Furys is a nice club in Oldenburg, newly opened I think, with a DJ that has good taste in music, good lighting stuff, a great atmosphere, and not too much smoke. And it was packed. It was getting a bit late, and thus it was slowly turning into something of a sausage fest, but it was clear to see that most of the chicks who went there were dressed up to their nines and trying to look their best.

Amidst all of this chaos, a rather normal looking German girl came and sat next to me. Her friend tried to talk to her, but she just stared off into the distance. Her friend danced around in front of her, but still she remained still and stared resolutely ahead. Finally, she broke her silence. She began to talk with her friend agitatedly. Within a minute, she was crying, and her hands went to her eyes to wipe away the tears. I fumbled around trying to find my pocket, which I knew always had a piece of tissue paper in it, but when I could feel it in my hand, her friend had already whisked her away to someplace more private where she could cry more freely.

Evidently, not only are there sluts in clubs, but assholes too.

I believe clubs are a distinctly Western thing, born out of their rather laissez faire attitudes to relationships. I can never bring myself to get acquainted with a girl in a club. If she’s friendly and open, she’s probably a slut looking for a one night stand (god knows there are so many of them). If she’s closed and rejects me… I lose anyway! Somehow clubs are being advertised as a glamorous venue for guys and girls to meet each other (and hook up), but it is never the case. The amount of people filling the clubs each night makes me sigh at their gullibility. Look at casinos. Real life ones. Always dark, smelly with cigarette smoke, and filled with losers going broke trying for that “one last time”. Clubs are dark too, so the ugliest of bitches can have a chance if she puts on enough makeup. Stinky with cigarette smoke, check. Customers: groups of girls all dressed up looking for attention, and groups of boys looking for easy women to fuck. Loud, so loud that you can’t have a decent conversation without ripping your vocal cords apart. The only good thing about that is that you get to go up and close to their ears and neck, and boy they smell good. I hear some people saying “to dance to the music”. Really? I haven’t seen a single person in a club who can dance. They just stand around shuffling like zombies.

If I had a hot girlfriend (otherwise, why have a girlfriend at all?), I would not bring her to the club with me, plus I would try to dissuade her from going to one. Reason 1: tons of guys would hit on her, either in front of me or behind my back. In front of me, they’re openly insulting my girlfriend by assuming she’s easy pussy, even when she’s obviously taken. Behind my back, I’d have to trust her. And I haven’t really met a girl who’s that trustworthy. Not even my ex, God bless her soul. 2: If we do anything together they’ll all look at us and I will feel like I’m showing off. And showing off is really immature. A girlfriend, by definition, is a companion, not a showpiece that you strut around. Sure it feels good. But on a not so subtle level, what you’re doing is using her. And that’s no good to anybody.

I seriously doubt that you can find a quality woman in a club. Either she’s hungry for attention and ego stroking (and let’s not get started on the despicable and common practice of flirting with other men behind their boyfriends’ backs), or she’s looking for some one night dick. No, the best place to meet women is outside of a club, where if she’s really beautiful, you’ll see it, not because it’s dark and she’s all dressed up – and if she is friendly with you, there’s a higher probability that she actually does like you and wants to get to know you better, not just because she’s in a club with her friends and her boyfriend’s at home (I also despise this sort of behaviour. I would never flirt with anyone behind my partner’s back in a relationship).

And have you noticed, couples rarely go to clubs? They’d much rather stay at home and have a wonderful time with each other in bed. I think that’s the final indicator that clubs are for immature and lonely people. I’ve been to them several times over the past few years, and I just can’t ever seem to get used to them. This probably means I should really stop trying, because I’ve understood the truth about clubs.

Introductory disclaimer: there are arguably more important aspects to a computer than just its performance. For example, the display (its size, resolution, viewing angles, colour gamut), the keyboard (is it obvious when you’ve pressed a button down?), the mouse (does it move ever so slightly when you click? is it a good shape? Are the buttons easy to reach?) etc. In general the I/O devices attached to a computer make more of a difference to the user experience than the computer itself. But there is always a place for more performance.

