uppercase numbers

Data warehousing has become a sort of personal quest of mine.  I’ve been using computers since I was four and in those few decades I’ve managed to create, acquire, and loose countless precious bits of data.  It’s disheartening to have lost some projects I created in my pre-teen years that I know I poured my soul in to at the time.  And all because of a bad floppy.

What’s worse is that I just recently lost more of this precious data in the past few weeks while upgrading my fileserver.  It’s hard to say just how much I’ve lost.  It’s hard to notice when a rogue file or two goes missing over the years but it happens all the time.  On linux with some historical backups a quick diff or rsync can find problems like that.  Cygwin and Windows doesn’t really work quite as nicely.

So currently I have been sorting through 9 year old backup CDs trying to look for things that have gone missing.  I had been thinking it was silly to keep hanging on to a binder full of ancient CDs but I proved myself wrong today.  In fact I found quite a few little nice surprises that I had thought lost forever.

Windows XP is a terrible tool for archiving or backing up data.  Vista is not much better.  I really wish this thing could be Linux.  Heck, I wouldn’t even mind dual booting if I thought Linux could be trusted with live NTFS partitions.  I don’t mind Ubuntu hacking it’s way through one of my NTFS USB drives but my lovely RAID5 array is another story.

NTFS and Linux is getting better though.  It’s a lot less of a struggle to get it to WRITE to NTFS anyway.

Computers are good at remembering things for us.  From letters we sent to ex landlords to what music we used to listen too and pictures of people we used to work with.  My computer remembers my past a lot better than I do.  I try to focus on making new memories rather than spending time living in the past.  It’s possible that this choice means it’s actually more difficult for me to retrieve older memories.  If you spend enough time dwelling on the past it’ll seem much more clear.  I think that in a sense having an “off-mind” memory storage device is quite beneficial.  If only they were reliable on the cheap.

Amazon S3 is not cheap but it does protect my memories from fire and theives or any other sort of disaster that might befall my house.  It’s money well spent I think.  But like burning CDs or using backup tapes it takes quite a bit of thought and energy.  Archiving anything requires a lot of patience and technical knowledge.  Your average computer user simply doesn’t backup their data properly.

Of course now that the web has become very cost effective one can upload their pictures to Flickr or Snapfish or any number of gallery products out there.  You can probably RAR up your text documents and shove them on to RapidShare or something.  But people have the tendency to unwittingly back things up to the web and this is a trend that should definitely continue.  Archiving data really should be this natural.

For me the problem is sheer quantity.  Home videos and huge print quality photo files and CD and game backups start taking up gigs of space.  I have 3.5TB of storage in my file server and the more I have the more I tend to fill.  The RAID5 array has redudnancy but nothing a power surge or virus can’t wreck in an instant.  So I have backup DVDs.  It can take days to compress and burn just a few dozen gigs worth of data.  So I backup more regularly to portable USB drives.  But this is problematic since Windows XP doesn’t have any good backup utilities to properly handle this.

The real reason I lost data in the move is because In order to back up 2TB of data you need 2TB of backup storage.  I had 1.25TB.  I backed up the most important things, so I thought, and assumed the rest would be safe on the RAID5 array.  After the crash I made sure to buy a 1TB drive for one of my external enclosures and I’ll be sure to be buying more of those.  I really need the ability to have full backup somewhere.

And since I wouldn’t want to squeeze even 1TB in to Amazon S3 I need to consider getting some sort of fireproof safe for the backup drives.  Heck, I’ve even considered hiding a hard drive somewhere in one of my cars.  At least if my house burns down or is robbed I’ll probably have the car with me.  I just don’t know how a hard drive will survive in the car with all the moisture and vibration.  I regret throwing out all those silica gel packets now.

The fun comes from my old Atari 800XL system.  I’m still working on preserving the files I generated when I was eight.  It takes some special hardware to get the data on to a PC but I have managed to get some of it uploaded.  It’s still another time consuming process but one I hope to start in to again soon.  Those old 5-1/4 floppies rot pretty darn quick.

I was feeling up.  By flashing the 1740 and 2320 controllers with special configurations which prevent them from acting as boot drives I am able to have them active on my motherboard at the same time as the ICH10R.  I also discovered that while the 2320 does not work at all from the second PCIe x16 slot it does work fine from the first one.  And I was happy to discover that the 2320 will read the RAID5 array the 1740 made.  I got my backplane installed and my hot swap trays mounted up with the drives and a fresh install of Windows XP and everything was working great.

And then I decided to do an Online Capacity Expansion.  I wanted to go from three 1TB drives in RAID5 to four 1TB drives.  I started the rebuild process and it all seemed to be going swimmingly.  An hour later I came back to check the process of the rebuild and…

The computer went to sleep.  It went to sleep in the middle of the capacity expansion and the RAID controller couldn’t cope.  The failure alarm started to go off, the rebuild was halted and I couldn’t restart it.  My only option was to reboot the machine.  It came back up, the original array was inaccessible but the OCE started again from 0.0% automatically.  I thought that maybe it was a good sign.  Maybe it would pick up where it left off and just make things work again.  I let it run for 14 hours to finish doing whatever it was doing.

It didn’t work.  The result was an incredibly broken array with a weird size and busted partition tables.  I’m really bummed.  I have most things backed up on to USB drives.  I didn’t really loose anything I can’t get back from bittorrent.  But I’m just more annoyed than anything.

