Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.
Tuesday, August 29
Nearly Almost
My new office PC has moved from "parts allocation" to "invoicing". They had to swap the memory as well as the motherboard to make it work, but now they've done a 72-hour burn-in with all 4GB and it's working.
So I'm sitting here trying to get it to move to "shipped" by sheer force of will.
Doesn't seem to be working.
Update: Just needed to concentrate a bit harder. Eet hes sheeped!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:13 PM
| Comments (9)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 76 words, total size 1 kb.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, August 30 2006 03:18 AM (CJ5+Y)
2
It's some kinda 'strilian thing, I guess ....
Posted by: Kristopher at Wednesday, August 30 2006 10:25 AM (O5Ju8)
3
Dual core goodness.
Crunchy and oh so good for you.
Posted by: Andrew at Wednesday, August 30 2006 08:52 PM (t8tOu)
4
ahhhh, tech bliss. hope it continues well into the drivers install phase.
Posted by: Michele at Friday, September 01 2006 02:59 PM (y9UuV)
5
Pixy,
Can you offer advice for someone new to RAID? My home computer has nothing on it but software that I have available on cd. I regularly back up my personal files once every couple of years, since losing them would not be a very big deal.
In my position, would you go with RAID 0? Or one of the safer modes? I'd like 500G of space, but only have the spare cash for 2-300GB drives.
Thanks in advance,
The guy who's not a fan of Anime ;)
Posted by: Kevin at Friday, September 01 2006 08:49 PM (++0ve)
6
My experience with RAID on a budget is: If you are running Linux, software RAID-1 works beautifully. Software RAID-5 sucks abominably. RAID-0 works fine too, but of course offers no protection.
On Windows, software RAID in general sucks. Spanned volumes are okay, though.
And any RAID controller that costs less than $500 is
not hardware RAID, no matter what it says on the box. Likewise the controller on anything but a high-end server motherboard.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 02 2006 12:10 AM (FRalS)
7
Darn, thanks for the info. I assumed that RAID was built in to my $78 motherboard. Oh well :(
Posted by: Kevin at Saturday, September 02 2006 08:24 AM (++0ve)
8
It's actually a sort-of-RAID sort-of-thing. Most of the work is done in software, usually badly.
The 3Ware controllers work brilliantly - we use those in the servers at work. But they ain't cheap.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 02 2006 08:41 AM (oFrbW)
9
Darn again :)
It turns out that my ASUS P4P-800 motherboard does do RAID, but as you suggested, it does it badly according to online reviews (eats 30% of cpu on a P4 2.8 when hitting the drives and a few say it doesn't really increase the read speed noticeably!). I guess I'll just use them as separate volumes since joining them no longer offers me any value.
Thanks again for the help/opinion.
Posted by: Kevin at Saturday, September 02 2006 10:44 AM (++0ve)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Monday, August 28
Percussive Maintenance
I was fussing around with my iPod, and ended up just giving it a ding over the head and plugging it into the Firewire cable.
And the light came on, and then the Apple logo, and then the infamous DO NOT DISCONNECT message. The battery is completely flat, in spite of being plugged in for several hours the other day.
Windows can see it as a disk. iTunes doesn't seem to want to know, though. I'll see if I can sort that out.
In other news, I got a delayed write error on my external disk drive... But that's on the same Firewire card that I was plugging and unplugging the iPod on, so might just be a glitch. Yeah, I'm sure it's just a glitch.
Update: Swapped the iPod to my other Firewire card, and dinged iTunes over the head, and now that's working. And I got a whole bunch more delayed write errors on the external drive, so I swapped that to USB, and now that's working too.
Hmm.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:17 AM
| Comments (1)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 175 words, total size 1 kb.
1
http://ipodbatteryfaq.com/iPod batteries have always been a major problem ... Apple has been sued over this issue.
They are user-replaceable for the adventurous.
