Barnson.org

I have been working on my BS degree in IT for about a year now with another year to go. One of the classes i am taking this quarter is a Hist & Meth. of Science. So far pretty interesting.

This weeks discussion topic is solar power / photovoltaic solutions for alternative home power. I was suprised at how much this option would cost. I think the idea of solar power /(PV) is a great “green

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, somebody decided on a general rule for handling virtual memory in a computer that went something like this:

“Thou shalt have one and a half to two times the amount of swap space on a hard disk as thou hast RAM in thy computer.”

I think it’s time to revisit this rule from On High with an eye towards real-life numbers.

OK, first thing’s first. RAM is the thing which stores temporary data in your computer. When you see the splash screen when Windows is booting up, what it’s doing is loading data from your hard disk drive into the RAM of your computer.

As most people know, the Windows startup can take a long time. Even on modern, uber-fast machines, you are looking at a 15-30 second startup time, minimum, from the moment you see the Windows splash screen. The vast majority of the time, the computer is just waiting for data to load from the hard drive so that it can execute it and continue on its merry way with booting up.

Once that data is loaded, your computer is pretty speedy at handling it. As a matter of fact, one of the most common upgrades on computers is to add more RAM. Simply creating more of this temporary storage space makes an enormous difference in your computer’s performance (to a point), and it’s one of the cheapest upgrades you can perform. So much so that investing in a faster graphics card, faster hard drive, or faster CPU generally takes a back-seat to having more RAM in your machine.

The throughput on modern RAM is pretty amazing, too. Some of the more recent technology is staggering! The memory is running at 400 million cycles per second, and usually follows a “refresh” schedule that’s something like 4-3-3-3 (if we’re conservative). That means that out of every 13 CPU cycles, your computer can read or write data for 9 of them. What’s this mean in real life?

9/13 * 400 million cycles per second * 64 bits simultaneous = something like 2 gigabytes per second.

So a computer’s RAM can read and write somewhere around 2 gigabytes every single second (2 billion bytes).

In contrast, the hard disk of a system can deliver maybe 50 megabytes (50 million bytes) per second, and if you have to write to it? Try more like ten, or maybe fifteen, megabytes per second.

In other words, DOG SLOW.

Now, back in the day, memory was extremely expensive. Per megabyte, hard disk drives were much cheaper. Conventional wisdom was that, if you had 4 megabytes of memory in your machine, you should have about 8 megabytes of “swap space” (pretend memory, really) on your hard disk drive. Keeping in mind that hard disk drives have only been increasing in speed rather linearly, while memory access speeds have increased logarithmically (in an increasing curve), this makes sense. Small amount of memory, pretty small swap space.

Fact was, performance was acceptable.

These days, your average new PC ships with 1GB to 2GB of RAM. Realistically, 512MB is a practical MINIMUM for effective operation, and there’s a substantial speed boost going to 1GB from 512MB. Many workstations are shipping with 4GB, and the only reason we don’t commonly have workstations with a lot more RAM than that is because it’s pretty rare (and expensive) to run a 64-bit version of Windows on a 64-bit workstation. 32-bit machines can’t address more than 4GB of RAM efficiently.

So where I work, and elsewhere, I still see people following the “twice as much swap as memory” rule. This means that I see machines every day with 2GB to as much as 8GB of swap space.

Do the math on that, folks. If you are just trying to READ 4GB of swap, it’s going to take eighty seconds to read it, minimum! Considering that generally the machine is also trying to write to the “virtual memory” on a swap partition or file at the same time as it’s reading, multiply that by at least 2, and more like 3 or 4 if the disk is a standard slow-writing consumer disk.

Basically, if the computer is actually using more than a few hundred megabytes of swap space, it has slowed to a crawl, and will be almost completely unusable.

I hereby propose a new rule:

Thy swap space shall equal the maximum amount of data your storage subsystem can deliver within 10 seconds or less.

Now, think about the practical ramifications. If your hard disk can read 50 megabytes a second (like most modern 7200 RPM IDE drives), OK. Get yourself a 500 megabyte swap file. If you have a nifty RAID array which can deliver 100 megabytes a second, fine. Go for a 1GB swap file.

BTW: I’m aware of special cases like Solaris, where /tmp is actually your swap, so it has a direct effect on performance to have this filesystem be quite large. I don’t agree with that particular architectural decision, though… /tmp should be its own space.

The age of large swap files or swap partitions is dead. Let it rest in peace.

So we’ve posted a lot of music here. Unfortunately, some of it has gotten buried beneath mounds of blog postings. My Music Page has become woefully outdated as I haven’t linked all the posts with music in them in some time.

