Dev. Blog

Monday, January 13, 2014

Setting up a new VM

https://help.ubuntu.com/13.04/serverguide/cloud-images-and-vmbuilder.html

A very easy way to setup a new VM with pre-built images.

Even if Ubuntu assumes the use of EC2 or Openstack - that's not required to do this.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

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

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

Thursday, May 12, 2011

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

"Whatever happened to just fuckin' a dude?"

Indeed.

Monday, March 14, 2011

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.

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

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

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

>>> .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).

Sunday, January 16, 2011

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/kitty_pet

The kitty decides when it's petting time.

Monday, August 23, 2010

# iptables ! -V
Not 1.4.8 ;-)

Friday, July 30, 2010

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.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

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).

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

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.

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?

Sunday, October 25, 2009

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.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

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....

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Friday, September 25, 2009

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...

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

Thursday, August 13, 2009

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"

Thursday, May 14, 2009

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.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

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!