No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.
Wednesday, October 31
Out Damn Singularity!
So my still-new Nexus 7 and my even newer New iPad are now both obsolete, replaced by the more capacityful New Nexus 7 and the fasteriffic New New iPad.
And here's the Nexus 10, just to complicate matters: One of the first Arm Cortex A15 devices to reach the market, 2GB RAM (twice as much as the Nexus 7), 16 or 32GB of flash (twice as much as the Old Nexus 7 but the same as the New Nexus 7), 2560x1600 display (vs. 1280x800), starting at $399. So cheaper, faster, and higher resolution than my Old New iPad. Which I only bought last month.
There's a problem, though, with the Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and the Nexus 4 - and shared with the iPad, iPad Mini, iPhone, and iPod Touch: Not one of these devices has any expansion capability. Between them, they have a total of zero micro-SD slots.
Given how fast these devices are coming out, how cheap SD cards are, how much Apple and Google charge for incremental upgrades, and how fast I filled up my Nexus 7, that's simply not good enough.
I was thinking of replacing my 16GB Nexus 7 with the 32GB model and giving the original to a family member, but now that Google has crippled the Nexus 10 and Nexus 4 the same way, I'm just getting ticked off.
The Asus Transformer Infinity is kind of expensive, but it has 64GB of flash built-in, a micro-SD slot in the tablet part, and a full-size SD slot in the keyboard dock. So I could have 256GB in total, today - and more later. Other expandable candidates include Samsung's Galaxy Note 10.1, Galaxy Note 2, and Galaxy S3. The Note 2 isn't available in Australia yet, but I can add the S3 to my sim-only mobile plan pretty cheaply.
If I could expect a new device to last more than a few months without becoming obsolete, I wouldn't mind so much. But since that's not the case, I do. Mind. So much.
Update: For crying out loud... I posted this yesterday. Since then, the Note 2 has been announced for Australia (November 14 release date) and now it looks like there's a Note 7 coming out. I'd much rather have a Note 7 than just a larger capacity Nexus 7, so I'll put that on hold. But if iiNet get the Note 2 (and they already have the Note and S3, so it's highly likely) then I'll get that as a phone, and there's a question of whether I really need a 5.5" phone and a high-end 7" tablet. Want, yes. Need... Probably yes. But then the Nexus 10 launches on November 13....
If Samsung can merge the Note 2 with the Nexus 7 for a Note 7 (preferably 1080P), and the Note 10.1 with the Nexus 10 for a Note 10.2, I'll happily buy all three sizes, because that would tick every box on my wish list. (32GB, SD card, stylus, brighter colours, higher resolution, and HDMI out.)
I actually have a couple of new wishlist items after using the Nexus 7 for longer: 2GB RAM (already implemented in the Note 2 and Nexus 10) and a Cortex A15 (found in the Nexus 10). The memory needs became apparent when I found that the simple puzzle game Cut the Rope was using 100MB of memory - even when I wasn't playing it. The CPU requirements are mostly from browsing complex web sites - Chrome on the Nexus 7 is maybe 5x slower than my desktop PC.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:31 PM
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Trickle Treat!
Had a few groups this year, about 15 kids in all, ages ranging from about 3 up to 14 or so. Got rid of about half my candy so far. Only ate one piece myself.
Had a few groups this year, about 15 kids in all, ages ranging from about 3 up to 14 or so. Got rid of about half my candy so far. Only ate one piece myself.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:50 PM
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Tuesday, October 30
Living Up To Their Name
Power is out at one of our new datacenters - ReliableSite in New Jersey.
Power is out at one of our new datacenters - ReliableSite in New Jersey.
The servers, however, are still up. They switched over to generator power without so much as a hiccup.
Which is how things are supposed to work, but there's a world of difference between the best-laid plans and a real live hurricane. So well done ReliableSite!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:02 PM
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Saturday, October 27
Jaded
These days I read High Scalability about how the world's largest websites manage their data, and I think, Oh, is that all?
These days I read High Scalability about how the world's largest websites manage their data, and I think, Oh, is that all?
28TB of MySQL? 100 billion rows? We* added that much when we put a new feature into the latest release of one of our products. We're adding storage in quarter-petabyte increments.
* At my day job.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:22 AM
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Friday, October 26
Triangulation
That should keep an estimated 175% of my audience occupied.
Update: 325%:
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:50 PM
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Wednesday, October 24
We Have Cake!
Come join us in Fractal Village. Our very first SCIENCE! activation goes off tomorrow, and we have cake!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:39 PM
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Tuesday, October 23
Teaser Trailer
Don't you hate those? Show you just enough to tell you that it might be cool, but not enough to know whether you should be excited or not?
Don't you hate those? Show you just enough to tell you that it might be cool, but not enough to know whether you should be excited or not?
Ahem...
Chibi Quest, coming soon to a mee.nu near you!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:34 AM
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Wednesday, October 17
A Whole Bunch Of Nobodies
Nobody wants old-school computer role-playing games any more.
Looks like nobody has a whole lot of money.
Nobody wants old-school computer role-playing games any more.
