People like this…
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL
Really annoy me.
Ownership is one thing, but Tech Level? Full bar. One egg review, no pros but at least took some time to write a con. Look at that picture carefully… the con is that the drive doesn’t work. On arrival apparently, so essentially DOA. But has a tech level of 5, and wants to know, via Newegg reviews, if there’s anything anyone can do?
People like this need to GTFO the internet. Seriously. Goddamn.
Things I’ve learned
Posted by Ben | Filed under Random
Just a list, full update later.
- Running your own Minecraft server can be just as fun, if not more so, than playing the game itself.
- Watching the Star Trek (2009) trailer over and over again is still as rewarding as it was back in 2008-2009 when I was waiting for the release. (cough)
- Microsoft, even through all their “evils” is still responsible for about 98% of what we live in our daily lives. I am thankful to them for all my torture, all of my fun, and all my knowledge. Cheers M$.
- Bill Gates is not evil. Seriously.
- Neither was Steve Jobs. R.I.P. dude.
- I really hate that movie theaters have given up on sound trailers. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a true 8 channel SDDS intro teaser or a full THX trailer? Yeah, it sucks.
- Certificates are EVIL. Especially ones tied to multilevel server infrastructures with no formal training.
- I do my best thinking after about a full 2 liter of Diet Dew, and staying up until 3am doing nothing in particular. at least.
- I still own the first two totally free computers I ever received. Thanks, Ted Waitt.
- Like the pompous girl on the Sallie Mae website, I chose to be ready after school as well, I just didn’t count on the 1500 LB gorilla (Obesity is an epidemic after all) at the door. FFS. FML.
- Being my own web host for the past… uhh wow. 12 years or so has been awesome. And lets hear it for grandfathered rates while we’re at it.
- Lack of internet provider competition sucks
- The MPAA & RIAA should be shuttered for lack of morality, greed, and because they smell funny.
That’s all for now…
AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL
*clasps face and runs around the house* AHHHHHH!!!!
Why the hell can’t I keep this thing going? Curse you Facebook, curse you. But then I realized last night that I have a hard time with Facebook because I can’t write down long thoughts about something that I just can’t stop wrapping my head around, so I’m going to run a little experiment. I’m going to create a group on Facebook, let folks opt into it, and then post my blog updates to just that group. I also don’t like how the Facebook comments system integrates with WordPress at this point in time, so I’ll leave the commenting back on Facebook for now I s’pose. I may tinker around with the plugin later and see if I can’t get it working right.
That being said, oh hai 2012.
I’ve been keeping a running log of things I want to write about here, so I’ll be posting pretty frequently until either that list runs out or the site crashes. I hope the latter never happens, and as long as I’m wishing, ditto for the former.
woot woot.
Netbooks
Posted by Ben | Filed under Random
I admit, I never thought I’d buy into the whole mess. My first experience with them was with the Intel Atom, single core, and it performed about as much as most people seem to think it will.
Then I moved up to the 1.66 GHz Single core w/ hyperthreading, and things got a little better. I recently had to go on a working trip to Anaheim, and I took the company HP Mini with me, and used it to help me perform my work there. I also brought along my Dell XPS M1530, which is a tad more robust, and found that I really hooked onto the Mini for most of my work. It was just easier to pop on the top of the server rack and use it to load my programs, whether it be vSphere, the web interface for our SAN, or just general surfing. I even loaded office communicator on it and used it to talk to coworkers from the laptop (one of the benefits of working where I do, no phone required, just speakers and a microphone)
It was after that trip that I had decided that it was time to try looking for one for myself. That opportunity presented itself within the last two weeks.
A friend / coworker of mine had been considering one, and I have had hands on time with AMD’s C-50 processor, so I recommended one after he mentioned it. I was already in the “pre-purchase” mindset, so when he got his and I had a chance to play around with it, I decided that it would be what I wanted as well.
We both own the Acer AO722 Aspire One netbook. The specs are pretty standard fare for a system of its size:
- AMD C-50 Processor (1.00 GHz, dual core with integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics, which claims 256 MB of RAM from the system)
- 2 GB DDR3
- 250 GB Hard Drive (though that lucky punk ended up with a 320GB for free for some reason)
- 802.11 n wireless (yes! N! not g!)
