Overclock.net - Overclocking.net - Blogs - Tech Yabber by max302

Windows 7, the Ambassador of x64?

max302 — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:49:03 GMT

x64, also known as x86_64, has been around in consumer-level computers for a little over 5 years, having been introduced to the public by AMD in their famous K8 lineup back in 2003. The x86-64 instruction set, which AMD had presented in 2000, had for a goal to extend the existing x86 achitecture in order to be able to address more physical and virtual memory, use newer SSE instructions sets, and eliminate some of the older, archaic 16 bit instructions. 64 bit would also bring many more advantages than just the ability to use more memory, it would also give computers the ability to deal with bigger chunks of data in one cycle, making 64 big machines faster than their 32 bit counterparts clock per clock.

Back in the early 2000's, 64 bit computing was seen as the way of the future by all the major players in the computing sector: AMD had K8, which offered a smooth transition from x86 to x64, while Intel had originally planned a more brutal transition with their Itanium 64 server offerings, which never really took off due to it's total incompatibility with the previous x86 standard. Very soon after the release of the first 64 bit processors, the K8 Opterons marketed for server/workstation use, 64 bit processors made a debut in the consumer segment, first with K8 Athlons, then with offerings from Intel. The latter had admitted it's failure with Itanium and introduced Intel 64 in the late models of the Netburst lineup, Prescott 5x1 and beyond.

Ever since, both AMD and Intel have been offering 64 bit compatibility on all their processors. At first, running an x64 system was considered an extraordinary feat: while getting a compatible processor was easy, getting software to run on it was quite difficult. Linux had of course adapted to this new technology fairly quickly, but it took a while for Microsoft to introduce their first x64 operating system, Windows XP Pro x64. The initial releases had tons of compatibility issues which still dirty the name of 64 bit today, from software refusing to work to drivers not being available.

However, in the recent months, things have changed. 64 bit is a reality now, with OEM computer makers shipping out computers with 4, 6, 8 gigs of RAM, and most of the software vendors/makers have adapted to this reality by offering at least decent 32 bit compatibility in a 64 bit environment, or recompiled their products in x64 to work with 64 bit Vista.

Despite this, some people stubbornly refuse to upgrade. For some, it's the fact that it's Vista... for others, mainly mainstream consumers who have no idea what they're talking about, 64 bit is just another stupid standard that they don't need. Being an in-store technician for Futureshop, I've seen tons of machines come back with 32 bit Windows XP installed on hardware that was shipped out with over 4 gigs of RAM and Vista Home Premium x64. When questioned about why they decided to install XP on their machines, these customers usually mention software compatibility as their main reason for the switch. "Sir, ma'am, have you tried installing and running your software as an Administrator?" The question gets me blank stares.

Most people who buy pre-built computers usually find comfort in XP's user experience, and are ready to sacrifice some RAM to get that comfort. But as an enthusiast, it brings tears to my eyes. Why would anybody want to waste RAM? You payed for 4 gigs, why are you only using 3? The solution to this problems is obviously getting people to adopt and keep 64 bit operating systems, and there isn't a million operating system vendors out there; the one company that can make things change is Microsoft. What MS doesn't seem to realize, is that they have the tool to finalize that transition out in the hands of the public right now: Windows 7.

The successor to Vista, often referred to as "what Vista was supposed to be", is becoming a widely acclaimed product, even though it is still in it's release candidate phase. People everywhere are raving about how smoother the experience is with 7,the added stability, the enhance performance. This new product will surely be a hit, and unlike Vista, I think it's going to catch on from the time it is released to the market, unlike Vista which had to get a service pack before being half-reliable.

Why not use this OS to impose the new standard? At a certain point, you have to show the finger to backwards compatibility, and 7 should be the one to do so. If you aren't running anything more recent than a later model of Pentium 4, then maybe you should not be running a more recent OS, and for all the older machines, XP is still available, although it reach it's EOL last summer.

It's always a rough thing, upgrading. People didn't want to leave Win98, nor did they want to ditch XP in favor of Vista. DDR2 was frowned upon at first, and DDR3 is still lagging behind in term of popularity. Upgrading is not a pleasant thing for most, but it's a necessary thing, and whatever you do, there will always be a small group of people who will ***** and moan about what the market forces them to adopt. Microsoft has chosen to please this small share of the market, and to offer their newest OS in 32 bit flavor... something we should all frown upon. All this does is encourage the 32/64 bit ambiguity, and making software developers job more complicated than it should be.

Shame on you Microsoft.

My Thoughts on Core i7

max302 — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 05:25:19 GMT

Everybody knows that we, members of OCN, have a serious problem. Look at it from an average Joe perspective: we spend thousands on high end computers, and at every single occasion we go out and browse Newegg on a quest to find an upgrade for our systems, which according to us are quickly becoming obsolete. We then proceed to sell our memory, processors, graphic cards and all our other barely used gear, things which are sometimes only a couple of weeks old, in order to purchase the latest and greatest. While the common mortals still call a Pentium 4 HT/P965/7900GX2 system a top gaming machine, we constantly crave for more, more performance, more 3dMarks, smaller SuperPI times, and bigger e-peens. And after spending 50$ on Crysis:Warhead in order to be able to run the benchmark tool, we sit our asses on the chairs and play CS:S at framerates exceeding by 6 times our monitor's refresh rates. We are hardware junkies, hung on PCB like a druggy is on PCP.

Call me a hater, a lamer, what ever you will, but I really do think that the new Intel Core i7 processors are but a very expensive (and very temporary) fix for all the hardware junkies of this world. In my opinion Intel could and should have milked some more greens out of the Core 2 family, for three simple reasons:

They still kick the crap out of AMD performance-wise.
Wether you're selling cars, toys, wood pulp, high performance dish-washing machines or processors, it never really is a very good idea to launch a product while your biggest market is in an economical crisis.
It's easy money!!!111!122131!!

Heck, if I were head of Intel, I would probably have asked my engineers to produce some higher performance run-offs of the latest 45nm C2Q's, with more L2, higher FSBs (so that FSB 1600 spec board manufacturers keeps bragging about can actually be used for something else than running out of price chips) and matching boards, something like x58 with a memory controller on the northbridge, then postpone all that new gen stuff to some more strategic date. Like the day that AMD can match half of the performance and overclockability that Intel has to offer. Which won't be until like in a year.

And between you and me, does the increase in performance justify the performance? Let's weigh the arguments:

Hyper-Threading, according to what has been seen in the late Pentium 4s, and what ARM has to say about processors, is a total waste of time, silicon, and electrons. It has been said inefficient, and performance gains only exist on very specific operations (correct me if I'm wrong). In my head, it pretty much equates to useless.
QPI, I must admit, is a great step ahead in front of traditional FSB based systems. Faster connections between cores and uncores obviously means better latencies, greater overall performance, but I am still skeptical on whether higher FSBs could have done the job.
Triple Channel DDR3 too is great, but then again, could very well have been done with traditional FSB based motherboards too.
Turbo-Boost in itself is a good effort to make processors more energy efficient, but putting this technology on 130W TDP processors is kind of funny. 130W/4 or 130W/1 or 130W/2 is equal to the same wattage, so I don't see where the power savings/performance gains are. That, and just as parallel processing is getting bigger and bigger, and as more and more apps support it, Intel is telling us that you can now run single-threaded apps faster by "shutting down" a couple of cores and diverting power to a single core, as long as all the electrical specs are respected. Why the fight for support of multi-core processors in more apps then? Can you say conflict of interest?
Last but not least, SSE4.2 also seems totally useless to my eyes, considering the efforts that ATI and Nvidia are deploying to create more efficient ways of accelerating calculations that these new SIMD instructions are trying to compensate for. And if I am wrong and if it were really that useful, implementation in a C2Q would have probably been trivial.

Now remember, I'm not denying performance gains, but in most cases, these gains are not mind blowing, and as InsideHW tests confirm, you're better off investing in a bigger graphics card setup than a whole new platform right now.

I can hear you all preparing your excuses for your premature upgrades: "But Max, a bigger graphics card doesn't decrease my render time in Cinebench." My question to you: how many times per week does the average power-user render some 3D? As a matter of fact, how many times a week does a power-user max out his CPU usage, if you excluding benchmark runs? Probably less times than you would think.

i7 is what I like to call a post-beta pre-release product. It's a great introduction for the newer socket and technologies with plenty of potential, but there's a reason it's only available in SUPER EXTREME OVERCLOCKER ***BBQ+ edition: it's a quick dose of silicone dope for hardware junkies, but it's not yet ready for the general public. It's just irresponsible mass market a 45nm processor with a 130 watt TDP, when you can get a Kentsfield processor with only 90W of thermal design that gives you about 80% of the real-world performance that i7 offers.

