Saturday, February 08, 2003

SC4 Oyster Bay 100k

Oyster Bay passed the 100k population mark today, and I had to do a good bit of tweaking to the layout in order to accomplish that. (Going around and upgrading any medium density zoning to high density, changing any undeveloped zones to one of the other two types, adding in a park here or there, re-arranging streets.) I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get much above 100k or not, there's not much room left to tweak the city, unless I switch over to a subway system instead of trains (hmm...). Since Oyster Bay imports all of its electricity and exports all of its garbage, air and water pollution are very low, but I'm not sure yet how that impacts all the aspects of growing a city (other then less is better).

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 2:18 PM

Benchmarking Software

Currently looking for computer benchmarking software... I want to verify some transfer rates on my various systems, CPU performance, memory performance (don't care about graphical performance since I'm mostly checking servers).

PCMark2002 - Produced by FutureMark, they also make a benchmark program to test laptop performance and battery life, 3D video performance, and a benchmark designed to test simulated performance of business software. There is a limited edition that you can download, a registered version that is US$10, and the Pro version is US$40.

Dr. Hardware 2003 - More of a system information program, diagnostics, plus benchmarking. Haven't really looked at this yet.

SysOpt.com Benchmarking Database - not explored yet.

Performance Test - Has a benchmark utility, plus a burn-in test (seperate) available. Not really explored yet.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 11:44 AM

Columbia Disaster

space.com has a very good in-depth coverage of this event (including a very informative FAQ that is constantly being updated). The FAQ is impressive too, more so that it's being kept up to date as new events come to light. This is the way that news should be covered, IMHO, it sure beats trying to stay on top of a zillion different versions of static published FAQs as typically get put out by traditional news sources. Plus, all sorts of links, background information, and unlike Yahoo! Full Coverage - they have the actual images in question (no more reading in Yahoo! that such-and-such image showed something - then having to go track down a copy of the image).

All in all, looks like they're doing an excellent job of covering this.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 12:15 AM

Friday, February 07, 2003

SC4 North Bend 2150

Woot! I finally passed the 100k mark in North Bend which is my 2nd city to pass 100k in this region.

One of the bugs that has surfaced as a result of that massive demolition accident is that my fire engines can get stuck "out of station", which means that they're not available to dispatch. (They seem to get lost due to the massive number of dead-end roads in the industrial area.) The only fix was to go around and delete/rebuild all of the fire stations (same with the police stations).

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 2:03 PM

Snow

Snow? ... looks outside, notices that it is snowing and there's a few inches of fluffly white stuff on the ground.

Unperplexed, I casually drink my coffee as I do my daily 20 step commute to my home office. (It's a good thing!)

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 9:13 AM

Thursday, February 06, 2003

SC4 North Bend 2110

Well, not too difficult a task. It only took 2 hours to go from 55k pop down to 45k pop and then climbed up to 85k pop (which is more then I had at it's previous peak). The "West Point" area that fits into the river bend seems to be undergoing a slight recession, but the rebuild "East Shore" area across the river has rebounded quickly enough to balance it out. With a few more hours of work, I think North Bend is going to start vying with South Bend for the population lead.

One of the things that I'm beginning to suspect is that water volume does not mean that you'll get good water coverage if you have aging and decrepit water pumps. I had 50% more water then I needed, yet instead of water being available up to 5-6 tiles away from a pipe, I was only seeing a coverage span of 2-3 tiles away from a pipe. After I went around and checked all of my water pumps for efficiency (destroying any that were below 75%), I again had the coverage that I had originally designed for.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 10:48 PM

SC4 North Bend 2084

Whoops... had a bit of a disaster in my city of North Bend last night. I was using the bulldozer tool, when a fire broke out elsewhere in the city. Somehow I managed to bulldoze a very large swath, including the area downtown that I had just rezoned about 30 minutes before. (My own mini-disaster!) Since it was so late, I just saved and went to bed.

So, now I get the joy of putting the simulation on pause, repairing as much damage as possible (water, power connections are critical) before I run out of cash and/or population. Eh, so now I have a large area that I can rebuild from scratch instead of having to work around existing buildings and infrastructure.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 8:19 PM

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

SC4 Healthcare

Okay, clinics vs hospitals...

Medical Clinic - $400 to build - $400/mo ($100 ambulance) - 500 patients (550 if funded to $460)
Large Medical Center - $1100 to build - $1200/mo ($200 ambulance) - 3000 patients (3300 if funded to $1400)

Ambulance costs allow you to change the service territory of your medical facility. So, for instance, if you have an over-loaded medical facility in an area with overlapping coverage from other facilities, you can just cut back on Local Ambulance Funding and lower the number of patients being brought to that particular facility.

Costs per patient:

Medical Clinic - $0.80/patient at full capacity. $0.84/patient at 110% capacity
Large Medical Center - $0.40/patient at full capacity. $0.42/patient at 110% capacity.

