I drove my new Smart Car about 100 miles this weekend, about a quarter of that on the freeway. Here are some early observations.

Handling

The steering has reasonable road feel and the force required to turn is just right. The short wheelbase and light weight conspire to make the car jittery on roads that aren't perfectly smooth. Short speed bumps best be taken very slowly. Front suspension is surprisingly soft in a straight-line but gives adequate control when cornering. You can't turn off the stability control and it will come on quickly if you push the car in a corner. This will never be an autocross competitor but neither is it scary or uncomfortable.

On the freeway, I felt surprisingly comfortable. Stay out of the bumpy truck lane and freeway driving is very good. I went as fast as 80 mph but most of the time was 70-75 mph. The ride was very stable and surprisingly quiet for a convertible with the top up. I think the car would be quite comfortable on a long road trip. It is tall enough that other drivers see it easily. Maybe too easily - the biggest hazard on the freeway was the crazy maneuvering of other drivers who wanted to get a better look.

Interior

The seats are firm but comfortable. They have very little lateral support but since you can't even approach 1 G cornering, it is not so important. For me, the driving position is excellent. I like where the wheel and pedals are in relation to the seat. There is plenty of room in just about every direction and the passenger side is particularly spacious.

The speedometer is easy to read and the tach in the dash-mounted pod is very easy to see without taking your eyes off the road. The LCD screen below the speedometer has odometer, trip meter, outside air temperature, time, and the fuel gauge. With sunglasses on, the LCD is a little hard to read during the day. The nighttime illumination of the instruments is excellent. The center console position for the ignition key takes some getting used to - I still try to put the key into the steering column about half the time. Speaking of center console, I wish there was a center arm rest.

Entertainment

The audio system sounds very good and I like all of the features, particularly the ability to play MP3 CDs and the Aux input. A steering wheel mounted volume control would be nice but that is a minor issue. The radio as six presets each for one AM group and two FM groups. The six CD changer makes you select the slot in which to insert a CD (instead of just putting it in the first empty slot). Playing MP3 discs allows for close to 1,000 songs available at any time - very handy. The player displays the ID3 Tag info on it's LCD screen: album, artist, song name on three lines. The characters are small but very readable. If you play a CD that has song TEXT info, it will also display. The aux input is in the glove box which is a little inconvenient but at least is is available, which is more than on most cars.

Engine/Transmission

I was initially apprehensive about the lack of horsepower but in real world driving, it is perfectly okay. The most notable area where the engine suffers is at speed - when you are going 70 mph and want to pass, the acceleration is very weak. In around town driving, I haven't noticed a problem with the power. To move quickly, just get the engine up to 3,000 rpm where the torque starts to kick in and you can handle most situations.

The transmission is another story. The semi-automatic shifting is not the highlight of the Smart Car. The up-shift times are too slow; particularly from first to second. Lifting slightly on the throttle helps but it takes some practice to get the timing right. It seems a little silly to have to lift your foot from the throttle while using paddle shifters to change gears. Down-shifting is okay except when coming to a complete stop - sometimes there is a lurch forward in the last few feet as the clutch tries to decide if it should be in or out. Also, reverse is a little tricky to find but I think that may just be a problem in my particular car which is fixable.

General Driving

As you might imagine, parking is quite easy - just pull directly into a parallel parking spot. The short turning radius is useful; I can turn the car around in my driveway and exit pointing in the right direction (for my particular driveway, this is a safety plus). Being able to raise and lower the top while driving is very handy. The doors are very long (wide?) which is a consideration for some types of parking.

Because of the high seating position, visibility in the front and sides is very good. Rear visibility is hampered by the high seat backs and if the top is all the way down, it blocks the lower half of your rear view. The outside mirrors are located well and help offset the poor visibility of the inside mirror. The passenger visor has a mirror (no light) but the driver visor does not.

Even with the high compression ratio, the small engine does not offer much braking assistance. Use of the brakes on long downhill runs is necessary to keep speed under control.

The headlights work really well and night visibility is as good as any car I have driven. Auto on/off is handy and the lights also come on automatically when the windshield wipers are on - perhaps saving me a ticket sometime in the future (California law requires headlights on when windshield wipers are on).

