I recently did a bit of switching motherboards and CPUs between mine and my wife’s PCs. She got the Abit AB9 and Core 2 Duo E6300, I got the Gigabyte P35-DS3L and quad-core Q9300. Yes, I fared better . But my wife didn’t really give a rat’s about it anyway. To sweeten the deal, I installed a shiny new copy of the Windows 7 RC, which I am quite impressed with. Especially with the backup function of it - much improved over the clunky XP backup. With the upcoming free antivirus from Microsoft, they are nearly at the stage of releasing an OS that can almost wipe its own bum, rather than rely on a myriad of third-party software to perform basic system functions.

But I digress. Because what this post is all about is running the linux Folding@home SMP client under a virtual machine in Windows. I initially gave it a go when the quad-core was running XP, and installed two of the notfred folding images, running under VMWare player. Folding performance nearly doubled, from around the 2000 points per day the WinSMP client got, to around 4000ppd. The only drawback was that VMWare player only supports two virtual CPUs, requiring two instances to be installed. I always wanted to run it under linux natively with four cores, so I did the system swap. It was pretty trouble-free - just plug the hard drive with the install from the previous system into the new motherboard, and Ubuntu picked up nearly all the changes in its stride. I had to do a bit of dicking about to get the network up and running again, but it was all good.

I have since overclocked the Q9300 to 3GHz, running the FSB at 400MHz rather than the standard 333. Folding now gets ~5500ppd from this machine, combined with the Win7 E6300 which gets around 2000ppd, I am now consistently over 7000 points per day, and climbing up the rankings.

The machine is running like a dream. Just figuring out now what the next upgrade will be: a new screen that can show full HD (1920x1080) or a solid state hard drive. Decisions, decisions.

OK, I’ve decided to join twitter and see if I’m one of the 60-odd percent of users who forget about it after a month. I mainly joined to follow other users, rather than post my own content. Anyway, I’ll see what comes of it.

Check it out here.

OK, it’s time for a change in direction. This is just a personal blog now. The grand plan was to turn it into some sort of tech site, something like a poor man’s How to Spot a Psychopath, but without the technical knowledge - and to get enough readers to support a few google ads on the site. I was aiming to make a bit of extra cash, maybe enough to pay for the internet bill each month. I had a trial of that, as mentioned in an earlier post, and earned a grand total of $0.00. From zero clicks on the ads. Fair enough too, because I rarely click on ads either. But in order to get visitors, I was trying to write for a large audience on topics I thought would get views.

All that achieved was to get on to google for a few search terms, and a ludicrous proportion of those were for a photo I took of a rather pointless Sony billboard. I could start pimping the blog around different sites, but I have figured that it would then pressure me to keep making updates. And frankly, I don’t have enough to say to make a daily post.

So now, I am going to write for a readership of one - myself. Sure, there’ll be the odd bit of blogspam with a youtube link every now and then, but I have yet to sort out a purpose for this site. All I can think of at the moment is to keep my writing skills up. English ended up being my best subject at high school, though not my favourite. My forte was spelling. In the early years though, I just somehow knew how to spell correctly. Putting those correctly-spelled words into paragraphs that people wanted to read took a lot longer. And now, over the years, I have noticed my skills dropping off. My job rarely requires any lengthy blocks of prose, and so my abilities have atrophied somewhat. Adding to that is nearly a decade of reading crap in web forums from people who consider spelling and grammar a luxury, and I feel that I have become almost dyslexic. I sometimes see spelling errors where there are none.

So I shall continue to tap away here, honing my skills, writing about whatever pops into my head. And greetings to those of you who have found this blog through google, although you have probably not read this far and have, in fact, hit the back button by now. Never mind. I’ll live.

As promised, a couple of teaser photos of the my Honda Accord Euro:

These were taken just after we got it home, and it was a bit dark under the carport to get a good picture. I’m sure there will be many a good photo taken in the future; keep an eye on my flickr page for more.

