Sunday, December 31, 2006

Eve Online (a newbie's second thoughts)

Starting to climb the nasty mountain called "learning curve"...

Plan on spending your first 8 hours of play getting lost, possibly blown up, learning the interface, asking newbie questions in "Rookie Help" or "Eve University", and finding your way around. The top tips off the top of my head are:

- Do the tutorial once. Maybe twice.

- In your home system, figure out how to get to an asteroid belt, how to mine, then go back and sell your load. Don't worry overmuch about the price for the first day. Just get some ISK in the bank. Any ISK is better then no ISK.

- Always have a skill being trained. If you're unsure, train a learning skill or any other short-period skill that will only take 1.0-1.5 hours (if you'll be online that long).

- The autopilot is both your friend and your enemy. Manually controlling jumps allows you to get within a few km of your destination, while the auto-pilot always stops 15km short. In friendly territory this won't matter (much), but in low security space it can be deadly.

- Bookmarks are handy when mining. They allow you to move back and forth between the rock that you found and the local station where you're selling the ore.

- Grab a copy of EveMon. This will take a lot of the guesswork out of knowing what skills you need to upgrade to fly a particular ship along with the *total* training time required.

After the first day, I decided to upgrade into a mining ship. It wasn't a big investment and it let me mine more efficiently. The newbie ship only has a cargo capacity of 120 cubic meters (m3). When I finished outfitting a Caldari Bantam, I had almost 360 m3 to play with. So I could pull 3x as much ore back to the station on each run.

Between purchasing the skill books, purchasing the ship, purchasing the shuttle to go get the ship, and the misc parts (mining lasers, cargo expanders), I spent somewhere between 150k and 250k ISK. That's about 25 mining runs in a newbie ship. But with the Bantam, I'm pulling in 25-30k per run to/from the asteroid belt so it pays for itself quickly. Training time was about 16-24 hours for the skills required (use EveMon to find out for your character).

The payback is quick enough that I don't feel I'll have to mine for the next 2 weeks to have made it worth it. It made a good 2-day project where I had to learn how to search the market for deals, travel to the system where I bought, pickup the items out of local storage, then freight them back to my home system. I did the hauling in my newbie ship since my skills weren't up far enough to fly the Bantam yet.

So not bad for a weekend of play. Now I'm trying to spec out the cost to upgrade to the next larger ship class along with the training time.

Labels: 2006, EVEOnline

posted by Wuphon's at 10:33 PM (0 comments)

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Eve Online (a newbie's first thoughts)

Played Eve for a few hours today. The tutorial is definitely *not* optional for a newbie, unless you have someone IRL to guide you. It's a lengthy tutorial. The first introduction will take about an hour and the first training mission can take 30-60 minutes. Not that I timed it. So you should figure on maybe 3-4 hour-long sessions at the start.

As I login right now, there are 29,700 accounts active (early this morning it was only ~16,000). However, a bit over 2000 of those are trial accounts! I'd been toying with the idea of doing the download and checking it out for a few months; and it was just mentioned again on Slashdot.

One thing to get used to is the *scale* of the local star cluster. This is a geek's sci-fi dream in a way. There are over *5000* star systems and the map accurately displays them as laid out in 3D, with complex configurations of jump station routes. The scale of solar system objects seems to also be accurate, but with the "warp" drive all action happens in / around local hot spots of activity. You're never more then a 30-60 second warp drive away from any point in a solar system and jumps between systems are also under a minute.

Of course, if you're going someplace 20 systems away... all those jumps and warps eat up time. But there's a good autopilot system along with a smart waypoint and routing system. As long as you stick to high security systems, you *shouldn't* run into issues.

But as they constantly say... never set out in a ship that you can't afford to lose. Eve Online is wide open PVP and other then being docked in a station, there are no guarantees. Even if you're in a high security system the empire police ships may arrive too late.

Off to read some more reviews and maybe finish the tutorial. Then I need to figure out what I want to get done during the next 13 days.

Labels: 2006, EVEOnline

posted by Wuphon's at 4:39 PM (0 comments)

New monitor

Picked up a new monitor as my OLD 19" CRT was really on its last legs. (Lots of issues with consistent brightness and other elements on the same scan line would throw shadows across the rest of the scan line.)

I've been thinking about going widescreen for a while. And switching to LCD was pretty much a given (less weight and bulk to deal with). The only downside with widescreen is that older 4:3 aspect ratio games don't work as well (or you run them in windowed mode).

Price have also dropped quite a bit on the LCDs.

XGA - 1024x768 (15" $155-$190)
SXGA - 1280x1024 (17" to 19" $150-$200)
UXGA - 1600x1200 (20" to 22" $355-$480)

WXGA - 1440x900 (19" $180-$270)
WSXGA - 1680x1050 (20" to 22" $240-$340)
WUXGA - 1920x1200 (24" to 26" $640-$800)

The sweet spot right now is either the SXGA or the WXGA. I ended up going with a 20" WSXGA, but now wish I could've found the 22" WSXGA size (larger pixels). Still, the 20" WSXGA is nothing to sneeze at. Place (2) 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper side by side and you'll see how big this display is. The price on it wasn't bad either.

The model I picked is the Asus MW201U. Which is one of the few widescreen monitors (maybe the only) that includes a headphone jack in the monitor. The speakers are tiny 1W and sound a bit tinny, but it's nice not to have to deal with external speakers. Plus I can hook in my headphones directly.

The main downer of this display is that it's not part of the Asus Zero Bright Dot (ZBD) plan. So I'll have to live with a bright blue pixel that is stuck. It's really only noticeable with black backgrounds and almost vanishes if you're over 1 meter away. So if you're really worried, makes sure you pick one of the Asus displays marked as "ZBD" (and double-check it).

OTOH, this is the first LCD (out of 6 that I've used) that has a stuck pixel.

