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.

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...

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!

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.

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)

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!

Protect America Act for morons.

Thank you Russ Feingold.

Meanwhile this is timeless: Black Bush

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.

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.

Here Comes Another Bubble

Tee hee - I blogged about this song.

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

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.

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!

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).

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.

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 ...

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).

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.

//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.

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.

....