The LambCutlet Disorganisation

My maternal grandmother, 85 years of age, died in the early hours of August 24th, 2007. She parted us peacefully in her sleep with family by her bedside after a final two week long, strong and dignified fight; having had many years of gradually deteriorating health.

As a survivor of the Warlord Era of the then newly founded Republic of China, the Chinese Nationalist-Communist Civil War, Communist Collectivisation, numerous episodes of famine and lastly fleeing as refugees to the safe haven of British Hong Kong with my late maternal grandfather and then young children. She was the immovable rock to my maternal family and is survived by her son, my uncle; eldest daughter, my aunt; one grandson, myself; seven granddaughters and six great-grandchildren.

Nick Broomfield’s “Ghosts (鬼佬)” premièred on More4 a week or so ago and is about the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster which occurred back in 5th of February of 2004 (15th day of the 1st month by the Chinese calendar, so it was also “Little New Year”, that is: 元宵節 (Lantern Festival)) where 23 immigrant Chinese cockle pickers drowned, 20 of whom were from my late mother’s home province of 福建 (Fujian).

The film tells the story of 林愛琴 (Lin Aiqin), herself also from 福建 (Fujian), as she travelled for 6 months from (as mother would put it ever so eloquently in Cantonese) the “poor as fuck” home village across land and sea, finally arriving in ye olde Blighty.

Already available on DVD, our crazy Swedish friends have already “digitised” it, complete with English subtitles for those that can’t want for a shiny silver DVD to land through the letter box. Here’s a snippet by way of the official trailer and interview with families of the Morecambe Bay victims:

I’ve yet to watch the full film myself, though I have to say it’s curious the thoughts and emotions it has evoked already… particularly clear is my mother telling me the story where she had to literally “swim the last mile” to 香港 (Hong Kong) after being ship-wrecked near the coast (where luckily the Colonial Government of 香港 (Hong Kong) had the wisdom to have an “open door” policy regarding refugees and oversaw an immigrant driven population increase from 600,000 to 3,000,000 between 1945 and 1960), fleeing the Communists and re-uniting with family whom had already landed in 香港 (Hong Kong) a few years prior.

It is by pure fluke of history that I’m here with multiple-citizenship that allows me to live more or less anywhere (worth living in) I choose… so why should accident of birth deny anyone else that right? Some of these people have saddled themselves with the equivalent (on Western wages) of €1,000,000 worth of debt, travel half-way round the world, for the promise of a better life for them and their families… all for what?

Sometimes a single image says it best:

Most users ever online was 8680 on 19 Mar 2007 01:28:47

Perhaps there was some wisdom in Bertie feeding the server some honey in trying to make it go faster? ;) Sometime we just have to think on our feet. :D

As much as I like Microsoft’s recently released Windows Vista as an improvement over Windows XP (though ironically, “vista” means “chicken” in Latvian :P) and using it right now (the pre-release Release Candidate 2 version, having registered for the Community Preview Program back in 2006), it has chronically pissed me off that even though the current exchange rate between the mighty Pound Sterling and worthless American Dollar is 1-to-1.95, the historic “1-to-1” rate for electronics and software compared to the States is still alive and well… thus sparking the following petition by Paul Milne to pressure the Right Honourable Tony Blair, to pressure Microsoft:

There is a huge difference in the price that people in the US and the UK are paying for Windows Vista the new Microsoft Operating System. As an example of this, in the UK a full copy of Vista Ultimate would cost you £350, in the US it would cost you £195. The US version of Vista is exactly the same as the UK version. There is no difference. Therefore I can see no reason for there to be such a huge difference in prices between the UK and the US other than Microsofts belief that the UK customers will pay more than their US counterparts. I ask people to sign this petition in the hope that the Prime Minister will bring pressure to bear on Microsoft over their pricing as it is my belief they are simply overcharging the people of the UK and therefore are ripping us off.

Indeed, this over charging isn’t just endemic within Blighty, as it has also infected our EuroDisneyLand counterparts on the mainland European Union with France and Germany paying an even more rip-off-tastic €550 (£370)! Curiously, in Japan, a full retail copy of Windows Vista Ultimate is an apparently eye-watering ¥47,500… till you realise that translates to £200 (€300), more or less exactly the same price as those in America. So what the fucking fuck is going on? Europe (and apparently Oceania) have to subsidise the cost of Windows for America and Japan? Kill two birds with one stone and give both Mr. Blair and Mr. Gates a good kick up the backside by signing the petition (assuming you are a citizen of her Majesty Lizzy Windsor, naturally).

