In the past we’ve been using cheap nVidea cards that do S-Video out ($10 GeForce 440 MX’s) to connect frontends with TVs. However, the process of selecting an S-Video input on the new home theatre was deemed unnecessarily difficult. The only connection method that made sense was HDMI. There are plenty of Video cards that do HDMI out. Unfortunately, they’re all PCI-e cards, and the only spare PC’s we had available had, at best, an AGP slot. An AGP card that does HDMI out are hard to come by, and those that are available are surprisingly expensive.

After a few hours of research I stumbled upon the fact that DVI and HDMI carried the same video signal, but I couldn’t find any adaptor that integrated an external sound source with a DVI-HDMI adaptor to provide an audio signal through the HDMI cable. Enter ATI and their Avivo technology. Using a proprietary DVI-HDMI adaptor with chipsets supporting Avivo, the resulting HDMI connection would carry audio & video signals.

A local retailer carried a discount VisionTek AGP Radeon 2600 HD Pro for $33. Unfortunately this particular manufacturer doesn’t supply the proprietary DVI-HDMI adaptor despite the hardware supporting it. Which brings us to the title of this post. Acquiring this adaptor has been a struggle. Given that I’m looking for a proprietary part I would rather buy directly from the vendor, then risk buying an incompatible part. It also didn’t hurt that ATI is the least expensive supplier of this part.

My attempts to order from shop.ati.com were thwarted by their inability to ship to Canada. There is a link to shopati.ca on the product page for Canadian customers. But that domain expired and was snapped up by Namespro Solutions who replaced it link farm/parked domain template in June/09 (at the time of writing, that was 8 months ago!). So I decided to try and order over the phone. So far my calls have been redirected 4 times each requiring me to call another number, and I’ve reached a dead end.

1. Number found shop.ati.com 952-646-5888 redirected me to ATI’s office in Markham.
2. Number supplied by CSR at shop.ati.com for ATI’s Canadian HQ(905 882 2620) turned out to be a Fax machine.
3. Listed number for ATI’s Markham Office (905 882 2600), the extension selected by the automated prompter looped me back to the first prompt.
4. Hit 0 to speak to an operator after the auto dispatcher failed to connect me. CSR suggested I call GPU technical support.
5. The CSR at GPU tech support(877-284-1566) could not help me directly. He suggested I try calling yet another number, but he wouldn’t tell me the name of the department that answers the number. He also suggested an unaffiliated internet vendor, should I find the number unhelpful.
6. The nuber given to me by GPU tech support (888-974-6728) was a dead end. I’ve only ever gotten a busy signal in my attempts to call it.
7. The vendor suggested by the GPU tech support worker(svideo.com) didn’t even carry the part I was looking for.

In total, that’s 4 websites, 5 phone calls, 2 dead ends. And I still haven’t found a reasonably priced source for my part.

Update:

Shortly after writing this post I opened a support ticket with AMD as a last ditch effort. Their support website did not inspire hope, unintuitive design, and a warning that claimed it was best viewed with Internet Explorer 5 or 6. A day later they responded stating that the Canadian ATI store was closed for ever, and that my best source of the part was the manufacturer of my specific card. They wanted $30 in shipping for a $5 part. Which was completely unacceptable.

Today AMD reached out to me looking for feed back on my customer support experience. Lets just say that I was less than kind in my responses.

The is operated by Coach Canada. It serves a number of reasonably close cities. Tickets prices are determined by supply and demand, such that the ticket price is directly proportional to the number of people who have already chosen your trip. When booking my voyage, I couldn’t find any trips cheaper than $18 CAD, which is still a phenomenal deal for a one way trip to Montreal from Toronto. However the cost of your trip will depend on travel time. Luckily, I had the luxury of being able to travel during off peak times (Wednesday and Monday during regular business hours).

After I bought my ticket I heard many rumours about the Megabus that seemed too good to be true. In reality all of the rumours were truths. The bus came even better stocked than I expected. Both of my trips were on double decker busses. Each was equipped with a power outlet for every pair of seats, free wi-fi a second level and a wash room. There were also a few unused amenities. Every seat had a headphone jack tuned to a local radio station and each floor had a few LCD screens around for movies but neither saw much use.

The Toronto – Montreal trip took 5 hours & 45 minutes. Apart from the screaming child sitting two rows up on my trip out, I have no complaints. However on the return trip another passenger was asked to either move or shutdown his laptop because the light it was giving off distracted the driver.

Some stats about the Megabus internet connection:

Downlink: 1.4 Mbps
Uplink: 800 kbps
Provider: Bell Mobility
Surprisingly the gateway is using OpenDNS.

I get various results in my attempts for geolocation based on IP. One test put me in Manitoba within 30m of the Nunavut Border. Another put me in Etobicoke, Ontario.
It’s also worth noting that the wi-fi on the bus is insecure. Which means a few things, in increasing order of maliciousness.

• If you feel like keeping pace with a Megabus, you can use their network from a car following on the highway.
• arpspoofing can be used to inflict the Upside-Down-Ternet on passengers using the internet on your bus.
• Wireshark can be used to snoop the traffic of every device connected to the network.
• sslstrip makes it easy to grab passwords and other very sensitive information.

So as always be mindful of where you connect. You’re never really safe from these attacks unless you’re using SSH tunnelling or other security tricks. On the upside it seems I was the only one thinking of these things on my ride. But who knows how who else will be watching your traffic when you connect from anywhere.

Here are some pictures of the bus from my return trip:

There's a table with cupholders on the bus

The view from my lap

Surprise! There's a hidden outlet under those garbage bags.

Stuck in Montreal Traffic

Now Connected to the Megabus' internal Wi-Fi network

Software Engineering: Your only hope of preventing the eventual robot uprising.

Wish I could credit the original artist of the wireframe, but I have no idea where I found it.