Peter's Blog

Got new water softener fitted. Water still looks milky but my skin feels oh so silky smooth. Cup of tea is nicer but cannot tell much difference in coffee.

The Beast arrived five days early. Only an hour or so to play with it what with life and all. First impressions:

• Heavy. Solidly built case. Nice quality, nicest desktop case I've ever laid hands on.
• Side panel comes off really easily. Disk drives unclip, can tell I have a pair of Maxtor Atlas 140G 10,000rpm drives.
• Microphone and Heaphone jacks on the front: very thoughtful. Also a couple of USB holes. No sign of a reset button! Big dropoff for a Windows box.
• Takes 30 seconds to boot, most of this seems to be the serial scsi controller looking for the drives.
• Fairly quiet, not silent it does make a low hum. There's a huge fan inside with vents about 6 inches square. Big fan = slower rotation = quieter. Could live with it running all the time.
• When it booted it was infected with McAfee Security stuff. Had to spend a few minutes figuring out how to disable it enough for the uninstall to work.
• It is fast: it installed firefox virtually instantly. Silly things that shouldn't have ever been slow like the control panel pop up immediately.
• The programs menu includes the 'Dell SAS Raid Storage Manager' which asks for a username and password. Beast came with no manuals so I'm going to have to google for those at some point. Doesn't seem to be configured for Raid, have to think about that one. Do I care?
• Came with keyboard and mouse and a couple of Install CD's but no mains cable or manual. Keyboard is a black Dell one with a useless windows button but I'm keeping the Cherry one I was using as it has a nicer feel.

Happy thus far. Using it to type this. Can you tell the difference?

Have to find something taxing for it to do.

The Beast continues to amaze.

I've never really thought about it before but here is cpu utilisation while playing 'Freak on a Leash' by Korn in iTunes:

This is the windows task manager. Points to note:

• two cpu cores so two cpus displayed
• neither is working very hard: 0%. The little spikes are where the track started. While running it normally shows 0% with the occasional 1% glitch.

I've never tried this on a lesser pc. Thinking about it now, a pair of 2.4Ghz cpu's should have no trouble generating a pair of 44kHz audio signals: simplistically, that's 54545 clock cycles for each 44kHz cycle. Decoding mp4 files is probably more challenging than shifting the contents of a wav file to a dac but 54545 clock cycles seems like plenty to play with.

Forgive the vague and slightly contrived Mork and Mindy reference, but here's an iPod Nano update:

• Still using it every day
• Using it to listen to Podcasts: I listen to music, chat or nothing depending on my mood. Syncing with pc every day is a bit of a chore, it takes a long time and I find myself waiting for it to finish so I can turn the pc off. Maybe The Beast will be faster?
• With a spare 15 minutes to listen to something, shuffle mode is good for raking out odd tunes I didn't remember I had.
• I still have some more CD's somewhere to rip. How could I lose 'Dark Side of the Moon'? Currently have about 7G on the nano, it varies with the number of podcasts (which are automatically deleted once listened to: cool). I set up a playlist of 'my' music so wife's hip hop and daughter's cbeebies theme tunes don't take up space (although the Balamory theme is a classic, bordering on anthemic).
• Tinictus is starting to bother me, must cut the volume.
• Can't get Korn riffs out of my head. Twisted Transistor!

I needed a way to stretch The Beast. I was intrieged by the screen shots in Microsoft Flight Simulator X and further investigation found that it has high system requirements (odd for a Microsoft product). I haven't tried a flight simulator for about 15 years and back then realism was restricted to a screen that was half blue and half green. I never got into making a landing and was frustrated by the poor graphics making it hard to tell how far above the ground you were.

The Beast came with an NVidia NVS 285 graphics card which is a high end 2D card for workstations, no good for 3D graphics. After some research ended up buying an XFX 7900GS card: not the best available, a slight compromise. Plugged in, Just Worked.

Downloaded the flight simulator demo (800M file, not without some hassle) and had a play. The games loads up with reasonable speed on The Beast, I've played games that were more frustrating in the past (the original Half-Life springs to mind: I played it on hard and did a LOT of reloading).