I can’t even START getting data back on to the array because it insists on ‘initializing’ itself.  Whatever that means.  It contains no data but it’s going to spend all day parity checking itself for no apparant reason what so ever before I can format it.  It still says it’s a 2TB array and not a 3TB array for some reason so yeah… whatever it’s doing I have to let it do.

So much for my idea of letting my fileserver sleep when I’m not home.  The stupid Highpoint controller doesn’t deal well with it for some reason so I can’t risk it crashing again on a rebuild.  Crap.

Well, I installed the RAID controller in either of my two PCs and it pretty much keeps either from POSTing.  That’s a total bummer.  I tried to next day another one from the Egg but if I get it before the weekend I’ll be surprised.  It sucks to have to wait and spend another $N in shipping.  But on the other paw, I needed to order a 24p ATX power cable extender and an 8p EPS power cable extender.  The new Enermax PSU I installed doesn’t quite reach from one side of the cube to the other.

I’m more than a little worried about this configuration though.  The Highpoint 1740 still refuses to work on the Asus P5Q3 board even after firmware updates on both.  I still get the “No enough space to copy PCI ROM” error.  It just sucks that my ancient IC7 can run the 1740 and use it’s onboard Intel RAID, but the ICH10R on the new one won’t play ball.

Even if the 2320 works where they 1740 fails, I’m not sure it’s going to read from the data array on my three hard drives.  I could destroy the array simply by plugging the drives in to the different RAID controller.  Sure, it’s backed up somewhat.  But it’d be a bad thing none the less.

Meh, I’m sick of thinking about it.  I need to find a better solution to this problem.  I really might have to get a new motherboard :(

I continued the buying spree, I mean, doing my part for the economy.  Microcenter is evil.  Their prices are usually competitive enough to warrant not buying online.  Their sale items are usually great deals.  And sometimes I really like just being able to look at products in meat space.  Instant gratification and all that, even if I have to deal with dreaded sales tax.  I’d rather pay my 5% to UPS than the state I think.

I went in for a new RAID controller.  I’m using a Highpoint 1740 right now.  It’s a PCI 4 port SATAII RAID5 controller that works quite well and has Linux support.  I’m happy with it and it even supports online capacity expansion.  I have this second x16 PCIe port staring at me though so I wanted to get a x4 or x8 PCIe version of the HighPoint card.  Maybe even one with 8 ports.  The Highpoint 2310 looks like what I want.  Microcenter didn’t have this or anything close unfortunately.  I did end up buying the 2300 model there.  It’s essentially the same thing as the 1740 but only PCIe x1 which means it probably won’t be any faster or better than the 1740 I already own.  PCI is 1Gbps and PCIe x1 is 5Gbps.  But for the same price I can get the 20Gbps one so… I’m going to take it back and order the 2310 from NewEgg.  Or the 8 port 2320 maybe.  So hard to decide…

And I would like some faster throughput.  I’m using RAID5 which has ugly write speeds but stripe like read speeds.  And I bought another 1TB Western Digital 5400RPM “Green” drive.  So I’ll have four of those on the array and that will certainly be more data than a PCI slot can deliver.

I bought two 1TB drives actually.  I needed another for a USB enclosure because the 250Gb drives I have in them now are very old, dying, and are not large enough to easily back up the data I need to back up.  These 5400RPM drives run much cooler and are a great fit for an external enclosure.  Plus I can use eSATA with my P5Q3.

Against seemingly better advice, I’ve decided against just running with software only RAID even though my new motherboard has more SATA ports than I can count.  I really don’t like setting up RAID in Linux and any performance gain I can get out of a decent controller card is ideal.  Plus I like the thought of taking these drives and controller out of this computer and installing them in any other computer and not having to mess around with it too much to make it work.

The last waste of money, I mean, economic stimulus was the BFG 9600GT.  I absolutely needed a PCIe video card (even though I have a perfectly good PCI Nvidia 6200).  BFG has a nice warranty and with the rate of failure I seem to have for video cards that’s okay fine with me.  I needed to go Nvidia since it has better Linux support.  And heh, better Windows support for that matter.  Also if I run any Cuda apps, such as F@H GPU client, the 9600’s moderate speed will work nicely even though I won’t be gaming on this card.

So I have quite a bit to do this weekend.  I’m just waiting for my backups to finish so I can throw the new kit in.

Purchasing a KVM isn’t an easy task.  The brand names aren’t necessarily well known, the prices vary wildly for the same features, information isn’t forthcoming from many of these overseas manufacturers, and product reviews are often very negative biased.  I guess they just aren’t a mainstream product yet.

The review bias is an interesting phenomenon.  You’re average junky CPU cooler will often have a zillion positive reviews for no good reason what so ever.  People are just more liable to be happy with certain products than others regardless of the actual quality.

I purchased the IOGEAR GCS1762 KVM a month ago and I really dig it.  The price was a little steep but at least it came with cables I didn’t need.  I purchased much longer cables to run to my Cube which sits about 3-4m away from the LCD and keyboard.  This doesn’t seem like a very large distance but companies are cheap with cable lengths these days even though you can get extra long chinese cables for very cheap.

This assumes you know which polarity of cables you need to buy for your KVM.  And it’s not always easy to determine this unless you have good product photos.  You also need to get a KVM with replacable cables.  It’s a crime when cables can’t be detached.

