Dev. Blog

2011-05-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.survivalunlimited.com/deepwellpump.htm

Apparently these can work alongside a motorized pump ... very interesting.

2011-05-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-may-9-2011/minneapolis-is-the-new-gay

"Whatever happened to just fuckin' a dude?"

Indeed.

2011-03-14T17:19:00.000-07:00

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/roots-of-macroeconomic-ignorance/

How much of this is the reverse of science: I already have the conclusion, now let's create the evidence that gets us there.

2011-03-08T08:49:00.001-08:00

http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.aspx

Think sheevaplug only better. With 2 NIC's this can be finally used as a firewall/router.

2011-03-08T08:45:00.000-08:00

>>> .11+.19+.28+.35+.39+.91+3.74
5.97

So Mac OS is almost 6% (as of February 2011)

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Not really much else of interest to me (the hardware slowly improves - it would be curious to see year over year).

2011-01-16T21:57:00.000-08:00

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/kitty_pet

The kitty decides when it's petting time.

2010-08-23T11:13:00.001-07:00

# iptables ! -V
Not 1.4.8 ;-)

2010-07-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

Good Economic sites:

http://nakedcapitalism.com (Yves Smith - an alias)
- A lot of insight into the complexities of finance/banking.

http://calculatedriskblog.com
- pretty cut and dry, but still very informative.

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/ - Brad Delong
- at times a bit abrasive (usually in a good way), but still quite knowledgable.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/ - Paul Krugman (you may have seen him on TV)
- Similar to Brad Delong, and very good about macroeconomic policy (even if you disagree with his treatment (which I kind of do), his diagnosis is often very good.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/ - Mike Shedlock (Mish)
- Has a different perspective, and is seemingly less convinced that fiscal/monetary policy can stave of deflation/depression.

http://theoildrum.com - a very different perspective, but still worth while. Although right now demand is low enough where in the short term energy isn't the problem it was.

There are a lot of others too, but those are the main ones. A lot of economic commentators are one trick ponies (they look and something and decide _that's_ the problem) - the best example are goldbugs.

2010-01-12T10:54:00.000-08:00

Good point: http://valerieaurora.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/great-benchmarking-advice/

That's very scientific, for sure. I more or less agree. Although, I probably don't follow this (look at previous posts).

2009-12-02T10:57:00.000-08:00

So those previous benchmarks weren't benchmarks:

The first is the 1.2Ghz ARM5 processor from Marvell (the one in the Sheevaplug)


# nbench 

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          354.24  :       9.08  :       2.98
STRING SORT         :          33.613  :      15.02  :       2.32
BITFIELD            :      8.4763e+07  :      14.54  :       3.04
FP EMULATION        :          38.723  :      18.58  :       4.29
FOURIER             :          362.87  :       0.41  :       0.23
ASSIGNMENT          :          4.6711  :      17.77  :       4.61
IDEA                :          1201.9  :      18.38  :       5.46
HUFFMAN             :          462.25  :      12.82  :       4.09
NEURAL NET          :         0.51582  :       0.83  :       0.35
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          16.481  :       0.85  :       0.62
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 14.784
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 0.663
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 : 
L2 Cache            : 
OS                  : Linux 2.6.31-gentoo-r6
C compiler          : armv5tel-softfloat-linux-gnueabi-gcc
libc                : 
MEMORY INDEX        : 3.193
INTEGER INDEX       : 4.112
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 0.368
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

Now the Geode...


$ nbench

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          124.28  :       3.19  :       1.05
STRING SORT         :          15.581  :       6.96  :       1.08
BITFIELD            :      4.4277e+07  :       7.60  :       1.59
FP EMULATION        :          13.392  :       6.43  :       1.48
FOURIER             :          1999.4  :       2.27  :       1.28
ASSIGNMENT          :          3.3664  :      12.81  :       3.32
IDEA                :          519.83  :       7.95  :       2.36
HUFFMAN             :          215.18  :       5.97  :       1.91
NEURAL NET          :          1.6729  :       2.69  :       1.13
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          71.611  :       3.71  :       2.68
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 6.779
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 2.830
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 : AuthenticAMD Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS 498MHz
L2 Cache            : 128 KB
OS                  : Linux 2.6.32-rc8
C compiler          : i586-pc-linux-gnu-gcc
libc                :
MEMORY INDEX        : 1.784
INTEGER INDEX       : 1.625
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 1.570
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

AMD Athlon 64 X2...


# nbench

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          719.36  :      18.45  :       6.06
STRING SORT         :          119.58  :      53.43  :       8.27
BITFIELD            :      3.2184e+08  :      55.21  :      11.53
FP EMULATION        :          84.806  :      40.69  :       9.39
FOURIER             :           11684  :      13.29  :       7.46
ASSIGNMENT          :          15.326  :      58.32  :      15.13
IDEA                :          3096.3  :      47.36  :      14.06
HUFFMAN             :            1190  :      33.00  :      10.54
NEURAL NET          :          24.162  :      38.81  :      16.33
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          850.16  :      44.04  :      31.80
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 41.210
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 28.320
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 : Dual AuthenticAMD AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ 2993MHz
L2 Cache            : 1024 KB
OS                  : Linux 2.6.31
C compiler          : x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc
libc                : 
MEMORY INDEX        : 11.299
INTEGER INDEX       : 9.582
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 15.707
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

Going by this the Marvell ARM board (essentially the Sheevaplug with more NIC's) has no floating point performance (soft-float). Still in integer performance it does alright (more than 2 times the Geode's performance).

Unfortunately my Sheevaplug is slower than other people's for some reason. And it would seem that yes, the Core2Duo does kick ass.

2009-12-02T10:27:00.001-08:00

More basic benchmarks (stress running -c - which apparently computes sqrt() at some rate):


# stress -t 30s -c 8 -m 1 && cat /proc/loadavg
stress: info: [6975] dispatching hogs: 8 cpu, 0 io, 1 vm, 0 hdd
stress: info: [6975] successful run completed in 30s
3.64 1.23 0.53 1/47 6985
# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
Processor       : Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l)
BogoMIPS        : 1192.75
Features        : swp half thumb fastmult edsp 
CPU implementer : 0x56
CPU architecture: 5TE
CPU variant     : 0x2
CPU part        : 0x131
CPU revision    : 1

Hardware        : Marvell RD-88F6281 Reference Board
Revision        : 0000
Serial          : 0000000000000000


$ stress -t 30s -c 8 -m 1 && cat /proc/loadavg 
stress: info: [10077] dispatching hogs: 8 cpu, 0 io, 1 vm, 0 hdd
stress: info: [10077] successful run completed in 30s
3.78 1.28 0.85 1/126 10087
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 5
model           : 10
model name      : Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 498.091
cache size      : 128 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu de pse tsc msr cx8 sep pge cmov clflush mmx mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips        : 996.18
clflush size    : 32
cache_alignment : 32
address sizes   : 32 bits physical, 32 bits virtual
power management:

The Marvell board has a 1200Mhz X-Scale (ARM5) versus the AMD Geode (x86) 500Mhz. With about the same amount of RAM (some more things are running on the Geode device) the ARM board appears to win. But not by much; and this is supposedly a fast ARM board. I'm very curious about a Cortex-A8 to see how that does, but I don't have a beagleboard to test on.