The question for work is whether we outfit people with a single 16:10 ratio display or a pair of 4:3 displays. Most people in the office are still using 17" CRTs, which is something that I've wanted to address for a few years now. We may start addressing that at the end of 2007 and into 2008. Maybe by then the WSXGA displays will have dropped another $50-$100 and they'll be in the sweet spot.

I bet that if I dropped one of these on the desk of someone who does a lot of document work, they'll be the envy of the entire office. So there's going to be a little politicking involved. And until the 17" CRTs start dying, I won't have much of a business case for switching to the widescreen LCDs.

However... one thing I don't like about the Asus is that there's no way to tell it *not* to stretch the image to fill the screen. Which makes it nigh impossible to run 4:3 games in full-screen. I have yet to figure out whether the NVIDIA card can be setup to side step this issue. (Like outputting a 1680x1050 image to the card, but only showing 1280x1024 to the game.)

What I may do is use my el-cheapo 1280x1024 LCD to play 4:3 games. Or maybe I need to switch to DVI inputs.

Labels: 2006, Monitors

posted by Wuphon's at 6:33 AM (0 comments)

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Eve Online Tutorial (ship scale)

Here are some good examples of the *scale* involved with Eve Online.

The first shot is a little rough with no sense of scale because I didn't realize that the view was changeable at that point of the tutorial. But the later shots should give a better idea of the scale involved in the docking area of the space station.



This is the newbie ship for the Amarr race.





Now some pictures to give you the idea of the scale involved inside the space station.

Labels: 2006, EVEOnline

posted by Wuphon's at 8:20 PM (0 comments)

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Moving hosting providers again

Not happy with my old host, so I'm picking up stakes again and moving elsewhere. I'm sure there will be some downtime.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 10:28 AM (0 comments)

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Eve Online

I've been flirting with the idea of looking into Eve Online. Because I want something new to muck with and I hear that Eve doesn't have the grind as bad as traditional MMOGs. In fact, when you're training a skill it happens in real-time, even if you're offline.

The download for the client is around 600MB. Pricing is pretty standard $11-$15/mo (there's a quarterly billing option that I'll probably go with). No start-up fee and I found a 14-day trial code.

I don't know that I can categorize it, except that it's based around ships in a 3D environment (you never leave your ship). The makers of Eve pretty much stay out of the way and merely provide the base capabilities of the game (to keep scamming using exploits to a minimum). The Wikipedia entry does a decent job of giving an intro.

A key image to look at is the scale comparison chart of the ships. That's one of the things that attracts me.

I'll post some images later.

Labels: 2006, EVEOnline

posted by Wuphon's at 6:58 PM (0 comments)

Saturday, December 09, 2006

New 419 type scam

Well, here's a new take on the 419 scam.

--------------------------------------------------------------
From: Scott Morgan
Subject: From Captain Scott Morgan (US Marines)

Greetings,

With due respect, pardon me for this letter. This is a genuine matter of utmost importance and immense mutual benefit which must be kept highly confidential. It is with genuine interest and trust that I have contacted you.

I am Captain Scott Morgan of the US Marine Force on Monitoring and Peace–keeping mission in Baghdad-Iraq.

On the 30th day of November 2006, we were alerted on the sudden presence of some Terrorists camping in a suburb not too far from Karbala here in Iraq . After immediate intervention, we captured three (3) of the Terrorists, twenty-six (26) were killed leaving seven (7) injured.

In the process of torture they confessed being rebels for late Ayman al-Zawahiri and took us to a cave in Karbala which served as their camp. Here we recovered several guns, bombs and other Ammunitions including some boxes among which two contains suspected nuclear weapons, one filled with hard drugs (cocaine) and the other four to my amazement contain some US Dollars amounting to $10.2M. After I and two of my junior intelligent officers counted them, I however instructed them to keep this in high secrecy.

I am in keen need of a “Reliable and "Trustworthy” person who would receive, secure and protect these boxes containing the US Dollars for me until my assignment elapses here in Iraq . I assure and promise you will not regret this deal. However feel free to negotiate what you wish to have as your percentage in this business. Assure me of you keeping this in utmost secrecy to protect my job with the US Monitoring and Peace-Keeping mission. I will be waiting to hear from you as soon as possible to proceed.

All correspondence should come through my personal / private email:captsmorgan@hotmail.com for security reasons.

If you are interested to work with me in good faith and honesty, get back to me. Endeavor to let me know your decision rather than keep me waiting.

Thanks in anticipation of a favorable response.

Sincere regards,
Captain Scott Morgan
--------------------------------------------------------------

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 7:52 PM (0 comments)

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Move status

Moving to Long Island, NY now looks pretty certain. The CEO is happy with the idea and is willing to make it happen. Cost of living is going to go up by about 30% across the board, which is the downside of the move. OTOH, if I can talk them into a 15-20% raise to cover the increased expenses, I'll come out reasonably even without having to live hand-to-mouth.

So I ran the numbers today, looked at prices for housing again, and sent him the final salary goal that I'm looking for. I should know by the end of October where things stand so that I can go looking for apartments during the first week in November (or the last week of October).

Of course, that's not the only thing eating up all my free time lately. Still working my 50+ hours per week managing the servers, setting up new systems, making disaster recovery plans, and moving our systems slowly to a more failure-tolerant setup. Plus I'm still plowing through my 2 foot stack of technical books on the desk (dealing with Linux server configuration, security, Apache, Java, Postfix, PostgreSQL, etc.).

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 7:46 PM (0 comments)

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Seagate 750GB Areal Density 128Gbits/SqIn

Pulled these numbers off a spec sheet for a Seagate 750GB Perpendicular Recording drive.