Posted by: Kristopher at Tuesday, August 29 2006 10:18 AM (O5Ju8)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Thursday, August 24
Double Defoiled
EYO tried every Conroe-compliant motherboard they had in stock, and only one would detect the 4GB of memory; all the others showed 3GB.
The one that worked is a 975-based board; none of the 965 boards worked.
Very strange.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:15 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 43 words, total size 1 kb.
Tuesday, August 22
Curses! Defoiled Again!
I got a call from the computer store* today. Turns out that the motherboard I'd ordered would only support 3GB of memory, not the 8GB it said on the web site. So I was forced to get the better model with the dual network ports, dual PCIe x16 slots, FireWire, WiFi, eSATA, and all that.
Darn.
* EYO; I've been buying stuff from them for years.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:50 AM
| Comments (7)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 72 words, total size 1 kb.
1
"Forced", huh? At gunpoint, obviously. What a terrible fate, to have to buy better toys than you expected.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, August 22 2006 02:15 PM (+rSRq)
2
Worse than that - the company is paying for it. Oh, woe!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 22 2006 07:50 PM (9OTrh)
3
Err, just noticed that the number of comments on this post and the previous is off by one.
Posted by: Chris C. at Wednesday, August 23 2006 10:35 AM (2tRs7)
4
So ... steve's post was -1?
Or was that 2?
Posted by: Kristopher at Wednesday, August 23 2006 02:30 PM (O5Ju8)
5
The comment counter gets confused when I zap spam. In the final version, it will be maintained by a database trigger, but right now it has to be reset every so often.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 23 2006 09:52 PM (FRalS)
6
We're running into this problem as well.
Here's what we've just learned at work: Dell will happily sell you a laptop stuffed with 4GB of memory, but the machine is only capable of recognizing 3GB.
We're in the process of sorting this out with them, because we need to buy a *bunch* of 4GB laptops for our engineering staff.
Grrrrr.
Posted by: Barry Campbell at Sunday, August 27 2006 06:14 AM (xq6n5)
7
Wow. Considering what Dell charges for a notebook with 4GB of memory, you'd think they would have actually
tested one at some point.
I checked the technical specs for the chipsets, and it looks like it's a BIOS problem. The hardware really does support 8GB (and potentially more), but the lower 4GB of the address space is fragmented. So if the BIOS maps the physical memory there, you only get 3GB, or in fact slightly less than that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 27 2006 06:28 AM (9OTrh)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Sunday, August 20
Install Inferno
So now I'm re-installing all the stuff I used to have on my PC.
So far, I've loaded 18GB of software.
I thought I was going to have to install all my games as well, but it turns out that after the last disaster I loaded them all onto the (newly rebuilt) D drive - and they're still there.
So yay for that, at least.
* Except for Neverwinter Nights, which is very emphatic about where it wants to live. C:/NWN or bust. But that's a single DVD, and I haven't even lost the activation keys yet.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:40 AM
| Comments (1)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 101 words, total size 1 kb.
1
I haven't even lost the activation keys yet
I usually manage to keep track of mine for up to several hours after installation.
Posted by: TallDave at Tuesday, August 22 2006 01:49 PM (oyQH2)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Friday, August 18
Minus Oneth Normal Form
We used to joke about some of the database structures at my previous place of employment - for example, comma-separated lists of name=value pairs - as being in minus-oneth normal form. We were forced to do stuff like that because we were working with huge databases and impossible time constraints, and simply could not afford to take the databases offline to make the changes we really needed, so we had to stick data wherever it would fit.
(There's a good name for this sort of activity: deficit programming. I hate deficit programming.)
Why do I bring this up?
I've just been denormalising our database. We are running, right now, on a hacked-up copy of an ancient version of Movable Type. In preparation for moving off Movable Type, I am trying to get it into a form at least somewhat similar to the Minx structures.