Oh, but wait...


$ stress -t 30s -c 8 -m 1 && cat /proc/loadavg
stress: info: [20281] dispatching hogs: 8 cpu, 0 io, 1 vm, 0 hdd
stress: info: [20281] successful run completed in 30s
4.00 0.99 0.32 1/231 20291
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 15
model           : 67
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+
stepping        : 3
cpu MHz         : 2992.907
cache size      : 1024 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 2
apicid          : 0
initial apicid  : 0
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov 
pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dno
wext 3dnow rep_good extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_lega
cy
bogomips        : 5985.81
TLB size        : 1024 4K pages
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc

processor       : 1
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 15
model           : 67
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+
stepping        : 3
cpu MHz         : 2992.907
cache size      : 1024 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 1
cpu cores       : 2
apicid          : 1
initial apicid  : 1
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov 
pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dno
wext 3dnow rep_good extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_lega
cy
bogomips        : 5985.51
TLB size        : 1024 4K pages
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc

So it just goes as fast as it can. WTF is the point of stress again?

2009-10-25T22:24:00.000-07:00

More on the Radeon (after upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10):


bryan@baal:~$ glxgears 
7808 frames in 5.0 seconds
7736 frames in 5.0 seconds
7703 frames in 5.0 seconds
7809 frames in 5.0 seconds
XIO:  fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server ":0.0"
      after 38 requests (38 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
bryan@baal:~$ lspci | grep ATI
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV730 PRO [Radeon HD 4650]
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc R700 Audio Device [Radeon HD 4000 Series]

Now I'm really curious how actual games perform. This certainly hints at quite an improvement over the ~3K I was getting before.

2009-09-30T20:54:00.000-07:00

UT2004 benchmarks:


$ cat /opt/ut2004-demo/Benchmark/benchmark.sh 
#!/bin/sh
ut2004-demo dm-rankin?spectatoronly=1?numbots=12?quickstart=1?attractcam=1 -benchmark -seconds=77 -ini=default.ini -exec=/opt/ut2004-demo/Benchmark/Stuff/botmatchexec.txt

Here are results over the last year and 9 months or so:


2.736331 / 14.235601 / inf fps -- Score = 13.679287        rand[276381637]
5.503653 / 11.982956 / 34.976410 fps -- Score = 11.987910        rand[1886997259]
5.563165 / 12.212557 / 45.396217 fps -- Score = 12.217196        rand[1886997259]
5.556774 / 12.213729 / 46.879482 fps -- Score = 12.218822        rand[1886997259]
3.780525 / 204.517151 / inf fps -- Score = 61.584534        rand[1605499383]
5.914872 / 13.538128 / 115.044312 fps -- Score = 13.543859        rand[1886997259]
5.240792 / 28.211584 / inf fps -- Score = 26.802221        rand[1357638259]
5.196166 / 22.054844 / 60.286556 fps -- Score = 22.120491        rand[1886997259]
7.092757 / 25.348576 / 76.011848 fps -- Score = 25.362152        rand[1886997259]
5.720313 / 21.504700 / 61.338535 fps -- Score = 21.514923        rand[1886997259]
9.163403 / 24.096804 / 88.282417 fps -- Score = 24.170898        rand[1886997259]
4.439383 / 24.573044 / 76.100990 fps -- Score = 24.603319        rand[1886997259]
5.927572 / 27.762682 / 130.561325 fps -- Score = 27.756296        rand[1886997259]
4.238309 / 27.693068 / 95.542274 fps -- Score = 27.792650        rand[1886997259]
8.512435 / 28.529356 / 69.447021 fps -- Score = 28.553085        rand[1886997259]
4.627872 / 30.571907 / 110.623741 fps -- Score = 30.584023        rand[1886997259]
9.365571 / 21.006798 / 141.206314 fps -- Score = 21.015017        rand[1886997259]
6.343858 / 22.841759 / 79.750206 fps -- Score = 22.853823        rand[1886997259]
6.288816 / 22.901237 / 79.940460 fps -- Score = 22.911160        rand[1886997259]
6.933957 / 26.870264 / 115.506584 fps -- Score = 26.882593        rand[1886997259]
4.404226 / 26.891077 / 113.770134 fps -- Score = 26.900879        rand[1886997259]
7.666574 / 27.085035 / 90.499039 fps -- Score = 27.101841        rand[1886997259]
4.793906 / 27.111494 / 113.976692 fps -- Score = 27.120817        rand[1886997259]
5.426033 / 26.120008 / 110.599205 fps -- Score = 26.131107        rand[1886997259]
6.902118 / 25.060440 / 108.251572 fps -- Score = 25.068457        rand[1886997259]
8.680158 / 25.102127 / 113.842644 fps -- Score = 25.109219        rand[1886997259]

It goes up and down, but considering how old this game (and that it performs much better on windows) is somewhat sad, but not surprising.

That last instance was run several minutes ago:


$ cat Results/avgfps-2009-09-30-22-46-48.log UT2004 Build UT2004_Build_[2004-09-21_19.13]
x86-64 Linux
 Unknown processor @ 2394 MHz
Mesa DRI Intel(R) 965GM GEM 20090712 2009Q2 RC3 

dm-rankin?spectatoronly=1?numbots=12?quickstart=1?attractcam=1 -benchmark -seconds=77 -exitafterdemo -exec=/opt/ut2004-demo/Benchmark/Stuff/botmatchexec.txt

8.680158 / 25.102127 / 113.842644 fps         rand[1886997259]
Score = 25.109219

I think people were getting some 40 FPS in windows....

2009-09-27T21:17:00.000-07:00

Related to the previous post:


bryan@baal:~$ glxgears 
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
approximately 1/195213 the monitor refresh rate.
15438 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3087.536 FPS
15345 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3068.929 FPS
15339 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3067.797 FPS
XIO:  fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server ":0.0"
      after 50 requests (49 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
bryan@baal:~$ lspci | grep ATI
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV730 PRO [Radeon HD 4650]
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc R700 Audio Device [Radeon HD 4000 Series]

The Radeon plays Half-Life Episode 2 with low/medium detail at playable framerates (through WINE). But even this is a slow card compared to the higher end cards (and especially Nvidia cards in Linux).

2009-09-25T09:16:00.001-07:00

Oh, and with the VIA Nano I can get ~230 fps for glxgears in Ubuntu Karmic Alpha 6.

W00t!

Yeah, somehow I'm not surprised "VIA Chrome9 HC3 Integrated Graphics" aren't very good. As a comparison my crappy G965 (X3100) Thinkpad gets around ~1000 to ~1100 depending on what crazy crap they changed (or when it completely breaks and drops to 100).

I've been told glxgears is a bad benchmark, but it is a good ballpark (because it does seem to relate with general card performance pretty well when fancy things like shaders/glsl stuff isn't involved. Kind of a raw power benchmark.

After all, all glxgears does is render 3 gears made of solid color polygons via display lists. So that is the performance you are benchmarking (not cooler VBO's .... or other cool things like "textures" - you may have heard of them).

