sathyabhat
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from IndianVideoGamer:

Ain't this true. heh

Azeem Banatwalla on the joys of building the ultimate gaming PC, and the ridicule that comes with it.

via sathyabhat’s blurblog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/IVG/~3/PIHdT83vVi4/20086

sathyabhat
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from The Tom Kyte Blog:

This is a question I get on asktom frequently – what are the things I need to know, what do I have to do to become expert, where is the list of key things I need to do with regards to Oracle. It is a hard sounding question that has an easy answer.

If you are still wet behind the ears – or even just damp – then the definitive place to start is the Oracle Server Concepts Guide. Not only is this free – but it is your guide to understanding how the database works. If you understand something – you can use that thing. If you don’t, well, simply put – you won’t be able to effectively use it. Getting a solid knowledge of how a transaction is done, what locking and concurrency controls are and how they work, how the database makes the data durable on disk (redo, undo management) – all of it is key to effectively using the database.

via sathyabhat’s blurblog. More at http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-keys-to-oracle.html

Dear Customer,

We are writing to let you know that we are discontinuing the current TweetBackup service.

Your TweetBackup account will continue to back up for the next 30 days, until June 13th. Access to the service, and your data, will be disabled on June 28th. You will have the full 45 days to export any data. Please visit our Tweetbackup service shutdown FAQs answers to common questions, or you can also contact support directly with your questions.

Yeah, let me just quote from their blog when they announced their free service:

If you sign up during this time period, you get unlimited storage, for free. You get an account that is not a free trial, not free for a limited time, free forever.

Free forever, eh? Right. This is what annoys the fuck out of me. Why in the world do you promise shit you you can’t keep? Why the fuck do you have to sugarcoat and provide false promises? All in the name of “gaining traction”.

These services are driving me up the wall with their bait and switch tactics. Bait users with their free tactics, gain “traction” and then switch over to paid service or sell out to big cos (“yay, exit!!!!11″) and then dump users, early adopters and others who promoted their services for free, leaving them in the lurch.

STOP. FUCKING. DOING THIS. Argh. I’ve lost count the number of times and the time I’ve had to spend in moving shit out of the services.

Don’t have a business model? Don’t launch. Don’t assume giving things for free will work out. It fucking won’t. Unless you’ve bazillions in reserve.

sathyabhat
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from The Daily WTF:

LOL.

“Someone FINALLY got it right!!” Farz wrote, “In my native language, we don’t have translations for seven months out of the year. Way to go Windows Live!!”

“I know Dell is supposed to be going private, but I didn’t know that it would be up to me to keep them afloat!” writes James Helms.

Ben N. sent in the following screenshot whilst shopping online. I bet some pun minded categorizer at Amazon thought that having a BOLD cup of coffee sounded REALLY good at the time.

“Developer’s excuse for screwing up #439: Sorry, I was eating a milky way, so I forgot to fix any issues with the feed.” wrote Chris M.

Wilt writes, “I know the budget is tight, But even if it wasn’t, I don’t think I could justify NVIDIA at that price.”

“I’m fine that Thirstin Howl’s track Spit Boxer isn’t on Spotify,” writes Nick, “but their suggestion wasn’t quite what I was expecting.”

“Things aren’t looking so good for being able to read ‘Fine Cooking’ on my iPad,” wrote Jeff.

[Advertisement] Make your team a DevOps team with BuildMaster. Pairing an easy-to-use web UI with a free base platform, BuildMaster gets you started in minutes. See how Allrecipes.com and others use BuildMaster to automate their software delivery.

via sathyabhat’s blurblog http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Where-I-Come-From,-We-Dont-Need-July.aspx

Summary of “What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy?”

• When Game Dev Tycoon (a Game Development Simulation Game) was released, its developer released a cracked version on BitTorrent simultaneously.
• After a certain point in the game, the cracked version would prevent the player from generating simulated revenue due to simulated piracy.
• Many comments of people using the cracked version arrived on forums asking why their game would not take off and how to get rid of simulated piracy in the game.
• Analysis of the usage shows that 214 genuine version where used/purchased against 3104 cracked version (93.6%)

Oh, the irony. And the sheer brilliance of the game devs. Check the full story for some hilarious responses from the pirates.

Kind of dumbfounded at Dell launching an Alienware X51 with Ubuntu http://alienware.com/ubuntu/ Not sure what’s Dell thinking – there aren’t any great native AAA games available, can’t imagine this would make studios to make Linux ports either

- Me, on app.net

Mikhail echoed his thoughts on this as well

As much as some people want it, I don’t see AAA gaming shifting out of windows anytime soon. Even if Valve manages to do something it might kill stuff on win8 but tons of people use 7 so they are fine?