Part of the problem is that MT is highly normalised. There is, for example, no record of how many comments are attached to a particular post. MT executes an SQL query to count them as needed. Minx embeds it within its queries. But being forced to embed a carefully grouped count function within a query that is assembled ad-hoc depending on parameters set by the blog owner and the individual template tags is something of a pain.
So I de-normalised the database. Now we have a comment count field.
There are only two pieces of code that add comments to the system, and I've patched those to update the new field. A database trigger would be a much better solution, but this is MySQL 4.1, and it doesn't have triggers.
Unfortunately there are also several things that delete comments, so I need to hunt those down as well. Or just set up a routine to recalculate the comment counts every so often. Until we move to Minx. Whenever that might be...
Update: And, uh, just breaking the entire blogging system in the process. Stupid MySQL.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:56 PM
| Comments (12)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 337 words, total size 2 kb.
1
So, Pixy, what's null+1?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 18 2006 10:57 PM (FRalS)
2
It's null, of course. Which sucks.
Where are those bloody nulls coming from?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 18 2006 10:58 PM (FRalS)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 18 2006 11:14 PM (FRalS)
4
It hasn't sped up the queries much (if at all), so obviously MySQL has some neat tricks to optimise those count() calls. But it makes the joins a hell of a lot simpler.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 19 2006 01:02 AM (FRalS)
5
What did speed things up, though, was keeping the modified_on field updated and then adding an index on that field.
Took the forum view from 15 seconds down to about 6 milliseconds.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 19 2006 03:30 AM (FRalS)
6
So ... Dokuro-chan is still helping you with the database?
Posted by: Kristopher at Saturday, August 19 2006 10:46 AM (O5Ju8)
7
Reminds me of a story a co-worker of mine likes to tell.
Some kids, right out of college, wrote an embedded daztabase application for a place she worked. They were all excited about "normalization" and had no experience with actual work and so they made the app in what they triumphantly described as 3rd normal form. There was nothing that wasn't a database field instead of being a value. Instead of a yes/no logical field, you got a table to hold the values "yes" and "no" for it to refer to.
Of course, as a result, the application literally could not do anything without referencing about 900 different tables. It ran so slow most of the time no one could even tell if it was actually running. It never did any useful work.
But this was at the height of the bubble and they were buddy-buddy with the CEO, so naturally they just blamed the hardware and still got paid.
Posted by: TallDave at Saturday, August 19 2006 03:09 PM (oyQH2)
8
I've just been denormalising our database.
Yeah. Like anything around this place could be described as 'normal.'
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, August 20 2006 01:06 AM (CJ5+Y)
9
So, um, Pixy ol' pal... gots a question for ya.
What's with the alphanumerics after every comment here, eh? They're all different, except for yours (PiXy! indeed...); database stuff?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, August 22 2006 12:13 AM (6YRS5)
10
It's a hash of the commenter's IP address. I implemented that for Ace of Spades after the big sockpuppet kerfuffle.
Since you're on dial-up, yours changes all the time.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 22 2006 12:39 AM (FRalS)
Posted by: De_Bunk at Tuesday, August 22 2006 10:21 AM (NiWhx)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 22 2006 09:39 PM (FRalS)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Wednesday, August 16
Obvious
I'll call the physical system Haruhi and the virtual machines Mikuru, Yuki, and Kyon.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:51 PM
| Comments (22)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 16 words, total size 1 kb.
1
Oh, dear. Now that really
is geeky!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, August 16 2006 09:52 PM (+rSRq)
2
I don't know if you've managed to dodge the spoilers for the show, but yeah, it really is geeky. Geeky but unavoidable. ;)
Technically it should be Itsuki (or Ryoko) rather than Kyon, but I'm not
that much of a geek. And I'll probably end up with more than three virtual machines anyway.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 16 2006 10:17 PM (FRalS)
3
This Yuki? If so, I wholeheartedly support you. Something tells me (since I don't enjoy Anime) that I've got it wrong. But she
did do a song called 'Freckles' (Sobasaku) for
the anime show 'Rurouni Kenshin'(?), so hopefully I'm spot on.
