white noise

Jul

16

MML 8

The annual four-day, computer gaming fest, MillionManLAN 8 has just wrapped up and it was another great event. These things seem to fly by faster and faster with each one I attend. Team Boom Tape had eight of us from Cincinnati in attendance and we were joined by some of the usual players for some tournaments. This time there were about 350 gamers in attendance. There have been past MML events with many more, but it was still about 2x a typical lanwar. As expected we saw a lot of familiar faces there. There was CFB Gaming who brought about 12 members from places ranging from New York to Tennessee. There was our friendly rival team TBC (Team Bok Choy) from Wisconsin and beyond. I also met new teams, like SOMAD from South Dakota who drove 13 hours to come to their first MML.

We rolled into Louisville about 12:30, signed in and set up, and got the Duct Tape Server online. Thursday is pretty laid back as far as formal events go since people arrive throughout the day. I did try my luck at the Wii Bowling tournament in the evening, but my ~165 didn’t make the top four scores for the finals. Nvidia and BFG had a booth set up showing off some huge monitors and even huger “Phobos” computers. Many of the stations were demoing their 3D technology on games like Left 4 Dead and Fear 2. The 3D gaming experience is really awesome – I can’t wait for prices on the 120Hz monitors to fall.

Friday started with the Team Fortress 2 tournament at noon. We got a first round bye, which is nice, but it skipped us past the map we were most prepared for. In the second round we played team SOMAD on the map Well, which is the same map that’s knocked us out of the competition three times before. This time was no different; we put up a long, hard fight, but lost 4-1. Then early evening was the first ever dodgeball tournament sponsored by Crucial Memory. I assembled a team and then realized we had one too many players and sat myself out. Our guys gave it a good go, but didn’t advance past the first match.

Feeling a little dejected we went into the late evening competition…Duct Tape Wars. We had our core team all back together – the team which started our run of greatness in 2006 – plus a couple newer members to help. We didn’t win the past two competitions so we felt we really had to make a comeback. In this year’s challenge we had about an hour and a half to build a structure to suspend a container over a couple bottles with CDs balanced on top. Then the container was loaded with poker chips until a CD was knocked off the bottles. The winner was the contraption holding the most chips before it collapses. Check out this video to see the action and our triumphant victory.

Saturday we played a lot more Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead. We made a last minute jump into the Left 4 Dead Tournament and got beat up in the first round pretty good. Reps from Nvidia and BFG did a presentation and Q&A; and gave out some schwag. Rock, Paper, Scissors was later that night. Jedi mind tricks weren’t working; I lost in the first round. Starting about midnight was the Texas Hold’em tournament. I wasn’t concentrating well and got knocked about half way through. Johnny Boom finished an impressive, but prize-less, 6th place.

We ran the annual Armagetron tournament in the morning, and as usual it was a battle between Team Boom Tape and Team Bok Choy. Gratch and Xomox played in the final head to head and Xomox took the title this year. A final few hours of gaming and leaching and before we knew it we were packing up at the last possible minute. By the time it was over I had logged over 24 hours on Team Fortress, over 16 on Left 4 Dead, and stuffed my hard drive with over 250GB.

Filed under Lanwar

Jun

26

King of Pop RIP

There’s no doubt that Thriller (the track and the video) encouraged my love of Halloween and zombies. Thriller was quite possibly the first cassette I ever owned. I remember making a copy from someone (ah, the days before RIAA suits) and listening to it constantly with my awesome new Walkman. I remember to listening to Mom’s records before that (Pink Floyd and Foreigner most of the time), but getting the walkman was really the start of building my own musical collection. I was in sixth grade then – young enough to enjoy pop music unabashedly. Adolescence would bring new preferences. But in ’82 if I wasn’t at the arcade dropping quarters into Pac-Man or Galaga, I probably had headphones on and more than likely Thriller was running over the play head.

I may not listen to that music a lot anymore, but it’s refreshing to hear Michael pop up from time to time. I’ll be damned is this wasn’t one of the best feel good scenes I’ve seen in years:

Filed under Music

Jun

18

SSSC

Yesterday brought the debut release from Street Sweeper Social Club – the new band featuring Boots Riley (The Coup) and Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine).