Even on GOG, most games are windows only. Unless the next windows has something worse than win 8 for other apps and games , i dont see it happening.

I honestly don’t get what Dell is aiming for here. I wonder if some dude at Dell heard that gaming on Ubuntu is on the rise, and thought this would be a good way to ride the wave and get some PR. Incidentally, the same thought is currently the top most comment on Hacker News.

This seems like the sort of thing where they don’t really care whether they sell any or not. Gaming on Ubuntu is a hot blog topic right now, so they took an existing product and put Ubuntu on it. Probably cost a couple thousand to do all the paperwork surrounding a new SKU, and they’ll probably sell enough of these to make cover that. Boom, Free marketing and some cred with the indie gaming & Linux community. And if Steam on Linux does take off, they’ve already got their foot in the door.

Call me a cynic, but this is exactly what it sounds like. Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely a (niche) market for pre-built, certified for Linux, desktops/laptops(and System76, for example)… Dell’s Project Sputnik makes sense. Latitude/Precision series of Linux laptops makes sense. Heck even the Chromebooks make sense, but right now, the X51 with Ubuntu is just stupid.

Why? I’ll go back to a rant I had stored when Steam for Linux was announced

The success of Linux Gaming doesn’t depend on Steam, it depends on the game devs. Steam for Mac was here like like when? 3 years ago? There are hardly 500 games, most of them indie. The only recent high-profile game that I know is there for the Mac is Diablo III.

Indie games are great, God bless devs for struggling and slogging their asses, but ultimately AAA games is what drives the industry.

I’ll repeat what I said when Steam for Linux and Steam for Mac was announced: Steam is a platform. Build a new bus stand on a deserted place with no buses, you won’t get hundreds of people at the bus stand.

Is it great that Steam has arrived? Sure. Does it mean that “age of Linux gaming” is coming? No. All we have right now is one functioning SteamWorks game. Even if we consider all of Valve’s games, that’s not more than 10.

And Mac’s market share is roughly what, 10x the Linux desktop base? Hell, even on the X51′s highlights page you have this

With over 25 gaming titles available and more being added, users can access Steam For Linux to play online games, including your favorite titles like Team Fortress 2 and Serious Sam 3.

I mean really, really? Hell I’m bloody sure even the NextBox/PS4 will have more launch titles than this(not exclusives, mind you – but that’s a different story altogether). Even if there aren’t any launch titles, you can be guaran-damn-teed (excuse the WWE slang) that devs will come out with games for the the X360/PS3/PS4/NextBox.

I don’t see any such thing happening on the Linux desktop gaming side. By now, I’m pretty sure whoever’s reading this, are yelling SteamBox, SteamBox. Considering that it still officially doesn’t exist, and a prototype that was shown at CES was announced as lolucrazy-that-aint-steambox by Valve, that pretty much tosses that out of the factor. Even if introduced, I won’t be surprised if it’s a custom-closed-system, much like today’s console.

And soon enough, HP’s diagnostics started informing me that my system fan’s dead during bootup. To figure out which one’s the dead one, I dismantled the Envy(I was out of warranty anyway) and switched on the laptop – and was kinda surprised that the laptop was still able to run at all.

Opened my Envy again to see which fan has failed. The top left doesn’t rotate. Cc @jayesh @rushvora @ambar_hitman twitter.com/SathyaBhat/sta…

— Sathya (@SathyaBhat) November 29, 2012

And this was really torturing my system

I’m really, really torturing my Envy with the broken main system fan. Temps while playing Torchlight 2 i.imgur.com/NguB4AP.png

— Sathya (@SathyaBhat) February 2, 2013

@sathyabhat I’m surprised the temps didn’t cross 100C with a broken fan. :O

— Rushabh Vora (@rushvora) February 2, 2013

@rushvora they did. When that happens, system shuts down :P

— Sathya (@SathyaBhat) February 2, 2013

So now, while I experimenting with switching off/on to see if I can “jump” start the fan, I ended up screwing up my Windows 8 install – and ended up with a BSOD( bad_system_config_info) boot loop. No amount of reboots could help and I was stuck there. Also, thanks to the new “enhancements” F8-mashing would not result in the start up menu being shown up.

I had to resort to switching off in middle of a boot process to bring up the start up menu so that I could try our Windows 8′s Reset/Refresh. Unfortunately, both Reset and Refresh failed for some reason. I tried to refresh but somehow my custom recovery image got wiped out.. with no backup of it. Reset failed to work as well and I was back to status quo – BSOD Boot Loop.

Generally I keep a bootable Live USB with me, but this time I didn’t have that either, neither did I have any bootable DVDs. So my situation now:

• Windows is stuck on a BSOD boot loop
• No bootable USB or DVDs present
• No other laptops/desktops available except……
• …. Except for the Cr48.