My old VGA KVM, also an Iogear, worked just fine but VGA over a 4m cable is incredibly blurry and hard to deal with after a while.  But it was at least USB.  And it didn’t have any emulation.  And that’s a good thing.  I don’t know what problem emulation is supposed to solve.  But emulating a missing monitor, keyboard, or mouse really just seems to cause problems for most people.

If you don’t emulate a keyboard or mouse than at worst you might get a ‘Press F1 to continue’ keyboard error on boot which you can maybe disable in BIOS anyway.  The most typical issue you run in to without emulation is a slight 1-2 second lag time when you switch PCs before the USB devices re-register.  Having dealt with this delay for many years I can assure you it’s never been an issue.  Even when I was in the middle of a game.

Monitor emulation doesn’t seem to have a purpose.  Without it, my computers simply boot up in their ‘last known good’ state.  And everything just works.  When a KVM has monitor emulation, if you boot the PC and that PC isn’t selected on the KVM, the KVM tells the PC that you have some bog standard VGA monitor.  Windows responds by setting the resolution to something that is wrong.  And Vista/Nvidia seems to INSIST on putting the Start menu on my second monitor, the one not attached to the KVM, because I assume it wants to put that on the monitor with the largest resolution or something.

I have to go in to the Nvidia control panel and fight with it for about 3 minutes before I can get everything to show properly on the primary display again.  Why the Start menu EVER moves off the primary display is beyond me.

When a KVM emulates a keyboard, sometimes the extended features of those keyboards don’t work.  The media keys, the scroll wheels, the volume controls, the lights and LCDs, etc.  You might not notice unless you have a Logitech G15 but well I do.

The GCS1762 doesn’t seem to have much in the way of keyboard/mouse emulation but it can be gotten around by using the standard USB ports on it instead of the ones labeled keyboard and mouse.  It does have the annoying VGA emulation though and that really bites.  If I don’t remember to have the right PC selected when I boot it, the video gets totally screwed.  But it’s my only complaint.  It switches fast, my images are crystal clear, and I can even switch via keyboard commands which my old one couldn’t do.

It also has a serial port on it for updating firmware.  I can’t imagine what you’d need to do that for but perhaps you can find a firmware that disables emulation.  That’d be worth a look.

Anyway, if you’re in the market for a KVM, Iogear isn’t a bad choice.  I can’t speak for most other models except for Belken which also seem to work just fine.  Just don’t spend too much, get one with removable cables, and the smallest amount of emulation possible.  Read the reviews as there are always people complaining about the problems with emulation on the ones which do it poorly.

Well, rectangular anyway.  After months of whining I finally ordered a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM for the Cube.  Just as a reminded, this machine is used for file serving, general office work, bittorrent, and video editing/encoding.  Basically my stable, bogged down machine.  I keep the other free from cruft so it’s faster for gaming and is more fun to overclock.

The Cube will be getting the Asus P5Q3.  This is the second I’ve purchased.  The first was actually the P5Q3 Deluxe which Abi is using in her desktop.  Apart from the lack of WiFi, which works nicely I must add, I’m not sure what’s different between the boards.  Asus has the problem of making lots of little model revisions on each board and it’s a bunch of work to try to figure out which boards are better than others.  For $150 though it’s a hard board to beat.

Why no LGA 1366 board?  They’re kind of expensive still honestly.  Also I wanted to upgrade my gaming rig with a new processor.  It’s currently running the Q9450 which is an excellent processor.  It just doesn’t overclock very well.  Also, games just don’t benefit from the four cores.  Most games don’t even benefit from a dual core.

So I ordered an E8400.  These chips are almost guaranteed to hit 4GHz.  And at that clock rate, any non SMP games are going to run better.  This is an aging chip but it still seems to be the ’sweet spot’ right now.  $165 still seems like a lot of money for an old dual core.  I guess it’s the demand on the thing.

A DDR3 motherboard needs some DDR3 RAM.  My gaming rig needs RAM more though.  My current Corsair RAM is only good for 1600MHz.  That’s really not too bad.  But the RAM is often running at 1200-1300MHz because it can’t keep up with the FSBs I’m running.  I found that 1600MHz DDR gets a bit limiting fast.  Now, truth be told, RAM speed isn’t a critical factor for most things unless you’re swapping a lot of textures from RAM to video memory.  GTA4 seems to do that a lot as do some other games that allow you to set high view distances.  It’s generally better to have more video RAM but… well, I really wanted to try some 2000MHz DDR3 just to see if I’d get any more performance out of better dividors.  Sometimes it’s the case that weird dividors can increase latencies.  I don’t know if that’s the case here but let’s find out.

I went with some truely horribly colored RAM.  Patriot Viper PVS34G2000LLKNB.  4G worth this time instead of the 2G I currently have (which Vista64 hates).  I went with the Patriot because it was cheap and I’m sick of Corsair RAM dying.  Yes, I’m really scared of the high voltage this thing is rated at.  That tends to kill RAM fast.  And yes, I’m scared of the Patriot brand.  I haven’t had luck with it in the past.  But for $180 I get a flash drive and a copy of 3DMark Vantage too.  I was sold.

I think the RAM is a crap shoot.  Assuming it runs at it’s rated speed when I get it, I’ll be surprised if the RAM has any longevity.  I hope by that time we have some faster, and more affordable, DDR3 around.  If 2000MHz RAM makes any difference in performance that is.  It’s possible that the cheapest and slowest DDR3 is just as viable.  Just get a brand with a decent warranty.

