Jeroen's Weblog

Diesel gets expensive these days...

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:00:26 -0400

We’re using diesel for our heating, and guess what… it costs now more than a euro a liter in Chile. We’re at 1.0175 a liter…

Esso is coming to our place to fill up the tank. 500-700 liters… pain in the wallet.

Photo

Wed, 23 May 2012 14:35:00 -0400

A power outage - and the recovery

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:57:26 -0400

This post is a bit of a rant… but hey, I’m pissed off…

An power outage is one of the most disturbing events you can get in a business, especially if your job is to create computer software. Here in Chile we have power outages about once every 4-8 weeks, often of a short duration, sometimes they take somewhat longer.

The problems with outages is they always come unexpected and always surprise you when it happens. Here we are well prepared for them, having an emergency backup to keep my PC, servers, modems, telephones and other critical devices running whenever there’s a problem. Still, when we do have an outage work stops immediately and the preparation for recovery begins immediately.

What do we do when there is a power outage?

Finish a phone conversation immediately
Save your work
Shut down the computer (or put it in hybernate)
Shut down the servers
Turn on the radio (which runs on bateries) and listen to the news
Shut down power to the rest of the building, except a few light circuits
Wait for the power to come back. If it lasts more than 30 mins, turn off backup equipment aswell

The reasons we keep a few light circuits on is that we can easily see when the power comes back. (Hey, light’s back on!) Also, replacing a light bulb isn’t that big of an issue if the power company decides to put 500V on the lines for just a few seconds, etc.

Once we notice the power is back, there’s a 5 minute wait time before we turn on anything else. The reason for this is power gets interrupted (more often lately) after recovery… putting even more stress on everything. 5 minutes passes without problems? Good, time to start everything up again.

The recovery process (especially the computer stuff) takes all in all about 20 minutes. Servers are put back on, everything is checked, workstations are going back on and finally we do a few checks if everything is back up and running.

In total an outage of 5 minutes can cost us easily an hour of work. So the next time someone goes out here and crashes their car against a pole… Ah well, you’ll get the idea.

Translate a scientific problem in plain English

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:00:27 -0400

Translate a scientific problem in plain English:

This Stack Overflow question has an answer to put in a frame. The problem is about as complex as the solution, nevertheless this has been one of the best answers I have seen in a while…

Push to add drama :)

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 12:57:00 -0400

Push to add drama :)

Google Glass… Say what? Right, so Google gets to see what...

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 11:38:26 -0400

Google Glass… Say what? Right, so Google gets to see what I see, brings me targeted advertising right to my eyeballs and tracks my location all the time?

Er, there’s a point where things are getting just a bit too much.

Felix Baumgartner, Daredevil Skydiver Seeking Altitude Record, Makes 13-Mile Test Jump

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 09:28:09 -0400

Felix Baumgartner, Daredevil Skydiver Seeking Altitude Record, Makes 13-Mile Test Jump :

“Fearless Felix” Baumgartner has jumped 2,500 times from planes and helicopters, as well as some of the highest landmarks and skyscrapers on the planet. Now, he’s making a 13-mile test jump.

The jump lasted 3 mins and 33 seconds, (accourding to the austrian news source, not the linked article). A Dutch version of this story here.

Rubber Duck Problem Solving - By Jeff Atwood

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:50:43 -0400

Rubber Duck Problem Solving - By Jeff Atwood:

Jeff explains how to solve a problem by reformulating a question…

Greymail, just another word for spam

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:00:05 -0400

Microsoft is calling unwanted newsletters that you have subscribed to… “Graymail”. Right… Wasn’t “Graymail” something like blackmailing the government to evade prosecution? Silly that Microsoft’s marketing gurus overlooked that… or didn’t they?

In either case, I think that any newsletter that does not provide a one-click opt-out… is spam, simple. No matter what kind of tools your mail client provides, news that I’m not interested in should not get delivered into my inbox.

In all fairness, Microsoft does provide good spam filtering on my Office 365 hosted mail. Outlook does provide enough means to sort out mail when it arrives and so on and so forth. But keep it simple fellows… Unwanted mail is just spam, nothing else.

