CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?

Thursday, September 29

Cool

Lost In The Woods

You search for ingredients, and find: The Right Stuff (128), Potion Base (123), Twigpile (137), Power Flower (408), Nightshade (152), Powerpack (273), Apple-y Goodness (129), Ashen Film (129), Bitter Powder (117), Dayshade (135), Ebony Sand (132), Monochrome Flower (138), Milkshake (137), Glowing Goo (125), Smokeblossom (271), Stark Moonlight (139), Tasty Twig (518), Malted Pill (109)! +3300 Stamina!

(Now summarised for your convenience.)

http://www.animecubed.com/billy/userimages/sigs/85354.jpg
more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:17 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Friday, September 23

Geek

Go For The Eyes, Boo!

GOG is running a sale on all their D&D games this weekend, ranging from 20% to 60% off depending on how many you buy.

Six of them* are very, very good, and I've finished all six - though I didn't finish Torment until 2007.  The GOG versions include all their respective expansion packs as well, and several of them come with downloadable soundtrack CDs and other neat bonus items.  (And if you're new to GOG, they're all completely DRM free.  I already had all those games, but I bought them again so that I don't need to worry about the CDs any more.)

And because the discount increases as you go, the remaining three, which I own but haven't played, will set you back about 46 cents each.

If you like D&D and have about 400 hours to spare, this is probably the best gaming bargain in history.

* Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Icewind Dale 1 & 2, Planescape: Torment, and Neverwinter Nights.  Actually, the included adventure in NWN wasn't that great in its original release, but the second expansion, Hordes of the Underdark, was just amazing.  And NWN also includes design tools and a multi-player server (including a Linux version) so that you can set up your very own MORPG.  Not MMORPG - it's limited to 64 simultaneous players - but what do you want for four bucks?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:28 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, September 05

World

Eve Myles Has Enormous Pupils

Seriously, look at them, they're like saucers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:29 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Friday, September 02

Geek

Couching

I spent the last couple of weeks dead in a ditch (I spend entirely too much time dead in ditches) but this evening I crawled out and picked up my CouchDB library again and worked out which was the right version and renamed it and put it into Mercurial and all that good stuff.

And went back to the docs and worked out why my multiget method didn't work, and duh it was because I was using the wrong parameter, and I fixed it and it worked and I added a rangeget method and it worked too.

Slowly.

I haven't defined my own views yet (that's next) so I'm using the default _all_docs view, which allows you to fetch multiple records from a key range or an arbitrary set of keys with a single request.

But while I can write data at around 6000 records per second (single-threaded, using 100-record inserts), reads are significantly slower, only around 1500 per second (using 100-record queries).  Multi-threading got me to twice that, but no higher - though that may be my test environment.  Whatever, 1500 records per second for reads is slow.  6000 records per second for inserts is fine, but that read performance is just lousy.  I stopped work on Pita because it was unacceptably slow - but it was a damn sight faster than that.

I don't currently know exactly why it's so slow, but I can see that it's 98% CouchDB and only 2% my Python library.  Either the default view is intrinsically slow, or CouchDB itself is.  This isn't a latency issue; CouchDB is running at close to 100% CPU here - more when I run the benchmark multi-threaded.

Or I'm doing something seriously dumb.  Except that performance is the same whether I test with 2000 records or 50,000, so it's not clear what that dumb thing might be.

Update: If I don't set include_docs, it runs twice as fast.  That's not good.  If it had run twenty times faster, then I'd know not to use include_docs that way; I'd do something different.  If it had run twenty percent faster, I'd have concluded that the problem was something I was doing wrong.  But twice as fast suggests that the problem is inherently with CouchDB's performance.  Not good at all.

Update: So it's slow, but does it scale?

Just by chance, I happen to have a 40-processor Intel E7 Xeon system sitting here doing not very much (well, it's doing real-time social network influence analysis at a rate of 5000 records per second, but for such a large server, that's not much).  Since I'd very much like to get CouchDB working for that project too, it was logical to fire up a test.

Results: Around 90,000 record inserts per second, around 14,000 record reads by key list (multiget), around 30,000 record reads by key range (rangeget).  That's with a single CouchDB instance and 40 different databases, which was the easiest thing to test quickly.  CouchDB databases are pretty much the equivalent of tables in MySQL (not exactly; they're a lot more flexible) so having 40 of them is not at all unreasonable.

This is only a very small, quick test; it's no indication of how CouchDB would scale for large datasets, but it can certainly scale to multiple CPUs - CouchDB was using about 20 cores during the benchmark.

Writes scaled from 5000 records per second (in batches of 100) with one client, to 90,000 per second with 40 clients.  That's not bad at all.

Reads scaled from...  Oops, I've lost those numbers, back in a bit.

...

From 950 to 14,000 multiget, 1500 to 30,000 rangeget.

So yeah, it scales.  Not quite linearly, but quite well.

Now, if I can just get that single-threaded performance up a bit, I'll be happy again.  Otherwise I'll need to scrap the plans for the E3 Xeons and go back to waiting for Bulldot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:47 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Geek

It's Also A Phone

Samsung Galaxy Note.

With a 1280x800 display and a 1.4GHz dual-core CPU it sounds like an ultralight notebook, but it's actually a PDA.  The screen is a 5.3" AMOLED device, and the CPU is Arm (presumably A9).  16GB of memory (Flash, that is) and a micro SD slot.  Runs Android 2.3.

It has 8MP and 2MP cameras, WiFi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth, GPS, accelerometer, barometer, compass, and a proximity sensor.  It can record 1080P video at 30fps.  Oh, and there's an FM radio.  And a phone.

And a stylus.

Yes, it's a real PDA designed to do real useful things, not just another overpriced fingerprint collector.  I'm planning to buy one as soon as it becomes available, and finally replace my Tungsten T3.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:44 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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