DoomBook

So I’m doing a lot of subjective testing with WoW and a few different setups, trying to get a feel for how it performs before moving onto another game or two. All just play through stuff, far too much of the game to actually be fun, really.

And what does Blizzard do halfway through my framerate runs to figure out what influences the gameplay? Change the general settings.

So. Now I’ve gotta go pull a few rigs out and go through all the World of Warcraft game testing again.

Although one thing seems to have had a fairly big affect. Turning off the tickless kernel option and switching to the CFQ scheduler from deadline seems to have cleaned up some I/O inconsistency issues. Now it gets a bit catchy in odd spots (like when you’re taking off on a flight path) but the overall performance is fairly consistent and doesn’t hang up on any particular points when fighting or actually playing.

So far it’s been a pretty good experience with the current release of WINE.

So WINE and WoW do, in fact, make a good benchmark of system performance for Linux. Unfortunately I’m now butting up against the fact that it absolutely and sometimes erratically flatlines the system.

It doesn’t kill the box, but I’m seeing 100+% CPU usage runs on the dual core. This creates a slight problem.

So… I need to actually find some machinery that can run WoW (or whatever I end up benchmarking with for the article) at something under full throttle.

That and I need to cobble together a Windows release for some cross platform testing. I’m not positive it’ll perform any better under the native OS, but I am pretty sure the driver support on the video side will be more refined.

Ah well. Back to hacking.

Currently I’m working on a gaming and graphics cards article for PCBurn, and I’ve finally got the ATI 200M integrated on my Compaq laptop running World of Warcraft. As it wouldn’t give me more than blurry squiggels in DirectX 9 and wouldn’t run in OpenGL previously this is pretty cool.

It’ll work okay with all the eye candy turned off at 1024×768 as long as I’m not going through a very densely populated area. Oh, and this is using WINE 0.9.48 along with ATIs latest drivers as of Nov. 6, 2007 on Linux. I’m assuming it runs some variation of “better” on Windows, but I could be wrong.

Also note that the useful information on *how* to do this will be contained and linked to over on PCBurn once I get the article done.

So Dan and I teamed up to put together a site on data recovery for and using Linux. I’ve been looking for a steady writing project to go along with PCBurn only with a more commercial bent. PCBurn isn’t currently geared toward heavy moneymaking, it’s geared toward giving me and others a platform on which to write and showing users interesting products.

This’ll be largely the same content-wise, but with zan_d’s marketing skills attached. And a targeted URL toward the subject matter. All in all, it should be self sufficient with a wealth of data recovery/Linux information. Check it out at LinuxRecovery.org.

Last.fm looks like a fairly interesting service. Check out what other people are listening to. If it’s in the catalog, listen to it too!

Plus it looks like there’s integration in Amarok. That’s what I use to listen to audio these days, what with it’s exhaustive feature set, so that’s pretty important.

In addition to checking out last I’m also getting pulseaudio going. It looks like yet another audio daemon so I’m curious if it’s better than the rest of the (somewhat dissapointing) pack.

NAS (Network Audio System) always looked good and may yet be the audio layer of choice, but it’s a bit under the radar at the moment. Methodical is how I’d describe those Xorg folks.

And hey, whatdya know. It’s installed. Time to go play with last.fm .

We’re now on WordPress 2.2 and all the features (comments and whatnot) should be back to a working state. If you notice anything odd send me an e-mail over at PCBurn.com if you’d like .. that’s chris@ the aformentioned website.

In case you’re curious, the problem I was having started when I changed wordpress directories on the server. It just freaked out.

All the incoming links started flaking, it didn’t ping out to services anymore, and comments were screwy. This after I changed all the appropriate places to reflect the new directory (plugins and such).

Now with a fresh install, DB updated for 2.2, and a cleaned up set of plugins we should be good to go.

Using XEN with hardware vitualization to get Windows up and running in a cute little box (where it’s harder for it to break things) should be easy. Just pop in the disk, tell it to install, and away you go, right?

Nope. Went through a good hour of tweaking and prodding the Xen install to get it kicking correctly. After which it just wouldn’t do anything when I went to install Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

Nothing. Just sat at the Starting Windows for install screen.

Turns out, you need to hit F5 before it gets to that point. While it’s displaying “hit F2″ or “hit F6″ on the screen. Then choose the top option instead of the “other architecture” default option.

Freaky. And irritating.

While I was out celebrating the holidays there were apparently some server outages at the casa resulting in the MySQL server going down. Now it should automagically come back up after the fsck on a system outage and all is well in the world.

Except for the power mains in CT apparently.

Our new virtual server is live! Pound’s handling the connections and routing to the appropriate destination, Xen does the VM’ing, and Apache’s still working its server mojo.

All this being served up off a beefy (and more efficient) Red Hat Linux machine. Now I just have to get the processor power controls up and we’ll be all set.

As the new server lurches to life (thanks to Travis’s timely visit so I could clean up the Automobile, too) I’ll be swapping this machine out with it. Doombook and co. will be running on a swank little machine with a gig and a half of ram, a modern AMD processor, and virtualization up the wazoo.

Pound will be MCing as our delegator of incoming connections, so all the nifty Ruby/Mongrel/Apache connections are transparently proxied out to whomever is requesting them.

Ideally this will all be wired up by next weekend and you’ll never notice (except the speed bump). Miracles do occasionally happen.