How long is it going to take to get localization right?

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:00:05 -0400

Microsoft is one of the few software companies to actually get localization of their software right. If you have an English version of your OS (i.e. Windows), you will get English installers, English speaking software basically everything else in English.

Several other companies simply don’t seem to get this. I live in Chile, so my location is set to Chile, the keyboard layout is US, the dates & times are in Chilean format and my webbrowser is set to the English language, because that’s what I prefer.

So I downloaded a piece of software and I get… everything in Spanish. Then I download the english version of the software, the installer is somehow still in … Spanish. Hello?

Living in Chile does not mean I want to have my PC talking Spanish to me!

Looking at this from a developer’s perspective:

using System;
using System.Globalization;

namespace LocalizationOneOnOne
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Current Culture: {0}", 
                CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Name);
            Console.WriteLine("Current UI Culture: {0}", 
                CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture.Name);

            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

Guess what the output is…

Conclusion: Never use CurrentCulture for UI localization, it is simply not a good design practice. If someone installs an english version of Windows, your best bet is that they want the rest of the software in english as well.

First impression about my new PC

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:37:22 -0400

My new PC is up and running, it took me a whole Friday to put it all together and the better part of the weekend to make everything run like I want it to… (including probably a Monday & Tuesday as well) but it is worth it.

The computer case is a Cooler Master Storm Enforcer.

To the one who designed this case: you are a genius! This is one of the better cases I worked with. It has tons of space, cables can be put under the motherboard instead of over it and hard disk cabling is neatly in the back of the case, so it doesn’t mess that up either.

I’ve installed 2 extra 12cm ventilators in the top, which is probably a bit overkill, but I like to keep the internals cool. The PSU is in the bottom and the air exit is to the bottom of the case, so the air used for the PSU is not getting inside at all. There is a huge 20CM ventilator in front and 1 12 CM ventilator in the back (plus the 2 in the top) so this should be enough to keep the air flow going.

This is a case that is prepared for water cooling, so I can later make this a water cooled PC if I want to… not that this is needed because it doesn’t get hot at all and I’m not going to overclock this PC anyway… but I might do that in about 2-3 years when I’m going to replace the internals of this PC again :)

The mother board is a MSI board, the 990XA-GD55

What I like about this board is that it simply works. The BIOS has the options I need, like a RAID controller that properly can work with an additional SATA device that is not part of a raid set (my previous board wasn’t capable of that), 2 USB2.0 connectors, 2 PCIE connectors for graphic adapters, etc.

I’ve installed the processor (duh!), 16 GB of memory on this board (4x4), a card reader, the front audio, the front USB 2.0 connectors of the case and all the other stuff… and this all runs without any problem.

The only thing that is missing in action is the USB 3.0 connector for the case. This one isn’t present on the board, so I’ll need to get an expansion card to enable these.

All in all this is a fine desktop board.

The processor is an AMD FX 4100, 3.6Ghz Quad Core

This processor is a little less power hungry than my old one, it uses 95W instead of 125W and with these 30W less… it is 20% faster? Or is it…. The amount of Hertz doesn’t really tell much about speed and these days, processor speed is rarely a real bottleneck. Nevertheless, this processor is really a little faster than the old one. When I’m rendering Full HD video I can see the difference… kind-of… maybe… OK, It feels a bit faster but I can’t really tell if it is…

It is fast enough for what I’m doing with it though.

And now the best bit, the video card…

This card simply works like advertized. I can’t say anything less, I’m happy like a kid in a candy store with this thing! I’ve installed this card and connected my 3 monitors to it, one via HDMI, one via DVI and one via DisplayPort using a Mini-DisplayPort to DVI active converter… and this is just astonishing! (I’m sounding like Jeremy Clarkson atm, POWAAAAAH!!)

This video card has the ability to connect 6 (!) monitors to it… yes, you’re reading this right… SIX! Although I’ll be using only 3, this works so much better than using 2 video cards. The card is smaller than my one ones, uses less power and is about twice as fast!

