Tales from a computer upgrade

Instead of politics, you get nerdery.

I’ve acquired a largely undeserved reputation among some of my friends as a computer hardware expert.  This is due in part to the fact that the research I was doing about four years ago was heavily invested in state-of-the-art graphics cards, and in part to the fact that whenever I buy a new computer or upgrade an existing one I research the hell out of it before I lay down cash.  So when my existing hardware package started to fail (Windows XP pro not booting at all and random Linux applications crashing arbitrarily), I headed off to the internet for some market research.

Ars Technica is a pretty good place for this sort of thing.  I took a read through their latest system guide, and eliding my known-good components from their Budget Box configuration, I figured I could upgrade to a significantly improved system for about $400.

As it turns out, I only spent about $550.  Lesson one: budget more money than you think you’ll need.

Now, I didn’t just check Ars Tech.  I read system guides and component reviews at Tom’s Hardware, Sharky Extreme, and AnandTech.  Even better, I checked in with my lab’s sysadmin.  Not only did he support my brand prejudices (Asus and BFG Tech), he sold me a gently-used Geforce 8800 GTX — otherwise about $150 out of my price range — for the same price as the BFGTech 8800GT I was considering.

Lesson two: chat up your sysadmin.

Being a fine upstanding individual, my sysadmin didn’t want to take my money until he’d assured me that the graphics card actually worked.  So we plugged it into a lab machine, which promptly failed to boot.  (This turned out to be a motherboard issue — fuck you very much, Sun Microsystems — and the board worked just fine on another machine.)  Some concern ensued when he plugged two six-pin power connectors into the GPU.

Matt: Gee*, I don’t recognize those.

Sysadmin: Oh, they’re PCI Express power plugs.  Uh, if you don’t have a PCI-E motherboard, you probably don’t have any of these either.

Matt: Looks like I need a new power supply, then.

Sysadmin: Yeah, looks like you do.

Lesson three: Unless you do this sort of thing on a very regular basis, you’ll need answers to questions you won’t think to ask until you’re halfway through the upgrade.  See also lesson one, above.

So eventually I assemble this fine list of budget-priced hardware:

• Asus M2A-VM motherboard
• nVidia 8800 GTX 768MB GPU
• AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+ dual-core CPU
• Antec EarthWatts 650 PSU
• Kingston DDR2-800 RAM

(Antec, by the way, fucking rules.  I was first introduced to Antec’s products during an undergrad internship, where I used their cases to assemble network servers.  I was pleasantly surprised to find them genuinely enjoyable to work with, in, and on.  Based on that experience, I started buying their products every time I could get away with it, and I’ve never been disappointed.)

I put everything together, hit the power switch…

…and XP panicked.  My Linux kernel, being a somewhat more together OS install, booted cheerfully — but my X server coughed and died.  So much for the notion that I’d replace the dodgy hardware and solve all my problems.

Lesson four: If you replace your hardware with significantly revised kit, operating systems expecting the older stuff will get confused.

No big deal, though.  I install a version of the nVidia X drivers that actually supports my new GPU, and my Linux install is saved.  XP, however, requires a new install — I’ve been meaning to repave that partition anyway, so off I go.

Three hours later, everything works except the sound.  Fair enough; I play some silent Company of Heroes and give the upgrade a rest ’til the next morning.

Halfway through the next day, everything works except the sound.

Lesson five: Realtek onboard HD sound sucks dead donkey dick.

The short version is that the Realtek drivers install far enough to render one’s sound system completely foxtrot uniform, but not far enough to actually work.  Best of all, if you’re installing drivers with the recommended “InstAll”** feature, they fail silently.  This is all contingent, according to about 60% of the “authoritative” forum posts I found on this here series of tubes, upon whether your onboard sound is enabled in the BIOS before, during, or after you install XP service pack 2 (or, according to some sites, 3).

If the Realtek HD sound drivers team is reading this: I hope your peckers*** rot off.

So rather than fuck with anywhere from 3! to 7! (seriously) permutations of BIOS settings and XP install orders, I pulled a Republican solution**** and pick up a Sound Blaster X-Fi.  This turns out to be an excellent idea in the end, as it gives me better sound hardware than I’ve ever had before, and finally gives my SR-60s a worthy signal.  Given the Realtek driver issues (see “sucks dead donkey dick”, above), though, installing the X-Fi initially turns my XP install into a kernel-panic quick-reboot feature***** until I repave yet again and clean off the Realtek sound shit.

I should perhaps mention that the mobo’s onboard Ethernet is boringly stable.  So while I wouldn’t mind in the slightest — and might dance a happy little jig — if Realtek’s HD sound driver team died in a “tragic” lab fire, I’d feel kind of bad if that fire inconvenienced the LAN driver team.