Overclocking
Make no mistake, the biggest performance gains will always come from algorithmic optimization of the software. You can overclock, but stability in this case is never a “yes or no” situation. A heavily OCed CPU/GPU may pass 24-48 hours of Prime95/LinX/Furmark, but will only be stable 99.8% of the time, and that little 0.1% of instability may manifest itself in a quiet error that nobody ever detects, until it’s time to chkdsk and you realize something that was not supposed to be written was written to disk. It is not “definitely stable”, nor can you ever rely on it being perfectly stable until you reset it back to stock clocks.

And when overclocking, always go for the maximum clock you can reach without raising the voltage. That means turning off Load Line Calibration, which is simply a way of minimizing the drop in voltage when the CPU gets busy (you can see this with CPU-Z, load all cores, and watch the Core Voltage drop). The drop in voltage is actually normal, and always within design specifications. There’s an Intel document out there for LGA775 CPUs that talks exactly about “Vdroop”, as they call it. Asus motherboards, if you turn LLC on, may overcompensate for this drop in voltage and end up pumping even more voltage than necessary for stable operation into your CPU, making it run ~15C hotter, decreasing its lifespan (my 1055T used to run at 3.7GHz, almost a year of nonstop Folding@Home at that speed at ~1.525V it’s only stable at 3.5GHz), and eating into your power bill. See this page on what exactly affects the lifespan of a CPU. Yes, CPUs have a lifespan. They, like us, will all eventually die.

You may say “but I’ve got a CPU cooler that can deal with it” but your motherboard’s VRMs will resent you, especially if you’re using a tower cooler that doesn’t blow down onto the motherboard, in which case the VRMs don’t get much airflow over their heatsinks, if at all. Since power consumption increases linearly with frequency but nonlinearly with voltage, you reach maximum efficiency when you achieve the maximum stable overclock at stock voltages.

Proper fan placement always beats more fans/faster fans. Dust will get into your case anyway, so just use the side intake panel even if you don’t have a dust filter on it. In my experience, the dust filter is more of an extra part of your case that you now have to clean, rather than something useful that actually does reduce the dust buildup (ok it slows it down but not by much).

I/O Performance
The CPU’s caches transfer data at ~200-300GB/s. DDR3 SDRAM, at best, gives you around 10GB/s of bandwidth, at worst, probably half that. A hard drive that’s seeking, reading many small files (for example, reading the many DLLs required to load a specific program, or reading a fragmented file) will give you 1MB/s, reading a sequential file (best case scenario), ~100MB/s. Given that code and data always have to be loaded from something slow like the hard drive, you can see where the bottleneck is, can’t you? It’s really obvious, right? Yet when I was working in a computer shop in Malaysia, a colleague specced out a computer for a customer with a QX9650, RadeonHD 4870 X2 and… a Caviar Green 1TB drive. And that was all while we had a Velociraptor right under the glass tabletop. And because he had worked there longer, he had authority and I couldn’t complain.

Anyway there is a plain need for much, much faster storage. Which is why you need a solid state drive, aka SSD, and in the absence of that, lots of RAM. Having both an SSD and lots of RAM would be nice though, and RAM is dirt cheap these days. Today’s SSDs transfer sequential data at up to ~500MB/s, and deal with random file accesses at 20-50MB/s. But take note, the real advantage of an SSD over a HDD is not the 500MB/s transfer rate! That is only 5x faster than a HDD. You know this already but Windows and the programs you install in it is not just one big file waiting to be read off the disk like a long todo list. It is many small files, some a few KBs, some a few MBs, and in this case the SSD is 20-50x faster than a HDD! You can definitely feel the difference.

The best part is random read performance hasn’t changed that much much from the old days of SSDs (Vertex 1) to the present day (Vertex 4), and even the oldest SSDs can boast a 20x performance increase over the HDD (which is really what you’re after). So if you’re planning to install the OS on the SSD, you can save a bit of money by going with an older SSD.

