Christian Riesen

Recently mt PC died. It served me well for a few years and was slated for replacement this fall anyways. The exact location of where it died is not certain, but it’s in the CPU/Mainboard/RAM area. So I ripped those three out and replaced them with new ones.

Now my PC died again, no month after I replaced it. At first it didn’t find the harddisk anymore. That as odd, since I own an SSD that is on PCIE, the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 to be precise. I never had problems with it, so why would I suddenly have troubles with a non rotating disk in a secure case that has also a surge protector in front of it? That made zero sense. So I ripped the card out and tried a boot with that. The entire thing staied black.

I noticed though it seemed to cycle so I took a closer look. The board I put in is an ASUS Rampage IV Extreme and it has two fantastic features. One is a debug LED, which shows two segments that can show numbers and some basic letters. With that two digit code I could glimpse something about a CPU error. Stumped I turned to the net searching and letting the computer rest.

Then I installed the second cool feature, the Overclocking Key. It’s a bridge that sits between your screen and the computer (DVI) that then gets wired via a cable into the motherboard. This way the motherboard can display information about itself directly on your big screen. As I pressed a button, it went back to life and showed me that the 3.2 Ghz CPU was running at 3.9 Ghz.

Things fell into place almost instantly. I tweaked the BIOS settings to go lower in their fan use, so I can have a quite computer most of the time. With the overclocking thingy pushing my 6 core CPU, it created too much heat and after a certain level it just shut off.

So I went in and tried to disable all Overclocking things in there. Not much luck, it still seems to do some overclocking, unless I set by hand every single setting to the standard one, but at least it works again and I have a desktop in front of me.

As a side note, there is a nasty error that can happen in some circumstances:

Windows is unable to install to the selected location error 0x80300024

I got this while trying to run setup again. I simply was unable to install to that disk. I had another hard drive to select there as well, but I didn’t want to install on there. Shutting the computer off, unplugging that second drive and then retrying fixed this bug instantly.

Today the symfony.com server seems to have some trouble. Working with the frame work, having access to it often is very useful, specially when you do something you haven’t touched in a while. So what now?

The entire documentation is on github. You can find it in the symfony-docs repo. It’s not as nice to navigate, but the content is all present.

So if there is a problem again, simply go to github and you can still find all information you are looking for.

I had a Wordpress installation on my homepage christianriesen.com for a while now. As a friend of mine used to say, Wordpress is a remote shell program with a side feature of also including a blog. After having spent a significant amount of time on Tumblr this past year, I decided to switch completely over to Tumblr.

It’s similar to other services but has significant advantages. I can run it on my own domain. There is no comment spam, ever. I can tag, queue and delay posts (even backdate, as I did with my old posts). I can upload sounds, videos and images. The templating mechanism is very mighty and is enough for my needs by far.

Of course you also have the excellent Tumblr community that reblogs and likes posts, giving you a lot of content to like and reblog as well. The biggest downside of Tumblr is in my view still the communication system. The asks, submissions and “fan mails” are sorely lacking.

I connected the webmaster tools, analytics, Twitter and even Facebook to this tumblr now. Let’s see how that all goes.

There is a neat app you can get on your Android Device or Iphone. It’s called Google Authenticator and it implements some RFC specified one time password mechanisms. It’s main use is to give you a two factor authentication for your Google account. But it’s not limited to that. In fact, you can use it for your very own page or app and use it as a two factor authenticator. Because the app is by Google, you don’t have to worry about building that thing and getting it into the app stores, but you can simply use the preexisting application for your own needs.

In the latest update it added the rights for internet access to the android app, though only for time syncronization. Besides that, the app does not talk to the internet, and this, only when you tell it to.

So how does this work?

You create a secret that is saved with your local user, like a password, but they don’t really need to know that secret. You share that secret with the Google authenticator app through a QR code). From now on, every 30 seconds, your device shows a new one time password. As long as your time is in sync with the server, you will see the same code, the server will generate from your secret. Once you used the code, the server will make note (or should) and not allow that code to be used anymore for the next couple minutes. So even if someone can listen to your conversation you have with the server and replay it an instant later, they will be unable to login because the password no longer grants you access.

To make life easier, I created some classes (and unit tests) to take care of the complicated bits for you. You can get the otp classes on Github. Feel free to use it any way you like. If you do use it, or get stuck, contact me. I always like to hear where things I made are used. Of course also feel free to give feedback, fork the code and improve it.

After only a few years of possessing the study guide and not actually taking the test, I went ahead and made a break for it. I can call myself Zend Certified Engineer in PHP 5.3 now and have the link to prove it. With that, I’m now number 95 of the people who have made that certification in Switzerland.

