Google no longer loves me

A search of "pimaster" is no longer showing this blog near the top of the search listing.
I blame myself, I really haven't had anything to add to the world of the Internet. I've gone from updating my blog 4-6 times a month to barely 1 a month.

I blame work. Oh, which I haven't posted about.
Back in May I started work for Majitek. I joined the Product team and was looking forward to a maintenance/feature improvement sort of development. I was hoping to see how problems that I've had come up in the past had been solved in their products.
But it was not to be.
The product I am working on really hasn't reached a mature level. We are still trying to work out how to solve certain problems.
There are some good days, but some are frustrating.

I've started a few little things to tinker with, but haven't really got around to finishing anything. Which sucks.
I've been enjoying the company of friends a lot more than I used to. It's good in breaking up the weeks, but also takes time away from just sitting in front of a computer.
I'd love to update this clog more, but we'll see how we go.

I'm still with the TF2 clan I joined back in early 2008, http://mofoclan.forumotion.com/forum.htm
I've also been posting a bit on twitter https://twitter.com/the_pimaster if you are into that sort of thing.

CSS awesomeness

I was forwarded a link today at work that I just have to share:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/css/gallery/slide1.htm

Yeah, it looks that bad in a modern browser.

But at the height of awesome (*chokes*), in IE 3.03, there is some magic-fu.

Finally, a result for the Compact Flash card

Since I had some plans canceled yesterday, I decided I had enough time to re-shuffle my disks around, put the CF card first and install XP onto it and see what would happen.

As expected the install took a lot longer to complete that a standard disk. I wasn't really expecting 4-5 hours though.

It was when I got into Windows that my heart sank though. Trying to install the drivers for my system was extremely slow. Loading IE (which starts the driver installation) was slow. Trying to check out where the bottle-necks were was slow.
Basically the CF card was being hammered nearly all the time. I managed to move swap onto a real disk and "Program Files", but couldn't get my "Documents and Settings" reliably moved to another disk. I don't think it would have helped enough though.

So I timed a fresh boot from start up to shutdown on the CF card and it took nearly 8 minutes.
I re-installed onto a standard disk and did the same task in a minute.

It isn't a complete failure though. The animation during Windows XP was noticeably faster on the CF card compared to a standard disk. So there is hope for booting from CF. It was just everything after that that was slow.

My next task is to install *nix to CF and find out if it can be tweaked to boot with all haste.

Compact Flash to SATA

My XP install has become fairly slow and I want to move away from my RAID 1 configuration because it is not offering me anything I actually need.

So I figured the easiest way to transition all of my data is to have a free disk, a disk with all my old content and another disk for my OS.

Solid state disks have been making their rounds and I thought it would be cool if there was a SATA to CF adapter that allowed be to boot of a generic solid state media.



Now I have an 8gb solid state disk for my OS.

I opened up Nero (as it is the only thing I know that has some sort of disk speed test) to find out what the performance was.

15MB/s as apposed to the ~65MB/s I was getting for my other media. I'm fairly sure that is only a read speed (the only thing that is important for buffering before burning to cd), but it is as expected. I'm hoping the speed of CF cards will pick up in the future.

I'm hoping the seek speed comes into play when the OS is finally loaded onto this thing, but it could take a fair amount of time to do the actual install.

I've got a game on tomorrow night, so installation will have to wait till at least Thursday.

Slightly excited by Trac installation

Every now and then I pop onto the byteclub twitter feed and was surprised to see that we are edging closer to a SCM being installed.

I'm not sure what we are going to put on there but I take it we are still going for the theory that if we build it, they will come.

In other news that should be announced on a blog, I've started work at Majitek. Currently just doing java webapp work which isn't far off what I was doing at Hyro. New faces, new processes. I feel like the take up is a little slow but I'll get there.

Blog finally backdated to 2006

Phew, I think it is all done (except for a few video posts). I have copied and pasted every post that dates back to March 2006. It would be kind of nice to get the posts from uni days, but I believe that is long gone.

It's kinda funny reading over the old posts and comments.
I've left some of the linking out because it was related to the old blogs.

Random thinking problem from irc

Seen this little beauty on irc today

Divide prices of items between two people in the most even way possible, so if they get a fridge for 100 bucks, tv for 250, and a couch for 400. ONe person would have to buy the fridge and tv, and the other would buy the couch. What would be the best way to sovlve this problem?

by "thefalling"
It sounds like it has come straight from some course work but it lead me to an interesting wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem
My response was to sort the costs starting with the highest price with one person, switch to the other person and keep adding until they have paid more, then switch back to the other person and continue.
I'm currently doing some reading to find out if there is a better way to do it and whether my method is actually correct.
My other suggestion was to work out all possible combinations and determine which comes out the closest. Obviously brute force could cause performance to go out the window, but since the suggested size of items to be included was small, it is _a_ solution.

I'm interested in anyone else's thoughts on it. I'll put up a reply to this if I find anything intriguing.

Getting around to the import

I've finally missed my old posts enough to import them.
Unfortunately the RSS import was close to useless. No problem, I'll enter them manually.
Fortunately, I mirrored my blog when tyler.byteclub.net was up, it just a matter of copy'ing and paste'ing.