Music to my ears

Another recent addition to the technological no-mans-land I inhabit has been my new amplifier. If you've not been following, I'm in the camp where computers should be seen and not heard so spent 2011 chasing down SSDs, Watercooling and all manner of technological wonders to calm my computer into silence.
I don't normally add pictures to posts but I think reviews are worth a little context so here it is:

I hadn't considered getting a proper amp at all until I saw this. Once your PC is quiet your amp and speakers start to matter and the unbeatable warm tones make this amazing amp the cherry on the top of your quiet build.

First impressions are very good, very good indeed. I don't have my full audio collection as uncompressed PCM but my limited selection of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and John Lee Hooker was more than enough to feel quite satisfied with the experience and bring a smile to my ears.

At an incredible price point for its quality, and able to drive 4,6 or 8 Ohms this amp completes your set-up whatever your requirements.
Its a small form-factor but unusual height so might not fit in all hifi cabinets/racks, but I couldn't bear to hide it way - placing this pride of place on my desk.

Its lightweight and compact at about six or seven inches wide.  There are no fancy bells, whistles or horns on this one.  It takes RCA stereo inputs and has Banana outputs and a single volume control sits just in range of the valves radiance so you can feel their comforting warmth on you hand every time you reach for the volume.

More extended listening added the London Symphony Orchestra and a selection of Rock from the past few decades with every note and beat reproduced at a quality that quite simply exceeds requirements.

I am quite literally bathed in the warming light of the orange glow while treating my ears to audio quality unmatched in the computing world. No amount of digital progress can rival the incandescence of a valve amplifier and this binds together two generations of technology seamlessly. The future is here, and its got valves in it.

It's time to wake up and hear the music. It's time for a valve amp.

First Contact

Enter the Alienware TactX gamer mouse.!
Despite its glowing eyes and braided tail, the TactX unboxing was an understated affair. A plain black mouse in a plain black box it didn't have retail reviews and awards plastered all over it.  But lets face it, by the time you are holding it in your hands you don't need adverts.

Surprisingly small in the hand, the TactX delivers tracking that is Smooth with a capital Smoo. While I'd expected something a little larger, I don't have massive man maulers so its compact size isn't uncomfortable.

In-game config I found a little difficult to master in a hurry, since the motion and acceleration has quite a different feel it'll take a little time to master. However the first impressions are very good indeed. Configured at 3000 dpi the TactX represented a 100% increase in resolution from my previous mouse, which made a difference. Set to 5000 dpi the TactX really came into its own, although my tests were mainly performed on a "mixed ability" public server.

For context, I've always been a "casual sniper" rather than a nerdcore super-camper. At Medium range the TactX provided predictable fluid precision that scored plenty of solid hits.
Short range sniping was a frenzy of scope-and-fire meatshots that I would have lacked either the precision - or confidence - to succeed in before.  Being fair, both the short and mid-range are dominated by timing and reflexes rather than aiming so it was difficult to expect much improvement.
The high precision tracking allowed for a few Long-range and hail-mary headshots that I'm simply not familiar with so at some point I will crack out the marshmallows and learn about those cowardly long range tactics.

Satisfied with results, I tested my mettle against the Gog Clan.  Up against clansmen you see more tactical play, and a strategic cat-and-mouse mechanic with more well defined roles than the casual herpderpery of a public server. Against pros, the TactX helps as well.  I connected with crisp rockets and got some great scattergun meatshots - how much of that was a placebo-driven increase in confidence I'll never know but I had my A-game with me which is what I'm paying the money for.

Back to software to finish, the TactX control panel allows you to set up colour profiles, or roaming colours for the lights. There are about sixteen default colours, providing a whole spectrum but I've left mine at cool blue to match the LEDs on my PC.

A long-term review will have to wait until I've really put it through its paces, but for now fortune favours the bold - but the bold, it seems, favour Alienware.

Slipped a Disk

In November 2011 I had some SSD Failures which made me cry a lot. QQ More, I know. Having to fall back to a Magnetic HDD is a first world problem but its the state of play - and heres why it pissed me off.

