I’ve been playing around with my new 100mm macro lens lately, and I must say I find the concept quite interesting. Macro photography tends to have a narrow field of focus by nature, and in that regard, I tried something which is called ‘Focus Stacking‘.
This is a 1024 x 586 px crop from the original photo:
Macro Photography
Fireworks 2012, a set on Flickr.
I tried taking photos of fireworks for the first time, and this is what I caught.
I’ve recently upgraded Wiggum (my file server) from FreeBSD 8.0 to FreeBSD 9.0. Since I had made some mistakes when originally setting up Wiggum two years ago, I went for a complete reinstall – and recreation of the zpools. This blog entry is a step-by-step guide for how I did the initial installation and setup.
These are the results of this weekends benchmarking! I’ve tested a single-drive UFS2 file system, and compared it to several ZFS configurations (single and multi-drive). For all the juicy details on configuration and testing methods, please see FreeBSD: Filesystem Performance – The Setup.
I’ve run a series of benchmarks on my prototyping server to determine performance differences between a variety of configurations:
All the details on configuration and benchmark methods are below!
Continue reading
Historically, hard drives have had a sector size of 512 bytes. This changed when drives became large enough for such a small sector size to make the overhead of keeping track of these sectors consume too much storage space, making hard drives more expensive to produce than strictly necessary. Many modern drives are tagged as “advanced format” drives; Right now, this means they have a sector size of 4096 bytes (4KiB). This includes most if not all SSDs, and most 2TB+ magnetic drives.
If you create a partition on such a drive without ensuring the partition begins on a physical sector, the device firmware will have to do some “magic” which takes more time than not doing the magic in the first place, resulting in reduced performance. It is therefore important to make sure you align partitions correctly on these devices. I generally align partitions to the 1MiB mark for the sake of being future proof. Even though my current drives have 512B and 4KiB sector sizes, I don’t want to encounter any problems when larger sector sizes are introduced.
Although ZFS can use entire devices without partitioning, I use GPT to partition and label my drives. My labels are generally reference to physical location in the server. For example, Bay1.2 would mean the drive is located in bay one slot two. This makes it so much easier to figure out which drive to replace when the need arise.
It has been a very busy couple of months, especially with getting a new puppy last month.
I’m in the process of restructuring my personal infrastructure! In extremely broad terms, this will simplify and clarify each servers role, hopefully making it easier and more predictable to maintain the infrastructure. I’ll write a in-depth post on this at a later date!
I’ve also been working on a number of projects related to the game Anarchy Online. Probably most notable is the launch of Demoder’s PlanetMap Viewer v1.2, adding many new features which are described in the thread. Work have begun on sanitizing the Itemsbot and CIDB tool chain by making an independent resource database parser which handles all items, nanos, icons and a few other data types. I’ll go into detail on this later. Vha.Net and Vha.Chat is being upgraded from .NET 2.0 to .NET 4.0 (client profile), and is receiving a new packet system in the process. I’m currently on the planning stage for porting Helpbot to Bot#; No ETA yet.
Photography status: Slacking! I’ve taken some less-than-stellar photographs, and have not bothered uploading these; I am probably going for a photo spree this weekend though; Hopefully I’ll be able to take some which are upload-worthy. :)
My game time is pretty evenly split between Civilization 5 and The Secret World – an amazing modern-time MMO RPG. If you didn’t check it out yet, you should – Ragnar Tørnquist, the man behind The Longest Journey, is the main guy behind the game. The story easily sucks you in like a good book which you just can’t put down till you’ve finished reading. Quests are very original and fun – I end up doing quests not for their XP or loot, but for the story and direct entertainment value.
Savagedlight's Road 