Lesson six: The upgrade will take longer than you expect.  See also lesson one, above.

In the end, though, I’m happy: my research code runs in about a third the time it did before the upgrade, my system is stable once more, and rFactor looks fucking amazing on my new graphics card.

——

* I don’t say things like “Gee”.  I usually say things like “Fuck me sideways” instead.  This Bowdlerization is intended as comedy.

** Bonus Lesson 5.1: Avoid features with cutesy-clever names.

*** Dang, that was kind of sexist.  If the Realtek HD sound drivers team employs any women, I hope their clitori rot off instead.  Whew!

**** Borrow-and-spend; also known as VISA ex machina. Okay, I guess you do get some politics.

***** With bonus msvcrt.dll failures on OS load.  Yes, the Realtek drivers suck so hard they fuck up the C Standard Library if you try to work around them.

Sort of a political post

Politics is simmering at an almost-interesting level these days.  I’d comment on Obama’s speech… but I don’t give quite enough of a shit yet.  It was a very nice speech, to be sure, and he said some very pleasant things (with enough blah-blah about cutting taxes and respecting gun rights and all that to appease moderate Republicans).  Problem is, I don’t especially believe any of it — not because he’s a Democrat, of course, and not because he lacks experience; but simply because he’s a campaigning politician, and he has every reason to lie.

Similarly, I’d been hoping that McCain would pick Sarah Palin for his VP nomination.  Again, this falls into the “less bad than all the others” category: sure, she has some record as a creepy theocrat, but otherwise she comes across as someone out of a Heinlein novel — one of his later novels, mind you, once he got over his global-government phase.  I’ve heard a lot of scoffing from the Democratic side of the blogosphere, and a lot of more liberty-minded bloggers I read are sounding tempted to vote Republican this year based merely on McCain’s VP pick.  But at the same time, it’s tough to tell whether Palin’s going to reinforce McCain’s “maverick” image (she’s a reformer, you see) and distance him from the Bush 43 administration, or whether she’s just too far outside the mainstream to attract much support.  I kind of like Palin… but I kind of like Ron Paul too, and we know how that went.

And finally, it seems overwhelmingly likely that I’ll have some very unflattering things to say about a certain Canadian federal politician come Tuesday.  This situation is made particularly irksome by the fact that I can’t bring myself to support either this politician’s party or any of its opposition in Ottawa.  Frankly, the status quo in Canada makes me very happy these days, and I’m likely to look with great aspersion upon anyone who fucks with it.

Mid-week misanthropy, vol. 14

Long-time readers may have deduced that people riding their bikes on public sidewalks pisses me all the fuck off.  For all I rant about the public’s right to self-defence, I’ve been injured far more by cyclists than I have by muggers.  I have fucking had it with sanctimonious cocksockets riding their magnesium-framed hippie status symbols on pedestrian thoroughfares with the oblivious self-satisfaction of the monomaniacally anointed.  “Get out of my way, you dirty bipedalists!” they scream, “You’re impeding the Future of Transportation!”

When Sonny Bono hit that level of asshole, he killed himself on a fucking tree.  Apparently BC doesn’t have enough trees.  We surely have enough hills.

San Francisco also has enough hills.  Rather than trees, however, they’re substituting cars… and an environmental movement which condemns — are you sitting down? — bike lanes:

• San Francisco Ponders: Could Bike Lanes Cause Pollution? (Wall Street Journal)

At a time when most other cities are encouraging biking as green transport, the 65-year-old local gadfly [Rob Anderson] has stymied cycling-support efforts here by arguing that urban bicycle boosting could actually be bad for the environment. That’s put the brakes on everything from new bike lanes to bike racks while the city works on an environmental-impact report.

Cyclists say the irony is killing them — literally. At least four bikers have died and hundreds more have been injured in San Francisco since mid-2006, when Mr. Anderson helped convince a judge to halt implementation of a massive pro-bike plan.(It’s unclear whether the plan’s execution could have prevented the accidents.) In the past year, bike advocates have demonstrated outside City Hall, pushed the city to challenge the plan’s freeze in court and proposed putting the whole mess to local voters. Nothing worked.

[...]

Cars always will vastly outnumber bikes, [Anderson] reasons, so allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution. Mr. Anderson says the city has been blinded by political correctness. It’s an “attempt by the anti-car fanatics to screw up our traffic on behalf of the bicycle fantasy,” he wrote in his blog this month.

The rest of the article describes a tempest in a teapot, including some lawyer bitching about some other lawyer’s choice of acronyms.  It’s a delightful and amusing paean to people’s fixation upon the trivial at the expense of the useful.