I am confident that the months to come will be filled with quality updates for Intel's new platform, but for now, the only thing migrating to i7 will do is increase you're e-peens size by a couple of nanometers.

Once You Go Gigabit, You Never Go Back

max302 — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:10:29 GMT

I've heard people dissing on new technologies before, so when I heard people *****ing and moaning about the new hotness in cabled networking, gigabit aka Base1000, I wasn't surprised. Like most, at the beginning I thought that having so many bits per second was just useless because my internet connection was capped at only a mere fraction of that anyways. To me, buying a 100$+ router at the time just to get a boxed labeled gaming and some fresh new technology compatible with only one box on my network sounded like a stupid idea.

But these days are over. Thanks to my employer's super duper employee discounts and my habit of buying things impulsively as soon as I think I'm comfortable with my money, I have gotten my paws on a brand new D-Link DIR-655, the hot new router of tomorrow.

Just by the outside, you know this thing means business. Black on white, super bright blue (not green like pictured) LED indicators, not one, not two, but THREE antennae... I know the antennae probably do close to nothing, but they still look pretty awesome.

Performance-wise also, this thing is very impressive. Although I don't have some real world benchmarks and comparisons, because you know, I really was in a hurry to plug the damned thing in, I feel a significant boost in my general computing experience. Coupled with a local DNS cache and the OpenDNS servers upstream, I can see a significant reduction in load times, probably dued to the fact that my DNS requests to my home server have less latency. But I guess that it is under greater network load that the extra mbits/second would really make a second. As for the wireless, I currently possess no 802.11N devices, but the signal on G devices is stronger throughout the house, probably because of the rangebooster feature and the triple antennae.

And all the other features are cool too. I've been waiting years for a router with a USB port, and finally this one has exactly what I want.

I'll try to get some benchies for you guys... but so far, I'm very happy with my migration to the newer networking technologies.

I Work for Best Buy Now

max302 — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 02:23:32 GMT

I've been tired of flipping burgers for a while, and at some point I even was wondering if I would ever get paid to do something else then chain building junk food before obtaining higher education. After talking to a couple of friends and getting their encouragements to move on to somethig else, I made a man of myself and applied a second time at my local Futureshop, a Best Buy owned banner operating in most of Canada.

Now I know that here, BB and it's affiliates aren't really the most trusted vendors around here, and that pretty much everybody who posts here and knows his stuff has a story involving a BestBuy employee and his pet Fail-whale. Heck, before working at Futureshop, I had a couple of deviate opinions myself. But now that I work there, I talk with the technicians and realize that for that the staff over at that place really knows their stuff. Sure, some of the seasonal employees like myself have less knowledge of some areas, but overall, I was impressed of how much my colleges knew: every shift, I learn something new.

The knowledgeable team, combined with my working environment which is basically a huge Toys R Us for grownups, makes it the closest I've seen to my dream job. There's something about sales, salespeople will understand me, this little feeling you get when you know that you've taught your customer something relatively to what he was looking for, it makes me happy to a point where it's pretty hard to describe. I'll take the last two days for example: I've been selling quite a bit of routers and networking gear, and explaining wireles B/G/N inter-compatibility and gigabit ethernet to a customer who had stepped into the store with the simple intent of "buying a router" then hearing the said customer recall all the norms previously explained to him/her really gets me going.

I never considered myself a good teacher, but for stuff I like, I seems like it just to come out naturally. I still have to work on the more technical side of my sales-speak and some product knowledge (like on printers, :confused:), but otherwise, this job is my nirvana.

There are just so many advantages compared to my old job, it's incredible. There are no break scheduals as there used to be when a burger-flipper: the way it works is that if you feel you deserve a break, for a cigarette if you're a smoker, you just got our there and puff off your craving. Because all the employees are commission payed, you're the worst if you abuse this freedom: you'll be closing less sales, and eventually your manager will holla back. On those slow Wednesday nights, you can feel free to have fun with the demos until you can help someone, because after all, it can only improve your products knowledge right?

The staff is young and dynamic, and the ambiance really kicks arse. Bottom line, I'm happy with my new job. If you're looking for your first tech-related jobs, Futureshop is something I'd definitely recommend. I honestly thought I wouldn't be chosen because of my age: I'm sixteen and still in high school while the median age in the staff is about early 20s, but it turns out that they exert no discrimination about age, at least not at my local store. As long as you know your stuff, why not? If you're to apply, be sure to include a mention of your OCN blog if you have one. I don't know if they did a background check, but I like to think that some of my better articles did help in my selection.

Less is the Future of Computing?

max302 — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:13:04 GMT

If you've been following hardware news for the last 2 years, you may have notice some of the many trends that are becoming the new hotness in computing. As always the race for price/performance between Intel and AMD is on, the two giants along with Nvidia are releasing new flagship products, core shrink remixes almost every month. That's nothing new... But other hot topics are also shaking up the hardware world, namely more and more parallelized computing via multi-core CPUs, GP-GPUs and GPU acceleration, the growing presence of DDR3 in high performance systems, and something which I think is really special, the hype over smaller, cheaper, more power efficient computers, the topic of this article.

If you look around, you'll realized pretty much everybody is trying to get a stab at the new nettop/netdesk market: Via has been in the game for years of course, but both Intel and AMD are churning out more and more interesting products. The long awaited Atom is pretty much leading the ball, but the Athlon 2000+, and the upcoming Bobcat are also very promising alternatives. As for the actual manufacturers of such integrated systems, it's pretty much a free for all. Asus, MSI, Acer, HTC, HP, Fujitsu, everybody wants a piece of the pie. Since I find that releasing old revamped technology is almost an insult to the thousands of engineers who have been working their asses off to make better, more powerful chips, allow me to question this new hype: tiny computing has already caught on, but is it going to live on? Will people really continue buying underpowered hardware just because it costs peanuts?

I can see valid arguments on both side of the scale. I know that this isn't necessarily the right place to inquire about this, but if you think about it, what applications apart from games do you use? Chances are that unless you're doing some hardcore 3d modeling with SolidWorks or touching up video in Premiere, all you're doing is either surfing the net, writing up documents, and chatting on AIM or MSN. Do you really need an e8600 with 8 gigs of RAM to do that? Absolutely not, and chances are that most people currently can't afford a computer won't be doing much more than that either, so all these mini laptops are ideal for them.

I can also see those new chips working wonders in carputers, boatputers(?), and computer aided navigation/entertainment devices of all sorts. Carputers have been around for a while, but most will agree that the Atom is pretty much the beefiest chip available in an integrated nano-ITX form factor which can fit pretty much anywhere. With the rising popularity of home servers, the integrated Atom board is also a great choice which has a smaller physical footprint, lower price and lower power consumption then the AMD Sempron powered prebuilts I keep seeing in retail stores.

On the other hand, I'm questioning the longevity of the current low-power, low-cost chips. After all, what's the point in giving lower income families computers if they are rendered obsolete only a few months after they are bought? The Atom 230 has been called inapt at handling day to day computing by Tom's, which right off that bat is a pretty bad indication of how long the chip will survive, and even if it were to be good for another year or two for browsing and typing, the roadmap for the Intel Atom kind of makes me want to wait. Dual core Diamondvilles should be landing in nettops and integrated ITX devices near you any time soon, and next gen Atoms code name "Pineview" featuring a core shrink to 32nm are just around the bend, ETA 2009. Normally, I'm not the type to wait for a newer, better component because in the end you can just end up waiting eternally, but in this case, buying an Atom 230 right now is pretty much stupid.

Cost effectiveness is also an issue. Because of the almost disposable nature of the new nettops, my guess is that people will most likely want to get rid of their nettops after only a year of use (some EEE701's are already going on sale for cheap on the net), which has me questioning if it's better to buy a 450$ MID and having a so-so user experience for a year or shelling out under 900$ up front on a REAL laptop but enjoy it's full sized keyboard, screen, and greater performance for 2+ years until it becomes sluggish.

Part of me just wants to empty my secondary savings account and buy a Dell Mini 9 to run OS X on, but the other part tells me that it's a pretty stupid investment.

