Tag Archives: Ubuntu

So, no pony sex then

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After last nights Chinese and large amount of beer / wine combo all I was greeted by this morning was a large dog poo and pool of piss. Can’t blame the dog at all, I know she would have tried to wake me and failed. She did look rather guilty though, and gave me that ‘I jumped on your head at 4AM and you failed to respond’ look. It rained constantly all morning so put off the normal dog walking session and moved back on to doing server experiments. Basically you can fill a machine with network cards and providing they are on the PCIe bus (including the built in NIC), they will always transfer at a pretty constant 942Mbps. If you use the PCI bus however then you get 778Mbps (Even with Intel cards), also I’m sure if I managed to get it going that transferring from two PCI cards would have been even slower. So anyway, now built the pfSense machine up, removed the hard disk and replaced with a flash memory card, installed 4 additional NIC’s, 2 PCIe and 2 PCI. So that gives me 3 high speed connections and two slower ones to choose from. I only need 4 network ports really, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for them all.

The amusing thing is I’be had to configure one of my Ubuntu PC’s to run minicom, as when you install the embedded kernel on pfSense you get no VGA driver. The last time I used a null modem cable I think was in the 80’s. Anyway, it’s installed and it boots fine from the flash card and all the tty appears on minicom. Just set up the firmware load for the wireless (otherwise you have to unplug it each time as the driver isn’t built into the kernel). Next step is to do some proper pfSense configuration, but that’s enough on it for today, but great progress.

Oh yes, for some reason I asked Jamie if he would dress up as Rainbow Dash and I could dress up as Derpy….he turned me down, but did enquire into how I suddenly knew so much about ‘My little pony’.

Please, stop asking me about render….

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I don’t know the difference between Blinn and a bin liner. Spent the day looking at a Crytek paper and demo on SMAA. As usual all these things look really pretty until you move, then it all turns into a shimmery mess. It’s good to see the demo produces the same shimmery mess. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at MSAA again just to prove that isn’t any better and it’s still a shimmery mess.

Went to gym, only did a 20 minute run as I wasn’t really in the mood and my legs are killing from the last two nights jaunts. Car is in garage on Monday, will be fixed by Tuesday and I’ll be about four grand down.

In server news I connected two of my Ubuntu boxes to each other and ran iPerf again, still the same 943MBps, so the switch wasn’t adding any overhead. I’ve ordered two PCI nic’s and a PCIe one, all Intel, so I will perform further tests in various combinations. Still 943 is pretty good, if I can keep that up across all interfaces then I’ll be impressed. Also ordered a compact flash drive sata thing, to install pfSense on, just to make things interesting.

Now it’s time for wine and torture porn, until the next person asked me about render…

And today, not much happened

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Well, I got up and did work. Still on iOS codecs, today doing hardware encoding, which after many battles finally began to work. It’s only encoding to some raw thing at the moment but I don’t think it’s going to be too much longer.

Bumper ordered. No idea how long that will take to sort out, at least it’s in progress.

Finally got back to the gym as the weather has turned crap again.

In server news I set up another one of my eBay PC’s with Ubuntu and installed iPerf. I’m getting 943mBps throughput just raw PC to PC, not even sure they are on the same switch, so not bad. After all I only need about 200 tops working through pfSense. Next job is to configure another PC the same as that one and then the pfSense PC. I will then use one to send test data to the other.

Got round to watching some of the Olympics, all seems to be very well organised.

OpenAL continues to be an ass, but iOS also presents some issues

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So now the OpenAL saga continues. This time when testing on an iPod touch. As it has the power of a squashed tomato, I was getting buffer under runs when trying to decode about six MP3 tracks at once. So what happens when you get a buffer under run, well it queues the buffers as normal, and yes, marks all the bloody things as processed. So the work round for this was was to check the number of queued buffers, if that’s zero then call rewind, this resets the internal marker and every ones happy.

Sharing file handles between threads…on iOS don’t do it. It gets upset. Don’t open file on thread A, then read it using the same handle on thread B (they arn’t reading at the same time, it’s just opened on one then read on another). That threw me for quite a while as it was randomly working then failing. Still all sorted now. Now the next job is iOS hardware MP3 decoding.

In server news I’ve redone my apache configs to use the actual domain names now. Also added pop3 ssl in about 10 minutes, I’ve kind of got the hang of these things now. Final job on the server I think is to configure the UPS stuff, but can’t do that until it’s in place and can’t do that until I’ve reconfigured my mother (well her laptop mail setup).

I did head out on the bike, but by the time I got to the end of the road the weather looked very miserable, so took the dog for a walk instead. Now I’m going to have a bath and watch the Olympics opening ceremony.

The dog has a new pool. This is it before she probably ends up eating it.

OpenAL – what an ass

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Today I continued to do battle with Xcode and iOS, which made me even more heated in a very hot room.

What is it with OpenAL? It’s an open spec that is badly implement on every version I come across. The problem is, it’s too open and open to interpretation. The HW vendors are free to do what they want provided they adhere to the vague spec. So what you end up with is doing multiple workarounds for each platform for something which should really be platform independent. Take for example audio buffers, you queue them to a source and play them. If you call stop then all the buffers are marked as processed and you can unqueue them, nice, no problem. But what if you don’t play them? Well if you call stop not much happens, you can’t unqueue them they just vanish into a big pit of piss. You have to load a NULL buffer to the source, this then bins all the attached buffers and you can manually delete them, no unqueing. Except that’s only on iOS. On the reference driver calling stop will mark them all as processed and you can unqueue them as normal. Then you requeue them again, and what happens, well on the ref driver it works. On iOS it marks freshly queued buffers as processed so never plays them. You have to do an additional ‘rewind’ on the source to update the internal play marker that’s been shafted.

In server news I installed an old 250Gb hard drive into the box and set it up with ext3. Managed to mount it and set up a cron job to run a shell backup script. It now does a grandfather/father/son type rolling backup which I’m quite pleased with. Last couple of things are pop3 support, which I forgot about and a few bits on virtual domains. I also installed some stat stuff in word-press which I’m sure will be interesting at some point.

Once again the evening was warm so managed a couple of hours of fairly fly free cycling. And now about to settle down with the dog for some torture porn (see my other blog). If my dns ever sorts itself out, as the www is now pointing at the router address.

Oh, last nights shag, definitely rates in the top 10. That’s two entries my husband has on that leader board now:)

Why have one blog when you can have two?

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So today (well this evening, as I did do some work earlier) I’ve set up my other blog. It’s for movie reviews, you’ll have to guess the URL for the moment. So now everything is set up and working, still need to twiddle a few things regards DNS and MX records, but really now it’s all about adding content.

Oh and to be consistent, I went to the gym, but have failed to drink any wine yet…

I also did a ‘home check’ for Hollyhedge Animal Santuary as a volunteer. This just means I check to make sure they have a secure garden and live where they say they live. I get some sense of well being from it all. If your thinking of getting a dog or a cat, please don’t go to a breeder, visit a rehoming centre and save an animals life.

 

Hollyhedge Animal Sanctuary

The wonderful Hollyhedge animal sanctuary

Right now its defo time for Salad, and may be some of that wine.

 

And so we begin

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Right, so after four weeks of configuring Ubuntu and playing around I finally got here. First a bit of background. I may waffle a bit, I’ve spent all afternoon digging a hedge out of the front garden and I’m now somewhat relaxing with a rather nice Arabella white. I’ll note doubt waffle on about wine in future posts. I think I may have become an expert by proxy of how much of the bloody stuff I drink.

Anyway, I’ve been keeping a Filofax diary since I was 16, actually I got the diary at Christmas when I was 16, so that’s what the best part of 24 years. Every night before I went to sleep I wrote the day up. Admittedly the last 10 years probably consist of ‘did work, went to gym’. And the last few would probably be ‘did work, should of gone to gym, drank too much wine’. But the first 10 or so years probably contain some real juicy stuff, lots of inner thoughts, lots of things about other people, lots of feelings. All those years are safely sealed in dated envelopes stored away, so when I die they can all be chucked into a skip, as I will be ruled as ‘insignificant’, so nobody wants to read about my life, I can appreciate that as I’ve never been tempted to open them and read back through them. I guess unless you are Hitler or Einstein very few people could actually give a flying fuck about what you did, what you are, or what you perceive to be. Even your family, to be truthful really don’t give a toss.

So why now? Well time’s getting on, I’m getting more and more ancient (40) and I’m getting board of writing, ‘did work, went to gym’. So hopefully these updates will contain something of interest. I plan on continuing the paper diary until the pages run out at the end of the year, but that will be the end. Not quite 25 years, but enough is enough.

So basically I just plan on sharing my random thoughts of the day, things I’ve done or played with and generally waxing lyrical about anything I bloody well feel like. I’ve spent the past four weeks setting up this server, so will probably babble about that for a while.

You will experience bad language, probably defamatory statements about individules and companies, but I will try and keep these of a personal nature so as not to get sued, Bad spelling (although WP has a spell checker, it’s just failed to find ‘individule’ so no idea if that’s correct or not and I can’t be arsed to Google it), and bad grammar.

Anyway, that’s enough for my opening post. Next job is to do some extra WordPress configuring things. And this is the first night I’m going to let the server go live….bring on the hackers…