Thursday 22 December 2011

Lightning Slow


Since May this year (2011) I've been enjoying the slick speeds of an SSD Raid stripeset for my /steam partition. Its was only a two drive stripe but still crazy fast compared to its clunky Magnetic disk counterpart.
Its a pair of OCZ 180GB Vertex-2s, and they look pretty shiny.

Striping two drives together also helps account for the piddly size of SSD drives, doubling up the capacity so my two one-eighties appear as a single 360GB partition. Which is reasonable for /steam as I don't tend to have too much installed at once and its speed that matters.

With only six onboard SATA connectors, assigned to drives for /boot, /data, BluRay and Card Reader using up the last two drives for /steam seemed reasonable and sacrificing RAID-5 Parity saved the purchase cost of a third drive.

Given everything on /steam is DRM'd I can easily reinstall it and in my arrogance decided against fitting an additional SATA card just for the sake of adding a parity disk.  Let Valve mirror my files, why should I have to as well? Besides, the drives are rated at two million hours of reliability.  Thats two-hundred years and some change.  I only need them to be reliable for 10% of that time?  Parity Schmarity I'm going to be fine with a two-drive stripeset.

Local games were shockingly fast - the upgrade broke the back of the data transfer bottleneck. Gigs of data flowed so fast and I started considering that 8GB of RAM wasn't enough and it might be time to step up to sixteen.
Loading times had dropped, map changes were scary fast.  It was a golden time.

And then, within six months tragedy struck. It was the merry month of movember when one of the drives ceased to be, destroying the stripe and losing all data.  That weekend I regained composure, unplugged it and installed the essentials to the remaining disk.  A single SSD for games is still better than a magnetic drive after all. but Less than two weeks later, the second one gave up its will to live.
Well thank you OCZ.  How proud I was of the shiny pair of Vertex-2 drives when they arrived, and how far did I fall when they died, belly up. Two Million Hours of reliability. I call Bullshit. That should mean two hundred years if I ran them 24/7.  I ran them about 6/6 - thats maybe a hundred and fifty hours. like less than 0.01% of their expected lifespan. I don't even know if I want a replacement. Another ticking timebomb waiting to crash and lose all my games again? Pah.

And what would I have gained by adding the extra reliability of a third drive for parity? Three dead drives.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh, and should try again. Give OCZ a second chance. But I've got (e.g. my Boot and Swap drive) SSDs from Crucial that I've had for twice as long and they must have been thrashed harder and still going strong.

Thursday 16 June 2011

Swiss Army Computer

It might be apparent that I think every OS since the abacus has been an increasing pain in the arse, but it has to be said that some modern developments mean even the heavier contemporary OS has enough advantages to make it useable.
At the start of the year I was dipping into Ubuntu as a breath of fresh air from my otherwise stale Windows 7 desktop and I've continued my affair with Ubuntu through a VM so its become more of a launched application than operating environment, and its also meant I can try builds of ChromeOS and other Linux flavours to keep up to date.

Added to the VM belt has been half a dozen OS choices, including WindowsXP which has provided the unique ability to install applications and trial them without polluting an otherwise pristine Win7 setup.
The routine is rather neat - you clone your fresh-os-install VM image and install demos, trials and apps. Given Uninstall wizards tend to be more akin to Tommy Cooper than Mary Poppins in their ability to perform cleaning magic, keeping Windows skippy is all but impossible and the OS eventually gets bogged down. So you reformat and reinstall - Except this is VM, which means you only have to delete the OS and clone the fresh image again. The process takes about five minutes and you have a fresh windows install to use.
Better yet - because I've done the install once it already has its drivers perfectly configured, Chrome is installed, Acrobat Reader, Antivirus and firewalls are already up. Better yet, I'm just copying an OS image, so I can do this without rebooting and without a minute of downtime.

The surfing/browsing experience inside a fullscreen VM is seamless and secure. Day-to-Day operation is confined to a walled-garden super-sandbox that has no access to your hard disk, documents, or personal files. Want the best of both worlds? Switch to your OS of choice and take a stab at anything with your new swiss-army-computer.

As you can imagine, by now my Host OS doesn't have much installed. There are a few apps I want to run without a VM in the way but its fairly minimal.

Playing with VMs has lead to me a rather startling discovery though, one which I really didn't expect. It turns out, your OS choice doesn't matter as much as you think it does. With more and more apps running online, its only the hard-hitters that are restricted to one or two OS options. Everything else 'just runs'

LootBox

Each passing day, week, month or year has seen the occasional upgrade of my PC. Often to quiet down a noisy fan, sometimes in the spirit of moving with the times, other times for the sugar high of a new purchase feeding the construction avarice. At each step I am tinkering with machined aluminium and a servant to the sleek silicon-and-steel overlord and its maintenance.

