Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Avatar

I've just been see Avatar. This is an unbelievably awesome film. Intensely immersive. It's all filmed in 3D which adds to the immersion, and most of it is computer generated, although the  actors' performances are mapped directly to their digital avatars, so it is entirely believable. The filming technology has been described as a huge directable game engine. It's completely amazing and engrossing.
The film is essentially humans taking resources from aliens. The alien world is a beautiful, holistic, sensual place full of wonder, and nasty creatures on an almost Asher level. The humans are stereo-typically corporate driven and military supported, but their environment is in its own way awesome, with fantastic hover ships, and exo-skeleton infantry. The conflict is epic, and I found, deeply moving.
Again, the effects and sound are amazing, produced by the likes of Weta Workshop, Skywalker Sound, Industrial Light and Magic, a group called The Pixel Liberation Front, and many others.
The acting was generally pretty good I thought. Sigourney Weaver really likes her SF. James Cameron wrote and directed the film, and has been waiting for a long time for the tech to complete his vision. Brilliant work.
The avatar concept in the film, where humans can tele-operate a vat-grown alien body isn't entirely new, (usually done with a synthetic host), but works really well as a device for connecting both the viewer and the film humans with the aliens. It is beautifully done.
Go see this film. See it in 3D too. It's completely amazing.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Virtual Inheritance.

I found a bug recently that was causing a crash only on a Solaris 10 build, but the same code was fine on Win32. I eventually tracked it down to the Sun compiler not generating the correct code for a virtual inheritance situation. It was a multiple inheritance situation, and one of the parents was a pure abstract interface class, so it's not like the design was really ugly, or the situation was particularly complex. There was only one implementation of the virtual method for the class, and the abstract interface was derived virtually. Calling the method on the class worked fine, but calling the method on a const abstract base class reference (where the method was declared) returned fine, but the returned object caused a crash as soon as it was used. The method was there, but the compiler didn't hook it up in the virtual method table. It hooked something up though. Bizarre. I removed the virtual keyword, and everything worked fine.
The Sun compiler is Flakey.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Misspelling: jewlery

This one annoys me. Not only do people often say jewlery (say with a course aussie accent), but they spell it like this as well.
Lets have a look around for this. Here, here, here, here, here.

Idiots!

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Climategate

I sure hope we're not overly reliant on the models or data from CRU for our picture of global warming. Because it seems they are both complete crap. See here, here.

[update Dec 2]  While this looks very very bad, it's possible the science coming out of CRU isn't all crap, but there should definitely be some sort of review of their results.
Also there are other sources of good science on this, so lets not lose the plot on climate change altogether.

Crunchpad dies!

So close to going retail. the CrunchPad is dead. It looked exactly like what I'm after.
*sigh*

[update Dec 8] Its back, under the name JooJoo. Pricing set at US$500. That's probably over my threshold. I'm not getting into the politics of who owns what, let the legal action settle first.

[update Dec 14] And the legal action starts.

CERN geeks play D&D

Of course they do. Some interesting tid-bits in this interview with a CERN geek.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Sun C++ compiler precompiled headers implementation sucks.

I'm using the Sun C++ compiler (Sun C 5.9 SunOS_sparc Patch 124867-01 2007/07/12) on Solaris (5.10 Generic_141444-09 sun4v sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5220) for work.

I noticed that the compiler supports precompiled header files recently, and thought, great, this is going to speed up compiling enormously. For a given C++ package, compiling on Windows under VC9, the time taken decreases from 55 seconds to 22 seconds when precompiled headers is enabled. That is a significant difference, and well worth the effort of setting it up to work for you.
On Solaris, without precompiled headers, this same package takes 2:30s to compile. OK, it's an older machine, but when precompiled headers is turned on (-xpch=autofirst), the time taken, incredibly, increases slightly to 2:40s. I mean, seriously, WTF!?
With some more digging, I work out that the Sun compiler's implementation of pchs is infantile. They just collect up the postprocessed code from the headers and lob into one large file. There is nothing precompiled about Sun's precompiled headers, If anything, it's preprocessed headers. And it has to be implemented badly to take longer! Sheesh! Even the link above shows a minimal improvement for a really simple case.
Get it together Sun! Oh, right, Oracle is buying, and they probably care less.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Primer

Speaking of Time and Space, you seriously have to watch the film Primer. Don't read the plot on the wiki page before you see the film though, you should watch the film totally flat.
It's about time travel, and is incredibly complicated. Even after watching it twice, I still hadn't worked out the last 13 minutes. "What the bloody hell just happened?". And this is the point of the film, to feel very confused. And the last 13 minutes is the explanation, if you don't get it, you've missed the depth of what has been going on. But that's ok, you're not supposed to understand the first time. I think re-watching the film to understand the events nicely mirrors the time travel in the film.

Watch the film, maybe a couple of times, and then go and read the timeline explanation here.
Brilliant.
Like many things, this came to my attention via XKCD.

Splitting Time from Space

Here's an interesting article discussing a recent theory of gravity by Petr HoĊ™ava. I particularly like the way it can explain dark matter and dark energy without requiring some new exotic particles that we can't prove exist. I've always been very sceptical of dark matter and dark energy, particularly the latter which looks very much like a problem with the model.
More here.
His home.
Another article.
Hmmmm.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

D&D campaign progress

Ive been working on my D&D adventure recently as Andrew will finish running Call of Cthulhu soon so I need to be ready to start probably in February, it looks like. I've finished plotting all the levels, rooms etc and have written basic flavour text for all of them. I've just started working on mechanics and details for traps and required skill checks etc. I've recently received my copy of the Pathfinder Bestiary too, so I can start filling the place with wildlife as well. That's always fun. Then I need to add the treasure and magic items etc. Some of the later stuff can wait until the adventure is underway of course. Hopefully the players will find it fun. Mostly that means a decent challenge and believable. Hopefully.

LHC completes full beams

The LHC team just completed testing of the circulation of a beam in both directions. Apparently it looks good. I think the idea now is to slowly ramp up in speed and duration of beam to make sure everything is going well.
More detail here.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Stupid Impact

I watched what is perhaps one of the most stupid science fiction films of all time last night. It was on commercial television, so I suppose I'm really just asking for it.
It was called Impact. I don't care if it is just low budget and made for telly. There is no excuse for plain stupid science mistakes. The main premise of the film is that some super dense asteroid hits the moon, and lodges inside it, making the moon weigh twice as much as the Earth. This asteroid was later shown to be a piece of a brown dwarf. Seriously, there are so many problems with this it is in the same realm as Space 1999, only this was made in 2008! Complete and utter bullshit.
Most obviously to me, anything that weighs around twice as much as Earth and is the size of an asteroid, hitting the moon is just going to punch straight through like it's made of cheese. Conservation of momentum isn't going to see this chunk of superdense rock travelling at interstellar speed slow down anytime soon hitting something one twelfth as massive, especially when it's so much smaller than its target. Bullet through cheese.
Secondly, a brown dwarf is something half way between Jupiter and a star. It's not even a star. I think they probably meant a white dwarf. At least it has a super dense core, and could at a stretch be responsible for the thing in this film. This shit reminds me of Jennifer Anniston in a hair product advert saying "Here comes the science!". Hey, Writer, you suck!
The film progresses from here downhill with random gravitational fluctuations, "like electrical storms", where gravity is practically reversed on the Earth's surface in selected small areas. That's just plain crap. I can't be bothered going on any more. Of course it ends with them trying to blow up the moon, *sigh*, splitting it in half, allowing the super dense asteroid to escape to the Sun, and the two moon halves magically going back into a proper orbit. Oh yeah, I didn't tell you about the gross abuse of orbital mechanics in the film either. Watch it if you want.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Really old whiskey.

