I am playing World of Warcraft, controlling 5 instances at the same time. Here’s the script I’ve developed so far to help me do so. I’ve been writing it over 1 month.
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New computer
I was shopping for a new computer at Alienware this morning. Some of their upgrade prices, especially for RAM, looked fishy. You can get what appears to be the same items from Newegg for less than what Alienware charges as the upgrade price. The upgrade price means additional cost to what you are already paying for the base component. This seemed especially true for the 2 GB low latency patriot memory upgrade. Alienware wanted an additional $600 but I can apparently buy this from NewEgg for $240.
The memory from NewEgg
If the items are not equivalent I’ll correct this but they definitely need to work on justifying why I should pay $600 for 2 GB of memory.
I found Cyberpowerpc.com which gives you a great deal of freedom in what parts to pick. I built a computer that would cost about twice as much from Alienware. The only problem is that it’s very hard to know what parts to pick given the wide range of options, some of which are incompatible. The website form isn’t that good either, often resetting your choices if you go back and forth between pages.
I basically ordered the top of the line AMD, with dual top of the line video cards.
Code: ULTRASLIQUADZ $2,627.00 x 1 $2,627.00
Gamer Ultra SLI Quad (NO MONITOR)
www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Gamer_Ultra_SLI_Quad/
*BASE_PRICE: [+2259]
CAS: NEW!!! CoolerMaster Cosmos Silent Gaming Tower Case w/ 420 Watts Power Supply (Original Color)
CASUPGRADE: NONE
CS_FAN: Default case fans
CPU: AMD Phenom(TM) X4 9950 Black Edition Quad-Core CPU w/ HyperTransport Technology [+16]
CD: (Special Price) LG 20X DVD+/-R/+/-RW + CD-R/RW DRIVE DUAL LAYER (BLACK COLOR)
CD2: NONE [-18]
CABLE: None
FLASHMEDIA: INTERNAL 12in1 Flash Media Reader/Writer (BLACK COLOR)
FA_HDD: None
FAN: Asetek Liquid CPU Cooling System (Extreme Cooling Performance + Extreme Silent at 20dBA)
FLOPPY: NONE
FREEBIE_OS: None
HDD: Single Hard Drive [-327] (300GB Gaming Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 16MB Cache WD3000GLFS [+244])
HDD2: NONE [-54]
IEEE_CARD: NONE
KEYBOARD: PS2 MULTIMEDIA INTERNET CONTROL KEYBOARD (BLACK COLOR)
MOUSE: Logitech Optical Wheel Mouse (BLACK COLOR)
MODEM: NONE
MONITOR: NONE
MONITOR2: NONE
MOTHERBOARD: (3-Way SLI Support) Asus Crosshair II Formular 780A SLI Chipset DDR2/1066 SATA RAID PCI-E MBoard w/GbLAN,USB2.0,IEEE1394,&7.1Audio [+155]
MEMORY: (Req.DDR2 MainBoard) 2GB (2x1GB) PC8500 DDR2/1066 Dual Channel Memory [+150] (Corsair Dominator)
NETWORK: ONBOARD 10/1000 NETWORK CARD
OS: Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Professional w/ Service Pack 3 [+61]
PRINTER: None
PRINTER_CABLE: None
PRO_WIRING: Professional Wiring for All WIRINGs Inside The System Chasis with High Performance Thermal Compound on CPU [+19]
POWERSUPPLY: 900 Watts Power Supplies [+38] (Apevia Warlock Series)
RUSH: RUSH!!! READY TO SHIP IN 5 BUSINESS DAYS [+49]
SERVICE: STANDARD WARRANTY: 3-YEAR LIMITED WARRANTY PLUS 24/7 LIFE-TIME TECHNICAL SUPPORT
SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
SPEAKERS: Logitech (BLACK) X-540 70Watts 5.1 Configuration Speaker System
TEMP: NONE (AS SHOWN)
TVRC: None
USBHD: NONE
USB: Built-in USB 2.0 Ports
VIDEOCAMERA: NONE
VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce GTX280 1GB 16X PCI Express (EVGA Powered by NVIDIA [+5])
VIDEO2: NVIDIA GeForce GTX280 1GB 16X PCI Express (EVGA Powered by NVIDIA [+5])
VIDEO3: NONE
WNC: PCI Wireless 802.11g 54Mbps Network Interface Card + GigaByte GN-AT2050D 2.4GHz Indoor Omni-Directional Dipole Antenna [+25]
_PRICE: (+2627)
Here’s a class that given a predefined area of memory, allows you to allocate and deallocate areas of that memory. In other words, a custom memory manager.
Only partially done yet, but it’s already 25% or so faster than malloc and free
Header
CPP
Full alloc, then dealloc
Heap = 1304 us
malloc = 878256 us
Fragmentation
Heap = 3525 us
malloc = 4462 us
Most of the speedup comes from linked lists of buckets. There are 7 buckets, from 32 bytes to 2048 bytes, incrementing in powers of two. 20% of the given memory is dedicated to buckets. If an allocation is requested and a bucket is available, the allocation goes to that bucket instead. Because buckets are contiguous and reserved, those allocations cannot cause fragmentation.
