Just a quick post to test whether or not my upgrade to WordPress 2.2 was successful.
What I Look for in a (Linux) Server System
Posted by fdiv_bug
on April 3, 2007
No comments
A coworker of mine and I had discussed my stance on Apple — it hasn’t really changed much since I wrote that, in case you’re wondering — and she asked me for my thoughts on what I look for and expect in a Linux system, so I offered to write them down here. Most of these considerations and observations also apply to other Unix, or even non-Unix systems, too.
ICHicanery8
Posted by fdiv_bug
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.
Thoughts on Rails Performance
Posted by fdiv_bug
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 fdiv_bug
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.
Apple’s High Horse
Posted by fdiv_bug
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 fdiv_bug
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 fdiv_bug
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.
New Look
Posted by fdiv_bug
on September 13, 2006
1 comment
I decided I’d grown weary of the old style for the site and came across a theme I rather liked. It’s called “Off-Center” for obvious reasons, but I’m not 100% sure I’m going to leave it that way; I might expand it out to fill the whole page. It was designed by the awesome WordPress Diva and I highly recommend you check out her site if you’ve got a WordPress blog and are looking for a new theme.
D&D 3.5e Without Miniatures
Posted by fdiv_bug
on September 10, 2006
1 comment
One of the frequent complaints I hear about 3rd Edition (and 3.5) D&D is that you have to play it with miniatures. “It was designed to sell them,” a friend of mine bemoans, pointing to Attacks of Opportunity as the most damning evidence. I’ll admit that I did consider AoO to be so difficult without some sort of physical tactical gameplay aid that I’d generally not used them — they are an optional rule, after all, being labeled with such words as “can” and “may” in the Player’s Handbook. But I decided to see if there were other options.