That title really wasn’t supposed to sound as phallic and egotistical as it appears to be.. it really is huge. No, really, it is. Okay, I’ll stop. Last week, I got my hands on a Dell XPS 730 H2C, and then spent the next day (i kid you not) reinstalling it, and making it function properly. I read many reviews online about it before picking it up, and I believe that some of them were… set up. In all cases, they claim that the machine comes with nothing on it, bar 3dmark06, and that the configuration it ships with is just fine for gameplaying. That really isn’t the case - or perhaps I just have really bad luck; that, or the UK market makes things worse. In any case, having spent a good several hours installing games and other software, I found that most were unplayable - black screens, crashes, slow FPS. Blowing it away was the best, and worst, thing I’ve done thus far. The biggest bone of contention was getting CrossfireX to function afterwards - it’s very new tech, and being ATI, there is zero output from the Catalyst Control Center with regards to crossfire (they decided it would be a good idea to remove the check box for it on HD3870X2 cards).

I discovered, somewhere on the internets that the way to get crossfire functioning correctly is to remove a card, install the driver, reboot, install the second card, reboot, connect the crossfire connector, reboot. It worked. I shit you not. 90FPS in crysis, biotches.

Unfortunately, and here’s where things go downhill entirely, the fan management on this thing is less than adequate. ATI wholeheartedly believe that GPUs don’t need their fans to run while under heavy load; that’s about what I can figure at least - the fans are completely manual, they do not engage automatically. I have to run rivatuner if I don’t want everything to crash horribly with massive graphics corruption.
Dell appear to have followed suit, giving zero control over what the fans are doing, except by way of the nVidia ESA Control Panel, which is pretty awful at controlling anything - except for the LEDs. To top that off, today, 5 minutes into playing Neverwinter Nights 2 -hardly the most intensive game- I leapt from my seat as a nuclear launch sequence kicked in, every fan in the thing went batshit insane, air-raid sirens sounded, the ground shook -okay, so it wasn’t quite like that.. it certainly seemed like that at the time- I bring up the system monitor (thanks nVidia), and find out that my CPUs are hitting 212F (100c for you metric folk), and discover to my horror that the “Front CPU Fan” (read: Radiator Fan - it’s watercooled) is not running, at all. It has been told to run at 100%, but it’s doing absolutely jack shit.

Dell give you a nice tool kit, and a nice pen with a torch/laser built into it; now I know why. I stripped the thing down to re-seat all the wiring for the overly complex cooling setup, and this took me about 45 minutes to do. The radiator itself requires the system to be drained if you want to lift it off the radiator fan to get to the wiring that comes out the back of it, and the control unit for all the cooling/extras sits neatly behind that, a huge air intake and the front drive bays. They also use self-tapping screws into plastic, which is evil if you actually want to be able to put what you take apart back together. The radiator fan is still dicking around, ignoring calls to increase speed by the system from what I can tell through the system monitor, however, it is at least running now, and efficient enough to keep the CPUs at 104F (40c) during normal load. I think perhaps I shall be giving Dell a call at some point to get this fixed properly. It’s a lovely system, looks mean, is mean, plays everything I throw at it at 1680×1050 and max performance settings without even blinking. I’m still unsure whether it’s worth almost $7k though.

Originally, this image had “my son’s autism” where the blank exists, however, I think it works perfectly with a blank there too. It’s 2008, yet still, the world over people are persecuted solely for who they are, what they believe in, the color of their skin, the gender they choose to represent - or lack of -, their sexuality, their disability, …. The list is endless. Humanity fears what it does not understand, and persecutes what it fears to abate that fear. We as a species are, if anything, more abhorrant than any other species on Earth. For all our ability to think for ourselves, for everything that makes us ’special’, and ‘brilliant’, we seem to strive to hurt each other; hell, we even seem to enjoy hurting others. I put it to you to show me another creature that shares that trait. It’s 2008, the technology we have today has connected people together in ways 50 years ago no-one could have imagined in their wildest dreams; the internet is a borderless faceless nameless society, where you are free to be whoever and whatever you choose, without risk of coming into contact with humanities hateful ways. Sure, that’s a slightly rose colored view of the internet - if you take into consideration the groups of people who go around griefing people, however, in 99% of cases, their targets initiated the whole affair, and for the most part, everyone just leaves each other alone to get on with their lives.

So, on the one hand, we have this almost utopian ecosystem, where everyone lives together in a modicum of harmony, yet this is so far removed from real life. In the real world, there are people being murdered or beaten up simply because they’re attracted to members of their own gender, or because they do not conform to societies construct of the gender associated with the physical sex that their genes gave them. There are STILL wars being fought over things as ridiculous as religion. America’s borders are under lock down, because of ‘terrorism’. Every news article is pumping fear down the throats of those who read/watch/listen to it. In London, using the tube is like walking into a real life version of half-life 2, public service announcements requesting that everyone be vigilant, report suspicious people. Muslim clerics preach hate in backstreet temples. Non-muslims preach hate in their living rooms. No-one is equal.

