…there was a girl. And I thought to myself “she would be a cute girl if it wasn’t for the fact that she is actually an effeminate looking boy, who is also rather cute but probably doesn’t realise it”.
Anyway, after a little while, I realised she really was a girl.
Is my evident inability to sex teenagers a sign of getting older?
I bought the DGN2200 because I wanted a router with QoS. QoS is supposed to prioritse traffic based on various criteria, so the connection can remain usable under heavy load. For what it’s worth, Windows’s network scheduler seems to shape the traffic very slightly such that it’s pretty difficult to kill a connection with a Windows box, but if you’ve ever had someone else in your house decide to download 300MB of Ubuntu updates, you’ll generally find you’ve got 100% packet loss until they’re done. QoS is supposed to fix that.
But I wasn’t entirely convinced that it was doing anything. Browsing while downloading was still sluggish and my TF2 pings were still jumping whenever anyone else started browsing.
So I set QoS rules:
ICMP (ping) protocol with priority “highest”
BitTorrent protocol with priority “low”,
and started a BitTorrent download. The upload speed during the download was basically negligible, and the download speed was roughly 200KB/s (my connection maxes about 240 – yes I do live in the stone age, and yes I will accept donations). Here are my pings to bbc.co.uk:
| Min | Avg | Max | |
| Without BitTorrent | 31.015 | 31.305 | 31.846 |
| With BitTorrent and QoS1 | 159.724 | 160.755 | 161.787 |
| With BitTorrent and no QoS2 | 84.846 | 135.555 | 172.994 |
1. 50% packet loss
2. 25% packet loss
If the QoS is any good, the second line should be similar to the first line, and certainly closer to the first line than the third. Which it is not. The stats are better without QoS, but I suspect you’ll find that’s just because of the slightly variable nature of BT downloads, and I also suspect that in reality, if you could be bothered to collect and analyse a lot of data, you’d find the difference between the two statistically insignificant. I’m only using 4 packets so the packet loss isn’t too precise, but the fact it’s happening at all is important. I’m not seeing any compelling argument that the DGN2200 actually performs QoS.
I don’t know how Neatgear has made this so difficult. It runs the Linux kernel and good QoS tools for Linux already exist, like Wondershaper. Why didn’t they just compile it into the firmware?
I’m not doing very well with this stuff, to be honest. Amazon refunded my ATi card quite happily though, so looks like this will be going back too. I’ve since ordered a GTX560, but I’m not sure what (if anything) I’ll order to replace the router.
Yesterday on BBC news there was a bit of time dedicated to MegaUpload and related matters. Firstly, Ars has a pretty interesting overview of what went on at MegaUpload and it sounds like they are genuinely a bunch of scumbags. Those file hosting sites are pretty much the scum of the internet anyway. They are horrible things.
Secondly, they had a short interview with some random business person who claims to be getting hurt by piracy. He was moaning that he was spending money producing albums and that no one was buying them. I think people in the “creative industries” really struggle with a key part of capitalism which is exemplified perfectly here: people are free to not buy your stuff! It’s got nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with your failure to offer people something they actually want. We ‘consume’ a lot of music and other media, but usually it’s just because it’s there, not because we think “wow this is really good, I must pay for it”. Most music doesn’t have any monetary value to me. I don’t care if you spent £50,000 producing it.
As I might have mentioned before, I switched to an ATI card a few weeks ago to try to fix my TF2 driver crashes. It worked. I can play TF2. Unfortunately there are lots of games I cannot now play because the ATI driver crashes on them. Bioshock for example triggers a crash before you even get to the menu. I put this down to some kind of conflict with the old nvidia drivers, but today I did a clean install of Windows and it still happens in two separate and entirely unrelated games. The ATI driver crashes are horrible, at least Nvidia’s bowed out gracefully, an ATI driver crash needs you to hit the reset button.
Linux 2D performance is utterly dire too. Even worse than the nvidia drivers.
So I have my nvidia card back in, I can happily see the Bioshock menu, and so I am sending the ATI card back, I guess. I don’t know if my card is faulty or if the drivers are just awful but in either case, something isn’t fit for purpose. And the drivers are awful, I originally installed the Catalyst suite then had to remove it and install purely the display driver because Catalyst installed a bunch of processes which would consume 10-20% CPU time all the time, even when I’m trying to play CPU intensive games. Which does wonders for frame rate stability, as you can imagine.
The problem with graphics cards is that the solution to an Nvidia bug is to “buy ATI” and the solution to an ATI bug is to “buy nvidia”. They are both shit. Nvidia is probably slightly better. Although their hardware font anti-aliasing is more fuzzy.
I don’t know how else to express my feelings regarding the ruling that Richard O’Dwyer should be extradited for “copyright infringement” other than to say: what the fuck.
It’s ridiculous and terrifying that an arbitrary UK citizen should be plucked out of his home and told the past few years of his life in the UK is going to be retroactively evaluated against American laws. Why do we allow America to do this when we would be rightly disturbed at the idea of allowing Saudi Arabia to extradite our female drivers?
It is also disgusting that his domain has been siezed by America without any kind of due process. I do not fully understand how it works, but I do know that if DNS cannot survive an attack by a single malicious agent, which is precisely what America is in this instance, then DNS has a massive security flaw.
