Video Capture, Stage 2

MiniDVHitachi-Hard-Drive-TravelStar-T7K250-250GBA couple of years ago, I converted all of my old VHS-C tapes to DVD — 24 DVDs in all.  Now I’m starting stage 2 of the process of converting all of my video tapes — the miniDV collection.  Estimated storage required for raw video capture is 300 GB.  Today the approximate cost per GB is 8.21 cents (about $25 for this project).  3 years ago (where the collection ends), the cost was about 3 times higher.  While still practical to do 3 years ago, it amazes me to think about how much storage costs have dropped.  When I first bought the mini DV camera (1999), the cost of per GB was around $16 — putting the total cost of this project at about $4800.  This site has a great history of the cost of storage.

High Tech Fiction

imageI find it interesting that most of the books that I enjoy the most in the “Science Fiction” category are really not “Science Fiction” at all.  I’ve really enjoyed reading Zero Historyalt by William Gibson (not quite done yet!) and the other two books in the series.  While the publisher marks them as SF, they clearly aren’t.  There’s nothing really speculative about these books from a science perspective.  It reminds me of Cryptonomiconalt by Neal Stephenson, also categorized as SF but really just high-tech fiction.  And so my question is — who and what else should I be reading that falls in this category?  These aren’t quite suspense or spy novels, but they really resonate with me.

Facebook’s Effect on IE8

There’s some seriously bad behavior in Facebook that seems to kill IE8.  Leaving Facebook running overnight in IE results in the following memory utilization the next morning:

IE Working Set

That’s 1.7 GB of memory consumed by IE8 just for the tab that’s running Facebook.  You can usually tell that things have gone wonky because IE starts showing the error icon in the lower left hand corner.  Unfortunately, shutting down IE doesn’t always work — sometimes the Facebook tab keeps spinning in the background (each tab is running in a separate process).  The only recourse at this point appears to be to kill the process (just the Facebook tab process — easy to find because it’s the iexplore.exe process consuming more memory than any other), which crashes the tab and causes a reload.  IE stays alive (thanks to the multiple-process tab model) and reloads Facebook in its original, low memory state. 

It would be easy to blame IE8 for this behavior, but I suspect that this is really a problem with Facebook’s client-side javascript code.