Archived News starting from 02-06-2005 and earlier
BlogAll last week I was on the
Carnival Valor crusing around the
eastern caribbean. If you find yourself thinking you need to be fatter and lazier I highly recommend a cruise. It's like a city that floats around from port to port, with all the food you can manage to stuff into your face. Photos:
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8 Stavos was all geeked about the new
3DMark05 Benchmark lastnight and convinced me to run it
on my system. I have an
entire section of my site dedicated to system specifications so it would be against my religion not to run a performance benchmark. I thought I'd fair pretty decently considering my
recent upgrades but after
getting my results I once again confirmed that no matter how current your system is, it's never fast enough. Watching a high-res graphic demo at less than 15 fps brought me back to 1995 when I ran a creative labs demo on my old
IBM PS/2 65sx with similar results. Fortunately back then I was locked into the proprietary micro-channel architecture and an upgrade would have literally cost $1,000. Now with better video cards approaching the $200 mark the temptation is there, with my lack of time for quality gaming as the final boundry that will hopefully keep me in the realm of reality (and budgets).
I
recently installed a weather station at my house and all the streaming data it spits out got me all excited about what to do with it. Ignoring the fact that I'm probably the only one who will actually care about the weather conditions at my house, I forged ahead with my
Automatic Weather Station webpage. Not satisfied, I set a program to send updates to
Weather Underground and created an
XML Version of the weather page. This of course lead to the creation of my
Desktop Weather application to
consume the XML (requires .NET framework). Now that I can visit my webpage, a Weather Underground webpage, and have the temperature on my desktop I can finally rest.
Over a
foot of snow fell lastnight getting me all giddy to go for a drive in it. Fortunately I didn't have long to wait.
Duane called requesting assistance with his car which had blown a fuse and I was off. The nice thing about a foot of snow on a Saturday is that the timid tend to stay off the roads leaving me free to play. After assisting I returned to find that Missy had already blown off the driveway. To show her how much I appreciated it I made her videotape me doing drifts at an unnamed parking lot. With my snow fun satisfied for the day, we were off to see the homoerotic play 'RENT' with some friends. Getting lost in Detroit during winterfest before the play put us in the right mood for the perormance. Afterwards I returned to find
PlasmaTeam waiting at my house for web assistance and general brohaha. So ended my day of snow.
I recently started renting my old house, Beta (see
Alpha/Beta classifications). Saturday night, during part 2/2 of the
Jan LAN party I got a call from
Stavos alerting me that there were two cop cars, a fire truck and an ambulance parked in front of Beta. Concerned, but not alarmed, I decided I would ask my renters about it today while I'm installing cabinet doors for them. After emaling the renters about the time I would arrive today I found out the reason for the emergency vehicles. Apparently a homeless person had stopped in my neighbors front yard and succumbed to the cold. The renters in my house found the man and called the ambulance and police.
Here is the news article. A very horrible experience both for the gentleman that died as well as my renters who found him.
Before the
LAN Party, I was under the impression that
RAID disk controllers were only useful for redundancy and stability. That changed after the rantings of
Zorka regarding his new Serial ATA RAID0 array. RAID0 stripes across multiple drives and actually load balances the work between them, resulting in a performance boost. After running a
base benchmark I discovered my single
WD1200JB drive was half the speed of his array. Like an annoying mosquito the potential gains I could achieve from a RAID0 setup kept buzzing in my ear. I finally gave in and bought an identical
WD1200JB drive, which has an 8MB cache and decent specifications (and is affordable) but nowhere near the speed realized with a faster Serial ATA drive. Still excited, I setup both drives as master on separate IDE controllers. I debated using the same controller with a master/slave configuration but using my experience from single drives decided separate controllers would be optimal (if you know something I don't please email me!). The
GA-7N400 Pro2 motherboard in my computer has a built in ITE 8212 GigaRAID controller that was just waiting to be configured, which I did. The setup was simple, and wiped my existing drive clean (yes it was backed up silly!). After a little research I found the "Mass Storage Driver" required for WinXP (why do we still need to load 3rd party drivers from floppies?) and reloaded the computer with the new improved RAID0 array. While the load seemed somewhat faster, nothing spectacular occurred. However, the
new benchmark results was definitely an anticlimax. The new setup gave me an extra 20MB/s average read speed (significant) but actually went down in burst and random reads. However the graph does show a more sustained rate for the RAID as compared to the single, which is hopefully an indication of better archive decompression speeds (my primary need for speed). While the RAID0 now means I'm more vulnerable if a drive failure occurs (complete data loss instead of a bad block) the cool factor and marginal improvement are enough to justify the risk. Yes I know what you want now, so here it is:
an animated benchmark comparison. I used
HD Tach for the benchmarks, send me yours so I can gloat or cry accordingly.
The
Jan LAN Party was last night with a pretty good turnout. Highlights include the attack of the walking eyeballs, anti-wall destruction league, suicide jeep jump and toilet throwing fury. A blown fuse, clogged toilet, and odor dispersing fan signaled a successful event. Part 2/2 follow-up is next weekend.
Contrary to what the
weather station may be reporting lately, my house has not been surrounded by a wind-proof bubble. Nor do I have magic fairy gnomes spinning the wind direction sensor, both of which would have to occur to generate the readings it's been reporting. In fact, the recent rain followed by the freeze immobilized the wind speed sensor which apparently isn't as well protected against rain as the wind direction sensor. I know these reading put many of you in a panic so I thought I would clarify the situation. If anybody has good aim launch a snowball at the thing next time you're near my house. Maybe that will free it up and we can once again resume our normal lives.
Tonight I finished setting up my
WM-918 Weather Station consisting of an
Anemometer,
Rain Collector, and
Thermo-Hygrometer. The end result being some very detailed measurements of the weather occuring around my house. Of course, no new toy is worth much unless you can generate an interactive website from it, so I give you the
AtomicInternet Weather Station. Currently just a hacked piece of HTML which I hope to soon integrate with the
Gnome Cam for a full weather experience. Those of you sufffering 70 degree weather can now experience the virtual dreariness that is Michigan.
A visit from my
floridian friends created a change in my new years plans. Originally slated to occur at the
haus o' Downey, the last minute change turned out
better than expected. We drank, we danced, we played foozball/air hockey and best of all, we violated the light-up deer in my front yard. I hope all who participated enjoyed themselves or used alcohol to forgot. The downside of the floridians leaving is the temperature is sure to drop down from the fabulous 63 degrees we had today. Anytime you come to my house make sure you demand that Missy wear her sailor mercury costume, for my benefit (and yours).
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