A week past on Saturday I went to Glasgow’s Zombie Walk to take photos of the brain-munching undead…it was fun, and here’s hoping next year’s even better!
Some of the photos I took that have made it to Flickr so far…
I did mention there’d be computer assemblage porn in my last post but in the end that didn’t happen. I guess at some point I’ll need to have the side off to connect some of the extra ports that were included though so there is some potential for computer pr0n yet.
I did, however perform some comparison with the i7 CPU in that machine doing some useful real world task: compiling Firefox (from mozilla-central) and Thunderbird (from comm-central) on Linux.
VMWare Workstation only allows the assignment of a maximum of two processors to a VM, but it still manages to do the job ~25% faster than my laptop (Dell Latitude D820, T7200, 2GB RAM running Ubuntu), churning out a completed build of either from scratch in about twenty minutes.
Running Debian in a virtual machine was always going to be a requirement (it’s useful for a lot of things, including some far too risky to attempt on the live machines; it’s something I also do on the X2 3800+ and something the i7′s extra 6 “processors” come in handy for).
The machine was running the Windows 7 Release Candidate, but using either VMWare or VirtualBox on there is just one big clusterfsck. The Debian installer locks solid at some point along the way in both, and using NAT in VMWare is also busted.
Fortunately I’ve got spare Vista licenses up the wazoo, so it wasn’t hard to step back to Vista Ultimate while waiting for a fixed VMWare and the release of Windows 7.
My just-over-three year old desktop machine was due a replacement.
type | name -------------+--------------------------------------------------- Motherboard | Asus P6T Deluxe CPU | Intel i7 920 D0 Stepping Retail RAM | OCZ 6GB PC3-12800C8 DDR3 (3x2GB) (OCZ3G1600LV6GK) Case | Lian-Li PC-A71B Graphics | XFX Radeon HD 4890 1GB HDD | Western Digital Caviar Black WD640AALS PSU | Antec TruePower New 650W DVD-RW | LG GH22NS40 Backup HDD | Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS CPU Cooler | Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme Fan | Noctua NF-P12 120mm (11 rows)
Initially, it’ll be running some version of Windows 7 (though I also have a spare Vista license) but given it’s not released there’s no point considering how much that’ll cost for now.
The plan is to put the two WD6401AALSs in a RAID array then backup in some manner to the WD10EADS. Given the price of RAM (£70.99 for 3x2GB), I’m half-tempted to go nuts and have 12GB of RAM.
Some sort of computer-assemblage pr0n to follow – the motherboard and CPU cooler should be with me tomorrow…
Before Christmas I hired a Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens from Lenses For Hire. It’s a really nice lens, although, as with any macro lens the depth of field at the minimum focus distance (32cm) is rather small (~1mm at f/2.8, ~4mm at f/11)
So I bought one…a few shots from the other day:
Next order of business is a new camera bag and a decent tripod.
A while ago, in response to someone commenting about Opera being faster than Firefox I posted this, among others, based on my own testing:
(Results are from the Sunspider JS benchmark. Opera 9.60, Chrome 0.2.149.30, Firefox nightly is from the 17th October 2008)
Before anyone points it out, I get that there are issues comparing an Fx3.1-ish nightly with a release version of Opera but
Anyhoo, out of interest I reran the tests adding Firefox 3.0.6 and the latest Firefox trunk nightly, Chrome 2.0.160.0 and Webkit’s 40471 nightly.
I can’t be bothered testing IE because a) it would take too long and b) I wouldn’t get comparable numbers, because the machine I ran all of these on only has IE6 and it’s too much hassle upgrading and downgrading and sidegrading. The general trend (from messing about with it on Windows 7 and Vista on other machines) I’ve observed is that each new version is faster than its predecessor and IE8 more so than IE7.
TM = TraceMonkey, the new bit to Firefox 3.1′s JS engine. For the purposes of this, I set javascript.options.jit.content = true for TM, and false otherwise. True is now the default.