I wonder if there is any KMS stuff in the pipe for the Chrome9? Or if it's even worth while...

2009-09-25T09:06:00.001-07:00

I finally got my stupid VIA Nano (U2300) working, it was as simple as this:

idle=poll
(added to kernel boot param - apparently idle=halt should also work).

With this both Fedora 11, and Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 work. And fedora boots up quicker :)

The idle parameter has a number of values it can take, and they appear to boot the box in different fashions (halt is "cooler", or so I read on a forum - the kernel docs make it look like the mid-range C-states are not used, which is rather bizarre - a sort of all or nothing approach to CPU power management?).

From /usr/src/linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt (this includes X86_64 as well):


  idle=   [X86]
      Format: idle=poll, idle=mwait, idle=halt, idle=nomwait
      Poll forces a polling idle loop that can slightly
      improve the performance of waking up a idle CPU, but
      will use a lot of power and make the system run hot.
      Not recommended.
      idle=mwait: On systems which support MONITOR/MWAIT but
      the kernel chose to not use it because it doesn't save
      as much power as a normal idle loop, use the
      MONITOR/MWAIT idle loop anyways. Performance should be
      the same as idle=poll.
      idle=halt: Halt is forced to be used for CPU idle.
      In such case C2/C3 won't be used again.
      idle=nomwait: Disable mwait for CPU C-states

Needless to say, I'll stay with idle=poll. Apparently this is need for all Linux kernels 2.6.24 and above.

Board found here (and elsewhere, probably):

http://www.logicsupply.com/products/nf76_n1gl_lf

2009-08-13T12:34:00.001-07:00

The Fastest Defeat In Chess
The big name for us in the world of chess is Gibaud, a French chess
master.
In Paris during 1924 he was beaten after only four moves by a
Monsieur Lazard. Happily for posterity, the moves are recorded and so
chess enthusiasts may reconstruct this magnificent collapse in the comfort
of their own homes.
Lazard was black and Gibaud white:
1: P-Q4, Kt-KB3
2: Kt-Q2, P-K4
3: PxP, Kt-Kt5
4: P-K6, Kt-K6
White then resigns on realizing that a fifth move would involve
either a Q-KR5 check or the loss of his queen.
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"

2009-05-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

Future Stock

"Back in the 1980's I was the toast of Wall Street. I was having whiskey with Boesky and cookies with Milken. But then, I was diagnosed with terminal boneitis."

I love this line.

2009-03-29T19:12:00.000-07:00

The Banks Were Profitable In January And February Thanks To... AIG

Yay, now I can sleep better knowing that we are in good hands.

The Quiet Coup

Even more push for nationalization... now!

2009-03-16T06:34:00.000-07:00

Toyota: Moving Forward

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7932316.stm

The new marketing paradigm: product placement in war. To me this is a hilarious idea. But that's probably just me.

2009-03-09T23:07:00.000-07:00

Heres a link to the Vanity Fair article:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904

Oh theres more...

There are, of course, a few jobs in Iceland that any refined, educated person might like to do. Certifying the nonexistence of elves, for instance. (“This will take at least six months—it can be very tricky.”)

Where do I sign up!

2009-03-09T22:58:00.000-07:00

Notice that no one asked, What might Icelanders want to do? Or even: What might Icelanders be especially suited to do? No one thought that Icelanders might have some natural gift for smelting aluminum, and, if anything, the opposite proved true. Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”

I blame Iceland's financial crisis on the elves!

2008-12-30T06:31:00.000-08:00

Upside down economics - I more or less agree - I also see farming as increasing in labor and GDP, because inputs will go up, but you still have to eat. Also, the looming recession (I say looming because I expect it to last for a long time) will cause more people to move into farm labor.

I'm curious if farmers see rising inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, fuel) as a reason to go organic. But organic is far more labor intensive, and people will have to be pretty desparate to move from there fat-ass white collar jobs to farm labor.

Nonetheless, the important point is how you view the economy - and in down times it's always better to be producing/selling more essential goods. Whatever essential goods are. I'll tell you what isn't - financial innovation.

I still think this underlies a basic problem - a lot of America is in useless, unnecessary industries: finance, insurance, and real estate - industry that all relies on credit (read: debt). And when that debt can't be paid back...

Glad I'm out of that business (Stages of the Bubble - as an example). And when that bubble is the only means of increasing wealth over the last 5 years - asset inflation on it's own is not good for the economy - it needs an underlying factor - cheap energy, increasing efficiency and productivity.

2008-11-15T06:40:00.000-08:00

After the new Intel memory allocation changes (not sure what else):

//start snip
UT2004 Build UT2004_Build_[2004-09-21_19.13]
x86-64 Linux
Unknown processor @ 2394 MHz
Mesa DRI Intel(R) 965GM GEM 20080716

dm-rankin?spectatoronly=1?numbots=12?quickstart=1?attractcam=1 -benchmark -seconds=77 -exitafterdemo -exec=/opt/ut2004-demo/Benchmark/Stuff/botmatchexec.txt

5.927572 / 27.762682 / 130.561325 fps rand[1886997259]
Score = 27.756296
//end snip

That's up from 24 fps. Even more playable.

2008-10-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

MINNEAPOLIS, MN, US	10/30/2008	4:49 P.M.	ARRIVAL SCAN
LOUISVILLE, KY, US	10/30/2008	4:03 P.M.

46 minutes from Louisville, Kentucky to Minneapolis, MN. Wow, I guess UPS is using F-16's to move packages now.

2008-10-25T07:06:00.000-07:00

I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daBx_PBrvSE

Always a classic, and very pertinent now.

A little history, Chrysler got a 1.5 billion dollar loan from the Gub'ment (Mark Twain version sp?) to avoid bankruptcy. As of the bailout plan, GM, Ford, Chrysler got 25 billion dollars I believe in a similar deal. I know it sounds bad, but I have little hope for the US of A's car companies. Chrysler did pay back there old loan (early even), depending on long-term energy prices (demand and supply see-sawing against each other) and the affect of credit (betting on future growth). I'm thinking that won't quite be the case again.

Also, if you've enjoyed partial bank nationalization hold on to your hats because more fun is on the way - Option Arm recasts - remember not to confuse recasts and resets, I always do. Basically one comes before the other, and the second one is more important, because that is when you _have_ to pay more per month.

With 80% of these Option Arm people making the minimum payment, you can expect 80% to foreclose or short sell. Housing prices fall even further. But don't worry 60% of Option Arms are in California. There is no way we are out of this crisis.

The real economy will continue to decline, and we'll be in a recession -officially- because we are certainly in one now.

While the above is pretty incoherant (from cars to Option Arms) it displays my basic pessimism about the economy and public policy - if Option Arms can happen, there is no God.

But remember to always look on the Always Look on Bright Side of Life.