Also, I don’t understand why America is ridiculing itself with something so frivolous. Have they not considered how stupid it makes them look?
Businesses whining they can’t recruit software developers. Wah wah, lack of talent, etc. No there isn’t. Look on Github. There are over three million projects on there and most of them are completely non-profit written by hobbyists scratching some personal itch. Talent is not in short supply. Therefore you must begin asking why you are not attracting it.
Stop whining and look at your recruitment process. You’re probably paying barely anything and you’re probably using a recruitment agency/consultant who is rude, stupid and difficult to deal with. You might be asking candidates to start programming in the interview. That’s a favourite, but it’s also a pain. For every line of code I write, I probably spend ten minutes thinking about it. Even coming up with skeletal design and stuff, nope, sorry, I don’t think on the spot. It makes me write bad code. If you’re doing this, you’re a bad interviewer. Maybe your company is just boring. Maybe it gives the impression that it’s more concerned with stock prices and revenues than anything else. Most companies are. But as a programmer I couldn’t care less. All I want is somewhere to write some code, be creative and do something innovative once in a while. I don’t want to be bogged down in process or have to use obsolete tools because you think they are “stable” and it would be “risky” to try doing things differently.
Why do I need a Facebook account to register an account? I don’t want a Facebook account. I want to give you my money. I don’t know why you make this so difficult for me.
Forget it, I’m using Grooveshark.
Since Christmas coincided with my first wage packet, I spent some money. This is something that over the last 24 and a half years I have generally avoided as much as possible, but when your bank account suddenly inflates by a huge sum, you think “well maybe I could…”. I’m not sure what my net profit is. I don’t seem to have been charged any tax, which isn’t right. Also I need to deduct train fares which are a bit more than £100 per month
So I bought the 2K games pack on Steam. £39.99 for god knows how many games. The edited highlights are:
Civ III, IV, V (I have III and IV, but not V)
Bioshock I + II
Mafia I + II (I have played I but it was years ago, and it was very good)
Borderlands
And a bunch of other stuff. Those were the ones that interested me, anyway. Borderlands reminds me a bit of Fallout New Vegas. Some of the audio cues and music place you squarely back in the Mojave desert, and then there’s that little robot thing. My main complaint is that it is unaffected by your bullets.
CiV V has some terrible American accents. There is something jarring about ruling over your ancient civilization with an iron fist while “I vow to thee, my country” plays in the background (really, it does), to find the advisor pop up and declare in a casual American accent “I have some information that may be of interest to you…”. I don’t know what part of America this particular accent is from, but I also recognise it from the intro to Heroes of Might and Magic III, where it was equally out of place. Little things like that can make a big difference.
Bioshock’s writing is terrible. I wish games would have a bit of self respect. If your dialogue reads like it was rejected from a Hollywood film for being too stupid then it’s a good sign you should drop the dialogue.
Also I am considering a £4.99/month Spotify subscription so I can listen to the Beastie Boys all day at work.
I’ve noticed the company We Are Electricals have numerous complaints online. A lot of people think they’re running a scam, they’re not a real company, etc.
They are a real company. I should know, they interviewed me for a web development job (or rather, Turn90 did, but I don’t think there’s any difference between Turn90 and WAE, or any of the other companies that operate out of that office). They are a real company in the sense they have an office and they interview people for jobs which are presented as being legitimate jobs. They are not a professional or respectable company and they appeared to be run by and employ only 20-something year olds, but they are real.
They are the only company I have ever been interviewed by who never bothered to contact me after the interview, ironically after stating they “weren’t like other companies” and would “definitely let me know one way or the other” (which struck me as a bit strange…). They are also the only company who have kept me waiting about 10 minutes for an interview because the lead developer (or whatever his title was) was too busy chatting to some girl whilst the second interviewer was sat there apologising awkwardly to me.
The interview was alright in the sense that nothing terrible happened, but their interview skills were bad. They seemed largely uninterested in my technical abilities, or to rephrase, my general competency. Usually at interviews, I find a perverse pleasure in having a nerdy chat to someone I’ve never met before, but with WAE I didn’t really get that feeling. I didn’t find that they were people who cared a lot about what they did. If I am interviewed by a developer, I expect him/her to be genuinely excitable about the technology they use. I expect them to see programming as an opportunity to be creative and to create something useful or innovative. That’s why I do it. That’s why the web team at the company I now work for does it. We don’t do it just because we’re paid, we do it because it’s fun and we enjoy it. As a result we make high quality stuff. But that particular vibe was completely missing from my experience with WAE.
And this is evident in their totally awful web design. I mean, seriously, who thinks that having the entire viewport taken up by banner images is a good idea? Who thinks that horizontal scrollbars in a 1024×768 browser window isn’t a complete show-stopper? Not to mention the numerous rendering peculiarities. I simply couldn’t put my name to a site like that in either a personal or professional context. It’s just amateurish.
I view the whole thing as a close escape. Most of these complaints have only sprung up recently and WAE would look really bad on my CV.
I don’t know if they really still exist though. I walk past their office every morning and there are never any lights on, although maybe I’m a little too early.
I got paid to write Javascript for 8 hours.
Life is pretty alright.
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