The Blackbox

To go with my recently purchased and built Zalman HD160 HTPC I decided I wanted a wireless keyboard, and I came across a great little keyboard called the Microsoft Arc. It’s small and very light, and was perfect for the occasional use that I wanted it for.

It’s a fabulous little keyboard which I can tuck away when not needed. It has all the functionality that you need, although some of it has to be accessed via a function key but it’s all there. My only minor annoyance with it has been that there is no Caps Lock indicator on it which has caught me out a couple of times, but apart from that it’s great!

I recently decided to (finally) jump on the HTPC and acquired a Zalman HD160 HTPC. This is a slightly older model of what has now been replaced by the Zalman HD160xt Plus, which boasts a much larger 7″colour touch-screen display.

The Zalman HD160 shown above is my first foray into HTPC’s and it has been relatively simple. It takes a standard sized ATX motherboard which fits snugly into place around all of the other components. The motherboard sits raised, so there is room to slide cables underneath, or tuck them around the back and side of the hard disk holder to keep them out of the way.

Installing drives is relatively simple albeit a bit more time consuming than it could be due to the number of screws involved. It’s not really any different to a standard PC and I had Windows 7 64bit up and running in no time.

The VFD
The VFD is really there for show. It has no practical use and unless you sit 3ft away from the HD160, then you aren’t going to be able to see what is on there. I still wanted it to be working properly though (even if I couldn’t see it) instead of it constantly saying “Welcome to HTPC”, it’s default message.

The setup application on the CD provided didn’t quite install everything, and I had to manually run the VFD driver setup to get it working. I subsequently install iMon which works much better and has ironed out all of the problems I had.

The Remote
When I first started using the remote control provided with the Zalmand HD160, it was turning on my Xbox! This was a bit of a shock, and I eventually found that you need to disable all remote types on the Xbox itself and it will no longer happen.

Noise Level
The noise level of the case is very good. The two fans provided are nice and quiet, and even with a stock Intel CPU cooler, and an nVidia 8800 GTS with stock cooler, they can barely be heard.

Overall I’m very pleased with my first HTPC. It’s a nice simple case without the fancy VFDs that now come on the more recent versions such as the Zalman HD160xt Plus.

Solr Explorer is a great free tool to use and help you quickly and easily see what is in your Solr index. I struggled with this for a few hours before working out the problem – google didn’t turn up this solution either!

If you’re seeing “Could not load solr core (‘yourcore’): The JSON request failed or timed out” when trying to load a solr core in Solr Explorer, I found that the documentation for Solr Explorer wasn’t quite correct. The config I was using was as follows:


<solr-core name="blackbox">
<server baseUrl="http://localhost:8983/solr">
<select-uri>/select</select-uri>
<luke-uri>/luke</luke-uri>
</server>
<search>
<default-query>*:*</default-query>
</search>


The select-uri and luke-uri are what it defaults to if you don’t include them. I found I had to add the path to the core in order to correct the error:


<solr-core name="meon">
<server baseUrl="http://localhost:8983/solr">
<select-uri>/<strong>blackbox/</strong>select</select-uri>
<luke-uri>/<strong>blackbox/admin/</strong>luke</luke-uri>
</server>
<search>
<default-query>*:*</default-query>
</search>


You should then be able to select the solr core and get in without seeing the “Could not load solr core (‘yourcore’): The JSON request failed or timed out” error any longer.

What is Multivariate Testing or MVT?
Multivariate testing is a method of testing multiple combinations of content and call to actions on a website and measuring the results. It provides factual data on what people on a website prefer in terms of layout, call to actions and other content.

Why would I do this – I know what is best?
Do you really? Everyone thinks they are a web expert these days, and there are absolutely some people who live for usability on websites, but every site is different. Customers will react based on the branding, layout, whether they’ve just been paid, what they are looking for – the list goes on. MVT allows you to test different variations and use the one which people on your site use the most.

OK, so how do I get started?
Google Website Optimizer is one of the easiest ways to get started. The experiment wizard gives you instructions on how to install the javascript required, and you then create variations which Google will serve and track the success rate of the original, and the various combinations.

This is all great, but can you give me an example?
That I can. The biggest success I’ve seen to date, is changing a simple button to say “View” instead of “Book”. This increased the numbers of clicks on that button by just under 50% – something which I was amazed at – but the figures say it all!

Key points for MVT

• Don’t start with too many variations, especially on low traffic pages
• A negative result isn’t bad – it shows you’re currently using the better combination – but try another different one
• MVT is constant – don’t stop with the first success story, try and improve on it further
• Allows you to base decisions on fact instead of assumption, and remove problems like design by committee

I’ll touch on this again at a later date and come up with some examples of how I’ve been using it.

The UK launch date for the Apple iPad has been delayed from March to the end of April. Is it going to be worth getting one? The jury is still out I think. Could be a nice replacement for the Macbook around the house though.

Recently been working on a proof of concept for using memcached to solve some of the challenges we face with our legacy system.

I’ve gone down the route of using Coolstack to get it all up and running as it’s very simple to maintain.

I’m currently experimenting with spymemcached as a Java client for communicating with the memcached server. It’s all looking good!

I recently attempted to get media from my PC playing through my Xbox 360, to use it as a media centre, but quickly found that the Media Centre Extender on Windows Media Centre Edition and Vista, wasn’t allowing me to play DivX or Xvid encoded video clips.

As it turns out, you can’t actually do it through the Media Centre Extender, but you can get them to play through the Videos Share bit instead (a quick update is needed from Xbox Live – it should trigger when you first try to download the player). It’s obviously not as pretty as the Media Centre Extender, but it works perfectly well and that’s the most important thing.

I’m lead to believe that the reason for this is that the Xbox team have put support for playing these codecs in via their dash, but MCE doesn’t use any of this, as it is written by it’s own team as they are completely separate products.

Is it going to get fixed in the future? Apparantly not. Best start saving for a proper media centre pc!

Posted a couple of weeks ago, is this “Shopping online for blind people” article on the BBC News Technology pages. As per usual, the BBC’s technology team have done some excellent research to use in this article.

The first site we see, confuse.com (not to be confused with confused.com – hah), is shown as a price comparison site….. which it blatantly isn’t. It’s an ad site, which has the same standard layout as all other ad sites, and if you click on any of the supposed comparison links, all you see is a page of adverts. Excellent work BBC.