Posted by: Kevin at Thursday, August 17 2006 09:38 AM (++0ve)
4
You're not even remotely close. Yuki is an example of an "emotionless girl". There's a classic image of her I saw, taken from the show, where she's reading a book while waterskiing.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, August 17 2006 12:01 PM (+rSRq)
5
Must have been from the missing 'fifteenth episode' then... that doesn't show up in the series. Fanart, or something like it.
Great choice, Pixy!
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, August 17 2006 12:42 PM (+rGmJ)
6
Sorry sir Duck, but he's right. About fifteen minutes into episode 6, during the beach shenanigans, it's right between the jetski and floating in tubes. It's only a 2 second flash.
Posted by: Will at Thursday, August 17 2006 02:45 PM (mF7/Z)
7
Here it is:
http://www.tancos2.net/animepix/yuki.jpg
Posted by: Donald McClane at Thursday, August 17 2006 06:18 PM (JkPhI)
8
Great googly moogly! I slouch corrected, Steven, and humbly accept my apologies. I must have blinked.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, August 17 2006 08:37 PM (6YRS5)
9
Oh :( then I'm against the choice. Anime is just cartoons to me. And when a cartoon isn't funny, it's not worth watching.
To be fair OH!, I haven't seen any WHA? anime since Speed Racer HUH? appeared on the scene. Oh wait. I did see a movie where some parents ate some food and turned into pigs, forcing a daughter to save the day by going to the land of the gods and pull a plug out of a fat guys rear, turning him into a dragon, and kill the bad lady owner of the god's hotel or something. The end result was that life continued as if none of it happened at all. *sigh*
Yeah, I just don't get anime. Call me kooky I guess.
Posted by: Kevin at Thursday, August 17 2006 10:36 PM (++0ve)
10
I won't call you kooky, but I will call you rude. Why is it that you feel the need to come to someone's home page and to shit all over their hobby?
The next time you watch Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi I advise you to try it sober. You'll get a lot more out of it. You might even enjoy it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, August 18 2006 12:01 AM (+rSRq)
11
It's okay. We have to make allowances for Kevin; he's a Perl programmer.
:p
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 18 2006 12:04 AM (FRalS)
12
To be fair OH!, I haven't seen any WHA? anime since Speed Racer HUH? appeared on the scene.
Then you've really not seen any anime at all, have you?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, August 18 2006 01:03 AM (IRkCC)
13
Nurse! Give this patient 26 episodes of
Dirty Pair, stat!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 18 2006 01:13 AM (FRalS)
14
Though he'll have to watch them in Japanese...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 18 2006 03:22 AM (FRalS)
15
There's a nice one-pager about Yuki
here. (Remember when you're reading it that Japanese mangas read frames from right to left.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, August 18 2006 03:32 AM (+rSRq)
16
To be honest Steve, I never thought of it that way. I believed that I was only explaining my lack of depth, not disparaging your choice of entertainment. Re-reading my comment, it's pretty clear that I
was overly aggressive toward the cartoons :)
I apologize, and will refrain from commenting on future anime threads.
ps. I've seen more recent anime Wonderduck, but speed racer was the last one I've seen a full half-hour of. The close-ups with the characters covered in beads of sweat made me assume that not much has changed.
Posted by: Kevin at Friday, August 18 2006 07:22 AM (++0ve)
17
The names Pixy chose were from an anime series called Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu which was broadcast in Japan this Spring.
If you don't think anime has changed much, then consider this: one of the more famous scenes from it has Haruhi singing a rock piece and playing the guitar at a school festival while wearing a Playboy Bunny costume. Yuki plays bass while wearing a witch's costume.
I bet you never saw anything like that in "Speed Racer".
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, August 18 2006 10:58 AM (+rSRq)
18
I haven't programmed since 1979, but I recently saw a page of Perl and it was just numbers and letters and stuff, just like the Fortran I used back in 1979. So I assume not much has changed.