So, is minimal computing really the new hotness, or is it just a passing fad? I guess that only time will tell, but in any case, I'm just happy that finally computers are becoming something that everybody can afford.

OCN Blogs: What They Are, How to Use Them

max302 — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:28:13 GMT

Since the very day I started blogging here on Overclock.net's blogs, it has been very clear to me that some of the members are somewhat confused on what blogs are supposed to be and what they can and can't be use to do. I'm not pointing fingers here, but seeing two sentence blog entries just makes me want to cry.

I figured that I might be useful to newer members and first time bloggers by sharing the little knowledge that I have on blogging with you guys, as to make OCN blogs a better place for everybody: bloggers themselves, regular OCN readers, and all those external readers as well.

First of all, what is a blog? According to Wikipedia, the definition of blog goes like so:

Quote:

A blog (a contraction of the term "Web log") is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video...

...Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs...

In laymans terms, a blog is a tool for publishing on which an author or many authors my post whatever original content (we have a keyword here) they want, and share it with the world. While most blog's content usually follows a certain topic, the said topic can be rather large in some cases, as it is the case with OCN blogs, because computers are a rather wide topic if you ask me. Some people also use their blogs as an outlet for their thoughs, which most of the times results in a blog that's pretty much all over the place. Regardless of what type of blog you maintain, what really matters is posting interesting content, as I`ve seen many all-over-the-place blogs make their way into my Google Reader as very interesting reads.

So how do you, Mr. and/or Mrs. Joe Average, generate interesting content? Just keep those three things in mind:

If your content has the possibility of being useful, educational, entertaining, or if it may bring some people to reflect on something, do post it. Most of the time, you're writing your content for somebody to read it. Before posting, make sure somebody might be interested in the stuff you write. Be careful, this rule is kinda tricky, as the way you present your stuff will play a role. Nobody cares about the T-shirts you bought online, but if you do post an article about those new tees, you might get some interest if you include your impressions on how those garments are made, how they look like IRL compared to online, or how they tend to wash out pretty quickly, whatever. Before you press the publish button, ask yourself, is this interesting to at least a certain degree? As long as the content is your own (copying is lame), and that it may interest somebody on this planet, even if it's only one, it's fair game.

Remember, BLOGS ARE NOT FORUMS! DO NOT ASK QUESTIONS ON THE BLOGS! If you want to get an answer to your inquiries, post on the appropriate boards, not on the blogs. Answers to your questions will most likely be posted quicker and much more detailed. The comment system on the blogs is there so that readers may react to your content, help them share their views, not to tell you your Q6600 needs more voltage to hold 3.2 ghz.
If you're to communicate something, do so properly. I still consider myself a novice blogger compared to the old gangster bloggers I regularly read, and one of my biggest mistakes most of the time is lack of editorial work on my articles. Countless times, I've just posted stuff one-shot without proof-reading, and all those times I've looked back at my unedited articles and hung my head in shame. It's pretty impressive how one badly composed sentence can make you look like a total retard. Spell check and proof reading aren't optional. Heck, if you can get your stuff proof-read by teachers, parents, friends, whatever, go for it.
People generally write to be read, make sure your stuff can easily be found. Did you just write a kick ass article about your vision on GP-GPU's replacing multi-core CPUs? That's an interesting topic, so make sure people can easily find you articles. Overclock.net has a huge pagerank, and it's content can often be found on Google, and it's your duty to help put both your community and your content on the map for other people to enjoy. Concise titles, descriptive tags and/or categorization helps loads. If you think you stuff is teh bomb, you might as well go ahead and submit it to Digg, Reddit, and other bookmarking services.

Following those three guidelines usually results in a better blog, more readers, and will most likely make you a better writer in the long run. Next thing you'll notice, you'll be writing 5 page long product reviews like you've been doing it your entire life, and you'll enjoy yourself doing it. Have fun blogging!

Rethinking Hard Drives and Storage

max302 — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:29:51 GMT

The hardware industry in itself is constantly changing, but one sector that has particularly evolved over the years is the disk storage sector. Nowadays, everybody from hardcore enthusiasts like we OCN-ers to our formerly computer illiterate grandparents are now juggling around with voluminous files, music, movies, and large collections of high-resolution digital pictures, so the overall demand for bigger, faster drives just keeps growing.

Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital and all the other hard drives giants are well aware of this trend, and thanks to ferocious competition amongst themselves, great milestones have been reached. A terabyte of raw storage is now something that pretty much any willing person can afford, redundant and stripped storage via RAID is now within everybody's reach thanks to integration to many chipset solutions (think P35+ICH9R and later, nearly all Nvidia chipsets since the 5 series), drives are quieter, faster and more energy efficient than ever before, and most importantly, cost per gigabyte is rock bottom, below 0.20$/GB in many cases.

All this progress has me thrilled, however, I think that it is time to reconsider how we use our disk drives, and other means of storage on non-removable media. It seems that too much emphasis is put on making hard drives, bigger, faster, when maybe all we need to do is to think up and create mission-specific storage products, as to better suit the needs of every user and every machine, specially in these days where many people have more than one computer fulfilling more than one task.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by mission-specific drives. In my main system Fr0stbyte, on which I am typing this article at the moment, sits a Seagate 7200.10 with 320 gigs of capacity, or roughly 300 gigs once formatted. It's a mighty fine drive, and if you ask me it'll probably outlive me, but what saddens me about this drive is that it's just too damned big. No matter how hard I try, I just can't get past the 50 gigs of used disk space... I just can't! Now I hear you all asking: But Max, where are your gamez, your pr0nez, your warez, and your musicez?!?!?! Like many enthusiast and power users are doing these days, I have set up a home server, where all my files are safely stored on password protected SMB shares, which run off ext3 formatted drives. This keeps my files safe yet readily available from anywhere on my LAN via SMB, or even via the internetz with FTP or FTP over SSH. I only have 250 gigs or so of network attached storage for my personal use, and it's just enough for now. This is where the mission critical drives come in.

If I were to have it my way, I'd just trade off the 320 gigger inside my main rig, and use the money to buy two (or three, maybe four) higher performance single platter 40 gig drives. Those drives would be fast because of recent technology, stuff like perpendicular recording, insane cache memory sizes, and the lightning fast SATA interface, and it's single platter design would also make it cheaper (for obvious reasons), and most probably quieter and cooler, as less heads on less platters = less noise and heat from friction. Those would be so cheap that I could afford at least 2 which I would stripe up with RAID, resulting in a high performance OS storage setup much more suited to my needs. It would be far more scalable too: adding another drive to my stripe to improve performance further more doesn't mean adding another 320 gigs of space I would even get near to filling.

Another thing that should be considered is teaching the general public that hard drives aren't forever, and that data redundancy is important. I'll take an example close to me: my father takes lots of pictures with his digital cameras, and to store those he decided to buy a 250 gig disk which I share for him on my network: he stores pretty much everything he has on this disk, but it isn't redundant. What if this drive decided to bork it's bit even though it's less than a year old, like one of my drives did just a couple of months ago? You never know when it's gonna happen... and just like Murphy put it, it's going to happen at the worst possible moment. I urged my father to buy another identical drive to be safe... he replied by saying that it wasn't exactly on his lists of priorities, and that all he wanted was storage for the moment. Will he be pulling his hair out when I get an estimate done at a data recovery service place when his cross-Canada trip pictures get flushed a year from now? Yes.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying everybody is capable or willing to set up a RAID, but there is a huge market for safety in data, specially for products simpler and of less maintenance than those stupid USB hard drives and silly semi-automated backup software. I have a hard time believing that nobody has yet thought about a ready to deploy disk redundancy system that anybody can use. How hard is it to stack two laptop hard drives in a 3.5 inch form factor and add a controller that automatically mirrors everything, while still looking like a normal drive to whatever device uses it? It's a walk in the park for the boys down at Seagate's R&D, yet I haven't yet seen it at my local Best Buy.

So what are we waiting for? That's the problem with the hard drive's mostly linear evolution: many market segments are left unexploited, resulting in products that don't necessarily fit the consumer. There's more to storage then just writing bits on a disk, but it's up to the hard drive people to get cracking on new products.

Friendly Reminder from A Fellow Modding Nooblet

max302 — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:03:00 GMT

We all know that when painting anything, from metals to sheetrock, one should sand then use a primer to treat the surface prior to painting, as to assure a flake free paint job afterwards.