Now this is what makes me enthusiastic about my new computer. Forget the motherboard (which is great, especially compared to that DFI board from hell), forget the processor (which is also a fantastic piece)… the video card is where this system really shines.

Compare this to what I had

The old case was a big one, but a mess of cables. I had to fiddle in every way to get everything in there and it just barely fitted. The new one: I’ve got more space and I could even put in more than I have right now… 2 hard disks and 2 5.25” units can still be in here, I just need to install a separate controller to get it all to work.

The motherboard is simply way more reliable. Everything on it simply works. No need to jump through hoops and make special arrangements to get around some silly bug.

Although the new video card is faster and consumes less power, the old ones were absolutely good cards. Don’t get me wrong here, they were reliable and worked simply the way they should. The motherboard was the real issue in the last machine, the video issues were probably very much related to that.

The processor… I really don’t notice that much difference, but I don’t think anyone would unless you’re trying to do some advanced cryptography…

The biggest difference? Temperatures.

The North Bridge chip on the old motherboard easily heated up enough to boil coffee on. This board? 45 degrees is what we measured.
Video cards heated up to about 55 C, this board… (with technically more video load than the old one), 35C
Harddisks are better cooled now as well, these don’t even exceed 25C.
PSU (the same as in the old machine) has a lot less load on it. Instead of 55C (measured the hot air that is blown out) it is now 25C…
Processor is also cooler, doesn’t exceed 37C

Temperatures are now at below proper level. This means less power usage, and more efficient computing.

And this is what it now looks like:

Under the cover:

I could have done a bit better job on the cabling here and there (especially near the PSU), but this simply works fine. There isn’t that much I could do about the 2 cables going to the video card, if you have have some innovative ideas about this, I’m all ears.

These photos were taken when I was writing this blog post, while the PC was running. You can see the ventilator in the back, there are 2 more in the top and one in the front which you can see on the first picture (that big red fan).

Now it’s time to look for a USB 3.0 internal card… with an internal connector so those 2 front blue USB ports can work the way they should. More info about that… later :)

A Chilean factory that produces butter to fabricate bread. This...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:39:18 -0500

A Chilean factory that produces butter to fabricate bread. This television show, shows the horrid way the employees are treated, the horrible hygenic conditions and much more. The show is in Spanish, but the images speak for themselves.

Why do I post this? I live in Chile and I am ashamed that these kind of business practices are taking place, just because everyone is looking for the cheapest buy. This kind of company would never have survived in a european state, neither should it here.

This is outrageous, I lack the vocabulary to really express myself here… I won’t be buying bread in any supermarket any time soon…

Servicing my UPS

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 08:04:20 -0500

My UPS has been running non-stop for almost 5 years now. I’ve bought this device in April 2007 and it has been working fine ever since. Yesterday I decided it was time to rearrange my little corner of my office, take out my PowerEdge server and with it, service my UPS and clean up that little corner.

Now first of all, if you are not very handy with technology, do not try this at home. Opening up a UPS, even with an unplugged power cord and disconnected batteries, IS DANGEROUS. Touching the components can have shocking results, for you and your family. (No joke, simply don’t!, this literally can kill you)

The UPS has been standing in a corner for 5 years, so I suspected it might be full of dust. An electrical device that is gathering dust in a corner can become a fire hazard. We’re living in a wooden house, so a little electrical fire can become quite a disaster. So it was time to open it up, clean it inside and checking the health of the machine. I disconnected it, disconnected the battery packs and carefully removed the panels.

I was pleasantly surprised. The state wasn’t as bad as one might suspect. The machine didn’t turn itself into a ‘vacuum cleaner’ and a air blower was more than enough to blow out any remaining dust.

The batteries are in a surprisingly good condition, but those will need to be replaced. 5 years is about the maximum lifespan one might expect from a battery, according to APC. I tend to trust them on this kind of thing, they have certainly more experience in this field than I do.

All in all, the UPS is working like intended, I’ll order a new set of batteries and it will probably do another 5 years without problems. All I can say is, if you are looking to buy a good UPS, APC has never let me down yet.