- Gigabit LAN
- Card Reader
- a usable keyboard
- 6 cell Li-On battery, about 7 hours worth for this system
- 3.21 LBs
Performance on it is, I think, much better than the Atom. The chip performs like you’d expect one would at 1 GHz, and it runs pretty cool – most of the time I never hear the fan. I’m running an experiment with it now where I replaced the stock 250GB hard drive and put in an SSD to see if I could give it some extra speed. I’ll be upping the RAM to 4GB next month as well, seeing as how the system came with a 64 bit OS.
One of the advantages of AMD’s Bobcat architecture is that it’s an Out Of Order architecture, unlike Atom, which is in-order only. Since the Bobcat core can execute operations in any order, it doesn’t need to place them “in-order” first, like the Atom, which makes the overall computing experience, I think, to be more smooth, even though the chip runs at a 660 MHz deficit of the similarly equipped Atom processor. Bobcat is also AMD’s new architecture, which will be helping to push AMD’s desktop processor into the mainstream again. Most everyone else knows of this chip architecture as “Bulldozer.”
I’m always happy to give AMD’s newest technology a test drive, and since this netbook fills the niche where my XPS M1530 is too big, I find myself using it more. On the couch, in bed, outside at the patio table, etc. It even plays my latest addiction- Minecraft – pretty darn well.
It’s really worth giving one a shot, especially if you need something light and portable. You never know, you just might find a use for a netbook where you thought there wouldn’t be a good use for it.
Amazon’s link: http://www.amazon.com/Acer-AO722-BZ454-11-6-Inch-Netbook-Espresso/dp/B004UR16ES
Hey Weather.com!
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL
Fix your fucking map! It’s been like this for a month! I’m getting sick of it. It doesn’t matter which browser I use, or whether I use a computer at home or at work. The map never loads! FIX YOUR DAMN CODE!
Fix the map! You broke it sometime within the past 90 days.
History Repeats
Posted by Ben | Filed under Geekin' Out
Yeah, you’ll look at the subject and go “duh” but I have a valid reason for picking that title. I was thumbing through my latest issue of Maximum PC, and came across a “budget” PC (pretty scary when “budget” PCs are $1500+) and noticed a striking similarity in the choice of components compared to a very similar shift a few years ago.
When folks were introduced to the DVD ROM spec, PCs hardly ever shipped without both a CDROM or CD RW drive and a DVD ROM drive. I was one of the folks who built one such PC from scratch, including both a CDRW and a DVD-ROM. Then the shift was with DVDRW drives, and once again I had both a DVDRW and a DVDROM (yeah, both drives can read DVDs, but I wanted one to write with “just in case” I needed to write while reading, and no, I didn’t do it to copy movies.) Then it happened again with BluRay drives, both readers and writers, though, to a lesser extent.
The reason I bring it up is that these PC vendors are embracing the “SSD Era” by copying the old habits of system makers and ye olde rotational optical media. This time, it’s SSDs and hard drives.
Opting to make the boot and primary OS drive an SSD, whilst adding a platter based hard drive for more mundane storage tasks, we’re going to see this shift into top gear, if it hasn’t already. Yeah, totally clairvoyant of me, I know. 
If you read one of my prior posts, you’ll know that I upgraded my laptop to an SSD, and I use the same one in my workstation at work. I never really truly appreciated the SSD’s benefits until last night however. Much like a former Maximum PC editor once wrote (thanks Josh!) he never really understood the hype surrounding multicore processors at the time of their introduction. He never really took advantage of them until he realized that he was still computing in “single core land.” I was still computing in “rotational media land.” For me, it was a last minute LAN party at a friend’s house. Normally I host them at my house, but I wanted to have one without having to ask everyone to come over at the last second, but there’s always a couple who are up for last minute ideas, and so we scheduled the LAN. Instead of lugging my heavy ass desktop power house and accompanying hardware, I instead opted for my laptop so that I could go setup and leave at the end with little fuss.
I always knew that SSDs would one day rule my life, I just never expected to be shown in such a powerful way. My laptop is a little long in the tooth now, having purchased it about 3 years ago now. It’s a pretty modest little laptop, sporting a Core 2 Duo T9300 processor running at a swift 2.5 GHz, 4GB of RAM, and sporting the very gray haired GeForce 8600 GT-M. I installed my own Corsair 120GB SSD to replace the 7200 RPM WD that was in it prior. The Corsair is nothing special, just the standard Sandforce (first gen) powered 120GB SSD that has earned a place of respect in many other system builders’ systems.