As hardware nerds, modders, lover's of fine case art, we spend tons on high quality paints (12$ a can for textured duplicolor anyone?), just as expensive clears, wet-dry sandpaper in grits that most hardware store people don't even know exist and even those little 3M scrubby things that double up as pan scrubbers once your done prepping your cases with em'. Properly painting a case is an expensive project when you want it to look good, and let's face it, dollar-scraping cheapos like me who try and cut corners to save a few dimes always end up either buying the real stuff after the cheap replacement has failed, or rocking a ****ty paint job at their next LAN party.

My friends, I must admit, I am a sinner. Fr0stbyte's rebuild (I won't even bother linking, the log is half done and pretty gay) was a total flop (well almost), partially because I had done my surface preparation in a hurry, and partially because I didn't prime. However, I took this failure as a occasion to learn from my mistakes. I told to myself, never again will I skip some steps.

And guess what I did today? I set myself up for painting my Rocketfish as a part of Project Bloody Bridget, and seeing that I didn't have any primer, I went out to my local hardware store (the small banner kind), and grabbed a can of generic primer. It said metal on it, it's cool, right? NOT.

Prepped the surface, took it outside, sprayed it up. Let it dry for a couple of hours, came back, and the damned primer had choked up on me. The stuff was on the metal, no doubt about it, but as soon as I touched it, blowed on it or whatever, it just flew away from the metal, like I had sprayed talcum on my case and not primer. So I'll be sanding my ass off to get it all off, and I just chucked 8$ at the window.

Moral of this story: never, ever cut corners, on ANYTHING. Regular primer doesn't do it for cases. If your local home hardware doesn't carry good quality primer, like Duplicolor's Self-Etching, don't settle for the cheap stuff, keep looking. In the end, you'll walk out of it a winner.

SMP + GPU... The Numbers, They're Growing

max302 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:21:52 GMT

I was check my EOC stats and graphs the other day, you know a folding nerger's gotta get his fix of numbers and histograms, and I noticed this:

Yup, that's right, I increased my productivity by 200+ % this month, using the same amount of uptime. My secret? I've said it before and I'll say it again: SMP, SMP, SMP. Oh and GPU. If you're still using the basic GUI clients for Windows and thinking that you're crunching serious numbers in the name of science, it's about time that you wake up and run SMP and/or GPU on all capable machines. Gromacs, Amber, and even the more advanced Double Gromacs cores don't even dare to compare to what SMP and GPU are doing. Of course, if you're running a non-HT P4 or anything of the like, the standard v5 client is ok, but if you're really into folding, you gotta consider optimizing your folding setup. In short, look for the following things, in order.

Run a faster client on capable hardware. In order, generally, it goes like this: v5 < v6 < SMP < ATI GPU < nVidia GPU. But then again, if you have a 45nm quad core clocked at 4ghz folding SMP 24/7 running under the right conditions, you're likely to score more than a 8600GT running Nvid GPU.
Optimize your folding environments. Can that Peryn clock 100 more mhz while remaining stable? Go for it. Are your dedicated farm boxes running Windows? Switch to Notfred's or Linux. RIGHT. NOW. Linux will yield lots more points compared to Windows. Do you really need the Sendmail daemon? Disable some stuff you don't need. Disabling Anacron won't give you 400 more PPD, but it's worth trying. Besides, I actually enjoy skinning down my machines.
Maximize uptime. You know, normal people sleep about 8 hours per day. 8 hours is equal to roughly... 1500 points on a 8800 GT? If you can pay the power bill at the end of the month, do leave your machines open at night, that's some huge points right there. In extreme cases, or when you're going on trips, you might want to setup BIOS wakeup after power failure settings or boot on clock settings, to make sure your machines are always opened.

Once you've done that... You should be folding full force. You don't need a huge farm to help... you just need to put some effort into it.

Bad ELF Interpreter with SMP? Try this.

max302 — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:26:09 GMT

For those of you who do not yet know, I am a total, utter, complete Fedora whore. When it comes to Linux, if it isn't sponsored by Red Hat, I'm not running it. Now I do download other more specific distros, but when I'm installing Linux on a box for everyday or server use, I always grab my trusty Fedora.

However, a few days ago when I was setting up my server again after a hard drive failure, I came across a problem running the Folding at Home x64 SMP client. The error message I got was bad ELF interpreter... which confused me because I don't know how you can possibly interpret a compiled binary. I did a bit of searching, and it turns out that I didn't have some of the required libs, at least not in the format it had to be in.

The culprit was glibc, pretty standard libs, but in it's x86 form, as the x64 files were properly installed. What's weirder is that the Linux SMP client, which is x64 only, needs x86 files to run... hmmm hmm. Anyways, the problem can easily be solved be running the following line at your terminal.

Code:

yum install glibc.i686

I used YUM because that's the standard software updater on Fedora for up to Werewolf I think, it's something else for Sulphur, but YUM still is there. You can use apt-get if you're a debian-based guy/gal, or whatever the hell you usually use, you should have repo problems for such an essential package.

SMP should now run smooth. Happy folding!

First RMA: It SUCKS!

max302 — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:33:45 GMT

I'm building a budget rig a friend of mine who has lived off of his graphic designer father's old Macs for his entire life currently. He gave me a 700$ budget, and so with 750 I went out and bought these parts from NCIX.

Everything went fine when ordering, except for two small mishaps, the first one being that it took like a friggin week to even get the stuff in the mail, and the other being that the power supply I ordered was back ordered.

I get the parts, throw it together with a spare power supply, doesn't work. Try again. Nothing, clear CMOS, try once more. None. Try another powersupply, change RAM config, try other set of RAM, nothing. By now, I'm seriously pissed. I call NCIX, speak to some dude, he tells me that chances are that the BIOS doesn't support my chip, one of the latest 45nms, even if there's 45 nm support written in big on the board's box. Makes sense, I take my home server Annabel off it's ceiling rack, rip the whole thing apart, then swap the e4300. The damned thing boots! I flash the new BIOS using Q-Flash (way to go Gigabyte, great stuff you have there), and pop in the e7200. It boots, again! Then I proceed to install Windows... when all of a sudden BSOD. Ok, fine, I reboot. Doesn't boot again, so I clear CMOS again. The next time I reboot, I get this BIOS error message, the BIOS tells me it's fixing itself, then the box shuts down, and won't reboot with the e7200.

By now, I'm frustrated as hell. I try to sleep on it, and it comes to me that maybe that the BIOS has reverted to it's old version while recovering. So the next day, I don't even get dressed before I take down my server again, swap, and try to reboot. The e4300 which used to work now doesn't work anymore. I try repositioning the chip, nothing works.

So I phone the NCIX support team, only to be asked by a machine to leave a message. I get called back by a rep who I can't understand, finally get an RMA number after trying to explain to him that I haven't done anything to the damned board, and that it's obviously a manufacturing defect.

And now I feel super bad asking the guy I'm building this for to pay the shipping to return the thing, and I'm very stressed about NCIX just not giving a crap and sending in the same board telling me it works. What if I haven't testing everything?

Anyways... it's a pretty stressful thing buying stuff for other people, and doing RMA sure does suck.

Nvidia Turning Friends Into Enemies?

max302 — Mon, 26 May 2008 00:17:54 GMT

Nvidia is acting weird lately. Apart from keeping the bar high in the GPU sector, Nvidia seems to be wanting to take over something else, the CPU sector. I'm a bit confused as if they want to do so using CUDA and GPU-powered applications to entirely eradicate the need for a powerful CPU and build crappy replacements of their own, or just trying to beat Intel at their own game, plain and simple, by producing super high end chips.

I might be totally wrong, but in the case that this "can of whoop ass" turns out to be a flop, this may very well be the end of Nvidia as we know it.

For a couple of years now, it seems that Nvidia has been trying to turn friends into enemies. At first, it seemed that the computing industry was more or less neutral (don't take my word for it though, I was still a kid back then). The nForce 4 chipset was available in both AMD socket 939 and 775. The AMD version of the board became a classic, and still being used today by olde-schoole 939 Opty enthousiasts. Same thing with the nForce 5: the 590 and 570 were both available for AMD and Intel processors, and AMD users even had a larger choice of budget boards, 560, 550, etc, which if you ask me is a pretty good sign that the relationship between AMD and Nvidia was going good.

