Dave Winer just posted a totally unsubstantiated rumour that Google is going to pull out an iTunes-style music store, complete with RSS. He claims:

I’ve been hearing rumors that Google is readying an iTunes-clone, based on RSS 2.0, and fully podcast-capable. Multiple sources on this one.

Winer is a reasonably connected guy, so perhaps there’s a little more guts behind this rumour than most? I guess the RSS feed will be for new tracks. E.g. subscribe to new tracks by genre or artist, so you know when new releases are available to buy?

The big question is will Google go pay-per-song (a-la iTunes), or subscription (a-la Yahoo)? I can’t see Google wanting to get into the whole DRM side of the subscription model (e.g. songs expire if you stop subscribing), so I’m hoping they’ll pull a fast one and undercut iTunes on a per-song pricepoint. Or better yet, a per-megabyte model like AllofMP3.com (but more legal).

Update:
The Street has a bit more speculation on this, suggesting that Google is actually planning to team up with iTunes in some manner. No idea whether this is just returning search results that point to iTunes, or in fact offering purchases and downloads direct from Google.

There’s “speculation of an iTunes launch,” says Paul Foster, an options strategist at Theflyonthewall.com. “Google is going to offer iTunes somehow on their platform,” according to the rumor, he says.

Update 2:
It’s been a long time coming (4 months by my reckoning), but this rumour has been borne out, albeit in the slightly watered-down linking-to-iTunes mode.

Update 3 (Jan 27th 2006): And again, the rumour comes up in the form of some random analyst prediction. I’m not sure if this latest ‘prediction’ bears any more weight in light of the video store move.

“We believe that Google is in the midst of creating its own iTunes competitor, which we’ve dubbed ‘Google Tunes’,” the analyst wrote in a client note issued today. “We think this is a logical step, now that the nascent Google Video product has been introduced.”

Popularity: 5% [?]

As mentioned previously, the dodgey install of an Arctic Cooling VGA silencer resulted in a noisy, rattly fan. On top of this, the AC cooler does not leave enough room to mount two cards in SLI mode.

I have to say that the alternative cooler, a Zalman VF700, is approximately a billion times better. It is quieter (ball bearing vs ceramic sleeve), lighter (180g vs 243g), easier to install, and takes up less room. It also appears to cool the card better than the AC, with the fan running slower and quieter. Even with the fan at full speed, the cooler is barely audible, and provides more than adequate cooling for an NVidia GeForce 6600GT. After several hours of single and multiplayer Call of Duty 2, the NVidia control panel was reporting a maximum temperature of 53°C. Winding the GPU fan to full speed resulted in a drop to 41°C at idle within a few minutes.

Installation was a breeze, requiring a simple installation of threaded mounting lugs in the existing mount holes, then mounting of the back plate and cooler onto those lugs. The VF700 also comes with optional heatsinks for the RAM chips – simple aluminium heatsinks with sticky heat transfer tape to mount them. The VF700 when mounted extends over the RAM heatsinks, meaning that the cool air from the fan also blows over the RAM. Ingenious. In comparison, the AC cooler pretty much obscures the RAM from any existing case airflow, which seems to be a Bad Thing.

The single downside of the VF700 is that the fan connector is a standard 3-pin system fan connector. VGA cards normally power their fans via a two-pin connector. This means that you can’t plug the VF700 directly into your VGA card, but instead have to use either a motherboard fan header, a fanbus, or the supplied molex connector. Having said that, the supplied connector is better than most, and gives you the option of running the fan at either 12V or 5V. I can suggest that 5V will be plenty for all but the most overclocked super-cards.

So overall, if you’re looking for a VGA cooler, and your card is compatible, you can’t go past the VF700. If you’re choosing between the Arctic Cooling product, or the Zalman product, go Zalman for sure.

Popularity: 20% [?]

After finally getting around to building a new PC, I’ve become something of a fetishist – a quiet PC fetishist. There are any number of sites dedicated to reducing the hurricane of noise that is a modern-day PC, and I have delved into the depths of most of them before beginning my silencing crusade.

I’ve started down the path with a fairly well selected case and CPU cooler, but I have a long way to go. I’ll be documenting my travels under a dedicated category on this site, so feel free to bookmark that.