Summary

This is not an objective review because most owners of a new car are going to find it praise-worthy. Overall, the Smart Car is fun to drive and should prove economical to operate. It is roomy inside, comfortable enough, and surprisingly easy to drive at highway speeds. The clutchless shifting could be improved (and might be with some creative ECU remapping). The bumpy rides on unsmooth roads might be improvable, I will keep my eyes open for suspension improvements. However, I won't be able the change the wheelbase or weight so it is probably a permanent situation. There might be some power improvements available without seriously hurting reliability or the environment - a Doug Thorley exhaust system looks like it is worth about a 10% improvement.

Where can I go today?

I took delivery of my Smart Car today and am quite excited. I reserved it a little over a year ago and it has finally arrived. At the moment it is resting in the garage so I have some time to write this. I haven't blogged for awhile, maybe this will inspire me to get busy. Here is a link to some pictures I took when I got it home this afternoon.

Something this cute (yes, cute) has to have a name. Temporarily, it is The Red Menace. If you have a suggestion of a better name, feel free to contribute. I was warned that it would consume extra time to answer questions every time I parked it in the public place and that is certainly true. I think I will print up some cards to answer the most common questions. So far, the top four answers are:

1. 41 MPG
2. France by Daimler AG (Mercedes to you and me)
3. gasoline, 3 cylinder, 1 liter
4. 5 speed manual with automated clutch

You can guess the questions.

I'll come back later to add my first impressions.

We recently had a requirement from one of our web application customers to be able to access a copy of their data using ODBC.  They wanted to run some custom queries and reports directly against the database but needed a secure connection because the data is confidential.  Their data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database. 

Researching the web turned up many articles that were vague or overly complex.  Some said the root certificate had to be shared on the client computer and gave lengthy instructions on how to accomplish that.  Others said you had to use protocols other than TCP/IP.  I don't know what problem they were solving but it wasn't ours.

After a little experimentation, we determined that it is actually quite easy to get the SQL Server data encrypted using SSL while moving between server and client (and back again).  Of course, a security certificate on the server is a prerequisite.  We already had one installed for IIS and it worked as is - no parameter changes, no sharing root certificates, no nothing!  By the way, we use GoDaddy.com when we need to purchase a security certificate - they are inexpensive and easy to install.  To turn on encryption, connect to your database in Enterprise Manager, right-click on the SQL Server registration name and select Properties; it should look something like this.  Click on the Network Configuration button on the bottom of the dialog.  This will display the SQL Server Network Utility, similar to this.  You can also get to this utility screen by executing the utility directly, it is one of the programs included with SQL Server 2000.  Assuming that you are using TCP/IP as one of your protocols, merely check the box on the left that is labeled "Force protocol encryption".  Apply your change and then stop/restart SQL Server.  The data packets moving to and fro through port 1433 will now be encrypted.

But you should verify this on your own because it is probably pretty important that it is being done correctly.  To test the encryption, first create an ODBC connection on a client computer.  Make sure that you do NOT check "use strong encryption for data" as that is for something else (I don't know exactly what because it is not documented in the ODBC Help).  Test your ODBC connection. 

Now we need something that will transfer some data.  I used Microsoft Access (any version should do).  I linked to a table on SQL Server using the ODBC connection that I just created.  Opening the table verified that the data could be read but did not tell me if it had been encrypted on the way over from the server.  For that, I used Microsoft Network Monitor 3.1.  If you don't have it already, you can download it here for free.  You can, of course, use any other protocol sniffer that you like.  Using MS Network Monitor, transfer some data and look for the TDS packets.  These TDS packets contain the data coming and going from SQL Server.  If you look at the TDS packets with the monitor before you enable encryption, you will know exactly what you are looking at and will also know when that same data is encrypted during testing.

I think you will agree, that enabling SSL for SQL Server 2000 is surprisingly simple.

This week I spent some time ruminating about a video adapter problem that I've been having.  My desktop computer is housed in a Shuttle case (an SD37P2, to be exact).  Shuttle means small and small can often mean hot and the problem I was having was related to heat.  I have a Sapphire (ATI) X1950Pro video adapter, a well performing mid-range DirectX 9 card; about nine months old.  It has always worked fine for normal 2D displays and was a pretty good performer on 3D games.