Stuff started to go bad when AMD bought ATI in the summer of 2006, barely a few months after Nvidia released their new AM2 platform, the nForce 5. You just can't support a competitor, and as a result, all the other chipsets from Nvidia for ATI where a gigantic flop. I'd be surprised to know how many people on the forums knew prior to this article the the 780a even existed. Asus being the only producer of 6 and 7 series AMD boards, the public just never caught on.

This led to Intel becoming Nvidia's primary partner. And now, Nvidia wants to kick it's old friend in the nuts by developing an alternative to the CPU, and Intel responds with Larabee, a direct competitor to Nvidia products.

As a result, AMD-ATI are producing unified systems and getting a smaller yet comfortable portion of the market, while Intel is still offering ATI-capable chipsets (why? I have no clue) and planning to take a bite out of the GPU sector, and Nvidia still offers boards for both AMD and Intel, but plans to exterminate both. THE LOVE TRIANGLE FROM HELL!

The links are bound to break, the question real question is who will survive when they do. I don't think that Intel can be dethroned that easily: they dominate the CPU market, and that isn't going to change from one day to another. Nvidia on the other hand, HAS to be sure the GPGPU concept will work, because if Intel doesn't want to do business anymore, they're stuck all alone in an already very crowded market. Nvidia has already made the plunge in the ARM market for handhelds, and the next up for the tackle is x86(_64). Good luck Nvidia, but don't be missing your shot.

FAH: On the Road to the Top 100, Thanks to SMP

max302 — Wed, 21 May 2008 01:15:25 GMT

Although I'm now somewhat ashamed to admit it, I gnawed my way into the top 350 in the folding ranks with regular clients. By fear of bricking my machines with 100% load all the time, I simply ran the lamer v5 clients, even though half the machines I was running them on were SMP capable.

It's only until very recently that I've started folding full tilt with SMP on my capable machines. First impressions:

***BBQOMGLOL!!!

Seriously, I knew that SMP was fast, but I never even HOPED to yeild as much points as I do with it. No joke, I jacked 14 positions, from 324 to 310, with a single WU. As a comparison, my server Annabel, sporting an e4300 at 3 ghz now does ~2000 PPD under linux SMP v6 according to FAHmon(:gotproof:), and it used to get maximum 800 when I got good work units, the Double Gromacs ones. I expect my main rig Fr0stbyte to pop approximately the same score if not slightly higher, since the 400 extra mhz will probably compensate for running Windows.

I really was worried about my temps staying reasonable while folding in the summer, specially for my server Annabel which is stuffed in a small room with 3 other heat generating devices, namely a mini-fridge, a full sized fridge, and a full sized freezer. Turns out that the temps don't get any higher than 40, which is plenty safe. Also, remember that my server is on passive cooling with a Scyth Ninja. For those extra hot days, I'll probably just be strapping a Yate look to the Ninja.

If I take conservative numbers, then I should be folding over 3500 PPD, 24/7. Watch out top 100, millionaire club, I'm headed at you at the speed of SMP!

The HTPC, a Useful Tool?

max302 — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:14:47 GMT

I've finished building my server just recently, and despite running 2 active projects, one rebuild and another involving a Rocketfish, I still feel the need to chuck out more of my money at computers. Not necessarily super high end equipment, and certainly not to upgrade any current machine, unless it's an easy upgrade like SLI. To build the PC I would really want to build, I'd just buy super high end hardware and water cooling for Bloody Bridget, but I have tons of things to buy before that, car, camera, and all the other important stuff.

SO what could I buy for under half a grand? Another server? That would be totally useless, and I would prefer buying additional disks for my server before building another special purpose box. A quad core folding box to do some 24/7 dual-smp crunching? That would be awesome, but my parents are already getting mad about the kilowatts my current rigs are pumping out, so I doubt they would let me run another setup. The only place left for another box is in my AV rack: an HTPC.

I've done some research about the said HTPCs, checked out what kind of rig this type of build needed, and turns out that it perfectly fits my budget. The low cost combined with my uber downclocking skills (AKA the loads of time that I have on my hands) means that with the right components, I could make this into a super energy efficient build. Maybe even quiet too, unlike Annabel which was planned to be but got stuffed in a closet and forgotten.

This thing needs to be cheap, scalable, cheap, flexible, and cheap. Did I mention I needed something cheap? So this is going to be an AMD build. Yes I konw, you Intel fanboys are going to suggest a P35 + Pentium Dual Core config, but I need something that's mATX, and for now, the best mATX media board I've seen in reviews is the 780G from AMD. Besides, I have ZERO experience with AMD, and it would be cool to get some experience with stuff from the other guys, with all that weird obscure stuff, HT frequency and all.

Here is the parts list, not definitive yet.

Case: Silverstone Lascala LC-13B. Owning a Silvers has been a dream ever since I'm into computers, and if I have to pick up an HTPC case for a project, this is going to be it. Matches with my TV and all the other components, with slick looks while remaining discreet enough for my dad to accept it in his AV rack.
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H 780G mATX. This motherboard is cheap, yet loaded with HTPC enhancing features, notable the much appreciated Hybrid Crossfire and HDMI audio and video output right on the board. I've read great reviews both online and in print of the 780G and it's kick ass IGP, I'll most likely be testing this out for myself.
CPU: Either an Athlon 64 X2 4X00+ or the new 45 watt TDP 4050e. WIth aftermarket cooling amongst the lines of a Thermaltake Duorb, I'm wondering wether or not 20 watts will make a huge difference, specially if I end up underclocking the 4x00+. Is the 4050e just a cherry picked chip with a lower VID? Performance issues? I'm still trying to find reviews, but I'll probably end up buying what comes cheapest, being a used Althon X2 here on OCN.
Memory: Whatever comes cheap really. I don't need super kick ass sticks, I might en up buying some stuff from here to save some green. If it can run 800 mhz CAS 4 with a bit of a voltage bump, it's good enough for me.
Graphics: Although the experts in magazines say that the IGP alone on the 780G board can run 1080p output over HDMI no problem, it'd be cool to get a budget card for some Hybrid CF action. A 3850 would be cool to fold on, but in case I run out of funds, a 3650 will do just fine.
Storage: Since my server already holds all my media downstairs, I don't see the use in cramming tons and tons of disks in this build, which would make the entire thing noisier than it really needs to be. The smallest SATA drive I can find, most likely a 7200.9 80 gig drive, or maybe a quieter laptop HDD with a lower capacity. OS + iTunes won't be demanding very much out of the disk, no need to overdo it.
Cooling: As was previously mentionned, I'll probably be grabbing a Goldorb from a local shop, it's plenty cheap and way better than stock. It's also mounted lower than the other cooler I would normally buy for a budget build, a Ninja, hence more likely to fit the lower profile HTPC case. I'll also be grabbing a couple of silent fans, a controller, and that should seal the deal.

So I have a parts list that's cool... but one question remains: is it really worth it?

I've done some research on TV tuners... turns out that most of the HDTV tuners which I've seen only support clear-crypted channels, AKA not the specialized add-on channels. This makes the whole HTPC thing way less attractive. What's the use in having the damned thing if I still have to swtich to my receiver when I want to listen to TV?

Sure, it's a great thing to be able to display pictures on your TV whenever you like, or stream net radio to your entire house, but is it really worth it? I'll be using my HTPC mainly for playback.. in which case, I could just buy a PS3, run Fedora 9 off of it, and read from network, right? Apart from the PS3 not supporting 1080p and only 1080i, where's the problem?

This has me questionning the entire HTPC thing. Sure, it'll be loads of fun to build, and it's one more folding box on my LAN, but the only thing it really replaces in my current home theatre setup is the DVD player, and all the other stuff, video and audio playback from network and all, that's just convenient additions that can be done using other means anyways, like connecting an iPod to the receiver.

Since I'm not paying for this build, I have to convince my client, in occurence my father, that this HTPC will redefine his home entertainment experience... but so far I'm far from the goal.

D40: Bought!

max302 — Sat, 17 May 2008 23:45:27 GMT

I finally did it. After trying to snipe a D40 off ebay in vain a couple of times, I decided to be a real man and ride my bike to the camera store and buy it there, with the full warranty.

I've been jacking off over this camera for too many months now, and the pressure was just too strong, I put a down on it, and it should be arriving by next week. I took the standard kit, with the Nikkor 18-55, to start off. Anyways, I have access to a very wide collection of pro-grade Nikon mount lenses of all types, thanks to a pro photographer that I know from my dad.

