One of the first things you should care about when coming to London, is which side to look at when crossing a road. As you probably know, English people drive on the left. But this is not as uncommon as one may think, since this is the way people drive in India, Japan, Australia and many other countries. If you want to know a bit of history, you can have a look at this article: Why do some countries drive on the right and others in the left?

In London, it seems there have been too many accidents concerning the driving direction, and they have decided to tell the pedestrians which way to look

If you get confused each time you read this message, here is a little trick: Don’t look at the letters! Just focus on the arrow!

Kakashi was running very slowly, but I assumed it was due to all the installing and unistalling of different video capture programs. But after a couple of Windows restarts (which seems to work most times) nothing improved, and within some hours the computer was running reeeeeally slow.

So I decided to have a look at all the active processes and to stop every process I don’t really need. Finally, I turned down the Mcaffee Firewall and Kakashi went back to its normal speed. I never thougth it would be the firewall, but I’ve never had a firewall installed before. All the Mcaffee software came by default with the computer, with the registration for one year. But since I haven´t been able to register and it is slowing down the computer, I’ve decided to change the antivirus. I may try Avast, since it is free and some friends have recommended it for Windows systems.

.. Yes, I’ll definitelly give it a try!

I’ve been playing with our xbox thanks to VirtualDub. This program runs on Windows platforms and it is very light. It needs only around 1Mb of hard drive and doesn’t add that nasty lag. Moreover, it was very easy to configure, although having sound took a bit more time.

VirtualDub is specially designed for fast linear operations over video and includes a lot of different filters. I haven’t tried it much to take captures, but I managed to capture a short video very easily, though it occupies a lot of space. Now I want to learn more about, filtering, compressing and general video processing

Last friday, we finally received our new Dell! It’s name is Kakashi (although I’m pretty sure Andrés will call it Kikashi).

The technical features are:

• Dimension E521 AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200
• 1GB RAM
• NVidia GeForce 6150

I know it doesn’t sound very impressive but it serves our purposes: surfing the Internet, access to different SVN repositories, common desktop and web applications and…. playing the XBOX!!!

Our fantastic Kakashi comes with an analog TV Tuner specially for this goal. Unfortunately, Windows Media Center introduces a 2-3 seconds delay between the button pressing and the character moving. This delay can be ok for watching video, but it is unacceptable for playing! I’ll have to look for another capture video program