Buying value-for money I based my machine off of the Asus M78A-Pro. It included onboard video with HDMI out, so I knew that I could run the PC without a video card as a Media Player when I retire it from being a games/development PC.
It also has a good BIOS, and Six SATA slots. Thats the focus of this article - coming up with 'the best' disk config.

After fiddling in the Spring 2011 my setup looked like this:
The first slot is a 128GB Crucial SSD. This is my boot drive.
The second slot is for my BluRay drive.
The third slot is for a magnetic HDD (WD Green 1.5TB). Its housed in an enclosure to keep it quiet.
The fourth and fifth slot have 180GB SSDs in RAID-0.
The Sixth slot is empty.

Conclusions
Having an SSD as your main drive is great, and booting on SSDs is fast.  The capacity hasn't been a problem yet but I've used about 100GB. From a fresh install, Win7 took about 15 seconds from power on to desktop fully booted. These days its slowed to around twenty seconds, but still pretty fast. The Boot drive is a Crucial 128GB drive. Solid, reliable. Fast.

I don't use my computer for watching BluRays, so in hindsight a good DVD drive would have been fine. And I already had one so could have saved some money.  I think I only used it for the initial OS install, and actually an external/DVD drive might have been a smart choice and saved me an SATA slot for something else.

The magnetic HDD has been great. A huge capacity, its used for big installs to save room on the boot drive, media and some personal projects. Its never really a performance bottleneck as I don't use it for anything that is speed critical.

Lastly, SSD RAID is a great place to install games. SSDs are fast, and the stripe configuration is double the size and double the speed of a normal SSD.  Since all my games are easily installable, and saved games/profiles/user accounts are mostly online I'm happy with a two-drive stripe and adding a third for parity costs £200 more but gains me nothing so the last SATA port remains empty.
The Games drive is a pair of OCZ Vertex-2s.  Fast, cheaper, larger than the Crucial drive, this is where performance really counts.

Until ... BAH! One of the gaming SSDs failed. . . and then two weeks later so did the second. Even that £200 parity wouldn't have saved me.
The moral of the story? Not sure. The theory was pretty sound. I don't *much* care that I lost the SSDs. The machine is still fast, and I didn't lose anything I couldn't reinstall. The magnetic drive has my CD collection - but I've got a backup of all that anyway.

The SSD stripe was the crown jewel in the setup. Its still a fast machine but when you've run with the cheetahs once then everything else feels like you are plodding with the elephants. The come down of both OCZ SSDs dying within two weeks was heartbreaking.
I'm probably not going to buy from OCZ next time, thats all I can say.

We can rebuild it. Faster. Larger. We have the technology.

More news as it breaks.

Lightning Slow

Since May this year (2011) I've been enjoying the slick speeds of an SSD Raid stripeset for my /steam partition. Its was only a two drive stripe but still crazy fast compared to its clunky Magnetic disk counterpart.
Its a pair of OCZ 180GB Vertex-2s, and they look pretty shiny.

Striping two drives together also helps account for the piddly size of SSD drives, doubling up the capacity so my two one-eighties appear as a single 360GB partition. Which is reasonable for /steam as I don't tend to have too much installed at once and its speed that matters.

With only six onboard SATA connectors, assigned to drives for /boot, /data, BluRay and Card Reader using up the last two drives for /steam seemed reasonable and sacrificing RAID-5 Parity saved the purchase cost of a third drive.

Given everything on /steam is DRM'd I can easily reinstall it and in my arrogance decided against fitting an additional SATA card just for the sake of adding a parity disk.  Let Valve mirror my files, why should I have to as well? Besides, the drives are rated at two million hours of reliability.  Thats two-hundred years and some change.  I only need them to be reliable for 10% of that time?  Parity Schmarity I'm going to be fine with a two-drive stripeset.

Local games were shockingly fast - the upgrade broke the back of the data transfer bottleneck. Gigs of data flowed so fast and I started considering that 8GB of RAM wasn't enough and it might be time to step up to sixteen.
Loading times had dropped, map changes were scary fast.  It was a golden time.