Patriot’s website claims to have a limited lifetime warranty on the Viper RAM as long as you don’t modify it in any way.  I’ve heard that it’s hard to actually obtain an RMA though.

This RAM is also only rated for 2000MHz on the Nvidia i790.  How it will react on my P5E3 X48 is unknown I guess.  Crapshoot.  My experience in the past with this Nvidia only thing with other products is that they work just as well on Intel chipsets.

Since the Cube isn’t watercooled and I don’t actually have a cooler for it, I had to pick up this.  I really do like Zalman products.  A little costly, a little pretty, and definitely not the best performers.  But usually quiet and well made.  And for a machine that will be on 24×7, quiet and well made is important.

So I have a project for the weekend!

Yeah, I’m still talking about Vista tuning.  I’m just so bothered to have 25-30% of my RAM in use when I have nothing running. Service and Task tuning is very important with Vista.  It tends to run with a ’safe’ set of services out of the box but most of these things aren’t required by anyone.  I’m certainly not on a domain.  I’m not sharing credentials.  I don’t need tablet input services.  There are so many different versions of Vista which allow you to have differing amounts of useless applications.  But Microsoft isn’t doing anything to ask what you as a user actually intend to DO with this install.  Are you in an office?  Are you just playing games?  Are you just looking for internet and email?  Why not do some sort of on demand kind of installations?  Microsoft won’t change for the better until it has to.  *cough* Windows 7…

The most confusing and constant part of my Vista install is that right after boot up and log in it’s using 750-800m of RAM.  But this drops after a few minutes to 560-580m.  It’s at 631m right now after a fresh boot with only FireFox running.  It can’t be good for Windows to be loading so much of my hard drives that it doesn’t need that much longer after boot.  There doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it though.

I dabbled with using the Windows Classing theme, disabling the Themes service and the Desktop Management service.  After a couple days I’ve realized that it has no real performance impact on this machine and only saves about 30-50m of RAM.  Disabling Aero can save another 50-70m so as pretty as it is, I have that disabled for now.  Kind of splits the difference you know?

I really dislike the scroll bar in the start menu.  It slows me down I think.  I need to look for a way to kill that.  I prefer the XP just expand forever over half the screen method.

Someone really needs to write a good document on disabling Vista tasks.  There are plenty of Service references.  But less information about tasks.  Some online guides actually suggest you don’t modify them at all.  But that’s not quite right.  You can in fact disable 80% of them.  Certainly the defrag and anything pertaining to the indexer if you don’t use it.  Anything that runs while the system is ‘idle’ is probably a bad idea.  Anything that runs at start up or login can really delay those things.  I really hate that certain tasks like the error rollup tasks run every x minutes regardless of if you’re doing something more important at that time or not.

I almost had a complete XP install on the m17.  My first challenge was to get XP to install on the ICH9R-E RAID controller without a floppy drive.  Even my USB floppy drive wouldn’t work for it.  After several days of trying different things, slipstreaming which didn’t work, I found a solution that meant editing the floppy drivers to add additional USB floppy drive support.  This worked well.  Mobility Modder made Catalyst install.  Many of the Vista drivers worked on XP when I couldn’t find XP drivers to use.  Everything worked…

Except screen brightness.  It was locked at 100% and was giving me headaches.  I spent a week trying to find a way to reduce brightness.  I even tried reducing it from the display settings.  Nothing worked.  The m17 relies on Vista’s advanced power options to adjsut the brightness.  I tried looking for generic XP drivers for it but no luck.  I suspect something out there exists to do it but I just couldn’t find it.

So I’m back on Vista now.  Once again I spent a good amount of time stripping off all unnecessary services thanks to BlackViper. I’m sitting at 730M right now with all drivers, Steam, Firefox, and Avast antivirus running.  That’s not great and I don’t know why it’s using so much RAM.  I have themes and aero disabled.  I have all the fancy desktop manager stuff turned off.  Maybe it’s some sort of caching.  The RAM does seem to be hiding in the background.  I can’t find it in taskman anyway.

I don’t know.  I’m sick of thinking about it :)

It will be a week before my new hard drives arrive so I’m giving Vista Home 32 bit a brutal shakedown on this laptop.  It honestly seems to run faster and better than Vista x64 on my Q9450.  I still think I’m going to throw XP Pro on it but with some clever tweaking of Tasks and Services I got Vista’s footprint down to under 650M.  A slight help but still a bit heavy when you only have 2048M to play with and need to run some very memory heavy games.

I’m trying to find out just how viable Vista is.  There are a bunch of people these days who think you should just suck it up and use Vista.  However, my experience with Vista 64 on my gaming rig is that it really makes the system less responsive.  It uses too much memory and 3-4G is really optimal.  But drivers are just really unstable or non existent for Vista 64.

Just what on Earth makes Vista worth it then?  I couldn’t ever really see any noticeable difference in DirectX 10 games.  Yeah, I do like some of the UI things a bit but… at the end of the day XP is just faster.  But Vista 32 isn’t nearly so bad.  It’s just a lot more responsive and the benchmarks seem just fine.  It seems to want less memory.

In other news I have some more thoughts on the m17.  The speakers are too quiet.  This is a common complaint of mine with many laptops.  They just never seem to be loud enough.  Using some special software I have been able to determine that the GPUs and CPU run about 50c degrees while idling in Vista.  This is while using my Belkin lap cooler.  So the laptop is still breathing just fine.  It just runs hot.  With two GPUs this probably isn’t surprising.