The alignment boundary is 32 bytes, so all allocations returned to the user are aligned, and the average memory wasted per allocation is 32 bytes, excluding buckets.
The speeds shown are with a critical section lock. This is not necessary, and for single threads it would be even faster.
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Ron Paul on the bailout
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnWuUcL2otk
I’m moving my money out of US dollars. Foreign currency CDs are the best. Currently Canada has the most sound banking system, so is the least likely to suffer a depression when the dollar crashes.
According to this site, McCain has a 15% chance of dying of old age while in office.
http://www.marshfieldnewsherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081003/MNH06/810030395
The chance of Palin becoming president is higher than that, since you usually are unable to work for some time before dying.
So with that news, according to the public records on this site:
http://clapboard.org/temp/SarahPalinReport.pdf
Palin’s IQ is only 83, over one standard deviation, which means she’s dumber than roughly 85% of the population:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation
Most of my views lie with Republicans, but the last thing we need is another idiot in office. As much as I can’t stand socialism, I’m going to vote for Obama just so McCain doesn’t become president.
http://www.votesmart.org/issue_keyvote_member.php?cs_id=22467
California in particular.
Register to vote in California
The deadline to register is October 20, 2008.
For me, it’s John B.T. Campbell III. He voted yes, so I’m voting him out of office next month.
Here’s the list of senators that voted for the amended version of H. R. 1424, the mortgage bailout plan
- Akaka (D-HI)
- Alexander (R-TN)
- Baucus (D-MT)
- Bayh (D-IN)
- Bennett (R-UT)
- Biden (D-DE)
- Bingaman (D-NM)
- Bond (R-MO)
- Boxer (D-CA)
- Brown (D-OH)
- Burr (R-NC)
- Byrd (D-WV)
- Cardin (D-MD)
- Carper (D-DE)
- Casey (D-PA)
- Chambliss (R-GA)
- Clinton (D-NY)
- Coburn (R-OK)
- Coleman (R-MN)
- Collins (R-ME)
- Conrad (D-ND)
- Corker (R-TN)
- Cornyn (R-TX)
- Craig (R-ID)
- Dodd (D-CT)
- Domenici (R-NM)
- Durbin (D-IL)
- Ensign (R-NV)
- Feinstein (D-CA)
- Graham (R-SC)
- Grassley (R-IA)
- Gregg (R-NH)
- Hagel (R-NE)
- Harkin (D-IA)
- Hatch (R-UT)
- Hutchison (R-TX)
- Inouye (D-HI)
- Isakson (R-GA)
- Kerry (D-MA)
- Klobuchar (D-MN)
- Kohl (D-WI)
- Kyl (R-AZ)
- Lautenberg (D-NJ)
- Leahy (D-VT)
- Levin (D-MI)
- Lieberman (ID-CT)
- Lincoln (D-AR)
- Lugar (R-IN)
- Martinez (R-FL)
- McCain (R-AZ)
- McCaskill (D-MO)
- McConnell (R-KY)
- Menendez (D-NJ)
- Mikulski (D-MD)
- Murkowski (R-AK)
- Murray (D-WA)
- Nelson (D-NE)
- Obama (D-IL)
- Pryor (D-AR)
- Reed (D-RI)
- Reid (D-NV)
- Rockefeller (D-WV)
- Salazar (D-CO)
- Schumer (D-NY)
- Smith (R-OR)
- Snowe (R-ME)
- Specter (R-PA)
- Stevens (R-AK)
- Sununu (R-NH)
- Thune (R-SD)
- Voinovich (R-OH)
- Warner (R-VA)
- Webb (D-VA)
- Whitehouse (D-RI)
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Morgage bailout in two paragraphs
2002:
200 million a year banker: “Hey, lets give credit to anyone that wants to buy a house, regardless of income or credit. We can sell these loans as securities, and leverage it out 30 to 1.”
Irresponsible buyer: “Wow, I can buy a mansion even though I work at 7-11”
Average taxpayer: “These housing prices are insane. I’m going to keep renting.”
2008:
Irresponsible buyer: “Hey, my 200K house isn’t worth a million dollars now that nobody wants to pay for it. Cya.”
200 million a year banker: “The economy is fucked unless the taxpayers pay for our bad loans.”
George Bush: “Have a trillion dollars.”
Average taxpayer: “WTF?”
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Contractor pay calculator
It’s been coming up a lot lately on how much I should ask for to work as a contractor, given a certain pay value as an employee. Every time I do this in my head, an hour later I kick myself because I realize I asked for too little. So I wrote a calculator in Javascript that will do all the calculations for you.
I’ll leave it up to the reader to write the inverse operation 🙂
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Jeopardy done
First major game to show the RakNet logo prominently. There’s another AAA game out there that uses RakNet but they don’t show the logo.
http://www.us.playstation.com/PS3/Games/JEOPARDY
Unfortunately, they edited the middleware splash screen out of the video on the site.
The most difficult part of contracting on this project was working with 3rd party code. This is one of those cases where it would have been faster to write your own systems from scratch. In the end it did well though and the game is pretty much bug-free.