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Wednesday, July 20th, 2005
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2:35 pm
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| Friday, July 15th, 2005
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1:02 am - mmm
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| Wednesday, July 13th, 2005
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10:45 am - This is where all the hard work, sacrifice, and painful scaldings pay off
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Atomic surprised me this month by moving its release day up a week, so the latest issue is out today with my 8-page feature on building your own cluster. Crazyness :)
I've been meaning to update for a while, but hadn't got around it until today, but now I can't remember what I had in mind that was so vitally important to mention. Actually, one of them springs to mind -- no more Ps! Officially off them as of Sunday, it's been nice to be able to down a lovely beer with dinner and then go driving afterwards.
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| Friday, July 8th, 2005
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3:03 pm - quickies
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- went and got my big boy licence today! doesn't kick in 'till Sunday though, so no boozing just yet :)
- kitties in teh presses again -- huzzah!
- got Kirby for the DS last Friday (<3 canada) and finished it on Wednesday night, which might seem a bit short, but it was a good 5 hours or so (every spare minute has gone in to it lately), and I'll be damned if they weren't the best 5 hours I've spent with my DS. besides, there's still a buttload of extra stuff to get (I beat the final boss at about 20% completion)
- nice morning at the market today with my katty, which was good fun -- got a nyom cinnamon and raisin bagel (there's cocaine in it!), and some of the first bottles of this year's Surefoot Stout
- nicked over to Heartland while at the market, but they didn't have anything I was after. dagnabbit!
- got to work the other day to discover that my iPod had a whopping 250 songs on it for some reason, but not to worry -- i found some nice darkwave/synthpop/industrial podcasts on teh intarnut and set them up in iTunes, which now does quite a neat job of the whole podcasting thing
- I don't think I actually like The White Stripes, but their new single (Blue Orchid) is on repeat in my head it seems
- obligatory london thingy comment: yep, it's all bad and stuff, but far more people die each day from preventable causes without receiving a tenth of the media coverage, things like live8 not withstanding. you'll also have to forgive me for continuing to be more worried about dying from random car-related mishaps than from random terrorist attacks
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| Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005
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5:14 pm - servery goodness
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I started getting a bit more serious about upgrading our database server to PostgreSQL 8.0 today, building 8.0 packages from unstable's sources on my testing box, which runs Sarge. This means that I can dump the DB, upgrade the current database box to Sarge (it's currently running testing from yonks ago), install the packages, restore the DB, and be on my merry way.
It's a good thing too -- clients have been bitching about speed, so I did some testing. On identical databases, our production system (dual 2.8 Xeons, 2GB RAM, 10krpm drives and Postgres 7.3) ran a key query in about 330ms, while my test box (Athlon 64 3000+, 1GB RAM, 7200rpm SATA drives and Posgres 8.0) ran it in about 33ms. Quite an improvement there :) Comparing query plans, 8.0 came up with a plan that was 6 steps shorter and made much more intelligent use of the available indexes.
I've been looking at replacement database boxes too... a nice HP DL385 dual-Opteron box for $14.5k, or a slightly lower specced Tyan box for about $9k. I'm curious about IBM's OpenPower hardware too, so I'm getting them to quote me on an OpenPower 710 for comparison.
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| Saturday, June 18th, 2005
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11:16 pm
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For the last few months I’ve been heading down to Purvis Wine Cellars in Surrey Hills, who have a pretty amazing range of beers, to pick up a few new things to try each month, along with some recurring favourites. I had a look for the Emersons Oatmeal Stout, which they had last month, but no joy today; same went for beers from 3 Ravens, which I’ve been meaning to give a proper tasting. In the end, I (unsurprisingly) picked up some more Pale Ales -- the Jamieson, which I know and love, and a decent Purvis cleanskin which I’ve just polished off.
The real star, though, was the Hargreaves Hill Pale, which is probably the best drop I’ve had in quite some time -- quite reminiscent of the Little Creatures Pale, but a touch lighter in flavour, with a bit less bitterness, making it really quite nice. It doesn’t sound like it’s too widely distributed yet, but if you like the odd pale it’s definitely worth looking for.