# Number of Discs (physical) 4
# Number of Heads (physical) 8
# Bytes Per Sector 512
# Areal Density (Mbits/sq in) 128,200 Mbits/square inch
# Track Density (TPI) 145,000 tracks/inch
# Recording Density (BPI, max) 926,000 bits/inch
# Recording Components
# Recording Method Perpendicular

I don't remember what the Areal density of the older drives are off-hand.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 3:31 PM (0 comments)

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Relocation 2

Looked at housing market prices north of NYC as well. Prices up there are very similar to eastern Long Island, so other then being closer to the mountains it wouldn't get much much else. So I think unless I went north of Albany (4+ hours away from the main office), there's not going to be much gain in cost of living.

Things that I want in a rental unit:

- cats allowed
- washer/dryer in the unit
- 1-2 bedrooms
- central A/C
- hardwood floors
- close to shops / train

I reckon that I'll have to also budget for a 5x10 storage unit somewhere to house extra stuff that won't fit in a 1 B/R apartment.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 9:30 PM (0 comments)

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Relocation

So I'm considering moving closer to the main office up in Long Island. I'd have to trade down to a 1-B/R apartment instead of the 2-B/R place that I have now.

The big issue is, of course, costs. Moving to an area like LI means that instead of my living expenses being 50% of my net pay, it's going to be more like 75% of my net pay. If I could get a 10% raise that would drop back down to 68% of net for living expenses. Still more expensive but I could economize in other areas to make up for the difference.

In reality, I'd need more like a 15-20% raise to make it not such a bad deal. I'll have to talk with the CEO during my next trip and see what price he puts on having me more available at the office. Whether he's willing to slowly bump my salary another 20% in order to make that happen.

Why now?

- Because I've been considering a move for a while. Possible locations have been near Albany NY or Burlington VT or north of NYC.

- Things at the main office have changed over the years, people that I didn't like don't work there anymore. It's a lot less chaotic and I think I could actually get work done if I was there.

- Even if I moved near the main office, I'd probably still telecommute most days. Maybe dedicating only one day per week to being in the main office to do technical troubleshooting.

- I don't have a lot of ties left down here in York. And a change of scenery would be nice.

- I'm no longer dead set against moving to Long Island. It would be nice to be closer to NYC which I find to be an interesting city.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 11:39 PM (0 comments)

Friday, August 04, 2006

Updated my JVC impressions

After my business trip this week, which involved a lot of driving, I've changed some of my impressions of my car's new JVC deck.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 7:27 PM (0 comments)

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Another busy week

Shaping up to be another busy week. Put my car in the shop this morning to get both front seatbelt assemblies replaced (seatbelts were functional but not retracting properly). That required dropping it off first thing this morning, after which I walked home. Took me 2 hours to walk the 5.5 miles, which wasn't bad in all that heat. The entire repair was under warranty so I paid zero out of pocket.

Gonna miss that warranty when it expires next year. Ah well, the car's been paid off for 2 years so it's not like it's a big drain on the finances. I think I finally rolled over the 14,000 mile odometer mark on it. Might break 15k by the end of the year with all the planned business trips.

Spent some money on eBay today, bidding on Japanese music CDs. Trying to expand my collection a bit and find some new artists that I like (as well as picking up more CDs by artists that I liked before).

And Wednesday I have to leave again for another work trip. Work suddenly exploded back at the end of May and we've been going crazy trying to keep up with it all. I've been billing 30-40 hours per week instead of my usual 10-15 billable hours. Which means that work is cutting into my free time because there's still the normal sysadmin stuff to get done on a weekly basis. Billable hours isn't in my main job description, I typically just take overflow work that I try to fit in between my other duties.

After this trip, I should actually be home for 4 weeks straight. So maybe I can get some personal things finished (such as finishing Tuchola Forest!).

Oh and somewhere in all this I need to figure out how to build an N-tier java web application before the end of the year.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 12:19 AM (0 comments)

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Backfilling some stuff

Doing some backfilling to fill in weeks that I missed:

IPA photos from March 2000

Home office setup from Apr 2000

Christmas 2000

State College Office Meeting

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 9:13 AM (0 comments)

Sunday, July 23, 2006

JVC KD-G720

Yesterday morning when I was set to travel back from Long Island I went to change the CD in my old JVC KD-SH99 car stereo. For a year or two now it's been having trouble ejecting CDs (typically only ejecting halfway), but this time around it went completely kaput. I fiddled with it the entire trip home (in silence, alas!), managed to get it to eject the CD that was in it but couldn't get it to play the radio or anything.

So, I went ahead and had Circuit City replace the unit with a new JVC KD-G720. The new unit is very similar to the old one with similar capabilities (the ability to play MP3 CDs is critically important). The only downside of the new unit is that it's random play is not very good. On the old unit, I could pick random play and then click the "next track" button to get it to randomly pick a new song. The new unit only gives me the choices of skipping forward one track (sequentially) or skipping to the start of the next folder, even when "random disc" mode is turned on. So that's a bit dissapointing.

But since I mostly listen to 1 hour or 2 hour dance tracks (that are one large file), it's not a huge deal-breaker. And if it does start to become a real issue, I'll look into getting the aux input installed and using an iPod's shuffle capability.

The JVC unit also has an instant-mute capability where you tap the volume knob. It doesn't completely silence the audio, but turns it down about 90%. That works better then my method on the old deck, which was to flip the "source" button once to point at the non-existent AUX input. Then I had to click 3 more times to get back to playing the CD.

It does seem to restart exactly where it left off when you turn off the car. A critical feature to me because of those 1-2 hour dance mixes that are one big MP3 file. Also good for audio books.

The other interesting feature is the USB port on the front of the unit. It allows you to plug in a USB flash drive and play songs off of it (similar to a MP3 CD). That may work well for me because I have USB keys that take the SD cards that I use for my camera and laptop. I may install a USB extension cable that lets me dangle the USB key rather then having it stick out of the dash.

