dual-core 4GHz on a budget? yes please!
Tom’s Hardware were quite clear in their find.
“This particular story borders on being a sensation unmatched in our last eight years of hardware reviews.”
...and then they’re talking of their discovery of a budget-line Intel-CPU turning out to be the King of Overclocking and thereby outperforming every top-of-the-line processor around.
“The bottom line is that the Athlon FX-60 and the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 have both met their match – there’s simply no escaping this conclusion!”
Well, I couldn’t help myself today and had to try to get my hands on this CPU…
click to go to the corresponding pic in my Flickr-album
This is Tom’s Hardware’s spec sticker
click to go to the corresponding page on Tom’s Hardware
...and this is mine:
click to go to the corresponding pic in my Flickr-album
click to go to the corresponding pic in my Flickr-album
...looks like I succeeded in that. *^_^*
The idea behind it is not that hard to comprehend. This Pentium D 805 is the only dual-core CPU with a 533MHz frontsidebus… So, to reach the standard 2.66GHz it needs a high multiplier, 20x (133MHz)... Every dual-core motherboard out there will be capable of running 800FSB CPUs so when you put this CPU on there and set the FSB to 800 instead of 533MHz, you get 20×200MHz = 4000MHz on each core :-) The true beauty is of course, that these Intels seem totally capable of running at that speed. Not saying it will run on every motherboard on that speed, but I’ve got some time now to wait for real-world examples in different forums and decide which motherboard it’ll become.
But… this wasn’t planned and now I really have to make up my mind which symphonies I’m gonna finish cause there’s no way on earth I can finish building everything I want and/or everything from parts I have now… So, the coming few days I’m gonna puzzle what I’m gonna do and what stuff has to go…
Silicon Graphics, may you rest in peace
SGI Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
I’ll always remember the fun you gave me as being my first webserver, the trips we took together and the plans we made for the future...
(T_T)
WebFORCE, a badge you wore with pride…
Never mind that clown posing next to you, he was probably just jealous he couldn’t take you home…
*sigh*
earlier on this site
tag: silicon graphics
Let's show the world I'm a Flickr Pro!
A couple of days ago I finally upgraded my Flickr-account to Flickr Pro…
So, today I thought, let’s get to work and use some of that upgraded bandwidth… *^_^*
click to go to my Flickr-album
Although I now uploaded most of my archive, I could hardly put a dent in the available bandwidth… geez… ;-)
Anyways, during the uploading (which took a while) I tried to organize most of it immediately, by putting old pics in sets and altering the date uploaded (so they won’t appear as new pics), but I guess I can spend some time in finetuning tags and such…
Oh, and I’m very sorry for the RSS-feed-readers who, in the worst case, got a gazillion new posts from this site in their reader… I thought I had it disabled in FeedBurner, only after a while I saw the error-message that my Flickr-account-name can’t be nothing… Hmmmz… If your reader didn’t fetch this feed during the day, everything should be allright… *^_^*
Anyways… if you like to look at (my) pictures… enjoy!a little planned downtime
This afternoon I got a call from my host(ingcompany). The question arose if it was alright to put my server down, to be able move it to another rack. Well, I was planning on swapping some memory in there anyways so I offered to drop by and do it myself. On the way to the datacenter it seemed I was about 30 minutes early, so I decided to drop by one of my favourite shops in the meantime, the same shop (which is quite nearby the datacenter) I visited not too long ago also... I guess you can see on the pics what I got in those 30 minutes *^_^*
Anyways, even though I wasn’t too keen on rebooting it from a distance when I was overhauling this site and server, it came up beautifully when I colocated it (within a colocation)... Oh, and that last login on the console, September 24… that was then. It ran ever since… no reboot, no nothing ^_^
click to enlarge
...and I only log in as root on the console on the machine itself! *^_^*
...the command after this was ‘shutdown -h now’
Oh, about the memory, I swapped the 4×512MB PC2100 Reg ECC in there with 2×1GB PC1600 Reg ECC. Those 1GB-modules were a bargain, and I can use those PC2100-modules… for server number 2! (for which I’m collecting parts next to my desk.)
