bah

sometimes our wonderful loonix gets criticised by the windows noobs (yes my blog is going downhill, I know) about it beng hard to install.
Has anyone ever tried installing Windows to a SATA drive when you also have an IDE hard drive plugged in?
if you have, you might have been greeted with the message “This disk does not contain a Windows compatible partition” even though it can plainly see there’s a partition there and it’s the right type. Windows 7’s installer does exactly the same thing so it makes you wonder how much of their code is rehashed.

For this reason I have finally got Windows again after some time of being Windowless. I had to unplug my IDE drive although in theory I could have disabled it in the BIOS. I didn’t really miss it, but I did miss games.

:(

all does not go so well with my sister’s computer. The motherboard has borked, it is going back. Unfortunately the motherboard has borked in a way critical to the health of a certain other component, so it remains to be seen whether that will also need to be replaced, and if so, it remains to be seen whether we can convince them that we shouldn’t have to pay for it. Don’t buy Biostar motherboards. Don’t even buy one!

neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerd

so yesterday we upgraded my sister’s computer!

today we tested it properly and it (the CPU) was running incredibly hot, like 90+ degrees C under load. Uh oh. There are two interesting CPU temperature readings, there is the ‘core’ temps and the ‘CPU temp’. The core temp is measured by a sensor inside the CPU, the CPU temp is measured by a sensor on your motherboard. The latter will likely be a fair bit cooler (10-15 degrees C). In the case of ‘wow, is my CPU really running so hot or is the measurement just not accurate?’ well, there you go, you have two independent data sources.

Anyway, after much testing and reseating the heatsink with a different brand of the thermal stuff APPLIED SPREAD THINLY ACROSS THE CPU, not just in a fat dollop in the middle (the dollop method was what we tried first time but when we took the heatsink off it was pretty obvious that merely applying the heatsink on top of the dollop didn’t result in it being splatted evenly across the surface of the CPU, unlike every single website ever says), I was thinking we’d have to RMA it because the core temps were rising steadily towards 100 within a minute of stress testing. This is bad. But fear not, it turns out the heatsink was just not quite correctly mounted. The Intel heatsinks are a pain; they give you no instructions (well, they give you a short series of not very helpful diagrams), you get four pins which go into the motherboard, you have to push them down and turn them around in an order not quite specified. If you’re in doubt, it is best to remove your motherboard (with CPU attached) from your case so you can see the back of it. The heatsink pins should splay open when they’re pushed in properly, and there is a little black rod in each pin that should be visible, and roughly to the end of the plastic. If you can wobble the pins around at all after they’re pushed in, even if they seem perfectly secure with respect to their up/down movement, you haven’t pushed far enough and your heatsink won’t make adequate contact with your CPU. This is not mentioned in the instructioin booklet you get with the CPU, because the booklet HAS NO WORDS (okay it does, but none in the ‘instructions’ part). If you have one/two cores running a lot hotter than the others this is probably the culprit.

Anyway it (the core temps) now runs at 35 idle (at which point it seems to be clocked down to 2Ghz1 (from 2.5)), and 60 under full load. Which is okay.

SO ANYWAY, we got a quad core system for a very affordable £347. It consists of:
CPU: Intel Q8300 (£100)
Motherboard: Biostar TP45D2-A7 (£60)
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB (£100)
RAM: 2GB DDR2 800Mhz (£30)
PSU: 550W OCZ Fatal1ty (£50)

Plus postage times two because we had to buy from two separate places.

__________________________
1. Which is interesting because my Athlon X2 3GHz gets clocked all the way down to 1Ghz, not so good on the energy saving there HUH INTEL? Although that’s in Linux, hers is Windows.

hathathat

So! I changed linux distro. Again.

openSUSE had issues that were annoying me too much; various things like: my hard disk seemingly grinds to death when I try to open a program, the kernel it ships with doesn’t like my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-MA770, but there are a few reports of similar issues from other Gigabyte mobos too) which means a few annoying ‘features’ like lack of CPU frequency scaling (i.e. underclocking your CPU when it’s not being used much, to keep it cooler), and the lack of POWEROFF actually happening after you shut down. openSUSE is a good distro, it just doesn’t like me.

I briefly tried sidux (KDE distro based on Debian Unstable), which had initial promise, but it fizzled for various reasons. Mainly it’s just not that well configured with respect to ease of use, and now that there are so many well configured out-of-the-box distros, you just think “what’s the point?”. There is a point maybe 6 months to a year after you start linux that you want to configure things yourself to see how it all works, but now I’m more at the stage where I just want my computer to work properly wth minimal hassle. And when you get to the section on installing your nvidia drivers and it says you need to apt-get install these packages, and those packages don’t exist, you know you are not on a hassle-free distro. Looking on their forums didn’t inspire much hope, either.

