Category Archives: Tech

ICHicanery8

Posted by on March 9, 2007 47 comments

Or: How to install Windows XP on a SATA hard drive attached to an Intel ICH8 SATA controller in AHCI mode.

I, like many people, have an Asus P5B motherboard, the non-Deluxe model. It’s been a pretty good board for me so far, and I’m pleased with its feature set for the price I paid. It’s got the Intel P965 Express chipset, which features the ICH8 Serial ATA controller, not the ICH8R model that its bigger Deluxe brother has. Apparently Intel has decided not to release drivers for Windows XP that support running the regular ICH8 in AHCI mode. AHCI supposedly gives better performance and enables more features in supported SATA drives, and so it’s kind of a feature I want. But try as I might, I couldn’t get any of the drivers that Intel has on their Download Center to work with XP and my board — they all claim to only support the ICH8R and not the vanilla, non-RAID-supporting ICH8. So I did what any good geek would do in a situation like this: I Googled.

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Thoughts on Rails Performance

Posted by on March 6, 2007 1 comment
  • 2007-03-07: Added results for testing with Mongrel and the ActiveRecord session store using MyISAM tables.

As many of you know I’m a rather big fan of Ruby on Rails, the web application development framework. I adore Ruby as a language for all sorts of tasks, and I’ve found I’m able to get a great deal of work done very quickly with Rails and its approach to web application design. I’m not alone in theUpdated se beliefs, too, as the Rails community grew rapidly, and the software has many fans.

One of its “Achilles’ heels,” however, is performance. The Rails framework is very large, Ruby’s performance tends to lag behind that of other common web languages (at least, in Ruby 1.8; 2.0 is going to bring us an entirely new interpreter with significant performance boosts), and the recommendations from the community for significantly boosting performance tend to largely sound similar to “cache it!” It’s all a trade-off, just like everything in technology and life, however — what costs you incur in actual request-per-second performance tend to easily be made up for in improved developer productivity and happiness. The value for not having to bang your head against a wall dealing with JSP/Servlets or PHP and its abundance of code-in-view SQL is significant.

But I was curious just what kind of performance we were talking about. Read more »

Why I Like Guild Wars (So Far)

Posted by on December 30, 2006 2 comments

Updates:

  • 2007-01-10: Added another difference that I thought of — the game’s lack of different shards.
  • 2007-01-02: Corrected information about changing your secondary profession thanks to a comment from The Extremist.

Amanda bought me Guild Wars for Christmas, and it’s proving to be exceptionally fun. Some of my friends probably know that I’m an on-again-off-again EVE Online player and follow the evolution of virtual worlds with a keen interest. While I appreciate the number of things EVE is doing to advance the state of the art in online environments — large-scale, player-run corporations; freedom to follow your own course of action; minimization of restrictions on player activities — it’s a very hard game to get into. It’s alienating and distant, and that makes it hard to bring new players in. I pick it back up every so often, usually after major updates to see what’s new, but I have a hard time sticking with it despite how much I admire what they’re doing. Guild Wars, on the other hand, is much more approachable. It’s a fantasy-themed online role-playing game, and it takes a very different approach to the genre than anything else I’ve played.

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Apple’s High Horse

Posted by on October 18, 2006 1 comment

It was revealed that a certain number of Video iPods were inadvertently shipped with a Windows virus called RavMonE.exe. Apple has put up a support page to help users affected by this problem, which is good, but in it they say:

As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

Wait. They’re blaming Windows for this? As one of my coworkers aptly paraphrased, this is like saying:

We’re sorry that we put this fatal poison in the chocolate cupcakes we manufactured. As you can imagine, we’re upset with the human body for not being more hardy against toxic proteins.

Apple’s general holier-than-thou attitude has been getting exceedingly tiresome for me. With their “Mac vs. PC” ads, open swipes at Microsoft during WWDC 2006, and the zealotry of the community — which, to be fair, there’s only so much Apple can do about — it’s gotten to the point where I’m actively interested in not pandering to Apple’s ego or bankroll.

So Simple, it Might Just Be Worth Implementing

Posted by on September 28, 2006 1 comment

Tom Tromey had a Silly desktop idea for the GNOME desktop project — create a small interpreter that can load freedesktop.org desktop entry specification files, and then make those filese executable, so one can just execute the .desktop file to load the appropriate app.

I read this and thought, “Huh, that is a good idea,” and began implementing it in my head, in Python. I might throw something together this weekend. Or, I might not. Either way, you’ve been warned.

The Wii is Coming

Posted by on September 14, 2006 1 comment

Earlier today, Voodoo Extreme got word from several sources with the Nintendo Wii launch information. Sony and Microsoft can fight their little overpriced battle with hardware whose core interfaces and concepts haven’t changed in 20 years. I’m going with Nintendo. Read all the juicy bits here. Now I need to save up $300-400 by November 19th. Dang it.

I’m Getting Fed Up with Apple

Posted by on August 9, 2006 1 comment

After a terribly disappointing round of announcements at WWDC, I’m giving serious reconsideration to my affiliation with Apple and the Mac OS X platform. I’ve grown weary of Apple’s constant push to upgrade – if you’re not running the latest version of Mac OS X you may as well be running DOS. I’m tired of their flirting with the server and enterprise markets – they offer some fairly decent servers in the Xserve, but they run Mac OS X Server on them, which is an excellent server operating system if you don’t mind system management practices that date back to the early Eighties and a reliance on GUI tools – almost all of which only run on a Mac OS X client, by the way – for doing things remotely. I’m not the only one leaving or considering leaving the polished white and brushed metal of the Apple camp. I agree with both Mark and Cory’s reasons, but I’ve got my own personal gripes to air.

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So Much for Sun

Posted by on July 10, 2006 No comments

So Sun finally got back to me about the Try and Buy thing. Long story short, they wanted to authorize a roughly $5,000 — the price of the Ultra 40 I was looking to test drive — charge against my credit card in order for me to get the system. I don’t have that kind of credit just hanging around, so I’m unable to participate in the program. This is unfortunate, and does tend to unfairly punish individuals who aren’t as likely to have that much available credit, unlike businesses, but I can understand why they do it that way. Sun is a business, and they need to protect their assets. Oh well.

Sun Microsystems Experience, Part 2

Posted by on June 28, 2006 No comments

So I called again to follow up on my Try and Buy order of my Ultra 40, and I spoke with a very friendly and helpful lady who informed me of some things of which I was not previously aware.

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Sun Microsystems Experience, Part 1

Posted by on June 26, 2006 1 comment

While I still haven’t gotten my Ultra 40 yet, I did take an opportunity today to call Sun and ask them where my order was in the process. The menu options were sensible and easily navigated, and I was speaking with a friendly gentleman in short order. He was unable to find my order in the system, and he said it’s probably in the Try and Buy processing queue or something to that effect. I gave him my email address at his request, and he said he’ll follow up once he knows what’s going on with the order. I’ll update you folks once I’ve heard back from him.

All in all, though, a rather quick and painless phone call, even if it didn’t yield immediate results. It was a rather nice change from the phone operations with which I’m accustomed to dealing. We’ll see how things play out from here.