I've got 50,000 of them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:11 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I suddenly remembered what else was on the lost filesystem on Kodachi, my old Linux box: my collection of 50,000 photos. Gone! Gone! I've been using them for years for any web project that needed a small picture; I've used them to create avatars for my web forums; I had selected some of them for the overhaul of this blog before that project got eaten by the ever-hungry mice.

Gone! But wait... They originally came as part of Corel Gallery 1.3 million, a package long since forgotten, but I should still have the CDs. (Laughter from the gallery.) In fact, I managed to turn up twelve out of the original sixteen or seventeen disks, which is a pretty good effort considering that I haven't seen them for five years. The package was almost entirely crap... Except for the photos, which while low-resolution (384x256) were sharp and clear, with good composition and a wide variety of subjects. They occupied three of the sixteen (or seventeen) disks... and I found two of them.

Argh! Argh! I can't believe I didn't make a backup! One of the reasons I chew up so much disk space is that I'm paranoid; anything that is useful and cannot be easily replaced is copied and recopied. If it's something I created myself, a copy will sooner or later show up on every partition of every disk of every computer I own. Which is the only thing that will save you when two disks fail from a RAID-5 array. (Which is what appears to have happened.)

But not in this case. In fact, I came across a directory that seemed to have once held a copy of my photo library, but has since been cleaned out to save disk space.

Probably, if I trawl through eBay for long enough, if I search enough file-sharing applications, if I pester enough people, probably I can find a copy of my lost CD #7 of Corel Gallery 1.3 million. But if only I had made a quick copy of it; less than two gigabytes of data for those photos, which is less than three dollars at todays disk prices. Just drag and drop the directory onto one of my many servers; name it something obvious like Pix so that I immediately know what it —

Oh. Look! Look what I found! Now copy. Copy the copy. Burn to DVD!

Only the files of the paranoid survive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:01 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I'm waiting for files to finish copying from Ukyo and Lina over to Yuri, and for Yuri to download all the latest updates to Fedora, so right now I can't proceed with building Kei. I could do some useful work - there are some people waiting patiently for Mu.Nu blogs - but I thought I'd watch some anime first.

I decided on Mahoromatic, since the first DVD was kind of fun. So I went to pop it in the DVD player, and there was already a disk in there.

The disk was Big Trouble in Little China. Which means that I haven't watched any DVDs for six months.

A little catching up to do over Christmas, I think...

Update: First DVD in six months and I pick one I've already seen. Go me.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:12 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 It doesn't get any better than meeting someone who also owns Big Trouble in Little China.

Posted by: Sarah at December 15, 2003 06:35 PM (MbvGN)

2 Holy Christ. I've gotten the impression from poking around on your blog that you're a chick (or a pretty femme dude), but you also seem to know what BSD and Linux are, and you seem to have a wealth of knowledge about pooters, AND you own Big Trouble In Little China. If you ARE a chick, we need more women like yourself here in sunny southern California. Women here are hot, but generally aren't very geeky. Or cool, for that matter. Or maybe I don't get out enough. Maybe I should shut the hell up. Anyhow. Nifty blog, it certainly proved entertaining.

Posted by: g at December 19, 2003 07:30 PM (q0vv6)

3 Thanks

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 19, 2003 10:41 PM (jtW2s)

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(Via Ghost of a flea)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:38 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

root@lina Triplet]# ls -l
total 163840
-r--r--r-- 36036 2586182132 2609512448 64177273943300316 Jul 24 1902 Triplet 12 Beat.wav
?--Sr--rwt 228 1072470923 228 2586312932 Jun 23 1970 Triplet 13 Beat.wav

Those files might be corrupt.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:29 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The cables! The terrible cables!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:15 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The /pixy filesystem on Kodachi, my old Linux box, appears to be completely and utterly toast. Those crappy IBM drives finally got me good.

I think I already had everything interesting copied off. I can no longer tell for sure, because after trying a quick reboot to see if that fixed the problem, the filesystem will no longer mount. Or even fsck.

Of course, this happens just before I get my new server set up and copy everything over to a new home. Of course.

Fortunately, the vast majority of the files on there were either (a) anime and other videos that I have backed up to DVD-R or (b) backups of my other computers, which have not suddenly and irrevocably died on me. As yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:25 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Windows XP install routine has been stuck for, oh, fifteen minutes now. Somehow I don't think this is working.

P.S. Look, you idiots, I don't have a floppy drive. Device drivers are supplied on CD-ROM these days. The only reason anyone uses floppy drives any more is to load your blasted device drivers. Would you at least try to join the 90s, even if you can't quite make it into the new century?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:54 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Yuri, my new Linux box, is now formatting its 716.8GB /pixy filesystem. (Yes, all my Linux boxes have a large /pixy filesystem. Why do you ask.)

