Yesterday was my niece’s first birthday. Everyone came over to my place and ate/drank way too much – it was like Xmas, especially as I’m having leftovers for lunch tomorrow! Amelia was very happy and not at all noisy, Jacques was having fun too.

Pip has some photos and I made a video – ripped using the Mac’s Firewire/iMovie and converted to DVD-quality MPEG on my new Linux box at astounding speed, it transcoded about 3Gb of DV to MPEG2 in 8mins.

I tried converting a VMWare install of Win2003 for use with VirtualBox. Well it didn’t work, I followed the various instructions I found for doing the same with XP – similar to how I used to convert physical machines to VMWare using Acronis True Image. Basically it never actually got to the login prompt – it just sat there at the loading banner. Bit of a shame as it means that even though I can clone a basic 2003 R2 SP2 install, I still have to install Visual Studio 6/2003/2005 multiple times to fully migrate my VM’s, similar to what I did with RHEL/Oracle.

As a testimony to the ridiculous power of my new Core2Quad, I played OpenArena on full graphics detail (which looks very nice) over the internet whilst Acronis was backing up the VM, and didn’t notice even a pause. As another test I converted some DivX’s to MPEG2 to allow them to be played on a regular DVD player. Well I had four instances of mencoder running at the same time, each using a core; and it still wasn’t really taxing the CPU – or getting hot; it was so fast that by the time I had typed the command on core4, core1 had finished transcoding!

Update: just watched The Happening, which was a pretty good disaster movie about a mysterious toxin that is causing people in New York to kill themselves. Certainly better than 20 Years After, which I have started to watch but turned off twice now, which seems like just another apocalypse movie.