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.
Sunday, November 28
Wootbix!
I landed the elusive
Adversary Cycle today.
This is the framing story of the very popular
Repairman Jack series. The Adversary Cycle itself, though, has been out of print (with the exception of
The Keep) for something like twenty years.
I stopped by Galaxy Bookshop on my way home from TAM Oz (I left early on the last day because I was finding that 16-hour convention days don't really mix well with staying up 'til 3AM for work), and spotted it in the window - last set of the 6 volume limited edition, #888 of 1000, marked down from $530 to $200. So I said, do I have $200? And as it happened I
did have $200. So I bought it.
Also the latest Repairman Jack book.
There is also - and this is something to be rejoiced -
a new Miles Vorkosigan book out. I'll have to go back for that.
(Looks at price on Amazon. Looks at price locally. Looks at shipping costs to Australia from Amazon US. Weeps.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:36 PM
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Is an "e-book" version of the Miles book a viable alternative? I know it is available (including direct from baen.com for $6, at least in the US)
Posted by: Hypozeuxis at Monday, November 29 2010 05:17 AM (MXy5A)
2
Is it bad that I've never heard of this series? I guess one could say I don't know
Jack...
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, November 29 2010 06:18 AM (vW/MM)
3
Repairman Jack is a secret history / horror / action series; I don't know if you like that sort of thing, but if you do, I highly recommend it. The surrounding Adversary Cycle is more secret history / cosmic horror and less action (at least, so I've been led to believe; I've only read the first of them).
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 29 2010 05:26 PM (PiXy!)
4
Were any others made into movies besides
THE KEEP?
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, December 04 2010 05:58 AM (EJaOX)
5
The Tomb (a.k.a
Rakoshi) has been picked up for production, but it's been in development hell for years. The film adaptation of
The Keep is apparently "interesting".
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 04 2010 09:43 AM (PiXy!)
6
OT: cleanup in aisle four, please. (The
Brickmuppet just got hugely spammed.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, December 06 2010 04:42 AM (+rSRq)
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Friday, November 26
A Busy Hive-Dwelling Insect Am I
Just completed the migration of a 6TB, 15,000 table database with all its attendant fraughtness.
Off to
TAMOz today.
Back soon.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Saturday, November 20
You Can't Do That On Television
In
Mad Men, the co-founder of the fictitious advertising company Sterling Cooper is something of a Japanophile and art collector. In season three, episode one, he has acquired
Tako to ama, also known as
The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife.
Yes, that one.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:18 AM
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So you're telling me that tentacle hentai goes back to the freaking
ninteenth century?Why doesn't that surprise me?
Posted by: atomic_fungus at Saturday, November 20 2010 07:32 PM (J78qo)
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Saturday, November 13
Burn In... Burn Out
If you run an 80GB Intel X25-M at its rated 4KB random-write performance, it will exceed its rated 4KB random-write endurance after just 3 days.
For a 32GB Intel X25-E, it would take about 28 months.
This is why the E-series runs five times the cost per gigabyte of the M-series.
What the real-world lifespan is for either drive range I have no idea, but I aim to find out.
Update: Based on the actual activity patterns on our server, the 80GB M-series would last 2½ years, and the 32-GB E-series (which is what we are using, 3 drives in a RAID-5 array) would last about three centuries.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:49 AM
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I'm beginning to wonder if this will be a problem for the SSD in the Slate. My Win7 machine accesses the HD about once a second when idle. I assume it's writing something out, presumably to the same location every time. If the Slate's SSD is good for a million writes, it would die in 12 days.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, November 16 2010 05:38 AM (+rSRq)
2
I expect Microsoft and HP to use a custom spin of Win7 that minimizes pointless writes. If you look at some of the netbook and SSD tuning pages, there are a lot of things that can be disabled in Windows to make it run better in this sort of environment.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 16 2010 06:19 AM (fpXGN)
3
Like the indexing service, I hope.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, November 16 2010 09:11 AM (+rSRq)
4
I'm pretty sure it's a million per block, not total. Unfortunately, as I understand, something like TRIM is required for the firmware to level writes properly, otherwise it cycles through same 16 blocks or so.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, November 16 2010 12:03 PM (9KseV)
5
For MLC flash, it's 10,000 cycles per block. If both the flash controller and the drivers are pessimal, you're good for 20 million writes per GB of flash.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 16 2010 02:58 PM (PiXy!)
6
Oh, and just to clarify, the workload that would kill that 80GB drive in 3 days is 6600 random 4KB writes per second.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 16 2010 03:02 PM (PiXy!)
7
What I was assuming was that if the same location was written a million times, the chips would be dead. Sounds like that's a huge overestimate. If it's only 10,000 the unit wouldn't last three hours.
Presumably this is something they'd have noticed during design and testing, so presumably they've got an answer -- most likely, as mentioned above, tuning Windows so it doesn't do that kind of thing.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, November 16 2010 04:25 PM (+rSRq)
8
Another possibility is a robust "bad block" algorithm. That's easy to do with a disk. When blocks go bad, you put them into the bad-block list, and the drive keeps going with reduced capacity.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, November 16 2010 04:26 PM (+rSRq)
9
Yep. In fact, the drive will automatically move data around to balance out writes, and comes with reserve capacity to replace bad blocks. A good drive might actually be 20% larger than the stated capacity.
