wolfwings

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/17/eveningnews/main1329941.shtml

A decent-looking sports car that goes from 0-60 in four seconds, and still gets 50mpg.

On pure soy-bean oil bio-diesel.

Made by a group of high school drop-outs and no-accounts out of West Philly in their spare time.

...who's still playing Co* instead of WoW these days?

I've gotten annoyed lately at a technical oversight in some commonly-referenced documentation.

This isn't unusual for me, but this is a specific issue I feel should be aired out publically since it's something I think more people should know about.

If you use BitTorrent, set the number of upload slots between a third, and half the upload bandwidth you allocate. If you allocate 30 kilobytes/second to upload, allocate 10-15 upload slots. Almost every single document out there will tell you to set it to 2-4. Guess what? That only makes your upload speed vary wildly, and thus, your download speed will vary more wildly than it otherwise should.

I've noticed the average swarm speed smooth out noticably when I was only a peer, and the swarm had over 75 clients (seeds + peers) involved, just by bumping my upload slot setting up higher. Why? Because it means I'll have bytes queued up for numerous others, so even if one person suddenly stalls or lags out, I'll already have bytes queued up for nine other clients. Meaning my upload speed usually varies by a couple of dozen bytes in a given hour. If I set it to the 'supposed' best settings, my upload speed varies wildly from as low as an average speed of half of my allocated upload speed on average over a minute up to full throttle. This is bad.

Think of BitTorrent's download speed as having a random noise source (the outside world's upload speed to you) multiplied by your own internal noise source (your upload speed) and you'll get an idea of the effect a smoother, more consistant upload speed will give you. Now imagine if everyone out there had that consistant of an upload speed? Yeah... nice thought, isn't it? Smooth, constant traffic bubbling along instead of the hodge-podge most Torrents dribble you data at like a demonic roulette wheel at God's own craps table.

...I've finally been sitting down and stepping my machine through it's paces with a combination of Prime95 and RMClock to determine just how well my processor actually binned before being labelled an ML-class part, especially since it was originally sold before they officially acknowledged MT-37 as even being possible, let alone available. So the sheer fact it ran at 2.0Ghz at 35 Watts meant they stopped testing and binned it immediately.

Normally, the spec calls for this CPU to run at:
2.0Ghz @ 1.450 Volts @ 24 Amps for about 34.8 Watts of total power draw.
0.8Ghz @ 1.000 Volts @ 24 Amps for about 24.0 Watts of total power draw.

Turns out mine's currently survived two... make that three test stages wish Prime95 in Blend Mode at:
2.0Ghz @ 1.250 Volts @ 24 Amps for about 30.0 Watts of total power draw.
0.8Ghz @ 0.950 Volts @ 24 Amps for about 22.8 Watts of total power draw.

No huge savings at the low end... but good god I have a damn good chip for it to pull off only 30 watts at 2.0Ghz. I'm going to go for 1 hour of Prime95 Blend before I call this final, but it bombed out at 1.225 Volts instantly and 0.900 Volts just as instantly. 0.925 Volts resulted in some odd musical glitches as I was running WinAMP in the background for an audible 'system lockup detector' but that might have been as I was running a streaming radio station so I'll re-test at 0.925 once I've verified my peak power level.

Then comes the monotonous testing of the other 11 stepping levels I'll have defined, with their requisite 1 hour per level.

And sadly all this will be for nothing, as the Linux Athlon-64 stepping driver sadly only supports the 4 'officially documented' levels (Max, Max-0.2Ghz, Max-0.4Ghz, and 0.8Ghz) for the CPU. I find this amusing, actually, that nobody's modified the driver to support highly-granular stepping like the RMClock utility does. My one attempt at doing so resulted in numerous lockups becuase I simply don't understand what the code is really doing.

Also, mind you that all the above power-draws are peak power draws @ 100.0% Load. They aren't nominal or minimal power draws, which are MUCH lower once I re-enable the HLT-based idling RMClock adds. (Yeah, fancy that... Windows XP apparently doesn't issue full HLT instructions every chance it gets in it's idle-loop. Why am I not surprised?)