A couple of months ago I started playing 1701 AD, an "empire-building economic simulation game" which has spectacular 3D graphics.  After playing for a short while, an ATI popup message would inform me that the video adapter was overheating and it was slowing it down for it's own good.  I did a little research and got some annoyingly stupid advice from the 1701 AD user forum.  So far, no harm had been done when the overheating message appeared so I checked the box that said to not tell me about it anymore (kinda like putting black tape over the engine warning light in your car).

After awhile I got bored with 1701 AD  and ordered some new games from those accomodating folks at Amazon.com.  First up was Bioshock, the talk of the gaming community.  An over simplified view of Bioshock is that it is a first person shooter but it is so much more that that; and the 3D graphics are stunning.  About 10 to 15 minutes into the game my computer would either freeze or shut itself down.  Luckily, most of the time it was the latter which is a lot more graceful than the former. 

Suspecting an overheating problem (remember the black tape?), I dug out some tools to examine the temperatures and the fans.  First stop was SpeedFan, a nice little temp and fan utility from Alfredo Milani Comparetti.  This would tell me about the temperatures everywhere except the video card.  Everything looked okay so far.  I soon replaced SpeedFan with XPC Tools, another temp and fan utility but one specifically for my case and motherboard from Shuttle.  To look at the video card temperature, I first used the ATI Catalyst software that came with the card.  I wanted more control and more info so I downloaded ATITool from TechPowerup.com.  ATITool (not affiliated with ATI) is an overclocking tool that works on both ATI and NVIDIA cards.  It can directly test 3D operation with a graphic demonstration that it can run.  Now came my first real view of the problem:  the X1950Pro idled (2D) at about 66 degrees Celsius which I though was a little hot but may not be.  When I fired up (literally in this case) some 3D graphics, either from Bioshock or from ATITool, within a few minutes the temperature of the GPU was over 100 degrees Celsius and climbing toward that shutdown value.  Interestingly, when registering over 100, not much heat was coming out of the GPU fan vent.  My conclusion, so far, is that either the ATI temperature sensor is faulty or the Sapphire heatsink and fan have become completely ineffective.  In either case, the card is kaput and I will be seeking a warranty remedy soon.  In my quest for GPU termperature monitoring tools, I came across RivaTuner, another overclocking utility that has the best monitoring graphs and is a pleasure to use.  It is written by Alexey Nicolaychuk and distributed by The Guru of 3D.

My short term solution was to buy a new video adapter.  Since I wanted more horsepower for the new games coming down the pike and also DirectX 10 compatability in case I ever decide to install Vista again, I bought an EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS, third in line to the NVIDIA throne.  This is a somewhat large card, taking up two full slots of width, which is all I have in the Shuttle.  I had just read about someone else putting an 8800 GTX (which is even bigger) into a Shuttle so I thought it would work out okay.  It does fit but the fan side of the card is nestled up to the power supply at one end.  The card length is no problem as it is only a few millimeters longer than the ATI X1950 Pro. 

If fits and it works.  Downloaded the latest drivers from NVIDIA, installed, rebooted, and I was ready to take another look at the temperature situation.  RivaTools told me that the 2D temperature was 72 degrees Celsius.  Uh-oh, it starts out 6 degrees hotter than the card that overheats!!!  Not to worry - I started up Bioshock with every graphics option set to the max and the temperature of the GPU went up to 80 degrees Celsius and no higher.  I played Bioshock for awhile before I remembered that I was supposed to be working and the GPU temp stayed at 80 - well below the boiling water stage experienced by the ATI card.  Closing Bioshock dropped the GPU back to its 72 degree home state.

Also, Bioshock definitely lives up to the hype - I can see a lot of non-productive computer usage coming up.

I recently had a situation where my CD/DVD drive quit autorunning.  If I put a CD in the drive that had an installation program on it, the autorun.inf was never run by the system (Windows XP Pro).  This had been working fine until recently; I suspect uninstalling some of Roxio's crappy software was the culprit.  Anyway, I searched the internet for solutions, checking the registry, making sure the drivers were correct, all to no avail.  Microsoft had several Knowledgebase articles on remedies for the problem - none worked.  Then I thought, it's a plug and play device and doesn't require special drivers to be installed so I just uninstalled the drive in Device Manager and rebooted.  Viola!  XP found the drive, installed the device driver automatically, and autorun was functioning again.  Took all of about a minute (if you don't count my research time).  If this ever happens again, I know what I will be trying first.