Then I thought I’d just play it safe and go back to Kubuntu, until I installed it and promptly remembered why I quit Kubuntu in the first place. Ubuntu is nice. Kubuntu is baaaad.

So now I’m on Fedora. Fedora is actually the first distro I ever used, and it is unique in the sense that I didn’t switch from it because it annoyed me, but instead because I wanted to see other distros. Fedora is slightly risky because it’s kind of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Unstable which means you sometimes get things breaking, but that’s kid of a ‘feature’ because it also means you get the newest software. I installed from the Fedora 12 KDE live CD, and so far I’ve had 3 problems with it:

1) alternate boots failed to start the X server and just gave me a flashing cursor (not even a bash prompt)
2) X + KDE + nvidia = problems
3) I seened to end up with a totally broken GRUB

1 went away after updating everything
2 can be fixed by reading through this thread http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=234227, and getting the fixed X.org rpms.
3 I think is a leftover from kubuntu, but who knows. I have two hard drives and it seemed to end up on the MBR of sda, even though /boot (what the BIOS boots) was supposed to be on sdb1 (and I think I set that in the installer, but maybe not). Once you figure out what’s wrong it’s easy to fix, though.

SO apart from that my experiences are positive! It has nice features like the installer recognises encrypted devices and lets you actually decrypt them and use them as part of your filesystem. I’m not aware of any other distro that supports this in a graphical installer. And you get root partition encryption at install time IN THE GRAPHICAL INSTALLER.

Fedora is pretty well set up for KDE, and its overall appearance borrows a lot from GNOME. That’s not a bad thing, because GNOME is sexy. It feels awful, but it’s nice to look at. The fonts are a lot like Ubuntu’s big fat GNOME fonts, not like the horrible thin windows-like fonts in openSUSE/Kubuntu. The one area it seems to lag a little is with Firefox KDE integration; openSUSE 11.2 has KDE dialogues and strong integration by default. Fedora is better than Kubuntu (i.e. it actually has file handlers set up and clicking ‘open folder’ on the download thing opens Dolphin) but it still uses GTK dialogues by default. You can install a program, kgtk, from the repos which will act as a wrapper around GTK programs. You then change your firefox shortcut to execute:

$ kgtk2-wrapper firefox

And you get KDE file selector dialogues. It is a hack (library injection I think) and won’t be reliable for any arbitrary GTK program but it seems to work well for Firefox. Some people have filed bug reports for Mozilla to fix their KDE integration but it doesn’t look like they care. I guess that other distros will eventually upstream openSUSE’s packages, but not yet evidently.

film review

WHERE EAGLES DARE, a review by steph:
fucking awesome

last night

So!
I went to bed at 2!
I woke up at 3 with blocked nose/runny nose/sneezyness
About 4 I decided I would go on the interwebs for a while
About 4:30 I went back to bed
At 8:20 I was awoken by the postman (technically it was a courier). I didn’t even manage to put enough clothes on to go and open the door before he buggered off, so thanks for that, City Link. I think that must be (half) the stuff for my sister’s computer which is pretty incredible since we only ordered it yesterday afternoon and it said it would take 5-7 days.
then I went back to bed and slept for an hour.

So I slept for maybe 5-6 hours but spread over 3 times. It is not good. I don’t feel SO bad now but I am going to have to up my caffeine intake if I want to last all day, I think.

Last Saturday (this was the day after my graduation) I woke up feeling all snuffle snuffle and this seems to have turned out to be a cold but not exactly. It is now 9 days later and I still have it, but I have not once felt actually BAD with it, I just sneeze a lot and sometimes feel tired :-\

in other news I have sitting on my hard drive… 843MB of WHERE EAGLES DARE! yes.
if you go here,http://www.freefullmovies.net/movies/watch.where.eagles.dare.1968.movie.html , go to the bottom and click around a lot then you might end up with a download dialogue. It will take about 3 hours or so if you’re on a fast connection. I am going to watch it with Christine some time. She is obsessed by films but she told me last night she had not seen The Great Escape! Further prodding revealed a similar state of affairs for Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes. For some strange reason, it appears they don’t show many WWII films in Germany. I can’t imagine why.

edit: I copied it off a yahoo profile, okay! it was in my clipboard, APPARENTLY, when I thought something else was. I didn’t notice. I AM SORRY. And embarrassed. But no one noticed, right?