Anybody up to the task (Ben?) of providing links to all the uploaded music? I’d rather not link directly to the tunes themselves, but instead to the blog page listing the tunes. I am a big fan of context, and this site is all about hanging out and telling stories.

I should have put this entry under Matt’s ‘Pet Peeve’ thread, but figured this subject deserved a separate and distinct home.

Over the past year, I have seen many front-page newspaper stories characterizing the actions of particular political representatives and political groups as “quiet.

I have a lot of pet peeves. It’s just the way I am. Usually, I don’t let it get to me and just kind of grin and bear it, but tonight, I need to vent. Don’t know why. Just feeling snippy.

My Biggest Pet Peeves (today):

1. People who can see that I’m very busily involved in something, and think that whatever they want me to do is obviously far more important than whatever I’m doing.
2. Web pages where they take the mouse focus away from you. If I type something in on the address bar, that cursor is supposed to STAY THERE, not move to some random search box on the page. I’m talking to YOU, AMAZON, MSN, DICTIONARY.COM and EBAY! Die! Die! Die! Vicious Mouse-Cursor-kidnappers of vile fame! When I click on a box on the page, my mouse cursor should stay where I clicked. You shouldn’t randomly delete what I’ve typed and move my mouse to some other box on the page.
3. Animals that run out in front of my car when I’m going way too fast to avoid them. I realize that, over the long term, this kind of behavior will be weeded out of the gene pool by evolution, but in the meantime I’m the one that’s upset because some CUTE, FLUFFY WHITE KITTEN decided to LEAP OUT in FRONT OF ME when I’m driving seventy-five miles an hour. It’s now the FLUFFY WHITE TUFTED CHUNKS OF CUTE KITTENY GOODNESS permanently glued to the inside of my wheel well. I have a pet cat. Dangit, cats, get some web access and read these blogs and stop jumping out in front of my car!
4. Bottled water that says “A product of the Cincinnati municipal water system”. DUDE! If I wanted to drink your FLAMING SEWER WATER, I’d have DRIVEN TO CINCINNATI and STUCK MY HEAD IN YOUR TOILET!
5. Bunnies. Bunnies are evil. Anya was right. Neighbor bought some bunnies. Evil, evil, evil.
6. How come when you buy a CASE OF ORANGES, a third of them are ROTTING by the time you GET THEM HOME? I bought a CASE of oranges, thank you very much, not two-thirds of a case of oranges and one-third of a case of DR. CITRUS’ RANCID FRUIT SCENT.
7. The feet on my laptop. I paid for SIX RUBBER FEET on this $1,600 laptop, and ONLY ONE IS LEFT. I’m typing on a laptop with only ONE RUBBER LEG. If I wanted to type while on a pogo stick, I’d have bought some of those ENLARGEMENT PILLS I keep reading about in my EMAIL.
8. “Dell technical support; my name is Sennacharukharamasra, but you can call me Shirley. What may I be doing for you today?” You’re name AIN’T SHIRLEY, SHIRLEY! You’re working in an IT SWEATSHOP in INDIA for 4000 BUCKS A YEAR. Just cause the drink is yellow don’t make it lemonade, Shirley!
9. THE NEEDFUL.
10. Rice cakes. WTF??? Who’s BRILLIANT idea was this, to make a HALF-DOZEN GRAINS OF RICE EXPLODE and then press-form it into a HOCKEY PUCK?
11. Lactose intolerance. What’s up with this? I hit thirty, and suddenly I’m Dr. Barnson’s FART-O-RAMA just because I drank 8 ounces of two-percent?
12. Energy drinks. Most of them DON’T WORK. You chug down the equivalent of Lake Erie in a can, with the promise of BOUNDLESS ENERGY and ENTHUSIASM, and all you get in exchange is a lighter wallet and FORTY TRIPS TO THE BATHROOM. You’re just as tired as before, and the only thing keeping you awake is the BOUNDLESS PRESSURE ON YOUR BLADDER.
13. Mice. Damned mice. A whole storage room swept clean. Several traps out, laden with peanut butter. The critters manage to scale the equivalent of the EMPIRE STATE BUILDING to chew a hole in your OATMEAL and live like kings until they DIE OF OBESITY. The peanut butter is UNTOUCHED, and I open the door of my storage room to find a hundred pounds of oatmeal on the floor, with little baby obese mice erecting a STATUE in honor of their DEPARTED FATHER who OPENED THE BAG.
14. Idiots at my flying field. What my PARKED CAR isn’t an indicator that you shouldn’t FLY CLOSE ENOUGH TO KNOCK MY CAP OFF? Isn’t four thousand feet of runway room enough for you to HOT DOG? You’ve gotta spoil my fun and DRIVE ME OFF THE FIELD because you can’t figure out how to fly your plane safely?
15. Neighbors who want you to sign an agreement INDEMNIFYING THEM AGAINST POTENTIAL LAWSUITS before they’ll let your KIDS PLAY TOGETHER. Dude!

