aagh.net

I finally gave in :/

On the other hand, my computer actually seems stable with this new PSU, so maybe they actually spent that money on useful things like PSU components and not useless things like crappy branded gloves.

At least, it sure looks like it.

• The cable attachments on the first one are funky circular metal things with screw locks and pointlessly pretty LED's surrounding them, and rubber endcaps for unused ones; the PipeRock II instead has boring and cheap looking plastic connectors.
• PipeRock I has selectable combined/separate rails via a switch on the back, and has a nice fat power switch you can't miss, II just has a titchy power switch that'll be more awkward to find.
• PipeRock I came in a fabric bag, with another bag for storing the cables. PipeRock II comes in a plastic bag with the cables already attached.
• PipeRock I came with a rubber endcap to dull vibration, PipeRock II comes with nothing, and you can't use one because it lacks a fucking earthing cable. Woe be to you if your case insulates your PSU by itself.
• PipeRock I came with gloves, a chunky sticker, and an 45 page A5 manual with a textured facade and 8 languages. PipeRock II comes with a 21 page A6 manual in 4 languages and no texture.
• PipeRock II is an inch deeper than PipeRock I. Good thing I got a deep case.

I can take this any of two ways:

• Tagan care about quality of the PSU, the insides are great and well worth the £115, and while it may feel cheaper, they're more practical (those screw locks were bit of a pain, after all, and they made the cables awkwardly rigid, even if they look better).
• Tagan are in oh-my-fucking-god-we're-running-out-of-money mode, cutting back on perks and on quality.

Hmmm, which one is more likely, I wonder.

Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

Note to self: On second thought, maybe that 4 pin power connector really is required.

*twitch*

Note to self: 1 molex to 8 pin EPS12v is insufficient to reliably power a motherboard which actually needs those 8 pins.

Also, when the motherboard manual says a 4 pin power connector is optional in one spot, and required in another, at least try to go with the "optional" side to begin with.

I especially love it when the backup option is ten times slower than my local network connection. And when restoring from those backups somehow logs me out of Steam. And when restoring from those backups simply hangs. And when installing from the network is ten times slower than my Internet connection. And when a supposedly installed game gives the utterly useless "This game is currently unavailable" error message instead of running.

Try reinstalling the whole thing, "Cannot connect to steam network, please try later". *facepalm*. Meanwhile, Impulse is happily downloading Demigod at 6MB/s; I guess it helps that they're not making one of their most popular games free, thus destroying the experience for everyone who's actually given them money.

Valve, stick to making games, because you fucking suck at application development and content delivery.

What a faff on.

I built my new desktop today; 12GB Intel Core i7, with 2 1.5TB drives and an 80GB X25-M SSD for the OS. It's rather nice, and Windows 7 seems to like it. It also doubled my framerate in Dwarf Fortress, woo ;)

Sadly, I had to build the fucking thing. Something I think I shall avoid in the future; first, the case — the feet won't stay on. They're glued to it, and if you don't lift the (rather heavy steel) case enough when you move it, they get torn off. Quality.

Second, the motherboard wanted not only the 24 pin EPS12v and 8 pin auxiliary power cables most motherboards need, but also a 4 pin auxiliary cable along with it. Guess what most PSU's don't provide? Luckily I had an appropriate conversion cable sent next day delivery.

Third, this £100 PSU, which didn't even come with the cables necessary to drive the motherboard, is faulty; tick *power off*, tick *power on*, <wait 2 hours> tick *power off*, tick *power on*. And it would have to happen on a bank holiday weekend, gah.

Fourth, my spare PSU… well, it works, but the cables are a fucking disaster; it's an old modular Tagan. The PCI-Express cable connectors are very fat, and so don't fit together side by side - I had to hunt down a molex adapter for it. The SATA cables were clearly designed by someone who's never had to actually use one in anger; they're very stiff, and each one is so far apart that your minimum distance between drives is maybe four inches. Long story short, only one of my HD's is powered, and the entire PSU is outside the case, like the system's been disemboweled..

After all this faffing around, paying £400 more on a prebuilt workstation is looking pretty good. Well, so long as it isn't an Apple :P

Not content with having my 8800GTS commit suicide, nVidia's incompetence now seems to be resulting in the SATA controller on my motherboard forgetting how to talk to disks; my system keeps rebooting and all the disks attached to the nForce probe as being missing until I power cycle it.

Of course, Intel are dragging their heels on the CPU I want for my replacement system. Why on earth they couldn't have just included ECC support on the original Core i7 I have no idea; AMD can manage it, and what sort of fool wants 12GB of unprotected memory?

I've rewritten the page at my vanity domain, hur.st. There's less information on it, but it's more amusing, and that's what really matters. Right?

In case you're completely confused, it resembles the Dwarf Fortress dwarf information page.

My bl.aagh (huh huh huh) now has an Atom feed, so if you don't want to read my ramblings, you can now have your browser or feed reader of choice do so for you.

I've caught up on a few pending patches (one since 2005, erk) and packaged up a new Ruby PHP Serializer release.

This release fixes a few bugs, and adds support for serializing and unserializing PHP sessions. There's also a small test suite included, which passes on Ruby 1.8.6, 1.9.1 and JRuby 1.2.0.

Please let me know if you find it useful :)

html_entities_ascii() just appeared under Projects; this is a very fast HTML escaping function for binary data and ASCII text. We will be using it to generate NZB fragments from our new database.

That's right, Newzbin is writing it's own database for Message-ID's; this will remove about 5 billion rows from our MySQL database and putting them in a form which can be accessed and stored more efficiently. We're benchmarking it at about 110,000 inserts/sec, which includes checksumming every page (for extra paranoia, considering we're using ZFS).

Once this is done, MySQL can concentrate on our file and other smaller tables, and we can look to extending our retention to match the recent spate of NSP's announcing 365 days and beyond.

It's funny how C is repeatedly turning out to be useful for a website mostly driven by PHP and Ruby; Newzbin depends on quite a lot of our custom C services and libraries. Let's enumerate some of them:

• pencil; inspired by the pen load balancer, pencil is a buffering service. We use it to talk to PHP daemons over FastCGI; pencil fully reads the PHP response and buffers it for slow clients, so PHP can get on with other requests instead of hanging waiting for a client to read() a response.
• searchd; our first generation search accelerator service. It splits titles and subjects into 2 and 3-tuples and indexes what files and reports contain which pairs and triples of letters. It's used entirely for v2.
• resultd; our second generation search accelerator; or rather, a fully blown search engine, designed specifically for our datasets and our queries. This is what drives listings on v3. Watchdog is also driven by a releated service, part of the same codebase.
• msgidd; a bloom filter service; every Message-ID we add goes via this service. Its job is to remember what it's seen, so we don't insert duplicate segments into the database. Prior to an upgrade of a backend server, it has been running non-stop for about 600 days.

Our new database is creatively named msgiddbd; Message-ID DataBase Daemon.

I've spent a couple of hours applying a bit of polish to it, and now beta.freshbsd.org is starting to look pretty nice.

I've added project pages here for k8temp and mkjail.

I've finally gotten around to releasing a bit of code; nothing too exciting, but hopefully useful to someone.

First, thrqueue; a thread safe queue for pthreads applications written in C, allowing for "easy" producer-consumer threading. It's pretty much identical to Queue as found in Python, Ruby and many other languages; you enqueue things from N threads, dequeue things from M threads.

Second, pqsort; a C macro which generates partial quicksorts for arbitrary types, allowing for efficient sorting, ranking, pagination, partitioning, etc.

Both of these are used by Newzbin's backend search engine, resultd, so they've had some exercise in real world production use.