Why I care about power consumption...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:01:10 -0500

This post is a bit more about power savings. If you read the last post you probably noticed that I’m going all happy about saving electricity with my computer, let me explain why.

In the past I had 2 servers. One simple one, a DIY PC with some neat motherboard, proc, etc and one professional Dell PowerEdge 1900, dual processor machine.

Guess what the PowerEdge did? It used a lot of power, really a LOT of power. About half a year ago I decided to give my DIY server a little makeover, got a bit more memory for it and some other components. I took it easy on the processor and got really low watt stuff for it and a LOT of memory and disk space.

I migrated my VMs from the PowerEdge to the DIY server and… turned the PowerEdge off. From that moment on we saved over 50.000 CLP (about 77 euro’s/100 USD) per month.

I’m doing the same thing now with the most power hungry device I’ve got in my house, my own computer. We pay now anywhere in the range of 60.000-70.000 CLP a month, I’m expecting this to get about 20.000 - 30.000 CLP less.

Ideally we will get a bill in the 30-40-ish range, and that is more in line to what the average Chilean person spends on electricity. We used to pay more than 3 times that…

In addition of changing my hardware, I’m changing other things like light bulbs and so on. All this together is better for the environment and saves a lot of money.

Time for a new PC

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:33:00 -0500

My PC has become unreliable lately, so it is time for a change. After 2.5 years of heavy duty I’ve decided to perform some delicate surgery…

My current PC is quite a feat of engineering. Let’s take a look at the specs:

Processor: AMD Phenom II 940 Black Edition Quad Core
Motherboard: Lanparty DK 740FX-M2RS
Memory: 8 GB (4x2GB)
Video: Two Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4870
PSU: 1000W

My experience with this system had is good and bad sides. The good was that once it was running, it was fast and reliable.. and kept my office nice warm and cozy as well… and even the electricity company was happy to give me monthly my bill…

The trick was to get it running. If you power it on with an USB ‘storage device’ plugged in (e.g. a mobile telephone) it simply won’t even get to the memory test in the BIOS. It will just… hang… Sometimes it will give you a “OC Fail!” warning… funny, there’s no overclocking taking place in this system at all. Everything runs at factory default speeds…

And once it was running, it was hard to get it to stop. Shutdown the computer… and whooops, it restarts and not paying attention will… start windows again, all the way to the logon screen… unless you had your mobile plugged in. So to get it to shut down was basically waiting for the restart and then just cutting the power on the PSU switch at the back of the PC.

The DFI motherboard

Wait, did I say cutting the power? Sure, but do not touch the metal around it. It won’t give you a shock or so, but it will be hot, like, almost burning your fingers kind-of hot.

Cause of these issues (except for the hot PSU) is the motherboard. I’m sure the PSU wasn’t causing that because the first one I had, had the same issue and blew up after about a year. It really went out with a big bang…

The PSU Kingwin Mach 1 1000W that blew up

Then there’s the graphics. The video cards are great don’t get me wrong… but the motherboard simply has a tough time with them. If I put 3D rendering on all my 3 screens (or more specifically on the screen that uses my secondary video card) Aero promptly shuts down and the windows color scheme turns to basic.

Besides all these little hick ups, I was happy with this PC… It runs fast, like a bat out of hell, never crashed on me and was simply a beast. It was the best PC I have every worked with, period. … until about a week ago when the story started to change.

I was playing my favorite game and …. it hang! What the f—- hell??? OK… now something is really wrong. Opened it up, cleaned out the dust, Guido (a very good friend of mine) went to my place with his blower and we serviced the machinery. A whole day of diagnostics and… it looked like the issues were caused by dust, bad contact, or something?

After servicing it ran reliable for about 3 days… and it crashed again. OK, now it really looks like there’s more going on. Since these crashes were so spontaneous it was really hard to determine where the cause of this was… but I think I’ve got it now. One of 2 memory modules that are lying here on my desk is probably defective… unless it will crash again this weekend. Time will tell.

What we learned

During diagnostics we noticed a few things. Guido has an infrared thermometer and this device can tell the exact temperature of something by just pointing at it with a laser pointer… it is really accurate and fast. So a bit measuring gave us some useful info.

