A Man and his Penguin

6-cell Aspire One battery from Australian retailer: $130

9-cell Aspire One battery from Hong Kong eBayer: $109

Stay in a burns unit at hospital getting “spray-on skin” applied to the top of your legs: $400 per night

Buying the more expensive, lower-capacity, less-likely-to-explode battery instead: Priceless!

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“Knocked Up” on Blu-ray: $39

“Superman 2″ on Blu-ray: $35

Noticing those same titles on HD-DVD for $9.90 each and remembering that your Blu-ray reader can also read HD-DVD: Priceless!

I’m suddenly finding all sorts of things that I could do online now that I have a Visa card. Shop or sell on eBay, become an Amazon affiliate, buy some web hosting and a domain name, subscribe to a porn site, donate money to open-source, get Skype-Out credit, buy commercial Linux software or just an Ubuntu t-shirt… the sky is the limit. So far I’ve just bought the Mylene Farmer DVD which will be shipped on the 23rd of March (and will arrive during April or early May, grrr) from Amazon, and the two abovementioned HD-DVDs from DVDownunder, but it seems that all sorts of opportunities are opening up.

In particular, I have an idea for a website for music fans, where they can chat and share news. The fresh idea is that there would be software they could install to turn their computer into an impromptu web server, and they could download files from eachother. Another fresh idea is that I could join the Amazon.com or Sanity.com.au affiliate plan and place a customised web store on the site. For every purchase made through that store, I’d get a certain percentage of the sale price; and some of that would go back to the fans as money they can use to promote their favourite artist, buy concert tickets for underprivileged fans, pay for web hosting, or anything else that a group of music fans would want to do with some money. Of course, it would be in their best interests to get as many fans on my website as possible to chat, so that they can contribute to the fan group’s funds. Oh, and of course contribute to my funds!

I’d only create this infrastructure for bands and artists who I think have fanbases who could make some money and organise themselves properly. For instance, I wouldn’t create a forum or a kitty for Miley Cyrus fans as they don’t own credit cards and couldn’t buy merchandise online. I wouldn’t create a forum for Sneaky Sound System fans as there isn’t a lot of SSS merchandise that can be bought. I would, however much I dislike her, make a forum for Pink because her fans are old enough to know better than to like Pink buy things online, and to organise themselves properly to take full advantage of the services I’d be offering them. There are enough of them and there are probably lots of concert DVDs, CDs, T-shirts and stuff that I could sell.

Good idea? Yes? Let’s do it!

In other news I’ve removed the “mount your Walkman” functionality from Blacklight and I’ll give it a test a bit later on. It was causing some people some trouble, apparently.

I hope the new X-series Walkman supports playback of music through a wireless Samba network, or at least through Zeroconf/Bonjour/Avahi/UPnP/Whatever-Apple-calls-it-now music sharing. If it does, and if it supports drag ‘n’ drop music and video loading, I’ll be first in the queue to buy one.

I read an article on Current.com.au about the new 100 Mbps Telstra broadband that will be rolled out to people in a 100 metre radius of the centre of the Melbourne and Sydney CBDs. Well, okay, it’s fibre optics and it will service about 3 million people in Melbourne and Sydney.

One thing that rang alarm bells was Sol Trujillo claiming that a family could “download a high definition movie in just over a minute”. This didn’t sound right to me, so I got my calculator out and wrote the following letter to Current.com.au:

I don’t think Sol Trujillo has his figures correct.

Take that, Sol!

I hope Telstra doesn’t use “download a high definition movie in just over a minute” in any of its advertising, or they’d be in very big trouble! Actually; I do hope they use it and that they get fined a LOT.

Retailers are complaining that netbooks are too cheap and that there is not enough profit margin in them. This, my friends, explains why retailers are going under at the moment.

You don’t make money from the main product. That’s not entirely true - you make a small profit after you’ve discounted the product for the customer, because they will almost always ask for one. Where you make your money is in the add-ons.

Let’s show how this works with netbooks. Somebody buys a netbook from you, and you make minimal margin. Once you are assured of getting the sale but before the customer has paid, you ask them “Do you need a carry case?”. The customer didn’t think about that, and they will admit that they pretty much need one (netbooks are made to be carried), so you can sell them one. You get the carry cases from the supplier for $15 and you can sell them for $30-40. Money made there.

While selling the product, you can both spruik up the battery life (it lasts 3 hours which is long enough to last a plane trip from Perth to Melbourne) and also try and sell an add-on battery (…but we also have higher capacity batteries available with a 6 hour battery life in case you need to use the machine all day in between charges). I don’t know how much batteries go for or how much they cost the retailer, but that’s an extra add-on sale.