This camera is gonna cost me a crapload over this summer... I've already started looking at a super-wide fisheye, a Peleng 8mm, and IR photography looks friggin wicked too. Add to that a 70-200 to complete the kit, a case, battery grip, memory cards... I can't see the end!

People have been laughing at me for renewing my Flickr Pro subscription, but who's laughing now? According to the salesdude, I'll be clicking away by next friday.

On Fedora 9 Live, For a limited time

max302 — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:43:55 GMT

So as you might be aware if you read this post, I had multiple hard drive failures in my house on the same day. After hours of messing around trying to get the drives to work, I finally settled to running off a Knoppix CD I had for a one older machine, then using my dad's laptop to burn the newer Knoppix DVD to run off my sig rig, to get basic access to my computer while the drives are off for RMA.

I've been using Knoppix for about a week now, full time, and seriously, I owe Klaus Knopper a beer, or two, or three, or twelve. I had messed around with knoppix in the time back when I was a noob, and where I would go telling friends that I could hack into hard drives and rip the SAM password caches for domain passwords on my school network (ahhh the good old days), but that was just noobiness doing it's thing. Since the last time I used knoppix, I've had the chance to get my paws on lots of linux... I've run Fedora (I'm a Red Hat whore from birth) on several different machines, and I've gotten down and dirty with the command line countless times, so it's this time that I could really enjoy the quality product that Knoppix is.

Let me tell you one thing, the newer DVD is friggin LOADED! It comes with KDE, as it always has, but it's just jam-packed with software. I've never seen a live CD with so many software, honestly: it's not every day that you see XMMS, Amarok, and about three dozen more obscure KDE-only media players, yet Knoppix seems to have them all.

I ran Knoppix right up to until I saw that Fedora 9 was out, and with a new Live CD too. Personally, I'm a GNOME person, and going back to my beloved Fedora was a very strong temptation. 35 minutes on my torrent server (600 kbps leaching anyone?), 10 minutes to burn, and I was popping the new distro in my machine.

As of now, all I can say is WOW. In addition to everything working out of the box, sound, networking, graphics (I was expecting my 8800GT to not be detected, like on F8) and all, I'm back on the oh so sexy GNOME desktop. This ISO is designed to fit on a CD, so it's less jam-packed with software than the Knoppix DVD, but everything is functional: the latest Firefox beta, Pidgin for IM, AbiWord for editing, and you can install more stuff on the RAM-drive if you really feel like it. More than enough for listening to my music and writing some blog posts. :D Performance wise, I feel like the pre-caching on Fedora is way better than on Knoppix, the loads times are less important and the entire thing feels a lots snappier.

It feels good to go back to linux once in a while, you know, messing aroud with source installs, busting your ass to try and get the required dependancies for such and such apps, working over many desktops... Pure bliss.

Hard Drives, You've Lost My Trust

max302 — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:25:49 GMT

This weekend, I went through a broad range of emotions. On one side, I was pretty happy because attended not one but two interesting social happenings, one of which was very well stocked up in booze and therefor very entertaining. I also was very proud of myself, because over the previous week, I had received about 5 cheques in recognition for my work on a forum I built for a small RV community, but despite all this, something happened on Sunday that totally broke all my weekend, and even continues to be felt this week. On the same day, on two different machines, two hard drives experienced HDSDS (Hard Drive Sudden Death Syndrome). I don't know why it happened, nor do I know how, but what I do know is that the incident rendered useless two boxes, one of which was my second best folder, PPD is estimated to drop by at least 300 points. That's only FAH... I haven't yet figured what files I've lost and what files are backed up on my server, but I'm loosing all my apps and savegames for sure.

As a result of this, the first part of this week has sucked hard. Not only am I sad of my loss, but this incident has gotten me very paranoid about my disk drives, and if I could, I'd RAID1 all the friggin drives on all 5 computers in this house.

Over the past month, I've been witness to 3 cases of HDSDS: the first one being only a minor loss, a 20 gig Maxtor which used to be used as shared storage for my dad's files, files which where luckily transfered to another drive hosted on my server something like 6 days before the drive passed away, and now a Seagate 7200.10 320 gig SATA and a WD 80 gigger are added to the list. The thing that bothers me most is the Seagate, not only because it was the OS drive of my sig rig, but also because I've never had a Seagate fail on me before, and I was confident that it wouldn't happen.

How can drive in apparent tip-top condition give it's last spin after only a year of use? The thought that ANY hard drive can die at ANY time without warning has me gotten seriously paranoid about my storage pratices. What if all my other non-redundant (all of them) drives were to break down right now, bringing with them my father's music collection and family pics, aswell as my own? I'm guessing this is a totally random thing... I've seen 12 year old, 90% uptime SCSI drives still kick it strong after use and abuse, and now a modern, quieter, cool, more efficient drive fails 1200% faster? Not cool. Into who do I but my trust now? Can any drive at all be trusted when it isn't redundant? I' not sure, and serious, the perspective of loosing another drive freaks me out.

I've contacted Seagate yesterday as well as today, and I'll be starting the RMA process online tonight, and after that, it's Western's turn. In the meanwhile, both machines are running in super emergency mode off of Knoppix (Klaus Knopper, I want your babies!), and probably are going to stay like that for.... two weeks? Yup, unless Seagate RMA is super fast.

*Sigh*:sad-smile

More on the Duorb: 3-pin Fan Header

max302 — Fri, 02 May 2008 23:53:07 GMT

If there is one thing that I HATE on the Duorb, it has to be the fact that Thermltake put a molex on the end of the fan wires for connecting it to it's power source. I mean, *** TT, how hard is it to put a PWM controller on your fans, put a 4 pin standard GPU fan header and charge 3-4$ more for such a great product?

The calbe might be sleeved, but still, when you don't have a molex very near, and god knows that cable management freaks never, EVER, let a molex dangle that close to components, it's very hard to get the Duorb working without the ugly cable.

My solution to this? Chop the sucker off.

I wanted to get a 4 pin originally and connect it the GFX board directly, but then I realized that the Duorb fans don't have a PWM built in, and that they don't have a fan speed line, so I figure that I'd go a simpler route. I had my Ninja's stock fan nearby, so I went ahead and started a fan header transplant.

Chop, strip, solder, and my duorb now connects directly to my motherboard with a brand new three pin. It looks like this.

Can you even see it? It blends very well with my motherboard. Clean eh?

First Impressions of a TT Duorb

max302 — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:32:03 GMT

Although I had promised myself not to put any more money on Fr0stbyte on new year's eve, I knew my resolution wouldn't last long, like all the others. I got tired of getting thermal shutdowns on my 8800 GT (probably the memory), so I treated myself to a Thermaltake Duorb, a cooler which from what I heard is so fit for the GT that it's as if it were made for it.

So far, I've got it installed and tested the temperatures, but nothing more, and seriously, I'm blown away. I don't understand how two small heatpipes, a handful of aluminum heatsinks can cool that much. My temps used to be in the high 40s low 50s idle, and remained that way even after the BIOS fan fix, but the Duorb manages to keep my card at 36 idle, CLOSED CASE! Take my best idle temp with the stock cooler, being 48, and that's a whole 12C drop. And we're not even talking about memory.

Some people have criticized the Duorb because it just swings the ambient case air around instead of throwing it out by the back, but for a casual gamer like me who almost never games for hours on end straight, it's a major upgrade, and it looks kick ass with my V1 and all the other case fans.

Let's hope it allows me to BIOS mod to over the Akimbo clocks with the vmod. As for the memory and shader clock which seemed to be heating up quickly and causing crashes, I'm pretty my clever placement of heatsinks will get the job done.

A review is coming soon, as are the pics.

Pimp Your OCN Blog

max302 — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:46:25 GMT

With a banner!

What's cooler than having an OCN blog? Having your very own customized OCN blog header of course! I used to blog wayyy before I registered here at OCN, and right from when I started, I figured out that a blog is something personal, something that you should be modified to fit you. Right from the start, back in the days where I was a young ignorant noob, I ran Wordpress' default theme Kubrick with customs headers I had made myself with the GIMP, and I tried had to modify the CSS files to make Kubrick more "me". That is, less colorful, leaner, meaner, and even more simplistic than it already is (some people may call that dull, but what can I say...). For all the site rebuilds that follow, I paid special attention to modifying stuff to my likings, even if it's only making the menu DIVs slightly smaller or changing mouse-over colors.