As some of you know, I put down a deposit on a Smart Car several months ago.  The Smart Car is coming to the U.S.A. early next year, after nine years in Europe and other countries around the world (apparently, we aren't first in everything).  I fell in love with these cars on trips to France and Italy and have wanted one ever since. 

The smartusa folks have been on a tour with the cars around the country and I was invited to the San Jose stop.  They had three cars to drive, all European versions.  The U.S version will have slightly more power when it arrives.  I arrived a little before my time slot and got in line (about 15 people were ahead of me).  It was very much like a ride at Disneyland:  standing in a serpentine line with cars arriving every so often.  Then drivers would get out and new drivers would get in.  Then about five minutes of circulation and the ride was over.  I was tempted to get back in line after my drive.

The Smart Car name is normally shown in all lower case by the manufacturer but I have capitalized it here to make it a little easier to read.  The Smart Car was originally a joint venture between Swatch (yes, the watch company) and Mercedes Benz and the name 'smart' is an acronym for Swatch Mercedes ART.  Swatch has since dropped out of the project but Mercedes continues to be the manufacturer; albeit, Smart Cars are built in France.  The body panels are some type of plastic and are replacable with other colors and even panels with artistic designs.  The engine is a one liter three cylinder with about 71 HP.  Dry weight is around 1650 lbs.  Top speed is electronically limited to 90 MPH.  The demo guys said they had been averaging in the high 40 miles per gallon.  There are three models:  Pure, Passion, and Passion Cabrio (convertible) and prices are roughly $12K, $14K, and $17K.   

The transmission is the most interesting part of the drive train.  It is a five speed manual with an electically operated clutch.  There is no clutch pedal.  When you come to a stop, the transmission shifts into first gear and the clutch disengages.  When you step on the gas, the clutch engages.  It can also be put in a mode that shifts automatically but it is still a manual transmission because it has a clutch and not a torque converter.  You can manually shift with either the floor mounted shifter or paddle shifters on the steering wheel.  For the floor shifter, flick it forward to upshift and back to downshift.  Using the paddles, right paddle upshifts and left paddle downshifts - just like a Ferrari ;-)  I used the paddles but the turn signal got in the way of my fingers when using the left paddle; I'll have to practice my technique.

Anyway, I got to the front of the line, took my spin around the neighborhood, and was back in a flash.  On the route they made me drive, I couldn't get up to 40 mph and I was in second gear most of the time.  But it was still a lot of fun.  Unfortunately, I have to wait about six months before I have one of my very own.  I have ordered a Red Passion Cabrio with Black frame trim.  Anybody who wants a ride can stop by - one at a time.

My video is a little shaky; I need to practice my technique.  But you should be able to get the idea.

Here is my goal:  start with video produced by my camcorder in MPEG4/H.264 format, add a title page with a couple of transitions, export it to SWF format for easy viewing on the web (hopefully with a progressive download).  This goal should be accomplished for a moderate investment which I arbitrarily define as under $300.

I already have Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0, so that was my first trial.  It is very easy to add titles and transitions to my video but the export options are limited.  Most exports are to lower resolution formats and I want to retain the original 640 X 480 format.  I am able to export to Flash FLV format at the correct resolution though rendering was fairly slow.  I looked long and hard for a utility to convert the FLV to the more usable SWF format.  I settled on FLV & SWF Toolbox from Eltima Software and purchased this program, albeit prematurely.  Though FLV & SWF Toolbox creates a nice SWF file, it cannot be progressively downloaded; the viewer must wait for the entire file to be downloaded before the video is displayed in the browser.  It was not a particularly noticable problem with my short test videos but when I converted my three minute video (with sound) of the White Water Safari, the delay was significant, even with my 10 Mbps download speed.  Another problem with FLV & SWF Toolbox is that it always sets the SWF file to repeat.  When I inquired if there is a way to disable repeat, I was told that it would be an option in a future version.  So I am the not so proud owner of (yet another) piece of software that really won't be useful to me.

