A Man and his Penguin

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.

Yes, I got my Blu-ray drive. Recompiled Mplayer - twice! The first time didn’t work for some reason. I’m thinking of compiling it again but this time with Pulseaudio support, because I forgot to install the development libraries for PA before compiling.

It works; I can only use “mplayer” and not “gmplayer”, and the performance isn’t so great, but thank god I can play Blu-rays.

I bought three discs: Hairspray, 50 First Dates (which I haven’t seen yet) and Rush Hour 3. JB and Myer had “Buy 2, Get 1 Free” so it worked out cheaper than buying the discs from Target. Better selection in JB.

I chose those movies because they seemed the best of a bad bunch, and they were less likely to have excessive film grain. I don’t know why you’d bother watching Superman or Rocky Balboa on Blu-ray; I’ve seen those two and they look like shit because all the film grain has been left in. We didn’t buy full-HD TVs just to see the crappiness of the film stock you used, thank you very much.

Anyway, there’s another Blu-ray at JB that I’m going to get - it’s one of Hawaii. Only $18 and I bet it’s been shot with a 1080p digital video camera, so no film grain!

With all the discussion going on in the Doom9 forum I thought getting my Linux machine to work with Blu-ray would be a difficult, ultra-involved task. It was actually easy-ish - first, install the Java Runtime Environment. Second, download DumpHD and AACSkeys, and put the files from AACSkeys into the DumpHD folder. Then just tell DumpHD to rip. That’s the easy part. In order to play the ripped files you need a custom-compiled version of Mplayer because the version included with Ubuntu is too old. This is the most difficult part - you need to get shiteloads of libraries from the package manager, run ./configure –enable-gui –disable-x264 –disable-x264-lavc –codecsdir=’/usr/lib/codecs’, then make and sudo make install.

Mplayer wouldn’t successfully compile with x264 support, and for good measure I told it where to find what I assume is the w64codecs. You don’t need to compile the gui (actually the gui wouldn’t work properly with the Blu-ray files) but it’s a good idea as it provides an easy way to set the Mplayer preferences.

Once that’s done, find the biggest file in the STREAM directory of your ripped disc and tell Mplayer to play it full-screen, e.g: /usr/local/bin/mplayer -vc ffvc1 -fs 00003.m2ts

Done!

I’ll just rip Hairspray then, shall I?

With whatever the last kernel update was, suspend started working again for me. So I’ve been using it. I’m still using KDE 4, too.

One thing I was curious about was whether I could suspend the computer with Amarok playing a song, and then have it continue playback from the same place when I woke it up. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work like that - I had to press Pause and then Play to get it to start playing again, and it started from the beginning of the track. (might have something to do with an Amarok bug).

I’m going to get a Blu-ray drive today and at least one Blu-ray disc. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about a specification for a no-DRM, non-patented high definition video disc so maybe I’ll get underway with this at some point in time!