For your information, the fastest CD burning speed with an excellent reliability rating is 8x. The most acceptable CD burning speed with a very good reliability rate is 12x. Burning 16x is a hit and miss scenario leaning on the successful burning result but I do not generally recommend this. Note that *virtually* walang pakialam dito ang CPU speed and available CPU RAM, although the IMAPI driver engine would
sometimes need CPU resources for packet reading, writing and verification. Also, if you burn in 8x, you can still safely multi-task without the fear of getting a mis-burnt CD via buffer overruns or underruns.

There are mainly three types of recording dyes used in CD media - cyanine, phthalocyanine and AZO. Although you can super heat them at high speeds, the resulting superheated distortion of the recording dyes provide more reliable data-consistency at slower burning speeds.

Good references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_recorder
http://www.osta.org/technology/cdqa.htm

Friday. End of another work week. I have been working on HorseRace and PerCh on the side.

This week in HorseRace, I had difficulty in finding a suitable video-playing control for Visual Basic. The standard OLE control wouldn't allow me to play multiple animations on a single form. So I searched for other avenues. I went as far as using the Windows Media Player dynamic-link library (wmp.dll) for my purposes and created a custom UserControl around it. It worked, but the darned program crashed after reusing the controls for quite a while. Damn. Meanwhile, I tried to search the web for some help in using the Sprite control provided by DirectX - in vain. Luckily, I stumbled on some Windows Common Controls SP4, containing an animation control. I tried it and it worked flawlessly, without much of the crashing as I experienced with wmp.dll. So, I rewrote the whole stuff and junked the custom ActiveX UserControl. It hogged my system performance anyway.

In PerCh, I initiated the implementation of probers. Bahhh...

Sunday. Very early morning to be precise. End of December is coming and my life, along with my own little family's, is still not on track - at least the track that I expected.

Anyways, I made some significant progress in my R & D document for PerCh. It will all be a matter of time... and December ends - the years ends - not a moment too soon. Some progress that was. I'm hoping to finish that this year, so that my Big Boss can consider it next year.

I thought IT_Specialists could help me out. But nobody there knew WinSock programming in VB the way I did - or at least nobody's talking. I'm still having trouble ending my file transfers - in the algo, that is... especially for heavyweight files. What's the problem? And what's the sleekest data chunk to transfer anyway? 8 KB?

Gotta get some sleep...