And then, within six months tragedy struck. It was the merry month of movember when one of the drives ceased to be, destroying the stripe and losing all data.  That weekend I regained composure, unplugged it and installed the essentials to the remaining disk.  A single SSD for games is still better than a magnetic drive after all. but Less than two weeks later, the second one gave up its will to live.
Well thank you OCZ.  How proud I was of the shiny pair of Vertex-2 drives when they arrived, and how far did I fall when they died, belly up. Two Million Hours of reliability. I call Bullshit. That should mean two hundred years if I ran them 24/7.  I ran them about 6/6 - thats maybe a hundred and fifty hours. like less than 0.01% of their expected lifespan. I don't even know if I want a replacement. Another ticking timebomb waiting to crash and lose all my games again? Pah.

And what would I have gained by adding the extra reliability of a third drive for parity? Three dead drives.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh, and should try again. Give OCZ a second chance. But I've got (e.g. my Boot and Swap drive) SSDs from Crucial that I've had for twice as long and they must have been thrashed harder and still going strong.

Swiss Army Computer

It might be apparent that I think every OS since the abacus has been an increasing pain in the arse, but it has to be said that some modern developments mean even the heavier contemporary OS has enough advantages to make it useable.

At the start of the year I was dipping into Ubuntu as a breath of fresh air from my otherwise stale Windows 7 desktop and I've continued my affair with Ubuntu through a VM so its become more of a launched application than operating environment, and its also meant I can try builds of ChromeOS and other Linux flavours to keep up to date.

Added to the VM belt has been half a dozen OS choices, including WindowsXP which has provided the unique ability to install applications and trial them without polluting an otherwise pristine Win7 setup.

The routine is rather neat - you clone your fresh-os-install VM image and install demos, trials and apps. Given Uninstall wizards tend to be more akin to Tommy Cooper than Mary Poppins in their ability to perform cleaning magic, keeping Windows skippy is all but impossible and the OS eventually gets bogged down. So you reformat and reinstall - Except this is VM, which means you only have to delete the OS and clone the fresh image again. The process takes about five minutes and you have a fresh windows install to use.

Better yet - because I've done the install once it already has its drivers perfectly configured, Chrome is installed, Acrobat Reader, Antivirus and firewalls are already up. Better yet, I'm just copying an OS image, so I can do this without rebooting and without a minute of downtime.

The surfing/browsing experience inside a fullscreen VM is seamless and secure. Day-to-Day operation is confined to a walled-garden super-sandbox that has no access to your hard disk, documents, or personal files. Want the best of both worlds? Switch to your OS of choice and take a stab at anything with your new swiss-army-computer.

As you can imagine, by now my Host OS doesn't have much installed. There are a few apps I want to run without a VM in the way but its fairly minimal.

Playing with VMs has lead to me a rather startling discovery though, one which I really didn't expect. It turns out, your OS choice doesn't matter as much as you think it does. With more and more apps running online, its only the hard-hitters that are restricted to one or two OS options. Everything else 'just runs'

LootBox

Each passing day, week, month or year has seen the occasional upgrade of my PC. Often to quiet down a noisy fan, sometimes in the spirit of moving with the times, other times for the sugar high of a new purchase feeding the construction avarice. At each step I am tinkering with machined aluminium and a servant to the sleek silicon-and-steel overlord and its maintenance.

But a change has come and now all is quiet and still. The process has always been the purpose - differential diagnoses, research, budget, purchase, construction and satisfaction - but the journey inevitably comes to an end, and it has - for the time being - led to a box of loot that does its job very well indeed.

The paper specs currently read well enough. Its no supercomputer, but each component has a story behind it. In an age of minitureisation, I bought an oversized monolith of a case - not my smartest move ever but I wanted space for a HDD enclosure, DVD drive and 3.5" external slot - that culled a lot of options. I wanted holes for water pipes, too.

The HDD Enclosure is loot in itself, almost silencing the WD Green drive inside - again an extra 1.5TB of loot. The DVDRW drive has been replaced with a Blu Ray drive. The external 3.5" is a card reader, not floppy drive. In this way, every component has come along one more step that its 'default' configuration.

My solid blue-veined throbbing tower is a Zamlan Reserator, replacing a Domino ALC watercooling kit in a lootier-than-thou upgrade to cool the GPU and I'm considering a Northbridge block because the now fanless-and-silent case has quite low airflow.