This blog will now be known as Steve’s Journal, rather than its previous title, Bort’s Load of Bollocks. I felt it was time for a name change, along with a change in the focus of what I write about. I have previously tried to make it a tech blog, or one about cars, or something that shows funny videos. But still, with my readership consisting entirely of accidental google hits, with people spending about 1 second here before clicking the back button, that strategy has not worked. Time for something else.

More will come later. So will pics of the new car!

Well, finally the time has come. After more than ten years, and ninety thousand kilometres, it is time for a new car. Not that there was anything wrong with it, it is more a preventative measure. Sell while it is still sellable. You can read about my current car in my Nullarbor trip story. The falcon still runs great, and just recently took myself and three others to Swan Hill and back, getting pretty good mileage of 8.4 l/100km. Not bad, considering the car had four people in it, with the air conditioner running nearly the whole time. It’s a great car for eating up long distances, loping along the highway at a lazy 1700 rpm.

The new car is a Honda Accord Euro. Strangely named, because in Australia (and New Zealand), we get two models of the Accord, both with the same name. There is the Accord Euro, sold in Europe and Japan as just the Accord, and the US as the Acura TSX; and there is what we know here and in the USA as the Accord, which is sold in Japan as the Inspire.

We went for the Euro because it is a bit more compact, with a more powerful 4 cylinder engine (although the regular Accord is also available with a V6) than the other Accord. Mind you, it weighs nearly as much as my old Falcon. Still, Honda quote a 0-100 time of 7.8 seconds for the manual transmission model we have bought, which is better than what the auto falcon could manage. Although, to get that, I’d say you’d be spending a bit of time in the 7000rpm range - alien territory for a falcon owner with a 5500rpm redline.

I’ll put some photos up when it arrives - two more sleeps to go…

Just under a year ago I purchased a Mains Power meter, as described in a previous post. It did cause me a little concern, because the voltage reading was quite high - up to 270-290 volts sometimes, instead of 240 or so, which meant it was way out of calibration. I exchanged it with another one which only read a little high - it’s reporting 254 volts as I type this. It means that it was probably reading around 20% higher than its actual usage. I thought I would give you some updated power figures, as well as show you the difference in consumption of the older Athlon XP system, compared with a newer, Core 2 Quad system that is its replacement.

For my system, I have updated it a little since the previous post. It now has a TV tuner card, 2GB of DDR2-6400 memory, and is clocked at 2.76GHz, a bit higher than previously. I have also scored a UPS, which the PC, modem, router and the backup server are now plugged into.

Some updated readings:

My Core 2 Duo PC:

On, running folding@home, screen on: 120W
On, idle, screen on: ~110W

These readings are really just estimates, as the power meter’s readings just keep fluctuating anywhere from 104 to 129W. It is also clouded by the fact that the UPS is plugged into the power meter, playing havoc with the results. when the PC is off, it can still show a power draw of around 70W, with just a modem, router and a standby server running off it.

Athlon System:

On, folding@home running: 150-160W
On, idle: 148W
On, idle, screen off: 130W

Core 2 Quad Q9300 PC, nvidia 7200GS, all at stock speed:

On, folding@home running: 130W
On, folding@home running, screen off: 106W
On, idle, screen off: 64W

You can see what a difference a few years and processor generations makes. I also recently purchased an nvidia 8600GT graphics card for the Quad box, to boost its folding output with the GPU2 client. I chose a relatively low-power drawing card, as I am conscious of how much juice it uses.

Core 2 Quad Q9300, nvidia 8600GT, all at stock speed:

On, folding@home SMP (CPU) client only running: 133W
On, folding@home SMP and GPU2 clients running: 143-151W

I was pleasantly surprised. The faster video card, running the folding client, consumed only around 20 Watts more power than an idle 7200GS. Quite a good result for an extra 1400 points per day in folding production, in terms of performance per watt.

While I was in the mood, I though I’d re-test the home theatre setup. The only difference here was that the video player has been unplugged, since it is no longer used.

Home Theatre:

All on standby: 16W
All on standby, HD Set Top Box on: 31W
TV and STB on: 146W*
TV,STB, receiver on: 120W

* The figure for the TV and STB on was curious. since there was no signal to the TV, it was displaying the blue background and power usage went up. Once a signal went to it from the receiver, usage dropped.

