Finding Ada
Was listening to FLOSS Ep. 114 and the topic is Ada Lovelace Day. Neat concept. Who would you put on the list?
In Another Life: Solar Power
I am occasionally reminded of how much I admire the concepts of solar power and the future it could sustain.
If I were in a different line of work, it would likely be in the solar power industry. Renewable energy is a concept that’s satisfying to get behind, like it has become satisfying to become a bicycle commuter.
A casual googling for “Bellingham solar” brings up a hit to Western Washington Solar. The page summarizes a few very good points about making a domestic solar investment. If I didn’t have to worry about stockpiling savings and retirement (among other notable house projects), I would jump on a solar upgrade for my house. Unfortunately, it seems like a massive initial investment. I am very eager for prices in solar components to drop. (Who isn’t?)
I will blog more about solar power! I would love to hear from anyone who’s got a solar experience, even passive solar design. This is a topic I want to share.
Copyright Thought
Just now–looking at Slashdot and reading the post about 20,000 lawsuits of copyright infringement against BitTorrent users–makes me think that that copyright litigation is going to be a growth segment for the next decade. Like online advertising, online marketing and online gaming…copyright litigation is backed by solvent clientelle.
Back when I was first out of college, I chaffed at my first webmaster position, because I learned after a week that I was a tool of the chief merketer. That is not the role that garners respect from your engineering peers. (But it does pay rent nicely.). I am not so insensitive about our rights as to hitch my wagon to the RIAA or MPAA.
I did admit to Thomas Gideon recently in some feedback to his thecommandline.net podcast that I didn’t find the copyright segments as interesting as the programming segments. He did respond most kindly on that topic…but I don’t feel too guilty. I know that the RIAA and the MPAA are commercial gestapo organizations. They mold the best legal system we can buy. I vote a lot with my dollar: I don’t watch TV, I don’t watch network advertising, they only get a bit of an occasional DVD purchase from me. My friends know that these organizations are evil. Thomas, my friends and myself…we’re clearly on the same side.
However…a Desperate Programmer or Ambitious Consultancy would be eager to hitch up to the Media Establishment’s Legal Assult. There’s little living to be made supporting volunteer defenses…except that it is our digital living. It is a shame that the two sides are not both bound to a public budget which would hopefully expose the merits of a just argument, rather than reflect the amplitide of the affluent. (My thots on political campaigns are similar.)
You Want a Vertex Turbo
Unless you want to go all spendy on an Intel X25-M or X25-E…However, after reading Anand’s SSD Anthology, the best value SSD is the OCZ Vertex Turbo. Some of my lingering questions have been answered!
OCZ Vertex Turbo
TRIM commands provide a modest performance enhancement if the drive is not near capacity. However as drives approach capacity, TRIM support doesn’t help random write performance. Intel is the winner here, but the OCZ Vertex is a clear second. Anand’s review indicates that any other SSD is likely using a cheap JMicron controller and will “stutter and pause” in ways that platters don’t. The upshot of this is: inferior SSD controllers, even with TRIM support, would still stutter and pause when near capacity. TRIM support would give you a little more time to avoid getting there, but you’ll likely get there no matter what.
Basically, the Vertex is the only affordable SSD that performs better than a VelociRaptor at “used condition” random writes. Given that any read activity will be lightning fast compared to rotational media, this is much better performance than winchester raid and without the latency spikes that JMicron controllers exhibit.
The value of TRIM support and RAID. Intel and Adaptec, et. al., have indirectly mentioned to various forum moderators that they’re going to support TRIM on RAID controllers RSN. I wouldn’t wait, actually. Striping the Vertex would be fine, it would help random write performance by decreasing the amount of writes per drive. Read performance will ROCK!
Three SSDs? Or One?
So I was thinking about how fast the write speed for a striped set of OCZ Vertex Turbos would be: between 300-435 MB/s. That’s simply awesome.
However, there are some drawbacks to my plan:
1) assuming onboard RAID0 will be sufficient
2) onboard RAID0 won’t have TRIM support
3) extra effort and cost of three drives might not be as worthwhile as one badass drive, even if that one (sata) drive maxes out at 220MB/s.
I have to wonder if, as three SSD drives fill and their random write speeds drop off (because the drive has to do it’s internal monkeying), that a striped set wouldn’t be all that bad…the amount of monkeying presumably would be only 1/3 as bad in a three striped set, no?
The 220MB/s rate is apparently the SATA bus saturation rate, so you don’t see SSD SATAII drives faster than that until you jump to PCIe-X16 drives.