Sadly, OCN does not host it's blogs with Wordpress, not even with Wordpress MU, which is known to be a bit more flexible for theming, but despite that we still have a bit of control over how our blog looks and feels, and I was saddened to see that very little people actually use that feature.

The header can be modified to fit your needs, and very often people seem to forget that this header can take any BB code your can throw at it, making it pretty darn flexible. Instead of leaving it blank, it could very well be used for lots of things.

A banner in image form like I did here. I found 700 * 150 px to work well in both fixed and variable width OCN forum themes, in modern resolutions.
Links to your other patches of web space, either in text link or icon form. I wish I had thought of that before writing this article, I'm SOOO doing this right now.
Quick links to popular articles. Ghetto pseudo-imagemap links anybody?
Slogans
Notices
Custom category links, either in image or text form. Images would kick arse.

[IMG] and [url] tags are your best friend.

Honestly, I'm pretty surprised that I didn't get any responses on the banner I made for myself. It's probably because I just suck at graphics.

In any case, I invite you to create your own custom blog banners, and make your blog truly yours!

This Week, I Giving the Mailman a Lumbago

max302 — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:23:32 GMT

Yesterday I realized that I've been overly impulsive on purchases. I don't want to brag or anything, but I've got almost a grand in items coming in this week (not all for me though), and it's got me very excited. Let's list them shall we?

First, probably the biggest box of them all and the most anticipated, is my new BMX, a We The People Addict. I've been riding BMX for... 2 years now, and despite the fact that my previous bike, a DK Fury, has served me well, it's purely a track bike, and it's geometry is far from ideal for street riding. This inadequacy coupled with the fact that my bike is my sole mode of transportation during the summer (over 5000 km ridden last year), I figure that this purchase would be an investment more than anything else.

Second up, the Rocketfish that I wanted to bad. It just so happened that DuckieHo had one for sale at the time when I was looking for, at a ridiculous price too. So without hesitating, I snatched it. Shipping was a tad expensive, but despite that, I still think it's a steal for a Lian-Li.

This isn't for me, it's for my friend who has an e6600 and is sick of the stock cooler. I've tried overclocking his system many times, but despite all I tried, the B3 is pumping out way too much heat to my tastes. So I ordered a TRUE for him, that aught to shut his trap.

My rig thingy below my posts has been showing "Duorb soon" sine January, and I haven't had the time nor the dough to make it happen. However, either my memory or shader core has started overheating and even small overclocks have started to stop working and giving red images, so I decided to upgrade the cooling. Besides, it's gonna look kick ass with my V1. Got it at a reasonable price from a member here, so that's cool.

I'm building a super-budget build out of used parts for a friend to replace his 2 ghz P4 AGP rig that he's using right now. A mid-power power supply is a tricky thing to find at a decent price usually, but I managed to buy an Enermax Liberty 620, which from what I read in reviews is more than decent, for a meager 50$. It'll be great for powering a single GPU C2D config based off a Blood Iron.

I'm pretty sure I ordered something else, but I forgot all about it.

Anyways, hang in there mailman, I'm broke now so it's going to be easy till the month of June!

I Need a Rocketfish

max302 — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:03:29 GMT

It's this kind of object that you see once and keep on thinking about for a long time until you get it. It kind of reminds me how badly my dad wants a motorcycle, except that in my case, I can actually afford it and not have my mom on my back for the rest of my life.

A Lian-Li for under 100$ shipped, all brushed aluminum exterior, this would be my first full tower case, and would make a kick ass base for the extreme 3 loop WC build. Seriously, what kind of stinking enthusiast would snob out this case?

It's in those times that I realize that I, like many people here on OCN, have a serious addiction. When I look at this case, the logical part of me sees a good case for a possible upcoming build, but it also sees a total waste of my hardly earned money. Do I really need this? Hell no. No way I'm swapping out all of Fr0stbyte, and I'm way too poor to afford more hardware to build a new box. Two builds in 8 months (Fr0stbyte and Annabel), even though they are now sub-par by today's standards, cost me a serious chunk, not to mention that I still have to buy a couple of hard drives to totally finish up Annabel.

Despite all those good reasons NOT to buy it, I still want the damned thing like a junky wants crack. I'd kill to be able to touch it's aluminum body, sand it down, paint it matte black and then mod the living daylights out of it. To drill it for cable management. To fit it with more radiators and pumps than it has room for. I really want it that bad.

Please tell me I'm not that abnormal.

Folding on Linux: A short How-to

max302 — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:26:34 GMT

Twice I've had experiences with folding and Linux: once on an older, slower system where the PPD difference was barely noticeable (2 x 0 is still 0), and another time on Annabel, my new Core 2 based server, in which I made the FAH implementation much cleaner, and I thought I might as well spead the word to y'all. I thought about making an FAQ with this article, but since I don't yet have enough rep to post in the FAQs, I'd figure that I would type it down here until the FAQ's replacement (wiki?) hits the streets.

This tutorial is aimed at the beginner-intermediat level Linux user. Although you won't have to be writing your own Perl scripts to get your FAH setup running, you most probably will have to know how to execute some basic command line operations, or at least know the manipulations required to duplicated those commands in a GUI. Without further ado, let's get this thing set up.

Step 1: Planning

Before we can dive into the fun stuff, , you will need to determine what kind of folding you want the target machine to run. Ask yourself the following questions:

How many cores do you want folding?
Do you want to fold 24/7?
Is the target machine running other processes which might interfere with folding, and if yes, is folding or the said process a priority?

All those factors need to be taken in consideration for obvious reasons. On say, an e2140 system overclocked to over 3 ghz on air, don't be thinking that your setup will last 4 years plus if you decide to fold SMP with it: SMP folding under linux uses on average 90% of both cores at all times, in short just really rapes a machine. There also is concerns with other applications running on the target system. By default the FAH client has the lowest process priority all the time, but it still uses system resources and makes them less easily accessible to other apps. Lagging out your everyday use of your machine because of FAH is uncool, so you might want to either not fold SMP and have the client start on boot for the convenience, or start it manually all the time but in SMP mode, for those times where you are not using your computer. Decide on what you'll be running and what kind of priority you give to folding, and read on for more instructions.

Step 2: Setting Up FAH

For those who have been scared away from linux because of the relative complexity of source installs and all the dependency, config script and source code malfunction issues that it sometimes involves, worry not. Setting up the Folding at Home client in a Linux environment is as easy as extracting, giving the appropriate permissions and running.

Go ahead and grab the latest linux client from this page. Note that only the x86_64 package includes SMP folding. Once you have your package, extract it to where-ever the heck you want it to run: I personally choose /opt for that kind of stuff, but other popular choices might be /fah or /.fah (hidden folder) on the root of your filesystem. Be sure to use super user mode along with chmod to change the permissions for both the directory and FAH executable files.

If you are unsure about the permissions, go ahead and execute chmod -R 777 /directory/ , where /directory/ is the path to your FAH folder; it will open up your FAH folder to every user on your machine, eliminating the hassle of finding out the proper permissions.

Once it's extracted, cd to the FAH directory, and run ./fah (with -smp if you want to fold SMP) to run the client. Complete the initial config with your folding nickname, team (37726 of course), passkey and all the other options, and once the new cores and stuff are done downloading, press Control + C to exit. There you have it, a basic install of FAH. Now you can start FAH in a console simply by running /dir/ect/ory/fah [-smp] where /dir/ect/ory/ is the directory which contains the FAH executables. Note that you need to keep the console open to keep folding: shutting down the console closes the core.

And that's it. If you don't want FAH to kickin in on startup, then you're job is finished. If not, read on.

Step 3: Running on Startup

Although this is optional, in many cases it is very useful. Dragging a full tower case out of my server closet to start FAH manually every single time that power fails or that my cat plays with some wires isn't exactly my definition of fun, and chances are it isn't your's either. This is why having everything on your server daemonized is a practical thing to have: you just press the power button, and there it goes.

What we'll be doing is adding the the rc.d files, the ones that control the startup for services.

Cd to the directory /etc/rc.d/. This is the directory in which we will be working. You can try and ls just to see the content of the directory. It should look something like this.

init.d
rc
rc0.d
rc1.d
rc2.d
rc3.d
rc4.d
rc5.d
rc6.d
rc.local
rc.sysinit

The rcX.d (where X is a number) represent the runlevels, and what is to be initiated at each. We won't be messing around with that. Thankfully, linux dev people have created another launch list, which kicks in after the last runlevel script is initiated. This is the rc.local file.