The heat doesn’t bother me though since I use the lap cooler anyway.  Yes, I have tried to overclock the FSB.  But the CPU multipliers seem to drop when I do that.  I need to do a little more reading on overclocking without affecting speedstep or whatever other power management features are coming in to play.

It’s just not the right time to buy SSDs right now.  If you’re an early adopter or have money to burn than have at it.  There are a few reasons for this.  First off, the technology costs are going to come down dramatically.  These drives should end up being much cheaper to produce than standard mechanical hard drives.  They’ll probably follow a curve similar to Moore’s Law.

The software isn’t there just yet either.  Windows can have problem installing on SSDs.  Particularly the cheaper ones with MLC technology.  The SLC ones have better write performance and longevity but less capacity and huge price tags.  The write times are just terrible and can cause the OS to lock up now and again.  Better software and caching options will fix these issues.

I don’t need epic performance on my laptop.  The reliability would be nice but not $500 nice.  But in the spirit of getting GOOD performance I did order a couple of these Western Digital 7200RPM 16m cache drives.  This should give me disk performance comparible to normal workstations and for a much more affordable cost.

SSDs will become the thing to do as soon as they become mainstream and the costs drop significantly.  This new laptop may see them eventually.

It’s big and heavy and uncomfortable on my lap.  But that’s the sacrifice I made for the luxurious 17″ screen.  Anyway, here’s a list of what I think so far.

The machine came with a loose CrossFireX cable.  The first thing I did when the laptop arrived was to install Windows XP.  I just couldn’t get CrossFire working in XP so I assumed it was a driver issue.  Going back to Vista Home didn’t help.  I unscrewed the bottom panel and found the loose connector.  Snugging it back up seemed to make it work just fine.

It was probably rushed together but the good news is that Alienware shipped it to me very fast.  Fedex delayed shipment a bit but that’s not Alienware’s fault.  I think they were more than a week ahead of their estimated shipdate of 1/30.

Vista was crashy the moment I got it.  It could have been the loose CrossFireX cable.  Or it could have been the default software install which seemed sparse for the money spent.  I didn’t install most of that back on my Vista redo.

I’m not a fan of the keyboard layout.  I use Home and End a lot and these keys are only available on the numeric keypad.  I routinely hit keys on the numpad when hitting the backspace key because there isn’t any break between the numpad and they right of the normal keyboard.  The main keyboard and touchpad are offset to the left which actually isn’t so comfortable for me.  The unexpected depth of the laptop makes typing on this machine slightly more taxing as I have to reach.

I really love the fingerprint scanner.  It’s a modern feature I haven’t gotten to try before.  I wish I had it on all my PCs.

The 1920×1200 screen in a 17″ footprint is particularly tiny.  Color rendition isn’t spectacular on this screen.  The backlight is quite spotty.  I definitely wanted the extra screen real estate but unfortunately I feel like I’m squinting and straining to see it.

The touchpad has a texture which I’m not used to.  It feels a little strange on my fingers.  Is this a common thing on notebooks now?  I’m used to them being perfectly smooth.

WoW looks fantastic on the screen.  Shitty LCDs can give a lot of extra color saturation to games and WoW is colorful enough to benefit from it.  At 1920×1200 with no AA I’m getting about 20FPS in Northrend.  At 1600×1200 on my 8800 Ultra I get 45FPS with 2xAA enabled.  I think I could get a little better out of this on XP.  I’ve heard a rumor that ATI drivers don’t do CrossFire so well in WoW yet.

I’m getting 10881 in 3dMark06 in this configuration.  In XP with only one ATI card running I got 8896.  My record on the 8800 Ultra is 16433.  I would love to see what this laptop can do in XP with CrossFireX working.  These numbers are really respectable for what can be considered a ‘cheap’ gaming laptop.   I suspect there are overclocking options.

I can’t wait to get RAID0 on this laptop.  The 7200RPM 160G drive is still a bit slow and I think the laptop could feel much better with a better drive system.  I’m considering a second 160G drive or possibly a pair of SSD drives.  I need to do some research in to those though so I get the proper type.  Apparently the wrong SSD can cause OS halting now and then.  That’d drive me insane.

I can’t wait to get a decent cooler either!  I’m thinking about 4G of RAM which would only benefit me if I went to a 64 bit OS.  But 64 bit Vista is quite unstable and I have enough driver problems with the laptop.  With two 512m video cards and a 32 bit OS I would likely get 2.5G or less of available RAM.  It’s possible that faster RAM would be a benefit.  It’s 533MHz 7-7-7-20, Elpida brand PC3-8500F.  FSB is 1066MHz.  Chipset is PM45.  Anyway, it looks like there aren’t actually any faster options available.  And 4G of RAM is looking like a $160 upgrade.  So.  Guess RAM is out.

It’s about time I got a new laptop.  My 30th birthday seemed like a good enough excuse.  I wanted one that had some decent gaming capability so I can play Second Life and World of Warcraft on it as well as Grand Theft Auto and other easy to play on the couch PC games.  Something that could hold it’s own at a LAN would also be nice.  Gaming and laptops are still, surprisingly, a bad fit.  Six years ago, I reviewed my first gaming laptop, the Prostar 5694.  It was hot, heavy, had poor battery life and was pretty much non-upgradable.  Not much has changed today.  Buying a laptop you intend to game with really limits your choices quickly since far too few come with the better GPUs.

