Kev's Development Toolbox

This is an interesting point. Both PS3 versions, the $499 20GB version and the $599 60GB version will include the new Blu-Ray DVD drive, which many buyers will be looking at as a cheap way to get one of the first Blu-Ray players for their home, without paying a hefty $1000 price tag for a standalone player (similar to the PS2 approach when it first shipped with a DVD player).

However, only the $599 version will include an HDMI output, which is what the industry has agreed on as the standard output to a HD display to display the content in the highest resolution possible. The new add-on HD-DVD drive for the XBox360 also has the same issue – no HDMI output.

This is important, as this article on the Register notes, because without the HDMI output there is no HDCP copy protection, and therefore the output from the hidef disks will default to a lower resolution output. Something to be aware of…

Google announced new desktop apps yesterday, including a new version of it’s popular Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Trends and Google Co-op.

Interesting new features include being able to add search results to a notebook book along with notes for reference later and share the notebook pages with others.

The Google Trends webapp allows you to glimpse inside the search stats that Google is accumulating from users using it’s search engine. Given a search term, Google Trends shows you the search volume for those search words over time, plus a breakdown of what countries the search terms are originating from. This is interesting information, and information previously only available for sale from marketing companies.

Not to be left out of the hi-def geek-fest of annoucements coming out of E3 this week, Microsoft have announced they are adding an optional add-on extra for the XBox360 to give it an external, USB-connected HD-DVD drive in order to play upcoming hi-def movies and games released on the HD-DVD format.

Sony is backing the Blu-Ray hi-def next-gen DVD drive format, and both PS3 models will ship with an integral BluRay DVD drive as its main drive. Should game developers take advantage of it’s 25GB single-layer capacity (50GB dual-layer), this potentially offers PS3 gamers massive amounts of game content. Without the external drive, XBox360 owners could only match this capacity with some frantic DVD disk swapping. However, how long will it take before game developers are shipping content that will take advantage of this much content?

While the XBox360 currently does not have any true HD TV connectivity options such as HDMI or HDCP, the $599 version of the PS3 does come with HDMI output.

As I run this server on a MySQL powered solution (a Hibernate-based web-app running on JBoss4 on Linux), I’ve wondered occasionally what it would take to introduce fault tolerance at the database level in case of server failure.

OnLamp.com have an article by Giuseppe Maxia called “Advanced MySQL Replication Techniques” that shows what is involved to set up replication between multiple database server instances to introduce high availability of a MySQL database.