-Duff

2008-10-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

With the new GEM stuff, I've got double the FPS in UT2004

//ut2004 benchmark results:
T2004 Build UT2004_Build_[2004-09-21_19.13]
x86-64 Linux
Unknown processor @ 2396 MHz
Mesa DRI Intel(R) 965GM GEM 20080716

dm-rankin?spectatoronly=1?numbots=12?quickstart=1?attractcam=1 -benchmark -seconds=77 -exitafterdemo -exec=/opt/ut2004-demo/Benchmark/Stuff/botmatchexec.txt

4.439383 / 24.573044 / 76.100990 fps rand[1886997259]
Score = 24.603319
//end results

24 FPS, while not super awesome, is playable, barely.

Although now celestia is running dog slow...

2008-08-03T16:14:00.000-07:00

e17's expedite:

$ expedite -e gl
Failed to initialize TTM buffer manager. Falling back to classic.
76.78 , Image Blend Unscaled
67.44 , Image Blend Solid Unscaled
46.03 , Image Blend Nearest Scaled
46.22 , Image Blend Nearest Solid Scaled
46.39 , Image Blend Smooth Scaled
46.17 , Image Blend Smooth Solid Scaled
42.49 , Image Blend Border
44.79 , Image Blend Solid Border
43.46 , Image Blend Border Recolor
322.29 , Image Quality Scale
96.92 , Image Data ARGB
55.42 , Image Data ARGB Alpha
306.71 , Image Data YCbCr 601 Pointer List
338.09 , Image Data YCbCr 601 Pointer List Wide Stride
128.40 , Image Crossfade
98.84 , Text Basic
16.09 , Text Styles
14.92 , Text Styles Different Strings
72.97 , Text Change
88.36 , Textblock Basic
50.57 , Textblock Intl
60.21 , Rect Blend
62.39 , Rect Solid
527.56 , Rect Blend Few
624.59 , Rect Solid Few
247.03 , Image Blend Occlude 1 Few
226.17 , Image Blend Occlude 2 Few
314.52 , Image Blend Occlude 3 Few
85.65 , Image Blend Occlude 1
77.33 , Image Blend Occlude 2
89.15 , Image Blend Occlude 3
37.04 , Image Blend Occlude 1 Many
34.36 , Image Blend Occlude 2 Many
37.31 , Image Blend Occlude 3 Many
7.07 , Image Blend Occlude 1 Very Many
6.43 , Image Blend Occlude 2 Very Many
7.12 , Image Blend Occlude 3 Very Many
61.70 , Polygon Blend
119.87 , EVAS SPEED

In gentoo land that's using:

# pmerge -p mesa libdrm
* Resolving...
[ebuild R ] media-libs/mesa-7.1_rc3 USE="-debug -doc -motif (-nptl) -pic -xcb" VIDEO_CARDS="i810 -mach64 -mga -none -r128 -radeon -s3virge -savage -sis -sunffb -tdfx -trident -via"
[ebuild R ] x11-libs/libdrm-2.3.1 USE="-debug"

Not sure if these benchmarks are good or bad, but I'm going to update libdrm and see if that makes a difference.

2008-07-11T08:35:00.000-07:00

Solar power:

http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/solar_panels.htm

Here is a nice list of cheapy's - the Evergreen Spruce looks pretty good. And BeyondOilSolar has the charge controllers as well as inverters. Nice.

Still, for one 170 panel, charge controller, batteries, and an inverter - $2,000 easy. I'll have to run through the numbers - I think this would include one panel, and a charge controller and inverter with room to grow (so I can add more panels and batteries).

On an unhappy side note - the Federal Government sucks... mostly...

On FISA: Glenn Greenwald - he appears to be about the best source on the subject (since he is very comprehensive and links to a number of other good comments on this issue). I don't know why Obama has to "Move to the Center." It seems - now that the primary is out of the way they're changing the target audience, and with that

On a happy(-ish) note: Paul Krugman's column today does show some light, and that Democrats aren't useless.

2008-05-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

I recently got a new Lenovo Thinpad T61:

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T8300 @ 2.40GHz
Ram: 2 GB (not sure what the latency is).
HDD: 160 GB 5200 rpm
It has the 965 chipset (with the IGP X3100 graphics card - supposed a lot better than the GMA 950, but that's not saying much).

Since the X3100 has absolutely no benchmarks published, I've finally done a couple myself.

First of all: glxgears (which everyone says is not a benchmark)

$ glxgears
5471 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1094.008 FPS
5618 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1123.475 FPS
5606 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1121.063 FPS

It sucks (my Pentium-m 1.6 Mhz laptop with a GeForce FX Go5200 gets ~2100 fps).

That's probably why Eric Anholt (http://www.anholt.net/) wouldn't post any info on performance, it's not so good. Also, as everyone keeps telling me glxgears is not a benchmark, fine...

So here's some UT 2004 deathmatch - DM-Rankin, at 800x600@32 (not that it matters - lower resolutions and color depth did almost nothing (although fullscreen does help - a little - the last row is fullscreen):

5.563165 / 12.212557 / 45.396217 fps -- Score = 12.217196
5.556774 / 12.213729 / 46.879482 fps -- Score = 12.218822
5.914872 / 13.538128 / 115.044312 fps -- Score = 13.543859

The score is the avg. frame rate per second - more or less (they seem to do some minor adjustments). It still sucks, although it is playable (with less bots).

//benchmark script (from here):
/opt/ut2004-demo/Benchmark $ cat benchmark.sh
#!/bin/sh
ut2004-demo dm-rankin?spectatoronly=1?numbots=12?quickstart=1?attractcam=1 -benchmark -seconds=77 -ini=default.ini -exec=/opt/ut2004-demo/Benchmark/Stuff/botmatchexec.txt
//end script.

//Here is the botmatchexec.txt:
showhud
ship
//end snip

If you lower the number of bots, it's a bit better, I think...

Bashmark makes me think that the issue isn't a CPU limitation, but then again I'm not entirely sure what bashmark is testing:

//start bashmark snips
$ bashmark
#######################################################
: T E S T : :S C O R E : : R A T I O:
:-----------------------------------------------------:
:Cpu, Integer : : 4746: : +342%:
:Cpu, Floating point : : 3954: : +421%:
: : : : : :
:Memory r/w (cached) : : 7418: : +517%:
:Memory de-/alloc : : 1607: : +146%:
: : : : : :
:Multithreading : : 1903: : -24%:
#######################################################
: S Y S T E M I N F O :
-------------------------------------------------------
2x Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo T8300 @ 800.000MHz, L2 3072KB
Linux 2.6.24-tuxonice-r4
GCC 4.2.3
92KB binary size
#######################################################
: R E F E R E N C E S Y S T E M I N F O :
-------------------------------------------------------
Reference system was Geno's pc with:
Athlon XP 1800+ 1575.631MHz, 256KB
Linux 2.6.11-ck1
GCC 3.4.3-20050110 (compiled with standard cflags)
glibc 2.3.4 (with nptl)
128KB binary size
Scores gathered on March, 30th. 2005 with bashmark 0.6
//end bashmark snip

Hard drive reads (I really don't care about write speeds unless I'm setting up RAID):

//start hdparm snip
# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 3084 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1543.44 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 130 MB in 3.04 seconds = 42.73 MB/sec
//end hdparm snip

My 3 year old laptop (with 7200 rpm's as opposed to 5200 rpm's like my current laptop) gets about 8 MB/sec less.