Looks like nobody has a whole lot of money.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:59 AM
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Saturday, October 13
Fuzzy Logic
The following fuzzies were served to you directly out of a zip file - testing a new feature.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:58 PM
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Tap Tap On My Window
More of a thud, really.
More of a thud, really.
Opened the door expecting to scare off a raiding possum, but found a rainbow lorikeet instead. I think it my have flown into the window and dazed itself. It was skittish but not panicked when I approached to check on it, so the neighbours may have been feeding it.
It wasn't obviously hurt, so I put out a little dish of peach slices for it and left it to recover. Not sure what else to do, and calling the local wildlife rescue volunteers seems a bit excessive given that they not exactly rare hereabouts. (They flock in the trees near the railway station, and the collective noise at sunset in summer is astounding.)
Update: Lori was still there this afternoon, so I called WIRES, the Australian wildlife rescue service. Sadly, Lori passed away before a volunteer could arrive to help. I donated $100 in her name. Well, in my name, since lorikeets can't get credit cards, but in her memory.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:38 PM
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Thursday, October 11
VMWare Fixes Things (Somewhat)
I had an earlier rant about VMWare's pricing on Workstation 9: Not only was the pricing 25% higher than version 8, but they now had an Australian store that charged 40% more than the US store, for a price increase of 75%.
I had an earlier rant about VMWare's pricing on Workstation 9: Not only was the pricing 25% higher than version 8, but they now had an Australian store that charged 40% more than the US store, for a price increase of 75%.
The Australian store now only charges 4% more than the US store. Given that we have a national sales tax of 10% and the Aussie dollar is currently about 3 cents over parity, that's reasonable enough.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:00 PM
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Sunday, October 07
Now For The Fun Part!
Had some problems setting up Sakura, the new backup server. I could not get an ext4 filesystem to build under LVM on software RAID-5. It worked fine for the filesystems I set up at install time, but once the server was up, creating more pretty much made the server lock up.
Had some problems setting up Sakura, the new backup server. I could not get an ext4 filesystem to build under LVM on software RAID-5. It worked fine for the filesystems I set up at install time, but once the server was up, creating more pretty much made the server lock up.
Then I updated the kernel and suddenly it all worked. Hmm.
Now I just need to transfer about 15 million files across and we're good to go. Good to start getting ready to go, anyway. Slight problem in that this will use up most of our monthly bandwidth allocation.* But eh, we'll see how it goes.
* On the old servers. We have a ton of bandwidth on the new servers.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:14 AM
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Saturday, October 06
Zoomy Is As Zoomy Does
Huh. Well, the numbers don't lie. Probably.
Huh. Well, the numbers don't lie. Probably.
My new servers at ReliableSite in New Jersey - Aoi and Midori - use Xeon E3-1245 v2 chips; the ones at Incero in Dallas - Akane and Mikan - use Xeon E3-1270 v2s. There's only 100MHz between them - 3.4GHz and 3.5GHz respectively; the 1245 has integrated graphics while the 1270 does not, so the 1270 uses slightly less power but needs a video card or a motherboard with integrated graphics.
I have a Xeon E3-1230 as well, the previous generation at 3.2GHz.
The 1270 v2 runs my Python benchmark 15% faster than the 1230 v1, which is ~10% clock speed and 5% architecture. Fine.
The 1245 v2 runs the benchmark 25% faster than the 1230 v1. I checked several times, and it's consistent. Don't know why, but it's consistent. It looks like Incero and ReliableSite are using different motherboards, but that shouldn't make a difference to this benchmark.
It's also in line with the Passmark benchmark results that show the E3 v2 chips competing with the low-end Opteron 6200. They don't have the same memory capacity or bandwidth, and can't scale past a single socket, but they're certainly fast.
And we now have five of them. Well, I broke one, so four right now, but I'll have that fixed tomorrow.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:16 AM
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Friday, October 05
Unwanted Firsts
Today I installed a CentOS 6.3 server - in Dallas - from an ISO on my PC - in Sydney - using the IPMI virtual USB device.
Today I installed a CentOS 6.3 server - in Dallas - from an ISO on my PC - in Sydney - using the IPMI virtual USB device.
Okay, I took the easy route and did a net install from the mirror at Limestone Networks (also in Dallas), so it only took 40 minutes to get to the package selection menu and after that everything was nice and quick. But then I decided I wanted to rename my logical volumes, got it wrong, broke everything, had to reinstall, had Anaconda freak out and crash, had to reinstall again, had to go out to the shops while I was still waiting for the package selection menu to come up, had to reinstall again, and finally got things exactly the way I want them.
In short: It works, but it's not something you would ever want to do.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:59 PM
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SimCity
Unfortunately, the new SimCity looks really good. I say unfortunately, because it's an EA title, and I harbour a deep disliking for EA for many, many reasons, Dragon Age 2 not the least of them. SimCity itself requires an internet connection on all the time to play, even though it's intrinsically a single-player game.
Unfortunately, the new SimCity looks really good. I say unfortunately, because it's an EA title, and I harbour a deep disliking for EA for many, many reasons, Dragon Age 2 not the least of them. SimCity itself requires an internet connection on all the time to play, even though it's intrinsically a single-player game.
The game itself, however, looks like it's coming along nicely.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:29 AM
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