Stuff happening in the world of F1…..

• After the debate last year about Honda (BAR) using a seamless change gearbox, which was shouted about by the other teams, saying it was basically a CVT (Constantly Variable Transmission) it seems the other teams have jumped on the bandwagon. Williams F1 will be using their version of the same system as soon as possible apparently, with Sam Michaels sayiong he predicts all the other teams to follow suit at some point in the year. Why you ask? well Honda say that they could save in the region of 2 seconds a race on gear shifts alone.
• Team Super Aguri (Honda backed) have come to an agreement with the rest of the teams and the FIA to run this year, and even more importantly they have agreed a tyre supply with Bridgestone.
• Mercedes and MClaren have done another demonstration of the crushing speed an F1 car can attain in this video of a MClaren F1 vs an E55 and an A160.
• Pipass have a nice rundown on the rule changes for this year with Pat Symonds.

And that’s about it for now…..

A fair few of the 06 competitors have launched their cars recently.

First off was the McLaren MP4-21 in a splendid 70’s based yellow (harking back to the Can-Am days)

Next up was the Ferrari 248 designed by Aldo Costa, they launched saying it had a radical new mechanical and aero package, however noticing that the MP4-21 launched a day earlier was ‘clever’ stated that it will change significantly before the first GP

The last of the ‘big’ boys to launch has been Honda with the RA106, they where also the only team to show off two completed cars for launch. Nick Fry was quick to point out that this is the first ‘all Honda’ F1 car since 1968. Geoff Willis also pointed out that Aero Package efficiency has been the core focus of the Honda RA106 project, stating that the V8’s require better Aero efficiency than the V10’s used to.

All very pretty cars and quite significantly different to the V10’s they are replacing.

On this page you can see what I am currently ‘doing’ in no particular order. This is pretty much where almost all of my spare time goes……

• Books –
• TV – Battlestar S02, 24 S05, Lost S02, Stargate SG1 S10, Stargate Atlantis S02
• Computing – Snort (Linux), Windows XP MCE 2005 R2, Vista, Server 2003 R2, Server 2003 Compute Cluster
• Games – , ,
• Toys – XDA Exec, MDA Vario (wife’s), 360, Orange C550
• Music – , ,

What? I thought the days of really horrible setup programs where gone! Yes the product is in ‘beta’ but no 360 owner should have to go through this sort of pain to get a game running, after all Live works so well, why must PlayOnline get in the way?

Even after you have gone through the registration pain of PlayOnline it takes 50 minutes for it to install the actual game!

Square Enix REALLY have to sort this all out before release or people will not buy it, we have unfortunatly got used to Live.

Just cam across the Superman Directors Video Blog.

It makes for some interesting watching if your into how they put movies together.

I’ve just read a post (here) about the Toyota F1 project, seems there will be three cars this year, the TF106 for launch, a TF106b for Monaco and a TF107 (being designed by a second design team at Toyota) later in the season.

It’s just lucky Toyota are so cash rich at the moment.

Righty oh’ then all setup with media center (I’ve gone a bit further and knocked something up for media server on server 2003 but more of that in a later post). You may however have noticed that the OneCare firewall does not play well (or if you could not connect at all this is probably why).

Here’s whats needed to get it all working…..

1. Open up OneCare and head for the view or change settings option
2. Select firewall then advanced
3. Click the add button and add these 3 applications (usually found in \windows\ehome) MCXNetTw.exe, MCRMgr.exe and Ehexthost.exe
4. Click the ports and protocols tab
5. Add the following items (all local subnet and inbound only)
   TCP 5555 and UDP 7777 are required for the ehshell.exe
   UDP 3776 is required for Mcrdsvc.exe
   TCP 3390 and UDP 1900 are required for Svchost.exe
6. You should therefore now have 3 trusted applications and 5 listening ports allowed in your firewall

You should (with a little luck) now be able to connect your 360 up to the media center and still have the firewall enabled.

Well my foray into Vista MCE has sort of hit a stand still, seems the latest vista CTP will not allow the extender software to run, just complains it needs MCE 2005 (the last CTP worked fine).

Therefore I have setup my MCE 2005 to ’stream’ XVid and DivX to my 360. If you want to know how to setup the 360 to accept the streamed version of a XVid/DivX then hop over here as he has a great write up on the subject.

One thing to make sure about is that for us Europeans we need to set the video profile up as PAL, that way the Media Center PC does NTSC to PAL conversion if need be. The other thing I would recommend is that you use the Media Center remote control rather than a XBox 360 wireless controller, as when the controller turns itself off the display goes a little odd (icons over the video in the background).

I’ve also been playing with WMV HD (the Terminator 2 disk as well as some downloads) and they look GREAT! but they don’t half hammer the wireless connection.

Using the 360 as a MCE device is good, no really it is! I have however decided to give the Vista version of Media Center a go through it, I’m still playing (using the December CTP) however one thing you will need to get is the correct download of the 360 media center connect software. Unfortunately the Xbox.com website does not understand Vista and complains that you should install XP/XP MCE.

You can get round this by visiting the manual download page and just downloading the XP MCE 2005 UR2 version of the software.

More information when I’ve done playing

There is a ‘new’ email virus doing the rounds, here is the lowdown. The email will contain a file called message.zip which contains a HTA file. This HTA will try and download activex controls to the local PC from 1gb.ru, t35.com, hzs.nm.ru, users.cjb.net and h16.ru. The subject is usually “Secure Message from HotMail.com user”.

AV Vendors are now scanning for the virus, here is the links through to the AV Vendors.

Symantec (W32.Feebs.[D|E]@mm):
http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.feebs.d@mm.html

Trend Micro (JS_FEEBS.M):
http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=JS%5FFEEBS%2EM

F-Secure (Feebs):
http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/feebs.shtml