Woowee… everyone’s favourite cut of spring lamb served so rare it still goes “baaah!” with a side-dish of my ramblings is back! However it wasn’t with the redesigned relaunch as I’d wish due to the fact I’ve been rather busy with everything else in this so called life.

Still, today is the domain’s 6th birthday, which coincidently is another Sunday just as it was on the 7th of January, 2001 (fancy that!) and figured it was a good time to bring the site back online anyway. Also, triple thanks with crème fraîche on top to those that donated some much appreciated cash to assist with the server purchase and move!

For those that did donate and your name isn’t linkified yet want it to be, just forward me that PayPal invoice of yours with the destination link you want and I’ll get it sorted out as soon as possible. The irony that also didn’t pass me whilst the site was down were my Google AdSense earnings, which turned out to be the highest they’ve ever been. So much for targeted contextual advertising on this blog and my extensive gallery of everything, which within my “Offline indefinately” post, I said:

[…] my “World Domination 2005” set which covers my travels last year from Blighty to Reykjavik and southern Iceland; British Columbia, Canada at Vancouver and Victoria; Hawaii; down-under in Brisbane, Melbourne and Northern Territory; Singapore and to date as far as 香港 (Hong Kong)

You boys and girls will still have to keep yourselves assumed with what’s there, as whilst I’ve decided against deleting the whole fucking lot, the photographs from 中國大陸雲南省 (Yunnan Province, Mainland China); 澳門 (Macau); دبي (Dubai), الإمارات العربيّة المتّحدة (United Arab Emirates); Berlin, Deutschland; Wien, Österreich and lastly Frankfurt am Main, Deutschland will be due sometime in 2007. :D

I think I need a new hobby, preferably one that keeps me as far away as possible from a computer. Having already had the laptop hard-disk go kaputt back in October last year which then cost the best part of £750 to recover the data, Lady Luck appears to have a vendetta against me as the 400 GB hard-disk (in an external enclosure) I used for archiving has also gone south.

Considering there was some 6 to 7 years worth of data on there, I’m still rather numb from shell shock and now in the situation that my laptop is without access to basic backup facilities. Having had a gander on the Internet, even Netgear’s low-end NAS by the way of the toaster shaped SC101 plus a couple of 400 GB hard-disks so I could get a fault-tolerant mirror would set me back £300.

However, Netgear’s SC101 isn’t exactly a great performer which shifting large files so what I’d really like is an Infrant’s ReadyNAS NV as it can take a maximum of 4 disks and can be incrementally upgraded throughout its life, swapping out old disks for new larger ones and increasing the size of the array.

Problem is the bare-bones (hard-disk-less) costs just a little under £500… though it is possibly to get them from a reseller which bundles 3×250 GB hard-disks for 500 GB of storage for a psychologically more palatable £650.

Right now though… had I got £650 to hand, I’d much rather spend £250 on what it costs for a one-way ticket to fly back to 香港 (Hong Kong) with the remaining £400 roughly enough to see me through 1 month there and hopefully get myself out from the doldrums. That doesn’t even factor in the cost of what it’d take to recover the data from the now dead 400 GB hard-disk, which I’d guess it’d be at least another £750 to £1000 for possible services rendered. :(

Since the last donation drive netted a grand total of £0.00 and Google Adsense income barely even covers hosting costs, I think I’ll be stuck between a rock and a very hard place for some time to come yet. I did manage a little smile on further poking about Infrant’s site, as they appear to have chosen phpBB as the package of choice to power their community support forum. ;)

Still, the likelihood of them donating a shiny new ReadyNAS NV to yours truly are around zero… so between now and whenever, blogging will probably come to a complete stop. Feel free to browse the extensive gallery of everything, least not my “World Domination 2005” set which covers my travels last year from Blighty to Reykjavik and southern Iceland; British Columbia, Canada at Vancouver and Victoria; Hawaii; down-under in Brisbane, Melbourne and Northern Territory; Singapore and to date as far as 香港 (Hong Kong).

Would the rest ever make it online now? I really haven’t the foggiest idea as I’ve got no motivation to do anything on this laptop as things stand for fear of something else breaking…

Having staunchly avoided the Intel NetBurst Marchitecture in the form of the Pentium4 and PentiumD, where the former had dictated that “Megahurtz-madness” as the only true way since 2000 since the NetBurst line, which débuted on the 180nm process and used the “Willamette” codename… with successive die shrinks, would take Intel to the “magical” 10GHz milestone around about the 65nm/45nm transition in 2007.