ping

I feel like i should write something as I haven’t done so in AGES.
updates:
I still don’t have a job (yay)
I haven’t upgraded my sister’s computer yet
I have the paper copy of my thesis back (this is important to me). It is the proper bound version. I am quite proud of it o.o I shall show it to my grandchildren, or more likely, my sister’s grandchildren whom I shall inevitably have to poach for grandparenting purposes.
I went to… my graduation ceremony last week. It was okay. I was dreading it. But it wasn’t so bad. Except for the whole sitting in a big room listening to other people’s names being read out FOR TWO HOURS. I also went to a smaller awards thing afterwards to get my other award (which came in the form of a nice certificate and a £50 Waterstone’s gift card), which was much nicer.

mostly I have been spending my exciting free time with my guitar. My fingertips hurt rather a lot now. Something that frustrates me about the guitar is that I am crap, TERRIBLE in fact. It doesn’t matter how much I practise, I still never get to the point where I can play (much) perfectly. I still make tonnes of mistakes and my legato playing still sucks. I used to think “when I can play Iron Maiden songs I will be the best guitar player in the world!”. Now I can play Iron Maiden songs, but I am still crap. I think I have my right hand working a lot better now, though. I used to get a lot of discomfort in the area, uh, if you follow your thumb down there’s a bone at the side of your wrist… I used to get some pain just there. If you hold your pick too tightly, you end up very tense around there which is BAD. I am now playing A LOT and I haven’t had that recently so that shows I am doing something better than I was.

But if I want to play along to something it is frustratingly difficult. Apparently I no longer have any speakers near my computer and so I have to use headphones which means that I have to turn my amp really loud but I still don’t hear exactly what I am playing which is ANNOYING, and I am kind of restricted to doing it when no one (else) is home. I have my amp angled such that it is pointed right at my computer chair, but the sound has louds and quiets depending on exactly where you are; there are two speakers in my amp so I think it must be phase difference or something. I also have to worry about keeping my pedals powered through a small army of rechargeable 9v batteries. It is overall very hassling. I would like to plug my guitar into my computer then use a software amplifier so then I can get both sounds coming through one output, but it seems complicated, especially when you factor in Linux, which nobody supports. I think you need some kind of ‘thing’ between the guitar and the sound card because the signal the sound card expects in its mic/line in is somehow different to what a guitar outputs, but even when you’ve got that you have to get some amplifier software. I accidentally don’t have Windows at all any more so there’s no way I’d buy something for Windows, but even if I did reinstall it, I still resent buying hard/software from manufacturers/developers who don’t support Linux.

nerd corner

SO! I have been enlisted to upgrade my sister’s computer. I am tying (and think I have succeeded) to put together a quad-core system for £350. This consists of an Intel Q8300: £100, ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB: £90, branded 600W PSU: £50, 3GB DDR2 800Mhz RAM: £55 (4GB is just too expensive), motherboard: £50. Total ~£350.

NOW. The problem is that there are no good sites online to compare the Q8300 against other alternatives (mainly the Q6600). On forums, the Q8300 fares very badly becuase:
1) it is hard to overclock
2) it has only a 4MB cache (vs 8MB in the Q6600)

Unfortunately you largely get the feeling that these discussions are conducted by leet kiddies who don’t really know anything about computer architecture, and so it’s hard to find a fair discussion.

Here is my take:

Q8300 vs Q6600 by Steph.

1) overclocking: here’s the deal guys, if you overclock you’re the computer nerd equivalent of one of those people who has 4 exhausts on their car and their engine artificially tweaked to make it louder. You might think you’re awesome, but everyone else thinks you’re a twat.

Proper reason: it doesn’t matter how cool you keep it, if you’re pushing it far past its rating you’re still risking damaging it and a damaged CPU is not something you want because it’ll manifest itself in random looking, hard to diagnose crashes (and please note: passing a stress test for a few hours isn’t proof of stability, there’s nothing beyond hand waving to say that a damaged CPU will be more likely to exhibit errors under stress and not under normal usage). Your CPU is responsible for almost everything. If it starts occasionally giving you the wrong result then that might have the effect that your webpage has a single wrong character on it (probably unnoticable), or it might have the effect that your OS kernel tries to write into an illegal area of memory (uh-oh). Maybe Windows users are used to random crashes, but they would annoy the heck out of me. And if you’re not pushing it that far then it’s not going to give you a noticable difference for anything. And most games on most systems are GPU bound, so unless you’re doing something that REALLY IS CPU intensive like massive media editing or prime factoring big numbers then you won’t see any real effect (i.e. one you can perceive without a bechmark or frame rate counter) . In 99% of cases, overclocking is pointless and immature. Look at it like this: you can overclock your router but it’s not going to make your internet connection faster because the speed at which the router can process data is not a limiting factor. You can overclock your CPU but it’s (probably) not going to make your computer faster (except in fairly specific tasks).