Extended warranties. All electrical retailers have them. There’s usually 50% GP (gross profit) in them. Sell them. Miniature mice - many people don’t like trackpads. Sell them. The Atom chipset can handle 2 gigabytes of RAM, and Windows people seem to think that the more RAM you have the faster the computer will go - sell some more RAM.

Start with the most likely add-on sale and keep going until you get a “no” for two of your suggestions.

When I bought my netbook, I wasn’t asked about any add-ons. I wasn’t asked about a carry case, a battery, extra RAM, a mouse, a warranty or anything else. In fact, the salesperson was practically pushing me to the counter and I had to say “Hang on a moment, there’s something else I want to get, I’ll see you at the counter in a moment”.

Before you all start giving your salespeople extra coaching for selling add-ons, remember that they can only sell addons if you’ve GOT THEM. I tried to buy a carry case for my netbook - “Nup, we don’t have them”. “But you sell netbooks!” “Yes, but we don’t have any cases for netbooks, only for bigger notebooks”.  This happened at several local retailers. I went back to the place where I bought my netbook and asked if they had bigger batteries for them. “No.”

Retailers, if you want to survive you MUST SELL ADD-ONS, and in order to sell add-ons you must THINK about what you can add on for each product (especially low GP or low priced items) and make sure you have them! Of course, once that’s done, you can tell your salespeople “Right, we’ve just got in some big batteries and carry cases for netbooks, so don’t forget to suggest these to the customer.”

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been for the last little while, the reason I haven’t been posting is not because I’ve been too busy, it’s because my life has been pretty boring. I plan to try and write a post every week, whether it’s about selling, technology, furniture (yeah right…) women, or whatever!

The computer chucked another wobbly today while I was at work. I came home to find it frozen.

I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a hardware issue. The two obvious fingers to point at are the motherboard and the CPU. CPUs don’t generally stuff up unless they’ve overheated, and this one has never overheated. The motherboard should also be in perfect condition - it’s 100% solid caps and designed for extreme overclocking, so it should be able to last for donkey’s years.

I might try manually setting a CPU voltage; at the moment, the motherboard works out an appropriate voltage. It might be slipping downwards?

I’m also thinking of writing a daemon that monitors absolutely every aspect of your computer; all the sensor information, memory and CPU use, kernel messages, absolutely all the logs I can find. Maybe then I’ll be able to work out what the problem is, and in the end I’ll have a great troubleshooting program!

I bought a Noctua CPU cooler NH-C12P and a Corsair 620W modular power supply yesterday (oh, and a 1TB hard disk drive). It took me ages to install the cooler; I’m afraid I was a bit of a nervous nelly, especially the bit where the instructions tell you to take the cover off the heatsink’s base and there was no cover! The best advice I can give you is to install the backing plate and then put the motherboard back in and hook up as much as possible - otherwise you might not be able to reach the CPU power socket or one of the motherboard screws (happened to me).

It was my first time applying thermal paste but it’s all gone very well, and I followed the instructions to the letter in this regard.

The cooler is awesome. I’m running at 3.6 GHz (up from the 3GHz stock- E6850). The temperature at idle is 40 celcius, but with both cores under fire it goes to 55 celcius. With the stock Intel cooler, the CPU would burn at 66 celcius with a 3.3GHz clock. I can barely hear the fan - that Noctua fan is very well engineered and I’m thinking of getting one for the chassis too.

The power supply is also pretty nice. It’s got much more power than I need, but I bought it because it’s modular.

The only problem I had all day was GRUB. I had unplugged all the SATA cables, as you’d expect, and I put them back in different numbered ports. GRUB wouldn’t load. Once I figured out that it wasn’t a BIOS problem, I just booted from the Ubuntu live CD and reinstalled GRUB.

My crashes are gone - I ran the machine overclocked literally all day and night without issues, and all my encoding got done. One instance of Acidrip segfaulted, but only after the ripping job had finished anyway.

Happy? Yes, I’m ecstatic. Next time we’ve got the airconditioning on I’ll try pushing her to 4GHz; it should be a cakewalk with this cooler and motherboard. I have the P5K Premium motherboard - you just tell it what frequency to run the FSB at, and it adjusts everything (including voltage!) for you.

I’m off to rip the third, fourth and fifth seasons of Quantum Leap. See you later.

I think, hopefully, I might have found the source of all my troubles.

I played Sauerbraten today to test whether the freezes were caused by my CPU or GPU overheating. Sauerbraten ran fine, so I decided to do a more scientific test by using Phoronix Test Suite. When looking at the tests available, I thought “Hmm, I’ll try this CPU stress one”.

It went for an hour without incident. So I decided to do “memory-bandwidth”. No problem. So I decided to do “iozone” (I’d noticed that the crashes only occur when there is data being written to disk). Anyway, I ran the first test and the computer crashed. I rebooted and ran it again, and it crashed again. This time I got a dmesg log - the actual crashing process was “kswap”. I rebooted and ran the test yet again, and it crashed yet again.