Some more pics:
click on the thumbnail to go to the corresponding picture on Flickr
rdesktop: remote windows desktop from linux
I’ve been using VNC for years now, and it’s okay. Only it’s 2006 now and it’s hard to cope with very slow screen-updates while the windowsmachine you’re accessing is in your local network. That’s not necessarily VNCs fault, of course not, it’s Microsofts! (like always! ;-)). It’s a behaviour only found when the VNC-server is running on a windows-machine… When you run a VNC-server on a *nix-box, screen-updates and such are all smooth and you can hardly notice the difference between accessing it through VNC or sitting right behind the box…
Anyways, the problem existed of using a windows-box (I still got one left, my Media Center) and there had to be a solution. On several occassions I’ve seen the smoothness of Remote Desktop-connections to windows-machines so I looked into that. Somehow I looked into Remote Desktops before, several years ago and when I found that you can’t have one session on the local machine and that very same one accessible through Remote Desktop(I’m not a wizard in this (and I don’t want to become one either ;-) ), that isn’t possible, or is it?), I hardly could believe it… That was one reason to stick to VNC…
Well, now the problem arose that I wanted to use Google Earth and there are only installers available for windows and Mac. Now, I do have an ibook and I installed Google Earth on there, but I’m pushing the envelope running it on a G3/600 with 384MB of RAM (although it exceeds the minimum system requirements). So, then all of a sudden I thought, let’s look into RDP-clients for linux once again, that way I should be able to have proper screen-updates and such.
With one little search I stumbled upon rdesktop and a quick peek into Gentoo and yes, I can install it simply on my workstation by typing emerge rdesktop (for people not familiar with gentoo, that’s it, that’s all I typed (as root), no downloading up front or anything, pretty brilliant eh?)
I had to see how to enable Remote Desktop on my Media Center, but that wasn’t to hard and then I had to fiddle with the commandline a little to connect to it, in the end, my command looks like this:
rdesktop -u markie -p mypassword -g 1024x768 -a 16 -0 -r sound:remote -b -x lan 10.0.0.99
...and that’s it!
I added that sound-option later, it seemed it tries to bring audio over this connection as well, but that’s not what I want :-) With this option, the sound stays where it is, on the machine itself… I also added ’-b’ for forcing the server to send bitmaps as screen-updated, that way even some directdraw-stuff works flawlessly and with ’-x lan’ I set the experience to LAN (...) which uses the most bandwidth…
My desktop:
click to enlarge (huge! 2560×1024)
Windows in a window, like it should be *^_^*
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...and I tried to run Media Center on it as well and that goes rather well. It seems the guys over at Redmond optimized it for running over a Remote Desktop connection, which is rather nice. Now I can schedule the machine from a distance…
click to enlarge (huge! 2560×1024)
...and when you hit ‘live TV’ it doesn’t even blue screen or anything! (no, duh! it’s already blue….) It knows it’s running over a Remote Desktop-connection and gives you this proper message…
click to enlarge
So now I have a choice! During a day at home, I will run this machine through a Remote Desktop-connection using rdesktop, I can run all kinds of software on it, that can be Google Earth, but also other applications. One other advantage is being able to scroll fast through the explorer, for selecting MP3s for instance. (During a normal day, my Media Center is playing MP3s all day long, since it’s connected to my stereo and my workstation is not…) Normally I changed MP3s through VNC, but that could be a frustrating journey because of the slow screen-updates when using VNC…
In the evening, I will still switch to VNC because my Media Center is then powering my Video Projection System and I hate to look at a login-screen all night… *^_^*
Extra: Oh, of course! I almost forgot, now I can also watch Flash8-stuff the same way :-) There’s still only a flash 7 player for Firefox on Linux, so for those sites who thought it was really necessary to put flash8-only content on their site(don’t get me started on that one)... I can watch it through Remote Desktop… I just tried it and fullscreen flash8 runs quite smooth…
OpenBSD 3.9 almost here...
OpenBSD 3.9 is almost here and Software in Review has, well, a review of OpenBSD in general (which kinda figures for a site called…weeeell, you get it…).
I found this awesome logo here
I’m a big OpenBSD-aficionado and using it, for instance, on my fileserver. But… I want to change that server to a dual machine (more on that later*) so I really hope the SMP-implementation of OpenBSD 3.9 will be stable and especially the SMP-implementation on AMD64 cause even though I still have my hopes set for multi-CPU-support on sparc64, that will probably still be stuff dreams are made of… One day though, I will have my Sun Ultra 2 run OpenBSD on two CPUs… one day… aaaahhhhh *^_^*
*ADDED Yesterday I wrote more on that later and well… today I picked up the CPUs I meant… Just had to make sure I really got them (they were an absolute steal!)... Now I have to get myself a proper mainboard for these beauties… ;-)
click to go to the corresponding pic on Flickr
this must be it...
Today (sunday) I spent a great deal of my day to get all kinds of glitches out of the site-design. I’m still not totally there, but like the title says, for now this must be it... I ran out of time *^_^*
Let me know what you think (I’d appreciate that) and I’m open for ideas/suggestions… nothing’s final yet…
Oh, and especially for long-time commenter the unknown lurker I put an extra rss-feed in the right-hand menu, the RSS minimal feed... That’s without Flickr-photos and del.icio.us-bookmarks, just the feed of this site, nothing more, nothing less, hope you like it *^_^*
And oh! before I forget, the site-credits! (you can also find those here)
The most obvious thing in the site design, the skull-sticker, has been designed by my friend nijne. The rest of the logo is a picture made on my das iBook keyboard with keys from my old G3-keyboard on top of that (you can get an idea of what has been the base overhere). As a template, I took the textpattern-template serene as a base, changed a whole lot to it and I added a nifty navigation which got described as being a fake-dock with minimalistic vector-graphics... I couldn’t have said it better. The icons in the navigation come from the truly unique IRIX, the UNIX which runs on Silicon Graphics-machines and since this site started out on a wonderful SGI Challenge S (which at one point was a killermachine), it seemed the right thing to do. Also because IRIX already had scalable vector-icons long before OS X existed and even longer before Vista had it planned (or did they already remove this feature also?).
