The Right Glue

(2007-12-31 20:49:18)

The year will soon be over. Time to go over some of the things that I did this year.

I bought Diaeresis pretty early in the year. See My house for pictures of it. Diaeresis is one of my computers. Specifically, it is my primary desktop. It is my fourth computer, and by far and wide it is more powerful than my other computers put together. My first computer was Sock, purchased for university in 2002. Then I bought Chives as a server in 2003. Then I got Jupiter (my PDA) for Christmas in 2004. Diaeresis and Ron (my Xbox 360) came into my possession in 2007. Who knows what my next PC will be called? Whatever pops into my head when I first think of naming it, of course. Just like the rest.

I bought Diaeresis to play video games. Specifically, Command & Conquer 3, which, I'm sorry to say, doesn't live up to the C&C series; Bioshock, which was absolutely fantastic albeit extremely violent; and Portal, which is about an hour long and easily the best game released this year, if not this century.

I participated in OMG WTF programming contest, put on by my favourite tech site, The Daily WTF. I wrote the program TerseCalc and, of some 350 entries, was named one of twelve finalists. This one was of my finest hours. I got my 15 minutes of fame, got some pats on the back and some disturbed stares for my creative and absolutely fiendishly poor software design, and then was crushed like so many peas under the weight of the winner. It was such a great contest that I would have adored it even if I hadn't made it to the finals. Being one of the twelve worst (when I try to be) programmers on a site dedicated to the worst of the worst programmers is quite the impressive feat, if I do say so myself. Here's hoping the next contest is even better.

I visited my friends back at my alma mater, the University of Waterloo. This was the most fun I've had all year. I have every intention of doing it again for as long as I still have enough friends in Waterloo. My friends in Waterloo are awesome, doing things like buying me an Xbox 360 for my birthday. I'll pay them back, somehow.

I made this website, of course, and became instantly famous throughout the entire world [cough] as a result. I thank you, my loyal readers, for making this possible. Seriously, though, my site has been linked on some other forums, most notably ClanBOB by me, and the xkcd forums by none other than Gharbad. A user from xkcd even left a comment for me in one of my posts. You probably don't want to know how happy this makes me.

Since then I've discovered, using my Apache webserver access logs, that quite a number of users have found my little place on the web. Somewhat disturbing is the number of Europeans who have found the image of the pink-pony case mod I talked about in an earlier post. Don't ask me why they like it so much, but they sure do.

I was made part of a zombie proxy network; a story I've already told. I can't tell you how crappy it felt to be used in that way. But I learned from it, and that's what matters most. That which does not kill me can only teach me.

And at work, I've accomplished a lot. I've been working here for a year and a half now. In the last year I've been doing more and more high-level work, which is fine by me. I've learned new technologies, programming languages and concepts. I'm going to be the best Dean I can be, and you can't stop me.

Bring on 2008.

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Site Design by KenT (2008-01-16 21:24:58)

Quiet, you by Dean (2008-01-17 07:38:05)

Configurability

By Dean

(2007-12-20 20:39:42)

"Long ago in a distant land, I, Dean, the shape-shifting master of darkness, installed an unspeakable amount of RAM into my desktop! But a foolish operating system, wielding a magic service, stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final bit was filled, I tore open a window to services.msc and disabled it in the future, where my evil is law. Now the fool seeks to revert to a restore point, and undo the future that is Dean!"

We thank Samurai Jack for the original quote, which I have assimilated like some kind of linguistic Borg.

Basically, a few months ago I bought an extra four gigabytes of RAM for my desktop, which runs Vista 64-bit Home Premium. I bought the RAM mostly for bragging rights and also because games like Bioshock and TF2 tend to take up at least 600 megabytes of RAM alone and I want to avoid swapping.

One of the things I noticed is that sometimes while playing games my music would stop playing, claiming that there is not enough free memory to play. Worse still, sometimes game sounds and videos wouldn't load, apparently for the same reason. I took a look into my task manager only to find that of my six gigabytes of RAM total, only about 10 megabytes were free to allocate to applications; the rest were allocated to something called "cache".

After a quick trip to the Internets I discovered, to my dismay, that Windows Vista is actually designed to eat RAM in this manner.

Vista has this background service called "Superfetch" which uses disc-usage statistics to load disc segments into RAM in order to speed up read times of commonly used files. That sounds like a good idea, except it's implemented in the worst possible way: it's not configurable.

It's on or off. If it's on, then it eats up 99% of RAM (rather aggressively) and doesn't give it back, meaning games and music and other applications that are wont to use lots of RAM don't get it, so videos don't load and sounds don't play. If it's off, then the majority of your RAM isn't used, so having lots of kind of a waste.

There is no middle ground. I can't say, "OK, Superfetch. You may use 66% of my RAM for your own evil deeds. I will use the remaining 33% for good." I also can't say, "Shit, Superfetch. If I'm running a game you'd better back the fuck off so it can run properly."

Either of those options would make Superfetch a very, very good thing. Microsoft obviously has limits built into Superfetch, since it doesn't impose on virtual RAM, but it didn't feel the need to allow users to adjust those limits. Microsoft also decided that users don't ever run games, image editors, bit torrent clients or any other applications that require large amounts of RAM, since the cache created by Superfetch never seems to recede, even when Superfetch is turned off.

I have noticed such a performance gain after turning Superfetch off that it makes me wonder what kind of insane software designer came up with the concept in the first place. I'm not entirely sure that I can think of any kind of user who would benefit from not having any free RAM, honestly, and I'd like to think I have a pretty good imagination. Maybe someone who only runs Microsoft Office to open and edit the same couple of files every day. The rest of us are screwed.