The only thing I'm not 100% sure of is whether the new IDE controller is working in DMA mode. If it is, then this box will shortly be ready to go.

I've reserved 45GB for Windows XP so that I can dual-boot and play around a bit. I'll report in when that's done - or when I trip over some other horrible problem.

Pixy's Tip of the Day

When a mid-tower case specifies that it has 12 drive bays, this does not mean that it is physically possible to install 12 disk drives in the case. It means that you have 12 different bays in which to arrange your 7 or 8 - or if you really push it, 9 - drives.

Also, IDE cables still suck. If I'd known that I wasn't going to be using my 3Ware controller for this, I would have done things rather differently. SATA cables are a substantial improvement, but something like Firewire, which can be daisy-chained and supplies both data and power on a single lead, would be even better.

I took a couple of photos of Yuri before I closed the case up. It looks like Cthulhu is trying to escape from within - but has become entangled in fishing line. There are cables everywhere.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:42 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

You are DNA. You're a smart person, and you appear
incredibly complex to people who don't know
you. You're incomparably full of information,
and most of it is useless.

Which Biological Molecule Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Thanks to the Quizmistress of Chaos. Not to be confused with the Linkmistress of Chaos.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:37 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Pixy's Tip of the Day:

You cannot install a full-length PCI card in a Lian-Li mid-tower case if you are planning to use the lower drive bays. For example, using a 3Ware 8-channel IDE RAID controller to run 8 IDE drives is not possible.

So it's a good thing that I had no intention whatsoever of doing just that.

Grumble.

On the other hand... Hmm. If I pull this out of here and stick it in here, and then plug this into here instead of there... Yeah, that should work. Tinker, tinker... But I'll only get 700GB on this box rather than 800GB. On the other hand, I now have 320GB on the other box instead of 200GB. I can probably live with that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:14 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

If you idly twiddle the volume control on your Logitech cordless keyboard while waiting for an install of Windows XP to complete, the installation routine will crash and you will have to start again from the beginning.

So you probably don't want to do that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:27 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Thanks!!! I do have a Logitech, although it's not cordless, and I have Windows 95, but you never know when you might need to upgrade, so I will commit your advice to memory as soon as I stop laughing...(bad, bad Susie!)

Posted by: Susie at December 12, 2003 01:52 PM (0+cMc)

2 Logitech keyboards rule! I blame the entire episode on Microsoft.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 12, 2003 02:02 PM (kOqZ6)

3 Experience is a bitter teacher. And she also works at Microsoft.

Posted by: Simon at December 12, 2003 03:20 PM (OyeEA)

4 Logitech do NOT rule ... they are bad bad people:
http://www.xset.co.uk/archives/000032.html
I was going to start a "Boycott Logitech" but then realised that both my mice and one of my joysticks are made by them so I'd be shooting my self in the foot!

Posted by: Robert at December 12, 2003 10:58 PM (kXZI6)

5 I read your post, and you're right, they are bad people. This is upsetting, because I like their hardware.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 13, 2003 12:58 AM (jtW2s)

6 Well, it is the only thing they've done to make me not like them. Other than that they rock! And my WebCam (which I never use) is easily one of the best I've ...uh ... never used ...?...

Posted by: Robert at December 13, 2003 01:45 AM (kXZI6)

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Um.

You know how in scientific experiments, and debugging computer programs, and generally when trying to work out what's wrong, you try to arrange things so that you only change one factor at a time, so that you can determine exactly what it was that caused the problem or effect that is under study?

Well, if you both (a) had your phone line disconnected because you forgot to pay your bill and (b) kicked the cord out of the line splitter so that your modem was no longer connected to anything, this doesn't work too well.

Which leaves me in the very curious position of having to apologise for something I said about Telstra.

Yes, the young lady on the phone was correct. My ADSL came back up. The continuing problems were entirely my fault.

[There, that wasn't so painful. — Ed.]

I need a better line splitter that doesn't fall apart whenever I look at it. Or failing that, some electrical tape.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:33 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Looks like somepixy forgot to pay the phone bill.

Looks like when Telstra say Yes, your ADSL will be reconnected along with your phone service they really mean I have no idea but if I say yes you'll get off the line and it will be Someone Else's Problem.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:16 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Oh no! Not when we have two Munuvian emergencies! Well, one emergency (Jim's) and one crisis (comment spammers)....

Posted by: Susie at December 11, 2003 02:45 PM (0+cMc)

2 Lolita viagra spam! Prozac penis elnargement! Allegra nexium vicodin paxil adipex!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 11, 2003 03:28 PM (kOqZ6)

3 It would seem that MT Blacklist only works on URLs, not on content.
Cough.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 11, 2003 03:33 PM (kOqZ6)

4 That's funny, considering the last dozen we got had "normal" (ish) comments, and it was the URL that was spamish. Think it was an evil ploy to make us get Blacklist???