RAM
The performance gain from a 100MHz CPU overclock will probably beat anything you get from buying faster RAM/overclocking it/twiddling with the timings etc. Still, it does affect performance.
DRAM is not like SRAM (used in CPU caches). They’re arrays of capacitors, and like all capacitors, they lose their charge over time. So you have to refresh them. Refresh them too often, and you can never get in enough time to read/write from them. Refresh them too sparingly, and your data may be corrupted. That’s what all the CAS/RAS whatever timing strobes are for. RAM speed is all about latency, specifically, the time lag between the point when you request a part of data from RAM, and the point when it’s ready for you to read from it. And then there’s the time it takes to actually read the data into the CPU’s caches. The last part is easy. More MHz, less time taken. The first part is the tricky part. I’m not exactly sure on how this works (read Wikipedia for the details), but suffice to say the faster clocked DDR3 module is not always the fastest. You need the memory to talk to the CPU faster, but you also would like the memory to respond faster in order to see a gain in speed!

This is also of use while overclocking. For instance, your RAM may not be able to handle running at a higher clock. So you can try running your memory at a slower clock, but tighter timings, resulting in a net decrease in latency, thus a net increase in performance. The formula for the actual CAS latency number is:
(CAS / Frequency (MHz)) × 1000 = X ns
where frequency is (transfer rate/2) otherwise known as the I/O bus clock, due to the DDR signalling scheme.

Also remember that the L3 cache/memory controller in the Phenom is tied to the CPU/NB clock. Overclock the CPU/NB, the L3 cache gets faster, the memory controller also gets faster. It makes a difference, as Anandtech pointed out here.

For some reason my dear Phenom II X6 1055T is no longer stable at 3710MHz (265*14), 1.525V. No prob, never really needed the extra speed, I suppose. Went back to stock clocks.

And now my GTX470 with its Gelid Icy Vision Rev. 2 is crashing my computer. Before it would never ever crash at 770MHz/1087mV, but somehow it just did while folding. And temps at that speed skyrocket to ~88C, which I’m pretty sure was not what I had at first, otherwise I wouldn’t have been impressed by the product. I checked my old forum postings, it seems I got 40C idle and 60C load with the Gelid. Now, it’s 50-54C idle and 73C load! This needs to be rectified… tomorrow. Until then, back to stock clocks.

And when I put stuff on top of my case to defrost it, that somehow makes it go up a few more degrees, causing it to crash.

I asked an overclocker I met at CeBIT, he said that the thermal paste must have dried out. Although I don’t see how that would fix the CPU instability, because temps never changed, I do think the Gelid would benefit from some new thermal grease. I just have to remember which damn paste I used before so I don’t use it again… was it the one that came with Gelid, or was it the Arctic Silver Ceramique?

EDIT: Just took it apart, put it back together again, putting the Ceramique in a plus pattern, instead of the X pattern I used when I first got the heatsink. I had used the thermal grease that came with the Gelid thing, which was ok, but it wasn’t spread evenly. And I think I just used a dot pattern with it. Now idles at 45C, load 68C, overclocked to 770MHz/1087mV 80C. That X pattern couldn’t have helped that much, could it? Hmm.

In August I bought a used Nikon F5 for 180EURs. Yes, it’s a damn steal
Since then I estimate I’ve spent around 150EURs just to print and develop the negatives.
I estimate I’ve spent at least 40EURs on film, BTW never buy B&W film at the photo shops here in Oldenburg. When you can buy Ilford Delta 3200 for 5EURs online, you look at the 10EUR price tag photodose charges and you scoff.
Then I bought the cheapest lens Nikon offers, the AF 50mm 1.8D, a circular polarizer and a UV filter for it. All in all, 180EURs.
Recently I’ve been noticing some scratches on some negatives. Since the photos of my ex mean a lot to me, I had to shell out around 30EURs for 100 sheets of nice little polypropylene sleeves for the negatives. Taking proper archival care of these negatives will be a real pain in the future I imagine. And I bought some Rollei Nightbird and more Ilford B&W. All in all 50EURs.
So I spent 600EURs so far on film. What if I had gone digital?

