I want to ban the sniper rifles, because I think they change the game in a way that is not fun for many of the people at the LAN. I am hoping to test this change this week:
Any thoughts out there?
–Nat
More and more frequently, I don’t put an optical (cd/dvd) drive in many of my computers – especially it is a completely new build or a new build into an old case that has just an IDE drive but the motherboard supports SATA only. In the past I have done many an install from USB thumb drives of windows operating systems.
There is an issue with using USB drives for installs, however. They are tiny. Constantly, I am spending more time looking for the USB thumb drive than actually installing the operating system.
This morning, an epiphany. I looked into my back pack and what was there? Two external portable hard drives. You can use those too, I discovered. As a bonus, it is actually faster than my janky old 4GB thumb drive to copy files too and installation time is still vastly quicker with a hard drive than it is using a DVD or CD. A couple links (I used the first successfully, follow it step by step and it will work…)
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/john_paul_cook/archive/2009/01/19/11249.aspx <– xcopy commands for those that favor that. NTFS support, too.
I hope this helps you as much as it has helped me – finally I can quit fuming about where that little black thumb drive is. I’ll probably start misplacing my hard drives now, though…
–Nat
See the spiffy black bars to the left and the right of this text? This website modification is to protest the potential passage of Legislation that would give a minority (the entrenched recording/film industry) vast powers over the content of the Internet. This type of legislation threatens the economic incubator that is the Internet while protect a tiny part of our economy that needs to modify itself to remain relevant in modern times.
Should lobbyist protecting the horse, carriage and buggy industry been allowed to persuade the Federal Government to outlaw cars because they potentially used the same roads, copied their main innovations (wheels! suspension!) and caused an industry undue harm?
I trust you can answer that question and align the analogy yourself.
An article on how you can take action:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/protesting-sopa-what-you-can-do.ars
–Nat
Mark your calendars for March 3rd.
Why the third of March? First and foremost, that is the latest break I get in teaching this year – it is St. Paul College’s Spring Break. I think it is best to do this sort of thing when I don’t have to get a class nailed down during the same weekend. Also, and importantly, most of the longest tenured NATLAN attendees said they could make it on the third.
Current plans for the LAN:
It’s going to be in the garage at my home in Minnesota. It looks like the “normal” high for early March should be just above freezing – I think that if we put ~2kw worth of “heaters” out there and keep the doors closed it should work. That said, while planning to do it in the garage the basement has been getting more and more cleaned up and it should be possible to move up to sixteen folks inside should the weather prove to be really foul.
Gamewise I think we are looking at the typical collection (steam games, TF2, CS:S, DOD:S) plus Serious Sam BFE depending on the stability of COOP there. 16 player coop should be a hoot.
New for this LAN, and one of the main reasons I am thinking to do it at my house, is that I am considering providing for remote players. More to come on this – and as much a possible, I’ll incentive those who can attend to be onsite – so check back for more details.
Finally – I’ll have a nine month old at this point. What that means is that I am cool with some people being in the house, but it won’t be a crazy sleep over like it is sometimes. To that end I’ve talked to the Mooney’s who have graciously opened their house so that up to five people can sleep in beds there. We’ll be covering this in some more detail down the line too…
Exciting times!
–Nat
Wow, that went by ridiculously fast.
Some of the fun things that happened in November:
There is only so much stuff a guy can keep, right?
Kristin and I are clearing out some of our high school era memories and deciding how best we can move on.
I have decided that for some things, a picture will suffice. A tub of trophies is getting sent to the garbage, but first let’s relive my participation in the Bremer County Fair Crops competitions…
2000 Champion Beans, Reserve Overall
2002 Champion Soybeans, 2002 Reserve Champion Corn, 2002 Champion Overall
Purple County/Blue State Fair Ribbons
The last project there was for my exhibit on the differences between disc and drums breaks and how they worked. Unfortunately, I think it may have cost some misplaced Chevelle parts at this point…
Sadly these items must go, but it was fun remembering talking to the judges and getting the awards!
–Nat
Anand from Anandtech.com tweeted this – Pick a drive from Intel, Crucial or Samsung and avoid nearly everything else. I would personally add Kingston to the list to buy.