While I had it in the shop, I finally had them upgrade the stock factory speakers with better 5x7 speakers. The old speakers were not enough to match the 200W peak output of the old (and new) JVC deck and I think I blew one of them a while back. Volume-wise, the new speakers are perfectly matched to the head unit. I can turn the deck up about halfway (volume level 25) and be extremely loud but I also can turn it down without suffering from the "too soft" or "too loud" problem with no happy ground. (I'm sure my brother remembers the Alpine unit we had where you could only use the bottom 1/10th of the volume bar. Beyond 10% volume and it was overly loud and was extremely difficult to get a reasonable volume setting out of it.) The new speakers also have a better sound then the old stock factory speakers (which were decent, just not high-quality).

Took them 3 hours to do the install. They had to break out the soldering gun to work on the 4 speakers and most of the 3 hours was spent doing the install of those 4 speakers. A faster worker could've done it in 2 hours, but it was worth the $75 speaker install fee not to have to futz with it myself. (The stereo install was free.) Management-wise, I think they should've had 2 people working on each car at the same time. They could've cut the customer wait time down to under an hour and I wouldn't have had to put up with smoke breaks every 20 minutes.

The only lingering issue is that he didn't put the door column back together properly, so my seatbelt retraction isn't working as well as it should. I'm going to take it in to the Ford dealer this week and let them fix it (it was already "iffy"). Might even get covered under the warranty. I tried to fix it myself, but unless I take the entire column apart again, I don't think I can get it working like it should.

One last note: The new JVC unit seems to have a better (sturdier) ejection mechanism then the old unit. The old unit gave off lots of clicks and rattles as the CD tray moved upward prior to ejecting the disk. On the new unit, it's a lot quieter and the CD seems to stay on the same plane (and the center hub moves into position instead?).

Update: Well, after playing with the JVC unit on my business trip this week, I discovered that there are 2 sets of "next track" buttons. There's the up/down arrow to the right of the display which seems to take you either to the next/previous track or the next/previous folder. But the fast forward / rewind buttons are the ones that operate like the old JVC unit. Pressing the fast forward button (briefly) will skip to the next randomly selected track in the folder or disc.

I'm also liking the ATT feature which instantly mutes the music down to volume 1 when you tap the volume knob. Or you can press and hold the volume knob to turn the deck on/off. The deck also does a very good job of resuming playing the MP3 files where it left off, a key feature for those of us who listen to longer audio files.

The volume on the deck goes from 1-50 (I think 50 is the top). A level of 20-25 is good for tooling around town and 30-35 is for heavy head banging. The new speakers sound a lot clearer then the old stock speakers.

The display is also pretty good. On the old unit, the auto-dimmer would result in a display that is difficult to read when you have the headlights on (as I always do when driving) during the day. The new unit has a much clearer and easier to read display, even with the auto-dim feature turned on.

So all-in-all, I'm pretty happy with the JVC deck now. I'm still figuring out some of its other quirks of operation but it's still nicer then my old deck.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 9:03 PM (0 comments)

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The bearded one spotted in the wild

One of the things in my job description at work is to keep track of all of the computer equipment. I typically do this by periodically taking pictures of every piece of electronic equipment in the facility on an annual basis.

This year, while doing the inventory, someone inventoried me!



(Plus this is one of the only pictures taken of me this year.)

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 8:59 PM (0 comments)

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Out of town next week

I have another business trip next week, so not much will be happening here on the home front for a while. July and August are busy travel months for me and I should probably fit in a vacation somewhere in there.

September and October are looking moderately busy (2 business trips planned along with a trip to Nerdvana 2006).

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 9:04 AM (0 comments)

Monday, July 10, 2006

Hoodwinked

I picked this up from the bargain bin this week. It's a 3D animated film that I hadn't heard about and ran across in some random fashion. If you can get past the slightly sub-par animation you get a film that is a very unique take on the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tail. (In listening to the DVD commentary, you find out that due to the low budget of the film, they went for a "stop motion" animation style rather then the fluid animation of Pixar's work.)

The plot is a 4-way P.O.V. style affair where the 4 principle characters (the wolf, granny, little red and the woodsman) retell their side of the story after being detained due to domestic disturbance by the local police force. Nothing is entirely what it seems and the 4 tales weave together in an interesting fashion to reveal the actual villan of the story (the "goody bandit"). Up until the 4th retelling, I still suspected the main characters. So they do a good job of muddying the waters.

Well worth a rental or purchase if you like slightly off-beat takes on established classics.

And for fun, here's the villan's checklist (in ROT13):

(purpx) Gnxr qbja Zhssva Zna
(purpx) Ehva Erq
(purpx) Npg phgr naq shmml
(abg qbar) Fgrny erpvcr obbx!!
(purpx) Fraq jbys ba tbbfr punfr
(abg qbar) Cvpx hc qel pyrnavat
(purpx) Cnl rivy fxv grnz
(abg qbar) Cnl tnf ovyy
(abg qbar) Pnyy zbz
(abg qbar) Svavfu ynve

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 9:22 PM (0 comments)

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Zork

Finally installed Frotz on my linux server and downloaded the free copies of Zork from Infocom.

Brings back memories (I got a chance to play the original Zork back in the early-80s).

Maybe I'll setup guest accounts for friends who want to play...

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 7:37 PM (0 comments)

Monday, July 03, 2006

Pricing for dual-core dual-CPU video editing

Currently, I use a dual-CPU Opteron 246 system with 3GB of RAM for my video editing and conversion. It's been holding up very well for being 18 months old. At some point I plan on converting the old dual-CPU system into a Linux server and building a new dual-CPU dual-core Opteron box. Why? Because when it comes to video encoding, there's no such thing as enough speed.