Obviously Sunspider isn’t representative of, well, anything (Dromaeo tests DOM manipulation too, and there are loads of benchmarks around, some more useful than others) but it’s interesting to see (I guess) that the general trend is for things to get faster…
Since the dawn of time (even before switching from RedHat to Debian ~6 years ago) I’ve used the Qmail MTA, with a whole pile of other crud piled on top (like vpopmail to handle virtual users, and some Perl to hook up to SpamAssassin and ClamAV).
It worked (in the loosest sense), but had loads of issues.
Most of the parts had to be compiled from source (especially Qmail, since it needed a bundle of patches) and in the early days, not being used to the Way of the Swirl, even ClamnSpam were compiled from sauce. Down the line, that changed, but there was some manual intervention required to make qmail-scanner-queue.pl pick up on changed version numbers. Despite the avalanche of suck inherent to his setup, it worked…so there wasn’t much impetus to break it.
A while back, I played with Exim but never made any real progress making it work and somehow arrived at Postfix, finding guides to do what I wanted (which I’ve since wikified and mangled for my own uses). The current setup uses Postfix MTA, Amavisd with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and Courier for IMAP, with virtual user details stored in a MySQL database and the mail stored under /var/vmail.
Because Postfix can check if a virtual user is valid at SMTP-time it can reject invalidly addressed mail then, whereas the Qmail setup accepted everything then let Vpopmail bin the invalid ones, generating loads of crud to postmaster@domain.
These images should speak for themselves:
There’s just one small annoyance – apparently, there’s no way to get Amavisd-new to include the verbose spam report from SA unless the message is tagged as spam.
After hearing Nicholas Felton talking on Boagworld about his annual reports and Daytum, I thought it might be interesting to sign up.
After being bitten by an issue — having reject_non_fqdn_hostname (which apparently now lives in a separate config option and calls itself reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname) in smtpd_recipient_restrictions results in
postfix/smtpd[10468]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from 209-20-86-76.slicehost.net[209.20.86.76]: 504 5.5.2 <daytum>: Helo command rejected: need fully-qualified hostname;
— with the Postfix configuration for the box handling mail for one of my domains, I finally got an invite.
I couldn’t actually think of anything I’m that desperate to count (that isn’t already, like RSS feed stats on Google Reader) though, but someone else was doing drinks so I might as well jump on the bandwagon…
Sooo…installed WP 2.7b3 on my BitFolk VPS, and it seems pretty decent so far, though FigureRender’s settings took some fun with MySQL’s command line (not to mention the images that were deleted but weren’t and caned my upstream no end).
“Long term”, it seems like a pretty good not bad idea to run this from here, rather than hanging off my Zen (will it ever be Be?) ADSL…
So Wednesday, Windows (Vista) on my laptop did an Xbox (crapped itself and died). Woke it up from standby, started up, black screen. Forced the power off and started it up, black screen for ages, Windows finally starts, Event Log/Sidebar/Wireless all kaput.
Some Googling later, and found this. Long and short, run NETSH WINSOCK RESET CATALOG and restart. Job done, it all works again.
On Friday I got a Seagate ST3500320AS – 500GB, SATA2, 32MB cache – and used it to replace the 250GB IDE Western Digital as the Windows boot drive (removing a 120GB WD which used to be the boot drive and became purely for storage when I built this machine a little over 2 years ago).
Used Acronis True Image to copy one drive to the other to dodge installing Windows (last installed 25th April 2006!). All goes well except the next morning, the machine’s back at the login prompt. Fair enough, maybe I restarted the machine and forgot to log in. Until the same happened the next morning…long story short, it turned out that ntbackup.exe was using Volume Shadow Copy, and for whatever reason that made the machine chuck a BAD_POOL_HEADER BSOD.
Much Googling suggested a driver issue, and eventually I found this post on techspot.com, with the following:
- open regedit from the run menu.
- goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE-10318}
- Export this key so you have a backup of it. (I know this solves the MSbackup but I don’t know if other problems will pop up.)
- delete the key “UpperFilters”
- re-boot
- My computer did a “Found new hardware” when it re-booted and required another re-boot.
- Go ahead and re-boot
Worked fine, so I’m happy.