They're going to dig up some really old whisky from under the ice in Antarctica. After a hundred years, frozen, in glass, I doubt they'd be that interesting to drink. Probably hasn't changed much, and it isn't clear if its a single malt, a blend, or how long it was aged in the barrel.

Dollhouse is done.

It's all over folks. It's done. Nine episodes to go.
Ah well, some of it has been really good, othertimes just a little bit crap. I'm looking forward to see how Whedon finishes it off.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

How to Survive a Robot Uprising

Just finished reading this.
Very Boring.
Half the book(let) was robot facts, the other half was how to thwart an imaginary aggressive robot using said facts. The book is interleaved, fact, followed by attempted humorous discussion of thwarting robot knowing this.
For example, a robot using a thermal imager to seek and destroy you could be thwarted somewhat by smearing cold mud all over yourself as you flee for your life.
The book is supposed to be in the humour genre, however, its really of the roboticist-telling-you-about-robots-and-trying-to-be-funny-and-failing genre. Which sucks. Quite frankly.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Hardwired

I've just finished reading Hardwired byWalter Jon Williams.
This is a great cyberpunk novel, written in 1986 when cyberpunk was at its peak - Gibson's Neuromancer was from 1984, and Count Zero was 1986. This is a real cyberpunk novel as well, it's not just a wannabe, it has the hackers, AI, large corporations, fantastic drugs, body enhancements, and recent past massive social (and geopolitical) upheaval. It has beautifully written text, full of imagery born of technology. It has gruesome fights, deaths, and ghosts in the machine. It is paced well.
I just loved the panzers. These are mil-spec hovercrafts travelling at 200mph, bristling with gattling guns and heat seeking missiles, reinforced with armour that lets them blow through just about anything in their path. Great fun.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Cian's DSTT

I finally got Cian's DSTT working properly. It's been a bit of a saga really.
I ordered this thing along with a 4Gb MicroSD card, and with the DSTT comes free, a USB MicroSD reader.
Now I suspect that my problems all started with the shipping of these three items from the dodgey online store from which I ordered it. In fact, the store's website isn't even loading as I type this. The Dodgey Award givewaways are:
  • all three components ship to me loose, in a standard envelope
  • none of them are wrapped in boxes, plastic, foam or even bubble wrap, but are directly exposed to the care and attention of Australia Post directly. [The microSD card shipped inside the USB reader, which is probably better than loose, since it is the size of a small finger nail]
  • the address was hand written on the envelope in writing clearly more used to writing chinese characters (it is amazing how you can tell this, isn't it? BTW - its the very badly hand-written part that's dodgey, not the chinese hand, the Chinese rock)
  • the microSD card ships with a load of pirated games on it (complain, me?)
I open the envelope on arrival, and my shoulders are already slumping, this is not a good sign. First, I put the microSD in the DSTT and then into the DS Lite. It actually friggin works! For about a minute. And then then it has problems loading occasionally. And then it has problems loading games ever.
I tried putting the MicroSD card in the reader, and the USB reader in the PC, and the PC can't see any files, and tells me I need to format the files system.
I send back the USB reader, as it wasn't until the next day that I see loading problems on the DS. Anyway, they happily send me another reader to try, a different brand, also loose in an envelope. This reader allows me to see files, but will only allow transfer of files for ten seconds before off-lining itself.
At this point, Cian loses the DSTT and MicroSD card, and a week later we find it under his car seat. *growl*
I send back the reader and the MicroSD card, and they happily send me another of each, a third brand of reader. Loose, in an envelope of course, even after explicitly asking them to send the gear in its original packaging. *sigh*. This time, I can read and write the files on the card happily, and the DS can play the games on there, no problem. Occasionally, it can't load games, but mostly it is now all working. Way more trouble than $40 is worth. Don't use this website.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Karmic Koala upgrade problems

I think maybe I'll wait a while before upgrading my Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). If only 10% of upgraders are getting a good experience, I'm just not going there for at least a month. OK, the Windows 7 upgrade took 12 hours to complete, and that was the fourth attempt, but I'd rather multiple attempts with flawless rollback than being stuck with an OS release with graphics drivers issues.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Windows 7 Upgrade Finally Completes

You may know I had some initial difficulties upgrading to Windows 7. As it turns out, mostly, I just wasn't patient enough. Apparently 5 hours just isn't enough time, and it doesn't matter if the PC appears to be doing nothing, you need to be patient!
I went camping on the weekend, and decided to give the upgrade another try and let it take its own time while I was away. It had 48 hours, and that has to be patient enough, right?
The bad news is that the upgrade was still going when I got back on Sunday. Seriously! But ok, the good news is that it had stopped at a very well known point with a documented hang. The old 62% point. The log showed that it had taken around 11 hours to reach this point, even with my recent hardware upgrade!
I think the 62% metric is really just a Microsoft stab in the dark, because I followed the KB article fix, restarted the upgrade and forgot about it for another 12 hours or so.
And this time, it worked. I'm writing this from Windows 7. Yay.
No other serious issues encountered. I needed to upgrade VMWare Workstation to the latest version. No big deal. Everything else just worked - Ubuntu domain login included.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

LHC gets first beams

First proton beams hit a couple of sections of the LHC. Full ring traversal in November.
You go girls!

Monday, October 26, 2009

Upgrading to Windows 7 Hangs.

So I finally decided to go ahead and upgrade my main Vista 64 installation to Windows 7. I would have done it earlier, only I was waiting in hope for A.L Tech to release a firmware upgrade for the media player to see Windows 7 shared drives. That's clearly not going to happen.
Anyway, so I punched in the upgrade, and it went really smoothly right up until it slides gently into a kind of hanging situation. The screen is happily updating alternating between "Please wait..." and "Updating your drivers ...", the drive light flickers occasionally, you can move the mouse cursor, but after four hours of this, you just know it isn't going to go anywhere. So I hit the reset button. Click-click.
Magically, and happily, it automatically recovers and reverted to my Vista install. Whew.
I've tried this twice now, and I see some signs of this happening all across the blogosphere.
That is, unless of course, it really does want to take 11 hours to complete...
It looks like I'll have to do a clean install. And it all worked perfectly in my various VM tests.
Fisking Super.
[Update - it worked after 12 hours!]

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Induction Fan

Now this is cool.
It's a fan without blades that works by induction. OK, there is an impeller in the base that sucks air up, but it blows it out through the edge of the ring. The motion of the air over the airfoil sucks more air from behind to follow it (induction), and as it all blows out, more air follows that air (entrainment). The upshot is 15 times more airflow than the impeller pulls from the base. $300 bucks though, and I'd say the impeller is a bit whiney.


Friday, October 9, 2009

should have, not should of

This one annoys the hell out of me. Writing:
"I should of done that."
NO. No people, it's
"I should have done that."
Yes, when you use the contraction in speech, it sounds right, i.e.
"I should've done that"
But you're not actually saying OF. It's HAVE.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Bridge Crossing

Today was a public holiday, Labour Day or some such (yay for 8 hour working days!) and we decided to go for a walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The kids love it, and well ok, I do too. Here's a couple of shots on the way.

 

We stopped in Argyle Plaza for lunch where some hokey "talent" was playing keyboard. We were worried about getting wet since there's a thunderstorm due this afternoon, so we didn't stick around more than an hour or so in the Rocks, but enjoyed the bite and looking around at the stalls.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Pitch and Putt

I just played a game of pitch and putt with Kris up at the Terry Hills Par3 course. Despite the 12C temp and 15 seconds of drizzle, I really enjoyed the round hitting a respectable 71. I've hit much better than that, but this was my first game in a long, long time, probably a year or so. I even had a birdie on the 17th! I've been up the driving range a couple of times in the last few weeks, and I think that also helped, as my pitches were respectable. My putting and chipping were awful to start, but improved over the 18.
Oh, yeh, the course has this awesome new doppler radar tower overlooking it now which actually looks like a giant golf ball sitting on a tee.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

The Introduction.

And, lo, today marketh the day that Cian Roberts was introduced to the world of Dungeons and Dragons. Having seen me go off once a week to play this mysterious game, and even host many sessions downstairs in the Den, Cian accepted his first rulebook to read and character sheet to fill out with due reverence and excitement.
I have started him off with the Basic D&D set, the one published in 1983, in fact an original copy that I myself used more that twenty years ago, now complete with badly coloured pictures of female clerics and large snakes sitting atop piles of gold. Yes, of course I kept it, what? You don't just throw out stuff like that.
The Basic rules from this era were written with kids in mind, and as Cian will be 8 in a couple of weeks, I'm sure he'll be on top of the game mechanics in no time. Also, with his already formidable imagination, I'm sure this game will grab him and not let go. The only problem will be in encouraging his friends to play. I'll have to start off as DM of course, but it is my sworn duty as Nerd Father.


Monday, September 21, 2009

Saturn's Children

Just read this, some space opera from Charles Stross.
Quite a different read from the other Stross novels I've read. It's essentially about the society of sentient robots left behind by the human race after they've engineered their own extinction. The story focusses on the life of a particular sexbot, who is having a little trouble finding direction in life without any actual humans to do her job with. Never fear though, there is plenty of robot on robot action in this novel, and it's a lot wetter than you'd expect!
The plot gets really quite complicated and difficult to follow, what with robots being able to wear the soul-chips of other robots, which means they can access (although indirectly) the memories of others. There were a few times I wasn't sure if I was reading a flashback, a dream, or real current event or something else. It might have helped I think if I had read the book more quickly in larger sessions, rather than a few pages at a time.
The characters were a lot of fun, and the whole concept isn't one I'd read before, so I recommend reading it.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

GenCon Day 3

Two more back to back sessions, a nice Viet dinner, a rush to the airport, aaaaaand, Home.

GenCon Day 2

Wow. Full on day. Session 9-1, then 2-4, then into a special Pathfnder futures session with Jason, then back to the game, which had to run late, a rushed dinner, then played from 7-11.
Lots of good laughs in the games. It's a different experience playing these official society games, but well worth the effort.
OK. Tired now.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

GenCon Day 1

Great day. We played two four-hour sessions of Pathfinder D&D and it was fairly intense. Intense in a good way though - really enjoyed it. We're now in a bar chatting with the lead designer of the game, Jason Bulmahn which is really cool. Its interesting to hear the history behind some of the rules and issues of game balance etc.
Eating and drinking lots. Bit hungover this morning...

Thursday, September 17, 2009

GenCon Day 0

Arrived in Brisbane late after work and hit the Pathfinder Intro session hosted by the lead designer Jason Bulmahn. Good laugh actually - the guy has a good sense of humour. GenCon is gonna be great - looking forward to the sessions tomorrow. Now in a tapas bar getting wasted.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Space:1999. Crock of Shit.

I like science fiction (can you tell?). There are certain things you have to deal with when consuming SF, like the suspension of your disbelief. SF usually includes the use of technology that just isn't possible or physical phenomena never seen before. SF authors typically try to present these things in a plausible way, for example, building new tech off existing tech, or cutting edge scientific theorys. Further, there is a rule in SF that states that completely unbelievable tech or phenomena should be restricted to one or two occurences, and only where important to the plot or story.
Space:1999 is chock full of completely unbelievable bullshit.
In the first episode, there is an explosion on the moon which produces 10g of thrust for about 10 seconds, and pushes the moon out of it's orbit and into outer space. It's complete bullshit. Not only would such an explosion simply destroy the moon, it probably wouldn't move it from it's orbit, let alone flying off into outer space. But, since the plot of Space:1999 is completely dependent on this event, it can be overlooked.
But then in subsequent episodes, the moon travels to different solar systems, and as far as I can tell, at least a new solar system every two or three episodes, where a new planet (with aliens) provides a new episode plot. That moon sure is travelling fast to get to these new solar systems. Bullshit! and when it is there, it seems to moving at normal local planetary speed. Bullshit!
Then there's the episode where an alien race gives the moon an atmosphere by releasing gas from cannisters. Yeh, that'll work. NOT. And then it rains on the moon, in this atmosphere because the aliens generate a lightning strike. Um, where the hell did all the water come from?
And then there's the black hole (black sun) episode where some anti-gravity shield protects them as they fall into the black hole, and then some mystic star intelligence transports them to the other side of the universe. Just stop.
I've only watched maybe ten episodes, and I'm not watching any more. Blake's 7 is of a similar era, and is much more engaging.
To end on a good note, the sets of Space:1999 are incredible for 1974, and the theme track is a brilliant funky 70s tune.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

VHS to DivX

It's a tedious process. I just finished converting some old VHS tapes to DivX. Physical media must die, but digital media will move from one disk to the next. Hopefully.
For each tape, I had to :
  1. Hook up the old MiniDV video camera to the VHS player, and record from VHS to MiniDV.
  2. Hook up the video camera to the PC via firewire, and rip using the very good and free WinDV.
  3. Use the also very good and free VirtualDub to encode to DivX and MP3, doing gross editing as well.
  4. Lob the final file where the media player can see it!
Tapes converted include the wedding video, engagement video and some important yoga video.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Blake's 7 : Series 1

I just finished watching Blake's 7 : Series 1. It's 70s TV SF at its very best. Well, OK, maybe not its very best. It's quite good though.
The special effects have dated spectactularly, so much so, that it's quite amusing to watch some of the spaceship scenes. Brilliant styrofoam models. *chortle*. Actually, there are quite a lot of scenes where you can hear the actors sqeaking past the various styrofoam sets, especially in enclosed spaces. Now that's funny.
Having said that, the episodes are mostly engaging, not brilliant, but still quite watchable, and some of the chracters are a lot of fun. Avon, in particular is excellent. He's so droll, and always ready with excellent put downs. Have a look at some quotes. Avon features heavily.

Petition for Apology to Alan Turing

Alan Turing was a legend. An awesome mind. Imagine his contribution if he had lived another 30 years! There is now a petition to the UK government to apologise for his prosecution (and chemical castration), which probably led to his suicide. Sign today!

[update - 11/9/09]
Success!

Friday, August 28, 2009

It's so quiet!

Well that made a huge difference.
My Ubuntu server was originally installed onto an old 80Gb Maxtor drive, and it had a very very loud, horrible, whiney, grating, pulsing sound. Since I've recently freed up some drives from my old PC, I went looking for a way to replace the old whiney drive with a newer 200Gb Maxtor SATA drive that was just sitting in a drawer. This 200Gb drive may not be ultra fast, but it is quiet and still faster than the old drive.
So I found this useful link on how to clone my Ubuntu boot disk onto the new disk. I used SystemRescueCD to do it all and everything went according to plan.
The noise in the office has dropped considerably - it's sooo much more comfortable in here now. Ahhhh.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Windows CAN support more than 4Gb RAM

This is something I hadn't appreciated earlier. 32 bit Windows can support more than 4Gb of RAM. The link is a very well written article and worth some time if you have interest.
The main point to think about when trying to get your head around this is that a modern OS doesn't allow applications to access memory directly, but via virtual memory pages. These pages are mapped to physical memory in a way the OS decides given the ability of the hardware. 16 bit Windows was able to access more than 64K memory, and in the same way, 32 bit windows can access more than 4Gb memory. 32 bit Windows drivers need to deal with 64 bit numbers to do this, but this has been part of Windows since at least Windows 2000 and probably Windows NT. Note, of course, that any individual 32 bit app can only access less than 4Gb RAM, we're talking about the OS here.
The reason Vista 32 and others only report less than 4Gb RAM is a licencing one! See the article.
Obviously it is in Microsoft's interest to have us all using 64 bit Windows asap. That's fine with me.

Augmented Reality starts here

Mattel is releasing toys using Augmented Reality (AR).
Have a look at the video on the news site. They use web cam software to augment what the toy looks like to the user. It's a bit crappy on a small laptop screen, but I'm sure would be really cool on a super wide screen TV. Look out for consoles to implement this in the next generation. This doesn't just have to be for kids toys. Think of the possibilities. It gets even better when you move the screen to goggles with a built in webcam.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Web Tablet

I totally want a web tablet. Tech Crunch have a good idea of what I mean. There have been lots of rumours of Apple doing one lately.
As well as web surfing in front of the TV, this would be a great eBook reader. I currently use my Nokia n61i for the former, and would really like a cheap eBook reader.
I'll buy one for less than $300 AU.

[update - more rumours]

[update 28/9/09 - tech crunch going at it]

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Gigabit Router - DGL-4100

I just replaced my aging existing router with a shiny new D-Link gigabit DSL-4100. The obvious point here is that PCs with gigabit network connections connected to this router can then share files much faster than with the old 100M router. Good. What I didn't expect was to have web surfing sped up, but in fact, it is. Now the downlink from the web hasn't changed, at most, it's a 9M link anyway, and although a single hop speed has increased, you wouldn't think this would have such a large effect.
What's giving me the speed increase is the QOS implementation and probably general hardware speed of the router. I've set up the router to prioritise outbound traffic based on a few simple rules, shown below.

The rules specify priorities (lower number, higher priority) for IP address source, target and port. The rules I've used are (highest to lowest priority)
  • VOIP - all traffic from my VOIP ATA at highest prioriy, 10
  • DNS - all UDP DNS lookups at high priority, 100
  • ICMP - all ICMP requests at high priority, 100
  • PDC - all traffic from my primary domain controller at medium priority, 200
  • HTTP and SSL - all websurfing at medium priority, 200
  • Everything else, like bittorrent on my PC at default low priority, 255
This works really well for me. For example, I can now have my bittorrent client open and filling my outbound bandwidth to the max (256M), and then open a bunch of tabs in a browser as normal. Previously, it would have taken a lot longer for all the pages to load because of the torrents flooding the uplink. Now I can watch the torrent bandwith meter die right back as the router throttles it. The same goes when I'm using the phone, I can see the bittorrent client get notched back about halfway, as VOIP doesn't use all the pipe, but gets exactly what it requires.
Brilliant.
Note, if you are looking here for help with your DGL-4100, FIRST upgrade your firmware to the latest!! If you are trying to get a VPN pass-through to work, you should try turning off the IPSEC ALG under Advanced/Firewall as your VPN client probably supports NAT traversal. TO get my VOIP ATA working, I had to forward the main port under Advanced/Virtual Servers, and the SIP port range under Advanced/Gaming.

[update - removed the PDC entry as network would starve for bandwidth when PDC was doing a large update!]

Sunday, August 16, 2009

PC Transplant Part 2

I realised recently that my new PC was just going to get too hot this summer, so I decided to go ahead and buy a new case with better cooling function. I bought a Cooler Master HAF 932 and amd very happy with it so far. It totally dominates the office, but is quieter and cooler than the previous case. The previous case had three 120mm case fans, which while using the quiet Noctua fans, would still give off more noise than the fans in the HAF 932, because the new fans are much larger and spin more slowly. The HAF 932 has three 320mm fans and a 140mm fan at the back. Awesome cooling.


EHDDVD

It's a work of art I tell you! Check out the EHDDVD (External Hard Disk Drive Vibration Dampener) I made. That's right, it's sole function is to stop this awesome piece of data storage from vibrating my desk. I started with a piece of packing foam with some nice angled corners, and painted it in industrial black and yellow warning stripes. Artwork! See action shot here.


Friday, August 14, 2009

Whirlibirds

I finally got round to organising someone to come out and install a couple of whirlybirds on the roof. I've been wanting to get this done to make the house less stuffy in the winter, and cooler in the summer. It's apparently a good thing, and makes a difference. Time will tell now.
To get a tradie out to do the job, I first looked through the local yellow pages, then threw that over my shoulder as useless, then went web surfing on true local, also useless, then general google searching, and found the Trade Connect website, which has had some radio advertising as well. I punched in the job details into this site, had a call within an hour, and had the job sorted next day. Easy.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Ten years

Today, Sinead and I have been married for ten wonderful years. It seems to have gone so quickly, but has easily been the best ten years of my life. I feel so lucky to have met her. Not only my lover, but my best friend, a brilliant financial partner and special mother of two gorgeous kids. I couldn't have wished for anything else. Here's to another hundred years!
Thank you Sinead, I love you!


Sunday, August 9, 2009

Getting Windows 7 to join Ubuntu Domain

[see updates at end for Ubuntu 9.10 info]
I finally managed to get the release of Windows 7 to join my Ubuntu domain controller at home. First I had to upgrade Ubuntu from 8.04 to 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). This was pretty easy, since Ubuntu has a single button for upgrade, although I had to upgrade in two steps with 8.10 on the way.
The next step is to install Samba 3.3.4. The required version of Samba running is very specific since Windows 7 will only join a Samba domain of this exact version. Previous versions of Windows don't care. So the default 3.3.2 of Ubuntu 9.04, nor later versions of 3.3.7 etc will work at all.
I found a posting here that helped my do the manual Samba upgrade. Quite a long and tedious process, but I got it to work in the end.
Finally, I had to tweak some Windows 7 registry settings to let it use some lower security options for dealing with the old style NT domains. All the details are found here. You'll notice I posted a question here when I was having problems, and the poster Greg was really helpful with getting me on track. Thanks Greg!
My problem was the upgrade of Samba/Ubuntu left my smb.conf with an invalid -n option in the "add machine script" line, which caused an error when attempting to add a machine to the domain.
All sorted now, which means I'm one step closer to upgrading my main workstation OS from Vista x64 to Windows 7 x64. I just need to verify VMWare Workstation and a couple of other critical apps are going to work. Joy.

[Update 28/8/09]
Upgrading a Vista machine that is already connected to a Samba 3.3.4 domain to Windows 7 RTM also works fine. I notice the only reg entry it changed of the four above was the "RequireStrongKey" one.

[Update 16/11/09]
It seems Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, does support Windows 7 clients in a samba domain (fix released), however I'm waiting to upgrade my server for a while.

[Update 6/2/10]
Upgraded. Seems fine.

[Update 26/5/10]
Now I've noticed that one of my accounts couldn't log into the domain. I had to change these reg settings:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Netlogon\Parameters]
“RequireSignOnSeal”=dword:00000000
“RequireStrongKey”=dword:00000001

In smb.conf, I also added to
[netlogon]

write list = root


Not sure which is important, but the account now logs in.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

All Tomorrow's Parties

Just finished William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties, for the second time. I read it when it came out ten years ago.
This novel is the third in a postcyberpunk series featuring Virtual Light and Idoru, but reads easily standalone. For those that have tried and perhaps struggled with Gibson's earlier cyberpunk work, I feel that this novel in particular is very accessible. It deals with the emergence of nanotech and emergent AI in an environment, where clearly things have gone astray economically and the omnipresent gritty feel of cyberpunk is thick, however tech progress is still climbing inevitably.
Formost, Gibson's language is just beautiful throughout the whole novel. Often you'll see a few good chapters of rich descriptive detail, before a novel grinds off into the plot, but not here. The flavour and richness are relentless, the poignency affecting.
The characters are mostly compelling, I love the unnamed zen assassin character. He's just beautiful, not killing, just "completing a motion that had already begun".
The reveal feels a little flat, until you get to the very last paragraph of the book, when it really hits home. It's an ending that you may need to just think about for a while.
If you are new to the genre, I actually recommend reading this first. Then go back and read Neuromancer. That is required reading.

Spin Control

I finished reading Spin Control by Chris Moriarty last week.
This is a very cleverly written SF novel set mostly around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict some 300 years in the future. A lot has happened, and sadly, not much has changed. Although this doesn't have as high a "fun" level to read, there is a lot to compensate, and this novel really isn't about that conflict, so there's no focus on those issues.
There is some intelligently written and fascinating in depth involvement of the Syndicates - the races of tank grown clones on the fringe of post-humanity. Where each clone race is made up necessarily of what would appear to us as the exact same person, homosexual, to boot, because obviously, you'd only really want to work/live with your own clones. Although it is a deeply disturbing concept, it was executed in a very believable, intelligent way. Fascinating.
The other really cool part of this book is the use of EnderBots by both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian war. If you don't immediately guess what an EnderBot is, you need to read Enders Game. Seriously. Enders Game is required reading and I don't want to spoil the ending of that book if you haven't read it.
Check out this passage from the book :
"... felt ... the old story [of] ... an obsolete and ossified humanity giving way to the Syndicates in a clean neo-Marxist ballet of thesis, antithesis, and sythesis had been replaced by ... a coevolving cloud of quasi-species in which Homo sapiens had not been replaced, so much as exploded out into a bewildering fractal of coevolving post humanities."
Whew. A really good read, but I would have liked to hear more about the AI Cohen, and thought he would have a much larger role.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Portal

I've just spent a load of time playing Portal. This video explains it very nicely. This is a cool compilation featuring the end-song, and here are some of the best AI comments while you are playing ...
Essentially, this is a well conceived and executed puzzle solving game. The hilarious AI comments are all bonus. It also does wonders for your spacial visualisation. Unless you are seven. Then it gives you nightmares. Apparently.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

FTP PASV problems

I've been having some problems with a friend connecting to an FTP server I set up using IIS 6.0. IIS is a real pain in the ass. Filezilla seems much better. The big problem with any FTP server is setting up the PASV ports on the router to be forwarded to your target machine, as well as the obvious port 21.
FTP server in active mode means it tries to connect back to the client, which when the client is firewalled as well, obviously isn't going to work. Putting the FTP server in passive (PASV) mode means the client connects both the control and the data connections. The control connection is over port 21, and the data connection is over a port specified by the server.
So you need to tell the FTP server to use a narrow range of ports (Passive Port Range) and then forward all these ports at the server's router to the server machine.
Then any client can connect to the server from behind their firewalls.
Only, I'm having a problem with a particular situation where the client can't connect to the PASV port. I don't know yet whether the problem is IIS 6.0 or a Bigpond router. Both Microsoft and Telstra SUCK. *sigh*

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Stealing Light

Just finished reading Stealing Light by Gary Gibson.
Really good, solid science fiction. Gibson writes really well and keeps a good pace. I'm really hoping there's a sequel, or even a series out of this, because there was a lot of great detail revealed about the book's Universe, setting the scene for some excellent space opera.
There's super powerful aliens, then even more super powerful aliens, restricted FTL tech, banned head implants, lots of violence and large scale destruction. The books starts early with the the wholesale destruction of a resort-living asteroid full of nefarious and banned activities and the super rich living the good life. The main character escapes with the use of a skin implant that expands to surround her body from vacuum as she and everything on the asteroid are blown into space, and then picked up by her low level AI controlled ship.
The final scenes made this look like a bit of a picnic on a sunny day with a few cold beers.
Great stuff Gibson. I was prepared for a weak ending such as we saw in his novel Against Gravity, but he really nailed this one.

Monday, June 29, 2009

wmain parameters corrupted?

Well, that was frustrating. I was trying to get command line parameters passed into the unicode wmain function defined as

int wmain( int argc, wchar_t *argv[]);

But I was getting corrupt looking bizarre values placed into argc and argv.
My problem was that in Visual Studio, I set the linker option for the entry point as wmain, but it has to be

wmainCRTStartup

Don't make the same mistake.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Fanboys

I just watched Fanboys.
This film is saturated with geek reference to the point of overdose. Awesome. At no point was I bored, as the characters kept on hitting nerdy lines, one after the next, in joyous, unashamed pride. It made my cry. Fantastic. I was also drinking.
Not just Star Wars, although obviously mostly Star Wars, and obscure, geek head-nodding-obscure Star Wars at that, but also, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, various comics, D&D, Willow and others. The various scenes that mirror or recreate scenes from Star Wars are prolific and a lot of fun.
Appearances from William Shatner and Carrie Fisher were satisfying, surprising and very well done. The Carrie Fisher gear was subtle and appreciated.
Star Wars fans and true geeks must see this film. It's purile and stupid, but that doesn't mean it isn't awesome.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Home networking

I've learned a lot about home networking in the last few days, specifically using some of the cool Windows domain features. I've had an Ubuntu server for a while, which I use for DHCP, DNS and some shared directories, but in the last week I've configured Samba on it so that it acts as a primary windows domain controller. That means that the user accounts on the Ubuntu server can be logged onto on any machine that joins the domain on the network. Since Cian is starting to really get up to speed on his computer use, and Neise isn't far behind, this is going to be really useful. The kids could be using either the server, my machine, or one of the various laptops, and being able to log into the same account everywhere is really useful.
There is an option is make your domain account users roaming profiles, but that means syncing data back and forth from the server to client every time you log on and log off, which for large document sets, is prohibitive, so I've just used normal profiles.
I've also leveraged the domain accounts to really sort out my backup strategy at home. When you log on to a domain account, the server sets you up some extra shared drives, including your home account on the server. The really really nice thing is that you can retarget your Documents folder (among others) to point to a directory on the server, instead of the local drive. Vista has really clever tech for keeping these in sync, so it isn't even noticable as remote. The Ubuntu server has two physical disks, so all the users' home directories are on one, and it backs these up to the other one, so a single disk failure isn't going to let you lose any documents.
I've also just purchased a 1.5Tb drive connected by eSata on my main desktop to backup all the public media, videos, photos, music, installers, VM data and other public data not associated with user accounts.
Now for off-site backup. Hmmm. Can I post you a DVD or 20?

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Facebook and Twitter

Twitter and Facebook are different and should be used separately and for different purposes. I bring this up, because it is pretty clear that quite a few people are treating Facebook like Twitter, and I find it mildly annoying. Only mildly annoying, because there is an easy way of dealing with it.

First of all though, it is easy to see why people confuse the two. They are quite similar. You use both to inform people of your status, and things that you are doing, or things that are on your mind. They are both in a sense a bit of an ego trip and a popularity contest. They can both contribute to your need to feel wanted and accepted.

But they are very different. Twitter restricts you to 140 character posts. Small tweets. Links. "I'm having coffee.", "This shop sux.", "check this out - ". You can put a lot more interesting detail in there, of course, but it is still fundamentally limited. More limiting, is the level of interactivity. Yes, you can cross reference tweets, but it isn't very convenient, and doesn't really facilitate conversation.
I have used Twitter for a while, and, like 60% of people that try it get bored of it within a few weeks. The top 10% of Twitter users produce 90% of the tweets. Whereas on Facebook and other similar sites, it's much closer to 10% producing 30%. Twitter is more like a news feed. You subscribe to producers you want to hear from.

Facebook is a much richer, engrossing, social experience. People can post quite a bit of detail, images, videos, links, but much more importantly, the threaded conversations under each status post are what really makes Facebook excellent. It's engaging, social and lets face it, a lot of fun. Checking the notifications to see which threads have been updated keeps you immediately up to date with all your conversations.

So, if you are posting small, inane, irrelevant posts about your coffee, or making the bed in Facebook, you are completely missing the point. That is what Twitter is for. And you'll get followers who want to hear everything you dribble out. Use Facebook to post interesting things that may start conversations. Facebook is more like being in a room of friends, start a discussion, but don't update people with what you are doing every ten minutes. It's boring, and people will simply hide your status updates.

Predictions for new Facebook features:
- multiple threaded conversations under a single status update.
- personal stats like, %friends hiding your status, and %friends commented on your status in the last month
- better email style conversation support, and longer term look for Google Wave integration.

Then, there's always blogs for people who really want to get a bunch of stuff off their chests. Like this trollop :_)

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Spam rates up

Spam rates are way up.
Spam took a big hit, and was cut tremendously in November, but now, the spammers are back with a vengeance! Have a look at the recovery stats. That is massive growth and it's now worse than it was.
I've personally seen this with my optusnet account spam rates going from 40 over a running 7 days, to 136 as of today.

Here's a sample of my recent spam. Nice.


I use the Spamato plugin for Thunderbird. It's working pretty well.

[update 13/6 - 166 spam in the last 7 days]
[update 16/6 - 184 spam in the last 7 days]
[update 20/6 - 123 spam in the last 7 days - seems to be abating!]
[update 24/6 - 54 spam in the last 7 days - thank the gods.]

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Windows 7 due October

Windows 7 is due October 22, in time for both my birthday, and more importantly, before my MSDN subscriber account expires! Hopefully this includes 64 bit. I'm sure it wouldn't be far behind.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

V. Remade.

Remember V from the 80's? I remember loving this. It's being remade, to hit US airwaves later this year. Can't wait. It also has Morena Baccarin (Inara) from Firefly.


Monday, June 1, 2009

Google Wave

Google Wave looks really cool. It feels like it could be an important leap for communication in general. I recommend you watch some of the video on the link above.
The email part of it seems incredibly powerful, being able to split up your mail content into separate comment trees, effectively forming a tree of discussion points. I know, especially from technical work discussion email, this will be incredibly useful. Everyone currently has a bunch of techniques for doing this now, from inserting comments, using tab indenting and colouring to form such a tree, but it always seems to fall flat and becomes very un-wieldy and difficult to navigate and understand. And coming to such a thread late is nearly impossible. Google Wave will have a "playback" facility so that latecomers can see the the tree of discussion unfold as it did originally. Awesome.
It also has a very powerful instant messaging feature where in this same structure, you can immediately see responses, and indeed see the actual characters appear as typed if desired.
Also importantly, it will be open source, leaving open the door for plugins and custom behaviour, as well as others being able to host their own servers.
The main problem I foresee for Google here is one of scale. It's going to need fast network responsiveness for the IM side of things. Perhaps people being able to run their own servers can help with this, but that sounds like it may be more for corporates and independent user bases.
Waiting with interest for the beta!

[update - other positive reactions here, and here]

Divergence

Just finished reading Divergence by Tony Ballantyne.
Another very good SF novel from Ballantyne. I thought the earlier novel Capacity, was also very good, but this didn't quite live up to it.
The disturbing concept of Capacity was fleshed out nicely, essentially that of an AI dictator, although a very nice one at that. I thought the novel played out a couple of ideological extreme cases and I don't think either are particularly compelling. The other extreme case is that of software for dealing completely fair transactions and towards the end starts to feel very socialist, and next to the AI dictator makes a very strong contrast. The resulting good vs evil trope wasn't clear for most of the novel, which I liked, but I wasn't convinced at all by the ending. The "Fair Exchange" entity just didn't seem believable, and the explanations and reasoning were more obtuse than a lot of magic you find in SF.
Still, I really like the Dark Seeds, and Dark Plants concept in this novel - now that is really cool.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Do you Boinc?

I BOINC.
BOINC is a platform for distributed processing. For example, it takes a lot of processing time to sift through radio signals from the whole sky looking for possible alien signals, like it takes a lot of processing time to test various iterations of mathematical models to see what fits physics data the best. You can volunteer your PC to work for these projects when it is idle, and your PC is idle really, most of the time.
I volunteer for the following projects:
Einstein@Home - search for pulsars
LHC@Home - help develop particle accelerator physics
SETI@Home - search for alien radio signals
Cosmology@Home - match math models to physics data

As you may know, I have an awesome PC with 8 virtual cores and 6Gb RAM :_)
Here's a picture of BOINC using it hard.

You can see most of the processors are close to max (it often does max them all) and RAM usage dip suddenly as I logged on to actually use the machine.
Here's the BOIC control screen:

You can see the actual project tasks that are running, ready to run, finished and waiting for RAM allocation.
This is all very cool, but it also keeps my office toasty warm in the winter.

[update - Rosetta@Home also seems very worthy - thanks Rich]

Monday, May 25, 2009

Iran blocks Facebook

Iran has recently blocked access to Facebook.
I wonder why that would be. There has been no official reason given, but clearly this is to stop candidates using Facebook in the upcoming election. Or more precisely, one particular candidate has been using it effectively, and Ahmadinejad isn't. So he's banned it. "I'm not going to lower myself to using this effective Western technology, so nobody can."
That's not dictatorial is it.
I can see how Facebook would be a really effective front in an election campaign, especially in places where most media is controlled. Specialised apps, and even just groups can cut a blaze through relevant Facebook communities.
Have a look at the recent growth stats of Facebook here. (when the site returns)

Friday, May 22, 2009

Sarah Connor terminated

"Terminator : The Sarah Connor Chronicles" has been terminated.
Bugger. I was watching that.

Hilldiggers

I just finished reading Hilldiggers by Neal Asher.
Once again, Asher delivers a very enjoyable SF novel. This one is quite different from most of his other work. There is noticeably less "up close and personal" violence and more political maneuvering. Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of violence and gore, but much of this novel deals with the broader conflicts between two societies, and later two factions of a single society. And then of course there's destruction and mayhem on a much wider scale to that we usually see from Asher, but is necessarily more impersonal.
Technically, again, very well written and a good page turner and paced well.
The one interesting quirk I wasn't sure about was that chapters featuring the main character were written in first person while all the other chapters, each focussed on a particular character, were written in the normal third person style. I'm still a little confused as to why and found it somewhat distracting. Perhaps it represents the fact that said character is the only Polity citizen and is meant to stand alone, or that we are supposed to empathise more with him because he has the best knowledge or view of events. Not convinced either way, pehaps there is a better reason I am missing.
I really liked the organic technology of the world Brumal. It is different again from other nanotech grown technologies and mixed with the "Consensus" hive style civilisation shows the usual brilliant imagination of the author. Great stuff!

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Star Trek 11

I went to see Star Trek 11 on Tuesday night and thoroughly enjoyed it. I had heard it was a lot of fun, and I quickly found myself agreeing with the sentiment during the early scene of the bar fight with a young James T. Kirk. Smack!
I'll try not to spoil too much if you are going to see the film, but although it is billed as a prequel, and really is at heart a prequel, it's technically more of an alternate past of the Star Trek universe we know from previous films. Star Trek is without doubt the king of the temporal anomaly, and this film is reminiscent of one of my favourite Next Generation episodes "Yesterday's Enterprise" which blew my freakin' mind back in the early 90's. This is what I love about science fiction. Technology provides such a massive space for plot device. The film, while using the time travel and changed alternate realities device, does try to make it feel like a prequel, and there is a sense of the altered timeline trying to heal itself to become what we know it should have been.
I really enjoyed a few obvious nods to the original series, in particular there is a scene with Kirk and a green skinned alien chick. That's just timeless.
The acting was all really quite good, which The Onion actually make fun of. In particular, I thought Karl Urban's portrayal of McCoy was brilliant. "Good God Man!"
Lastly, I have to say the sound effects really did it for me. The sound for a ship jumping to warp was more like a bullet out of a gun, and the laser weapons were more punchy as well. There were also a lot of similar sounds to those from the original series which provided good linkage.
Go See it!

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Super healthy, stupidly delicious salad

You should try this for lunch one day, its fantastic.

Grab a large bowl and add the following
- handful of asian bean sprouts
- handful of diced red capsicum
- handful of diced avocado
- handful of diced ham or turkey
- some diced cold roast potato leftovers
- a bit of finely chopped coriander
- some finely diced mushroom
- two handfuls of salad, cut and diced
- hit the lot with a good spray of Balsamic Vinaigrette (with extra virgin olive oil)
- add some garlic granuals
- crack some pepper over it
- dust with chilli powder
- mix and enjoy

This is super healthy, being dairy and gluten free and satisfying your daily vege intake recommendations. Tastes fantastic too.


Monday, May 11, 2009

A bad day that ended well.

It was one of THOSE days today.
It started as I woke to the sound of a quite unwell wife asking me to sort the kids out this morning and get them to school. OK. No worries, I'm feeling good, and fair is fair. Driving back from school, I realise I've given Cian a peanut butter sandwich, and dammit, I've only just been allowed to rejoin polite society after the last time I did this about 13 months ago.
I get home, and Sinead's work partner Sioned is on the phone telling me the server at work will not boot. At all. And I'm the CTO. Bugger, drive into their office, and yep, sure enough, it won't boot and looks baaad. I set the router to do DHCP so they can get internet without a domain controller (*sigh*) and hauled its matt grey metal ass out of there. I dropped it off at the local PC Guy Shop, cause, you know, I'm supposed to be working today.
Right, so then I'm working at home, and I hear this almighty, slow motion creaky cracking sound. It is a deep and powerful noise. I look outside in time to see a massive branch, hell, a whole tree in its own right break right off a tree out the back and fall towards the earth. The patch of earth in this case is my back yard, complete with flimsy aluminium pool fence, and well, my house. It crashes to the ground, scything through the fence as if it was plastacine painted gum-nut-grey. I didn't even hear the metal complain over the sound of the awesome deep crashing of tree vs pavers, grass and pool. It missed the house. Here's some pics.
One should note that this is the very branch that the kids' swing hangs from, and which they were using not 18 hours previously. The obvious alternate universes here left me feeling cold, quite unwell and not a little shaken.


Then I got the call that the motherboard on Sinead's server had just given it up, and thus the server needed a complete rebuild. Mobo, CPU, RAM, all of it. At least the disk was fine.
The day started to improve from here. Insurance should cover the tree damage, Sinead's server was fixed by 6pm and reinstalled by 8pm. Then I sat in front of Good News Week with a whiskey. Ahhhh.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Duke Nukem Forever Isn't.

Bugger, Duke Nukem Forever won't ever be released.
That sucks. Mind you, its been No. 1 vapourware for the last 12 years.
I really enjoyed playing Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem 3D.
Duke's sense of humour was awesome.
RIP Duke.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

All VOIPed up

Yes! No longer will Optus charge us nearly $30 a month for the privilege of connecting a phone to their copper wires. We've gone to VOIP. More specifically, I bought a VOIP analogue phone adapter, Cisco PAP2T, and have subscribed to MyNetPhone for service.
Its brilliant, and will save us loads of money. It does mean a new home phone number though, but that's no big deal.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

PC Transplant Pain

Oh dear. I ripped out the guts of my PC home Ubuntu server and replaced them with the old guts of my main desktop PC which I upgraded recently.
This all seemed to go quite well, the guts-ripping was completed in style, and the dust-cleaning of the existing case completed to satisfaction. Then I put in the power supply and motherboard from my old desktop. The mobo still had processor, heatsink, and RAM attached, no big deal. I used the existing hard drive to keep the Ubuntu install as my network server, and added some extra SATA drives from my old PC, made redundant by the awesome new RE3 RAID 0 twins.
Started it up, and after some initial BIOS shenanigans, got Ubuntu up and running nicely. Then. After 10 minutes. CRASH. Black screen, PC speaker waiting WEEE-WAH-WEEE-WAH like a desperate siren looking for a wreck. I don't think it's heat as I've checked the BIOS heat levels for CPU and mobo and added a case fan. Its not the video card, because I swapped it with another for the same result after 10 minutes. How can it be the mobo/RAM/CPU after I've been using it for five good years??
I don't know. I have sent mail to ABit tech support hoping for joy.

Bugger.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Jupiters L4, L5

Check this very cool animation of some asteroids orbiting within Jupiter's L4 and L5 lagrange points. The yellow dot at the top is Jupiter, and the fast green on in the middle is Earth. See how huge an area Jupiters L4 and L5 occupy! I assume the main rotating circle of asteroids is the asteroid belt. You can also see the glomming of asteroids around Jupiters L3 as well.
Linked from here.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Fibre to the Home

This is great news today for Australia. Laying fibre optic cable to most homes and businesses in Australia will mean we get internet access speeds of 100Mb/s and better - expanding up to around 1Gb/s. OK, many websites can't feed you that sort of speed, so if it were in tomorrow, it wouldn't make a huge difference. However, this will take 8 years to complete (todays guess), but I'd say most of us will have it in around half that time. Do my street first!! This really is an investment in the future and I applaud the decision.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Back from Canberra

Just back from Canberra and we had a great time. We took the kids round
Questacon had loads of really cool experiments and interactive science displays including an earthquake simulator, giant animated Funnel Web spider, optical illusions, holograms, lightning cage etc.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Fusion net energy gain

The physicists at NIF have finished building their fusion reactor. They hope to produce more energy from the fusion reaction than required by the lasers to start it. Awesome.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Star Wars Exhibition

We had a great day today, having taken the kids out of school and going into the Powerhouse Museum to see the Star Wars exhibition. It was pretty cool. There were loads of costumes on display, the 8ft tall Wookie costumes looked awesome. And the Wampa - that was really cool. Also there were loads of large models of spacecraft and actual lightsaber props and other weapons. The kids enjoyed the various hands on science areas such as robot kits, maglev train sets and an actual hovercraft you could sit in and drive in a circle.
We also had lunch in Darling harbour and rode the monorail through the city. The kids had a ball, and well, so did I.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Blood Royal

Just finished reading this.
*Yawn*
I did actually like the main character, Kal, as he was obsessed with striking dramatic poses, getting the wind to blow his large cloak around with legs in a wide stance, whilst holding a large laser rifle.
A very, very dark dystopian setting. Probably too dark for my liking, I mean I like a bit of rust and grimy bars etc, but this was probably overdoing it.
Luckily the book was quite short and while trudging through it was pretty boring, at least had some good violence.

Hardware built

I spent last Sunday building the new machine with Cian. He helped drop the CPU into its socket, as well as one of the RAM DIMMs. He enjoyed that bit. I think he also enjoyed blowing the awesome amount of dust out of the existing case to make it ready for reuse.
Anyway, so it is all built, and it is bloody fast. There was a noticeable increase in speed after adjusting the BIOS to use the RAM's XMP (extreme memory profile) which auto sets the BIOS parameters to make the most of your RAM, if it supports XMP. Since I have 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM in triple channel mode and CAS latency 7, it made a good difference.
I've installed 64 bit Vista, and am now using the twin TB drives in RAID 0 configuration, check the diskspeed output!

It's hitting 200Mb/second!
I had a minor scare this morning after I ripped out the old drives after copying everything to the new drives. The thing didn't boot into the BIOS, and wouldn't respond, so I had to use the PSU switch. That killed all the BIOS settings when it returned, thankfully, next boot. Scary.
Oh, yeh, I ran the Crysis demo yesterday. Ran it at 1200x800 or so, 4x AA. Sweeet.
Still waiting for another quiet case fan to arrive. I need to use three case fans to keep the temperature down, and the old case fans are really noisy. Got me some of these.
Next is to move the guts from my old PC to the server, to update it a bit as well.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

New hardware acquisition completed.

I've just taken delivery of the hardware components for my new PC. A PC so awesomely fast, it'll blow your freaking mind. Here's a pic of the delivered parts.

Review links for more details:
Intel Core I7 920 processor : best processor under $500
Asus P6T Motherboard : Best motherboard
Sapphire HD 4850 : Great card for the money
Patriot 6Gb DDR3 CL7 RAM. Fast
XigmaTech 750W Power supply
Two WD RE3 1 TB SATA disk drives. In Raid 0. Awesome

Now. To put it all together. First I have to strip my existing case, which I will reuse.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

ECOdirect video

I just uploaded my first video to YouTube. Its an info-ad for Sinead's company ECOdirect. I also shot the video.


Saturday, March 7, 2009

Codex

I just finished reading this. I picked it up on a whim in a book sale because it mentioned both the search for a book from medieval times and the character playing a computer game and how the two reflected each other. It was actually a better read than I thought - hey, it isn't science fiction! It was cheap and I thought it would be ok, but in truth it was really well written, and found it hard to put down.
The main character was a bit weak for the investment banker he was supposed to be, but that was really required for the story, and worked pretty well. The computer game was cool and he was entirely useless playing it. It is hard to discuss more without giving away more than I should, but the parallels between his real life and playing the computer game are fun to watch unfold.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Anauroch

Been studying up on Anauroch for a D&D campaign. Plenty of good stuff, from the usual orcs, gnolls and lizardmen to phaerimm, and Shadowvar.
I can't actually give anything away, because the players might read this.
So all you get is the random picture linkfest.
Also, I have major campaign writer's block.
Help!

Sunday, March 1, 2009

World of Goo

This is brilliant game. It's so much fun. It's quite like Lemmings, for those of you who enjoyed puzzle games when they were actually fun. I particularly enjoyed Chapter 4 which has a theme of "Information Superhighway". Blocked sockets, packet routing. Hooo!
The physics engine is unbelievable. Your goo towers bend and sway in the breeze, gravity sucks, and goo flys in gentle arcs. There is even one level where you have to orbit goo around a central mass.
The backing sound track is atmospheric and a delight, and there's a humour through the whole game that will keep you smiling. Rock on 2D Boy!
Here's a trailer !