I also tried using Adobe Flash 8.0 to convert the FLV to SWF.  I had very mixed results with this approach and eventually abandoned Flash 8 as a tool for this project.  It would be nice it Adobe Premiere and Adobe Flash worked better together, but I know they come from different parts of Adobe and it is obvious - maybe some time in the future.

Magix MovieEdit Pro 12 was my next try.  I downloaded MovieEdit Pro because their feature list mentioned output to Flash format (don't know if that is FLV or SWF).  Installed and fired it up.  It cannot read .MP4 (H.264) - therefore useless for me.  Uninstalled - very quick evaluation!

Ulead VideoStudio 11 was next on my list.  Another download and install.  The user interface is a little unusual but I could get used to it.  Imported my MPEG4 with no problem.  Easily added a title.  Lots of output options; I chose MPEG4 for iPod 640X480 which is essentially the same as my original video clip except for the addition of a title and compression.  It worked okay, so I then converted the output to SWF using Sothink Video Encoder for Adobe Flash.  The original clip was about a minute long and 25 MB in size.  The resulting MP4 file was only 17 MB in size so some compression has occurred.

Success!  The MP4 ouput from Ulead Video Studio was fed to Sothink Video Encoder and resulted in a 12 MB SWF file and a small HTML file for setup.  I uploaded these to the server and the playback works just as I wanted.  Playback is immediate, size is 640 by 480, there is a nice control bar at the bottom of the video.  The VideoStudio rendering was much quicker than Premiere Elements though it is not an exact comparison.

Mission Accomplished.  Sothink Video Encoder for Flash was $45 and Ulead VideoStudio 11 was $99.99, so I came in well under my budget for this project.  Here is the White Water Safari video resulting from this combo.  This video sometimes stalls at the very beginning - clicking the link again usually gets it going.  I think I know what might be wrong so I will fiddle with it a bit to make it more reliable.

I bought a new camcorder recently, a Sanyo Xacti VPC-E1. It is a relatively simple camera but has one very important feature - it is waterproof to a depth of five feet. I wanted to record some of our upcoming Tahiti vacation and thought it would be nice to shoot some snorkeling video as well as have a camera that could be used in various wet environments. Five feet isn't very deep but I guarantee it is deeper than I will get. It got it's baptism recently when I accompanied my grandchildren and their parents on the White Water Safari at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom. The camera and I got soaked but the camera worked fine.

The Sanyo VPC-E1 is about the size of a deck of cards and weighs about 9 ozs. ready to go. It records to SD media and can use the new SD-HC (High Capacity) media. It has a small amount of internal memory as well. I purchased a Transcend 8GB card with a class 6 speed. The way I read the instructions, class 2 speed was probably adequate but I wanted to be safe. At the VPC-E1's highest resolution, 640 by 480 at 30 frames per second, the 8 GB SD card will hold about five hours of video. The battery is Lithium-Ion and is removable. The camera comes with an external charger for the battery. A protective wrap-around cover is also supplied. There is a bundle of software included, the most useful of which is Adobe Premiere Elements (version 3.0).

There is no eyepiece viewfinder, only the flip-out 2.5 inch LCD screen. The camera can take video or 6 mega-pixel stills; there is a separate button for each. There is a built-in flash for use with the still camera feature. The zoom is only five to one; pretty good for the still side of the camera but not outstanding compared to most camcorders. There is built-in image stabilization for those of us with shaky hands.

All things considered, it is a fine little camcorder for someone who is not too serious about their video creation. The waterproof capability adds a fun factor to this little camera. The Sanyo VPC-E1 was $467 from Amazon.com. The 8GB SD-HC card was an additional $74 from NewEgg.com and a spare battery added $17.

Since this is my first foray into putting video on the web, I had some decisions to make and some tasks to perform. The VPC-E1 creates video in the MPEG-4 H.264 format (same as used by video-capable iPods). You can't just post an MP4 file on the web and expect people to be able to view it - you need a special viewer or you need a different format.

First stop was to take a look at what Adobe Premiere Elements could do for me (without reading the manual, of course). It is a very usable piece of software and I quickly figured out how to add a title screen and a few transitions. It also can export to a variety of formats. Most of the export formats were not a good match for my 640 by 480 TV format, plus I wanted people to be able to view the videos without installing additional software. I tried making a QuickTime movie but had to fiddle with the setup to get it up to 640 by 480 (best default resolution was 320 by 240).