——

Poor Nancy Pelosi.  She’s been in trouble lately, and it’s all so very unfair.  She’s done all sorts of wonderful things since achieving the position of Speaker of the House, and all people want to talk about is her failure to end the War in Iraq.  It’s not as though she ever said she would — well, I suppose the Democrats ran on that particular platform to win their Congressional majority in 2006, but come on, they would have had to use the power of the purse to get that done, and that might have made them look bad.  That’s just far too much to expect.

Nevertheless, she’s done, uh, stuff.  You know, she organized that thing where the Dems voted for that bill where they organized funding for that shit the Republicans didn’t really want.  And stuff.  And sure, they tacked it onto yet another Iraq war budget authorization, but you need to make hard compromises like that in the dog-eat-dog world of politics.

And speaking of hard compromises, Pelosi’s committed to promoting energy independence and preventing global warming and, like, stuff.

• Meet the Press transcript for August 24, 2008

REP. PELOSI:  I’m, I’m, I’m investing in something I believe in.  I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels.

What?

• Natural gas (Wikipedia)

Natural gas is a gaseous fossil fuel consisting primarily of methane but including significant quantities of ethane, propane, butane, and pentane—heavier hydrocarbons removed prior to use as a consumer fuel —as well as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, helium and hydrogen sulfide.^[1] It is found in oil fields (associated) either dissolved or isolated in natural gas fields (non-associated), and in coal beds (as coalbed methane).

Key Riced All My Tea.

I blame the schools.  The mechanism by which anyone can graduate from high school — let alone get elected Speaker of the fucking House — without knowing that natural gas is a fossil fuel entirely escapes me.  It’s clear that a bunch of so-called teachers in Califuckingfornia are not doing their goddamn jobs.

——

While Pelosi and her Democrats are conspicuously failing to demonstrate any sort of intestinal fortitude in Washington, Zimbabwe’s MDC is demonstrating the sort of sisu that must have made Simo Hayha sit up in his grave and applaud with enough force to shake the leaves (or needles) from every tree in the northern hemisphere:

• MDC heckle Mugabe in parliament (The Beeb)

“You killed people, we won’t forget that,” they shouted, while Mr Mugabe listed government achievements.

Nice to know that someone on this fucking dirtball has some nuts.

——

And speaking of lack of sisu:

• Spider forces family out of home (The Beeb)

Lorraine Griffiths and her three children have moved out of their house in Colchester, the RSPCA said.

They are refusing to return until the large sandy-coloured creature, thought to be a camel spider, is captured.

This is not the England about which Kipling wrote.  It’s a fucking spider! Give your kids a pair of pliers each and set them loose.  Three kids on seek-and-destroy missions ought to rid your house of a goddamn camel spider in a couple of hours, tops.

DNC goodthink doubleplusgood

It should be obvious to even a casual observer that the Democratic party is not in a state of perfect unity.  This does not, of course, present the desired image of happy progressives united to bring Change (it’s capitalized now) to the country, or at least to the White House.  And since the function of the DNC is largely a matter of projecting the right image, steps must be taken:

• Clinton teams to keep critics in line (ABC News)

As party leaders look to heal the Democrats’ lingering primary battle wounds from the podium, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s staff has coordinated a floor team to quash anti-Obama disturbances in the convention hall tonight and help the party present a united front.

Clinton’s “whip team,” led by longtime staffer Craig Smith, is approximately 40 members strong, composed of both Clinton and Obama delegates working in coordination with convention floor volunteers. The teams are dispatched to answer delegate questions, ensure that the appropriate signs are displayed and generally avoid any potentially embarrassing spontaneous expressions of opinion.

Yep.  The Dems are deploying “whip teams” to prevent “any potentially embarrassing spontaneous expressions of opinion”.  It’s as though they want people to compare them to the PRC, which preemptively jailed dissidents for the duration of the Olympic Games and taught its populace a state-approved cheer.  Say what you want about the levels of collectivism in the Democratic party: they’re not Maoists.

Of course, as with all things political, there’s one rule for the grubby proletariat and another rule for the Party elite.

• Bill Clinton in Denver again undercuts Obama (The Hill)

(Hat tip: Donklephant)

If you’re a filthy-rich ex-President, you’re allowed to do shit like this:

[Bill Clinton] said: “Suppose for example you’re a voter. And you’ve got candidate X and candidate Y. Candidate X agrees with you on everything, but you don’t think that person can deliver on anything. Candidate Y disagrees with you on half the issues, but you believe that on the other half, the candidate will be able to deliver. For whom would you vote?”