First, I would’ve wanted the D7000 because it has a 100% viewfinder and most importantly works with screw type AF lenses. That would already be 1000EURs. And then I would realize that my 50mm is now a short telephoto at 85mm because of DX, so I now have to buy yet another lens, a 35mm DX, which is quite expensive, say 300. Archival costs are negligible, even including burning multiple discs with parity data. So 1300EURs.

So far, film is looking like a pretty good deal, although it has many running costs and storage/archival is bulky. No one component of film photography is much more expensive than the other, which means on all components there is not much room for improvement in cost effectiveness. As time goes by the initial investment on the F5 and 50mm lens will look even smaller in comparison with everything else. The question is when? I estimate around 1.5 more years before I will have spent 1300EURs on film photography. And then? in 1.5 years, the D7000 will be replaced by something with the same price, and the 35mm DX lens won’t be any cheaper. It’ll be just as hard to justify switching to digital.

So I think I’ll just keep shooting film.

Yes, I’ve recently been reading sites made by women for women! Nope, doesn’t make me gay. In fact, it makes me happy to be a guy, because I know I’m definitely not into the kind of stuff they write incessantly about over there!

Guys, reading sites targeted at women is really eye opening. Of course you’ll see pink with all the inane drivel about what floss the celebs are using at the moment, but there’s some good stuff hidden in between. You now know what a “cute” guy looks like, and what a “hot” guy looks like. What a good date idea is. You have a rough feeling for what they look for in guys. You learn what turns them on and what doesn’t.

For example, an article about up-and-coming actors has the word “sexy” written all over it, and an article about actors who used to be successful but now aren’t is entitled “Crushes Presently Unworthy Of Our Love”. I hope they were being a bit over the top there because this is uncomfortably materialistic, don’t you think? If they were being straight, I really respect Ava Gardner for sticking next to Sinatra when his career had “that little hiccup”.

And now and then they drop really useful hints that come after the phrase: “Guys, if you’re reading this…”. I’m reading privileged information here, stuff normally unavailable to the unwashed masses, because they’re too proud of their masculinity to stoop to reading sites targeted at women!

But now and then I come across disturbing articles that reflect how immature the authors/commenters are. You struggle to convince yourself this doesn’t represent the majority of the human population. These are articles which, when you read them, give you the feeling that females are bitches. Then you get jaded, because after reading so many articles about “flings” and “one night stands” you get the idea that not even girls believe in “love”. Oh I’m sorry I meant love without quotes.

For example, in an article about dating younger men, it soon became obvious that the author wasn’t really attracted to younger men per se, it’s just that she got her ego stroked by being able to see a male fall head over heels in love with her so easily (because of his naivety). A more honest, unabashed example of such trampiness would be impossible to find anywhere else. Of course, she turns herself into the “good girl” at the end by, uh, ceasing to toy with him.

Then there was the article about men desiring younger women, which had the audacity to demand that older men should focus their desires purely on older women, and leave younger women to younger guys, because younger women don’t find older men attractive anyway and find it mostly creepy that they would like younger women. And it was written by a guy. Seriously? Then come the wave of female commenters, who speculate that older men go for younger women because they get an ego boost out of younger girls looking up to them just because they’re older. No, I’m sorry old hag, but the fact is younger girls are just more sexy. You can cling to your rationalization if it makes you feel better, though.

Anyway, more guys should read sites targeted at women. They do spend a lot of time trying to figure us out, the poor things. Let’s reciprocate!