The worst of it is, it’s not getting any better. If something doesn’t change fast, the real world is quickly going to descend into dystopian anarchy, each group targeting the groups it inherently fears, and really, when it gets to that point, what are we? Nothing more than tribes, tribes with the technology to wipe countries off the map. Thus the cycle continues, a collective few survive, their numbers increase, they fork, they fight, the hate is perpetuated. Do I feel proud to be human? Not terribly.

Many years ago, when I was very young, my grandma and I would go to the local auction each weekend, looking for interesting bargains - basically, it was a place that sold off the contents of dead people’s houses. Invariably, I’d find many many things that I wanted to buy, and bid on them for 50 pence; usually, I’d win, and my grandad would end up having to come out with the car to collect us, and all the junk that I’d won. Some of it was useful, old computer gear, stereos, that kind of thing, most of it was absolute trash and went straight into the bin - after discovering that it didn’t work, then taking it apart and failing to repair it, usually due to losing interest.

One such purchase I made, was a 1960’s era portable record player, made by fidelity; the picture on the left is, bar a few slight differences, exactly the same as the one I bought for around 50 pence. Upon getting it back home, I plugged it in to see if it work, and it did, quite spectacularly. My grandma went rooting around in her bedroom, and came back with about 60 gramophone records, dating from between 1940 and ~1960, which we proceeded to play. She then promised to give them to me if she could use the record player to transfer them onto cd. This was duly agreed, and I’ve been hulking about 1/2 a tonne of shellac around with me since I began living on my own.

While tidying my room, which invariably looks like a bomb has hit it with clothes strewn everywhere, I came across the box of records, and spent the afternoon listening to them. There’s something about the way the music sounds emenating from the one mono speaker that the record player has, combined with the scratchiness of the needle. It’s raw, full of emotion, completely unlike the music of today. I think I’d happily trade places with someone living in the 40’s just on the basis of the music they had. Yes, the music only plays for 4 minutes before you have to change the record, but that makes it extra special, you’re involved in the sound itself, not a mere observer.

So, having resisted setting up a blargh for years, finally, I have given in. Most of what will be contained here shall consist of my random thoughts, combined with random tidbits of information - mainly centered around being a reminder in the event that I forget. At times, this blargh will likely be unapologetic and offensive to some. You have been warned.

After a few hours of googling, and turning up pretty much nothing; I figured I ought to make a note of this somewhere. I often find myself in the situation where I’ve just downloaded some asian movie (I’m a huge fan of Asian Extreme -think along the lines of Old Boy, Ishii the killer, etc-, and, I really want to be able to watch what I’ve downloaded on my TV) and it doesn’t have the subtitles embedded in the avi file (and no, before you suggest it, I will NOT watch dubbed crap). Microsoft, unfortunately, doesn’t think anyone in the world would want to watch something with subtitles, so this isn’t a feature of the Xbox360. My Xbox is hooked up to a NAS box which has all my music/tv/movies on it, and this box runs a /very/ minimal install of ubuntu - ~150mb in total.

So, down to business. You’ll need transcode installed, along with mplayer, then it’s a simple case of:

transcode -i videofile.avi -x mplayer=-sub subfile.xxx -o outputfile.avi -y xvid

There are other output formats, but I use xvid, since it’s supported by the Xbox. It takes a while longer than just straight transcoding, but it’s worth it to not have to watch it on my laptop.

So, your RAID becomes slightly unreliable, you’ve spent 2 months using rsync to transfer 25m files off the failing array, and having rebuilt it, you want to transfer those files back, in a faster way. How to go about it?

The above is a problem that I’m currently dealing with, and I found something of a hacky, yet elegant solution to this. I’m a huge believer in lftp, it’s a brilliant piece of software, and happily lends itself to many different situations. lftp also supports permissions/ownership setting on files it creates, which is a key feature in handling the above problem; along with all of that, it parallelizes transfers particularly well, meaning that small files aren’t stalled because of large many-gb files slowly transferring.

Unfortunately, I discovered that lftp doesn’t handle directory ownership/permissions _at all_. My original idea was just to set off lftp, walk away and in a few days marvel at the 25tb that had been transferred; however, I really needed to maintain the perms across the board. rsync came into play again:

rsync -avz --stats --progress --include "*/" --exclude "*" ip.address.goes.here:/path/to/files/* /path/

The above command creates just the directories that exist on the other end, skipping all files - this sets up the structure that I need for lftp to work.

Once that’s completed, it’s a simple case of:

lftp sftp://root@ip.address.here -e "mirror -c --parallel=50 --allow-chown --allow-suid /path/to/files ./"

This is the comic for Wednesday, December 31, 1969.