Yep, the Cr48 turned to be my savior. So, the Cr48 comes with ChromeOS. With the developer switch turned on, however, you get to do things. Like get access to a real shell. or install a distro like Ubuntu. I didn’t want to install Ubuntu on it, so I tried to gain access shell.

Booting into Cr48 after enabling the developer mode, I found that hitting Ctrl+Alt+T brought up a shell. Within Chrome, as a tab(!). However, this was the crosh shell,which is limited. I found out that typing in “shell” gives you access to bash & full range of *nix utilities. So with that, I first grabbed Linux Mint iso using wget. With the ISO downloaded, I made the USB bootable using dd.

dd if=/path/to/mint.iso of=/dev/sdb

Now, I had a bootable USB. Next step, I used the bootable USB to boot into Linux Mint on my Envy. So now, my Envy is alive. So how do I get this to boot/reinstall Windows? I had Windows 7 ISO, I have Linux Mint & can install VirtualBox. So yup – that’s what I did.

• Installed VirtualBox
• Created a new VM, installed Windows 7 to the VM
• Booted in to the Windows 7 VM.
• Now in the Windows 7 VM, I used the Windows 8 upgrade tool to download Windows 8 setup & made a bootable USB(I had another USB key, thankfully!)

With a Windows 8 live USB finally available, I managed to do a clean install and finally revive the Envy.

Amongst others, he’s created/led

• A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC.
• A new ASN1 compiler generating small and efficient C code.
• A PC emulator in Javascript: how much time takes your browser to boot Linux ?
• 2700 billion decimal digits of Pi computed with a desktop computer.
• Analog and Digital TV (DVB-T) signal generation by displaying an image on a PC display.
• QEMU is a generic machine emulator and virtualizer.
• FFMPEG, the Open Source Multimedia System. I launched this project in year 2000 and led it during several years.
• TCC is a tiny but complete ISOC99 C compiler which enables you to use C as scripting language. TCC has its roots in the OTCC project. The TCCBOOT boot loader demonstrate the speed of TCC by compiling and launching a Linux kernel in less than 15 seconds.
• QEmacs (for Quick Emacs) is an emacs clone I began to learn Unicode rendering algorithms, text buffers manipulation and XML/HTML/CSS parsing.
• OTCC is a very small self-compiling compiler for a subset of C I wrote to win the 2001 edition of the International Obfuscated C Contest.
• TinyGL: a Small, Free and Fast Subset of OpenGL.
• An online Scientific Web Calculator.
• Pi formulas, algorithms and computations.
• A tiny C program to print the biggest known prime number.

Mind Boggling. Read the HN comments for more.

And since the RP was working fine, including the GPU drivers which I had to install in Windows 7 compatibility mode, I decided to complete the upgrade. Now my Windows 7 install is a culmination of several years of crap, including lots and lots of software, context menu entries, personalized superbar and to add to the mix, some exotic software  Here’s what I had installed/present on Windows 7

• VS 2010 Web Dev edition Express(for nuGet) & VS 2012 Express for Windows Desktop
• SQL Server 2008
• SQL Server 2005 Compact edition(I think for Windows Live Photo gallery?)
• Actual Multiple Monitors ( I have an extended desktop setup, Actual Multiple Monitors makes multiple monitors usable and less frustrating on Windows 7)
• WinSplit Revolution
• Connectify(when I’m in my hometown, there’s no wireless router there, so the laptop becomes my adhoc Wifi router)
• Puty, WinSCP
• Git, Github & Git Extensions(including GitExtensions’ context menu entries)
• Mercurial & Kiln
• Media players like xbmc, Media Player Classic: Home Cinema & VLC
• SublimeText 2
• IrfanView
• foobar 2000 (including some plugins – such as this plugin which makes it possible to control foobar from anywhere)
• Bunch of scheduled tasks which run SyncToy & GameSaveManager and ensure I have automated daily backups
• Gaming platforms & tools like Steam, Origin, Raptr and loads of games
• Dropbox
• Logitech Gaming Software to manage my Logitech G400 mouse bindings & DPI settings
• ProcrastiTracker (I’d been running ProcrastiTracker side-by-side with Wakoopa, which unfortunately was killed quite some time ago)
• Some extra tools I wrote to make my life easy, esp when editing stuff on Stack Exchange
• Networx
• Teracopy
• SystemMechanic

And these are just some apps that I use regularly – there’s loads of more such apps that I won’t get into details right now.

Much like a lot of people, I grabbed the Windows 8 upgrade assistant, and left it overnight to complete the download. The Upgrade assistant has a funny stupid behaviour where if you quit the upgrade assistant before you hit the pause button, it conveniently decides to delete whatever it’s downloaded till that point.