I have an OCZ Vertex 2E 60GB, it’s not the 25nm edition, nor is it the 34nm edition, so it’s probably 50nm. Most of the time it has 17-21GB free space.
Attributes List
1: SSD Raw Read Error Rate Normalized Rate: 108 total ECC and RAISE errors
5: SSD Retired Block Count Reserve blocks remaining: 100%
9: SSD Power-On Hours Total hours power on: 9960
12: SSD Power Cycle Count Count of power on/off cycles: 250
171: SSD Program Fail Count Total number of Flash program operation failures: 0
172: SSD Erase Fail Count Total number of Flash erase operation failures: 0
174: SSD Unexpected power loss count Total number of unexpected power loss: 82
177: SSD Wear Range Delta Delta between most-worn and least-worn Flash blocks: 1
181: SSD Program Fail Count Total number of Flash program operation failures: 0
182: SSD Erase Fail Count Total number of Flash erase operation failures: 0
187: SSD Reported Uncorrectable Errors Uncorrectable RAISE errors reported to the host for all data access: 0
194: SSD Temperature Monitoring Current: 30 High: 30 Low: 30
195: SSD ECC On-the-fly Count Normalized Rate: 108
196: SSD Reallocation Event Count Total number of reallocated Flash blocks: 0
231: SSD Life Left Approximate SDD life Remaining: 100%
233: SSD Internal Reserved 2944
234: SSD Internal Reserved 3328
241: SSD Lifetime writes from host lifetime writes 3328 GB
242: SSD Lifetime reads from host lifetime reads 5376 GB

That’s 415 days. Wow, I’ve had this baby for that long already? Now 120GB drives are starting to drop in at the price this baby was at.
3328GB/64GB total capacity = 52. I’ve used 52 flash cycles, not including the <1 write amplification due to compression employed by the SF-1222 controller (writes from host). 50nm MLC NAND is specified for at least 10,000 write cycles before you can’t write to it any more. Since the SF-1222 compresses and dedups, I’ve probably used even less flash cycles than that.

If I was using 25nm MLC NAND, I would’ve used about 1.73% of its available write cycles. 34nm: 1.04%. 50nm: 0.52%. Despite obvious advances in controller technology, there is no substitute for more reliable NAND, and I’m sure my Vertex 2 will outlast future SSDs in the far future, when even I have lost interest in using it. I can’t wait to see how much more awesome RRAM will be compared to this.

it’s over

I don’t know why I found this significant enough to put back all the cables on my dear SGI Octane (which I’m selling soon, once I get over how awesome it is) just to telnet into miku.acm.uiuc.edu. My dear Octane, it looks so drab now that I’ve removed all the customizations from the Nekochan wiki! I will miss you more than my Powermac G5, more than my 9114-275… really you are wasted on me.

Holy shit, has it really been a year since I bought my EVGA GeForce GTX470 for a little over 200EURs? It was a great deal at the time, the GTX470 going from ~350 to a little over 200 was a massive discount – even now, the GTX570 is no lower than 289EURs. The GTX560 Ti is basically as fast as the GTX470, and has less VRAM too.

I must have really played the fuck out of it, haven’t I? Well… actually, in March I played a lot of G Senjou no Maou. Not something you need a GTX470 for. Indeed, even my laptop’s GMA950 could handle this.

And then I played a lot of Homeworld. A LOT of Homeworld. But I only have this screen to show for it:

I think this must have been on the last level. I’ve spent 3 hours on that level already and I still haven’t cleared it, mostly because the maps are huge, traveling takes a long time, and I was focusing on capturing a few ships to increase my force.

There was also EVE Burst Error. I only spent a few hours on it, but a particular scene interested me. Why does everybody in this scene look like they came from Evangelion? EVE Burst Error predates Eva!

And in between, I spent days and days on Minecraft! Minecraft was sluggish on the integrated 880G (RadeonHD 4250) graphics, but it might have been because I set aside too little VRAM for the integrated GPU. I’ll try it again I tried it with 128MB Sideport + 256MB of system RAM reserved, giving it 384MB of VRAM total, and it was very playable, 45-60fps with fast graphics and normal/far draw distance, Max FPS and Advanced OpenGL off. On the GTX470 it flew like nobody’s business, and the GPU itself didn’t even need to go up to 3D clocks. I found inter-island traveling slow, and I hated getting lost and dying from creepers, so I always built an overhead walkway network, lighted, naturally, so that on the ground every part of it would serve as a giant landmark.