Then, perhaps mindful of how his off-the-cuff remarks might be taken, Clinton added after a pause: “This has nothing to do with what’s going on now.”

I could swear Bill’s been drunk 24/7 since Super Tuesday.

It’s not like this is an isolated slip of the forked tongue, either.

• Bill Clinton will not attend Obama’s Invesco speech (CNN)

(Hat tip: Below the Beltway)

Hillary Clinton will be on hand for Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, but according to a source close to former President Bill Clinton, he will not: the source tells CNN that Clinton will not join his wife at Invesco Field Thursday night.

It’s like a bad junior high school drama.

Man, I hope the Republican National Convention’s this entertaining.

Conventional misanthropy

Afflicted by a morbid curiosity, I watched Howard Dean call the Democratic National Convention to order.  (He didn’t scream, by the way.)  That’s thirty seconds of my life I won’t get back.

The event had the same flavour as the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games.  It was slick, stylish, well-staged, and well-rehearsed; throngs of eager sports fans party supporters shouted and applauded at every pause.  Senator Clinton’s PUMAs and the City of Denver’s free-speech cages notwithstanding, there’s no real business to be conducted at the DNC: it’s all ceremonial theatre, full of pomp and circumstance.  (According to someone on CNN — another fifteen seconds wasted; I should know better — renting stadia and organizing a four-day mutual metaphorical masturbation event is supposed to convince voters that the Democrats are in touch with the trials and tribulations of the middle class.)

Not that I expect the Republican National Convention to be any different, mind you.

Back in January, this was the election I hoped to see.  (I admit to entertaining some pleasant fantasies about Ron Paul and Mike Gravel facing off, but that was never in the cards and we all know it.)  With people like Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani in the race for nominations, Senators Obama and McCain seemed reasonable and moderate.  Obama talked a good line about political ecumenism, and McCain hadn’t quite lost his maverick aura from 2000.  When Giuliani tanked in Florida and McCain knocked out Romney, I breathed a small sigh of relief; when Clinton finally conceded the nomination to Obama, I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

As usual, though, wanting is better than getting.  Now that the parties’ hard-line statists are unavailable to make the (still presumptive) candidates look good by comparison, Obama and McCain have rather lost their appeal to me.  It’s hard not to see Obama as an authoritarian paternalist of the socialist persuasion, or McCain as an authoritarian paternalist of the Orwellian persuasion.  Both have seized upon the happy-assed bullshit of populist rhetoric with disconcerting alacrity and enthusiasm (though Obama gets half a bonus point for deriding the blatantly pandering gas-tax holiday).  What looked “better” in January now looks “not quite as bad”.

I suppose the silver lining of this election is that no matter who wins, one of them will lose.

Mid-week misanthropy, vol. 13

I didn’t have much in the way of hope for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the awe-inspiring athleticism involved (as well as the unusually low levels of athletes’ self-absorption). Usain Bolt set a new world record of 9.69s in the 100m sprint — even though he jogged the last twenty metres or so. Ilya Ilin posted a 406kg total (180kg snatch, 226 clean and jerk) in the men’s 94kg weightlifting division with the deepest split jerk I’ve seen on TV. And of course Michael Phelps set seven new world records and won eight gold medals, dominating every event he entered except for the 100m butterfly (which he won by 0.01s).

Phelps, however, has the bad taste to be both American and wildly successful. We don’t like either up here in Canada. With that in mind, the Globe and Mail cast about to find some way to impugn the swimmer, and settled upon a report of one day in the life of Michael Phelps’s food:

• Eat like Mike (Globe and Mail)

See, Phelps is genetically gifted with extraordinarily high limits on his performance (see the above Wikipedia article for details). He works his ass off — reportedly swimming five hours each day — to hit those limits. Between his workouts and his metabolism, Phelps needs a fuck-ton — defined here as 12,000 — of food calories. (If you saw him swim, you’ll no doubt have noticed that he isn’t keeping any of those around his waist for a rainy day, either.)

So, some dick at the Globe and Mail decided to sacrifice himself, Supersize Me-style, to point out how disgustingly unhealthy Michael Phelps’ diet of… well, a shitload of food; see the article… would be if you didn’t have the metabolism to require all that stuff. (Incidentally, the word “metabolism” never shows up in the article. That’s what a detective would call a “clue”.) Which brings me to this quotation:

“Dude,” I curse my Olympian nemesis, “how do you not weigh 700 pounds?”

I’d guess that when you swim five hours a day, your body gets used to burning a lot of energy and keeps doing it all day. But given that most people subscribe to the nutritional equivalent of astrology — phobias of fat, calories, and whatever hysterical fear-mongering the media’s putting out lately — it’s rather cruel of me to expect a fucking Globe and Mail reporter to know shit-all about endocrinology.

