Archive for the ‘hardware’ Category

Acer ASPIRE 4520 Review Forthcoming

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

I’ve actually had the gumption to write up the first review of the new season. All it needs are some pretty graphs and analysis of the same and it’s good to go.

Graphics-wise there is one oddity that’s throwing up a bit of a sticking point. Running the OpenGL test “glxgears” in a dedicated Xorg sessions prior to starting up an initial X session kicks in at 1500 fps … while starting the same session up after an KDE desktop is running (or after it’s been closed) results in a frame rate of 900 fps.

A roughly 30% drop.

Needless to say this will require a bit more investigation before I go to press with the review.

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New Doombook Server Coming Along Nicely

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

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.

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Revitalizing Villa-Straylight and Doombooks Hardware

Friday, April 13th, 2007

The hardware all this runs on is a hodge-podge of servers in my basement. On the one hand they’re likely to fail at any moment, system wise. On the other they’re more reliable than MySpace.

Which isn’t saying much, but still.

So I’ve invested in some decent power supplies and a new case (to replace the frame that one system is currently housed in) to keep the whole mess running for a while longer. The one bright side of the setup is the lack of dust in their current locale.

So here’s for another 8 years of villa-straylight.

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