Aah lasagna's gone!
Saturday, February 28
When Chrome's Sixty-Four
Well, no crashes in a week. The problem seems to be isolated to Chrome 40.0.2214.115 32-bit with hardware acceleration enabled, plus something specific about my combination of Windows, my Radeon HD 7950, and its drivers and / or firmware.
Well, no crashes in a week. The problem seems to be isolated to Chrome 40.0.2214.115 32-bit with hardware acceleration enabled, plus something specific about my combination of Windows, my Radeon HD 7950, and its drivers and / or firmware.
This started (near as I can tell) when Chrome updated itself, and stopped when I turned off hardware acceleration. After updating to 64-bit Chrome and having a couple of days of stable operation, I turned hardware acceleration back on - and I've had another couple of days of stability.
Which is good, because this is my primary machine for work, and I typically have about 15 apps and a total of 100 tabs open at any given time, not to mention a couple of Linux virtual machines each with their own sets of applications.*
Which is good, because this is my primary machine for work, and I typically have about 15 apps and a total of 100 tabs open at any given time, not to mention a couple of Linux virtual machines each with their own sets of applications.*
Having it crash every day is like trying to build a house when once a day, bam, all your tools and supplies and whatever you were working on in the last hour suddenly scatter themselves all over the lot. The fact that nothing is broken and you can pick everything up and start again is beside the point; sooner or later you are going to say to hell with this and take up a job farming potatoes.
* That's why I bought a system with 8 cores, 32GB of RAM, and a 960GB SSD. The Radeon 7950, though, that was for Mass Effect.
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Monday, February 23
A Farewell To Chromes?
TL;DR: It seems that some combination of 32-bit Chrome 40.0.2214.115, Chrome's hardware-accelerated rendering, AMD's graphics drivers, and perhaps my early model HD7950 BIOS had my computer crashing constantly last week. I turned off Chrome's hardware acceleration and installed the 64-bit version, and it seems to be stable now. Even loading up 16GB worth of tabs (one of the pages of this blog uses 1GB, which is handy to know but painful to trip over) and then closing the whole window at once didn't faze it.
I've been using Kei (my new PC) since January 2 (though the individual components are a lot older than that). For six weeks it ran fine (ignoring all the reboots for updates), but then last Monday I arrived home from work to find that it had crashed.
You might want to get that looked at...
TL;DR: It seems that some combination of 32-bit Chrome 40.0.2214.115, Chrome's hardware-accelerated rendering, AMD's graphics drivers, and perhaps my early model HD7950 BIOS had my computer crashing constantly last week. I turned off Chrome's hardware acceleration and installed the 64-bit version, and it seems to be stable now. Even loading up 16GB worth of tabs (one of the pages of this blog uses 1GB, which is handy to know but painful to trip over) and then closing the whole window at once didn't faze it.
I've been using Kei (my new PC) since January 2 (though the individual components are a lot older than that). For six weeks it ran fine (ignoring all the reboots for updates), but then last Monday I arrived home from work to find that it had crashed.
Tuesday, it crashed again.
Wednesday it crashed again.
Thursday it didn't crash.
Friday it crashed twice.
Saturday it crashed when I wasn't even using it.
Sunday it crashed.
And so today, before I left for work, I fed it a CD containing Memtest86 and left it to run.
Got home just now, and it had completed 3 test cycles with no errors. (It takes quite a while to run the full test suite across 32GB of RAM.)
That's a relief. The predecessor to this computer's predecessor - Haruhi - had memory problems and slowly corrupted the contents of its disks over the course of several months; I ended up having to replace the memory and do a complete reinstall of Windows and every application. Almost anything is better than faulty memory.
It randomly freezes solid, sometimes leaving half the screen blue. No BSOD, doesn't reboot, just locks up solid. At least twice when I was closing tabs in Chrome.
Google Google....
Other people have reported issues with Chrome acceleration on Radeon graphics cards. I haven't done any hardware changes since I got the darn thing to boot, and I haven't done any software or driver updates recently, but Chrome updates itself all the time.
At least two of the crashes happened when I was interacting with Chrome. I always have Chrome running; it's my primary browser, and I use it for mail as well. Closing a tab has two main effects: It frees up a ton of memory (pointing to a possible memory issue) and it clears out a hardware accelerated graphics context.
If the memory is reliable enough to sustain a 12-hour torture test without a single bit out of place (which it should be, of course) then it's extremely unlikely to be the cause of so many crashes.
Which leaves...
Et tu, Chromium?*
* Chromium comes from chroma, which is Greek, not Latin, so I have not the faintest clue what declension it is or what form it takes for the vocative case, and more to the point, nor does anyone else.
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Sunday, February 22
Best Version Number Ever
I learned something new about USB 3.1 today.
I learned something new about USB 3.1 today.
The major points to know about this new version of USB are as follows:
- It runs at 10Gb per second, up from 5Gb for USB 3.0.
- It supports a new connector, USB type C, which is compact, reversible and the same on both ends of the cable.
- It supports as much as 100W of power (5A at 20V) so you can charge not just a phone or tablet, but a good-sized notebook.
- It's backwards-compatible with all the old versions; at most you'll need an adaptor cable.
- It can carry video signals like DisplayPort for resolutions up to 8K (7680x4320).
The new point is a little less significant, but still nice. USB 3.0 uses what is known as 8b/10b encoding. To send 8 bits of data over the bus, you encode it in a 10-bit pattern. This is a more sophisticated form of the start bit / stop bit / parity on old serial connections. But it does mean that 20% of the bandwidth is used up by the encoding.
USB 3.1 supports a much longer and hence more efficient pattern - it encodes 128 bits of data in a 132-bit pattern. That improves efficiency from 80% to 97%.
In effect, USB 3.0 can transfer 500MB of data per second before protocols and error correction. USB 3.1 can transfer 1200MB per second.
Which makes it fully twice as fast as SATA 3, and offers a much smaller connector than the hideous SATA Express. Plus one cable carries both data and power. Plus it's easy to create a USB hub to get more ports.
I'd like to see internal drives switch entirely over to USB 3.1, with the exception of PCIe x4 M.2 cards with NVMe.
Video is not as cut-and-dried; USB 3.1 can carry a DisplayPort 1.3 signal, which is the highest-speed consumer video standard - but only over a 1 metre cable, which just isn't enough to be practical. It can carry DisplayPort 1.2 for 2 metres, but that limits you to "only" 4K@60Hz. So DisplayPort / Thunderbolt cables still have a role there.
DisplayPort 1.3 has been designed to carry USB 3.0 in addition to video, though, so you still get USB everywhere.
DisplayPort 1.3 has been designed to carry USB 3.0 in addition to video, though, so you still get USB everywhere.
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Saturday, January 24
On Being The Wrong Size
There's a problem with the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies: The scale doesn't make sense. Little things, like the fact that the town of Dale is about as big as Minas Tirith. And big things like the dwarves' attempt to drown Smaug in molten gold.
There's a problem with the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies: The scale doesn't make sense. Little things, like the fact that the town of Dale is about as big as Minas Tirith. And big things like the dwarves' attempt to drown Smaug in molten gold.
If we assume that the volume of molten gold is about the same as an Olympic swimming pool (and frankly, it looks larger), then we're talking about 2.5 million litres of gold. That would weigh close to 50 thousand tons - 50 billion grams. Gold in our world is currently runs about $40 per gram.
That's two trillion dollars worth of gold right there. And never mind the hoard itself, which is much larger.
It's possible that gold is more common in Middle Earth than on Earth, but that just means it's less valuable, since it has little practical use in a pre-industrial economy. (It doesn't corrode, which is good, but it's soft and very heavy.)
And the dwarves pay Bard in silver, not in gold, and yet that is enough for him to risk his life to smuggle them into Esgaroth. Either the values of silver and gold are inverted - in which case the dwarves wouldn't be hoarding gold - or the economy of Middle Earth is bigger than Earth's - which isn't possible; they have nothing we'd even recognise as a city in the modern sense.
Of course, this particular part is Peter Jackson, not Tolkien, and The Hobbit is a children's story (and canonically, is told by Bilbo, who is not an entirely reliable narrator).
Still... Where is everybody in the Lord of the Rings movies? The world seems to be utterly depopulated. It's the movie equivalent of a Bioware game.
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Wednesday, January 21
Samsung U28D590D Review
TL;DR: Oh my God, it's full of stars.
TL;DR: Oh my God, it's full of stars.
Tech Specs
Resolution: 3840x2160
Input: 1 x DisplayPort 1.2, 2 x HDMI 1.4
Output: 1/8" audio jack
Power: External power brick
The Samsung U28D590D is a 1.5th generation 4K monitor. Early 4K screens were targeted squarely at the professional market, with prices upwards of $3000. Second generation 4K screens, showing up now, are priced under $1000, still use high-quality IPS panels, but forego some high-end features like colour calibration.
The U28 sits below those, as a high-end consumer model, for consuming rather than producing high-resolution content. And it's priced appropriately; I paid A$499 for mine on sale; regular online prices range upwards from $549 to $699.
Out of the box it takes a few minutes to attache the stand (you'll need a large-bladed screwdriver, either plus or minus) and get it plugged in. The default settings are retina-searingly bright; I have the brightness and contrast turned down to 60 currently and it's still on the bright side.
This is a subjective review; I have no measurement equipment. But there are no static colour or brightness inconsistencies significant enough to notice (and there were on my old Dell U2711, a professional monitor), and no visible dead or stuck pixels (though at 4K they might not be easy to find).
Colours are vibrant and text is very sharp. It's not quite perfect - I'm judging it against my 2560x1600 Nexus 10 - but it's very good indeed.
The stand isn't as solid as it could be, particularly compared to the Dell, which is rock steady. I'd feel comfortable leaning on the Dell if I needed to climb on the desk to change the light bulb (and have); I'd never do that with this monitor.
This is a TN panel, so there is going to be some colour shift if you view it from an angle. Good news is that the horizontal viewing angle is as good as any monitor I've seen, including expensive IPS screens. Bad news is that if you stand up and look down at a 45 degree angle, white turns to blue-grey and other colours take on a distinct blue shift.
Both my desktop with its Radeon 7950 and my notebook with its Intel integrated graphics (Haswell CPU) recognised the monitor immediately and worked flawlessly over HDMI, albeit at 30Hz. What didn't work so well was connecting my 7950 over DisplayPort.
On one of the two mini-DisplayPort outputs on the card, the display shows graphical glitches on random horizontal bands every 10-30 seconds. On the other port, the whole screen goes black and then restores itself every 20-60 seconds.
Adjusting the resolution to 2560x1440 stops the problem, but that doesn't look particularly great. On the HDMI port at 30Hz, the display is rock solid. I suspect this is an issue with my DisplayPort cable - my card has mini-DP, and the included cable is full-size, so I picked up a mini-DP to DP cable from the corner computer store. I suspect it might be an older cable only rated for DP 1.1, and so not able to reliably carry the 4K@60Hz signal. I'll order another cable online and test that again.
Right now I'm running quite happily at 30Hz; you can notice the difference, but for work, watching movies, and light gaming it's not a really problem.
The remaining question is Windows 8's scaling. It's a bit of a mixed bag. I'm having more luck (for some reason) on my desktop than on my notebook (a 1080p 13.3" screen, so basically the same DPI as this). I'll report back on that aspect in a few days.
The on-screen display is driven by a little joystick on the back of the monitor; you can easily reach it from the front - it's just behind the lower right corner. It works quite well, and has all the usual amenities. I haven't yet tried features like picture-in-picture or picture-by-picture, but I have little use for them anyway.
Overall, it's a good monitor for its target audience, and at this price, a good buy. The big selling point is not this monitor in particular but 4K and high-resolution displays generally. : It's like washing the mud off your screen; everything is suddenly so clear. I'd find it hard to go back, and I've only had it a day.
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Tuesday, January 20
4K Or Not 4K
Guess the answer is 4K. Dick Smith has the Samsung U28D590D on sale for $499 right now, and even had it in stock at my local store, so I trotted over there at lunchtime and got one.
Guess the answer is 4K. Dick Smith has the Samsung U28D590D on sale for $499 right now, and even had it in stock at my local store, so I trotted over there at lunchtime and got one.
This is one I considered and rejected before, because it's a TN rather than an IPS panel. Having now had a chance to look at one up close... Frankly, if they'd said it was IPS I probably would have believed them. It doesn't have the characteristic colour shift of TN when viewed at a sharp angle, though there is a brightness/contrast shift. I think it will do fine.
Also, at $499 for a 28" 4K monitor, I'm willing to forgive a few minor foibles. Just 15 months ago the only 4K monitor for sale here cost $4200.
The stand does wobble if you poke it, which is the first thing every review comments on. Samsung, spend another $5 on the stand for next year's model, okay?
Review later once I finish work for the day and have a chance to set it all up.
Update: The display glitches when I run it on DisplayPort at the full 4k@60Hz. It doesn't glitch on HDMI running 4k@30Hz. I'll try it with a different DisplayPort cable as soon as I can find one.
Running at 30Hz isn't a killer, but you do notice, so I'm really hoping that it will be happy at 60Hz with a cable swap.
Update: Some other people have reported these issues with this monitor and Radeon video cards, and the solution is to find a better cable. So I'll do that. Meanwhile:
Also on the plus side, I plugged it into my new notebook, and it worked immediately. Only 4k@30Hz, but many notebooks have trouble running higher than 1080p for an external display, so I'm happy with that.
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Monday, January 05
Next Problem
Most of my remaining errors were being caused by Windows Error Reporting.
Most of my remaining errors were being caused by Windows Error Reporting.
This thing is awful if you're trying to run older software. Turn it off and suddenly things work again.
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Sunday, January 04
Ticket #12350 (New Defect)
Hardware Virtualisation support not detected if Hyper-V installed.
Hardware Virtualisation support not detected if Hyper-V installed.
Which means I can't create 64-bit virtual machines in VirtualBox, which was kind of the point. (And CentOS 7 is 64-bit only.)
It's something of a relief, though, as my first thought was a hardware or BIOS issue.
Update: So I turned off Hyper-V (which required two reboots, but was easy enough) and now it works.
And that's the hardest problem I've had with this install so far.
Why haven't I run into this before? Because Hyper-V is only included in Windows 8 Pro, and I've only used Unpro before now.
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How Did We Cope?
Steam.
Steam.
Library.
Click. Scroll scroll scroll. Shift-click.
Right-click.
Install.
Disk Space Required: 406849 MB
Disk Space Available: 3131066 MB
OK.
more...
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Saturday, January 03
Kei
So, my New Year's Resolution was to set up Kei, my shiny new Windows PC that has been waiting to be assembled and installed for... More than two years.
So, my New Year's Resolution was to set up Kei, my shiny new Windows PC that has been waiting to be assembled and installed for... More than two years.
And done. Not perfect, but done.* Finished about 3AM today.
Since I had a lot of parts to play with, even though many are two years old, the result is pretty good: 8-core 3.6GHz CPU, Radeon 7950, 32GB RAM, 2 x 960GB SSDs, 5 x 2TB disks, and a Blu-Ray burner for burning all my Blu-Rays. 22 USB ports (8 x USB 3 and 14 x USB 2), and 12 x 1/8" audio ports for that perfect 16.2 mix.
Currently Kei is hooked up to a spare 1600x1200 monitor and I'm sharing the keyboard and mouse via Synergy, which works perfectly except that the Windows Do you want to allow this program to do stuff? dialog flicks me to the primary monitor on Nagi every time. (Update: The solution for this is the obvious one - plug the keyboard into Kei and share in the opposite direction. Works great now.)
Now I have a bit of an install party going on. I built Nagi late in 2008 when the original Kei went flaky due to faulty memory. So Nagi has everything installed. Despite a few hiccups over the years, that adds up to 841 applications.
I'm hoping to whittle that down a bit. Really, I just need my JetBrains IDEs, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, Visual Studio, Sony's creative software, Notepad++, Cygwin, VirtualBox, Chrome, Firefox, Firefox DE, iTunes, Clementine, Steam, Origin, Xshell, Xftp, Zoom Player, Python and Ruby and about a hundred libraries for each, uTorrent, Bryce, Carrara, Hexagon, Poser, virtual machines running CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 14.04...
Hmm. This might take a while.
The other thing I need to do is decide on a new monitor; my Dell U2711 is visibly declining. Right now, my short list is either the Philips 40" 3840x2160 monitor or a couple of Dell's new U2515H 2560x1440 screens. The Dell is about half the price of the Philips and has about half the pixel count, so it all balances out. The only real problem with the Philips monitor is that it has a static television-type stand, where the Dell is height adjustable and rotates on all three axes. Well, that and 40" is huge.
* As usual, the disk layout isn't what I wanted. Windows 8.1 denies the existence of my motherboard's RAID functions, and it also denies the existence of either my Adaptec RAID card or my cheap dual-port SATA card, so after much messing around I'm left with RAID-0 for the local drives and one drive not doing anything at all. Plus the SSDs aren't on the first two SATA ports, so it seems that Windows put a boot partition on one of the disk drives, so if that ever dies Kei won't boot any more.
But those minor issues aside, the dual SSDs, eight cores, and 32GB of RAM really makes a difference.
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