Plus you shorten the lifetime of your hardware, and if you spend any extra money on cooling (which you almost certainly will) why didn’t you just use that money to buy a better CPU in the first place? Duh.

2) the CPU cache. Quick review: the cache is necessary because programs are stored in somewhere called memory (RAM). Memory is pretty big and can fit a lot in it, but it’s a long way away and it takes a long time to get data from memory over to the CPU. CPUs can process the incoming data faster than they can fetch it. This means they spend a lot of their time doing nothing, waiting for data to trickle through. To minimise this, a cache is built onto the CPU which keeps a copy of things that are expected to be used often. The cache is local to the CPU so it’s very fast to access. But since it’s on the CPU, there isn’t a lot of room to build it and it’s pretty small in capacity. So when the CPU needs some data, it first says “wait, let’s see if it’s in the cache”. If it is (a cache hit), then it rejoices as it retrieves it very quickly. So a bigger cache is better, right? The bigger the cache, the more it holds, the higher the probablity of a cache hit, RIGHT?

Well yes, but the probability of a cache hit is logarithmic in terms of the capacity of the cache. That means doubling the cache size doesn’t double the number of cache hits; the increase in hit percentage gets lower every time you double it (look at this graph, ignore the scale, and imagine ‘Cache capacity’ on the X, and ‘probability of cache hit’ on the Y). This should be self evident if you accept that the most recent data used in the program is what’s most likely to be used again in the near future. That’s not a law built into the fabric of the universe, it’s just how it usually works out (if that wasn’t roughly the case, it would be hard to make the CPU cache do anything useful anyway). The ‘older’ some data is in the context of the program’s execution, the less likely it is to be used again. Doubling the cache size doubles the amount of data you can fit in the cache, but it doesn’t double the amount of USEFUL data (data whose absence implies a cache miss) in the cache. Simply put, an extra 4MB of cache capacity gives you an extra 4MB of OLD data. There’s a chance that some of that old data will be used again before it’s kicked out, but the probablity of which is not nearly as high as for the ‘newest’ 4MB.

And the cache is not the only factor in the performance, so don’t look at the idea of “well it will increase cache hit probability a bit though” as being an absolute performance indicator. Yes, two identical CPUs but one with double the cache of the other should have the one with the larger cache performing faster. But the Q8300 is clocked a bit higher than the Q6600 (2.5Ghz vs 2.3Ghz), which I strongly suspect will negate the cache issue.

The Q8300 also fares better in the sense that its core is smaller (insert figures here) which means it runs cooler and consumes less power, and it’s about £50 cheaper. A 4->8MB cache is not worth a 50% increase in price. Overall on paper, there is no reason to buy a Q6600 over a Q8300.

caveats:
1) the Q8300 doesn’t support Intel VT-x, and the Q6600 does. If you don’t know what that is, you don’t need it. Even if you do virtualise, you probably still don’t need it unless you KNOW you do. VirtualBox claim their software methods are just as fast or faster than Intel or AMD’s hardware virtualisation support, and from my own experience this is true for AMD’s. I can’t speak for Intel’s but I’d be surprised if it’s noticable. That’s perfectly good for home users. Servers may be different. To 99% of buyers, this isn’t a consideration.
2) For scientific computing you might often be multiplying together big matrices (yes matrix multiplication happens all the time in games, but 4×4 is not big so no it doesn’t apply), and if you know how matrix multiplication works, you will see that it will inherently give a lot of cache misses if your matrix is big compared to your cache (although a decent programmer in a performance critical program would order the steps in their multiplication routine to focus on maximising cache hits). But this is a specialist area and if it affects you, you already know it.
3) I should also have mentioned that task switching kills the cache a bit so a bigger cache is definitely more useful if you want to run a lot of things at once and one or two of those are CPU intensive. However, few people try to play Crisis while encoding videos.

serious business

I’m thrilled. I haven’t had any hate mail for months, AT LEAST!

I asked Christine if she was imaginary, and after a long pause she said she was not.

for the record, I don’t know this person, I’ve never spoken to him before, and in fact, before he contacted me I was completely oblivious to his existence. Why he seems to be under the impression that I have personally insulted him, and why he feels the need to do the same back to me and why he thinks I was interested in subscribing to his newsletter, is as much of a mystery to me as it is you.

also for context: my profile on there has exactly one sentence on there related to romance, which existed to stress that I feel romantic propositions to be undesirable. I hardly think it was excessive o.o

ps alexinbrum: please in future wrap your lines so the screenshot fits on my blog better. Thanks. xx

the joys of grandparents

message from my grandfather on the answer phone, today, word for word:

“what the hell is the use of having an emm ess see bee ess see in the family if you can’t get any help when you want it. Don’t call back later, it’ll be too late”

Fear not Grandad, I have no intentions of calling back!