But a change has come and now all is quiet and still. The process has always been the purpose - differential diagnoses, research, budget, purchase, construction and satisfaction - but the journey inevitably comes to an end, and it has - for the time being - led to a box of loot that does its job very well indeed.

The paper specs currently read well enough. Its no supercomputer, but each component has a story behind it. In an age of minitureisation, I bought an oversized monolith of a case - not my smartest move ever but I wanted space for a HDD enclosure, DVD drive and 3.5" external slot - that culled a lot of options. I wanted holes for water pipes, too.
The HDD Enclosure is loot in itself, almost silencing the WD Green drive inside - again an extra 1.5TB of loot. The DVDRW drive has been replaced with a Blu Ray drive. The external 3.5" is a card reader, not floppy drive. In this way, every component has come along one more step that its 'default' configuration.

My solid blue-veined throbbing tower is a Zamlan Reserator, replacing a Domino ALC watercooling kit in a lootier-than-thou upgrade to cool the GPU and I'm considering a Northbridge block because the now fanless-and-silent case has quite low airflow.

Corsair provided 8GB of RAM, although I have yet to fit the optional cooling fins they shipped with. 8GB isn't that looty in this day an age, but at the time or purchase it was quite respectable and is going to be more than enough for a while yet.

While the extra RAM is to reduce paging, a pair of 180GB OCZ SSDs speed up /swap no end. Despite its finite write cycles, SSD makes great swap because of the fast access and zero seek time. When paging to disk, the computer becomes throttled by the HDD seek time not the bus bandwidth so the <0.1ms seek time equivilent SSD beats the >9ms average HDD seek and is a hundred times faster. Actually its a hundred times not-as-slow, which isn't the same as a hundred times faster but still pretty good going.

A third lone Crucial SSD serves as a Boot drive. While OS boot isn't as performance critical or capacity limited as /swap it's worth noting that even a single SSD is bigger and faster than I need for boot so I'm quite happy with it.

The zero-noise build policy has informed a number of decisions, so its a reduced power rig not a super computer. Four Cores and 8GB isn't a monster in this day and age, but the machine is built for shiny things and loot rather than for brute force high-performance and its more than fast enough with no shortage of RAM and fast disk access. Its cost a few extra quid here and there to put the computer together but its been spread over a few months and you start noticing the improvements straight away.

Overall if you are building a rig or just tinkering with upgrades, consider RAM and SSD Raid to make it less slow which is just as important as making it faster. Buy loot because its shiny, because you want it and because you are worth it.

The weird thing about having 'finished' construction, was realising that it was the constructing that was fun. That was the driving force, not the end result. Now I've got an end result, I just don't know what to do with it - its the end of the chase, once you've won there is no more "looking forward to winning" feeling. But on the plus side... winnzies for me!

Homebrew Programming

Sometimes I write code at home. Often its a sample, example or fragment. Sometimes I'm working from or writing to a tutorial. Maybe I'm sharpening my skills and every now and then its recreational. Homebrew for me tends to be a quite polarised affair - its either VERY close to my day job, solving the same problem a different way or just exploring the problem domain - or its that I've chosen to tackle something that I'll never get paid to do.

And this is one of those times, except I've let it run away with me. I stated glancing at the code I've got scattered around there are classes for a simple physics integrator, some camera code, an input tutorial I wrote for somebody, maths libraries that date back to the 90's, some file IO and resource management. Left over from a previous project I've got some network replication and RPC code I wrote, and last Autumn I wrote a streaming perlin-noise landscape.

So it wasn't long before I realised I'd accidentally written a game - or at least most of it - piecemeal over the past few years. In fact, just adding a message pump and sprinkling it liberally with Dependency Injection provided a mulitplayer first-person sandbox I can use to write a game.

What I can't get over is how similar foresight and hindsight are when you are writing code. Knowing the author and intentions of each system in a codebase really helps, but believe me - you don't want to live in this guys code - or his head. On the plus side, he wrote a lot of code and quite a bit of software. It all 'works' and is an entire working games codebase with an example game sitting on the top - but some of it feels like legacy code rather than a lean games API.

Oddly though, the project is coming together - so much so that I can't put it down. Every now and then I open up the project and tinker a little further. Adding something small, contained and complete.

Each of these steps has been reasonably self contained and a brief retrospective revealed that I'd fallen quite comfortably into agile habits as I've bounced from feature to feature. The discipline is getting each step "just working" with minimum effort, regulated by user-story based production.
At each step I've started with the Statement "I want feature X so I can get result Y" and attempted to follow the shortest stable path from here to there.

