe – and would welcome doing dancing to anyone normally stuck behind the computer. There is just no way that you can even begin think about work when trying to keep up with the instructors!

I wondered, had the empire turned into rebels (in their own view)? Who is the new empire to rebel against? Or were they just blissfully aware of this angle?

Microsoft managed to get everyone to pay to listen to their new product introduction… that was pretty neat work. Mine was paid by my employer… Now, at display was Microsoft’s 2008 lineup – MSSQL Server, Windows Server and the Studio. All is now fantastically integrated, and if we are to use their tools, life is good – or so they say. One very cool demonstration was performed by a fellow Norwegian, who demonstrated JSON and a win/web bridging application. This was but one example of a lot of coolness on display.

Being a Machi-II ColdFusion developer, taking notes with my Linux powered Nokia N810, I could not help but be in awe at the way Microsoft have embraced the hottest Internet technologies. Studio 2008 even runs fast enough, or maybe that’s just my quad pumped 3.8ghz watercooled system? Nevertheless, going to enterprise computing one feels that Microsoft and their 08 range is the path of least resistance; J2EE certainly never gets as easy as this, and staying with ColdFusion would now seem like a career limiting move.

So I guess I will accept their challenge of becoming one of Microsoft’s everyday heroes. However it is not without trepidation of becoming another clone.

Cheers,
Funkdancer

ps. Freebies included time limited versions of Server, Studio etc, plus what the representative claimed was a non time restricted version of Vista Ultimate SP1. Opening the package, however, there was a note saying the software would expire in 365 days after installation. Has anyone confirmed which is true?

If we weren’t renting I’d love to get a solar panel set up. However I settled for getting the air leakage into the garage fixed up; the gaps around this sliding door were big enough to poke a finger through. Got a door specialist to do a perfect install of air blockers to prevent this huge energy loss so that we’re all ready for the winter. It’s pretty mind boggling how bad the house construction standards are here in Australia.

Also, just noting that Rudd’s first action as incumbent Prime Minister was to sign Australia’s ratification of the Kyoto agreement. Well done.