The problem with being me is that people expect you to know what’s wrong with their computer as if you have some kind of psychic link with it. Either that or they really think “it’s a bit slow” or “the bar at the top has disappeared” is an insightful description of the situation. It is very frustrating for me to spend hours of my life talking to people on the phone trying to find out what COULD be wrong with it, as the only information I receive goes through what might be referred to as an obfuscation routine, and any information I wish to send to the computer would rarely match its checksum upon receipt. Fixing computers is not what I have a degree in: there is no reason that I should know why Windows does what it does or how to change it, or how one could go about making program X perform function Y. Talking computer illiterate people through fixing computers is DEFINITELY not what I have a degree in. It is no longer a technical problem. There are people who do generic tech support for a living. They’re good at it. Talk to them. They’ll charge you, but at least you know they won’t be trying to resist the urge to hit you over the head with your keyboard. I make no such promises.

My grandfather makes no secret of the fact he doesn’t like me. He thinks I am a lazy waste of space who has never done anything worthwhile, ever. It baffles me that he has the audacity to ask me for help, or as I should say, DEMAND that I help him. It baffles me even more that my mum (my grandfather is my dad’s side) pretty much makes me help him, in the hope that he won’t think I’m a lazy waste of space in future.

In sort of related family news: yesterday was my sister’s birthday. It was quite nice. I gave her some computer games. YES. I haven’t played any of them. I don’t know what they’re like. I made her a card. Or more accurately: a paper. Having no money neither of us wish to spend money on cards for each other so instead we make them. Last year I made her an edited Dinosaur Comics card and the year before I drew a picture of Elan. This year after having almost run out of inspiration, I drew her a short comic in the style of Pictures For Sad Children. Nothing happens in it and PFSC isn’t inherently funny, just bizarre, so I didn’t know if she’d like it or if she’d look at it and go “um okay” and there would be a PFSC style awkward pause, but she burst into laughter, so it was a success.

She also received a CD: Epica  – Design Your Universe. I have of course ripped it to my computer which makes me a pirate, I think. It is quite good. I ripped it at 256kb/s ogg, it is 152MB, costing me 1.9MB of space per minute of audio. I am toying with the idea of buying a MAHOOSIVE hard disk and starting a lossless audio collection. But I need to figure out how mahoosive it needs to be. I’m guessing that 1TB probably won’t be enough. I have most of my stuff at 128kb/s mp3, when I started ripping music I could never hear the difference between that and higher quality, but I really can now. Although it does depend on the song, anything with an orchestra needs better encoding but, I have noticed a lot of very modern stuff seems to offer no improvement at >128kb/s. That’s because they’re low audio quality, not because the compression is really good. Probably because of this.

In related computer news: OpenSUSE 11.2! I am using it. Installing and post-install setting up was such a long series of problems I honestly couldn’t recommend this distro to anyone who doesn’t know what they’re doing and have time to waste, but now I’ve got it up and running it’s, as I think the word is, SLEEK. It’s very fast, much faster than 11.1 was. I have no current complaints.

In relatedish music news: ohmygodmyfingersaresore

Event Horizon

Christine has just made me watch ‘Event Horizon’ with her (on the internet).
Has anyone ever seen this?

Our conversation went something like this:

(22:38:59) Christine: I watched “Pandorum” today. It is a good movie of an underrepresented genre :P
(22:39:20) Stephanie: are you going to tell me what the genre is? :P
(22:39:28) Christine: space horror :P

(22:40:59) Stephanie: I don’t like horror.

(22:51:13) Christine: hmpf…why didn’t you like alien?
(22:51:36) Stephanie: because it was 1) disgusting and 2) scary
(22:52:01) Stephanie: I know if I ask you why you did like it, you will give those same reasons :P
(22:52:01) Christine: hmmmmm :P
(22:52:47) Stephanie: don’t hmmmmmmm at me :P
(22:53:01) Christine: http://stagevu.com/video/szdpqyeaodfd [link to Event Horizon] paused at 3 seconds :P

So in summary, I said “I don’t like horror” and in response she said “I know, LET’S WATCH THE MOST TERRIFYING, DISTURBING AND DISGUSTING FILM EVER!”

I didn’t know anything about it before [I didn't even know it was horror :-\], and, honestly, after watching it, I can say I have never seen a film before that has made me feel so distressed.