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Sunday, December 15

Anime

Western Animation

I've been trying to think what western animation I've liked as an adult*, without going back to the classic Warner Bros stuff, and ignoring films for the moment (which actually do pretty well).  And I just can't think of that many.  But here are seven I can strongly recommend.

Adventure Time

Archer

Futurama

And the video is gone already.  Thanks Obama!


Invader Zim

Kim Possible

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Wakfu

* Ish.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:47 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 76 words, total size 1 kb.

Saturday, December 14

Anime

I Could Do A Movies Post...

But it would just by "Everything that Ghibli has produced, plus Millennium Actress.  Oh, and the second Patlabor movie.".

So, instead, here's a little fish.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:50 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 31 words, total size 1 kb.

Anime

Close Enough

So, I was watching that Secret Base 10th Anniversary video, and wondering, what the heck?  Those girls are too young to be having a tenth anniversary of anything.  Were they 12 when they recorded it originally?

Between 13 and 15, according to Wikipedia.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 45 words, total size 1 kb.

Friday, December 13

Geek

Fallen Out

Fallout 1, 2, and Tactics are free on GOG through tomorrow.  They might not be available at all after the end of the year, so grab them now!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:14 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.

Thursday, December 12

Anime

Top 40

My favourite anime TV and OAV series of all time. In alphabetical order, because it's getting too hard to sort otherwise.

Also, I'm at least two years behind in my anime-ing at this point, so no matter how great your favourite show is, if it came out after mid-2011 I haven't seen it and may not have even heard of it.

Update: Now in a new illustrated edition!

Anyways:

A Channel

Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai

Azumanga Daioh

Black Lagoon

...

What?

Oh, alright then.


Brigadoon

Bubblegum Crisis

Cowboy Bebop

Cutey Honey

Dirty Pair

El Hazard

Full Moon wo Sagashite

Galaxy Angel

Haibane Renmei

Hidamari Sketch

Ichigo Mashimaro

Irresponsible Captain Tylor

Jungle wa Itsumo Hale nochi Guu

K-On!

Kamichu!

Kimi ni Todoke

Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi

Maison Ikkoku

Midori no Hibi

Moyashimon

Nanaka 6/17

Oh My Goddess

Potemayo

Princess Tutu

Ranma 1/2

Slayers

Tenchi Muyo

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Tenshi na Konamaiki

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

The Vision of Escaflowne

Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar

Urusei Yatsura

Usagi Drop

Ushio and Tora

Zettai Karen Children

Strictures apply for some of these, like "first season only" or "OAV and movie, but not the TV series", so consider the list sprinkled with little asterisks and double-daggers and numbered footnotes.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:23 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 215 words, total size 5 kb.

Wednesday, December 11

Geek

The 50/80 Rule

When a modern server shows that it is running at 50% capacity, it is actually running at 80% or more, and is effectively if not absolutely saturated.

The reason for this is recent* changes in server CPU architecture from both Intel and AMD.  Current Intel CPUs are almost all hyper-threaded (each core provides two hardware threads); current AMD CPUs are mostly based on a module architecture, where each module contains two cores with some shared resources.**  While to software, a chip will appear to have 2N available cores, the available performance is only about 1.2N.

Chips from both companies also feature turbo modes, so that if only one or two cores on a multi-core chip are busy, it will accelerate, often by 25% or more.  As more cores become busy and power and thermal load rises, clock speeds scale back automatically toward a baseline.

Unfortunately, operating system schedulers are currently smarter than our monitoring tools.  Both Linux and Windows know that programs will perform better if you assign each new task to its own hardware core/module rather than just to a logical thread, and the operating system does its best to do so.  But monitoring tools are still at the level of logical threads.  At 50%, all your independent cores/modules have been allocated by the scheduler, and all you have is the extra 20% or so you can squeeze from the chip by allocating the additional shared-resource threads.

The result of which is that if you look at a server, and it is running at around 10% load, then the maximum that server can handle is less than 5x that (even before we take queueing theory and response times into account; sustainable average load is probably only 2x).  And a server running at 50% is flat out and the engines cannae take any more.

Cf. the 80/20 Rule (a.k.a. the Pareto principle): 20% of X accounts for 80% of Y.  For example, 20% of your customers will account for 80% of your revenue, and 20% of your customers will account for 80% of your work - and it's not the same 20%.

Also cf. the 80/80 Rule: The first 80% of a project will take the first 80% of the time, and the last 20% will take the other 80% of the time.

* Recent meaning the last few years.

** While this doesn't inherently contain the same limitations as hyper-threading, in the Bulldozer and Piledriver implementations, it effectively does; the bottleneck seems to be the shared instruction decoder.  The performance boost going from one busy core in each module to two is of the same order as the boost from Intel's hyper-threading.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:37 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 446 words, total size 3 kb.

Tuesday, December 10

Geek

Quote Mine

Peebs is a mother lode.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:28 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 7 words, total size 1 kb.

Monday, December 09

Rant

Dear Sydney Trains

Will you please shut your bloody trains up?!

Taking one of the newer trains from Hornsby to Wynyard subjects passengers to no fewer than 102 automated announcements and alerts.  That's about 100 too many.  And that excludes any manual announcements made with the volume invariably cranked up way, way too loud.

Stop it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:34 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 56 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

At My Day Job

Needed to set up some virtual machines under OpenVZ.

Result:

root@s1:~# vzlist
CTID NPROC STATUS IP_ADDR HOSTNAME
100 36 running 192.168.33.100 akane.x1.pb
101 17 running 192.168.33.101 akari.x1.pb
102 17 running 192.168.33.102 akemi.x1.pb
103 17 running 192.168.33.103 akiko.x1.pb
104 17 running 192.168.33.104 arale.x1.pb
105 17 running 192.168.33.105 arisu.x1.pb
106 17 running 192.168.33.106 asuka.x1.pb
107 17 running 192.168.33.107 ayane.x1.pb
108 17 running 192.168.33.108 ayumi.x1.pb
109 17 running 192.168.33.109 azusa.x1.pb
110 17 running 192.168.33.110 kasumi.x1.pb
111 17 running 192.168.33.111 kemeko.x1.pb
112 17 running 192.168.33.112 kimiko.x1.pb
113 17 running 192.168.33.113 kiyoko.x1.pb
114 17 running 192.168.33.114 kotone.x1.pb
115 17 running 192.168.33.115 madoka.x1.pb
116 17 running 192.168.33.116 makoto.x1.pb
117 17 running 192.168.33.117 mariko.x1.pb
118 17 running 192.168.33.118 megumi.x1.pb
119 17 running 192.168.33.119 miyuki.x1.pb

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:31 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 121 words, total size 3 kb.

Wednesday, December 04

Geek

All I Want For Christmas Is A TERABYTE OF SSD!!!

So I bought one.  Went for the 960GB Crucial m500 over the similarly-priced 1TB Samsung 840 EVO because the EVO is all about speed, where the m500 is all about not losing your data.  

The m500 offers internal redundancy (it can survive a entire flash die going bad) and power loss protection (the 1GB of internal RAM is backed up by capacitors long enough to flush the cache to flash).  The EVO offers a high-performance mode where writes are cached in system memory - brilliant right up until you have a crash or power outage.

They're both great products (though I really wouldn't suggest turning on "rapid mode" on the EVO); I just went with the more conservative offering.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:24 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 129 words, total size 1 kb.

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