Posted by: Toren at Friday, August 18 2006 03:19 PM (68AXj)
19
Ah. So, apology accepted I guess? ;)
Posted by: Kevin at Friday, August 18 2006 05:28 PM (++0ve)
20
Toren - Yep. Programming languages reached their peak with Algol and have been going backwards ever since.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 18 2006 07:00 PM (vP+3j)
21
Ah, I can still remember the glory days, in 1983, when Algol invented the internet. Good times.
Posted by: Kevin at Friday, August 18 2006 08:06 PM (++0ve)
22
Algol, Iceball, Snoball, Madcap...good times, good times....
Posted by: Toren at Saturday, August 19 2006 04:38 AM (68AXj)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
New Toys!
Getting a new PC at the office.
Finally.
For the last 18 months I've been running on an old PC I bought in 2001... because it was better than what I had before. Even after half the memory died.
Specs:
Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4GHz)
4GB memory
320GB disk
Radeon 1600XT
This will replace not only my Windows PC*, but three Linux development boxes** as well. Hence the 4GB of memory. VMWare server is neat, and it's free, but it goes through memory like a starving honeybadger through a bag of Maltesers.
Now all it needs is a name. And for the CPU to arrive...
SpecIntRate Figures
Current Thingy: 6.05
Sun E450: 10.9
RS/6000 M80: 25.1 (8-way RS64-III)
AlphaServer GS80 Model 6/731: 36.0 (8-way Alpha)
Unisys ES7000: 44.3 (16-way Xeon)
Sun E4800: 51.3 (12-way UltraSparc III)
New Toy: 53.9
SGI Altix 4700 Density System: 4236
* Tara
** Fred, Willow, and Xander
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:47 AM
| Comments (6)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 156 words, total size 1 kb.
1
I vote for "Whiskeyjack." But that's probably because I've been reading through
Erikson's Malazan series recently.
Posted by: Will at Wednesday, August 16 2006 10:44 AM (mF7/Z)
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, August 16 2006 01:39 PM (+rGmJ)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, August 16 2006 01:44 PM (+rSRq)
4
Is your computer better than my 1.2GHz Celeron? Don't speak too fast! I am overclocking, and it's running at 1.32Ghz. Also, it has thousands of bits in both the L1 and L2 caches. THOUSANDS!
Posted by: Kevin at Thursday, August 17 2006 09:27 AM (++0ve)
5
Umm, isn't Xander kinda out of place in that list? Or is he in there because he's girlier than Anya and Cordelia?
But he can Snoopy dance like none other.
:-D
Posted by: tommy at Friday, August 18 2006 12:11 AM (UynUa)
6
We also have Buffy, Angel, Spike, Cordelia, Wesley, Glory, Faith, Anya - actually, I think Anya died - and Harmony. We had a Giles, but he got replaced.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 18 2006 12:21 AM (FRalS)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Tuesday, August 15
I Have
A copy of Windows XP Media Center, a 250GB hard disk, and a screwdriver,
and I'm not afraid to use them.
They were supposed to go in my new media center PC, but that kind of didn't work - the motherboard seems to be faulty and I haven't had a chance to get it replaced. So they get reporpoised.
Actually, I am afraid to use them. If I pull the wrong plug, I'll trash my 600GB spanned volume. Which has Magipoka and Haruhi on it. And some other stuff. But I'm going to do it anyway.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:28 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 100 words, total size 1 kb.
Sunday, August 13
B u g g e r
Went over my monthly download limit* and now my bandwidth has been trimmed from 17m down to 64k.
Fortunately for me, it resets tonight, because 64k really sucks. At least the forum version of my site comes up quickly enough...
* Downloaded one too many episodes of Bullshit!, I guess.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:50 PM
| Comments (1)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 62 words, total size 1 kb.
83kb generated in CPU 0.0873, elapsed 0.2723 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.2528 seconds, 405 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.