I got the Alienware m17 with dual ATI 3870 HD cards in CrossFire mode.  It’s an interesting choice since I do usually prefer nVidia.  I recently used an ATI 4850 card in Abi’s desktop and was strongly impressed with it.  This is not the fastest laptop GPU configuration by a long shot.  Alienware’s m17x, a slightly older but slightly better model and certainly more costly model, can be got with dual nVidia 9800m GT GPUs.  Each is significantly faster than the 3870.  But this add on costs $850 and adding even the non-SLI 9800m GT adds $300 to the cost.  Dual 3870s should be faster than a single 9800m GT and was a $250 upgrade for the m17.

I don’t use the term notebook because it implies something about how I’ll be using this machine.  Notebook or desktop-replacement are terms that let people know that you’re not actually intended to use these machines on your lap.  They’re supposed to be used on a desk.  My previous experience with 10 pound gaming behemoths is that they’re really not comfortable in the least anywhere else and I swore I’d never have anything over 6 pounds again.  I lied.

The Dell I have is small, light, and games moderately well with it’s Mobility 9000 GPU.  It plays Second Life, World of Warcraft, and GTA:SA at the lowest settings.  It’s light and doesn’t damage my wrists when picking it up off the floor.  But it’s 14″ 1024×768 screen is inadequate for doing any serious work on.  I have a lot of windows up when I’m programming and I really miss the luxury of large screens.  My decision to go with a large ‘desktop-replacement’ has much more to do with the big gorgeous screen than the gaming prowess.  The 1920×1200 Wide UXGA screen was another $250 upgrade on the m17 but one that was an absolute must for what I do.

I really wanted to go with the Intel T9400 2.53GHz processor with it’s 6m of L2 cache.  But it was another $250 upgrade which just wasn’t in the budget today.  So the T8400 2.26GHz with 3m of L2, the smallest I could get, will have to do.  This is still much faster than anything I currently do work on and more than enough for most games so I’m okay with it.  It’s also something I can possibly upgrade in the future.  I also went with the base 2×1024MB of DDR3.  For Vista 32b (which was forced on me) this really isn’t adequate but I’m going to try to go with Windows XP instead.  It just performs better.  RAM is also one of those things which can always be upgraded later.

Yeah, I did opt for the $25 upgrade for an illuminated keyboard.  Sure it’s pretty, but there’s been lots of times where I’ve used the laptop in the dark and couldn’t see what I was doing.  I guess I’m not much of a touch typist still.  The 160g 8m cache 7200RPM drive I chose was the cheapest as well.  Another easily upgradable option.  I fully intend to roll with a SSD drive as soon as I can afford it.  What I’m not clear on is if there are two HD spots in the machine and if I can enable RAID0 later myself.  The only other upgrade I got was the $25 Intel Ultimate N wifi card.  It would be nice to have N support with out a dongle hanging out of my machine and the rumor on the internet is that internal wireless cards have better range than external ones due to being able to have larger antennas behind the screen.  Don’t know if it’s true or not but $25 isn’t bad for N.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a decent Alienware coupon code and they charge $70 for fedex ground shipping.  That seems ludicrous.  I also had to pay sales tax.  So my $1900 purchase became more like $2065.  Yep, it’s the most expensive thing I’ve ever purchased.  You can call it my midlife crisis.  It also means I’m scared shitless over it.  And for good reason.  The $1800 Prostar I had back in 2002?  It died several times and seemed to spend more time in the shop than on my lap.  So I’ve been burned before on laptops.  Alienware actually sold rebadged Prostar notebooks back then so they’re not immune from getting crummy products.  They’re Dell parent company probably won’t help matters much.  But this is the reason I didn’t by some Clevo or Whitebook or Asus or some other  ‘no-name’ machine recommended by many online… I just don’t trust them to last more than a year or two.

For $2000, I want to get five years easy out of the thing :)

Something has been troubling me for many months now.  I currently use an old Iogear USB KVM to switch between my fileserver and my gaming rig.  If I’m on the gaming rig (port 2) and I get up to go to the bathroom, when I come back the KVM will have selected the fileserver (port 1).

At first I thought it was my Vista install since the problem started around the same time.  Then I noticed that if I’m on the fileserver (port 1) and get up to go to the bathroom, the LCD screen blanks out a few times.  I wondered if it was some timing issue, or if I was pressing something weird when I got up, or some cable was loose.

But the cause is weirder than that.  There is a spot in my room about 4 feet back and to the left of where I sit at the desk that when I walk through it the KVM goes insane.  I walk through this spot when I get up to go to the bathroom.  Walking through this spot forces the KVM to select Port 1 if its on Port 2, or causes the screen to wig out if it’s already on Port 1.

This room is also where I have my new wireless router.  I suppose it’s possible that standing in that one spot somehow reflects radio waves back at the KVM in some unusual way.  Or perhaps I block the overhead light and something is sensitive to that.

It’s not Vista because it seems to occur when the gaming rig is off.  The fileserver is always on though.

I’m still planning on buying a new KVM with DVI support.  I just wish they weren’t so expensive.

I have a serious cold going on right now.  Then I was kicked while I was down.  My laptop caught a virus somehow.  I can’t really tell you how I got it except to say that I haven’t downloaded or installed anything on it in months.  It seemed to hit me while browsing Failblog.org last night.  I was watching movies and suddenly FireFox 3 started to grind to a halt.  I used taskman to kill it.  When I restarted FireFox, AVG popped up with some virus warnings and then I started getting a bunch of popups.  The HD was being pinged hard and I noticed weird things in taskman like cmd.exe eating up 100% of my limited CPU.  I did what I always do in these cases: I held the power button down until the thing shut off.

