What is that?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
Sunday, December 15
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.
Invader Zim
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!
Kim Possible
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Wakfu
* Ish.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:47 PM
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Saturday, December 14
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.".
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
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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?
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
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Friday, December 13
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!
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
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Thursday, December 12
Top 40
My favourite anime TV and OAV series of all time. In alphabetical order, because it's getting too hard to sort otherwise.
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
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Wednesday, December 11
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.
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.
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09:37 AM
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Tuesday, December 10
Quote Mine
Peebs is a mother lode.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:28 AM
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Monday, December 09
Dear Sydney Trains
Will you please shut your bloody trains up?!
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
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At My Day Job
Needed to set up some virtual machines under OpenVZ.
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
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Wednesday, December 04
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.
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
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