Firstly, I think the 64GB drive size has been really popular as it is the first tier you can get that really gives you a reasonable amount of space to work with. Basically, those vendors fall out like this (the first three are notable because they largely use controllers they engineer themselves or source from those making Enterprise drives):
Intel: Reliability is tops, performance and features are second, and they want fat margins (admittedly) and so they make you pay more per GB.
Crucial: Performance and features are of equal importance as reliability, pricing is fairly to very competitive. They want into the market.
Samsung: Reliability is tops, performance and features are second, and they really do most of their sales to OEMs like Apple so their NewEgg type pricing isn’t too competitive outside of their 64GB drives.
Kingston: Price is tops, followed by reliability, followed by performance. They are maybe 50% (or less) as fast as others on random IO writes (not a large part of normal workloads…) but they are reliable and the pricing cannot be beat if you can deal with large rebates.
For example, my SSD usage has looked like this: I have a 40GB Intel SSD in my main PC for my C: drive. I bought it on a great sale for ~$70 when the only other real options were Intel 80GB for ~$200 and the OCZ crap using Indilix and the freshly minted Sandforce controllers that are seemingly notorious for having issues and constant beta fixes rolling out. I had to move things like my page file and Windows 7 User Profile folders to a secondary drive. That said, despite the paltry write speed it is incredibly responsive and holds my 7 install plus all my productivity apps like Office with ~30%+ free space. I would be really comfortable on a 64GB drive.
On Kristin’s PC I wanted her to not have to monkey with moving things around and folder redirection and so bought here a 96GB Kingston 100V+ drive. The plus indicates slightly better performance than the vanilla 100V line and the size should allow her to use the drive exclusively with a secondary 7200RPM drive for things like Steam, Guild Wars and Starcraft 2 and pagefile. This drive came in at $95 after a whopper of a $50 mail in rebate which came very quickly.
My Dad’s PC has an awesome storage subsystem with a Sata 3 (the latest and greatest SATA standard) 64 GB Crucial M4 as a cache drive with a 1TB Western Digital Sata 3 Black Drive. The SSD cost about $115 and has been on brief sales in the ~$90 range. The great thing about this approach is that my Dad can deal with a simple and spacious 1TB C: drive while enjoying the speed of a SSD 90% of the time. For those that follow storage performance on a larger scale, 64GB of fast SSD for a terabyte of SATA is a nice spot to be, the vast majority of the time what you want will be cached. The trade of is that 10% of the time (which is an edcuated guess) you are going all the way to the SATA to get what you want, so the first time you access a file and maybe sometime later you will have the performance of the slower spinning disk versus what you’ve come to expect of your SSD.
I’ve used SSD drives from Kingston and ADATA in other builds with good results – I think we are nearing the time when any ~$500+ build is going to include an SSD versus a pricey processor as having nice system drive does so much for general usage of the PC versus new CPU for anyone that already has a dual core or better.
–Nat
Thank goodness this game only has a demo out for PC right now:
http://www.robotentertainment.com/games/orcsmustdie
If it had a full version, after playing the demo, I would have had to buy it so I could keep playing. A little bit of a bummer that it only has twenty levels but I suppose that it might get a bit more involved outside of the demo levels. The smoothness and obviousness of some of the concepts really let me get in there and play it. Being more involved in a tower defense games is a good time.
Ars has a review of it as well
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/
I’ll be watching for this one on sale, that’s for sure…
Nat
Every once in a while when building a new ESX (not ESXi, mind you) server you don’t really know which of your multiple connections is bound to the switch that will work for your service console if you are lucky (?) enough to have your networking interfaces all separated out.
Well, here is just the bit of code to run at the command line to try several different vmnic uplinks in quick succession:
esxcfg-vswitch -U vmnicX vSwitch0
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnicY vSwitch0
Iterate through your vmnics until you can ping out and voila, all better!
–Nat
When John Stewart interviews people it is often because they are supporting a book that they have recently published or a movie they have starred in that is opening soon. The movies stick with me but I can never remember the books. No problem, other people are creating a list themselves!
What boggles my mind is that the Daily Show doesn’t do this for themselves? How hard would it be to simply have a list this on their site? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
In the meantime, I’ll rely on bored people to maintain their blogs 🙂
–Nat