Power usage is pretty good (via powertop):
16.3 W (3.4 hours) at idle (albeit with firefox and my wireless sending kernel interrupts like mad). The screen doesn't dim at all when on battery power - so it should actually be a bit better than this. My old Pentium-M laptop gets about 21 Watts at idle (which is pretty good, imho).

My OLPC get's less than six, and my server (with similar architecture) gets about 8 Watts at idle - and only a couple watts more at 100% CPU usage. Whatever you have to say about the OLPC, hardware-wise it's phenomenal in what it does at that level of power usage.

Long story short, this thing is weak on the graphics department, but otherwise it seems pretty quick. It also works quite well in Linux

The gaming stuff is most important since I'm getting back into that sort of programming...
more later...

2008-04-23T06:54:00.001-07:00

Re: previous post - I'm dumb. It was an April Fool's joke. Good one guys.

My problem with April Fool's is that I never know what day it is exactly. So I'm easily fooled. It's still March!

2008-04-04T05:48:00.000-07:00

I was listening to a NPR a couple days ago and it talked about a couple in Arizona getting there Economic Stimulus rebate

I was kind of surprised they got it early (payment schedule) - they should be getting it in May. But for some reason they got it early. You don't want to get it early. In there case they didn't get a check ... or cash....

They got an Fucking air conditioner. Yep, that's right they got there rebate in the form of retail goods at the "value" of the cash. Even funnier, why an air conditioner you might ask? Well apparently the government makes a geographic guess (not sure what else factors in) about what you would "need": these people live in Arizona, it's hot there ... give 'em an air conditioner." Thank you government.

The reason for the air conditioner is obvious - that money has gone into the economy already (the A/C came from somewhere): thus performing it's stimulating functions. The reason why these people got one, allegedly, is that they were calculated by some IRS algorithm as having a good probability to pay off debt (on silly things like car and mortgage payments) and not buy things, like air conditioners.

I better not get a God damn snow blower.

2008-04-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

Power usage of computers. In an attempt to lower my power usage (and to understand my power usage) I been using my Kill-A-Watt to see how much power my computers as well as my monitors use.

For starters, LCD monitors appear to be a lot better. My 20" Samsung (with higher contrast and similar brightness) beat my 19" ViewSonic by almost 2 to 1, ~75W to ~45W, respectively.

As for computers, it's a little suprising. My Dell laptop uses about ~20 Watts at idle (going up to 35W under high load). My AMD64 system, with it's Nvidia video card that is now a couple years old (and wasn't top of the line when I got it) uses a whopping ~132+ on idle. With that in mind here are some more specifics; it has 3 hard disk drives (HDD's), 2 GB's of RAM, a Nvidia 7600GT, Athlon 64 3800+, and a DVD writer.

Still it seems relatively high compared to my PIII 450 Mhz, with 384Mb's ram, one HDD, and a CD-ROM drive which clocked in at about ~50W. I was actually pretty impressed how low that was. This makes me wonder how much power the Nvidia video card uses. This was my old server, which was replaced by my new Koolu.

The Koolu with it's AMD Geode processor (similar to the OLPC) clocks in at ~8W with a standard laptop 30 GB HDD. This computer runs constantly, so it's the most important to have low power usage (and generate less heat - which is good for the summer).

So long story short I was actually hoping my old server used more power. Nonetheless, using a laptop is certainly much more earth friendly than a desktop. By Far (recap: 20W at idle compared to 132W at idle)

2008-02-13T11:20:00.000-08:00

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/02/where-is-all-oil-money-going.html

Real perty. Meanwhile we gear up for recession time. If oil prices stay this high (they will) it's going to be a bad one.

Enjoy!

2008-01-29T19:49:00.000-08:00

Protect America Act for morons.

Thank you Russ Feingold.

Meanwhile this is timeless: Black Bush

2008-01-18T06:30:00.000-08:00

I got one of these cute little OLPC laptop's. It's not the most powerful, but for what it does, it works pretty well. With one definite exception: 3d. The graphics chip is on the same die as the processor (or something close to this). The only features it has show pretty obviously what it's intended purpose was. Your awesome accelerated features consist of features only really used in 2d: blitting (BitBLT or just BLT). Oh and hardware screen rotation.

So the only possibility to get any more performance out of this is by using the AMD 3DNow! and MMX extensions to the limit.

I know gcc does optimizations for such things, but I'm not sure how good it is, or how to code it to help gcc along.

Either way, it was decided that performance was so abysmal that there is no glx in the Xorg package that comes with the system. So I had to compile my own: xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.4-42gl.olpc2.i586.rpm - with "-mmmx -m3dnow" put in cflags. Not sure if it really made much difference. In fact it really didn't - GLX gears ("glxgears -fullscreen") still performed at ~25 fps (the first polling says 35 fps, then it drops to 25 fps and stays there). Ubuntu apparently gets 60+ fps on glxgears - which is a big "wow" in comparison. I'm not sure if that is DRI (no DRI in OLPC kernel), or a newer version of Mesa (the FC7-based official OLPC stuff is 6.5.2).

With Black Shades Elite I was able to get 22 fps on the main menu, which actually isn't too bad. And I still think I can create a playable version on the OLPC.

Any input would be appreciated.

2007-12-17T13:41:00.000-08:00

Home equity hell:

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2007/12/homeowners-with-negative-equity.html

I realize that these are national estimates, and thus not representative of my situation per se, still I think if we go by the dates they set. If values go back to 2005, 2004, or even 2002 levels where would that put me?

Well I got my place virtually at the end or 2005. And the guy I bought it from lived there only a 2 or 3 years. And he bought it for less than 10% of my purchase price. If he bought it in 2003 then that would be my 2003 level: -10% in value. If it was 2002, then even better. Either way hopefully it's less than that, because I don't have that much equity :(. That is not factoring in improvements, which will certainly help. The other good thing is relatively few foreclosures in my area (3 in the last 2 years out of 200+ units, iirc).

We'll see how this goes with fuel prices going up. This Spring will tell us how that goes.

Re: Previous Post: Unfortunately youtube removed that video in my previous post; possibly because of the song it used. Or it could have been the creator himself.

Dunno.

2007-12-05T19:51:00.000-08:00

Here Comes Another Bubble

Tee hee - I blogged about this song.

2007-11-28T22:00:00.000-08:00

Other good blogs/sites I've been reading:

This is the blog of Paul Krugman on economic policy:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

I find him quite interesting, and often quite correct (and if not - at least quite honest). He is also quite critical of the analysis of our media stars, whether it be Greenspan on economics, or Guliani on whatever Guliani thinks is the way forward (it's not - whatever it is).

I read most of these:
http://kernelplanet.org - blogs buy Linux kernel developers, especially Robert Love - although I don't always agree (John McCain for pres?) he is still interesting to read. Most of the people on that planet are (others like planet.freedesktop.org not so much - not that it's bad).

Others like Glenn Greenwald have some of the best insight in our Beltway/Establishment media . Although I haven't been quite into his blog as I recently was (possibly from outrage fatigue) his recent posts on Joe Klein are very interesting indeed. Joe apparently can't read the very obvious language of the bill, and does a poor "correction" in response.