A word on the test. It’s not always 100% clear in many places. Not to confuse with a question that is asked in a roundabout way, those unclear questions simply don’t compute into a clearly asked thing. There are few of those though, making it not too hard. There is no grade, just pass or fail.

I worked on a cronjob today and logged the output, which was just the title of this post:
Extension ‘/path/script.php’ not present
Now in cron, the script is called directly, with the usual shebang line at the top of the script, so the call in cron does not include a “php” in front of it. Never had much of a problem with that. After some searching I came across that it might be a problem with newlines being in DOS format on the Linux server. This one ran Ubuntu (Debian) which made the problem come out.

The utility dos2unix solves the matter rather efficiently. To compile, gettext needs to be installed, other than that, it was smooth sailing and the problem has been solved.

The second “writing” of the title of this post, is the overall activity, the process and actions leading to the end product. The first “writing” is the actual manual physical process of writing.

To give you a small sample, I’ve taken some numbers from Brandon Sanderson. His book Elantris has 202,765 words. The first book of the Wheel of Time series, called The Eye of the World has 305,902 words. Why Wheel of Time? Brandon Sanderson now is finishing the series, with three more books after the death of Robert Jordan. The first of those, will be Towers of Midnight and is also supposed to be clocking in at about 300,000 words. Besides me loving these books (and waiting for this next one) consider the size in comparison to this post. At the moment, this post is only 134 words long.

So to get into the range of these large books, this post would have to be 3000 times longer. Just typing this took me not long, but searching those numbers did. And that was very simple research.

Let’s look from a different perspective for a moment. Let’s assume you don’t have the luxury to spend 8 hours a day or longer on writing. You can only write, physically, let’s say for two hours every single day, not more not less. Now the average computer user (really average, not those fast typing people) can hack about 19 words per minute. Let’s round up to 20 for this thought experiment. So if you consistently type for two hours, without pause or anything else, you can hack out 2400 words. So in 124 days, or something over 4 months, you would have typed out a novel the size of those mentioned above.

That’s pure mechanical typing. No deep thoughts, plotting, research, anything else. So say you did just that, then you got a gigantic collection of text on your hand. Now you can start editing it. While doing so, you realize half way through that the other half doesn’t make sense anymore. So you can throw away two months of typing right there. Again, pure mechanical writing alone.

Research can eat up our time amazingly fast. If you like what you write about, are into it, you can get sucked into the research badly. You want the melting point of normal iron. Then you read about alloys, steel, and so on and your time has flown away. And in the end you realize you didn’t even need the melting point of iron. The important part there is to not be afraid to throw away research. Even if you spent four hours on something, don’t try to force it into your story, just because you spent time on it.

The name game is one of the worst time sinks I’ve come across. The hours spent on finding names for things (stories and other wise) just blow my mind. Naming characters and places is just as bad. the best advice I can give anyone here is, grab any name, really, any at all and run with it. Thanks to the wonderful feature of search and replace, you can change it later on. Or of you adjust to it and start to like it, well you’re set.

Second worst in time suckers are dead ends. The hero rushes into the room. The door closes shut, no way out… and what now? I’ve seen writers digging a hole just to dig deeper after that. And the deeper they dig, the less likely they gonna find a way out. The easiest way is to back track. Find the point where you wrote yourself into that hole and then change the story there, dropping the part where you ended up in that dead end. Of course if you realize that late, you might have a lot to drop. If you keep writing deeper into the dead end, digging a deeper hole, there is even more to drop. You can write through it, as in write your way out of it by going forward sometimes, but usually, it’s a rather uninspired journey that makes your story as a whole suffer. Backtracking has so far improved the story every time I had to employ that strategy. Writing out of it, never did the trick really, if I was even capable of it.

Number one for time is always editing. With more experience, the writer usually creates more “good” raw material than bad. But even the best writers do not just print what they wrote down the very first time they had a thought, in it’s entirety. Before it is sent of to the printers, it will be read, changed, read again, and so forth. Scenes and entire chapters get moved, deleted, changed, rewritten and reinserted all over the book. This takes a lot of time. In most cases, editing takes longer than any other process.

In my rough estimation, the actual writing text process takes somewhere in the 5 to 10% of the time of the over all product. To come back to the two hours a day example of the 300,000 words book, it would take not 4 months, but closer to three and a half years.

Much more realistic though is a number of 1000 words a day (including all those time suckers above) and 200 days of working on it a year. This is including any time for promotion and all that other side stuff you need to take care of. So a 200k novel a year is a more realistic thing, even if you do write pretty much all the time.