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| Thursday, June 16th, 2005
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3:28 pm - high school art wankery
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Well, after trying some sneakernet action (like I've got a working floppy in my house), I finally got SMRT and worked out how to get the files off my old Amiga -- removing its SCSI hard drive and plugging it in to my PC. I wasn't expecting it to be quite as easy as all that, but sure enough, the Ubuntu kernel on the old box with the SCSI card in it supports Amiga partition tables and Amiga FFS filesystems out of the box. I feel good knowing that thousands of Ubuntu users everywhere have a few k less RAM free than the should have, all so I could mount my 10-year-old Amiga hard drive without building a custom kernel :)
So anyways, I can now share with you my piddling high-school artistic exploits. It's all in here, and if anyone's even remotely interested, the notes I took on the tools used, rendering times, and my motivations, can be found here.
current music: Switchblade Symphony - Sleep
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| Wednesday, June 15th, 2005
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4:33 pm - memory lane
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I did end up with a little spare time last night after finishing off my writing duties, so I dragged the old Amiga 3000 out of the wardrobe. The old girl's been through a bit, including a minor case of flooding, but it worked, and after hunting down the (non-standard, of course) keyboard and mouse I was in business. The OS install was just as I left it, and my old image gallery (complete with notes on each pic) was intact, so I had a quick browse through... it was almost quaint watching and waiting for about 10 seconds while loading a JPEG file. Most of it was pretty crappy work of course, but such is youth :)
I'll try to get some of these files off shortly, though I haven't decided the best method to do so. It actually has Ethernet, though it's 10base2, so I'd need to grab out some coax and hunt down another card with a 10base2 port (I think I've got a PCI NE2K somewhere...) to use that. My first choice was my trusty old Zip drive, but (unsurprisingly) it had trouble reading the disk that's been sitting in it for the last 5 years. At this point, I'll probably just resort to floppies since most of the images are under 100k each, but I've probably got a MOD or two on there worth getting off too, and they probably won't fit on a single floppy.
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| Tuesday, June 14th, 2005
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6:06 pm - tales from teh irc
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18:02 < katius> leigh i eed aother keyboard
18:02 < katius> guess which key has stopped workig
18:03 < [lsd]> n!
18:03 < katius> i ca see you laughig from over there!
18:03 < katius> you cut
current mood:  amused
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5:03 pm
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Nearly done with this big feature... handed it in yesterday, but it needs some tweaking. Hopefully I won't have too late a night ahead of me :)
While playing with a distrubted version of POV-Ray last night for some screenshots for the feature, I dug through my old files from my swinny days (some four years ago) and found a nice POV-Ray scene that I actually put together while I was still living at home (some 7 or 8 years ago). I used to do quite a bit of 3D stuff back on my old Amiga 3000 using Imagine 3D, and later POV-Ray (shipping scenes over to my dad's P75 via a Zip disk for final renders) -- little space scene videos and stuff that could easily take a good 18 hours for four seconds of footage.
I ran a nice big render of the scene I found across the little cluster I've built at home for your (and my own) enjoyment:
Click on the image to pull down a larger (but still JPEG) version -- the full PNG 16x12 is here.
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| Friday, June 10th, 2005
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7:36 pm - they can't hope to compete with today's super writers... steven bochco could kick shakespeare's ass
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Crazy-busy still, but the big feature I'm working on at the moment is wrapping up on Monday -- huzzah!
Last night I did something I haven't done in ages... bought some DVDs. We were looking for something at JB and I ended up finding the newly-released box set of the first series of Murder One, and I couldn't help but snap it up. Murder One was a refreshing change from the other crime dramas of the 90s, with the entire series following a single high-profile case through an amazing procession of twists and turns through to the amazing finale. It's always a worry buying stuff you haven't seen since you were much younger, but I put the first two episodes on this morning, and it's perhaps even better than I remember it, and certainly a long way better from the current flood of crime dramas that compress things so much to bring each case in under 45 minutes (though I do quite like NCIS, which may or may not be due to the fact that it's hilarious and has a hot goth chick)
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7:20 pm - game updates
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There's been a few new games come in to the house in the last month or two that I've neglected to comment on -- clearly an oversight that needs rectifying :)
DK King of Swing -- GBA
Fantastic little platformer with crazy controls, where you use the L and R buttons to swing your way around levels. The unique control mechanic works really well, the levels designs are great, and the difficulty level is spot-on -- quite hard, even infuriatingly so in parts, but never in a bad way. It could possibly be a little longer, but only because it's so much fun to play, though there's plenty of unlockable bonus games for those going for 100% completion.
WarioWare: Twisted! -- GBA
This is the game that Touched! on the DS should have been -- another wacky new control mechanic that works fabulously, with a huge pile of microgames that make great use of it, and a similarly huge pile of unlockable goodies to play with. Twisted! uses a motion sensor that's built in to the cart, having you control the games by twisting the GBA from side-to-side, and it's the kind of crazyness that suits WarioWare perfectly. Touched! on the DS was a fine game, but Twisted! shows just how much better it could have been with some more time.
Zoo Keeper -- DS
An addictive little puzzler that's apparently much like the PC game Bejewelled, though it seems to handle quite nicely using the touch screen. I've been having fun with it, but it's Kat that's the real puzzle-nut, and she's been loving it. Definitely one for puzzle fans, especially with the sales that are on at the moment.