(I'm currently working on converting a bunch of taped shows to DVD again and encode times are around 4-5 hours for every hour of footage. Plus the time spent creating the PAR2 data for the final disks. It's gonna take me a few weeks of running the CPUs 24x7 to plow through everything that I currently have lined up for encoding.)

The 246 CPUs are 2.0GHz and can be had for around $180 now. The fastest that the single core CPUs have gotten is the 252s which are 2.6GHz (30% faster) for $470 or so. But the 2.0GHz dual-core Opteron 270s are also around $470 and would have roughly 2x the performance of my 246s.

Unfortunately, my current motherboard can't be upgraded to work with dual-core CPUs. Besides, it's a good chance to move from PCI/AGP to PCI/PCIe as well as getting a better memory layout. The problem with my existing dual-CPU system is that all of the memory is hung off the first CPU. The second CPU has to go through the first CPU to access its memory.

Rough pricing for a MB/RAM/CPU core:
$0940 (2) Opteron 270 dual-core 2.0GHz CPUs
$0300 TYAN S2877ANRF motherboard (ATX)
$0440 (4) 1GB 184pin DDR 400 PC3200 ECC Registered
-----
$1680

Note: In reality, there's no real point in putting more then 3GB into a WinXP box. I'd have to wait for Vista or use Win2003 server setup in workstation mode. So instead of (4) 1GB modules, I'd probably go with (2) 1GB and (2) 512MB modules to take me to 3GB of system RAM. (Which is what I currently have in my existing box.)

I keep hoping that the prices on the Opteron 270s will drop a bit now that Intel is releasing dual-core Xeons. Even AMDs dual-core Athlon64s are still $300 while the cheapest Intel dual-core is only $120. Although I expect that the low-end Athlon64s are faster then the low-end Intels.

Maybe once the Opteron 270s drop down to $250-$300 each it will be worth the pain of the upgrade. I figure that will be sometime next winter. Would be nice to cut my video encoding times in half.

Other parts that I'll need are:

$0130 Antec p180b case
$0140 EPS12V 600W power-supply
$0100 misc parts
$0500 (2) 500GB drives

I can get a total of (10) drives into an Antec p180b case. So there's lots of room for expansion. The two drives I'm listing there are actually starter drives for the Linux server.

My current vid box has a trio of 500GB drives used for video editing. Everything on the primary 500GB gets copied to the second 500GB daily and any deleted files get moved to the tetriary 500GB drive. This gives me speed and safety against the primary spindle failing. The tetriary or "trash" drive is my failsafe in case I delete something off the primary drive and don't catch it before the daily sync wipes it off the secondary drive.

Another nice trick is that if I sync first, I can use the mirror drive as the source drive for video encodings. That gives me better speed for situations where I'm disk-bound instead of CPU-bound.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 12:54 AM (0 comments)

Sunday, July 02, 2006

DVD Cases

Looking for multi-DVD cases (and single DVD thin cases):

TDK 10PK EMPTY SLIM DVD BOXES (Black) (#MBY-10)
MEMOREX DVD SLIM VIDEO MOVIE CASES CLEAR 25-PK
MEMOREX DVD TWIN VIDEO MOVIE CASES HOLDS 2 IN 1 CASE 10-PK
TDK 10PK EMPTY DVD QUAD MOVIE BOXES 4-DISC CAPACITY (#MBQ-10)

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 11:21 PM (0 comments)

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Canon PowerShot SD550 (Initial Impression)

Picked up the Canon PowerShot SD550 camera yesterday (I was also looking at the SD600). My criteria was ultra-compact, with a separate viewfinder (allows for less battery drain) that uses SD cards (since my laptop has a SD card slot). I got a camera with twice the pixels as my old Sony camera that wrote to mini-CDs for about 1/3 the cost of what I paid 5 years ago.

Now, for the most part, I liked my old Sony camera. Writing to the mini-CDs came in handy when dealing with older computers (USB ports and USB thumb drives was not as common back in 2001). It was very nice to be able, at the end of a shoot, to finalize the CD-R and hand it to someone to make a copy. I got about 120 photos on a CD-R and my 2 batteries lasted about 200-300 shots.

The downside of the old Sony is the size. The CD-R made it into a rather bulky camera that didn't fit easily into pockets, backpacks, or my laptop bag. It was still smaller and lighter then the old Pentax K-1000 SLR that I used to use.

So I'm not sure what to do with the old Sony camera.

The new camera, OTOH, is at the limits of being too small to be useable. This thing is *tiny*. The thickness is about the same as a deck and a half of cards and the length/width is slightly smaller then said deck of cards. Add a little $9 Case Logic TBC1 ultra-compact camera case and it's still thin enough to hide away in an inner coat pocket (imagine 2 decks of cards). That makes it easy to carry around, easy to conceal, and (hopefully) less of a target for when I'm just walking around a locale. (The Sony was difficult to hide or be discreet with.)

I can even pack a pair of spare SD cards and the spare battery (which I bought, always carry a spare!) into the mini-case. What I should've done was get a 2nd ultracompact case for holding the AC charger and one or two SD card cases (which are made out of aluminum). I'll probably pickup another $9 case the next time I'm in Circuit City. Eventually, I might purchase a 3rd battery.

I ordered a few Kingston 1GB SD cards from MWave (or NewEgg) because the prices at Circuit City were too high. Their prices were only competitive if you jumped through the rebate hoop. I'd rather pay a bit of shipping and get the same price without the rebate nonsense. Each 1GB card allows me to store about 300 pictures in the highest resolution (3072x2304) / highest quality mode. This camera only allows storage in JPEG and each image averages out around 2.7MB.

Picture quality on the camera is pretty good. There's a bit of barrel distortion at the corners of the image, but that's not something that bothers me. For prosumer work, I plan on picking up a new digital SLR once they hit 15-20 megapixels for under a grand. Mostly I'm using this camera to document computer installations and for touristy pictures. I'll post some sample pictures in a few days.

