Ambient Irony

No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.
What? Look, somebody's got to have some damn perspective around here.
Boom. Sooner or later... Boom!

Friday, May 18

Schadenfreuded

So, Diablo III is out, and people bought it despite the fact that the always-online-DRM-crap obviously wouldn't work, and it doesn't work.

Ha ha!

Me, I'm waiting for Torchlight II, which isn't out yet, but won't be completely crapped up either. And runs one third the price.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:35 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, April 29

Benchmarks: E3, E5, 6200

Comparing Kurumi (Xeon E3 1230), Midori (Opteron 6272) and A12 at my day job (dual E5 2620)

Threads	Kurumi (E3 1230)	Midori (6272)	A12 (E5 2620 x2)
1	385	289	241
2	771	564	477
4	1216	1085	958
8	1627	1819	1930
16	1629	2116	3032
32	1626	2178	3126

The E5 2620 is the only dual-socket system, and is the most expensive of the three. It also offers the best performance under heavy load - not surprising given the greater CPU resources - but as expected, lags behind under lighter loads due to the slower clock speed.

My performance model predicted a peak score of 3055; it actually outperformed that slightly, but I was pretty close.

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Saturday, April 28

Hadn't Thought Of That

If time travel is possible but causality still holds, then P = NP.

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Monday, April 23

Fringe Logic

So, we have 2009 Universe 1, 2009 Universe 2, 1985, Post-Ppocalypse, and now Post-Opocalypse timelines.

Has anyone done a flowchart of cause and effect in this show? A good detailed one, including the dinosaur wormhole and the white tulip timeloop? I suspect it would end up looking like a map of the London Underground.

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Saturday, April 21

Kurumi And Midori

Midori has now been set up. Benchmarky time!

Kurumi is a 3.2GHz Xeon E3 1230; 4 cores with hyper-threading for 8 logical cores, and turbo mode up to 3.6GHz.

Midori is a 2.1GHz Opteron 6272; two dies on a single package, each with 4 modules with 2 cores each but with some shared resources, for 16 physical cores, and turbo mode up to 3GHz.

The Xeon E3 core is more efficient than the Opteron core, as well as running at higher clock speeds. But the Opteron gives four times as many cores at a very modest price.

Let's see how they run for single-threaded applications, moderately-threaded ones, and then huge horrible messes of applications. These scores are aggregate throughput on my little Python benchmark.

Threads	Kurumi	Midori
1	385	289
2	771	564
4	1216	1085
8	1627	1819
16	1629	2116
32	1626	2178

Hmm.

Things are pretty much as expected up to four threads; the higher clocks and stronger cores on the Xeons outrun the Opteron. At eight threads, the Xeon delivers a better than expected result from hyperthreading, but the Opteron delivers an 80% scaling factor and outstrips the Xeon.

At 16 threads there's no improvement for the Xeon... But there's not much from the Opteron either. At 32 threads there's little change.

So...

The Opteron is 25% slower for single-threaded applications, and 30% faster for multi-threaded ones. The performance at 16 threads is disappointing; that's probably due to a combination of the lower clock speed when all cores are active and the shared resources between core pairs. In fact, the performance gained by the extra cores in the Opteron is less than the gain from hyperthreading in the Xeon. That's a surprise, and one I hope AMD can address in future versions of the chip.

But it supports four times as much memory, so it's a much better chip for large servers.

A dual Xeon E5 2620 (the other option I was looking at) would be as much as 40% faster, based on these benchmarks, but it would also be about 40% more expensive (for the same amount of memory and storage). And - here's the tricky part - up through 8 threads it would offer no advantage at all. A dual E5 2620 would offer 12 full cores vs. 8 dual-core modules, but its lower maximum clock speed would offset the stronger architecture, and it would offer no performance advantage until you get beyond eight threads.

A dual Opteron 6272 would be about 40% faster again - at least, for heavily threaded workloads - and at the same price as the dual E5 2620. But I've decided to go for dual servers once we get to that point.

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Friday, April 13

Midori And Kurumi

Just placed orders for two servers with ReliableSite.Net:

Midori

Opteron 6272 (16 cores, 2.1-3.0GHz)
64 GB RAM
2 x 2TB disks, RAID-1
2 x 240GB SSDs, RAID-1 (Intel 520-series)

Kurumi

Xeon E3 1230 (4 cores x 2 threads, 3.4-3.8GHz)
16GB RAM
4 x 1TB disks, RAID-5

Midori will be main server, with Kurumi handling backup, logging, and monitoring tasks. Depending on how things go, I might end up adding more small servers like Kurumi to act as the web servers while Midori handles databases and applications. Everything is virtualised, so it will be easy to migrate tasks between boxes.