The sound of SSSC is almost exactly what you’d expect from mashing up Boots and Morello – politically infused rap grooves with heavy guitar riffs and experimental solos all leading up to choruses meant to be sung loudly. Some criticize Morello for always sounding the same (from Rage, to The Nightwatchman, to SSSC), but that’s the nature of having a signature sound. There’s actually a lot of variety to what he does, but it’s always unmistakably him. As for Boots, he brings a great presence to the band – a little more chill than Zack de la Rocha, but also just as explosive. To put it simply, if you like Rage you will almost certainly love SSSC (or if not, don’t expect to be won over).

We saw SSSC open for NIN last month and even though we missed a few of their songs I was completely impressed. The band was crazy tight. Boots strutted and danced while he threw down. And Morello? That guy is a magician. He’s got blazing fret work. He DJ scratches over the pickups. But it was when he soloed with his face that we lost it. Here’s a video someone shot from the pit of the show we saw:

Filed under Music

Jun

15

Trimming up the compound

We spent a crazy amount of time getting the deck and yard in shape this weekend. Pruning the trees and bushes always starts out enjoyable – especially when I get to play Mr Miyagi on the Japanese Maples. But after 15 hours over two days, the fun is long gone.

Filed under General News

Jun

10

Clifty Falls

Just had a great weekend of camping in southern Indiana with Dave, Christian, and Nigel. The weather was absolutely perfect – very warm days with a little breeze and nice chilly nights – with none of the downpours that we usually get.

We did a 5+ hour hike on Saturday in the 80 degree weather. It started with a pretty treacherous climb down a steep muddy hill. From there, the hike turned wet and rocky as we followed a creek until we eventually got up to a set of waterfalls. After the falls we had to wind our way back up the cliffs and way back around the creek on high ground.

Back at camp we relaxed with games and beers and an awesome meal of steaks, brats, potatoes, peppers, and of course, s’mores. I think as we get older the camp food we eat is about the same, but we use better ingredients (gourmet meats and cheeses, etc).

Filed under Vacations

Jun

04

NINJA (Partying like it was 1991)

Saturday night, D and I zipped over to Indy to catch one of the few Midwest stops of the NINJA tour. Although we’ve see Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction many times before, we haven’t seen them together since the first Lollapalooza tour in ’91. This tour is huge in so many ways. It’s the first time the original Jane’s lineup has been together since 91. It’s also the first time we’re seeing Tom Morello’s new band, Street Sweeper Social Club. But most of all, it’s Trent Reznor’s goodbye tour. Not that there won’t be any new Nails music ever again. But he’s recently engaged and ready to invest in other parts of life…stuff you can’t do in a tour bus.

Street Sweeper and Jane’s put on amazing sets each propelled by their guitar legends and strong front men. Morello and Navarro shredded solos song after song. Tom takes top honors though with playing one solo with his face and another using only the guitar TRS plug and a wah-wah pedal. He was kindly rewarded with 20,000 people singing Happy Birthday to him. But both of these acts were bookends to the main event…the last NIN show I may ever see.

The first time I saw NIN was in ’91 in Columbus. I went alone, got right up to the stage, and moshed to survive while Trent hovered over us. Over 18 years later I was on the other end of the spectrum – out in the lawn, with a bunch of friends – for this final show. In many ways it wasn’t the best Nails show I’ve seen, but in more ways it was the perfect one.

True, a lot of my favorites didn’t make it into the set list. I would have loved to see “Burn” or “Perfect Drug” once more. In fact, the only song from PHM was “Head Like a Hole”. But I have seen those performed before and it gave time for songs I haven’t seen. With six songs in the set list, the Indy show seemed centered on The Downward Spiral. But every album was touched (three each from Broken, Year Zero, and The Slip and one from Fragile and With Teeth). Metal and The Fragile were definitely down tempo highlights for me – I really gained a new love for both of those songs. And there were so many great manic moments (March, Gave Up, Hand that Feeds, Wish, and of course HLAH).

The weather was mild and sunny all day. As concert time approached, heavy clouds rolled in. Just as the sun began to slip away, the rain began to fall and tornado sirens could faintly be heard during Metal – as if some kind of feedback. The rain subsided for a bit then came back during The Fragile. The rain’s intensity built with the song as Trent screamed “I won’t let you fall apart”. Everyone in the lawn got soaked while they kept a watchful eye on the clouds, but I didn’t see anyone leave. Swirling clouds, rain, lightning in darkening skies continued into The Downward Spiral…it was perfect.

