One of my more fun geek gifts this year is a Kill A WATT™ meter. You plug a device into it and it will tell you the instaneous voltage, current, resistivity in addition to the KWH it consumes. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.

For instance my lamp with 60W light bulb pulls 57W and with a 60W equivalent low-power bulb it pulls 17W. My Vacuum pulls 430W, mobile phone charger 3W and the cat 32W*. My eMac pulls 8W/112W/127W at standby/idle/full load. My laptop pulls 1W/5W/42W/86W standby/charging/idle/full load.

Interestingly enough viewing Microsoft.com on my laptop in IE uses 52W and in Firefox it uses 47W after letting the machine to “settle down” after 30 seconds. I guess Firefox is more efficient :-)

On a practical side I plan to use it to measure the power usage I’m using on various equipment so I can correctly size some UPSs I’m planning to buy.

*OK, I’m joking about the cat.

Now that Munich has been nominated for two Golden Globes and made several lists of the 10 best films of 2005 I’m happy to see that they finally got to the minor formality of releasing the film today, albeit in limited release.

A few weeks ago I was wondering how much does drive fragmentation really effect build performance. At least for my environment.

I did a fairly straight forward experiment. It’s not really perfect with everything controlled but I feel it’s a reasonable test. I tried both the defrag tool in WinXP and Diskeeper Pro 10 which is basically the pro version of the WinXP tool.

As the test case I did a full release build of approximently 15,000 files in 99 projects in a solution of a commercial product. The majority of the code is unmanaged C++. Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 was used.

The steps I ran:

defrag d: /a

devenv product.sln /clean release
devenv product.sln /build release
(two times)

devenv product.sln /clean release
[ms defrag]
devenv product.sln /build release
(two times)

devenv product.sln /clean release
[diskeeper defrag]
devenv product.sln /build release
(two times)

I timed only the build steps. I averaged the two build times of each step. A week later I ran the same test but swapped MS defrag and Diskeeper defrag.

I was not suprised to see that the defragged builds were faster. I was a bit suprised to see that Diskeeper noticably sped up the build over MS defrag. I was expecting to only see a small difference. I may have to register Diskeeper.

Today Steam greeted me with this gem of an advert featuring black text on a dark image. I realize it’s likely missing a style sheet but I tried hitting F5, Shift-F5, Control-F5 and right-mouse/Refresh to no avail. It that does not do it then in my book it’s broken.

So far the marketing has not impressed me enough to buy the game yet. I’d say they’ve failed the first impression test.

I reimaged my HP laptop from the original disks. I’m amused to see that the default homepage has changed from the HP support portal thing that it was originally to an advert to buy a new HP laptop. I wonder if it’s just a general redirect for a bad page or if they really change the portal for 2-3 year old laptops to suggest a new machine.