This is a very cost-effective solution too; it's about the same price as one Xeon E5 server, but gives me more CPUs (on the Opteron), faster CPUs (on the Xeon E3), more total memory, and a lot more disk space.

Really looking forward to getting these up and running. smile

Update: Kurumi is online!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:37 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, April 12

GamesGet

I regularly buy games on Steam and GOG, and I'm ashamed to say I've even bought a game on Origin, but I've only used GamersGate a couple of times, for things that were either drastically cheaper that way or that I couldn't find elsewhere.

I just changed that in a significant way: I bought the 1C pack, the IndieFort bundle, and A-Train 9. About 100 games in total for less than $60.

It's a very mixed bag, but the 1C pack offers more than 80 games for $20, including the well regarded King's Bounty, Men of War, and Space Rangers series. Along with what I'm sure are some real stinkers, but given that the first King's Bounty game alone would set you back $15 on Steam, $5 for another 80 games is pretty amazing value.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, April 09

Joisey?

Talking to the hosting company in New Jersey, and it looks like mee.nu might be migrating eastwards in the coming months. We have been there before, from late 2005 to 2006. As best as I can recall:

2003 Miami

2004 Lansing, Michigan

2005 Houston

2006 New Jersey

2007-now Dallas

I'm looking for a suitable provider in San Francisco / San Jose to replicate services to the opposite coast, but our main hardware will likely be in New Jersey.

I've got the money to spend on this, but I wasn't eager to upgrade our current systems because it didn't feel like I was getting good value. With this move, we'd be getting more hardware for less money - or a lot more hardware for the same money - which will give me scope to roll out lots of goodies.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:36 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, April 08

Squirrel!

CouchDB 1.2 is out.

I tried out 1.1 but ran into problems with database size and performance. There were new features in the pre-release code to address both of those - specifically, a native JSON library and built-in database compression - but it was such a pain trying to build it* that I gave up and went elsewhere.

But now I can just download it and throw it on a server (or indeed, my notebook) and give it a whirl. So I'll do that.

My attention is on MongoDB at the moment, but CouchDB has some nice features, such as its incredibly robust storage mechanism (it's practically indestructible; you can copy a database while it is being updated and just fire it up on a new server) and its incredibly flexible indexing (anything that you can define in a piece of Javascript code can be an index). And multi-master replication. The problems I ran into were (1) it was seriously slow at transferring large numbers of records, and (2) the database files were really, really huge. So an update that specifically tackles those problems is of considerable interest.

* Erlang with embedded Javascript. Eh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:21 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Friday, April 06

Comparison Shopping

I'm looking around at pricing on a newer, shinier server for the newer, shinier mee.nu I'm working on. The baseline config I'm using is this:

Dual Xeon E5-2620 (2 x 6 cores, 2GHz)
64GB RAM
2 x 2TB disks
2 x ~200GB SSDs
Hardware RAID-1
10TB bandwidth on 100Mbps port
Remote access over IPMI

Let's see what I get from five different vendors, taking list price off the website of each:

$615/month (but only 160GB SSDs)
$655/month (240GB SSDs)
$698/month (256GB SSDs)
$764/month (240GB SSDs)
$2,979/month (200GB SSDs)

Guess who's the odd one out?

Update: Sent out a couple of emails, got a reply back from number 3 who kindly pointed me to their latest specials. I might be getting a smaller server with them to try things out, and if it all works well, get two more.

And when I say "smaller" I mean 16 CPUs and 32GB of RAM, which is one-third more of each than have at the moment. And then three of those. I expect we can get four times our current capacity for the same price.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:21 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, April 04

Greatest Turn-Based Tactical RPG Of The Day

It's getting that way, isn't it? And isn't it wonderful?

Anyway, today it's Shadowrun, for PC, iOS thingies, and Android thingies. They've only got 1.5% 4.5% 58% 79% of funding so far - but then, the project launched about an hour two eleven sixteen hours ago.*

* I checked, and at the time I spotted it, it had been active for an hour and had raised nearly $4000. In the following hour, it's raised another $14,000, and is still accelerating.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:43 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, March 22

Dragon Age: Shadows

Bioware, this:

It's ten years after the events of Origins, and the brief peace following the Warden's victory has all but collapsed. There's open conflict among the lords of Ferelden, between the lords and the crown, between the mages and the Chantry, between Ferelden and Orlais. The only reason Orlais hasn't stepped in and taken over is that they aren't faring any better, nor is any help to be expected from Orzammar, which is in open civil war, nor the Dalish Elves, who have completely vanished.