Recently at the train station near my work, the following billboard has gone up:



What the hell? OK, it’s for a Sony Vaio laptop. Quite what it promotes about said laptop, is a mystery to me. It is used by women with too much makeup? When you open it, three pictures of women fly out? I can coordinate my top with my computer, finally?

Ad departments. Gotta love them. Somebody probably got a bonus for coming up with that campaign, too.

For a number of years now, my PC has never sat idle. Its every operating moment has been spent running flat out, looking for a possible cure for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and many others. This has been done by running the Folding@Home program. It sits in the background, using any spare CPU cycles that aren’t being used by any other programs you are running. It downloads some data from the servers at Stanford University, processes it, running simulations on protein folding, then uploads its results back to Stanford. It is a great cause, made a little more interesting by the awarding of points for every work unit your PC processes. These points introduce an element of competition - trying to out-produce fellow folders and make your way up the leaderboard. There are teams as well, with their own rankings. I am currently folding for the Overclockers Australia team - currently ranked number 2 in the world and trying to hold onto that spot and make a move to regain number 1.

If you feel like joining, you are more than welcome. Just enter Team 24 when you are setting it up!

Aaaanyway, after updating my system earlier in the year, I noticed my points production had dropped off. What had happened, is that the CPU was not running at full speed: it was throttled back to its slower idle speed. A little fishing around the web turned up this forum thread at techreport.com. It turns out that the CPU speedstep function on was on, with the multiplier dropped back to 6, not 7 (in my case with an intel E6300). The operating system’s frequency scaling control was not treating the folding client as an ‘important’ enough process - it was ignoring the ‘nice’ processes by default. To find what speed the system is running at, open a terminal prompt and enter:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

A bunch of info will come up - look for the cpu MHz field and see if it is the speed it should be. The other way is to install the CPU frequency scaling toolbar applet in Gnome - I have done this and can see at a glance if the cores are running at full speed or not.

To let the frequency governor include ‘nice’ processes, a flag has to be set, as the root user:

sudo su
echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ondemand/ignore_nice_load
exit

For a dual- or quad-core machine, you may have to do this for all cpus - cpu0, cpu1, cpu2 and so on. An example for the second core:

echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/ondemand/ignore_nice_load

Note that I only had to set it for the first CPU (cpu0) and the other one changed as well.

To make this change permanent, instead of having to re-enter the above commands after each boot, there are two methods, only one of which worked for me. The first method, which did not work, is to add the echo 0 > … line to the /etc/rc.local file, before the line “exit 0″. This did not work for me, as I found out after rebooting.

Instead, I used the second method, found in this thread at the ubuntu forums, involving changing a setting in the Gnome Configuration editor (found under the Applications -> System Tools menu):

Open gconf-editor, go to /apps/gnome-power-manager/cpufreq
and check box consider_nice.
Takes effect immediately.

I believe that the setting in gconf-editor was overriding the setting in rc.local, so it never took effect. After changing that, my system has been happily folding away ever since.

Lately I had been having trouble on flash-based websites where things just wouldn’t display properly - sometimes a screen would come up with the flash content, then just go blank. I was a little puzzled, but thought it more of the usual ‘not tested on linux/firefox’ issues from the web developers. But then it just started getting silly, and looked into it a bit. I remembered that a few weeks back, an update was available for the flash plugin (in ubuntu, the package is called flashplugin-nonfree) that upgraded from 9.0 r48 to 9.0 r115.

Turns out that most of the problems stemmed from that. In a thread in the ubuntu forums, it is stated that the current flash release is still pretty buggy. Kilz from the ubuntu forums has created a script that installs the plugin with the nspluginwrapper, for running in 64-bit installations. The thread in question is here. I tried it, first uninstalling the current plugin using the synaptic package manager, then ran the script. I now have the 9.0 r48 version, and it everything is running fine again.

Damn Adobe Flash - the majority of my linux usability problems have centred around getting the damn plugin to work in browsers at all, then to actually work properly. I can’t wait for the Gnash project to have a viable replacement up and running so I can dump Adobe’s product for good.