Into the final stretch of Mr Self Destruct, Physical, and HLAH the storm had past. Reportedly, Trent had planned to finish their set with HLAH, but the energy tonight was unique, which he commented on, and finished with Hurt. Lighters and cell phones blazed as the masses swayed. Sure it’s a rock concert clique, but it’ll be a goodbye I won’t forget.

NIN concerts:

Sin Tour 1991/01/28 Columbus, OH
Lollapalooza 1991/08/03 Chicago, IL
Further Down The Spiral Tour 1994/11/13 Columbus, OH
With Teeth Summer Tour 2006/07/03 Noblesville (Indy), IN
Wave Goodbye Tour 2009/05/30 Noblesville (Indy), IN

Filed under Music

May

30

Good storytelling is a fading red pupil

I was really looking forward to seeing the latest film in the Terminator series, Terminator Salvation. Dating back to ’84, the first film, and the second in ’91, put lasting stamps on sci-fi history with a memorable take on the theme of machine over man. The third movie 6 years ago, didn’t do much to extend the lore, but I cut it some slack and enjoyed more than many other viewers. Now, 25 years later, we’re taken (in almost real elapsed time) into the future to see John Connor fighting his war against the machines. This is what all the other movies were leading up to – what Skynet and the terminators were trying to prevent.

Unfortunately, Salvation isn’t really about John Connor or his war. It’s more about some new character, played by Sam Worthington, who is brought into the future (no spoilers). Worthington is a surprising bright spot acting-wise, but I didn’t want to see a movie about him because it doesn’t really connect to anything we’ve seen before. I was hoping to see a movie showing Connor’s rise into leadership of the Resistance, rallying survivors to fight the machines, but this movie never delivers. Instead, we get a war led by some government coalition in hiding, which just happens to be getting help from Conner. This movie fits into the correct timeline, but just seems to be telling the less interesting tale.

It’s ironic then that this movie’s at it’s best early on, when it’s not about Connor at all. Once Worthington’s character meets up with Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) in post apocalyptic LA, the movie hums along nicely. As far as action goes, there’s plenty here and it’s shot well enough to make you not regret the money you spent on tickets. The sound effects are thunderous and menacing robots large (no, huge) and small might beat the other summer robot movie at their own game. As the movie spirals along it gradually loses personality. Christian Bale as Connor, doesn’t help. His portrayal is so one-dimensional that he’s barely different then the cybernetics he’s fighting.

Filed under Movies

May

21

Computer Build 09: Part 13 (it’s a wrap!)

This past weekend I put the finishing touches on the big red box. Here’s a rundown of all the last projects in pics.

Added handles. These are standard drawer handles from Lowes.

Added soft grips to feet. The original feet were clear acrylic – nice looking, but hard and smooth. These pads add some grip and may quiet things a bit.

Created green board cover. Remember how the wireless network card had a green circuit board? I made this cover from a piece of acrylic, some black mesh, and an old ISA slot cover.

Using the same mesh I covered the top of the front panel bay device just to clean up the appearance.

Added third hard drive. Brought one more drive over from my old machine. This one sits behind the front 120mm fan.

Filed under Comp hardware / mods

May

20

Computer Build 09: Part 12

So what’s to be made of all those numbers in the previous post? What kind of difference has all that tuning made to performance? Let’s take a look.

3Dmark06

This is the previous gen benchmark from Futuremark and is still useful for comparing against older DX9 systems. Here I could compare my stock and overclocked scores from the new I7 machine to my previous best score from my old 939 system (AMD X2 4400+ OC’d to 2.6, 7900GT OC).

3Dmark Vantage

Vantage is the latest benchmark from Futuremark and it puts a good test on the graphics system (including DX10 features) and the CPU (including physics processing). Incidentally, during the overclocked run the CPU temp peaked at 76°C and the GPU hit 65°C.

Crysis

Since it was released in Nov ’07 the game has been making graphics cards cry uncle. Using the CryEngine 2 engine it takes advantage of the latest DX10 features and makes extensive use of physics processing. The game includes a built-in benchmarking utility which makes for reproducible test runs. The temperatures reached in the overclocked configuration were 65°C on the GPU in the graphics test and 54°C on the CPU in the CPU test. Both tests were run with 64bit high quality settings, 1920×1080, and 2x anti-aliasing.