Posted by: Susie at December 11, 2003 03:47 PM (0+cMc)

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Now that I went and bought a gigabit ethernet card, I find two just lying around...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:23 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 I hate it when that happens...

Posted by: Susie at December 11, 2003 03:07 AM (0+cMc)

2 It's a sign from yourself...I mean, the Gods that you must build two computers in which to install them.

Posted by: Victor at December 11, 2003 11:58 PM (16A49)

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Rather than spend days fiddling with Linux drivers, I bought a gigabit ethernet card and a cheap IDE RAID card. I just hope I have enough PCI slots...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:49 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 So for those of us with no idea what you're saying, can you maybe put "good" "bad" or "indifferent" ratings on these posts so we can respond sympathetically or enthusiastically as the case requires?

Posted by: Jennifer at December 10, 2003 01:26 AM (k+MKr)

2 Ditto what she said....

Posted by: Susie at December 10, 2003 03:04 AM (0+cMc)

3 I'll hazard that this is an "indifferent" post. Pixy had to buy new hardware (boo!) but has stuff working now (yay!).

Posted by: Chris C. at December 10, 2003 06:45 AM (it17o)

4 That's about right

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 10, 2003 11:02 AM (jtW2s)

5 For a geek, the opportunity to go into the computer store and buy something is never a cause for "boo!" Hell, my wife won't let me go into the computer store alone "just to check prices".
As for the nic problem. I assume the new card is tulip compatible, right? How about the old one? I found an oddity with some standard cards. By default the use a random port number, which can be a problem. I couldn't get SuSE 9.0 to get the nic to work because it couldn't find the correct port value. I suppose some good guessing on my part would have done the job. Some cards come with a configuration program that allows you to set the port to a fixed value. Unfortunately, these are usually DOS or (worse) Windoze programs, so it's a pain to use them.
BTW, what level RAID?

Posted by: Rossz at December 10, 2003 11:11 AM (43SjN)

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So, I've built Kei, the Pentium 4 2.6GHz super wizzy box, and installed Fedora on it as well. How does it run? Let's find out!

Test 1: Woot*625

Yuri's rating of 2800+ looks realistic as it pips Kei's P4 2.6 by about 15%. On the other hand, the Pentium 4 2.6GHz is nearly twice as fast as the Pentium 4 Celeron 1.7GHz.

Kei x2 shows the average CPU time for two copies of the same code run simultaneously with HyperThreading enabled. Here we see no advantage from HyperThreading at all: At 2.93 seconds the programs take just as long to run in parallel as they would in series.

Test 2: Memory Exerciser

But now Kei steals the lead - and by a healthy margin. As I had expected, the 800MHz front-side bus really delivers the goods when you're tossing 48MB strings about.

Also, we see a marked improvement with two copies running simultaneously: The total time for two runs drops from 6.36 to 5.26 seconds - about 20% faster.

Test 3: Cache Cruncher

Ouchie! Kei falls in a heap, outperformed by a 1.2GHz Athlon. A sad day for Intel, a sad day for - me, because I bought the darn thing. In proportion to clock speed, Kei delivers the same performance here as Misa. Kei claws back a bit of respect, though, with a hefty 46% speed gain from HyperThreading.

So, the conclusion we draw from this is: Um.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:55 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Fedora does recognise the gigabit ethernet on my 8IPE1000Pro2, where it didn't recognise the gigE on my 7N400Pro2.

So if I run Windows on the Athlon and Linux on the Pentium, it will all work!

Maybe.

But at least I haven't blown anything up yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:55 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Although my IDE RAID, network controller and video card aren't working properly, I was still able to install Fedora Linux on the box and run a few tests. (Hint: Don't wiggle the mouse while it is starting up the X server during installation. This will crash the X server and you will have to reboot and start over.)

Anyway, I wrote a couple of little Python scripts to test relative performance on CPU-intensive and bandwidth-intensive tasks. The actual work involved is just manipulating meaningless strings, but since I do a lot of that this is probably not a bad thing. The machines tested are running different versions of Linux and of Python, so the results aren't particularly meaningful, but I will present them anyway.

The systems on test are:

Yuri: A shiny new dysfunctional Athlon XP 2800+
Misa: The web server hosting mu.nu, a P4 Celeron 1.7
Lina: A somewhat reliable Dual P3-800
Kodachi: An Athlon 1.2 with the least reliable storage system in the Southern Hemisphere

Program one makes a string containing the phrase "woot!" and repeatedly quintuplicates it out to 3125 bytes:

for j in range(0,10):
    for k in range(0,10000):
        s='woot!'
        for i in range(0,4):
            s=s+s+s+s+s
    print j, len(s)

Results: (total CPU times in seconds)

No real surprises here. Yuri is about twice as fast as Kodachi, despite only having a 70% higher clock speed. This illustrates real advances in the Athlon core over the last three years. The Athlon 64 should do even better, but I don't have one.

Program two is intended to stress the memory system: It continues the quintuplication until the string is 48,828,125 bytes long, containing 9,765,625 copies of the word "woot!". I expect the older systems with their PC133 memory to suffer. I also expect that Kei, my so-new-I-haven't-built-it-yet Pentium 4, will rule here, with its 800MHz front side bus.

for j in range(0,10):
    s='woot!'
    for i in range(0,10):
        s=s+s+s+s+s
        print len(s)

Results: (times in seconds)

This time Misa with its 400MHz bus manages to outrun Kodachi with its 200MHz bus (and 133MHz memory). Suprisingly low user time from Misa is balanced by a surprisingly high system time. I repeated all of the tests and the results are consistent.

Yuri with its 333MHz memory bus - 2.5 times as fast as the 133MHz memory on Kodachi - gets almost exactly 2.5 times the performance.

Program three is a cache-cruncher - it creates a 15,625 byte string and does a search-and-replace on it:

s='waat!weet!wiit!woot!wuut!'
t=s
for i in range(0,4):
    t=t+t+t+t+t
for j in range(0,10):
    for k in range(0,1000):
        u=t.replace('t!','py?')
    print j, len(t)

Results: (total CPU times)

And the Celeron, with its smaller caches, crashes to the bottom of the list. I think this may be the problem we're having with Movable Type - a Celeron just can't handle the template processing very well. I'll be running these same tests on a P4 later this week, so we'll see the exact difference.

Either a slightly disappointing result from Yuri here, or an impressive result from Kodachi, as the speedup is less than the ratio of clock speeds this time.

More to follow...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:06 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:34 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ah, yes. I'd forgotten how much fun it is trying to install Linux on the latest hardware.

So far, Fedora (which is equivalent to Red Hat 10) doesn't recognise my IDE RAID controller, my gigabit ethernet, or my video card. Gigabyte (who made the motherboard) have a driver available for the RAID controller. All I need is to put it on a floppy and... This new machine doesn't have a floppy drive.

So I'm downloading Mandrake 9.2 now. Which will take about... 10 hours.

See you all tomorrow, then.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:56 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 I wish I understood only half of that...but at least I can figure out that most of it's bad (the picture in the next post helped with that)...

Posted by: Susie at December 08, 2003 02:31 AM (0+cMc)

2 I should do a little mood-meter thingy that shows different Pixys depending on how badly my computers are screwed up each day.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 08, 2003 02:46 AM (jtW2s)

3 Mandrake? Don't do it! It's French. The first time some script kiddie attempts to break into your system it will surrender.
BTW, why haven't you picked a small USB drive (128Meg is probably more than enough). They're fairly cheap here in the States and work perfectly for transferring files when the network is not available. I also left out the floppy when I bought a new server, but I can always fall back on my Laks Watch.

Posted by: Rossz at December 08, 2003 05:56 AM (43SjN)

4 Also downloading Gentoo now

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 08, 2003 10:45 AM (jtW2s)

5 You could try debian, too.
and get a usb key to use instead of floppies. It mounts fairly painlessly in linux and stores oh-so-much more

Posted by: Chris C. at December 10, 2003 06:39 AM (it17o)

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Yuri, my new Athlon XP 2800+, boots into BIOS.

Which means I have failed to destroy anything.

So far.

One gripe: The cables on the little extra port thingies that come with the motherboard aren't long enough, so you can't use the nonexistent slot to the right of the AGP slot. Poo.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:01 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Feeling just a little more relaxed today.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:30 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 You look much better!!!! The Barkeep says he's been buggin' you about a blog for a friend, so read your email and let's work on the frazzled look for next week...

Posted by: Susie at December 06, 2003 05:00 AM (0+cMc)

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AnandTech has a detailed comparison of Intel and AMD's low-end chips. To keep it short: Intel get slaughtered in every test. I'm so glad I didn't get a Celeron...

But guess what Munuvia is currently running on? Gotta fix that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:11 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

So, the power supplies and the second motherboard have come in, and the shop is just waiting for the second video card. It's on back-order, and they send me a message saying it's not available right now, and would I like a different version of the card, which they do have available?

So I ask exactly which version it is they have available, since there are five very similar cards made by just this one supplier.

And they cancel my order for the card I wanted, replacing it with a different card, which is also on back-order.

Thanks, guys.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:52 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)