I’m done. I’m not mad anymore, I made myself laugh. What are your pet peeves today?

Who knows what comes of this, our hopes have been dashed a few too many times in recent years. But AICN is linking to a Daily Variety story that reports that JJ Abrams (you’ve heard of Lost, right?) will produce and direct a new Trek film that “will center on the early days of seminal “Trek” characters James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, including their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and first outer space mission.” Here’s the Daily Variety link.

Considering how many times the Superman reboot stopped and started and got tossed around from one bad idea to the other, we have to hope this is a legit story and that they aren’t toying with us. Because there are plenty of really great potential stories to tell about Kirk’s early days that would be great on the IMAX screen.

Okay, so we all have seen how that rich dude retired and got 36 million dollars severence. The argument, of course, is well, “he made us record profits!”. Who got these record profits?

YUP, the oil companies – who boasted 36 BILLION dollars in profits while I use 30 bucks to fill up a Civic at the pump. Its not right, and the Government refuses to do something about it.. so what do we do?

Well, I got a forwarded email (which I usually hate – but this one got me thinking). We can try to push the price of Gas down. A pundit needs to get behind this – a Bill o’Reilly, or an Al Franken – Here it goes.

Boycott Exxon and Mobil. We, the American people are not going to revolt, not going to buy hybrids, not going to carpool, and not going to ride bikes to work. We should, but we won’t. What do we do? Stop going to Exxon and Mobil – and buy your gas elsewhere. Exxon and Mobil will lower prices to entice you back (They control most of the Market share). People will go back, and then the places you went during the boycott will lower their prices. Boycott on, until we see Gas prices going back to where they were, or at least until we hear about the profits being down to, say 5 billion,or 10 billon.

Its easy to do, and it makes sense, at least to me. Thoughts?

Interesting NOVA on TV last night, it dealt with global warming.

Synopsis is that pollution caused less sunlight to reach the earth from 1950-1990 because pollutants made clouds more reflective, by an average of 5%.

However, the trend is reversing over some areas (Europe, US) because we’re reducing visible pollutants. Now here’s the rub. Global dimming may have been saving us from global warming. Basically, the clouds have kept sunlight out, keeping us cooler. But, they may have also prevented the monsoons that usually occur in the Subhara, causing those nasty famines in Ethiopia in the 80s. So, global dimming was responsible for “We Are The World”. ‘Nuff said. If you’re downwind of major pollution areas (Mid-Atlantic US, northern Maltives, etc), then you’re more likely to be cooler because of that pollution.

And the thing is that America is reducing polltuion, as is Europe. The problem is developing countries like India, China, etc. They’re playing catch up in the industrial/economic sector and have no desire to put expensive pollution-reducing measures in place to save the environment. And who’s going to bully China into doing anything?

Another example of how we have very little clue as to how our environment works, from little to big scale. That being said, I’m pretty sure pollution is bad and needs to be reduced. C’mon hydrogen fuel cells.

My $.02 Weed

P.S. Matt: While I understand your “oil is free while hydrogen is not” point about hydrogren extraction, I still don’t buy into its ramifications totally. Yes, oil is already formed thanks to global pressures and such, but it still takes effort to extract it from its resting place. Not to mention shipping it and the political factors. I can take a short trip and find water, tho, as can 99% of the world. It can’t be THAT much more expensive to get hydrogen from water when water’s so abundant and close. Why can’t someone come up with a device that sits at my septic tank, takes THAT water, and gets the hydrogen out of it, powered by solar? What about rain barrels that feed into it? With the $80+ billion we wasted in Iraq plus a nice tax on oil companies profits (sorry, Daniel) we should be able to make that somewhat feasible and cost-effective. C’mon, America, can’t we get inventing???!)

So to you and yours, Happy easter!

I got this from my friend Debbie Stone (Hey, Deb!). Wait, no, she’s been married… I think she has a different last name now. Some of you guys may remember her as part of the group with which we did a band exchange program in high school. We still keep in touch.

Heyguys.. Ran into Andrew bolton (QOHS Class of 91 – I think he’s a jamaican Dude) Sang with the choir and is now a pro Reggae singer here in the DC area! He wanted me to pass along hellos!