The blog I've been reading every post of lately is theoildrum.com. It's a very thorough blog on the issue of fossil fuels and hitting the peak (when supply will not increase). Peak Oil as it's called is getting more and more well known with $100 oil looming. Most of the talk is in other countries unfortunately, especially Ireland (smaller nations do usually lead the pack, often vulnerable ones).

The price of oil has been going up steadily over the last 8 years, and will continue to climb. Shortages are already occuring in China, Nepal, and even North Dakota (diesel shortages). I suggest reading more on the subject. While there is a lot of information and it is complex (with many unknowns in production/capacity) even is pointing that we are currently already in a supply plateau, while demand increases.

The UK is already importing oil (it was an exporter for some 20 years or so prior) while Mexico's production decreases -it will probably be importing oil within a few years, top that with the fact that 60 of 98 oil producing countries (Non-OPEC iirc) are in declining producton- and many exports decrease in oil exporting nations because of increased local consumption (the Export Land model) - resulting in less gas and other oil products for us. An ecomonic downturn (say, from sub-prime mortgages) will only delay the inevitable.

You can guess which issue I find more problematic (Peak Oil is right up there with Global Climate Change). The only good thing is that Peak Oil may make Global Climate change a moot point - a lot of models predict continual increase in oil production. Right now total liquids production is about 85 million barrels per day (including ethanol, natural gas, et al), even the head CEO of Total said it will never go above 100 million. That is how much we would require in less than five years.

Needless to say I expect more issues in smaller countries from now on (like Nepal and Indonesia) to keep hitting the airways (did I mention Indonesia's airline being grounded for lack of fuel). It just keeps getting better.

Enjoy!

Oh and btw, hydrogen fuel cells are totally gay. About as gay as ethanol. Electric and Biodiesal are much less so.

-Bryan

2007-11-28T21:38:00.000-08:00

More on the OLPC laptop front:

"Thanks to your early action, your XO laptop is scheduled to be delivered between December 14 and December 24. Our "first day" donors are our highest priority and we are making every effort to deliver your XO laptop(s) as soon as possible. We will send you an update upon shipment."

I received this email about the XO laptops earlier today. Hopefully it comes closer to the 14th than the 24th. I've been getting worried because of the lack of feedback, besides a paypal reply email I haven't had any feedback until this email today.

In other news I finally posted Black Shades Elite on happypenguin.org, and I've already gotten a decent amount of feedback - a patch, another link site, a Gentoo ebuild and a few others that appear to have followed the previous incarnation of this game (Black Shades).

The OLPC laptop also comes with a 1 year T-Mobile Hotspot subscription - anyone want to buy it? I'm never going to use it - even when I do travel.

2007-11-12T22:14:00.000-08:00

OLPC Laptops are up for grabs, I was ordering one the minute you could :).

http://www.laptopgiving.org/

A couple nice links:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home

http://www.olpcnews.com/

Apparently the laptops are going fast (while they said until the 25th, it appears as though there are only X number to be sold at well - so they'll probably go a bit quicker.

I think getting a rugged low power laptop for even this price is quite good. So giving a laptop to some Uruguayan is icing on the cake (I doubt I'll even use the year of T-Mobile hotspot wireless).

Publish me!

2007-09-29T18:03:00.000-07:00

More Black Shades Elite

Recently added the ability to take screenshots, and added some screenshots to the website . They can be taken in game by pressing F12 (also added to the help page - which I may want to make a bit more readable).

Also have a sound bug that I need to fix (appears to only happen on my x86_64 box).

2007-09-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

First of all I'd really like to buy one of these: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6994957.stm
then they go on sale in November - especially if I can get the hand crank or foot pedal. The coolest thing about it (imho) is the screen - very cool that it's so low power (apparently by reducing the filtering process - I forget the details - there's a white paper on it by the woman researcher that invented it).

The other thing is Black Shades Elite. While it still needs a much if it's ever going to be a multiplayer game I have fixed basically all of the things that really annoyed me (except for the sound bug): (1) added a help screen since I can't remember the keys to save my life; (2) re-wrote the GUI, this made the help screen almost trivial, but a lot more needs to be done in this reguard; (3) fixed the FPS limiter and tick thingy, so they run independently and less stupidly (it was very confusing at the get go), what really annoyed me was the busy loop instead of sleeping, so a game that should use less than %25 cpu at all times use 99%; (4) split up some of the huge functions (Init, Draw, and Tick), so it's a lot easier to read; (5) fixed all of the compiler warnings (that gcc found for me); (6) moved some other stuff around, and added new classes (Environment, Weapon) and added to others, making the game more modular (still a long way to go); (7) now you can change resolutions and it doesn't look too silly and added full screen as a config option; (8) and lastly a lot of general cleanup that is only really obvious if you look at the original code.

Major additions that'd I'd still like (although I'm not sure I'll ever get there) are: a model viewer - so I can work on added new models and animations. I think a nice tool to figure that stuff out will be very helpful. And with the re-organization it's becoming a possibility. Much more difficult is the networking: I've dealt with it only enough to know that it's very hard to get running smoothly. Not only does this require additional networking features it also requires more GUI additions (input boxes at least), a check box, as well as a proper button widget.

So the next part that I'll put most of my effort into will be the model viewer, because I need to figure out how all that works, and make it easy to add more animations and models. I'm not sure if I even want to think about any other cool features - this is enough for now.

2007-07-29T06:51:00.000-07:00

Been doing a couple things - playing around with package core, and also the source for this game: http://www.icculus.org/blackshades/. It has this iDevGames license. Before I put too much work into it I better see if I can actually use it. This license is weirded very... poorly, imho. I would like to simply GPL my code. Would that fall under educational? I don't see why not :).

I was working pretty heavily on getting my gumstix computer working. Which it does, although with some major bugs. But that was sidelined when I started playing Warzone2100, which is pretty fun. Although it has a unresponsive interface, annoying AI, and most annoyingly they switched the usage of the mouse buttons. Usually right-click is move selected units here, while left click is moving around the map. This game (that originally came out in 1999) does the reverse. I've played for a while and I still do the wrong buttons constantly.

Eh ...

2007-05-17T13:43:00.000-07:00

I'm going to take a quick jaunt to talk of pkgcore - I feel like trying new things, and eventually this may prove much better for embedded development. Assuming I want to do Gentoo on gumstix. Don't know what pkgcore is? It's a replacement for Gentoo's portage.

I used the ferringb branches. They use bzr, one of those decentralized versioning systems.

$ bzr get http://bzr.pkgcore.org/ferringb/snakeoil-dev
$ bzr get http://bzr.pkgcore.org/ferringb/pkgcore-dev

Building/install was fine for snakeoil-dev (installed with the --prefix=/usr/local). That works well enough. But pkgcore-dev itself had trouble building because it couldn't find snakeoil includes. You would presume that snakeoil is in /usr/local/include/snakeoil, but no, it's actually in /usr/local/include/python2.4/snakeoil. This is slightly weird, so I have to add an enviroment variable for gcc to pick it up:

$ CPATH=/usr/local/include/python2.4 python ./setup.py build

Now it compiles just fine. Also (in the case of installing to /usr/local), you need to add the package location to PYTHONPATH:

$ cat /etc/env.d/99pkgcore
PYTHONPATH="/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages"

Then it works fine for me without any goofy symlinks or running from the user directory like some kind of punk bitch (that's right).