History however, tells us that NetBurst was a great big lumbering and power guzzling elephant where back in late 2004, Intel were to change their tune and that from 2005 onwards CPUs from Intel (and AMD) were to be of the multicore (well, dualcore initially) variety. For 2006, Intel’s watchword was “Performance per Watt” by the way of the Core architecture, which would form the basis of CPUs in the mobile space, desktop space and commodity server space.

Pentium M’s (namely “Banias” on 130nm and “Dothan” on 90nm) introduced in early 2003 had already revamped the “dead” Pentium III line in producing a low-power, high IPC CPU in pretty much the form that the RWT guys speculated way back in 2001 in how to make x86 run cool. “Yonah”, fabricated in the 65nm semiconductor process node allowed Intel to bring two lower power high performance cores into one piece of silicon!

Of course, problem with “Yohan” was that it was a CPU purely for the mobile space (that is, laptops) as it lacked features such as EM64T, XD bit and more recently VT, as seen on the desktop Pentium4s/PentiumDs and server Xeon 50xx/70xx. That said, it didn’t stop Intel from releasing a Core based server processor under the Xeon LV brand, codenamed “Sossaman” since low power blade servers have seldom need for 64bit-ness.

Less one has been living under a rock, Intel are starting to push the new Core 2 architecture into servers with Xeon 51xx codenamed “Woodcrest” back in June, desktop with Core 2 Duo E6xxx/X6xxx codenamed “Conroe” and mobile Core 2 Duo T5xxx/T7xxx codenamed “Merom” (for both 2 MiB and 4 MiB L2 cache variants) to both officially launch on 27th July, i.e.: not that long to go now!

Personally, my 1.5GHz Celeron M (130nm “Banias” with just 512kiB instead of the usual 1MiB L2 cache) based laptop is getting rather long in the tooth with the dual Pentium-III 700E (Slot1 180nm “Coppermine” with 256kiB L2 cache) only useful for server tasks, so am in pretty dire need of something (read anything) faster and hopefully be a bit more productive in the computery things I do.

Whilst a new laptop would just be a brain-dead simple answer of anything “Merom” based, a new desktop/workstation is a little trickier. You see, back in the day when I built my dually, Pentium II/III Xeons for servers used the same SECC2/Slot1 package as desktop Pentium II/III CPUs. Also, desktop CPUs were able to work in dual processor mode when coupled with a suitable dual slot/socket motherboard.

Nowadays, if you want a dual-socket computer for some multiprocessing goodness, it has to be a Xeon which adds a little to the cost of things. Furthermore, even though dual-cored CPUs are now here, the lure of some 4-way (oh eer!) lovin’ is a bit too much to resist! ;) Still, I have in mind what I’d like to build (yes build… home-rolled computers beat anything off-the-shelf in terms of geek satifsaction :P) for a desktop/workstation.

A single-socket computer which would help satisfy my hardware craving would probably look like this:

Core 2 Duo desktop

Component	Item Cost	#	Collective Cost
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4GHz, 4 MiB L2)	£250	1	£250
Intel D975XBX “Bad-Axe” ATX motherboard	£150	1	£150
nVidia Geforce 7900 GTX	£320	1	£320
Crucial CT2KIT12864AA80E (2×1 GiB DDR2-800)	£233	2	£466
Lian Li PC-V600 (ATX, Al mid-tower, silver)	£85	1	£85
Dell Ultrasharp 2407WFP (1920×1200, 24″ widescreen)	£700	1	£700
Terratec Aureon 7.1 Universe soundcard	£115	1	£115
Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 (SATA300, 7200rpm, 16MiB)	£150	4	£600
Antec Phantom 350 PSU (350W, fanless, ATX12V2.0)	£109	1	£109
LiteOn SHW-16H5S DVD ReWriter	£23	2	£46
Mitsumi FA404M 1.44″ FDD	£13	1	£13
Logitech Ultra-X Media Keyboard	£14	1	£14
Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000	£25	1	£25
Thermaltake Big Typhoon VX (CL-P0310)	£30	1	£30
Total Cost			£2923

Bucketloads of processing grunt for under £3k where the Conroe E6600 can comfortably overclock to 3.0GHz (1.333GHz FSB) right up to around 3.6GHz (1.6GHz FSB) on air-cooling without the need for exotic methods. On top of this is a display exceeding 1080p HDTV resolution, 4 GiB of RAM with 1.5 TB of RAID5 storage enough to store some 300 hours of DVD quality video!