Pac-Pix -- DS
This is some crazy crap... a Pacman game where the aim is to draw pictures of Pacman which then come to life, eating the ghosts in their path. The whole game revolves around this drawing concept, requiring you to draw walls to control the paths of your Pacmen, and arrows and bombs as well. It's quite hard -- frustratingly so at times -- and even though its tech-demo roots still show, the final product is quite polished, with a lot of levels to get through. It's just come out here, so if you've got a DS and are looking for something unique to show it off, it's well worth checking out.
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| Tuesday, June 7th, 2005
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2:05 pm - hell feels kinda chilly today
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So... the first Macs running on Intel x86 CPUs will be out by this time next year. What's next - Debian releasing a new stable version? Oh... that happened too. Shit. Well, at least we can still fall back on Duke Nukem Forever :)
It's a shame to see PowerPC disappearing from the desktop (though it certainly won't be disappearing for good -- all three next-gen consoles run on PowerPC, and Apple's business only accounted for about 2% of IBM's PowerPC chip output), and a lot of people are divided over this, but personally, I'm very excited. I'm not the worlds biggest Intel fan, and I really don't like the P4 in general, but Apple won't be using the P4 in any production Mac. They'll be skipping ahead to products based on the awesome Pentium M, which gives amazing performance with remarkably little power. That's precicely the reason for the move, in fact -- both today, and in the future (based on current roadmaps), the Pentium M and its derivatives will provide far better performance per W than the G5, or anything else IBM can provide.
So, Apple will be able to go from having dual G5s overclocked to 2.7ghz with liquid cooling in their PowerMacs, and aging G4s in their Powerbooks, to having Yonah 65nm dual-core Pentium M-based chips in both, presumably with 2 or more of them in the PowerMac. If the idea of dual 2.5Ghz Pentium M cores in your lap, running OS X, doesn't get your panties wet, I don't know what will :)
I'm still surprised that this happened, but not amazed -- I always though Apple could do this if they ever wanted to. As had been rumoured, Apple have always had a secret OS X on Intel team, with every version from 10.0, and every major Apple app, up and running in full on x86 hardware. In fact, the demos Jobs gave of new Dashboard widgets, new iTunes features, and other goodies before revealing the the Intel switch, were given on a P4 system running Tiger, presumably similar to the P4 systems Apple will be making available to developers within 2 weeks. He went on to demo existing PowerPC apps, including Word and Photoshop, running quite smoothly on the system through an emulation layer called Rosetta.
Apple really seem to have played this well, learning from past mistakes in the 68k-PPC transition -- the systems are still a year away, but the OS and its apps are running natively and very nicely on the new hardware, existing apps seem to be well supported (presumably with a drop in performance, but we'll have to wait to see the numbers), and developers will be able to get systems to port their apps with just two weeks from now. This should be fun ride :)
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| Friday, May 27th, 2005
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11:09 am - phone stuff
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So... had fun last night customising the crap out of the new phone, since no phone is truly complete without a nice wallpaper and an annoying ringtone. I threw the Zelda tunes I'd been using on my old phone over (though the MP3s from the official soundtrack, rather than MIDI files), and they're cool, but I had something Simpsons-derived in mind. It didn't take me too long to dump out the audio from the episode I was after, hack out the appropriate bit and compress it a little in Audacity, and then encode to MP3 for teh phone. Result -- most annoying ringtone evar :D
I scaled/cropped a nice Twisp & Catsby wallpaper too, which was cool, but I decided to go one better and hack up a nice Twisp & Catsby theme, which any K700i-owning interested parties can grab here. I used the SE theme editor for OS X, but the themes are just tar files containing the images and an XML file containing the colours and such to use, so you could knock up a theme manually easily enough. It's handy having the a real-time preview in the theme editor though, so I found a nice unofficial one that's written in Java and runs nicely under Linux here (requires a free registration).
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| Thursday, May 26th, 2005
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4:24 pm - new phone!
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Finally got me a new phone, thanks to work :) It's nothing terribly exciting -- just a K700i, which I'm sure most of you have seen (if not own), but it's a nice little upgrade from the old S55. All the sync stuff works with my Powerbook, and a good bit more quickly too, and it's nice having stuff like MP3 ringtones and a built-in camera. UI speed is a nice step up from the old phone too. Huzzah!
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| Wednesday, May 25th, 2005
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10:25 pm - friends don't let friends use these
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I don't normally bitch about Windows, but...
I bought a nice SATA drive on the weekend, which I had no trouble at all transferring my existing Linux install on to. Moving Windows installs is usually a massive pain though, so I just canned my existing install, and tonight I got around to doing a fresh reinstall. Windows doesn't know what to do with SATA drives though, not even my leet h4X0ry XP corporate edition slipstreamed with SP2.