I was forwarded a link to a great Anandtech article on SSDs and why the Intel SSD is still quite stellar. Haven’t finished reading it, can’t say more yet.
Favorite Avatar Maker
This is pretty fun: http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=9962
Are Two SSDs Worth It?
I was just pricing out components for a Windows 7 system for a Photoshop user. My idea was to have two SSD drives, one for the boot drive, a second for ssd for photoshop scratch, and a 1TB drive for finished work. A Core i5 system with 8GB ram seems to price out at $2000, including two nice Viewsonic 24″ monitors. By choosing an AMD X4 processor and two 23″ Acer monitors, I can squeeze it down to $1500. That’s a big difference. With the SSDs and a CS4 approved ATI graphics card (don’t need a gamer card of course), a slower processor shouldn’t actually make much of a perceptible difference, right? Seriously–the system it would be replacing is like six years old.
ATI FirePro 3700
So my big question is–are two separate 32G SSDs a good choice? To divide up this way? These motherboards come with built in RAID, so would I ultimately get better performance striping both a C: and E: across the two SSDs? Or is it best to just let Photoshop dominate a whole drive just for itself? I’ve always been hesitant to raid a boot volume, of course. And booting off the the 1TB drive is of course…absurd.
All advice welcome.
Edit: it might be better to just raid0 two OCZSSD2-1VTXT60G and get a combined 400MB/s write speed.
Diffed and Merged…and Ported
“Hard at it,” is how you’d describe me these days. I’ve really learned a lot about programming C# in the last three weeks. There’s some stuff I like, even. I’m still, rather instinctively, feeling hesitant to praise Microsoft for anything…but it’s melting.
Consider this latest Tools episode from The Commandline podcast. Thomas Gideon describes a journey, somewhat similar to my own, about early programming in a Microsoft environment, discovering the power of Linux, and trying not to look back. I was rather overwhelmed the first time I tried programming console graphics using the Borland C compiler back in 1992. By 1996 I had taught myself C and Perl and even written an assembly compiler for a MIPS processor in Perl in a SunOS 4.x environment. I went on to programming CGIs in Perl but took a right turn at Cold Fusion more than once at two different jobs, dodging PHP both times. I ended up deep into Java, learning OO and Patterns and Refactoring (Fowler, Beck, Cunningham, et. al.) not out of righteousness….but out of desperation in deadline environments…seeking wisdom and arguments to battle absurd deadlines with. My biggest conclusion was the resulting confusion between reading all of Steven McConnell’s, Kent Beck, and Martin Fowler’s books in 18 months.
Almost all my book reading seems to have ended. I no longer (and not for a few year now, after 18 hour days and 2am pages and midnight server bloodbaths) care to know more than I do from a book. My reflection of being a smug, knows-better-than programmer may as well be a flattened aluminum can. Nothing stops the deadlines. Almost no human programmer/sysadmin can know enough to forestall the melting server farm. So when it came time to convert to C#, it was with resignation. I recognized pretty quickly that I needed to accept that. Anyhow, I’d never become the Free Software rock star I hoped to be…one day. Rather–I discovered that I was pretty darned human: with house, pets, and kids…and limits.
In two weeks of C# programming, I feel actually more productive than my first six months of Java programming. Experience, of course, plays a large role. Knowing how to Google-to-solve is actually so much more fluent to me than looking up anything in a book that I never considered buying a C# book. Poor trees. Poor publishing industry (watch me cry).
It was really interesting reflecting on Cmdline’s thoughts on using an IDE in his latest podcast. He describes how he’s somehow still not as productive with an IDE as with vim. (Boy, Kevin will like to hear that!) I’ve heard the same of Emacs programmers. (Did you know you can setup a VIM SERVER?) I, myself, would be “absocrippled” were I to lack bash (thus: cygwin). But presently, between Visual Studio 2008 and the Advanced Logging package for IIS, my estimation for the Microsoft Web platform has actually…grown.
I find the C# API is actually easier to use than the JDK API (from whence I last used it). Convenience methods and a bit of simplification of file operations seems to have made learning how to work with streams only a few hours of learning…not a day. The expressiveness of “properties” in C# is remarkable. That VS2008 has at least a few built in refactoring capabilities makes simple refactorings quite effortless. In to weeks of programming I’ve already probably thrown out 1/2 of the code I’ve written because I’ve refactored–leveraging properties.