And there are reports of a new Blight from the north... And from the west, and from the south.

And into all this steps the Warden, the saviour of Ferelden. Only you have no idea where you've been for the past ten years. If you died at the end of the first game, doesn't matter, you're back. You still died, but that's still you walking around. (Indeed, whoever died at the end of the first game is back, very much alive.)

You have even more trouble on your hands than the first time, and all your former allies are dead, lost, or struggling with their own problems. You have to gather the scattered remnants of your party and try to save Thedas from the greatest peril it has ever faced.

Annnnd.... The rest is up to you.

more...

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Saturday, March 17

Tiny Pixels

Galaxy Note and iPad.next both land in Australia in the next week or two.

I'll take one of each.

Well, I'll wait for my next pay cheque, and then take one of each. Right now might be a little improvident.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:25 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Mongofied

I survived MongoDB Sydney!

Don't think I would have lasted much longer in those lecture hall seats, though. My back is aching again, but it's more a long-day-need-to-lie-down ache than the help-I-am-severely-injured pains of two weeks ago.

Spent some time talking to one of the MongoDB engineers, whose wife, by curious coincidence, is named Meenu. No, really. He was staffing the desk when I picked up my name tag, and I had it listed as my company (since in fact it is).

Pretty impressed with the talks, and I'm eager now to put it to use at both my day job and mee.nu.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:22 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Friday, March 16

Mongolated

In theory I'm off to a conference on MongoDB in about nine hours.

In one sense the timing couldn't be better, because I'm about to deploy MongoDB in anger (or at least, sincere aggravation) for the first time.

In another sense, I'd rather sleep all day.

In yet another sense, I can sleep just as well at the conference. Really. You haven't met my neighbours' kids.

'Night. Don't forget to set HoiHoi-san on bedbug patrol.

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Thursday, March 15

With A D

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Wednesday, March 07

Enemies Everywhere!

There were only two games I was looking forward to this year, and both of them were sequels: Mass Effect 3 and Torchlight II.

Now I find that there's a new XCOM game:

A spiritual successor to Terraria, a new game from the creator of Day of the Tentacle, probably a new Wasteland game, possibly a new isometric tactical RPG from Obsidian...

And SimCity 5.

God only knows when I'll have time to play these things - I didn't finish Planescape: Torment until 2007 - but until then, I'll be in my bunk.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Three Terafloops

I may have jumped in too early on my new video card.

I got a Radeon 7950 for Shana, my new Windows box. That's a huge upgrade from the 4850 in Nagi, but it looks as though a better idea would have been to wait for the 7870.

While the 7950 has 40% more shaders (1792 vs. 1280), it runs at a 20% slower clock speed (800MHz vs. 1GHz), leaving it only slightly faster in shader performance. Both chips have 32 rendering units, but the clock speed on the 7870 gives it the advantage, so the cheaper card has a higher pixel fill rate despite the 7950's greater bandwidth.

My 7950 is factory overclocked to 900MHz, closing half the gap, but there's still probably little advantage to the more expensive card for most games.

Using the 7950 as a double-precision compute engine is a different story; the 7900 cards have full double-precision units giving them about four times the performance of the 7800 models. But I don't spend that much time on computational fluid dynamics these days.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:00 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, March 04

Fool Me Twice

I just pre-ordered Mass Effect 3.

This better not be another crawling abomination like Dragon Age II, or I will be seriously ticked off. And I have a hamster.

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Tuesday, February 28

4.2!

Eight years late, but finally here: A mainstream microprocessor that runs at more than 4GHz.

At its launch in November 2000, the Pentium 4 ran at 1.5GHz, but it did less per cycle than the Pentium III or Athlon, and wasn't all that great. Particularly since Intel initially tied it to the overpriced and underwhelming Rambus memory.

In 2001 Intel reached 2GHz, in 2002 2.8GHz, and by 2004 3.8Ghz.

And there they got stuck. Unable to increase clock speeds, they went back to the drawing board, abandoning the Pentium 4 for the Pentium III-derived Pentium M, Core, Core 2, and now the i3/i5/i7 family.

And eight years later, neither Intel nor AMD had reached the 4GHz barrier at stock speeds (not overclocked or turbo mode). My new systems can reach 4.2GHz in turbo mode, but standard speed is only 3.6GHz.

IBM will happily sell you a 5GHz server if you have the money, but for mainstream systems, the AMD FX-4170 has the fastest clocks around.