The one feature that sparks my imagination is the "stich" mode. The first picture you take sets the exposure, then you pan across the landscape that you're capturing (overlapping the previous image). You can then stich the multiple images (up to 26) back together in the computer to get a very high resolution photograph. That's definitely something I'm going to experiment with.

The other thing that makes me happy about this camera is the speed. Quick to activate, quick to take pictures. And you can even do continous pictures (multiple times per second down to about once per second) if you have a high-speed (133x) SD card installed. Makes the old Sony camera look pokey.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 8:48 AM (0 comments)

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Dreaming in greek subtitles

I swear I was dreaming in greek with greek subtitles last night. The person was flip/flopping between greek and english but the symbols below were greek. Well at least I think it was greek, I only understood about half of it.

And it's been about 18 years since I studied greek (and that was only ancient written greek).

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 10:24 AM (0 comments)

Friday, June 16, 2006

Japanese Language

For the past month, I've been hitting the language books at least a few times per week. Mostly because I found out that someone I know and talk to frequently is also attempting to learn the language. I'm sure we'll make all sorts of mistakes and our language won't be the most polite, but it's fun to trade words because it forces me to start picking them up.

Back in the early spring, I estimated that I knew around 1/4 of the kana symbols (hiragana/katakana) and maybe 100-200 words. Which isn't a terribly good start, but might have also been underscoring myself a bit. There are a lot of words that I can identify in spoken speech which helps in breaking down the spoken language (so that I can recognize sentence structure).

Now, I suspect that I might know closer to 300-400 words. I've been mostly concentrating on nouns because they rarely change based on usage. Verbs are much more difficult because there are all sorts of rules about how to change them to match the sentence. Adjectives aren't too bad, but they also change in certain situations. Stock phrases are easy enough to learn, but I'm still a ways away from forming my own sentences or understanding spoken / written speech.

At some point this summer, I need to knuckle down and write out all of the kana symbols a few hundred times. That way I'll know the stroke order and be able to recognize all of the kanas.

Then I get to start on the Kanji symbols... eep!

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 1:25 AM (0 comments)

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Lexapro 6 month mark

So I've been taking Lexapro 10mg/day for about 6 months now (with at least another 12 months of refills on my prescription form).

I started to down-spiral again last summer, but put off going to see my physician until December (about 3-4 months later then I should've). By December I was classified as mild/moderate depression (simple).

Key signs for me was the fact that I was laying in bed most nights, idly thinking about different ways to kill myself. (Suicidal ideation, but with no firm plans, timeline or method.) Also, laying in bed at night doing nothing but reviewing past mistakes and feeling hopeless about the future. Work was also not going well as I felt "slow" and "laggy" most days with very little motivation to do anything (except sit in the chair and stare at the screen).

So for now, I'm simply taking medication. No therapy. We've classified it as mild/moderate with no complications. When I went in to see my doc last December, I told her that even if I didn't ring up as severe depression (like back in 2002), I knew that I was sliding that way. That in a few more months (say early spring) I'd be curled up on the floor most days and in a severe state of depression. (Been there, done that, got the hand stamp.)

At least this time around I got in and got help before I got to that stage. Getting better at putting up the white flag and saying "yo, I need a bit of help here".

It took a while to get used to the meds (6-8 weeks) and I've been off of them twice. Once at the start of March (3-4 days), which resulted in a basic anxiety attack causing me to cancel a trip to NY. The second was at the start of April (2 weeks) due to the pharmacy not being able to refill my prescription when I wanted it (9 days left on a 30 day prescription) and the next week I relapsed and didn't leave the house for 2 weeks.

For the most part, I measure my emotional health by the # of times per week that I think about suicide. And I mean spending an extended amount of time while I lay in bed thinking about it, not just a passing reference. Last fall, I was pondering it at least 3-5 nights per week. Now, I haven't dwelled on it in weeks and it doesn't attract me in any more then morbid curiosity.

So I may not be cured, but the Lexapro lessens the symptoms enough to be functional again.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 12:01 AM (0 comments)

Monday, June 05, 2006

Mozilla Firefox Extensions, Moji

One useful extension for Mozilla's Firefox web browser is "Moji" which is a sidebar tool that allows you to lookup kanji symbols and obtain the english equivalent.

I'd imagine that there's something similar for other languages as well.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 9:38 AM (0 comments)

Friday, May 19, 2006

Testing kana/kanji

Dunno how well this works in Blogger's tool. The IME doesn't seem to work inside this.

??????(konban wa)
??????? (oyasumi nasai)

I actually had to compose those in another application, then past them in.

And... they display as all ?????s. Probably because I don't have the proper language setting in the <HEAD> element. Mmm, nope, Blogger chokse on them entirely. Looking at the HTML source generated, it converted them to ?????s.

Oddly enough, they show up properly inside of the Blogger edit window.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 1:18 AM (0 comments)

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Archives and broken links

I've fixed about 90% of the broken links. There are still a lot of pages with the old ".html" suffix instead of ".shtml" that I need to find and fix. There's also some images and cross-page links that are broken.

(For the curious, I'm using Xenu's Link Sleuth.)

Statistics for managers
Correct internal URLs, by MIME type:
text/html 1006 URLs 8676849 Bytes (8473 KB) 69.72%
text/xml 1 URLs 12692 Bytes (12 KB) 0.07%
text/css 1 URLs 1850 Bytes (1 KB) 0.07%
image/jpeg 407 URLs 42939203 Bytes (41932 KB) 28.21%
image/gif 22 URLs 387046 Bytes (377 KB) 1.52%
text/plain 6 URLs 25242 Bytes (24 KB) 0.42%
Total 1443 URLs 52042882 Bytes (50823 KB) 100.00%
All pages, by result type:
ok 1443 URLs 45.51%
skip external 1455 URLs 45.88%
not found 272 URLs 8.58%
connection aborted 1 URLs 0.03%

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 8:06 PM (0 comments)

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

York PA January 2003

Just 4 random pictures of York PA back in January 2003.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 12:12 PM (0 comments)

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Spam spam

Oops, found out that my late-2005 spam stats were underreported.