First impression was that it was nothing special. Start off trying to drop flour bombs onto targets from a Microlight and it's pretty much impossible to control the thing using mouse as a yoke. Later I altered the sensitivity of the controls, turning them down and reducing the dead band in the middle and it was better but still very hard. It's like those driving games where the slightest touch of the 'wheel' sends you careering into a wall: totally unlike actually driving a car (at least the cars I have driven). Other aircraft were easier to control. Taking off in a Lear Jet was fun.

Being a demo it comes with no manual so it's a bit of a challenge working out how to drive it, a matter of pressing all the buttons to see what happens. You can go into the keyboard setup and look at all the assignments but you can't print them out.

I altered the display settings to make it more of a challenge. I turned up the auto-generated scenery and some of the effects. I turned off the bloom effect which is reputed to slow things down. I started a new flight (don't seem to be able to change settings mid flight) and it was better. Water has realistic reflections and sure enough there are little trees and houses all over the place. These were actually a little naff, all the trees look the same and as you fly along forests in the distance suddently appear, as if they grow out the ground as you approach. There were silly bugs like trees on the side of hills appearing to float with just one edge of the base touching the ground. It could do with more anti-aliasing as the trees were rendered with unrealistic sharpness. The frame rate with this was ok, very slightly juddery when banking but nothing to make me rush out for an SLI setup.

Later in the day I tried a flight and found it was night: it had looked at the clock and decided that because it was evening time I would get a night flight. I gave it a try but apart from being scary flying towards hills in the dark there seemed to be more bugs in the scenery with trees and houses floating in the air (or it may have been showing the ground under the houses/trees in the wrong colour, giving this effect). Does make me appreciate WW2 pilots though.

Overall I wasn't bowled over by it but I have bought a copy of the Delux version from an Amazon marketplate for £24 under what they wanted for it in town. I like the idea of flying around London, New York, Las Vegas etc but the demo only has a few sparse carribean islands. Also the full version has tutorials which would hopefully show me how to use it.

I've read that people set up virtual airlines and play at being pilots, maybe even wearing hats. Not sure I could get into that but this does seem like a nice diversion.

Ripped Stadium Arcadium with the Beast and iTunes (CD Sainsburys £9, iTunes store £15). It ripped it at 20x where the old celeron 2G managed about 6x. It only took a couple of minutes, I was impressed. Ripping definitely still cpu limited or it would manage 52x (like the CD drive) but I'm happy.

Should I keep using the term 'ripped'? Should I be saying 'imported into iTunes for my own private use'?

Beast only has a DVD-ROM. I have a DVD writer to fit but unfortunately it is beige and would spoil the Dell Black colour scheme. Must get some black paint.

UPDATE: Stadium Arcadium: very good. Great bass riffs. Can't understand the lyrics, either the enunciation or the semantics.

Reading about World of Warcraft (hereafter known as WoW) on slashdot left me interested. It is apparently the most addictive game there is which to me is some kind of recommendation, if it is addictive it must be good. If I followed this logic to the extreme I would end up a drunken, drug addled, cigarette stained gambler but since I am none of those I say "Bring it On".

Found it in PC World for £15 but when I got to the checkout they charged me £10.

Comes on five CD's and installs very slowly. Left the last one installing and went to bed. This morning I create my account (free for 30 days which should give me plenty of time to get bored with it) and try running.

First thing it insists on doing is downloading a 450M patch at about 5k/sec using the wonderful Blizzard Downloader. Looked in faq and found I'm supposed to unblock a clutch of incoming ports in the firewall to allow it to work properly. Have to wonder what is so wrong with the http and ftp protocols that these people need to invent their own poor download protocol. Unblocked ports and no difference. Gave up.

The patch can also be downloaded from conventional web sites so I'll be doing that.

If you don't hear from me again then it is probably because I managed to get it going and would rather spend my time grinding with Warlocks than posting here.

UPDATE: downloaded patch via http and it's the US version and it won't install. UK http sites all want me to register so I'm using the blizzard downloader. This turns out to be a bittorrent-esque peer-to-peer affair. Right now it's downloading at 30kb/s and uploading at 31kb/s: yes other people are getting it quicker than I am!!

It reckons it'll take another four hours to finish so that's another overnight job. If you install WoW, plan on losing one of your 30 free days patching the damn thing.

By pure coincidence there was something on the news tonight about chinese peasants being paid £2 a week to play WoW and earn goodies to sell to sadder people than me. I was shocked and appalled that they were doing wasteful things like this and not gainfully employed making cheap consumer goods.