Since there's almost no seek time on an SSD (there's a small delay to switch pages) for most uses you hardly notice this. A badly fragmented drive might only deliver 100MB/s on sequential reads instead of 200MB/s, and that's where TRIM comes in. Regular software defragmentation just gets remapped by the drive anyway and achieves nothing, so they had to add a drive command to do it directly.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 17 2010 01:48 AM (PiXy!)
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The FusionIO ioDrives we use in some of our servers at my day job are basically dumb cards full of flash chips. They don't have intelligent controllers because the CPU in a server is much faster than anything you can fit on an expansion card, so it all happens in software. Which means you can see what it's doing.
Which gave me a really lousy time in December 2008 when I was trying to do a database reload and ran out of free blocks for the wear-leveling algorithm and the drive's performance plunged by 95% and I thought it was broken and had to get a replacement part shipped to Seattle on Christmas day at midnight in a blizzard.
Well, approximately.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 17 2010 01:52 AM (PiXy!)
11
Yet despite its tiny capacity the use of the enormously expensive SLC
NAND flash memory means the Intel X25-E retails for a wallet crushing
£505!
Posted by: devizakereskedés at Saturday, December 04 2010 02:36 AM (EIzjX)
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Oh. That's Actually... Affordable
As I've mentioned before, I may have an opportunity to move from expensive hosted servers to cheaper managed colo. A rack-mount server with 6 cores, 16GB of RAM, 6TB of disk and a nice SSD can be had for well under US$2000, which is currently about A$2000 as well (though the Aussie dollar has recently dipped back below parity).
Only problem is that many of the mu.nu sites and other related things run under CPanel, which I license through our hosting company. I'd need to buy my own licenses, and the last time I looked it was
quite expensive.
Now it's $200 per year for an unlimited-user virtual server license. Since I virtualised all our systems 18 months ago, that's perfect.
So plans are moving ahead. Slowly perhaps, but definitely moving.
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Thursday, November 11
Magical Google Unit Converter Fail
So, what's 671 kWIPS in FLOPS?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:46 AM
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I found the following possibly useful information about the Whetstone benchmark:
http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/whetstone.htm
Looks like one kWIPS is 0.001 MWIPS, and judging from the table of data the MWIPS for a particular architecture/compiler is usually in the range of 2-5 MFLOPS.
So a rough guesstimate would be 200,000 FLOPS (ie, not very fast by modern standards)
Posted by: Hypozeuxis at Thursday, November 11 2010 11:52 AM (MXy5A)
2
Heh. Thanks, I used a figure of 1 WIP = 0.5 FLOPS,which is probably near enough.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 11 2010 12:05 PM (PiXy!)
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Wednesday, November 10
That Imouto Show, Save The Whales Edition
It's actually
good.
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Tuesday, November 09
Equations
Being Erica =
Tru Calling x
That GirlOnly where
Tru Calling went horribly off the rails when they decided to thicken the plot, so far*
Being Erica keeps improving.
Hey, I take my (spoiler) stories where I can get them.**
* So far as I've watched; I'm a full season behind.
** Even when the spoiler is really just a spoiler for spoiler, as in the two recent BBC series spoiler on spoiler and spoiler to spoiler. In this case, you might take the spoiler parts as a spoiler for different spoiler, but spoiler spoilers spoiler that spoiler.
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Friday, November 05
Thanks For One Thing, President Obama
Just one thing.
| | 1 Australian dollar = 1.01500 U.S. dollars |
Just after the Global Financial Kerfuffle, the Australian dollar plunged to US 55¢. How things have changed in two years.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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With today's announcement by the Fed, the US$ is going to crash. It's below 81 Yen, for instance.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, November 05 2010 05:07 PM (+rSRq)
2
I think a lot of it has already been factored in; the Australian dollar has been climbing steadily against the US dollar recently.
What will be interesting is whether QEII sparks inflation in the US. There's been some recent discussion that deflationary trends are so strong at this point that the Fed could pump over a trillion dollars a year into the economy before it had any effect on inflation.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 05 2010 10:45 PM (PiXy!)
3
Looks like they're going to try it to find out.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, November 06 2010 02:42 AM (+rSRq)
4
Obama saved U.S. space program, too. Mostly unwittingly, I'm afraid, and against or because of oppostion of Republican porksters like Shelby. But the results are in, and more are coming.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, November 06 2010 02:51 AM (9KseV)
5
Sorry, Pete, but that's well down on my list of "things to worry about". If the US currency gets undermined, all hell breaks loose.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, November 06 2010 05:00 AM (+rSRq)
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Thursday, November 04
Misplaced Snark
Mea culpa. Or at least, mea snarka.
When that
huge German sinkhole opened up and it was reported that "natural causes were suspected" and I said "As opposed to what?", well, as opposed to subsidence due to mining operations.
Which appear to have
not been the cause, hence the perfectly reasonable statement about natural causes.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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