None of these thing were as easy using vim and PHP. The IDEs I was using for Java were terribly heavy, a decade ago. The thing I miss most from jEdit so far is the Jdiff plugin. However, combining WinMerge, TortoiseSVN and the Comparison Tools add-in for Visual Studio off Codeplex gets me pretty close to the Jdiff plugin. And…I admit…an integrated debugger in an IDE is actually a pleasure to use. I was never comfortable getting the Zend IDE or Eclipse and Xdebug to fit together.
Thus…I admit…from a practical standpoint, I have been amazingly productive in the face of recent…platform adversity…you might say. Granted, I’ve never been a big IDE developer because…nothing is more distracting than a programming environment that slows down your “syntatical expression.” That I’m on the fastest workstation that anyone has ever bought me certainly helps the IDE do it’s job. But really, my situation could be so much more difficult.
I feel like I’ve accepted a lot of change and have remained competent in the face of it. I have to be grateful for that. And I remind myself…that even though it’s not F/LOSS software I’m developing with, really the real challenge in my life has not been the software, it’s been with programming and programming environments and business in general. The various businesses I’ve worked for have always presented (necessary) challenges for someone who’s naturally inclined to stay home and read sci-fi novels. F/LOSS was not extra-better at reducing my workload.
F/LOSS has always been better at providing turn-around in the face of unfunded development efforts. That’s the biggest change in the last decade: again working at a place where they spend money on you. In San Francisco, they spent money on us (while the VC lasted). But after the bubble popped, it was back to field-stripping your trusty AK47-vim editor on my aged 350mhz machine, waiting for the next small client to arrive. Who had cash for an IDE? “…from my cold dead hands” eh? Stripped down development habits are hard habits to break. Instructive, certainly. Character-building: undoubtedly!
So really the change has been getting me to grip the controls of an M1 Abrams. Microsoft really wants to keep their developers. Just listening to a few episodes of .Net Rocks, hearing about their Road Show really put into stark contrast the affluence Microsoft was offering compared to the frugality I was used to. I’d LOVE to attend a vim or jEdit launch party. Heh!
I’ve described a large difference in my professional life. I don’t want to make myself all worked up by re-treading some older moral points. My sense of panic is evaporating. Now it’s time to remember to pace myself.
Good weekend rides
Going up Ferndale road has been quite nice. It was fun to see the Saturday packs of riders. Where were all the Sunday riders? Duh: church? Looking forward to corned beef tonight!
Foundation Bolt, 2010-01-26
So after listening to that podcast about digital color, I’m not so concerned (in fact, I can happily prefer) to use somewhat over-exposed images. It’s much easier to darken and add contrast than it is to safely reduce contrast. Unless you actually blur the picture and add more artificially gradated pixels, you cannot add color resolution to an image. So you can guess what this picture used to look like when I started.
Whatever a foundation bolt does out in the middle of a parking lot–this one does its job quite well.
Foundation Bolt, 2010-01-26
Twelve Mile Route on Saturday?
This is a 12 mile route that I’ve wanted to try. Maybe I’ll try this on Saturday.
Bicycle Route, 2010-03-13
Keep a Chain Tool On Hand!
This morning as I was on may way to to the store before work, I got to Conneticut and Northwest and .(This being my lucky corner) my chain failed. This is only 2-3 blocks from my house, so like the time it was 18F outside when my freehub died at the same intersection, I was able to quickly walk the bike home.
However, I was not prepared: I was not carrying a chain tool on me. It took about 20 minutes to repair, and I oiled the chain while I was at it…but if I was on the side of Northwest, this would have been much more difficult.
That Much Closer to Jacking In
I heard these articles mentioned on The Commandline podcast:
Your analog brain.
A wearable brain computer interface. And for only 9000E, you can type by thinking.
I would have thought that this technology would have made it on the scene a long time ago. It’s very much something that would mesh will well with wearable computers. Just need a VRD to get you an augmented view of reality.
Moon, 2010-03-04
I’m impressed that even though I was so lazy as to not hang a sandbag from my tripod, it was as sharp as it is.
Moon, 2010-03-04
Bark, Bellingham, 2010-01-31
This was a rainy weekend walk, where again I risked my camera. I wasn’t too worried, it’s a pretty tuff camera and it’s not too fragile a lens. Anyhow, it was the 28MM F5 Vivitar tank. It’s actually quite good at close ups. Almost all the pictures I’ve uploaded have been hand held at 100 ISO.
Bark, Bellingham, 2010-01-31