So if you’ve grabbed 99.9% of the file and if you quit the assistant before you hit the Pause button – well then shit, all that download is gone. So moral of the story: Pause before you quit.

That hiccup aside, I left the Upgrade assistant overnight to complete the download. Next morning, I started the upgrade and left for work. Back from work, I see that Windows 8 is ready for me, asking me for some details (“which colour do you want?”) and prompted me to create an account(though I already had an account from the Windows 7 install). Thankfully, it proceeded to merge things with the existing account.

So how did my system look after the upgrade? Amazingly, for all the crap I had on my system, the upgrade went exceedingly well. No broken programs, no broken links, for that matter all my scheduled tasks, context menu entries, startup items, superbar entries all were preserved.

What was broken, however, was my multi-monitor setup. My HP envy has a hybrid IGP-discrete GPU setup. The IGP is an Intel HD graphics thing, while the discrete GPU is an AMD Radeon Mobility 5650.

Post Windows 8 upgrade, I noticed that both the IGP as well as the GPU had been using Microsoft’s built-in drivers. While IGP drivers were working fine, the GPU drivers were borked and it was not being detected.

I tried to use the previous Windows 7 drivers, running them under Windows 7 compatibility mode, but the install would silently fail. Taking a look at the logs, I see that the install failed because the installer kept throwing ACCESS_VIOLATION errors in the MFC dlls. With a little rubber-duck debugging help from Root Access, some VS 2005 runtime uninstalls, and a hotfix install I managed to get the install running. The drivers still managed to fail installation – the drivers were dated back to 2010 and Windows refused to install the older drivers.

Finally after a lot of wrangling around, I downloaded AMD’s beta drivers(which don’t seem to have the check for “supported chipsets”, as opposed to the stable drivers and managed to get it installed. (thanks to Romit for the tip).

Now I do have my extended desktop running, but being the beta drivers that they are, I’ve run into several driver crashes(thankfully since Vista or so, GPU driver crash no longer brings about a BSOD). And worst of all, my system believes there are 3 monitors

This is a pain because I use Actual Multiple Monitors which adds 1-click move to next monitor and with the third “phantom” monitor, the move to next monitor workflow goes for a toss.

From a software point of view, Raptr reports that they have disabled in-game and tracking features. AMD’s beta drivers mean that the switchable graphics doesn’t work. I don’t think I’ve run into other problems

Thoughts on Windows 8

Still too early to judge Windows 8 for now – I do like the Modern UI & how Microsoft has conceptualized it, but ultimately, Modern UI apps are bit too restrictive for my taste, especially when I have multiple programs running simultaneously  and each app dedicated it’s own space on my monitor(via WinSplitRevolution) – the Modern UI doesn’t allow for this and I keep having to go back to desktop mode more often than not.

As for Modern UI apps, I haven’t tried too many. I like the People hub/app. Youtube RT is pretty nifty, esp for having it on the small screen, with a twitter or the messaging app in the snapped view. Things like this is where Modern UI really shines.

If you’ve been wondering whether or not to upgrade, I’d urge you to consider the upgrade. For most people, Modern UI works well, and though the Start Screen is something totally different, you’ll come up to speed with it in no time.

For powerusers, Win+C & Win+X and the desktop mode should keep you entertained.

(oh, before I forget, #scumbagHP had decided that all laptops sold prior to October 1, 2011 aren’t going to get driver updates for Windows 8. Sadly mine falls into that category. While I took that risk, i’d urge you to not do so, for it might lead to frustration).

meanwhile, HP says they won’t provide Win 8 drivers for laptops sold before Oct 2011.u.sbhat.me/VBtDr9 cc @theromit

— Sathya (@SathyaBhat) November 7, 2012

“prior to October 1st , 2011, HP has not tested or developed drivers.upgrade of your computer may be difficult or impossible.” #scumbagHP

— Sathya (@SathyaBhat) November 7, 2012

Along with lots of bug fixes, the patch brings in two new types of Gameplay events – the Infernal Machine and Monster Power.

tl;dr version:

• Monster Power increases monster health difficulty & health from 100% to OMFG-are-you-nuts!?!? levels
• Infernal Machine brings in not just one, but two Bosses.

If Ghom wasn’t bad enough – I shudder at the thought of going against Rakanoth and Ghom simultaneously. I have no freakin’ idea how the Monk’s going to cope up with Ghom’s gas attack and Rakanoth’s shielding .

It’ll take some time before I can even think of Infernal machine – considering that the components required for building Infernal Machine are dropped only in Inferno .

Monster Power, on the other hand – gotta check it out. Looks fairly balanced, only after trying it out can say how it feels like.