It was a bad day. A lot of bad stuff happened. And I'd love to forget it all. But I don't. Not ever. Because this is what I do. Every time, every day, every second, this: On five, we're bringing down the government.

Echoes

There's a Railway Street in Baulkham Hills.

Which is odd because there isn't a railway in Baulkham Hills.

But there was, once.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:55 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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stdole32.tlb To You Too, You Piece Of Crap

I needed to process some data for my business partner, so after mangling the source files appropriately with a little Python script I wrote for the purpose, I fired up Excel so I could convert the text output from Python into a handy spreadshet.

Quoth Excel, stdole32.tlb.

And reinstalled itself.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained; I rebooted but soon was pained to hear Excel once more proclaim

stdole32.tlb

I searched the web but all in vain; no page I found could well explain the reason that Excel laid blame to

stdole32.tlb

I ran Regedit at this point and discovered that my registry has pretty much lost its marbles, not only did no-one have access to HKEY_ACCESS_ROOT (which would explain certain difficulties I've had installing software), but I couldn't grant access to anyone, because it had lost whatever registry setting allows it to grant access to users.  I could grant access to things that aren't real users, various system default things like SYSTEM.  Which I did.

And then all the shortcuts in the start menu stopped working and turned into .lnk files, which makes using Windows pretty bloody difficult, let me tell you.

For one thing, it comes up with a helpful message telling you to use the Control Panel to fix the problem.  The Control Panel which you now have no way to access.

Then, while I was faffing about again in Regedit trying to fix this new problem, it suddenly fixed itself.

Yes, I'm running a virus and malware check.  But I do that regularly anyway, and AVG scans all downloaded files automatically.  And I've been having strange issues with the registry on and off for a while now.

My Linux box hasn't even been rebooted in the past year, while it looks like my Windows box needs a complete reinstall.

Bah.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:02 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Meanwhile, Something That Matters

Testing the ioDrive again.  Getting 770MB/s.  On random reads.

Okay, sure, that's with a 128k block size and 4 threads, but it's still close to saturating the PCI-E slot.  At a nice steady 6000 iops.

I wrote a little Python script to generate 240 test cases with a combination of block sizes (512 bytes through 256kb), I/O activity (random or sequential, read, write or mixed), and threads(1, 2, 4 or 8), and I've set 'em off to run and log the results.

I planned to run the same set of tests on a normal drive for comparison.  Then I calculated how long that would take.  Then I quietly abandoned that plan...

Lessee now...  16k blocks, 1 thread gives me 14,877 iops; 2 threads gives me 24,908 iops; 4 threads gives 32,737 (and 524 MB/s throughput).  Shiny.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Oh Well

America survived Carter; it will survive Obama.

Of course, the rest of the world almost didn't survive Carter, and as to that, well, tough luck to the rest of the world.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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