So I rebooted and turned off the swap. The iozone test didn’t crash the computer nor make it unstable. I’m now encoding videos, with the only notable incident so far being a single program crash (Prism); probably unrelated.

So, it looks like the problem is corruption of the swap. I don’t know if it’s a software problem or a hardware problem (bad sectors?), but so far turning off the swap has stopped the crashes. We’ll see what happens next morning though!

An open letter to computer users and the builders of gaming computers:

32-bit Windows (indeed, any 32-bit operating system) cannot address more than 4 gibibytes of RAM. This is a limitation of the number of bits required to represent memory addresses above 4 gibibytes, not a bug in Windows.

In fact, a 32-bit operating system cannot actually use more than 3.3 GiB of RAM; sometimes less. This is due to “memory-mapped I/O”. Parts of the computer hardware have their own small amounts of memory that the processor and motherboard need to be able to address, and they do this by mapping them to the ceiling of the address space. Basically, from 4 gibibytes downwards, any hardware devices with memory on them are allowed to take address space. Typically, you end off with 3.3 GiB of address space afterwards.

People and companies building gaming computers are either incredibly ignorant or are playing on the ignorance of others. You occasionally see ‘gaming PCs’ being advertised or reviewed with 8 GiB of RAM and 32-bit Windows. Most of that RAM will not even be SEEN by the processor running in 32-bit mode! What’s really daft is including two 512MiB or 1GiB graphics cards in SLI/Crossfire, as the former will eat up another gibibyte of address space, and the latter will eat over half the available address space, leaving you with only 2 gibibytes of memory available for Windows and your programs!

When asked, the companies often say “We use 32-bit Windows because 64-bit doesn’t work with anything”. Well, at least 64-bit Windows works with all your RAM! Besides, 64-bit operating systems work with almost everything nowadays; I’ve been using one for months without even noticing a difference.

You still hear people complaining that they just installed a 32-bit operating system and “It only sees 3.3 gigabytes!”, but what’s even more disturbing is hearing people say “Go to this address and install a hacked Windows DLL that my friend made, that enables PAE support.”. Or, on Linux, they say “Here’s a HOWTO about recompiling your kernel with PAE support”.

In the first instance, installing hacked DLLs is a really, REALLY bad idea for the possible harm it can cause, and the very likely possibility that the hacked DLL has a rootkit in it, preying on ignorant young souls who want to use obscene amounts of memory without the pain of using an operating system that “doesn’t work with anything”. In the second instance, recompiling the kernel is much more work than just installing a 64-bit version of your distribution. In both instances, there are more 64-bit-compatible drivers than there are PAE-compatible drivers, especially on Windows!

So please, practice smart computing. Follow this checklist:

1. Got 4 gibibytes of RAM or more? Install a 64-bit operating system.

2. Got 3 gibibytes of RAM and more than 512MiB of graphics memory? Install a 64-bit operating system.

3. Got 2 gibibytes of RAM and a pair of 768MiB or 1GiB graphics cards? Install a 64-bit operating system (3300MiB - (768MiB x 2) = 1764MiB addressable).

4. Are you affected by 1, 2 or 3 and your processor is 32-bit? (Core Solo and Core Duo, but not Core 2, are 32-bit). If you use Windows on the desktop, you must use 32-bit; you have no choice (hacked DLLs is not a choice, and using a server edition of Windows is probably not a choice either). If you use Linux, then either build or install a pre-built PAE kernel.

3. Otherwise, either use your existing 32-bit operating system or, if you’re already going to be installing or reinstalling, take the opportunity to move to 64-bit.

My recent project of “Rip and compress all your DVDs and put them on your hard drive, then share them across the network to your netbook” is not going well.

My extremely-powerful computer keeps crashing while excercising that extreme power, and I can’t bloody figure out what’s causing it. It rarely leaves anything in the kernel log, and what information is there doesn’t yield any clues to me about what to check.

At first, I ran “watch sensors” in a terminal to see if it was a thermal problem. It wasn’t. I clocked my system back to stock speed in case it was a problem with my overclock. Still crashed. I ran Memtest, which passed with flying colours.

I submitted a bug report to Launchpad - it has just been triaged as Medium but I don’t believe anyone at Ubuntu will know what the cause could possibly be. I stopped running KDE briefly and switched to Openbox - still freezes. I removed the Nvidia driver completely and switch to “nv” - the crashes seem to be happening more frequently now.

I upgraded my kernel and HAL from the Proposed repository, and not only is the problem still there, but the new HAL is causing problems with ejecting DVDs.