Unfortunately for AMD, a slower clocked Intel i5 2500 will run faster for most applications, but I've been waiting a long time for this, so let me enjoy it for a little while.

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Saturday, February 25

Deviated

I've wanted for some time to have better logos and logotypes, and if possible, mascots, for the mee.nuniverse. Ideally I'd like to get a co-ordinated set of logos and mascots for each of the domains and system components.

I don't know if I can afford to hire a serious professional artist, but I can afford some commissions on deviantArt. The problem there is finding the right artist, because there are a lot of them, and a lot of them are good.

I like this for mascot characters. It's not exactly a chibi, but I think it strikes a perfect balance of simplicity and clean lines, wholesome cuteness, personality, and just a touch of sexiness.

For logotypes, this guy seems to have it together - clean, clear, and simple.

I don't know if any of my readers follow deviantArt, but if you do and know of artists you think would suit, and who are open for commissions, please let me know.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:55 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, February 22

Farewellaria

Development of awesome 2D mining engineer training system Terraria has apparently ceased after the very welcome expansion late last year. Two of the original three developers left to pursue other dreams and I can just imagine the feelings of the remaining developer, trying to meet the demands of a million (literally) fans.

Fear not, though, because there's a new game coming from one of the Terraria developers that is basically Terraria in space. Terraria in space with penguins.

Starbound.

Update: More Starbound.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:15 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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My Kittens Just Had Kittens

So, Double Fine, the game company headed by Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts) has raised over $2 million on Kickstarter for a new old-school adventure game - five times their original goal, and still going strong.

This has not escaped the attention of other developers of classic games. Brian Fargo (founder of Interplay, creator of Bard's Tale and Wasteland) plans to launch a Kickstarter drive very soon to develop a sequel to Wasteland.

If you're not familiar with Wasteland, it's the predecessor to Fallout. Fargo didn't have the rights for a direct sequel, so the Black Isle division of Interplay developed Fallout as the next best thing. Possibly the next better thing, because Fallout is a gem.

And Obsidian, the present incarnation of the aforementioned Black Isle, are also looking into the idea. As Black Isle the team created both the original Fallout games, both Icewind Dale games, and Planescape: Torment, possibly the best computer role-playing game ever. They're currently busy with a couple of projects - they do a lot of work-for-hire - but they have a lot of projects they never got to complete in the Black Isle days.

It's unlikely that we'll ever see the original vision for Fallout 3 or Baldur's Gate III due to licensing issues, and Torment was a massive project, with 800,000 words of text (about twice as much as Lord of the Rings), but a just-plain-fun party-based isometric dungeon crawler like Icewind Dale is something that likely could and would be funded through Kickstarter.

I loved the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate I & II, Icewind Dale I & II, and Planescape: Torment) and if they were still making them today I'd still be buying them. So if and when those projects show up on Kickstarter, I will leap on them, cash in hand.

Brian and Chris (Avellone, of Obsidian), you hear me? However many of these projects you think you can deliver, me and my money are ready and waiting.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:02 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, February 19

It's Not An Addiction!

I was browsing around Kickstarter yesterday, looking for cool projects to throw money at, and there aren't actually all that many that excite me, having already tossed cashbombs in the direction of Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick reprint drive and Rob Balder's Efrworld motion comic project.

One that did catch my eye, though, is The Adventures of the Salamander. It's a series of children's books based on a story the guy wrote when he was five, and recently found while going through stuff his mum had kept (as mums are wont to do). He's now a freelance artist and has illustrated a number of books, but this is the first time he's both written and illustrated something.

Unlike Rich and Rob, I don't know this guy and can't vouch for him, but if you scroll down you can see that he can sure draw some nice salamanders. I thought it worth a few bucks for a PDF set.

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Tuesday, February 14

Bits

All the parts for Shana and Lina have now shipped, except for the black Lian-Li drive bay adaptors (convert one 5.25" bay to four 2.5" bays) which are expected late this month, and the Sapphire 7950, which is now in stock at the distributor and should arrive this week. (Update: Shipped!)

I also added a Lian Li EX-503 to the mix - a little (7x9.5x10.5 inches) USB3/eSATA RAID array which nicely complements my existing Lian Li cases and gives me somewhere to put all my spare disks.

So Shana will be configured with a 4TB C drive, a 4TB D drive, and an 8TB E drive, all RAID-5 - something of a step up from the 1.5TB C and E it now has (with E mostly set aside for the daily backups).

All that remains is to cart it all home from the office and put it together.

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