Agile does make programming games even more fun, and I've never had a satisfying goal further than arms-reach away. After sprint four, I realised I was cherry picking items from the backlog rather than taking the highest priority item so sprint five was a backlog-clearing exercise of assorted odds and ends that I had been avoiding. The few sprints since then have been quite clear sailing, and the empowerment of always doing something important combined with constant drip-feed satisfaction keeps momentum quite high. I'm now finishing Sprint thirteen, with a large product backlog to choose new features from and invaluable feedback from a couple of players.

By working in a free, almost goal-less manner, I've scored more goals than this metaphor makes sense. I've gone from a single rendered triangle through to a 3D world made of bricks where you can construct and shape the world in a first person perspective.

Watch this space. Its evolving.


Sunday 15 May 2011

iPlodding


The list of books i'll never read continues to grow as great works and greater drivel is penned each year, and hours of commuting eventually exhausts even a reasonable music collection and it doesn't take long to tire of news. As a motorist I did rather wish there was a bus or train that would take me the route so that I could read, fiddle with my laptop and work, rest or play for the entire journey.
Driving alone is not enough to excite me, and as a commuter you eventually dread the feel of the wheel. That is, until I started listening to audiobooks during the journey.

Formally "books-on-tape" and latterly "books-on-tape-but-on-CD" MP3 Audiobooks gave a shot in the tired arm of a serial commuter which is the context for this review. Not an individual audiobook or author, nor a particular technology, device or gadget. Just Audiobooks.

Continuing an aural tradition that predates the homeric epics, I stated by picking from the already long list of Books You Are Supposed To Read and I enjoyed both abridged and unabridged tomes from those famous authors - you know the ones. I moved on to a few more contemporary authors, and dabbled in science and education. There is nothing quite like a lecture series with pause, rewind and skip buttons to empower your learning beyond the restrictive structure that would otherwise be imposed.

The opinion on books you should read varies with each person you ask and I won't presume to prescribe or endorse even the ones I've really enjoyed, but I will recommend the experience of being read to. The spoken voice brings forward such character, its a different sensory experience to the written word and one you can thoroughly enjoy while travelling.

As a pedestrian I've continued to listen to books - both fact and fiction - on my journey into work. The return journey is usually reserved for music as brainwidth is a little lower at the end of the day. Audiobooks are cheap and plentiful in this day and age and you don't have to limit youself to the reading list prescribed by the literati, in fact I recommend against it. Go with what you enjoy and enjoy going with it.

I'll give hearing things five stars. Its like reading but its out loud and you can keep your eyes on the road.

Laps, tops, and laptops.


Since its launch in mid 2007 I've enjoyed the easy computing of the Asus EeePC 701. Spurned as "sublaptop" by the bulky, expensive laptop owning elite of its day it was the pioneer of a netbook revolution that reshaped the digital marketplace. Small, robust, lightweight and packed with features the Asus EeePC was also one of the cheapest laptops you couldn't buy - I got mine on import some 6 months before the UK release, complete with Chinese keyboard layout and mains adapter.

As a landmark in hardware the Asus EeePC provided WiFi, webcam and microphone and sported a shock-proof SSD all built in - in an age where all of these were expensive optional extras for the traditional laptop crowd. Even its big-icon tabbed UI paved the way for the tablet iOS and Androids that followed, challenging the desktop-and-start-menu status quo with a glimpse of the future.

After years of service, a few OS installs and bricking it every now and then the EeePC is currently close to being laid to rest. When its been good, its been very very good, but when its been bad its been horrid. Having a Netbook was once like holding a little piece of stardust future in your hands, but the world soon caught up and overtook the humble EeePC. While its battery life is alright "a few hours" doesn't feel like so much any more, and occasional wifi glitches prevent it from being the perfect coffee shop companion. The aged cpu and reduced memory are always 'just less' than you want for all but the most basic netbooky tasks. At around £160, I've had if for something like 160 weeks so its one-pound-per-week value for money brings a smile to my thrifty side too.

The new contenders were a new Gaming Laptop from Alienware - a beast of silicon and steel with a price tag to match, or Googles own Chromebook which follows after the EeePC as the next ultra-thin client netbook. Meanwhile Always Innovating were back in the limelight with their smartbook, packed with and experimental feature set and attractive low price tag. Macintosh also have a new tablet out, which is to be considered as a sleek appliance computer.

...However the final judgement came in favour of the new-model Asus EeePC. Packed with features and apps, its a 10" form factor netbook with a trick up its sleeve - the keyboard detaches and can be discarded rendering the device a touch-screen tablet for a best-of-both worlds device. If it delivers as well as its predecessor I can expect at least a four-year lifespan again and have joined the tablet revolution.

Fractal Design XL Case.


Sturdy and spacious, the case comes with two 120mm fans and a larger (140?) one, lateral mounted 3" bays and cable cavity which all add up to excellent airflow. The case is rock solid and has no sharp edges. Removable dust filters on the air intakes will be easy to wash and help keep the inside clean.