On the dual-socket front, one can be restrained balancing cost with performance, or just go all out burning money like no tomorrow. For the former (sensible) option, I’d personally go for something like this:

Value Xeon 51xx “Woodcrest” desktop/workstation

Component	Item Cost	#	Collective Cost
Intel Xeon 5130 (2.0GHz, 4 MiB L2)	£254	2	£508
Supermicro X7DAE E-ATX motherboard	£350	1	£350
nVidia Geforce 7950 GX2	£450	1	£450
Crucial CT2KIT12872AF667 (2×1 GiB ECC FB-DIMM)	£220	2	£440
Lian Li PC-V1200plusII (E-ATX, Al mid-tower, silver)	£130	1	£130
Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP (2560×1600, 30″ widescreen)	£1450	1	£1450
Terratec Aureon 7.1 Universe soundcard	£115	1	£115
Seagate 750 GB Barracuda (SATA300, 7200rpm, 16MiB)	£265	4	£1060
Tagan TG900-U95 PSU (900W, ESP12V, ATX12V2.0)	£165	1	£165
LiteOn SHW-16H5S DVD ReWriter	£23	2	£46
Mitsumi FA404M 1.44″ FDD	£13	1	£13
Logitech Ultra-X Media Keyboard	£14	1	£14
Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000	£25	1	£25
Total Cost			£4766

Works out not that much more than a Core 2 Duo E6600 based system considering the shift of a 24″ display to a 30″ one offering nearly 80% more screen real-estate, a beefy video card in the shape of an nVidia Geforce 7950 GX2 to drive such insanely high resolutions plus an extra 750 GB storage space with the vast 2.25 TB array! All off this is powered by 4 “Woodcrest” cores each clocked at 2.0GHz which should be more than plenty even for people that abuse computers like I do. ;)

Lastly, ultimate geekpr0n would be something in the shape of this “all out” Xeon system:

Extreme Xeon 51xx “Woodcrest” desktop/workstation

Component	Item Cost	#	Collective Cost
Intel Xeon 5160 (3.0GHz, 4 MiB L2)	£650	2	£1300
Supermicro X7DA3/i SAS E-ATX motherboard	~£500	1	~£500
nVidia Quadro FX 5500	£2080	2	£4160
Crucial CT2KIT25672AF667 (2×2 GiB ECC FB-DIMM)	£595	4	£2380
Lian Li PC-V2000plusII (E-ATX, Al full-tower, silver)	£152	1	£152
Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP (2560×1600, 30″ widescreen)	£1450	2	£2900
Terratec Aureon 7.1 Universe soundcard	£115	1	£115
Terratec Phase 88 recording interface	£200	1	£200
Seagate 146 GB Cheetah 15K.4 (SAS, 15000rpm, 8MiB)	£532	4	£2128
Seagate 750 GB Barracuda (SATA300, 7200rpm, 16MiB)	£265	6	£1590
Supermicro All-in-One ZCR card (AOC-LPZCR2)	£270	1	£270
Tagan TG1100-U95 PSU (1100W, ESP12V, ATX12V2.0)	£235	1	£235
LiteOn SHW-16H5S DVD ReWriter	£23	2	£46
Mitsumi FA404M 1.44″ FDD	£13	1	£13
Logitech Ultra-X Media Keyboard	£14	1	£14
Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000	£25	1	£25
Total Cost			£16028

Yes that is a 5-digit sum you see there which if converted to American dollars is just a teeny bit shy of the 30 grand mark! Impressive eh? ;) Out goes the pair of “slow” Xeon 5130 and replaced by the top-end Xeon 5160 clocked an extra 50% faster. Everything hangs off a yet-to-be-released Supermicro board which supports SAS where the goodies include a pair of nVidia Quadro FX 5500 each driving a Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP giving a rediculous 5120×1600 pixels of screen real-estate.

The system is “only” half maxed out in terms of RAM sporting some 16 GiB, since going the whole hog for 32 GiB would require 4 GiB modules which roughly cost about £3200 each, 16 of these will then total an astonishing £25600 for just memory alone! :D Storage wise, this time we exceed 4 TB with the 4 ultra-fast SAS disks set up as a 292 GB RAID1+0 (stripped-mirror) array and the 6 SATA disks collated in RAID5 for an enormous 3.75 TB array. ;)

Silliness aside, all three systems are upgradeable to quad-cores when “Kentsfield” arrives as a Core 2 Extreme probably under the X7xxx designation and “Clovertown” most probably as a Xeon 7xxx of some sort. 8-cores in 2-sockets will obviously gain full marks on “e-penis” stakes! ;)