Right now I’ve pulled the cheaper RAM out of my computer and we’ll see how that goes. I just tried to SSH into my desktop and it didn’t work - it didn’t respond to ping either; it’s probably crashed again.

I wish I had any idea whatsoever of how to fix this and stop it from crashing again! I guess I could abandon the whole project; that would certainly stop the crashes as they only ever happen when I’ve been ripping DVDs or encoding video files to h.264.

I’m partway through my current project, which is ripping all my DVDs to low-bitrate h264 so I can stream them to my netbook which is hooked up to my TV.

I’m encountering a real problem: The computer is randomly freezing up after a few hours of hard work. I’ve only seen it happening when ffmpeg is running.

I have the command “watch sensors” running in a konsole, and the temperatures are normal - this is not an overheating problem. The power supply is well and truly good enough to power my system even with both cores going like the clappers. At first I thought the problem was my overclock, but it just happened at stock speed too.

This system is locking up hard. The emergency keys don’t do anything, the keyboard lights don’t blink, and there’s nothing printed to the kernel log that suggests anything. Next stop: Running ffmpeg with “gnome-system-monitor” open to see if it’s got anything to do with memory use… I doubt it, but it’s the logical next course of action for me. I’ll also turn off the desktop-background-changing feature of KDE 4 in case that’s causing some sort of graphics card problem, although the Nvidia binary blob hasn’t given me kernel panics or X crashes since I upgraded to Intrepid.

I’m upset.

Yesterday, one of the girls at work asked if she could go home early because “there is nothing to do”. Surprisingly, the request was granted.

At the end of today, she effectively got fired, but in a cleverly-worded way that tries to make it sound like it’s what she wanted.

Look, I know she’s got some faults, and I know that it was completely out of line for her to ask to go home early, but she still didn’t deserve this treatment. She has been talked about behind her back, and some of the things said have been most unfair. I would go so far as to say that she can be pretty damn indispensable sometimes, especially when there are lots of customers.

Take today, for instance. It was busy virtually the whole day. Before she came back from worker’s comp, I was the ONLY salesperson on the floor most of the time. Even if there were five sets of customers waiting to be served, none of the other staff members would leave the office and actually go and serve customers, without whom there would be no office work. The girl I’m talking about DID serve customers, without being told to. She’d also find odd jobs that needed doing, and do them. I did the same, which I guess is part of the reason why I get along with her so well compared to the others.

So, I’m upset that she’s been treated in this manner and I’m upset that my colleagues have been mean to her and mean behind her back. I’m upset that she was fired a mere eight hours after I gave her some vocational coaching in an effort to keep her from getting fired. I’m also upset that my workload is going to go back to the completely unrealistic levels it was before.

I’ll say it again: She’s got visible faults that can be a problem, and in fact she wasn’t going to stay at the shop for much longer anyway, but she didn’t deserve any of this, and I’m going to miss her. (I got her phone number anyway to keep in touch). So yes, I’m upset at the moment; I see that Mary Poppins is going to be on TV in twenty minutes and I just feel like lying down and watching it.

Two more things for today: I heard on the radio that the State government budget is in the red already - remember, we’re half-way through financial year! I would like to start the call for Colin Barnett and his government to be investigated for corruption. Barnett is famous for not spending money on anything (and blaming it on Royalties For Regions and the “Global Economic Downturn”), so how on earth is WA in deficit? The answer: Somebody must be siphoning off money. There’s no other way this could be happening.

From the “A Bit Hypocritical” files: Christians have been complaining about the atheist advertisements in the buses and trains of England, that say “God probably doesn’t exist”, and demanding that the atheists be made to prove their claim. I’d like to see the Christians be made to prove their advertised claim that “God loves you”.

But what really annoys me is that the atheist ads were made “In response to the Christian ads threatening damnation to non-believers”. Well if you want to retaliate against the Christians, that’s fine - but the wording of the ads implies very strongly that NO god exists. This is offensive to me as a non-Christian and non-atheist, and VERY misleading because no atheist has ever attempted to disprove the existence of MY god, only of the Christian god. Neither I nor anyone representing my god actually threatened damnation on anyone, so why are you attacking my beliefs?

That’s what atheists do - they don’t actually believe that no god exists; they just want to try and prove that the Christian god doesn’t exist. And then expand that claim into “No god exists”. You never find an atheist who was never involved in a religion when they were younger. It’s like a vendetta that they have against Christianity, only the ironic thing is that there’s still one core Christian belief that all atheists still hold: That if there’s a god, then it’s the Christian god. If atheists try to prove that the Christian god doesn’t exist, they think that it proves that no god exists.

It’s complicated, and darkly humourous.

Anyway, I’m still feeling a bit upset so I’ll leave it ’til later.