:: boyter page :: Ver 3.0

Yes the beast is gone... the X-90 of doom which took me far and wide, without a single failure or issue over its 6 year lifespan (with me 13 in total) has retired to a farm where it can climb every mountain and ford every stream in its own time.

I dedicate this post to the beast. Oddly enough I was dreaming about it last night

At least its image will live on in Wikipedia.

X90silver.jpg

Published on Wednesday 25th August 2010

Comments (5)

Well I now know what its like to have a blog post land on a major news site. The below images show a post I made (this one actually about the hidden value of test driven development) hitting the front page of Hacker News. It also made the front page of Dzone and was tweeted around quite a bit as well.

In short my blog got quite a lot of traffic in a very short amount of time. I was trying to see how much traffic I could build on my blog in a short amount of time and frankly I am still amazed at how well the experiment went.The goal now is to build it up to more organic SEO traffic and see how things go.

hits.JPG

madeit.jpg

Published on Friday 20th August 2010

Comments (0)

Dear ServerPronto Customer,

Thank you for your continued business and interest in our product line.

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The Hardware changes will require "minimal downtime" in order to upgrade the CPU and RAM. This, of course, can be scheduled at your convenience, any time, 24x7, through our Support Ticket portal, at no cost to you.

Again, thank you for your business and we hope you have made the best of this Incredible offer!

Published on Friday 20th August 2010

Comments (0)

Im not usually one to promote events and the like unless I feel there is a genuine benefit to be had by attending but this is one stands out. Richard M Stallman, the guru of Free Software is coming Down Under to hold a talk. You can read about him here, Open Source Celebrity to visit Australia

You can register for the event at the ACS Website

I am certainly planning on attending.

Published on Thursday 12th August 2010

Comments (2)

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/07/30/core-i7-980x-pc-versus-eight-core-xeon-workstation/

I fired it up on my 4 year old desktop PC, which happens to be a C2D 6320 at 1.86 ghz.

Time below (running in nice since im using the pc at the same time, but should be pretty accurate I guess),

boyter@boyter-desktop:~$ time nice ./smallpt 100
Rendering (100 spp) 100.00%
real	12m16.759s
user	22m25.410s
sys	0m3.450s

Just goes to show some progress. While this computer dosn't feel slow at all, the CPU time indicates that it is a good deal slower then a newer chip. Either way though im not going to upgrade

Oh I should mention this is on gnu/linux so its possible that effected the time. I reran it without nice option and got the following

stupid slow CPU.


boyter@boyter-desktop:~$ time ./smallpt 100
Rendering (100 spp) 100.00%
real	11m45.074s
user	22m25.540s
sys	0m1.620s

Published on Saturday 07th August 2010

Comments (8)

Laco
Wow, CPUs really do improve a lot in just a few years. One of the commenters got 17min on an Atom N280; I would have expected an E6320 to be more than twice as fast..

BTW my i7 860 (running the Windows version) took 112s

nisch
255 seconds here on a quad Phenom II @ 3GHz.
Not bad for a CPU which costs $165.

But I agree with Boyter, it makes no difference to the experience because things are just so fast regardless. Maybe if I was rendering every day I would care...

boyter
Thanks Laco. I was hoping you would give it a go since I knew you had a i7 and I wanted to see how it would go. I will throw it on my netbook tonight and see how long it takes.

If I can really be bothered ill try it on my Phenom as well nisch. Should be interesting to get some scores going.

But as I said I cant tell the difference day to day between any of the machines I have access too. I guess in terms of what I do any modern CPU is fine. About the only thing I have noticed some speed gain is when doing some advanced HTML parsing, which takes 10 seconds on the netbook and under a second on my desktop.

"Eternal life or your money back!"

boyter
Im running it on a N280 now and its taking bloody ages. I stopped the first run because the dammed thing shut down although the process had taken about an hour at that point...

I did another run using 4 not 100 to see how long it would take and the answer is,

boyter@boyter-laptop:~/Downloads$ time ./smallpt 100
Rendering (100 spp) 20.73%^C

real 9m39.474s
user 18m40.042s
sys 0m1.992s
boyter@boyter-laptop:~/Downloads$ time ./smallpt 4
Rendering (4 spp) 100.00%
real 1m54.110s
user 3m32.013s
sys 0m0.520s

First run I aborted because I was getting bored but was the same as in the post. Second was the lowest possible setting and still took a while.

I am pretty impressed with how cool this thing stays though. It has been CPU pegged for a while and its still cool to the touch.

"Eternal life or your money back!"

nisch
Here is what a $9.95 VPS gives you:

nisch@totoro:~$ time ./smallpt 100
Rendering (100 spp) 100.00%
real 6m37.594s
user 6m31.069s
sys 0m1.026s

Not too bad I reckon.
CPU is Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5410 @ 2.33GHz

nisch
PS. That's a single core too.

boyter
AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 2600+

[root@PTY11258B ~]# time ./smallpt 100
Rendering (100 spp) 100.00%
real 14m27.438s
user 13m11.683s
sys 0m1.731s

"Eternal life or your money back!"

nisch
makes the VPS look quick and cheap!