To be totally correct on this one, I got the icons out of an iconpack for Gnome (I use Gnome on Gentoo on my workstation) but that iconpack got inspired by IRIX… ;-)
...and oh! This site’s got a fresh 404-page *^_^*
alpha-testing the new site from now on...
Right, after quite some days up in css-trickery and such I totally had it!
Noooooo, that’s not entirely true, but I’m gonna loose a little of my professionalism here and start plugging the new site over the old one… this process will probably take tonight and the bigger part of this sunday. In the mean time chances are, this site looks… euhm… not like it should :-)
3 browsers (including IE! through VNC…)
click to enlarge (2560×1024!)
with textpattern wrting everything inside a MySQL-database, I don’t see any other way than to manually transfer all the settings/templates and such. When I would dump the test-database (including the new design) into the live site… I would lose some posts and such…
Oh… and start complaining you like the old site better not any sooner than this monday, okay? *^_^*
Oh(2)... Geez, it’s incredible how many hours one can spend on something like this… my pride & joy, the navigation, which became something like a fake dock with minimalistic vector graphics has taken more than a day (close to two days I guess…) and in some settings it isn’t always behaving like it should. The whole design should be scalable with font-size. In firefox it behaves quite well, but on some other browsers only from default view to bigger font-sizes, not smaller… (don’t try that! ;-)).... pfffff… well, one day left to get it all right…
MacPlus video-game that never was...
...but we might be on to something here… *^_^*
On BoingBoing I saw this Video of dementedly awesome fake MacPlus video-game that never was -post.
Now, I already have plans of making some kind of compact-Mac-gaming-installation for quite some time, but now it all seems very coincedental. I mean, I’ve got the Compact Macs to build this thing in my very livingroom right now! Even though I planned on using the real SE/30 hardware inside there… Now I’ve seen this video, I just know I have to pull some tricks to get this kind of videoperformance out of these babies… *^_^*
Because I already have this modded SE, which I use as a monitor to my Media Center-setup, I could easily preview what a Compact Mac with something like this on it looks like… I think we have a match here!
click to enlarge
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And I posted a small video to YouTube. My photocamera only allows me to take 15 second-flicks, so that’s what it is… but you can find it here
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a picture taken a few steps back… (that’s my ancient video projectionsystem... the Mac and that system show the same signal…
click to enlarge
...and a few more.. and tadaa! there are the two Compact Macs I already planned on building in some kind of gaming rig (I talked about that before and also about the installation from C-TRL Labs who inspired me to go this way… more C-TRL 68K installations here
So… what’s the rush? Well, I don’t know actually, I’m all excited about this video since it seems to be the perfect footage to show on this installation I already planned on doing. I’m not sure if there’s any possibility on this video becoming interactive, but I’m sure that Paul Robertson, who made this video, will get a heck of a lot of attention and I truly hope someone will make a game out of this video. It’s simply too awesome to be left alone… It doesn’t matter for what platform, I’ll hack it into the two SE/30’s ;-)
(Oh, and if black & white gamecharacters seem familiar… I called some of them ‘the usual geektechnique-fangrrls… a couple of posts back…)
just a little patience...
This week I’ve been busy, trying to come up with a new site. Although this is a slow process (in my case it is) but I’m getting there. I guess I can put the whole shebang online somewhere this weekend.
Why is it such a slow process? Weeeellll… this is at most, something I do once a year and just playing around with the stylesheet wouldn’t cut it. So I started off getting my webserver all current again, this baby now runs of a fresh Apache and MySQL-database. Next to that, I configured this machine almost a year ago and really had to come to grips again with how I did it… I needed to resize some partitions and even though it runs of two harddrives, in softRAID1 with Logical Volume Manager 2 (LVM2) and ReiserFS on top of that, I really had to delve deep to come up with the right commands *^_^*
Anyways, the base this site runs on is all fresh again (without a reboot! 208 days of uptime and counting… I’m gonna reboot it when I’m gonna switch some memory in the near future… So when I’m standing next to the machine… just to make sure…)
...and I’ve been busy in a very slow but steady way to come up with a fresh design and such… Designing a new site overhere means geeking around on my kitchentable and taking pictures… *^_^*