UPDATE 2: next morning and two more patches to install before it will run. Each patch requires rebooting game and logging into server. Ready to go now. Takes a while to think of character name as the naming rules are pretty strict. Cannot call character Colin or Loretta

UPDATE 3: Fantasy Name Generator

On the exercise bike I've progressed from levels 4 to 7, all at 24 minute duration and final distance is always precisely 13.88km. So what's to stop me fitting a standard cycle computer to measure speed and distance traveled? Another project for the list.

UPDATE: better plan, use a cordless optical mouse to detect the crank going round and do the logging on a pc. Less wiring. I was planning something like this for the rowing machine but never got around to it as the setup was more awkward.

Since the profile of the hill program is predefined, data logging program can munge together speed with 'hill steepness factor' to give a measurement of effort expended.

Had first taste of World of Warcraft. It starts off quite easily, running around killing wolves and it was kinda fun but I haven't played any games for years so thats not saying much (last game I played was Halo I on Xbox). The wolves take some bashing with a big hammer but they deal little damage and you don't even have to aim. I played for about an hour and was getting into a 'just one more quest' frame of mind when I had to stop (husbands will understand).

The beginners levels were full of noobs running around killing things, everyone seemed to be independent, doing their own thing, myself included. It reminded me of a creche: the little kids all play with their own little toys, there is no social interaction, these skills have yet to come. Is all of WoW like this? Does social development in WoW mirror human social development? Is there a PhD thesis here somewhere?

One aspect of game playing I used to enjoy (1st/3rd person shoot-em-ups) was the exploration. I have a feeling that it may be the exploration aspect of this game that will appeal to me.

Turned all display settings to high and The Beast didn't blink.

Also installed on Dell d410 laptop. It ran ok with the default settings (the WoW graphics engine doesn't seem to be outrageously demanding). Good to see that I can play as the same character on either pc (the game application on the pc is just a client to the online game). At least I can indulge in it anywhere there is wifi.

Wow servers were down for maintenance this morning dammit.

Learn from my mistakes. I'm playing World of Warcraft as a dwarf paladin:

• when offered the choice of a big axe and a two-handed hammer, if you already have a two handed hammer, get the axe. The axe is a one handed weapon and can be combined with a shield in the other hand. A hammer is a two handed weapon and apart from two taking two inventory slots with two similar hammers you cannot use it in combination with an axe (I naively looked at the damage the weapons offered would make and chose the most effective, without considering what I had already and without studying the two handed thing).
• it seems you can interact with any of the NPC's that stand around. I experimentally clicked on a gunsmith and was offered some guns to buy. Don't just talk to the ones with big yellow exclamation marks over their head.
• a right click buys a gun. Two right clicks (while fumbling) buys two guns. Once you buy two guns you can only sell one back at a vast loss.
• make sure your character can use a gun before spending all your cash on one.
• when attacked by four trolls at once RUN AWAY
• when waiting for a fight to be resolved do not look away at the TV. The enemy might move around you and your player will stop fighting because it is not facing the enemy.

Fighting seems rather dull (when there are < four trolls). You right click on an enemy and watch your character fight it to the death. There doesn't seem to be any point in trying to duck away from their blows as it makes no difference (they can appear to be standing about 8 feet apart and still manage to hit each other). I guess this may be by design of the game, it means there's less network traffic involved in fighting, a fight becomes more like playing out a script.

I have yet to successfully use a spell during a fight. They only seem to do anything when I am not fighting and fiddling around. I did use a 'jump back home' rune (?) that you can only use once an hour. This seems to be real world time as when I logged back in later I could use it again.

I was in the troll cave when some little guy asked me to join a group. I accepted and we did some troll fighting together. The group members get to share the troll loot. Is was cool except the little guy seemed to be waiting for me make the decisions and I didn't know what I was doing. A big yellow cross had appeared in the middle of my display and I was trying to figure out what it was. If the little guy is reading this (Myk?) then sorry for my ineptitude. Once I found the quest item I was looking for I ran off and left him behind. So much for group loyalty.

There was a big bear thing in the cave so I attacked it. Turns out it was another real world player. The game engine slapped my wrist, don't think I did him any damage. It's not a PvP realm so I can't just go around starting fights. When people challenge me I decline. Why don't they go to a PvP realm if they want trouble?