While most people probably have the Apple QuickTime plug-in installed in their browsers, I think it may not be universal. Why not do what YouTube does, convert the video to Flash. Premiere Elements can export to Flash (.FLV) format and has a nice default of 640 by 480 at 30 FPS. So I rendered another copy of the video to FLV and uploaded it to the server. Oh, you can't view an FLV file with the Flash plug-in; you need the video fo be in .SWF format (ShockWave). Premiere doesn't do SWF (don't know why not, since Adobe owns Flash). So I fished around on the internet for an FLV to SWF converter. My son, Alec, likes the Sothink Video Encoder and I like it too, but it wants to render the MP4 to SWF and I already had the FLV file rendered so why burn more CPU cycles?

Eltima Software makes the SWF & FLV Toolbox which will, among other things, convert FLV to SWF and includes a nice little self-hiding viewer control panel in the SWF file. Plus, it only takes a couple of seconds to perform it's magic. The Toolbox does have a peculiar interface but it seems competent at it's job. So the end result of this multi-step process is an SWF file on the server that can be viewed via a link like this (White Water Safari) or directly, if I choose to give the filename to someone in an Email or something like that.

Update 8/20/2007

The links to the videos actually show results from part 2 of this article.

Here's a quick restaurant review of El Rincon Mexicano in downtown Morgan Hill.  Located on East Second Street, a couple of doors east of Monterey Road, El Rincon is quite small but the food is great.  It has just a few tables inside and a few outside but this is no Taqueria.  Doris and I ate there for the first time a couple of weeks ago.  We came a little early and ate at an outside table on the sidewalk; it was very pleasant.

For starters, we had the fresh Guacamole which is constructed at your table.  Alberto the Chef brings avocado, diced tomatoes, chopped cilantro, onions, and diced peppers to your table where he combines the ingredients, letting you choose the quantity of peppers to be added.  It is served with a stack of warm corn tortillas.  It looked like way too much guacamole for the two of us but it was so delicious that we polished off the whole bowl.  By the way, Alberto is also the host, waiter, and busses the tables. 

We each had a salad, Doris choosing the mixed greens salad (Ensalada Mixta) while I had the Jicama salad.  The Jicama sticks were joined by thin slices of tomato, avocado, nectarine, orange, and, I think, blood orange (it looked like a pink grapefruit but tasted like an orange.  It had a chile dressing that had just the right amount of kick.  We both thoroughly enjoyed our salads.

For the main course, Doris had the Chicken in Green Mole and I had one of the best Chile Rellenos of my life.  The Poblano chile was stuffed with the traditional cheese plus peas, slightly crunchy carrots, and ground beef.  It was served over a tasty brown sauce.

Alberto brought the bill before we could order dessert, so I guess he thought we had had enough to eat (which was probably true).  We want to go back, but Alberto has opened a larger version of his restaurant in Gilroy and the Morgan Hill branch doesn't seem to be open during the advertised hours.  I hope it doesn't close, but if it does, it will be worth the trek to Gilroy for some more of Alberto's excellent cooking.

El Rincon Mexicano
40 East Second Street
Morgan Hill, CA 95037
408-778-6769

8/10/2007 Update:

El Rincon is still operational and we have been back twice since the first visit.  If you go, I highly recommend the Lamb Shank in mole - it is outstanding.  Most everyting we have tried is excellent except the Carnitas which I thought was just average.

 DF

I wanted to start a category about living in Morgan Hill; what we like and don't like, tips for new residents, and stuff like that.  This morning, we had a taste of what we like about living in Morgan Hill, particularly in Jackson Oaks.  Just before breakfast, we found two Mule Deer bucks grazing in our front yard.  Their antlers were just starting to grow, six points each, so far.  I haven't seen two bucks co-existing before.  The one other time I saw two bucks together, they were fighting (it was mating season).  By the time I got my camera, they had wandered away.

One of the bucks has been sleeping in various parts of our yard for the past couple of weeks.  Doris took a picture of him with her cell phone camera.  He was chewing his cud in the gravel next to the driveway.