I stand by this decision even though, in this case, it was seriously bad for the hard drive.  Windows would no longer boot and I couldn’t use my 2.5″ USB drive caddy to access the drive either.  I was able to run chkdsk /P with the Windows XP recovery console which fixed the file system up enough to be read from again.  Back in the drive caddy and AVG was able to scan and fix the following viruses/trojans:

SHeur2.KXI
SHeur2.KZU
Win32/Heur
Patched_c.AGE
Downloader.Agent.ASOS
Generic12.AVES

I’m running Avast scanner against the drive now to see if it finds anything else.  I also got Malwarebytes Anti-Malware as well.  All free tools of course.  Hopefully it’ll clean the drive off.

As for the drive corruption itself, i just don’t know.  The thing seems to be working okay again.  It’s a Toshiba 40G 4200RPM drive so nothing special and 4-5 years old already.  I put another 30G Hitachi drive in to the laptop for now and have a fresh XP install on there.  Hopefully the corruption was software based and there aren’t any serious mechanical problems.  If the old XP install isn’t completely pooched I might just go back to the way it was and pray everything was cleaned up.

Sometimes starting fresh isn’t a bad idea.  Especially since I have no idea how I got the thing.  There are some reports of infections coming from youtube videos and other flash based sources.  Even from failblog.org where I got this one.  I don’t seem to have that particular virus though and information is scarce.  It’s horrifying to think that might actually be how I got infected though.

I usually have regular virus scans off on my laptop since they’re extremely slow but I do run HijackThis once in a while if I suspect something is up.  I think it’s unlikely that this virus was sitting there already on the machine.  If I didn’t notice something strange going on, I assuredly would have noticed the slowdown, or redirects, or adware, or something.

Scanned every other PC in the house and they’re all clean so at least it didn’t spread.  Another reason to pull the plug ASAP.  I really should consider running in unpriviledged mode.  How come DEP warns me about everything BUT viruses?

Update:

The avast! antivirus software found a few that AVG missed:

Win32.FASEC
Win32.Downloader_BQA
Win32.Trojan_Generic

I bought orientedobject.com for no real reason what so ever.  Perhaps I found it clever at the time.  It will probably end up being in my pile of domains I really never do anything with.  It would be a good programming consulting business name if I were interested in such things.  I guess I could use it as an umbrella entity for my other DBAs.

It kind of makes me think of Second Life where you’d be positioning some object.  I really always loved SL’s use of primitives for object construction.  It’s much easier to wrap your head around than polygons I think.  Even I, with very little artistic ability, was able to build and design some pretty cool little environments there.  I know a few people who make their livings on SL.  It mostly just ended up costing me a lot of money so I stopped playing.  I’m thinking of writing a similar primitive engine though.  Just to play with.

Amazon Web Services added a web interface to EC2! This is something it sorely needed. Configuring an instance from the command line really isn’t what I wanted to be spending my time on. If I wasn’t indisposed for the next several days on a company trip I would totally be getting my new webserver up there.

I still haven’t set up an Amazon S3 account yet.  And my Amazon EC2 account is also sitting in limbo.  If you’re keeping track this might be the fourth month I’ve been sitting on it.  And nope, I still haven’t really backed up any of my important data to a remote data center yet either.  The bug just hasn’t bit me yet.

The stomach bug has though.

Anyway, I’m much more interested in other persuits right now.  I got a cheapo Sony camcorder for the holidays.  I don’t have the model handy at the moment but I picked it up at K-Mart for about $250.  Not cheap by any means but certainly a low end model.  The key feature is that it has i.Link output.  This is ideal for video capture to the PC.  I’ve been doing video imports for years over S-Video or other analog means since my VHS-C camcorder and VHS VCR are from the 90s, a time before digital even existed.  Well, maybe a little…

In fact my new camcorder uses a digital tape technology from the 90s, MiniDV.  It feels strange to be buying a new camcorder that still uses tapes and is only standard resolution.  No HD, hardware H.264, straight to mini DVD-R here.  Tape based camcorders actually have a lot of mechanical features that can go very broken very quickly.  My old JVC VHC-C never had a problem though it was $600 back in 1998 so it wasn’t a cheapo one either.  MiniDV tapes are very cheap and you can pretty much shoot one and store it as long as you want in a box somewhere until you’re ready to encode it.  It’s solid technology and I never really need to worry about my digital stream being compressed with some lossy algorythm just to make it fit on a limited size flash card.

It’s not that flash is bad but rather that it’s better suited for the $600 HD camcorder models that can do proper on the fly encoding and compression.

Unfortunately since my camcorder is only concerned about raw digital, I need some additional equipment for my PC to tackle it properly.  My choice is the Canopus ADVC110 video converter.  I don’t actually own it yet but I did select and use this before when I needed to do digibeta conversion when I worked for Synacor.  I’ll also need to buy a standard firewire card since my media PC doesn’t seem to have a slot, although I suspect one of my Soundblaster cards has one.

The Canopus, apart from having a funny name, makes grabbing i.Link video super easy and I know it works great with Sony Vegas which is what I prefer for editing.  It also provides analog inputs which means I can use it to import my older VHC-C tapes as well as other VHS tapes or even analog signals from video game systems and the like.  Yes, for the cost of the Canopus and my shitty MiniDV camcorder I could have got a HD camcorder which would have done all the encoding work for me.  But I still needed a good analog capture anyway.  I’ll get a better HD camcorder once I do a little more research in to what I really want one to do anyway.