This is a pretty important lesson in software design: good ideas aren't good for everyone, so it's important to be able to turn good ideas off. Now, Microsoft has that one nailed with its service manager. The problem lies in the second pretty important lesson of the day: too much of a good thing isn't necessarily still a good thing. The idea of Superfetch, which is to sacrifice free RAM in exchange for faster common-file access, is a good one. It just utterly fails with its furious crusade against free RAM.

And, for those of you using Vista, here's a neat application that lets you change your logon screen's background. Once again this is something that could be built into the OS just fine, but was overlooked for whatever reason. Too bad there is no third-party application to rein in Superfetch...

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ORLY? by DLikhten (2008-01-03 16:19:16)

My house

By Dean

(2007-12-11 19:51:25)

So I borrowed a digital camera today so that I could use it to take some pictures of my house, because my house is awesome and you want to see pictures of my house taken with a borrowed digital camera. Accompanying the photographs is helpful and possibly amusing commentary explaining just what the hell you're seeing. Enjoy.

IMG_0799.JPG - What you see when you enter my house: the kitchen and part of the living room. Behold my couch in its glory! It is a glorious coat rack. Behold the bicycle I have not used for six years!

IMG_0800.JPG - The inverse view of the previous image: a view of the front of my house. Behold my television and Sock (the laptop on top of the TV). Behold the magnificence of my Nintendo chair, and my Nintendo.

IMG_0801.JPG - A view from out of my hallway toward the kitchen table which is secrely a recycling bin. Is that a Galilean thermometer? Yes. It is.

IMG_0802.JPG - I think this image focuses on my telephone. Its batteries aren't as good as they used to be. That sucked. :(

IMG_0803.JPG - When kitchens attack, they do not leave any part of their prey behind. The noble kitchen, using its knives, surgically removes the head and places it into the white trash can in order to appease its god.

IMG_0804.JPG - This is where it all happens, when all := sleeping. In situations when all ≠ sleeping, {all} ∩ {sleeping} = ∅ ∀ all ∈ {all}

IMG_0805.JPG - Pianos that play Moonlight Sonata are different from normal pianos, because their owners are significantly more baroque.

IMG_0806.JPG - Upon entering my study, you see that I am awesome. This is awesome.

IMG_0807.JPG - The best image of my study. You can see Chives in the corner under the wooden desk. Its monitor is the CRT. Jupiter is the PDA on the wooden desk. Diaeresis is the black thing behind the chair under the metal desk. Ron is the Xbox 360 next to Jupiter. Diaeresis and Ron share the widescreen LCD monitor. You can also see my favourite book, Caps and spelling, on top of my subwoofer.

IMG_0808.JPG - A more direct view of Diaeresis and my metal desk, as well as my cool space posters. My mouse has eight buttons. That's five more buttons than your mouse has.

IMG_0809.JPG - A closeup of Jupiter and Ron, as well as my subwoofer and my favourite book, the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

IMG_0810.JPG - I took a snap or six of my book case, because it holds all of my favourite books like Contemporary Abstract Algebra. Also in view is the +20 crushed Coke can of computer science. Bitches don't know about my +20 crushed Coke can of computer science.

IMG_0811.JPG - Part two of the book case saga. This time you can see my Samurai Jack and Harry Potter DVDs better. Last time there was too much specular lighting in the way. Caustic!

IMG_0812.JPG - Part three of the book case fiasco. The last photo of the case before the two-photo hiatus. This one focuses on my DVD collection. That's anime at the top, and regular stuff on the bottom. I'm missing House season 3 and Rescue Me season 1 from that, since I have them lent out right now.

IMG_0813.JPG - This shot looks suspiciously like IMG_0807.JPG. I think this is a rerun. Let's take this opportunity to admire my chair. Isn't is awesome? Yes.

IMG_0814.JPG - This image shows off a great deal of caustic lighting the real world is so famous for. I mean, wow. Those graphics are amazing. This looks just like a photograph. I think those wires have something to do with it. There are so many, so they must be really, really important.

IMG_0815.JPG - Back to the book case, part 2: electric boogaloo. I like this one 'cause you can see my favourite book, Snow Crash, on the third shelf from the bottom.

IMG_0816.JPG - The first of the two-part book case finale. This one features my favourite book, Old Man's war.

IMG_0817.JPG - The final and arguably best photograph in the epic book case miniseries. This one features my favourite book, Calculus, as well as my favourite book, Physics. And let's not forget my favourite book, The Klingon Dictionary.

Thank you for your wasted time.

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Latest comments:

Comment by Tex (2007-12-16 04:18:36)

Comment by Dean (2007-12-16 14:20:10)

Re: Re: Catbert by Baronen (2007-12-16 16:47:33)

This is some kind of footnote. This webpage is awesome and can be viewed in any browser. Even ones that suck ass like Safari and Firefox. Isn't that awesome? This site is best viewed with browsers that aren't maximized on large-resolution displays (> 1024 pixels in width). But then again, if you are running a large resolution and browsing maximized, then you're a terrible person so you don't really deserve to see this site at its finest. Jerk. I mean, seriously. I spend all this time making a nice site and your silly browsing habits ruin its look. That's really cold, man. If you're using IE6, then in order to see the cool avatar effects you need to enable JavaScript. No rights reserved by Dean Whelton (who is awesome) of any of the content, images, design, backend or electrons used in this site. Steal at your convenience. None of it is worth stealing anyway, so there. I have even made an RSS feed for more efficient theft of my intellectual property: CLICK IT NOW!!! Now, don't say I'm not generous. I guess if you want to know more about me, you can visit the about page. It's not really an about page, though. It's just one of the first posts. I don't feel like making a real about page. You can contact me, too. If you feel like it. Are you really wasting time reading this? Go outside or something.