In that same room were people with an i7 920, and an AMD Phenom II. Both of them had standard 7200 RPM hard drives, and much faster video cards. Even the folks we played LoL with over the internet couldn’t have known what I was rocking. We started the game, and during the loading screen, I watched, in complete awe, as my little 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo raced to the finish of the loading screen several seconds before even the local i7 or Phenom II. I was blown away. I had already been used to the Corsair’s prowess in Windows general environment tasking, such as with office apps and other things such as vSphere at work, or the IM software and mIRC I used at home. Little did I realize how fast that little SSD would be in that situation. My desktop PC uses a six-core Phenom II and two 150GB Raptor-X’s in RAID 0, and even they were ousted in my later testing.
One thing is for certain, I welcome our new SandForce based overlords, and will be seeing about replacing my dual Raptors come this Christmas. For me Ben? You shouldn’t have! Why, yes… yes… you should have! My Geeky heart thanks you!
Google Chrome is… not Chrome-y
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL, Geekin' Out
At the behest of a friend or two, I decided to give Chrome a try a few weeks ago as my primary browser. I had it loaded already, I just didn’t use it that often. I know about all the claims that say it’s supposed to be faster than IE9 or Firefox, and I know that Google gushes about it all the time for the other features. I loved the bookmark sync tool and for the first time in a decade, I made a valiant effort to syncronize my bookmarks between all the PCs that I use. It worked, and I was happy to be using the same exact set of bookmarks everywhere, even on my phone.
But then I got to know Chrome better, and some of the “charm” was quickly evacuated into deep space faster than you can say “Event Horizon.”
One of my biggest pet peeves was the fact that Chrome was supposed to be this lean mean social surfing machine. Sure, if you use it like 99% of the population SEEMS to. Facebook, Google tab or two, maybe your Email. Not here. This geek loads up his browsers in full-on browsing warfare. I build myself fast computers, and I expect them to perform as quickly as I built them to be, but Chrome was not helping the situation. It would spawn additional threads as necessary, which was nice, except that I ran into two issues with that. Firstly, the extra threads didn’t serve to do much other than eat up rows in my task manager and spike the CPU graph every so often. I didn’t ever see a tangible benefit to the “spawn more overlords” …er I mean -threads-, scheme. I looked closer at those threads and realized a more horrific truth. Those additional threads were eating up gobs of memory. I thought maybe I had an issue with my PC, so I repeated my inspection on two other machines – my laptop, and my work PC. It’s noteworthy here to mention that my work PC didn’t run with any extensions or addons, while my laptop and desktop at home did. Chrome ate memory up like a fat kid in a Waffle House on Chicken & Waffles special day. Odd. I knew Firefox could be equally as ravenous on RAM usage, so I fired up the same test pages with Firefox, and discovered that while the program did use a sizable chunk of ram, it still used 90-120 MB LESS than Chrome did with all of the spawned threads. What’s up with that?
The complete deal breaker however came when I noticed a behavior that was unbecoming of a browser. Maybe Firefox spoiled me, and this is how they are supposed to be, who knows. Chrome could not handle multiple concurrent tabs, especially if they were loading.
I love Break.com. I love the galleries they post of images from all over the web, it’s like a mini “best of imgur” in one place most of the time. So I got into the habit of, much to Break’s server admins distress I’m sure, opening the tabs all at once. I’d open a gallery page, and then either Control-Click or mouse-click on every link in the gallery to have it open in the background while I looked at the prior tabs. For some reason, Chrome handled it like a horse trying to choke down a Volkswagen Beetle full of obese clowns wearing skunk spray aftershave. Many times, on the smaller galleries, I’d only notice lockups and occasional freezing. But the larger galleries would bring the party crashing down in an instant. The larger galleries would cause extensions and even the core Chrome operating environment to halt. You’ve probably never had to deal with it, but the “dead man” face Chrome throws up when it can’t run for some reason sucks. Really sucks. And the glorious auto-recovery that both Chrome and Firefox have is useless in Chrome. You can end the program, but if you chose to open Chrome again, it tries to restore the same clusterfuck that you were trying to load in the first place.