2003-10 2944 - 94/day
2003-11 3225 - 108/day
2003-12 3778 - 122/day
2004-01 3252 - 105/day
2004-02 3590 - 124/day
2004-03 4162 - 134/day
2004-04 5144 - 172/day
2004-05 5453 - 176/day
2004-06 6258 - 209/day
2004-07 5966 - 192/day
2004-08 6134 - 197/day
2004-09 5331 - 178/day
2004-10 5602 - 181/day
2004-11 5939 - 198/day
2004-12 6847 - 221/day
2005-01 7049 - 227/day
2005-02 6208 - 222/day
2005-03 6202 - 200/day
2005-04 5689 - 189/day
2005-05 6490 - 209/day
2005-06 6190 - 206/day
2005-07 6175 - 199/day
2005-08 5642 - 182/day
2005-09 5562 - 185/day
2005-10 6556 - 211/day
2005-11 6611 - 220/day
2005-12 7748 - 250/day
2005-01 7564 - 244/day
2005-02 5429 - 194/day
2005-03 3249 - 105/day
2005-04 2826 - 94/day

We've started doing moderate filtering at the mail server, so the client machines will see less spam. My goal is to catch 80-90% at the server level so that the client machines are less swamped.

The fun spams are the ones that are 750KB to 1MB! What are these folks thinking when they're sending out such large attachments?

Labels: 2006, Spam

posted by Wuphon's at 9:25 AM (0 comments)

Monday, April 24, 2006

2004 Confederate Armada (CA) LAN Party

Pictures from the 2004 CA LAN party up in Williamsport, PA. Bunch of us from the gaming clan got together at Parrot's place and played games all weekend in an outdoor tent. It worked out pretty well and we had a good showing.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 11:57 AM (2 comments)

Thursday, April 20, 2006

AIM gets the boot

I've pretty much disabled AOL Instant Messenger on my system now. It has a bad habit of chewing up CPU cycles in the background, even when it's *hidden* and not showing at all.

Thanks, but no thanks, AOL. When I minimize an application like a chat client, I expect it to go to sleep, not chew on my CPU while it downloads ads that I'll never see.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 1:04 PM (0 comments)

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

The Apple Product Cycle

The Apple Product Cycle

Enjoy!

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 1:25 AM (0 comments)

Friday, April 07, 2006

Wishlist items

Samsung 204B - 20" LCD 1600x1200

Kensington Desk Monitor mounting arm

Tiger K8WE (S2877) - dual-CPU Opteron board

Antec p180/p180b case

Opteron dual-core CPUs (probably the 270s, they're getting close to my price target)

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 12:35 PM (0 comments)

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Working on the archives

Re-working the archives again, changing the pages to make use of server-side includes.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 10:15 PM (0 comments)

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Spam

2003-10 2944 - 94/day
2003-11 3225 - 108/day
2003-12 3778 - 122/day
2004-01 3252 - 105/day
2004-02 3590 - 124/day
2004-03 4162 - 134/day
2004-04 5144 - 172/day
2004-05 5453 - 176/day
2004-06 6258 - 209/day
2004-07 5966 - 192/day
2004-08 6134 - 197/day
2004-09 5331 - 178/day
2004-10 5602 - 181/day
2004-11 5939 - 198/day
2004-12 6847 - 221/day
2005-01 7049 - 227/day
2005-02 6208 - 222/day
2005-03 6202 - 200/day
2005-04 5689 - 189/day
2005-05 6490 - 209/day
2005-06 6190 - 206/day
2005-07 6175 - 199/day
2005-08 5606 - 181/day
2005-09 5539 - 185/day
2005-10 6467 - 209/day
2005-11 4138 - 138/day
2005-12 1439 - 46/day
2005-01 7564 - 244/day
2005-02 5429 - 194/day
2005-03 3249 - 105/day

We've started doing moderate filtering at the mail server, so the client machines will see less spam.

Labels: 2006, Spam

posted by Wuphon's at 9:21 AM (0 comments)

Friday, March 31, 2006

Order of the Stick

Finally got my copy of Order of the Stick, Dungeon Crawlin' Fools in the mail. Most excellent.

For those not in the know, Order of the Stick is a webcomic with an extremely clean (and well done) style about a party of adventurers. The author / artist takes great liberty with the concept which results in a lot of fun inside jokes.

Don't worry if you've never played D&D, there's enough other jokes there to keep you laughing. And D&D jokes are somewhat self-explanatory anyway.

The other nice thing is that it's a fairly clean comic. About the worst part is the cartoon violence when the party does battles with the bad guys.

Definitely worth the $25.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 1:28 AM (0 comments)

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Antec p160 case internals

Here are some pictures of the Antec p160 case that I bought back in 2003. I've used this case for 4 or 5 systems since then. It makes a fairly nice server case, although it doesn't do as good of a job as I'd like in keeping the drives cool (in the lower 4 bays).

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 10:43 AM (0 comments)

Monday, March 13, 2006

Mars Probe Scorecard

The Mars Scorecard - A page that tracks how the game of "Mars Expensive Hardware Lob" has been going for the past few decades.

(a.k.a. How many probes have we sent to Mars vs how many succeeded.)

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 4:12 PM (0 comments)

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

CoDUO: Broadsword Beta

Not my map, but one that I found interesting.

Labels: 2006, CallOfDuty

posted by Wuphon's at 9:44 AM (0 comments)

Friday, March 03, 2006

How telephones work

The Telecom Digest New User Information and FAQ contains a FAQ section about how telephone systems work.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 12:56 PM (1 comments)

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

CoDUO: Key map debug commands

/devmap [mapname]
- Allows you to load a map in debug mode.