Common sense dictates that you should always place the large medical centers... unless I'm missing something.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 10:47 PM

SC4 500k Population

Uggh, finally grew the region past 500,000 population. From what I'm seeing, there's a definite population cap at 20k for a city - unless you add health and education items. (I've got more then a few cities that are capped at 20k.) I'm even beginning to suspect that there's a 5k cap if you don't have water pipes (maybe 10k?). I notice that residences will only develop to the single-double family homes when relying on well water.

At 120k, my South Bend city was awarded a movie studio... (the mayor refused to comment on whether he was going to be starring in any upcoming movies).

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 8:58 PM

Monday, February 03, 2003

DVD Media

What a confusing technology... fortunately the Sony is compatible with all of the currently competing standards. (Currently there are 3 Re-Writeable standards and 2 Writeable standards... plus the original DVD-ROM standard.)

DVD+RW - targeted at compatibility with the DVD-Video players/recorders, holds 4.7Gb. Technology is based on CD-R/RW formats. A disk can be re-written about 1000 times. Disk prices are around $5. When used with Roxio's DirectCD, the DVD is ready for files in about 5 minutes (you have to use the DirectCD format utility to prepare the disk).

DVD-RW - similar to CD-RW in that the data is stored in one long sequential track, 4.7Gb capacity per side and can be re-written around 1000 times (each sector slowly wears out). Disk prices are around $5. When used with Roxio's DirectCD, the DVD takes 90 minutes to prepare (using the DirectCD format utility).

DVD-RAM - basically is a hard-disk / zip-disk / floppy-disk that has a 2.6Gb or 4.7Gb capacity per side. It can be re-written around (more than?) 100,000 times. Requires special drives (is not compatible with anything else) to use. Disks are around $10 each now.

DVD+R - write-once, 4.7Gb per side. A competing format with DVD-R, but cost is higher then DVD-R media (around $5-$6 per disk).

DVD-R - write-once, 4.7Gb per side. Professional grade media (a.k.a authoring) supports copy protection (CSS) and "glass mastering". Most of us will want to use consumer grade, which is a good bit cheaper and more fitting to our needs ($2-$5 per disk, professional media runs $20-$40 per disk)

Links:

DVD Cookbook

DVD FAQ

So what am I using? I've settled on using DVD+RW for my data storage where I want to re-write the media (using DirectCD), and DVD-R for my longer term storage. Of course, that may change in a year or two once the format wars shake out. The DVD-RW media's requirement of a 90 minute format before using with DirectCD is a bit off-putting compared to DVD+RW's less than 5 minute prep time.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 7:21 PM

Data Security 2

Got my Sony DRU-500A drive today, and I've figured out that for DVD+RW re-writable disks (using Roxio's DirectCD) - a good maximum size for your PGPDisk container file (.pgd) should be 4450Mb (much roomier then the 695Mb container files for CD-R media). Now, you'll still want to format the mounted encrypted volume as FAT32, just in case you dump it onto DVD-R media (PGP will refuse to mount an NTFS formatted volume if it's on read-only media).

At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how well PGPDisk works when the container file is stored on the DVD+RW disk. So far it seems just as snappy as when it's sitting on an external USB 2.0 drive -- but I forget how many times you can re-write sectors on DVD+RW media. I still like to do the actual volume creation on my C:\, then I unmount the volume, move the container file to the DVD+RW platter (takes about 15 minutes to copy that 4.35Gb container file), and then mounting the volume for actual use.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 7:16 PM

Fair Use

Had a thought with regards to fair use and making backup copies of something like a DVD movie. Does anyone actually know anyone who makes backup copies of all of their DVD movies? DVDs are pretty tough when compared to their CD brethren. If I remember correctly, there's even another layer of error correction built in to DVDs that's not available on CDs. Which means that (1) they're more unlikely to go bad and (2) the amount of time it takes to make a copy of a DVD movie plus the cost of DVD-R media puts it sqaurely in the "why bother?" category. If it happens to go bad, you buy another copy (or you go rent it, or borrow a friend's copy). I still forsee a lot of low-end pirating occuring at the college and aquaintance level, but watching a movie is a foreground activity, unlike music which can be pushed into the background. Meaning you'll listen to a lot more hours of music in your life then you will spend watching movies.

Eh, it's an incomplete thought still - it just struck me as odd that someone would make a backup copy of a DVD movie... well, unless it costs you more then $10 to replace the disc.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 7:09 PM

Cascading Style Sheet References

Dave Raggett's Introduction to CSS - a nice article that lays out the basics.

TopStyle Lite - this is the CSS editor that came with HomeSite (bundled), and is what I'm currently using.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 7:38 AM

Sunday, February 02, 2003

SC4 100k Population

Got my first city to 100k population this weekend (South Bend). I'm also in the process of fixing some of the writing style, adding in more details, and trying to stay on top of all of the cities that I've created within the region.

Total region population is now 339k.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 11:55 PM

Updated Blogger Template

Got a new template in action for 2003. I'm still trying to fix some of the things I didn't like with the old template, but mostly it's fixes to the CSS file in order to make things simpler.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 1:05 AM