I thought that last part was just me, so I had a friend try it out on his computer, with no extensions or addons to speak of. He used dual monitors, running on the same computer to give both browsers even more of a workout. Sure enough, when he tried to open the same assortment of tabs in Chrome as he did in Firefox, Chrome would spit up and spew binary bits all over the place. Firefox, through whatever magic the browser coders whipped up, knaws through the page loads without a problem, every time. I performed the same test on my system, where both browsers have a few addons installed (Chrome: AdBlock, Firefox: Adblock, DownThemAll, TACO) and it still ended the same way. One other problem surfaced as well – Chrome would have kittens on multiple tabs with flash content. Woah, wait a sec. I know Google, Adobe, Apple and Steve Jobs are all on the “I HATE UR GUTS” stage right now, but give me a break. It’s pretty obvious when a platform neutral company (Mozilla) makes a browser compared to one that thinks Flash should die a horrid death, reserved for those who try to choke down VW Bugs and clowns who masticate too much.
Google, WTFBBQ?
I should note that I don’t hate Chrome, I just prefer to use Firefox. Since I did all the hard work with consolidating my bookmarks, the import into Firefox was all the much sweeter. Firefox’s sync has been just as good to me as Google’s feature in Chrome was. Bummer G-Team. The bottom line is that you should use the browser that fits your surfing style, and just read this knowing that Google has to do some more fine tuning on their browser before I’ll give it another shot (and I will, in the future for sure.) After all, this is just a blog – who said my word was law around these parts? 
Trial by Fire
Posted by Ben | Filed under Random
I’ve never been very good with networking. It’s one of the reasons I chose the networking degrees in school, I wanted to learn more and gets hands on with it. I should have saved my money and time and just waited for the opportunity I got with this trip I have been on. The hands on and actually touching, fixing, attempting configurations on this network are helping incredibly. I’ve gotten a great insight into the inner workings of VLANs, LAGs, and the correlation between the 6-8 different network ports on an Equallogic SAN and the accompanying host hardware for a vSphere setup. Of course, I’ve gotten some more hands on time with ESXi version 4, and seen the kinds of things it can do. I’ve deleted and recreated VMs, and troubleshot things I thought would be completely above me.
I can safely say the trip was productive, even though I don’t yet have everything working again. It has been fulfilling in that aspect, and though I’ll still leave with a part of me missing if I can’t get those other systems online like I am hoping, the bulk of the network is up again and working as the staff remembers it, so that I can be grateful for.
I haven’t done any actual from-scratch configuring, but I’ve been on the phone with Dell, VMWare, Equallogic and AT&T (unrelated) enough to gain new appreciations for the difficulty and time it takes in getting something like this running well. I am also fortunate that I have a boss who is willing to let me learn (and of course supported the idea of me coming out to a remote site to experience the network hands on.) I also don’t want to disappoint anyone.
If I can just get these two systems that are being a pain in the arse online again, I can leave knowing I’ve accomplished things that I didn’t think were possible just 5 days ago.
I know the blogs have been slow to come, but let me know if you read these or not – either through comments here or in other mediums. I appreciate knowing folks see this, and I’d like to get more how-tos and info out there, so if you feel like you need some help with something, let me know and I’ll check it out.
Google+, SSDs and free time – Oh My
Posted by Ben | Filed under Random
Well, just when I thought my free time couldn’t get even less, I went and signed up with Google+ (Thanks Faif!) and got stuck doing a Windows XP reinstall on a laptop with an SSD, so I’m prepared for hell – it’s the first time I’ve used XP on an SSD, so it shall be a learning experience. As for free time, not sure how much of it I will have at the end of this day. My WoW guild is probably wondering if I died. -.-
Not to mention, I have three, count ‘em, THREE drafts in this site that I’m working on getting finished. The problem is that I start writing one and find that my passion on the subject wanes. I can’t help but wonder if I have a case of undiagnosed ADHD or something. Arrgh!
Well, in keeping with the tradition of honoring NDAs, I will refrain from sharing anything about Google+ here except to say that it’s a great attempt so far, and I really hope Google can make it shine. I’m honestly quite ready to ditch the FB boat, as I think Zuckerberg has mined enough data out of me to last two lifetimes. Frack.
Moar! to come, I promise.
Mushroom, Mushroom!
Posted by Ben | Filed under Random