/cg_drawFPS 2
- Shows you additional information, such as the number of tris / vertices / primatives / entities visible at the moment.

/cg_drawshader 1
- Shows you the texture names under your crosshairs.

/r_showportals 1
- Draws the portal boundaries, allowing you to see how the map was sectioned out.

/r_showtris 2
- Draws the outlines of surfaces. Useful for seeing how finely an area was divided.

/r_showsurfcounts 1
- Shows the number of textures in use by a particular model.

/r_showtricounts 1
- Shows the number of triangles in use by a particular model. This is a good measure of model complexity.

Labels: 2006, CallOfDuty

posted by Wuphon's at 7:58 AM (0 comments)

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Slowing rate of advancement for PCs

We've been talking about this effect off and on at work. Back in the mid-90s, it was not uncommon for a 3-year old machine to be completely outclassed by newer machines. Processor speeds were doubling every 12-15 months, memory sizes were jumping and hard drive sizes grew by leaps and bounds.

Fast forward to the last few years (2001-2005). Processor speeds really haven't budged much, maybe a four-fold improvment in performance over the past 5 years. Some of that is simply due to the advent of dual-core machines.

For example, my 1.6Ghz Tecra 9100 laptop with WinXP is still a very viable machine for office work. Mostly because we've upgraded it along the way to have a 100GB HD and 1GB of RAM. I've been using it for 4 years straight (heavy use) and just replaced the keyboard and DVD drive. In another few months to a year, I'll be handing it off to another user who will probably use it as their primary machine for another 4-5 years. The major reason I plan on upgrading is because 1GB of RAM doesn't meet my needs anymore (I need 2-3GB).

It boggles the mind a bit to realize that this laptop will be in active use for 8-10 years. The first laptop (Tecra 8100) that I bought in March 2000 only lasted me 2 years before I handed it off to another user (who used it for 2 years). I reckon that the Thinkpad T60p that I'll be purchasing later this year will probably last me 4-5 years as a primary machine as well. It might even still be in use in 2020!

It was a subtle shift, but somehow we've moved into the domain where a 5-year old machine is merely middle-aged instead of hopelessly antique. At least, for office / school work.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 9:38 PM (0 comments)

Friday, February 17, 2006

Fraud Resources

Fraud Resources

FraudTech

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 12:03 AM (0 comments)

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Depersonalization Books

Picked up a new pair of books for a bit of light reading, this time about depersonalization.

The Stranger in the Mirror by Marlene Steinberg, M.D. and Maxine Schnall.

Feeling Unreal by Daphne Simeon, M.D. and Jeffrey Abugel

Sometime I should list all of the books that are currently on my "to-read" list. It's a rather eclectic collection that covers a very broad range of topics.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 10:27 AM (0 comments)

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Hard Drive Densities

There are only a few ways to get more capacity in a hard drive.

1) Larger platters (physical size). Not really an option for most applications as the larger platters lead to larger seek times. Which is one of the reasons that the old 5.25" HDDs went out of vogue (they had 20-40ms seek times). The 3.5" drives typically have 8-12ms seek times and 2.5" drives are even faster (3-5ms).

2) More platters. Some drives pack 5+ platters into each unit, with up to 10 heads (one on each side of the platter). After a certain point, you run into a roadblock. The platters can't be made any thinner and you can't pack the platters any closer together.

3) Areal density. This is the number of bits that you can store per square inch (or square centimeter, 1 square inch = 6.4516 square centimeters). Most gains in capacity come from increases in areal density. However, even with GMR, they've run into a roadblock where you can't store the bits any closer together without them starting to interfere with each other. Future drives will use a technology called PR (perpendicular recording) which allows more areal density without this problem. PR is expected to boost capacity up to 5x over GMR technology.

Areal densities:

1998 - ~12 gigabits/sq in
1999 - ~25 gigabits/sq in
2000 - ~60 gigabits/sq in

GMR was expected to top out at 75 gigabits/sq in, but even today, most drives being manufactured are only 60 gigabits/sq inch. That's the main reason that hard drive sizes seem to have stagnated for the past few years.

PR drives are finally shipping (nearly 4 years after being demonstrated back in 2002). Their starting density is 100-130 gigabit/sq inch. Expected maximum density should be around 230-245 gigabits/sq inch. That's about a 4x gain over what we can cram into a 3.5" drive today.

As a rough guess, we should see 600-800GB drives soon with drive sizes topping out just shy of 2TB in a 3.5" package before we hit the wall again.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 12:14 PM (0 comments)

Sunday, February 05, 2006

CoDUO: Alpha Town test shots

Just two screen shots from a bit of mapping I was doing where I was considering creating a central town for a map. The key idea was that there would be a river running up the middle of the city that tanks and vehicles could use as a travel path.

Here's the T34 in the canal. The water is 30u deep, which is about the maximum depth before you run into issues with players wading into it.


An overhead shot of the probable street locations. Two vehicle crossings with a foot bridge in the middle. You can see that the canal wall has been broken in two places to allow vehicles to exit the canal.



Mostly, this was an experimental map. I was experimenting with street sizes, how tall bridges needed to be, and whether a sewer system would work. One thing I found out with the sewers is that forcing the player to crouch-walk for more then 300-500u is boring. So I made the sewer tunnels tall enough that players could stand up inside and run/sprint.

I also did not understand patches or terrain meshes when I created this map. So everything was done with simple brushes. That gets to be a bit of a pain when you're trying to do more realistic terrain.

There's also the issue that I'm not sure how I would've portaled this map. I wanted players to be able to get up onto rooftops, which was going to be tricky with frame rates.

Labels: 2006, CallOfDuty

posted by Wuphon's at 8:30 PM (0 comments)