Corsair provided 8GB of RAM, although I have yet to fit the optional cooling fins they shipped with. 8GB isn't that looty in this day an age, but at the time or purchase it was quite respectable and is going to be more than enough for a while yet.

While the extra RAM is to reduce paging, a pair of 180GB OCZ SSDs speed up /swap no end. Despite its finite write cycles, SSD makes great swap because of the fast access and zero seek time. When paging to disk, the computer becomes throttled by the HDD seek time not the bus bandwidth so the <0.1ms seek time equivilent SSD beats the >9ms average HDD seek and is a hundred times faster. Actually its a hundred times not-as-slow, which isn't the same as a hundred times faster but still pretty good going.

A third lone Crucial SSD serves as a Boot drive. While OS boot isn't as performance critical or capacity limited as /swap it's worth noting that even a single SSD is bigger and faster than I need for boot so I'm quite happy with it.

The zero-noise build policy has informed a number of decisions, so its a reduced power rig not a super computer. Four Cores and 8GB isn't a monster in this day and age, but the machine is built for shiny things and loot rather than for brute force high-performance and its more than fast enough with no shortage of RAM and fast disk access. Its cost a few extra quid here and there to put the computer together but its been spread over a few months and you start noticing the improvements straight away.

Overall if you are building a rig or just tinkering with upgrades, consider RAM and SSD Raid to make it less slow which is just as important as making it faster. Buy loot because its shiny, because you want it and because you are worth it.

The weird thing about having 'finished' construction, was realising that it was the constructing that was fun. That was the driving force, not the end result. Now I've got an end result, I just don't know what to do with it - its the end of the chase, once you've won there is no more "looking forward to winning" feeling. But on the plus side... winnzies for me!

Homebrew Programming

Sometimes I write code at home. Often its a sample, example or fragment. Sometimes I'm working from or writing to a tutorial. Maybe I'm sharpening my skills and every now and then its recreational. Homebrew for me tends to be a quite polarised affair - its either VERY close to my day job, solving the same problem a different way or just exploring the problem domain - or its that I've chosen to tackle something that I'll never get paid to do.

And this is one of those times, except I've let it run away with me. I stated glancing at the code I've got scattered around there are classes for a simple physics integrator, some camera code, an input tutorial I wrote for somebody, maths libraries that date back to the 90's, some file IO and resource management. Left over from a previous project I've got some network replication and RPC code I wrote, and last Autumn I wrote a streaming perlin-noise landscape.

So it wasn't long before I realised I'd accidentally written a game - or at least most of it - piecemeal over the past few years. In fact, just adding a message pump and sprinkling it liberally with Dependency Injection provided a mulitplayer first-person sandbox I can use to write a game.

What I can't get over is how similar foresight and hindsight are when you are writing code. Knowing the author and intentions of each system in a codebase really helps, but believe me - you don't want to live in this guys code - or his head. On the plus side, he wrote a lot of code and quite a bit of software. It all 'works' and is an entire working games codebase with an example game sitting on the top - but some of it feels like legacy code rather than a lean games API.

Oddly though, the project is coming together - so much so that I can't put it down. Every now and then I open up the project and tinker a little further. Adding something small, contained and complete.

Each of these steps has been reasonably self contained and a brief retrospective revealed that I'd fallen quite comfortably into agile habits as I've bounced from feature to feature. The discipline is getting each step "just working" with minimum effort, regulated by user-story based production.

At each step I've started with the Statement "I want feature X so I can get result Y" and attempted to follow the shortest stable path from here to there.

Agile does make programming games even more fun, and I've never had a satisfying goal further than arms-reach away. After sprint four, I realised I was cherry picking items from the backlog rather than taking the highest priority item so sprint five was a backlog-clearing exercise of assorted odds and ends that I had been avoiding. The few sprints since then have been quite clear sailing, and the empowerment of always doing something important combined with constant drip-feed satisfaction keeps momentum quite high. I'm now finishing Sprint thirteen, with a large product backlog to choose new features from and invaluable feedback from a couple of players.

By working in a free, almost goal-less manner, I've scored more goals than this metaphor makes sense. I've gone from a single rendered triangle through to a 3D world made of bricks where you can construct and shape the world in a first person perspective.

Watch this space. Its evolving.