Even if you type very fast and not very precise, such as me, and use all the other tools like spellcheckers to keep you in line, you still not getting anywhere fast enough. For many people I have met, that are writing in one way or another, it’s the physical part of writing that’s actually hindering them. If they had a BCI or Brain Computer Interface, they could just think the words and a computer would record them, then their actual writing process would be in sync with their though process.

Personally, I’d welcome that technology, though I must say that chances are high that you also get a lot of garbage flowing out of your brain if you did that. Then editing that all out will take a lot of time too.

To round this up, this post took not a full hour to write (physically) but almost two hours including the research editing it, and so on. It clocks in at 1118 words, so just another three hundred more posts like these and it would have the length of a novel.

It actually is just QPD but saying it like you would cupid makes it more memorable.

The short version is simple: Quality, Performance, Design.

You want something quality that performs well and then you look for which one looks better. This is a general way of how people select things and also how I’m approaching creating pretty much anything at all.

Let’s look at an example, because these terms are way too broad to make this easy understood at first glance.

A friend needs a frying pan. His old one is way too old so he goes to a store. There he has a selection of 20 different ones, ranging from high end to lowest crap. His need for quality is low, he needs a pan now and he knows no matter which one, after three years or so, the one he buys now is garbage anyways. He goes with one of the cheapest one, which will perform the task as equally as any other (or so close that there is virtually no difference). The design doesn’t even play a role, but I must say it’s a very ugly pan. Thankfully it’s a tool which is used temporary in the kitchen and spends the rest of it’s days in a cupboard. If he had a fancy kitchen where he hangs the pots up for display, he might chose something slightly less eye gauging.

Another friend want’s a new notebook. He has selected a Samsung or a Toshiba one, of the class of machines that are small and thin, but still fully capable notebooks. The quality is roughly equal as far as he can tell and the performance, well, it’s the same guts in essence anyways. So his decision is now down to design in the end. Which keyboard is more appealing, which casing, which screen.

So we almost always start out with a level of quality. That one is also determined by our budget more often than not, but quality is a huge key. Then in that range we look for performance, does it do the job well or better. And once those are satisfied, only then the true design is considered.

There are exceptions to this, like novelty items, or “cool looking thing” that you don’t really need or is impractical, but we select anyways for their design only.

In creating the quality is also paramount. A fine planed application or a quick hack. Performance, ignored (because of time constraints, not needed since it’s only a couple people using it) or highly optimized. And then in the end, a design (not application design, but the look and feel of it) to make it work smoothly or a like a huge kludge.

The principle applies rather broadly, not only to software as you can see in the samples, or purchases or projects. The sense also applies to relationships, to decisions in courses and so on. It boils down rather neatly, as long as you understand the fundamental contributors  of quality, performance and design.

I’m the happy owner of a Asus Sabertooth X58 mainboard. Since yesterday, I’m also the happy owner of a OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB. The later is an SSD running on your PCIE bus. Rather nifty as it bypasses all the SATA3 shenanigans I had with the now two defunct SSD’s sitting in my desk drawer. It also boasts a 1.5 Gigabyte per second read speed and 1.2 Gigabyte per second write speed, with 200’000 IOPS on top of that. So, after this little hardware porn, back to the problem.

It doesn’t work as advertised. First the install was weird. You need to download the driver and put it on a stick or something before you can actually install anything. After booting the Windows 7 disc, it will not find the drive, period. Out comes the USB stick with the driver. Load it and it suddenly finds it. Strangely it refused to install at that point, telling me it can’t create the partition or some such nonsense and that I should check the install log. What log? A reboot and repeat of the process later and it worked just fine.

A completion of the install later and I’m on Windows. Atto comes out and has a crack at it (standard settings, 256MB size and QD4). The excitement builds as the graphs go for larger chunks and then stops. At about 600 MB read and 700 MB write speed it’s done, no speed increases, nothing. No 1.5 Gigabytes by far.

Now I mentioned the mother board for a reason. See there is a little trick here. If you look closely at the specs of the RevoDrive, it says it’s PICe v2. If you check for the same on the motherboard, it says it has PCIe v2. Trouble is, only on the two beige 16x ports. The black 16x port is wired at 4x but it’s only PCIe v1. Guess which port my RevoDrive is sitting in and you will be right.

Lucky I had that second port free, but now the GFX card and the RevoDrive are sitting uncomfortably close. I switched them both around so there is one empty slot between them.

Booting up again, I gave Atto another go. Look what I get now: