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.

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.

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!]

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.

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!

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.]

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]

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.

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.

Back from Canberra

Just back from Canberra and we had a great time. We took the kids round

• Questacon
• Parliament House
• Canberra Space Centre
• Cockington Green

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.

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.

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.

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.

New Fish

Just bought some new fish, bright orange Comets. I've also filled out the back of the tank with some new plants as things were low after the algae attack earlier in the year. Here's a current pic:

Very soothing :_)

Finished Faery Tale

Woot! Finished Faery Tale on my emulated Amiga 500. Just in time before I go back to work tomorrow.
You have to collect 5 gold idols through the game, but I found I was missing one towards the end and was pretty sure I had been everywhere. But no. Whilst I had been through Hemsath's Tomb, featuring the longest corridor in computer game history (at the time, and probably still close at 5 minutes realtime), I hadn't searched all the maze thinking I'd already extracted the bones of the Lich King (or whatever I was there for) and had missed the damn idol. It took me forever to realise this, and then to go back and find it. I eventually made it to the astral plane, and the freaky section where you walk backwards, defeated the baddy with magic wand, and won. Yay!

Amiga Games

I've been playing some old Amiga 500 games recently, emulated on my PC. In particular, I've been playing The Faery Tale. It's so cool. OK, maybe it's mostly cool because I played this for weeks and weeks non stop in 1987 or thereabouts when it was fresh. 20 years ago, this game was state of the art. The graphics and sound were awesome, the RPG element quite good, certainly new at the time. The sheer scale of the game world unbelieveable. Today, ok, the graphics are a little blocky to say the least, but I can still whistle along to the sound track although you can count the number of sound channels. My son has quite taken to it and is happy to sit next to me playing it for hours.

"Julian was getting hungry."
"Julian was starving!"
heh. The game is still challenging to start. Just surviving is hard work. But then you get the turtle, and a cheat in the game that lets you attack your friendly ride, increases your Bravery points, and you become nearly invincible. Which is lucky really, because the rest of the game requires a lot of exploration where you can't afford to die. I'm going to try not to cheat too much otherwise. Damn, this is fun. Next I'll get Elite. That was awesome too.

Laying a floating floor

I finally got round to laying the floating timber floor in the den (rumpus). A lot bloody harder than it looks. Sure, click clack, front and, um, sides. Sawing the timber for the ends wasn't too bad, the worst part was trying to get each row to join correctly with the previous one. First you lay out a row of boards, end on end, and measure and cut the last one to suit, and then hammer them end on end so you have one long piece that stretches the width of the room. Then, with much cursing at first, angle the boards so the close edge of a row dips its interlocker tongue into the next row's groove. Sounds sexy? It's bloody not. Fernickety damn son-of-a sweaty frustrating muscle aching pain in the ass. Here's some photos.

A Short Walk

We walked along the Castle Rock track this afternoon. The kids had fun, we all got muddy. Actually Neise started to cry the minute she got wet feet. Little princesses don't like to be muddy.

Ah well. We pushed on :_)

Dad & Janet visited

Dad and Janet visited today. One of the highlights was when Cian sat us all down to play the board game he just created. Cian is six. Here's a picture of the board.

There were many rules:

• Each player takes turns to roll a d6 to proceed. Note the game tokens are lego pieces.
• If you land on a black dot, you got a card, which could have said "go back 3" or "hold this money for 10 seconds"
• To cross a bridge with a number on it, you needed to roll the exact number to cross it, that or you could add the numbers from your last two rolls.
  
• There was a complex rule about branch decisions being decided about whether or not you landed on a particular previous spot or not.

It was awesome. Janet won. Oh, yeh, Janet also rolled the following during her subsequent turns: 6,6,6,5,6,5. That is like rolling up a character in D&D with an 18 and a 16. Damn!