2007-05-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

This site is depressing. Including the breaking news section.

Especially considering the nation I live in, the "US and A" uses 25% of the worlds oil on a daily basis. Good thing I'll be going home and drinking tonight...

This will cheer me up: http://www.chrisburke.org/

From the site:
"Chris has always had dreams of being an actor, a singer, a writer and helping people who have as he calls it "UP Syndrome", says Joe. Believe in yourself, work hard and never give up", says Chris. "We've all got disabilities. It's what we do with our ABILITIES that counts!" "We are all a celebration of life", says John.
"Everyone can be a Singer With The Band!"

"UP Syndrome" he calls it. Magical.

2007-05-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

//reposted from the letters section of this blog: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/05/11/quotes/index.html

Re: Re: Joe Klein

Glenn:

duffolonious:

I don't think he is differentiating left-wing bloggers from Rush Limbaugh as far as "things just went too far". I don't see that in the section you quote.

My point here is that long before bloggers emerged, the various components of the right-wing noise machine -- the Rush Limbaughs and Matt Drudges and Fox News -- were viciously attacking the supposedly "Liberal Media" on a daily basis with the most personal and insulting sorts of assaults.

And the Joe Kleins and company didn't unleash these angry outbursts then. They did the opposite. The apologized and desperately tried to figure out how to appease those criticisms.

The angry pushback happened only since blogs began attacking with a much different narrative.

I get that (you made those comments before); but frankly I still don't understand how that works. Maybe it simply does come down to money (and career).

Glenn:

duffolonious:

I'm not sure who these "left-wing bloggers" are? You? Andrew Sullivan? Are these bloggers the new "liberals"? Another bad but vague sect. He specifically states Limbaugh after all.

That's a different question altogether, and I've given up trying to constantly make the point. I think the world has basically become divided into two broad political categories (at least for now) -- those who are supportive of the Bush regime and the prevailing power structure that surrounds it, and those who are opposed. The latter group is called "liberal." That is how I would define the "liberal blogosphere."

Sorry about making your repeat yourself, that question was meant to more rhetorical than anything else (as in he's so vague in who he's attacking, he may as well be saying "Americans don't know America, I know America!".

And the point you bring up about the two kinds of Americans - those who are with Bush and those who aren't; "left" and "right", respectively. This brings up the interesting point that the US Ambassador to the UK (former Clinton official) brought up when in the UK - that he loves the UK political system because they are "all Democrats" (pro-choice, progressive taxes, etc, etc). So I'll make the bold statement that the basic mechanics of America have given us the current administration - when there are only two major parties this is what will eventually happen. I don't see this happening in any established parliamentary system. Most of which have like 4 or 5 major parties. The Republican strategist on Lou Dobbs even talked about America moving to a parliamentary system.

I think have 3 or more major parties will solve all of America's greatest problems - seriously. Even the issues you bring up with the Beltway media.

This is certainly something that I would like to see more consideration of. Because to get right down to it - America is broken (debatable). I'd like to do more research into this; because I think it is worth debating.

I notice that my posts are kind of incoherent ramblings, but there are so many issues ... I think the above is the root cause.

2007-04-25T15:16:00.000-07:00

I've heard about Carlos Mencia's joke stealing; and now it's apparently come to a head:

http://www.joerogan.net/main.php?archives=1&article=53945

Apparently it's not new, so says Joe "you's crazy" Rogan:

http://www.joerogan.net/main.php?archives=1&article=53945

Joe makes an interesting case - I wonder how this will develop further? No more "Mind of Mencia"?

I won't cry.

....

2007-04-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

I've been looking at some of this energy crisis stuff as of late, where will gas prices be?

Oregon State has a nice graph (others cite higher or lower values for given years, but remain relatively consistent):

http://oregonstate.edu/Dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/gasol.htm

Keep in mind the price increases of the 70's were more artificial (political) than the current situation. As of today the problem is with actual supply/demand issues - we are coming close to full capacity.

Nonetheless, I see many arguments that gas was $2 in 1950 (adjusted for inflation). And that's true, but at that time the world's supply of oil was increasing. Now that is not the case.

With prominent people making dire predictions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Simmons - look near the bottom at his bet.

Even worse, this guy makes it look like we're, well ... fucked:

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

While I think that site is overreaching a little, because there are many factors that can delay and soften the blow. Unless it does happen as quickly as it could: prices quadrupling in a matter of weeks (a barrel of oil hitting that $200 mark). The issue isn't the price per se, it's the rapid advance to that price - several weeks.

In the USA, this would destroy many communities that I know. I hear about people all the time that have hour+ communtes, 50 miles one way, etc. Not to mention nasty inflation given that everything from plastics to food. Long story short, this creates lot's of instability. And the big question is how much, it will most probably create a long term recession, or it could go all the way to the dark ages of chaos. Well probably not the latter, except in specific areas.

I'm certainly curious on the specifics of such repercussions. But the usual applies, and you better make sure you have a financial cushion. For my own curiousity I'm going to find more details about this. Many are already available, so research away!

So that's why I've decided to live a bit greener... and with the above in mind, cheaper in the long term. More on this to come...

2007-04-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

Remember Reggie White? Defensive Lineman for the Green Bay Packers. He ranks in the hall of fame of athletes who need the Crash Davis School of Interviewing ("I'm just glad to be here", "I just wanna make a contribution to the ball club").

http://www.skeptictank.org/white.htm

I still think of Tracy Morgan's immitation (4/4/98):

Tracy: "And you know big midgets."
Colin Quinn: "You mean people?"
Tracy: "Yeah, hate them too."

Classic.

2007-03-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

Economic Left/Right: -3.25

Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.21

The questions are a bit weird: "No one can feel naturally homosexual." Ummm... Agree, disagree, ... Pat Buchanan?

I took one of these before, but it had different questions (way different questions). Interestingly I came out in roughly the same spot (maybe more economically right).

2007-03-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

I need to post more often...

A few things. One, I think that Fearann Muin is probably dead. Because I'm it's last developer, and I feel no real want to continue it.

Favorite recent convo:

X: Is today Thursday?
Me: No today is Tuesday.
X: Heh, yesterday I thought it was Saturday.

2007-01-27T14:10:00.000-08:00

Btw, Fearann Muin development has slowed, possibly to a halt.

Right now I'm playing with OpenGL funness... more on that if it does anywhere.

2007-01-27T14:03:00.000-08:00

A post I emailed dealing with the ticking time bomb rationale for torture:

///start email
I came upon your "Once Upon a Time..." blog, and this article on torture; specifically the ticking-bomb scenario.

In Cornelius Ryan's book A Bridge Too Far, at the start of Operation Market Garden (which is what the book is about), the land invasion of the Netherlands from Belgium was instantly met with heavy anti-tank fire (taking out some 9 of 15 tanks of the tank platoon that spearheaded the operation). The way this was reportedly stopped is quite similar to a ticking-bomb scenario. The British troops captured some forward infantry (sentries or spotters for the anti-tank guns hidden somewhere in the woods firing on the tanks). The captured Germans were rushed over to a truck where they were aggressively interrogated: the interrogator pushed a pistol into one of the German's ribs and barked at him in German, asking him where the guns were hidden. I forget the exact details because I don't have the book in front of me, nonetheless, the a capture German revealed -well enough- the positions of the anti-tank guns, after which the guns were disable via counter-battery fire.

While ticking-bombs in cities with civilians are different then active fire on soldiers - the information they had are basically the same: they knew about the guns (obviously), and they had a good idea that one of the captured soldiers knew the location (although not necessarily true, I suppose - give the situation that rational was that it was "worth a try" - more on that in a second). The major difference being that they were already under attack - this would be like the bomb situation if a bomb had already gone off, and there was another with the potential to go off.

The multiple bomb situation was actually hit on with a British documentary (where London is hit by a dirty bomb), but interestingly enough they stopped the second bomb with good ol' fashioned police work. I wish I remembered the name of it...

As for the "worth a try" rational, it's dicey: in this situation they did not KNOW the soldiers knew the guns locations, just a good guess (at the very least to get a lead on the locations). But with this situation many questions come to mind? What happens if these Germans had no clue about the location? Would they have been shot? (or at least one of them to prove the seriousness of the interrogator). What if you shot them and still got no information? Unfortunately these situations are rarely told, probably for the reason that no one wants to be thought of as a murderer - even in so called "good" wars like World War II.

My own conclusions are unsure. There are other examples of on the spot interrogation yielding results, but with the failures rarely being reported (probably) it's hard to gauge how affective it is. In the example above, this scenario was a life-or-death struggle. If we don't stop these guns we are dead. But like you say KNOWing about the bomb is probably unlikely - the intelligence would probably be more general. The scary thing is if this is used as a substitute for actually investigative police work. As noted about the NKVD (the KGB prior to the KGB) was that they eventually degenerated into thugs that only knew how to torture, and thus useless in actual investigations. It got so bad Stalin (the main boss himself) had to disband them, because they became much worse than the enemy/criminals. It's just not a substitute for traditional police work. That and the main problem just keeps biting at you - how do you KNOW the person you are beating on or what-have-you knows the information? With the number of people released from Guantanamo cleared of being evil shows that KNOWing is rarely obvious. With that in mind, I think I would be right next to the interrogator poking at the German soldiers on their gun positions before the truck I'm in takes a round.

Unfortunately that's how this fear thing works so well, the proponents make you fear that you are in that truck, that it's them or us; even when it's a rare ... or impossible event. United 93 may be a good example.

I'd like to hear your thoughts. Thank you.
///end email

Btw, one of my own misunderstandings is the difference between torture and interrogation; which may explain some of my email. Google ticking time-bomb and you'll get a number of articles about this; 'tis interesting. And frankly I can't find the exact post I'm replying to here... just the blog:

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com

2006-11-21T15:03:00.000-08:00

Real quick... I see that I haven't posted in a while. Time to post again.

Besides do cursory work on Fearann Muin, I've also got a little project of my own to dabble in. Right now I'm simply calling it "strong", short for "Stronghold" - the original game that strong is loosely based on).

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/stronghold/ - the game does have a number of problems. But I like the basic idea, and some of the concepts aren't bad. The major problem with the game is the micromanagement: in building and war. Kind of important parts of the game. In building, you can allocate the proportions of 3 different things - building, training, recruiting, with the default being 50%, 25%, 25% respectively. The annoying part is your rarely building - and when you do building you usually want the allocation to be at 100% for build. If your not building you'll want some combination of the other two. While you can ignore changing it - it annoys me to not even be close to full potential with what I want it to do - so I micromanage.

Combat is even worse. The terrain is layed out in a series of tiles. To get units to attack a tile (where an enemy is) you must attract them. Before I get into that, here is a quick explanation on attraction - I go to a tile and select on of my main players (you get up to 5, each with it's own class/race - elves, thieves, halflings, fighters) I click on a bad and "attract" how every many loose units I want to the tile. I call them "loose" units, although a better term would be "unhomed", for a unit can be one of three things: homed (the unit will not move when attracted), unassigned (the unit will move when attracted), and ready (this means it will be among the first to move when attracted - giving it priority of unassigned units). With these two things in mind (the 5 different players you control, and the goofy idea of attraction) it's incredibly painful to do any military campaigning. You much move each unit in relation to it's player, so in essense you'll have 5 separate armies. On top of that, it's hard to attract (and thus attack) in an orderly fashion. It makes the game much harder than necessary (give the AI is hilariously bad). You spend a painful amount of time simply assembling units where you want them - juggling your elves, fighters, etc. separately. It's a hair pulling experience. One that could have been made stupidly easy by allowing grouping of units and the ability to simple say attack tile x,y.

The terminology "attraction" annoys me in an of itself - as though this is the AD&D version of eHarmony.com.

Fortunately the AI is incredibly stupid. They ignore you for the most part. So you can run across their lands and kill them one or two at a time. Although since move units by "attraction" it's usually easy to just make a bee-line for the enemies stronghold and take it out. The enemies units then, in armageddon style, all march straight for your nearest stronghold. But they don't even group themselves for maximum effect. You'll more than like fight them 1 or 2 at a time if you place a number of guys between them and your nearest stronghold (it doesn't take very long to get good at guessing the route they will take). It's as if Canada took out Washington DC and every American simply dropped what they were doing and marched on over to Ottawa to burn it to the ground (ignoring everything else eccept for what was directly in your path). It's very funny, and very predictable. Too predictable.

Still building is fun, the idea that in AD&D style your player's attributes affect your units is interesting, the seasons affect on crops, and the idea that where you farm affects your farms output (mountains = bad, near rivers = good!).

So change some mechanics (movement), make the AI better (relative to this AI that's no problem), and nullify alot of the micromanagement and you have yourself a simple but enjoyable game.

That is what I intend to do.

2006-09-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

I'm restarting my dev blog, now that I'm doing something interesting again. I work on Fearann Muin - a Multiplayer Online Roly-Playing Game (MORPG). You may notice the lack of the word 'Massive' - which is used for many a commercial games that are similar - World of Warcraft, Everquest, et al.

While I've been working on development of this game on and off for 1 year and 3/4ths - it's now finally starting to take shape in a number of areas - such as inventory, combat, dialog with NPC's, and trading. While all of these elements are still in there early stages, they are becoming usable.

You can now talk to NPC's in the style of a discussion tree (think Baldur's Gate or any similar ADnD game, as well as countless others. Inventory works (although it's still pretty simple - you can't do anything besides pickup and drop things). Combat works - but you don't really see anything - no animations, just results of basic attackes dumped to the console. And the trading frontend in the client still needs to be written (the backend in the server is done, more-or-less).

If I can keep the work up, these areas will be working in a stable fashion in a month, even if they aren't very feature rich.

The major issues we have are many. We need to work on Collision Detection (CD) in the server - so players can't cheap by walking through walls. This will also keep our own AI from cheating. We are still working on how to deal with this without making it overly complex.