The north-bridge on the motherboard is hot enough to boil my coffee on. 127 degrees is the highest temperature measured with an average of 123 degrees… Celsius. All I can say is “Wow”… (wait, that’s my favorite game!) This is reason for concern.

Besides that, as I told before the 1000W PSU is also getting quite warm especially when I am doing crazy work. That is something what you can expect when you have 2 video cards of about 300W each and a processor with 4 cores at 60-80% running. Still, this isn’t reaching those kind of crazy temperatures but a 50-60 degrees is easy to get.

My current PSU, a CoolerMaster Silent Pro M1000

Now 50-60C is acceptable in a computer, but more than 60 is problematic. So I decide to get rid of all these little quirks and help to save the environment a little… We are going green with even higher performance.

The reliability issues in this computer and it’s quirks partly due to their high power usage but mainly to the motherboard. Seriously, if you want to buy a Mobo, I strongly suggest you stay far away from DFI… but since they stopped with their Lanparty product line, I don’t think you will see these in store anymore. DFI stands for “Design for Innovation”, if they just would incorporate a bit reliability on that part it might work… but I’ve had it with them. OK, that’s my innovative rant for… nevermind.

So what’s new?

The order for a bunch of new components has been placed, I can’t wait untill the new goodies are here and once they are I will tell everyone what it is like.

The new goodies:

A new main board: MSI AMD 990XA-GD55.
Processor: AMD FX-4100 3.6Ghz Quad Core.
Memory: 16GB instead of 8, 1033 DDR3.
A new box to put it all in.
A new video card, ATI Radeon HD6870

The new motherboard is an AM3+ board, so that requires a new processor and new memory. This motherboard has proper cooling on it’s north-bridge chip set, so I don’t expect it will cook as much as the old one.

The new processor is a quad-core just like the old one. But… it uses less power! So instead of 125W it can do with 95W. This makes my PC a bit less power hungry.

You can never have enough memory… ever. I doubled it because I like tons and tons and tons of memory. The less my hard disk has to work, the better.

Now the best part, a new video card. I always liked ATI and still do. Their video cards have been reliable and really perform great. Now, this new card has Eyefinity on it… this allows me to run 3 monitors using only one video card… ONE! instead of 2… So that’s cutting the most power-hungry item out of my PC in half!

Actually, it gets even better with this card. It can not just do 3 monitors, it can do 6. Yeah, that’s insane, I know. The video card is twice as fast as my old ones… and it uses (you are probably guessing it) LESS power.

Finally, I got a new box to put it all in. This one has a bottom-mounted PSU and a better design on air flow than my current case.

Conclusion

One video card instead of 2, a processor with lower wattage and all is faster than before… All this will pull about 300-400W less of the PSU. That’s a whole lot less… I’m expecting that after a year or 2 I’ll have it earned back in electricity savings. So I end up with hopefully (but probably) a more reliable, more economical and faster PC.

I can’t wait until it gets delivered… Once it does, I will let you all know what it is like.

4.7 Earthquake near Santiago

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:14:00 -0500

We had an earthquake last night, not a really heavy one but look how close to Santiago…

You can see all the details about this quake overhere.

My schedule is now online

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:35:00 -0500

Often I get questions like “When do you have time for…?”, now you can see it yourself! I’ve published my calendar online, you can see it at http://jeroenlandheer.com/Calendar

Or if you want it to add this to your Outlook, simply open this link.

Update: For security reasons, I’ve decided to only publish free/busy information. Being busy does not mean that I’m not reachable, it just means I’ve scheduled a task on that time.

Internet Access - Is it a human right?

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:56:44 -0500

Internet Access - Is it a human right?:

Well, no… according to Vinton Cerf, one of the pioneers of the Internet.

Our 2 new kittens

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 10:07:00 -0500

Our 2 new kittens

Work it harder, Make it better, Do it faster, Makes us stronger,...

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:49:00 -0500

Work it harder, Make it better, Do it faster, Makes us stronger, More then ever, Hour after hour, Work is never over..