If you need an excuse to hate on successful Americans, I hear Naomi Klein has a new book out.

—–

Moving from consumers of fuck-tons of calories to purveyors of fuck-tons of calories, have a look at this:

• What is Burger King thinking? (Idea-Sandbox.com)

Within, you will find a porn-loving onion about to get violated by a cucumber with a Village People handlebar mustache. Oh, and a whole lot of righteous indignation. (“I take my kids to eat at Burger King! This is immoral! They can’t be allowed to find out about boobs until they have unprotected sex in high school!”)

Despite the voyeuristic airport-security type in the featured illustration and the fruit-filled whorehouse in one of the linked pieces of art, this stuff fails dismally to be anywhere near as creepy as the plastic-masked King character.

—–

And speaking of things that’ll get you an amateur prostate exam from airport security (the segues just keep on coming, don’t they?), here’s the latest from what used to be Great Britain:

• UK police seize War on Terror board game (Schneier on Security)

See, in the game:

In their cardboard version of realpolitik George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” is reduced to a spinner in the middle of the board, which determines which player is designated a terrorist state.

That person then has to wear a balaclava (included in the box set) with the word “Evil” stitched on to it.

But according to the plods:

the balaclava “could be used to conceal someone’s identity or could be used in the course of a criminal act”.

I suppose the real issue is that the balaclava has “evil” stitched into it, thus encouraging people to stereotype and profile others based purely upon their appearance.

Pants-shitting hysteria: you’re doing it wrong

Every once in a while, the CBC outdo themselves.  Just today, they released a scare-mongering piece about a violent drug gang getting busted in Victoria:

• Violent Red Scorpion gang busted in Victoria (CBC.ca)

Part of the formula for pants-shitting hysteria among Canadian newscritters is a mention of firearms:

During the raids, police also seized several guns, including a sawed off shotgun, $1,000 worth of cocaine and $3,000.

A more universal element of the PSH formula for drug busts is a table-o’-goodies shot, showing the evil guns with minds of their own and the evil drugs with minds of their own that were courageously taken off the streets by fearless, dedicated public servants:

(Photo used without permission, copyright lies with the CBC.  I just wanted to keep it around in case they replace it with something less embarrassing.)

As captioned by the CBC:

Police seized weapons, drugs and cash during a raid on alleged members of the Red Scorpions gang in Victoria. (CBC)

Those are paintball markers, not firearms.  They are weapons only in the sense that any object can be a weapon if you try hard enough.  As far as PSH eye-candy goes, though, this is fucking pathetic.

How to make an ass of yourself with statistics, vol. 2

Extrapolation is an interesting thing. When the system you’re examining is relatively well-understood, you can extrapolate from known data to predict unknown behaviour with at least a glancing likelihood of success. For example, from the excellent Physics of Racing series of articles:

Our flight plan called for holding speeds up to 165 for minutes at a time. As part of planning, we did a survey and calibration run of the course at legal, highway speeds. On the survey run, we noticed several bumpy spots. Driving over them at 70 mph, they were not frightening. But, we had to figure out what to expect at 165. So, right there in the middle of nowhere, we whipped out some envelopes, turned them over, pulled multicolour pens from our pocket protectors, and started scribbling. Geek racing at its best.

– Physics of Racing part 15: Bumps In The Road

On the other hand, if you’re extrapolating from known data on a poorly-understood system, you’ll more often than not make a fool of yourself. Predicting the future, particularly dozens of years in advance, is notoriously error-prone. (Weren’t we supposed to have flying cars by now? Failing that, weren’t we supposed to have incinerated ourselves in the global nuclear exchange made inevitable by the Cold War?) The problem is that human behaviour doesn’t lend itself to long-term predictability.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s always the danger of getting one’s head too far into the mechanics and the data, and neglecting to check your predictions against the obviously impossible. For example, today’s idiocy:

• If trends continue, we’ll all be fat in 40 years (Reuters, via MSNBC)

NEW YORK – If the trends of the past three decades continue, it’s possible that every American adult could be overweight 40 years from now, a government-funded study projects.

[...]

The new projections, published in the journal Obesity, are based on government survey data collected between the 1970s and 2004.

If the trends of those years continue, the researchers estimate that 86 percent of American adults will be overweight by 2030, with an obesity rate of 51 percent. By 2048, all U.S. adults could be at least mildly overweight.

OMG! OMG! OMG! And in 2066, 114% of American adults will be overweight! Everyone panic!

It bothers me that this shit got published.