Team Fortress 2

TF2 is a fairly low demanding game graphics-wise, but one I play a lot. This benchmark (as well as for the other games) was averaged from multiple runs of typical gameplay at max quality settings.

Left 4 Dead

L4D is one of Steam’s newest game set in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. The number of on screen models and sophisticated physics and AI engine make the game fairly demanding on the highest quality settings (1920×1080, 4x anti-aliasing, 4x filtering, high quality)

UT3

Unreal has been a staple of fast-paced FPS for years. UT3 is a couple years old now, but still provides a decent graphics test with high settings (1920×1080, max quality).

Audio Encoding

For this test I ripped an audio CD to mp3 (13 tracks, 256kbps, CBR, Lame encoder).

Video Encoding

For this test I converted a 40MB flv video to mp4 H.264.

WinZip

Here I compressed 223MB (17 files) into a new zip archive.

In summary, while the synthetic benchmarks show sizable gains from overclocking, most games already run so smooth on this platform that there is only a relatively small difference in frames per second. The improvement tends to be about 10% which is in line with the overclocking on the graphics card. The big boost I made to the CPU simply doesn’t factor into in-game performance since there is already ample processing power. In comparison, the encoding and compression tasks that rely on the CPU showed a nice 20-30% performance bump.

Filed under Comp hardware / mods

May

13

Computer Build 09: Part 11

With the hardware side of my build nearing the end, I’ve been working on system tweaking and overclocking. The new I7 platform has a lot of new overclocking facets to it over the AMD architecture that I was used to. I7 overclocking revolves around the base clock frequency (Bclock) a pretty close analog to the Front-Side Bus speed of the old days. Changing the Bclock affects the speed of the CPU, the L3 cache, the on-chip memory controller, and the RAM and each one of those is further tailored by a multiplier. Another new player is the Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) which is like the HyperTransport that AMD has had for years – in lieu of a Front-Side Bus, the QPI connects the CPU to the motherboard chipset. Generally the QPI has plenty of bandwidth so you can keep it scaled back a bit as you crank up the CPU and memory. And of course with overclocking comes voltage tweaks to feed the power that’s necessary.

The bios on my new machine gives access to tweak all these thing and is laid out very well. It also supports storing overclock settings to different profiles to make it easy to switch around and compare. Here’s the screen that deals will the clocks and multipliers (with the default settings). Besides this there is another screen for changing voltages and another for RAM timings.

In my first tweak session, I initially pushed things too fast without the necessary bump in voltage and it wouldn’t post. After edging some voltages up (Vcore and VTT) and the speed (Bclock) back down I starting having more success. After several more trials over a couple weeks I got things dialed in pretty well, while not raising the voltages (and the temps) too far. Currently I’ve raised the CPU up around 43% to 3.8GHz. That’s over a full gHz over the stock speed (for free!) so I’m pretty pleased. I have speed stepping still on so it doesn’t run at that speed full-time, though. I also have Intel’s Turbo feature enabled which means at times one core may jump up to about 4Ghz!

Param	Default	OC	increase
CPU (GHz)	2.66	3.8	43%
Bclock (Mhz)	133	190	43%
V_core	1.17	1.31	+140mV
V_TT	1.15	1.29	+140mV
V_IOH	1.10	1.22	+120mV
QPI (MHz)	2400	3425	43%
DDR3	1066	1524 (7 7 7 16 1T)	43%
CPU Temp (typ C)	32	44	+12
Mobo NB (IOH) Temp (typ C)	39	42	+3
Mobo SB (ICH) Temp (typ C)	28	30	+2

I also cranked the graphics card up just a bit. My GTX260 is already EVGA’s factory overclocked model, so I didn’t want to push it too much further, but with decent cooling in my case I knew I could get by with a little.

Param	Default	OC	increase
Core	626	675	8% (17% over standard gtx260)
Shader	1349	1455	8%
Memory	2106	2400	14%
GPU Temp (idle/max C)	37/65	40/70	+3/+5

Filed under Comp hardware / mods

white noise

Jul

16

MML 8

Jun

26

King of Pop RIP

Jun

18

SSSC

Jun

15

Trimming up the compound

Jun

10

Clifty Falls

Jun

04

NINJA (Partying like it was 1991)

May

30

Good storytelling is a fading red pupil

May

21

Computer Build 09: Part 13 (it’s a wrap!)