On the list of things to do are:

• Swap out the stock graphics card cooler for something a little quieter. Done. Worked a treat.
• Work out why my power supply fan seems to run at full speed all the time, and probably tone it down a bit by reducing input voltage.
• Do the same thing for the additional case fan that is currently unplugged.
• Isolate the hard drive a bit better from the case, probably using grommets where the screw mounts are.
• Add some form of sound damping to the sides of the case.

Of course through all this I still want to run the system at a standard performance level. A common approach for hardcore silent PC enthusiasts is to under-clock or under-volt their systems, but that’s not an option as far as I’m concerned. With the CPU currently running at around 25°C at idle and never above 40°C under load, I’m happy that I have a good amount of headroom to reduce airflow and noise before I have to start worrying about things running too hot (> 60°C).

Tonight I’ll be pulling out the soldering iron for the first time in a long while….

Popularity: 2% [?]

Like most hacks, this one is laughably simple. So simple in fact that I never imagined it would work. The scenario: an ASP.NET web application with numeric entry fields. The users prefer to use the keypad Enter key to move to the next field, instead of the Tab key.

The answer: a little tiny snippet of Javascript in the onkeydown event:

if ((event.which && event.which == 13) || (event.keyCode && event.keyCode == 13))
{
event.keyCode=9;
}

Hilarious huh? Rather than some sort of nice MoveToNextField code, we simply grab all Enter key events (keyCode 13), and modify them so they behave like Tab key events (keyCode 9).

For all you ASP.NET lackies out there, I’ve even whipped up a little helper method that will jam this javascript into any old server-side control (stick it in some sort of helper class and call it lilke MyHelperClass.TabOnEnterKey( myTextBox )):

/// 

///     This causes the enter key to behave like the tab key for an input control.
/// 
///

///     This is the textbox to have modified enter key behavior. It doesn't have to be a TextBox control, but must be derived from either HtmlControl or WebControl,
///     and the html control should accept an 'onkeydown' attribute.
///
public static void TabOnEnterKey( Control TextBoxToModify )
{
// This is our javascript - we fire the client-side click event of the button if the enter key is pressed.
string jsString = "if ((event.which && event.which == 13) || (event.keyCode && event.keyCode == 13)) {event.keyCode=9;} ";
// We attach this to the onkeydown attribute - we have to cater for HtmlControl or WebControl.
if (TextBoxToModify is System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlControl)
((System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlControl)TextBoxToModify).Attributes.Add("onkeydown",jsString);
else if (TextBoxToModify is System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl)
((System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl)TextBoxToModify).Attributes.Add("onkeydown",jsString);
else
{
// We throw an exception if TextBoxToTie is not of type HtmlControl or WebControl.
throw new ArgumentException("Control TextBoxToModify should be derived from either System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlControl or System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl", "TextBoxToModify");
}
}

The caveat: I’m pretty sure this only works in Internet Explorer The property to look for in Firefox is event.charCode, but that property is readonly. I imagine the cross-browser hack would probably have something to do with passing the id for the next field into the handler for the enter key. Not nice if your fields are auto-generated.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Update: Reviews are coming in, and this thing looks like it could be a smash hit.

Looking at those juicy screenshots from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, you’d swear they were from a cinematic cut-scene, but no:

IGNPC: The screenshots for Oblivion look too good to be true. (To be fair, we said the same thing about the first Morrowind screens.) What new graphical effects and techniques are you using in Oblivion? What types of things are you showing in the screens?

Todd Howard: I can assure you those shots are 100% real, taken right from playing the game and will look even better in the final product, as there are effects we’re working on now that haven’t been shown yet. The main effects we use include normal mapping and specular mapping, which are becoming commonplace in games. We also use parallax mapping, which is kind of like displacement mapping. This allows surfaces to appear truly 3D in a pixel-shader, even though they are flat.

This sort of stuff makes me want to get back into PC gaming. If anyone has any tips on how to fit a kick-ass gaming rig into a tiny two-bedroom house containing a couple of adults and a tiny one-year-old entropy generator, please let me know.

Popularity: 3% [?]