The only answer... this:
High-tech meets low-tech :)
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| Saturday, May 14th, 2005
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4:47 pm
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Hmm.. time to catch up with this whole LJ thing :)
Busy busy busy with day-work and other-work, though having ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) fryboy around the office has been great so far -- he's getting stuff done that I wouldn't have had time to do myself, and he's fitting in well, so it's all good. There are some big projects on the boil atm, so while I get on top of those, Fry's helping out with some of the smaller things that need doing until I can bring him in on the bigger stuff. The new stuff I'm working on is all Java, running on Tomcat/Hibernate/Spring, so I'm still learning it all myself -- I'll wait till I've got my head around it before trying to teach it :)
Right now, I'm relaxing a bit (done enough writing for the moment :) ), and playing wtih GCC 4.0 for an upcoming tute, which is good fun. Given my interest in Java (and open-source Java in particular) I've been twiddling with GCJ, which is really quite impressive these days. In 4.0 you can precompile jar files in to native shared libraries and add mappings between the two in to a database file. After doing that, you can throw the jars in to your CLASSPATH and run classes inside them using the GCJ interpreter (gij), and it'll pick up the precompiled versions rather than interpreting the code. The upshot of this is that it's now relatively easy to recompile complex apps like Eclipse and Tomcat in to native code. The Swing and AWT code is really coming along too.
I nicked down to the beer shop in Surrey Hills that has a crazy range of beers and picked up a few interesting ones to try... looking forward to the Grand Ridge Supershine and the Bellevue cherry especially. The Supershine is 11%, so it's more for sipping than for drinking, but it's meant to be a good drop.
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| Monday, May 2nd, 2005
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10:17 pm
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I have my copy of Electroplankton! I haven’t had a huge amount of time to play with it yet, but it seems very cool indeed so far. I’ve been playing mainly Hanenbow and Luminaria so far, tooling around a little in Volvoice (which is hilarious), but I’ll have to get more in to all of the others. The packaging is awesome, with uber-shinyness throughout and some bonus cheapy headphones as well, very different to a typical DS game, but I guess that’s quite fitting given the subject matter. Ah well... better get back to it :)
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| Wednesday, April 27th, 2005
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1:25 pm - My, Earth really is full of things
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Our PS2 swap disc and slide card combo arrived yesterday after its trip from, well, I'm really not sure where, but it got here, and that's the main thing :) I grabbed the Katamari Damacy ISO last week in preparation, so last night I quickly burned that while I was fiddling wtih the PS2, removing the front of the drive tray and such.
Using the swap disc is a bit of a pain, but I'm sure we'll get used to it. After booting with the swap disc, you need to shove the slide card in under the drive tray, unclip the tray, pull it out, put in your burned/imported game, push the tray back in, and use the slide card again to clip it back in to place. The important thing, though, is that it works -- Kat has been busily playing much Katamari :) It's a very crazy game, but I'll discuss it in more detail in another post if I can be bothered.
Speaking of Sony stuff, they've announced the local launch details for the PSP -- September 1st, for a hefty $429. It's not uncommon for console makers to inflate European and Australian prices (the PSP's $249US price equates to about $320AU at current exchange rates), but it's particularly striking in this case because the Nintendo DS, at just $199 locally, hasn't suffered this kind of inflation. With games very likely to launch at $99 each, rather than $69 for DS titles, Sony may well have a hard time selling the PSP at first.
current music: Nine Inch Nails - Ringfinger
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| Friday, April 15th, 2005
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4:58 pm - we've had tickets since septembre!
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It's been too long since my last post, so events just get the quick summary treatment:
- Saw Cirque du Soleil's Quidam the other week, which was awesome. It was the first time I'd seen one of their shows, but I'd definitely want to go again when the next one comes to town.
- Bob's bucks party, with laser skirmish akshun, followed by dinner and drinks, but a distinct lack of boobs
- Beer, dinner, more beer, and norgs ahoy last Friday, in an attempt to address the shortage of boobs from the previous weekend -- big woots to katty for organising it all :)
- I bought my first import game for my DS -- Electroplankton! Those crazy Japanese guys... it's not really a game as such, but rather a kind of interactive artwork which lets you do visual stuff to produce music. It's hard to describe really, but this 40MB video shows off some of the different modes, and it looks like a lot of fun in a trippy, relaxing sort of way. Hopefully I should have it in the next couple of weeks.
Work's been very busy again of late, with lots of decent-sized projects coming up. I've been using Python a lot lately, but I think I'll try my hand at some Java for one of the upcoming projects -- I've been looking at stuff like Hibernate and Spring that should help out quite a bit.
current mood:  busy
current music: Assemblage 23 -- Blindhammer
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