Yes, it does. If you do a search for ‘lyrics’ you only get a few thousand sites shoved in your face. We need one more. Lyrics Muse.

There are two twists to Lyrics Muse which makes it stand out. It’s community based so anyone who registers can edit and improve the lyrics. The most cool differentiating factor however is that if you’re a user of last.fm you will get your own personal interface to browse lyrics because Lyrics Muse tracks your listening.

In other words this makes it very easy to find the lyrics you need. It’s the primary goal of Lyrics Muse to make it as easy as possible to find lyrics. Oh, and not plaster the site with irrelevant ads and popup crap.

If you sign up please join the last.fm Lyrics Muse group here.

With the plethora of great games coming out soon it was about time to invest in a new gaming rig. My 2005 era junk can’t cut it no more.

There are at least three titles I’ll want to play. Call of Duty 4 which is Battlefield 2 infantry warfare sped up. Much fun. Unreal Tournament 3 which is mostly an update of the 2004 title. Amazing graphics and more balanced play. The multiplayer demo is lots of fun.

And then there’s Crysis.

The follow-up to Far Cry. A singleplayer demo is currently out and my god is it good. Every couple of years a new game comes along that sets new standards. Crysis is one of these games. The graphics is absolutely spectacular. It is jawdroppingly good even at small resolution with low detail. You have dense forests and bush, all dynamically rendered, even at distance. When you walk into a bush the branches move and makes sound. There are so many details in this game it’s unbelievable.

Nice graphics without good gameplay obviously don’t make much of game but Crysis excels in gameplay as well. Let me put it this way. I’ve never played a singleplayer demo more than once. The Crysis nanosuit enables you to increase your speed, strength and armor or cloak yourself for a short period of time. Cloak makes it possible to sneak in on the North Korean soldiers and put a bullet in their neck. It’s fucking priceless.

So anyway to play this beast of a game I needed new hardware and went with the following:

• Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0 Ghz CPU
• Noctua NH-U12F CPU cooler
• 2 GB Crucial DDR2 BallistiX PC8500 RAM
• Inno3D 8800 GT 512 MB graphics card

In 1680×1050 with all settings on high and 2xAA I get around 20 FPS which is actually quite playable. At 1360×768 with no AA the FPS increases to around 30.

For more than two years now I’ve had a dedicated server at EasySpeedy. They were my first encounter with the dedicated server business as a customer.

The only other company I’ve ever been in more direct phone contact with is TDC Kabel TV (now YouSee).

But they were cheap.

That’s why I chose EasySpeedy. They also had lots of bling on their homepage. 7253 operating systems were available to be installed on my shiny new server but I would only ever need one – Debian. Sure it’s a nice feature but it’s not that fucking important.

Uptime and stability is fucking important though. On the front page of EasySpeedy.com you can read:

“99.98% Proven Uptime.”

Lies! Lies! Lies!

During my first two months in 2005 with them they had already gone below 99.98%. Excuses were plentiful. Sometimes it seemed as if I had to make them aware of network problems with their carriers. Absurd. And before you think it was my line that had problems I’ve always tested on 2-3 lines on different ISPs.

Adding to downtime there were for months problems with extremely slow connectivity making it near impossible to work in a shell.

The last half year or so has improved though but both September and October saw issues that affected uptime.

So I’ve migrated to a new Hetzner server. I now have two servers there and manage four. The only issues I’ve had has been a few problems during the initial setup. Price obviously matters. Their DS5000 server is a much better offer than any of EasySpeedy’s.

Only time prevented me from moving away from EasySpeedy sooner.

I’ve been having all sorts of hardware troubles for the past many weeks. They always seem to come in batches. First a bad RAM stick caused massive corruption of my files as I installed two new SATA disks in my fileserver. Problem surfaced when I suddenly noticed audio glitches in my MP3 files which weren’t there before.

Thought the problem was fixed when I identified the RAM as the culprit and it largely was. Yesterday, however, I decided to test moving a bunch of files from one of the new SATA disks to the other to see if the problem was gone. If there are issues with the RAM the files would likely have corruption after the copy.

And they were corrupted. I wtf’d as I had tested this RAM thoroughly when I removed the bad stick. Retesting showed no errors and replacing it with a pair of extremely high quality RAM modules also produced no errors in memtest86.

Then I suspected the disks to be faulty but there were no errors being thrown around in the logs. By further testing I narrowed the problem down. There would only be corruption when copying between the SATA disks. Not if first copying to an IDE disk and then from that to the SATA disk. I.e.:

 SATA disk (1|2) <-> SATA disk (1|2)  - corruption
 SATA disk (1|2) <-> IDE disk <-> SATA disk (1|2)  - all good

The system this was happening on was Debian Etch. Kernel 2.6.18 and I tried the latest stable 2.6.22 as well. No difference.

I think I’ve finally found the solution after hours of searching and planning massive hardware upgrade (new board, CPU, etc.). Setting EXT-P2P’s Discard Time to 1 ms instead of 30 us have so far made the problem go away. God knows what that setting does.

The board in question is an Abit AN7 with an onboard SiI 3112 chip.

(Danes only, sorry)

Marianne has a competition at her blog so if you are stocking up on little ones or know someone who is there’s a chance of winning an EyeClops microscope.

Link

At 8:02 AM an incident occured here at the apartment. Neighborhood #2 (Laika) from the Arcade Fire album “Funeral” was discovered much to my distress to contain a sound glitch. Having heard that album quite a lot I knew this stemmed from some very recent file corruption or possibly that iTunes had raped the file. The latter I believe to be more likely.

Luckily I have an iPod lying about with the album on so I thought I’d just hook it up, browse to the file and recover it and I could go back to the days chores. That’s actually exactly what happened but instead of taking less than a minute I had to spend around 30 minutes on the operation.

Apple, in all their coorporate wisdom, have made it not only near impossible to retrieve the files from an iPod by hiding the folder your music is stored in, but have also renamed all the files into random 4 letter words like “WZBX.mp3”. Why? Because they can.

So I found this guide which is very helpful if you discover errors in your music collection, accidently delete some files or just want to move some of YOUR files from the iPod to another storage.

Since filenames were rendered useless I noted the size of the file and did a search in the terminal on the exact size on the iPod:

find . -size 6092603c

Will search for files below current path with the exact size of 6092603 bytes.

My next MP3 player will probably be of the iRiver kind. I find my three year old iRiver iHP-120 to be a better experience than this shiny new 80 GB iPod. Albums are quickly and easily navigated to and it just gets out of your way. Luckily we’re going to use the iPod with our iPod Hi-Fi so its shortcomings will be no huge problem.

So up yours, Apple.

We attended a spectacular show at Vega yesterday with Chris Cornell and his band performing. Was absolutely awesome. That man still has one hell of a voice.

Seasons

Preaching the End of the World

On the 4th of August Marianne and I got married in Skedsmo church. After having been a couple for more than 8 years it was about time.

We bought our first video camera. A hard disk based Sony HDR-SR1 which can record high definition video. So far very pleased with it but an extra higher capacity battery has been ordered. The battery shipping with the camera lasts a little over an hour when recording HD.

OS X support non-existant as far as I can tell until software comes along which can read Sony’s native m2ts format.