This allows you to just put a command in, and it'll get executed at runtime. I've used this countless times to do stuff like mount network drives over CIFS, and the like.

However, you can't just put /opt/fah/fah in there and expect it to work properly, for two reasons:

The FAH client is known to work erratically if it is started from somewhere else that it's own directory.
Starting a program that needs a console window to be opened means that FAH will cause an interruption in the boot cycle, and any step after it in the rc.local file or otherwise will fail. This means that you will never get to the login prompt. Trust me, I know this from experience.

The solution to the first problem is quite simple, you just need to cd before executing. We can do this by adding a cd before the command and using the ./fah command afterwards, which would look something like this:

cd /path/to/ && ./fah

As you might have guessed, && seperates two commands on the same line.

For the second issue, it's a bit trickier. Since the FAH client needs to output its text somewhere, we can't just run it on startup and expect it to work properly, like I said before.

This is where a handy function function comes in: the > command line parameter. What this does is that it redirects all the text output that you would normally get onscreen to whatever path you specify. This brings us to two choices: we either create a FAH log, or send all the text into the abyss. In my case, creating a log file would just take up previous disk space, so I chose to ignore all the output, and send it to the "black whole" of linux: /dev/null. Think of it as an incinerator: you can put anything in it, but when something goes in it doesn't come out. The command would do something like:

cd /opt/fah/fah && ./fah >/dev/null &

Although I do not know what the final ampersand is for, I know that it is necessary, probably to allow additional commands to be run with the execution of the previous command still ongoing.

If you would want to log all the FAH activity, just replace /dev/null with whatever text file you want to dump your text in, like so.

cd /opt/fah/fah && ./fah >/path/to/log.txt &

Open up /etc/rc.d/rc.local with your favorite text editor, and add the new command we just created to a new line below any other commands that might be there.

Reboot, and your FAH should be working in the background!

Additional Considerations

If you want to monitor more closely the activity of your newly setup folding rig, you can always share the FAH working folding over the network with CIFS/SMB in read only mode, and use FAHmon to track the progress by adding a client with the following path.

\\*computer's ip*\sharename

FAHmon has full support for checking work over windows shares, and the said shares are very easy to configure, as most distros come with a GUI SMB configuration tool.

That's pretty much it, feel free to contact me if you want any additions or modifications to be made to this tut.

Happy folding!

Networking: The Need For Speed

max302 — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 14:52:41 GMT

Just recently, I realized that I really had to do something about my network. As more and more machines continue to be added to my LAN, and as my sister starts discovering streaming media, both my LAN and WAN transfers are slowing down considerably, too much for comfort I might even add. Gaming with decent pings is becoming a rare thing, and I'm at my sister's mercy when I'm lucky enough to get reasonable latencies: she can just open up the Jewtubes and make my game unplayable. Hell, even browsing while seeding a couple of torrents has become impossible. A nerger's gotta do what a nerger's gotta do: my parents have accepted to get a bigger pipe, but in the meanwhile it's optimization time.

The easiest and probably most profitable upgrade would probably be changing my router to a more recent gigabit variant (teamed gigabit NIC on my 680i have been begging for this). My entire house is wired in CAT 5E anyways, so pulling off half-duplex gigabit isn't problem and the increase in performance, specially in a network attached storage on LAN context, is promising. People with newer routers have also noticed lower pings and faster overall internet as a result of the reduction of the latency from within the LAN.

Buying a new router is an interesting option, but there is a major downside, and that's the price of a quality gigabit router. Even off ebay, those things run for a 120$ minimum, and that's for a Netgear. My problem with putting 120$ on a router (or rather my father's problem) is that all the gigabit routers come with tons of useless features, IE 802.11N wireless with Super-Duper Range Booster Max Extreme Plus Improved and a 24 entry DMZ system. My sister's already growing a third arm because of prolonged exposition to all the wireless networks I have running in my house, and none of my wireless adaptors are N, I just DON'T NEED any of it! The challenge is now where to find a wired only gigabit router, either used or at a low price. I was thinking D-Link's GamerLounge special edition, but those things are very rare and run for the same price as Wireless N + Gigabit routers. If you think you have a router that I would like, please post it here.

Otherwise, I'm looking forward to accelerating web browsing with my new home server Annabel by setting up a DNS cache on LAN using DNSMasq, with the supposedly super fast and feature-full upsteam DNS servers from OpenDNS. People in larger LANs have used DNS caching to speed up things a lot, and browsing is supposed to be greatly improved, specially on pages where elements load from lots of different locations, ads from google, content from a seperate server, images from Flickr and videos from Youtube all at the same time for example. Anyways, the only thing that I care about it that it reduces traffic on the WAN side, I'll have to see if the difference in speed is that dramatic.

I also thought about scheduling torrents to run only during the morning and at night and when I'm not at my machine, but that's pretty much it. Now all I have to do is to wait for that 10 mbit symmetrical
I've been waiting for.

I hate the Antec 900

max302 — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:42:22 GMT

Why? Well actually, I don't think I do hate it that much; if you were to give me a 900 right now, I'd surely go ahead and take a look at it, try a rig in it, appreciate it's craftsmanship that everybody seems to be raving about, then get rid of it before anybody sees me with it. It's not because of the product itself, it's more about how disturbingly popular it is. Demonstration:

Member: I'm thinking about getting a Lian-Li but I don't know what model would fit my needs. I'll be doing (this that this that), what is right for me?

Other Member: Or lol ur can save teh money and buy teh Antek 900 hundred lol it's much kewler.

In the previous example it is pretty clear that Other member has a very limited grasp on english and probably an IQ below 80, but still, he recommends and Antec 900. lol? This presence of a product in the average noob's catalogue is proof that too many people either have a 900, or at least have been wishing for one.

It seems that the 900 has become a cult case just like the Motorola Razr was and still pretty much it a cult phone. When I see a dozen members jubilating over this case I can't stop myself from thinking about a pack of early teenage girls screaming with glee over one of them's new OH SO SEXY Razr.

Pardon me if what I'm saying is blasphemy, but the 900 isn't the best case, nor is it the most well build or most loaded with features.

So for individuality's (and my mental well being's) sake, please, oh pretty please stop suggesting the 900 in the frequent "Suggest a case" threads. Everybody wants a good case, but being unique is always a plus when building custom PCs.

Blu-Ray Wins?

max302 — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:23:35 GMT

If there is one thing on the tech scene that pisses me off, it's those silly proprietary format wars that keep raging on for everything. It's seems that companies don't get together to talk about how to solve problems and make formats standard, but rather how to make them as different and incompatible as possible in order to give the end user a bigger headache.

Everybody can recall at least one of the famous format wars that have been going on in the past decades: PPC vs x86, USB vs Firewire, Minidisk (remember that? lol) vs flash, and the ongoing and probably never ending MMC vs SD vs MSPro Duo vs XD. With all that the past has carried concerning formats, is it even surprising that there is a all-out war on the potentially very lucrative successor to DVD? Sure not, but it's still a pain in the ass.

What really bugs me about it though is that this time, Sony's got the big part of the stick. I really don't know why, but it seems like because it's Sony, I'm thinking that they will use their control over the standard to control the planet or something. It seems like Sony is always trying to control every single standard out there but never actually gets a hold on one, like a violent husband that never really got around to actually hitting. Probably just a weird impression on my part.

The tech specs are also something that don't necessarily get my approval. It seems that Sony always are trying to break the limits with what concerns technology in fabrication. Sure, the Blu-Ray is appealing for it's larger capacity, but the costs associated with it isn't exactly sexy, since consumers want HD media NOW, to go with their fancy TVs. I'm no laser expert, but the 0.1 mm protective coating sounds like a little bit fragile... not something that would survive in a BlockBuster environment too long.

Seriously, I'm a bit disappointed of HD-DVD. It look good and strong when it first was announced, but I think that lack of effort on the commercialization part kind of killed the cat for Toshiba. Proof that hanging out with the big guys (Microsoft, HP, Intel) doesn't always mean that you win.

Blame it on the PS3? Sony's very wide network of film and tech industry leaders? Better advertisement? Either way, the cards are now on the table, and Sony wins it all. Comforting victory that compensates for the BETA cassette?

Read, Engadget article on Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD.