I’ve been looking at replacing my home desktop system with something a little newer. Gone are the days of AGP, DDR400 and HyperThreading. These days it’s all about the number of cores and PCI Express. The Mac Pros are a very tempting machine - being Intel based, you can still run Windows XP on there if required for all those important programs (such as Half Life and CounterStrike :)).

This is until you look under the hood a little. The majority of the hardware is fairly generic - until you get to the memory subsystem. Apple have chosen to go with FB-DIMM memory while the rest of the generic industry has gone with straight DDR RAM. This means that on average, the memory latency involved with the Mac Pro system can slow them down on CPU intensive things (like Half Life etc) by a whopping 10%. Add this to the expensive base price of the Mac Pro compared to generic hardware and things get a little dissapointing.

I am certainly hoping that Apple look at addressing this (no pun intended :)) and looks at removing the FB-DIMM based RAM on the Mac Pro and instantly giving their lineup a 10%+ speed gain - bringing it inline with the rest of the industry. Something I doubt will happen however :(

Here’s your chance to once again be part of the select group that makes Windows Live Messenger better. We’ve added new features and we need your help to make sure they’re perfect. The new features include:

When you throw them all together, you have a nice virtualised VoIP server with excellent support for up to 4 FXO or 4 FXS modules per card! Although this seems quite simple, giving direct hardware access to a virtualised machine is not the most simple thing to do. This being the case, I’ve documented how to do it over here.

Let me know if there’s more that should be added!

If you’re using the adutux module, it’s now live in kernel version 2.6.19. As this kernel is only in the testing phase and hasn’t been declared stable, it’s not really recommended for production environments as yet - that being said, it’s been running here fine for about a week now.

You can find the 2.6.19-rc kernels at ftp.kernel.org.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted due to lots of work lately. For those interested, I’m in the middle of doing a 500-600 user VoIP rollout at work as well as the normal stuff. It takes a lot of time to get this stuff right ;).

In the mean time, Airservices Australia have released updates to their Australian DAPS (the SID/STARs for Australian Airports). To reflect this, I’ve updated my charts page with all the updated pages. It seems the biggest change that affects me from YMML is the DOSEL5 and LIZZI1 approach. Grab all the updates here.