Aah I'm late.
Tuesday, February 18
Aye Aye Net
Eight years ago I signed up with iiNet for ADSL on their top-tier business plan, which gave me 1.5 mbits down, 256 kbits up, and 60GB of monthly downloads.
Eight years ago I signed up with iiNet for ADSL on their top-tier business plan, which gave me 1.5 mbits down, 256 kbits up, and 60GB of monthly downloads.
I'm still on the same plan, and paying the same amount each month. Only now I get 14 mbits down, 2 mbits up, and 1200GB of downloads.
I wish more things worked like that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:01 PM
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Correction
Dog goes woof, cat goes meow.
Bird goes tweet, and mouse goes squeak.
Cow goes moo. Frog goes croak, and the elephant goes toot.
Ducks say "Hey, got any grapes?".
Dog goes woof, cat goes meow.
Bird goes tweet, and mouse goes squeak.
Cow goes moo. Frog goes croak, and the elephant goes toot.
Ducks say "Hey, got any grapes?".
And the man says no, no, no...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:01 PM
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Sunday, February 16
Databaseses
New database server, running MySQL (actually MariaDB 5.5.30 with TokuDB 7.1.0), Redis 2.8.6, ElasticSearch 1.0, TokuMX 1.4.0, Neo4j 2.0.1, and RabbitMQ 3.2.3.
Everything is set up with init scripts and chkconfig so that it cleanly and automatically starts up and shuts down. This was a little fiddly with Redis, which runs multiple independent services, but I hacked something together to look after that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:18 PM
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So, Maybe We Can Have Nice Things?
Kickstarter got hacked.
Kickstarter got hacked.
They weren't storing passwords in plaintext, or using a reversible cypher.
They weren't storing credit card details.
They were using either multiple rounds of salted SHA-1 or bcrypt for passwords, depending on the age of the account. Both are good options.
So yes, they got hacked, but it's not a clusterfuck like Adobe or Sony, and there's no reason not to keep using the service. Just change your password first.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:09 PM
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Saturday, February 15
I Love Technology!
On the new server, I'm using MariaDB with TokuDB instead of the fairly old vanilla MySQL we've been running on for years (which has actually served us pretty well, except for the limitations of MyISAM).
You mean I can actually see the progress of a long-running operation? Inconceivble!
On the new server, I'm using MariaDB with TokuDB instead of the fairly old vanilla MySQL we've been running on for years (which has actually served us pretty well, except for the limitations of MyISAM).
It's little things like this that make you notice that things have really improved:
MariaDB [(none)]> show processlist;
+----+------+-----------+------+---------+------+----------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------+----------+
| Id | User | Host | db | Command | Time | State | Info | Progress |
+----+------+-----------+------+---------+------+----------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------+----------+
| 18 | root | localhost | minx | Query | 73 | Inserted about 577000 rows | load data infile '/data/load/dx_post_09.d' ignore into table dx_post | 29.534 |
| 19 | root | localhost | NULL | Query | 0 | NULL | show processlist | 0.000 |
+----+------+-----------+------+---------+------+----------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------+----------+
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:13 PM
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Saturday, January 18
Could Have Sworn...
I could have sworn I wrote this in my review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, but I can't find it or my review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, so here goes.
I could have sworn I wrote this in my review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, but I can't find it or my review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, so here goes.
Pixy's Law of Neuroscience: The intersection of consciousness and quantum mechanics is bullshit.
Oh, and since I seem to have lost my review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, here's a capsule version.
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
Tedious and interminable story populated by dishwater characters rises to a climax spectacular only in the disappointment it brings. The individual sentences are well-crafted - and some of the paragraphs too - but as a novel it fails in every other possible way.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:52 AM
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Wednesday, January 08
It's Been 25 Years Already?
Big Finish celebrated the 50th Anniversay of Doctor Who by dropping the price on their first 50 recordings to 5 squid a piece. (Each is a two-disk set, approximately 2 hours of content plus commentary and other bonus items.)
Big Finish celebrated the 50th Anniversay of Doctor Who by dropping the price on their first 50 recordings to 5 squid a piece. (Each is a two-disk set, approximately 2 hours of content plus commentary and other bonus items.)
Now they've done the same for volumes 51-75, for the next week. That range includes The Natural History of Fear, one of the best stories Big Finish have ever done.
I'll pick them up, though I have to admit that I haven't opened the box with volumes 1-50 yet.*
* If you buy the CD, you get the MP3 version for immediate download as well. So I might never open the box...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:41 AM
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Thursday, January 02
New Year's Resolution
3840x2160
3840x2160
Dell's 24" ultra-HD monitor has arrived in Australia, and the price is about $200 lower than I was expecting. I was planning to wait for the consumer-grade 28" model, but the price is low enough* that I think I'll go for the pro version. I currently have a Dell 27" 2560x1440 display, so this one will be a little smaller but a lot higher resolution.
Then I'll see how Windows 8.1 handles scaling....
Update: A shortcoming: This monitor apparently has no scaler; it only handles its native resolution. So if your graphics card isn't fast enough to drive a 4K screen in your favourite game, you can't shift down; you're simply out of luck.
Which isn't unreasonable for a professional monitor, but is potentially a problem for me. I may pair it with a matching Dell 24" 1080p screen - use the main monitor for work, and the low-res screen for extra real-estate and gaming.
In fact, that's a great idea. I need a retina screen for doing high-resolution site and application design, and I need multiple screens, but I don't need multiple retina screens. Want, yes. Need, no.