I knew a lot about video codecs and compression and standards a few years ago when my day job required it.  For whatever reason a lot of that knowledge has leaked out of my brain.  A lot has changed as well.  There are a lot of new formats out there, especially ones based on MPEG-4, and others for mobile applications like 3G phones are adding to the complication.  It’s a moving target and really I find it quite fascinating.

My mother should not own laptops.  She likes them I guess because she doesn’t need a separate desk for them and she doesn’t need to figure out the extra wires on the back of a desktop.  Whatever the reason though, she is incredibly hard on them.  Broken displays, broken powerconnectors, liquid damage, crush damage, drop damage, power adapter shorts, and lots of dust, pet hair, and cigarrette smoke.  I get a laptop from her to repair every year it seems.  She recently broke the power connector on the HP Pavilion ZE4xxx laptop she had repaired a half dozen times and got a Lenovo something or other to replace it.  She promptly ruined it with a cup full of some sort of driink.

She gave me the poor Pavilion though.  She had taken it to some other local guy who tried to repair it by DESTROYING the motherboard in various places.  Ugh.  For whatever reason she just hates sending these things to me to repair first, even though I’m ultimately the one who ends up with them.  Repairing the power connector would have taken $4 but since some other idiot wrecked it before I could fix it the right way it’d cost $210-$250 to replace the mainboard.  To make matters worse, the damn asshole didn’t give her back the power adapter.  So I’d have to spend on another one of those.

It might be worth fixing if I needed an old laptop.  It’s not siginificantly better than the Dell I have and I’m going to be getting a new one for myself anyway so I assume it’s just going to sit in a box.  This happens a lot to me.  I end up with things that could easily be made to work with a small investment of cash but it’s really not worth fixing these things to sell and I personally don’t need it myself.

I wish there was an easy way to interface a laptop LCD to some sort of video input standard.  It’d be nice to use a laptop screen for other things.  What they really need to do though is build laptops a bit more modularly.

I have two main desktop PCs.  One is water cooled and overclocked and represents the peak of affordable PC technology.  I use that one to play PC games.  My other machine is many years old and functions as a file server, video editor, and internet endpoint.  It’s the machine that has everything already installed on it.  It’s always on and it’s there and it just works.  I mentioned this one briefly in my dust borg post.  It’s still a P4 3.2C with 1G of RAM.  Great technology for 2003 but really slow for the things I need it to do.

I sort of regret selling off some of my older Core2Duo chips and boards.  I regretted that when I had to buy brand new stuff for Abi’s new PC.  And I’m regretting it now since I’m facing the inevitable processor upgrade for the dust borg.  It also means I have to buy more DDR3 since I’d like to use the same RAM types in all of the desktops here.

But first!  I need a new laptop.  I’m still rocking the old Dell Inspiron 600m with the Latitude mainboard.  I got to be honest… I’m not a big fan of Dell.  Their stuff is crashy and cheap.  But this notebook has been rock solid and I’ve put it through a lot of abuse.  Not bad for a 5 year old machine I got dirt cheap on Ebay.  I’m strongly considering a Dell XPS although there are some Asus brand notebooks I think have potential.

Between my laptop, my cube, and my work PC, I spend all my time and do all my important work on computers 10x slower than the one I use just for gaming.  It’s a very strange and seemingly stupid situation.  I could just do more on my gaming machine but one of the main reasons I don’t is because I like to keep it clean and fast.  Also because I may choose to blow away Vista x64 at any moment.  I’m really getting sick of Vista and it’s complete lack of driver support.  Driver support is supposed to get BETTER with newer OS releases, not worse.  Without driver support you might as well be using a Mac or Linux.

I signed up for Amazon EC2 last week.  Dynamic hosting was pitched to me by a coworker and at first I was sort of against the idea.  I don’t like the thought of the data on my server to be ‘dynamic’.  It took me a lot of time and effort to set up the software and the data itself is pretty important to me.  But I did some research and Amazon services seemed relatively safe to try.

The impetus for this is the $151 per month I’m paying for my current dedicated server.  Since my career and hobbies revolve around web technologies it seems like a good investment for me to have a dedicated server somewhere.  I do make good use of it.

My budget is more in the $80 per month range though.  And LayeredTech raised their once affordable rates on me.

$151 per month can buy me a much better server somewhere else.  But it’s more difficult to find a server that will work as well for $75 or what have you.  Amazon EC2 can provide a server instance that can cost about $80 a month and has virtual specs that more than rival any other hosting company worth a salt.

Except I can’t make an instance work.  They don’t make it easy to set up.  I might just be doing something wrong but it won’t let me launch a Fedora 6 x64 instance.  It keeps saying I’m trying to run a Windows instance.  What, because I’m doing this from a Windows machine?  Setting up the SSH keys and other account credentials is fine but doing that from the Windows comand line and having to set up PATH variables is just frustrating.

Is it seriously too much to ask to have some sort of web interface to launching an instance?  Surely passing a CERT over SSL for auth is just as secure as doing it from the CLI?

*sigh* For all I know there *is* one and I just haven’t seen it.  Maybe I should contact them and ask more about it.  I’m really not looking forward to having to set up a server again.  It takes up so much time especially when you have to figure out how to do it securely.