Edit: Looks like 1.250 was optimistic, finally blue-screened at about 30 minutes in. Bumped to 1.275, let's see if that works. =^.^=

...a useful pair of phone numbers for a lot of the folks on my friends list to know exists if nothing else.

(408)349-3300
(408)349-1572

Yahoo! Customer Service's phone number.
9:30AM to 5:00PM Pacific Standard Time

Account hijacked? Old e-mail address defunct but you're still getting Yahoo Groups E-Mail to another address you have associated with the account? Give em' a call, they can probably sort things out.

And have an ObQuote just because it's too priceless not to turn into a meme:

Peppering is what you do to a Ceaser Salad. He shot that dude!

...finished going through all my files, and ruthlessly limiting myself to 3 CD-R's worth of stuff.

Guess what, two of those are going to backing up a stack of photos I got from alexismckee, and a shorter (but massive) stack of videos I got from Skant of some racing-videos, mostly (sizewise) of a video of him racing Thunder Hill in his Corvette on the day his radiator hose exploded like an over-ripe banana.

And that's because after hunting through... I actually had very little I wanted to keep through this transition. Even including all my music, and most of that high-bitrate-MP3's I've downloaded in the last couple of days from friends... I still only took up one CD-R. So, I kept the gig or so of FC photos. =^.^=

Now... to begin formatting the drive tonight, and installing Gentoo to a solid slate of HD space. Then patching the kernel to support my flash-card reader and leaving it overnight to compile and install... well, a fuck-uva-lot.

...and one that's hammered me a few times already on this laptop of mine.

Windows XP will disable UDMA on your drive if it gets any errors or any drive reads take too long and offers no way to restore UDMA to the drive short of uninstalling the drive.

Good idea? Maybe. For a hard drive. For a CD-ROM or DVD drive though, that has to deal with scratched, mangled, and otherwise not-pristine media? No chance in hell is it a good idea.

Also explains why I've suddenly had CD/DVD reading become bog-slow. And gives me another reason to go Linux. Even if it had something like this, I could disable it trivially.

..to take the full plunge. Over the next week, I'm going to do all the following:

Re-install my laptop, converting fully to Linux. Second Life runs natively under Linux now quite happily, and I can build a 64-bit client myself that way. No more waiting. I might see if I can tweak their cache code to only write to the cache on logout and read on login, since I have 2GB of RAM.

This is being pushed forward because, at this point, 64-bit Linux has better driver support than 64-bit Windows for my machine. This, I find both amusing, and rather sad. 64-bit Linux has a fully-functional native driver for my memory-card reader, and my bluetooth adapter, while no such driver exists for 64-bit Windows for either device last I checked. It supports suspend-to-disk better than Windows because it only writes out used memory instead of ALL memory, so I don't get a 5-minute suspend-restore cycle just because I happen to have 2GB of RAM and a slow-spinning hard drive. :-P

I'm done waiting because of, or accepting any more of HP's crap that flails wildly between, "It'd being worked on and should be out in 60 days!" to "We don't, will not, cannot, and have no intention of ever supporting 64-bit Windows on any of our home-market PCs, and all of our Laptops are considered home-market PCs. We do not, have not, and will not sell any laptop as a 'business computer' and we only support 64-bit Windows on our business-class computers." If their tech support can't even get their story straight, I'm assuming I'm being strung along, and moving on with alternatives.

So... I already organized my drive to have a 20GB Windows Software partition, a 20GB Linux Software partition, and a 20GB Documents partition so things shouldn't be that difficult. I'll just re-org things again while I do this, back up all the files to CD-R's then flat-format the entire drive down to a single Linux partition.

And no, I didn't forget to include a Swap partition in there. This laptop has not, and will not ever use Swap. I have 2GB of RAM for a reason.

And once that's running, I'll pick up the replacement screen, (dead hinges less than 4 months in) and before I install it layer some strips of fiberglass tape across the back to reinforce the hinge area with well-cured layers of epoxy rubbed in each time. Again, tired of waiting on HP to fix this glaring issue. So I'm fixing it myself with basic engineering. If I can find a cheap source of carbon-fibre tape and appropriate epoxy, I'd much rather use that. Anyone out there have any links to on-line stores for that kind of thing?