* At $1559 it's hardly cheap, but I'll spend about 10,000 hours looking at it, so I'm willing to spend a few extra bucks. The 32" model at $4199 was a few extra bucks too many.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:15 PM
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Monday, December 30
Long Live The Queen
LLQ is a game in the Princess Maker mold, except that you have to not only study hard for your eventual (or at least potential) queenery, in this game you have to administer and defend the queendom.
LLQ is a game in the Princess Maker mold, except that you have to not only study hard for your eventual (or at least potential) queenery, in this game you have to administer and defend the queendom.
Maker should be sued for false and misleading advertising. I haven't survived six months yet. At least the deaths are varied - and cute.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:28 PM
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Sunday, December 22
The Power Of Cool Vs. The Speed Of Lite
Long time readers of this blog will be familiar with the fact that Moore's Law is dying - and in some respects has been dead for a decade already.
Long time readers of this blog will be familiar with the fact that Moore's Law is dying - and in some respects has been dead for a decade already.
This is of concern to everyone as the ever-increasing availability of computing power has been a key driver of economic growth for decades. It's of more immediate concern to some of us because it means we're no longer to be tempted by shiny new video cards every Christmas.
Maybe.
Video card makers have been enjoying a free ride from chip fabs for twenty years, rolling out new, improved cards on new, improved chip processes roughly every two years. But this is the third year in a row where Nvidia and AMD (the two remaining video card makers) have been stuck at 28nm. This makes it difficult to make any significant advances; whatever you do, if you make a card significantly faster, it will be significantly more expensive and use significantly more power.
Nvidia had some headroom available because they'd already released their high-end professional Tesla GPU in a consumer model. At $999 it wasn't ever going to find many customers, but as a flagship for the benchmark charts it was very useful.
So, recently AMD announced their R9 280 and R9 290 families. The 280 is simply a rebadged Radeon 7970; 2048 shaders running at 1GHz, with a 384-bit memory bus.
The 290 is a new chip, though. The full chip, labelled the 290X, has 2816 shaders (768 / 37.5% more than the 7970), running at "up to 1GHz". Its smaller sibling, the 290, has 2560 shaders (512 / 25% more than the 7970) running at "up to" 947MHz. That's a fairly significant increase for a chip based on the same fabrication process, and the new chip is 25% larger and has nearly 50% more transistors than the 7970. (Which is pretty interesting in itself, as they've achieved 20% better density without a change in the underlying technology.)
The cards rolled out to reviewers, and they found three things:
- They're fast.
- They're really good value for money.
- They're noisy as hell.
With a larger, denser chip, AMD needed to step up the cooling capacity of the new cards. For the reference design, they went for a blower fan - that is, one that blows the hot air out through a vent at the back of your PC - and it's just not very good. The fan problems reduced a potential home run for AMD to a single, and the recommendation from reviewers was to wait for AMD's partners to release cards with custom coolers.
In fact, Tom's Hardware tested the possibilities themselves by prying loose the reference cooler and installing their own, and the results were dramatic. But that's not something the average user would want to do, and the rest of us were left to wait.
And wait.
But the custom cards are now showing up in reviews, and the results are everything you could ask for: The redesigned cards run 20C cooler, 20% faster, 6dB quieter, and just $20 more than the original, while consuming no more (even a little less) power.
So, time to buy a new video card?
Not so fast.
There's another wrinkle here. AMD's cards are generally better than Nvidia's consumer cards for computation. Nvidia has an edge on some applications thanks to their Cuda compute library, and the difference doesn't necessarily hold for the respective professional cards, but for some applications the difference is huge. A $549 AMD R9 290X outruns a $999 Nvidia Titan for Litecoin mining by 2:1.
With the recent meteoric rise of Bitcoin (ignoring the even more recent partial crash) and growing interest in cryptocurrencies in general (of which Litecoin is one), cheap compute power has gained a whole new market. And if you happen to want a new graphics card for some more prosaic task - let us say, graphics - you may find yourself seriously outbid, if you can find a card at all. Newegg are showing AMD's R9 280 and 290 cards at 30-50% above MSRP, or simply out of stock entirely.
There's also another reason I'll be sticking with my Radeon 7950 for a little while longer. Apart from the fact that having just switched over from my old 4850 I'm not feeling any need to upgrade.
Dell have recently announced affordable 4K monitors. Their 32" model is the same panel sold by Sharp and Asus, at the same price, $3500. But the 24" model is $1399, and the 28" semi-pro model under $1000.
Meanwhile, LG have announced a new lineup of ultra-wide 21:9 displays. Their existing 21:9 monitors have a resolution of 2560x1080, which is not that interesting when 2560x1440 monitors are readily available. The new models bump the resolution up to 3440x1440, making for a clear upgrade. This is great for tasks where you would otherwise use multiple monitors, such as programming.
I commonly find myself switching back and forth between my IDE, a terminal session, a web browser showing the app, and another web browser showing documentation pages of whatever library I'm working with at that moment. Never mind the windows for the app documentation in Microsoft Word, the database monitoring utilities, scratch areas in Notepad++ and so on. I need all the screen area I can get, but monitor boundaries are a pain, so the fewer of those I have, the better.
But.
The only display interface currently capable of driving those new hi-resolution monitors at full speed is DisplayPort. The reference R9 290 cards, all the custom R9 290 cards announced so far, and all of Nvidia's consumer cards have exactly one DisplayPort output. My Sapphire 7950, despite being 18 months old, has two.
So whichever of those fancy new monitors I end up with, I can run two of them on my existing hardware, but only one if I upgrade. Asus offer an overclocked R9 280X with four DisplayPort outputs, but it offers none of the advances of the R9 290 family, is a huge 3-slot card, and as far as I can tell, is completely out of stock everywhere.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:43 PM
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