The PSU is mounted at the bottom with its own intake/exhaust and in a thermal chamber that isolates it and its airflow from the rest of the case. The Three large case fans have a variable speed control for them, there are USB, eSATA and 3.5mm jacks on the top of the case next to the power button. Mainly black, with a few white bits on the inside and a sleek door in titanium grey, the box looks great for what is ostensibly a functional item that you don't look at. Its got all the normal luxuries and a few extras thrown in I've not been able to find a fault with it.

It's larger than many cases however you measure it and heavier too - weighing in at 17Kg empty - the weight is likely to be a problem for me personally because I like LAN events and social gaming, but its not a negative about the design or engineering of the case. Its something you may want to consider before buying if you plan to travel with your PC or have a fragile table made of balsa wood and glass.

While 14 drive bays sounds like a lot, the ratio of 10:4 in favour of 3.5" bays doesn't make too much sense. In the Terrabyte age, ten drive bays is a lot for a domestic computer (~20TB) and I'd prefer to see three more 5" bays replacing the top four 3" Bays - it'd still be plenty of drive space (six of each) but provide a lot more flexibility as bay adapters are easy to come by, and I think the case came with one anyway. Its not a bad design decision, but its not a good one either.

Secondly, custom drive trays and screws - while they look great on paper - will ALWAYS cost a star in a review I write. One by one they ARE going to bend/buckle/break, and now i've got to keep track of specific screws for this case too (the SSD bays need screws 1 or 2 mm shorter than normal HDD screws). This knocks the case down from its perfect ten to a maximum score of nine and represents the only thing I might really regret about the case.

Lastly for consideration, I'm not going to subtract any for size and weight and I'm letting my first-impressions score stand at 9/10 but its a great score on thin ice. If the weight or drive bays are a dealbreaker then you might want to choose again, but otherwise the Fractal Design XL comes up aces - even 9/10 feel low for this superb case that comes up trumps in every category.

Monday 24 January 2011

The Top of my Desk.


While I've slowly been tapping Alt-F4 for many years, I'd always had trouble finding a mature Linux desktop OS that I was really happy with. The problems were small and varied, but often there was something that stuck out as either a grumbler or deal breaker. It feels like I *should* be using Linux but its normally a bit uncomfortable, and a few windows games and apps have always provided excuses to stay with Microsofts burnt offerings.

While making a few hardware changes to my PC, it was left out-of-action while awaiting an RMA on a new component so I lugged my Ubuntu machine on to the table and braced myself for the worst. And as it happened the worst wasn't as bad as I'd expected. Wanting to be prepared I upgraded to Lynx, made sure Chrome was working and felt my way in the dark from there.

As a disclaimer, the Ubuntu machine is an old Core2 Duo with 4GB and an HDDs for boot, swap and data. I'm trying hard not to compare its performance to a modern PC, although obviously the weakness of the hardware are going to colour my experience.

First impressions were pretty good and I soon appreciated how dominant online services really make your desktop OS choice all but irrelevant. With Chrome installed I realised I was halfway there - having Mail, Docs et al. available at my fingertips. Google have been a key player in opening up the OS market for competition with a single power-play, and the old-world two horse race between Microsoft and Apple will never recover.

More than a day or two of Ubuntu was a stretch for me, so I installed Wine for Steam and my game(s) of choice. Installing was almost painless - (it was DOA and I had to google the errors) - but after a bit of dicking around it all worked. I'm not sure if I'm getting the performance I'd expect from running native, but its running all the same. I couldn't say games weren't a problem, but being able to install and run Team Fortress 2 without drama and trauma explains why there isn't a commercial Linux client available. Its just not needed.

I was also able to try out some Linux-specific software, in this case Darktable. Its a photo darkroom app that gives you white balance, and many other tweaks to just bring up the standard of your pics. Kudos to the Darktable people, it does what it does really well. I kind of felt weird not being able to airbrush, and perform a few other effects but Darktable assumes you took the right picture to start with and provides you with the Dark Room / Light Table tools and effects essentially allowing you a bit more control over the developing process.

Overall, Desktop Linux wasn't painful because I didn't have to learn anything. In years gone by, there was a brainwidth overhead which a more idiot-proof OS abstracted me from. I had a couple of problems with Eclipse Galileo and with Spotify. The former wasn't much more than "Sudo just fucking work" and the latter I suspect I shall work around with Wine or VirtualBox.

However even the worst gripes I've got are pretty minor, and nothing that would stop me using Ubuntu as a casual Desktop OS. The warm geeky feeling of running Linux finally washing over me, this brief cup of Ubuntu has taught me just how much the desktop market has shifted. Its reminder of how quickly things can change might serve as a glimpse of the future.