I also played some PCSX2, although not as much as I thought I would. It’s funny, I don’t know why. I thought I would catch up on FFX and FFXII, but instead I ended up playing a lot of Suikoden 5. Suikoden 5 is a really awesome game, it’s too bad they canned the series after this one. I even bought an expensive Xbox 360 Gamepad for PC just to have a nice comfortable PCSX2 experience.

Of course, in the meantime, I leveled up my Borderlands character a lot, played a bit of CoD, played the hell out of Crysis 2, found that Crysis Warhead was much more satisfying than Crysis, had a lot of fun with Deus Ex Human Revolution, tried Leisure Suit Larry 7, played some Metro 2033 (too depressing!), had so much fun with Portal, tried Halo 2 but couldn’t get into it as much as I did with Halo 1 (that was a GODLY game I raped my Geforce 4 Ti4200 and Radeon 9500 Pro with it), and quadrupled my Folding@Home points with the help of my GPU.

Yes, I could have been happy with the integrated 880G graphics, but still the GTX470 was a great investment. But the extra 8GBs of RAM?

Yup, that came in handy too I suppose. This year I have little to no money left, but thanks to a friend and my girlfriend (so cute!), I got into photography.

Yes, if he had money, ritchan would actually buy a 50mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor prime lens for his F5 rather than spend more money on his computer! Isn’t that an amazing turn of events?

To get myself ready for Bulldozer when I have the money and the need for that much more power (my Phenom II X6 is very fast thank you very much) I bought a Asus M5A99X EVO to replace the M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3. So now I have a spare mainboard, RAM stick, a 60GB hard drive from my PS3, and spare case and PSU. What do I do? Why I build a new computer of course! Since the only thing missing was the CPU, I went and got the absolute cheapest I could find, which was the AMD Sempron 145.

It’s a Regor with one core disabled. I tried unlocking it but then syslinux and GRUB didn’t like it, so it’s only running on single core mode. The incredible thing is, it’s fast! It feels really fast. I installed Arch Linux but had some problems with udev freezing the system upon boot, so I switched to Debian and haven’t looked back since. Running GNOME, Firefox, GIMP, the usual stuff, it feels incredibly fast and snappy. You don’t need a dual core! It can play 1080p H.264 videos without help from the integrated Radeon HD 4250, whereas the dual G5 I had could play 720p but not any 1080p video smoothly. I tried installing Catalyst for Linux, but it proved to be a system breaker on Arch Linux, and it’s supposed to be a server with a GUI anyway so who cares. Plus it requires that you disable kernel modesetting, which is a very bad thing.

The only problem is that it’s not quiet enough. The hard drives make a subtle buzzing sound. The CPU fan (the stock heatsink for the Phenom II X6) makes a not so subtle buzzing sound even at low speeds. I unplugged the CPU fan but temperatures slowly and steadily climbed up to 70C over a 30 minute period. I think I need to buy (sigh) yet another cooler for this if I’m going to make it dead quiet. But first I’ll try suspending the 60GB Seagate drive. It’s the type of computer that will have to stay on when my main computer goes off for whatever reason (usually never), so it has to add absolutely nothing to the noise floor.
The heatsink that came with the Sempron is dead silent even when spinning the fan at 1300rpm!

In any case, the point is if you have enough RAM (just one stick of 4GB DDR3-1333), a good filesystem that doesn’t need defragging (anything other than what Windows uses), a cheapo computer is incredibly powerful! GNOME3 is a bit laggy though, but that’s because the integrated graphics is a bit slow. Plus who cares about all the eye candy, GUIs should feel snappy, manage windows and get out of the way.

Oh, and the M5A99X EVO is a very good overclocker. I think I can push this one up to 4GHz if I have the patience, because the VRMs on this one somehow manage to keep the CPU stable at 1.45V (including LLC, which is configurable! imagine that, configurable LLC!), whereas the old motherboard gave it 1.525V (not configurable), which produced a lot of heat. The only problem there is no option in the EFI to switch the JMB362 controlled ports to IDE mode.