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helushune's Profile
Server Relocation

This really only affects people from this site who are using my FAH GPU Tracker XML generator. Currently helushune.net (and some other websites I run) are located over at A Small Orange and mirror.helushune.net is over on a VPS located in Kansas City. Well, to consolidate costs I'm moving everything over to a new VPS located in Los Angeles which should be significantly faster than my current solution. This also gives me a lot more control over the machine and not be restricted by cPanel's silliness any longer. Anyway, the transition might take additional time since I'm also switching to new DNS servers run by myself. The VPS is currently running Debian but I might try to get this switched over to FreeBSD since that's more familiar ground to me but will add to the initial downtime/transition time.

Howto: Start Folding For The Tested Team Using FAH GPU Tracker
Here's how to get folding with the Tested.com Folding Team using the FAH GPU Tracker client.  The client's pretty awesome and will automatically download and, to some extent, configure the folding clients for you.  It's as easy as helping out with folding proteins can possibly get. 
 
First, you'll want to download the FAH GPU Tracker from http://fahtracker.com/.
 Unzip the file anywhere.  I used the root of my c:\ for this example.

Head over to  http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/getpasskey.py and get yourself a passkey if you plan on running SMP clients.  This will give you added security to your account as well as extra points for completing work units.  Who would say no to extra points? 

   You'll receive your PassKey through email with the address you provided.  Be sure to check your spam folder as well.

  This is optional and you probably won't have one until you push out a few work units for our team.  Head to the Extreme Overclocking.com Folding page and find yourself.  The number I've highlighted below is what's called your "EOC ID".  

Head over to  http://helushune.net/folding/ to automatically generate a configuration file for the FAH GPU Tracker.  This is optional but it makes the whole thing easier.  Fill out the information it asks for, you don't need a PassKey or EOC ID but if you have them, go ahead and fill those fields in.
 When you&squot;re done, hit "Generate XML"

The configuration file will be created for you and you'll be presented with a URL that you'll need later so copy this somewhere or keep the window open.  You can also download the file in a .zip archive and save it to your hard drive.
         



 Be sure to press "Apply" when you&squot;re done with the configuration or you&squot;ll need to do these steps over again.

 Click the "Start GPU", "Start CPU", or "Multi-GPU Control" buttons accordingly and fold those proteins!

 
Don't forget to stop by our thread over on Tested.com and say hello.
I Finally Experienced Microstuttering
And it's in Mass Effect 2.  I've been running a SLI setup since the 6800GT and while there have been some trials and tribulations, I've been privileged enough to never experience any sort of stuttering in my history of PC gaming.  Until tonight that is, when I sat down and decided to spend some quality time with Mass Effect 2, a game I've been neglecting for far too long.  I now understand what you all mean by it being annoying as sin. 
 
On the other hand, I've read it can be caused by drivers as well and I noticed Gigabyte recently updated a boatload of drivers for my board so I'm hoping that'll fix it.
Howto: Disable Auto Reboot (Windows)
I feel like I've had to write this several times lately so it'd be easier to just make a blog post and reference people to it when they need to disable the auto reboot in Windows. 
 
The screenshots in this post are from Windows 7 however the steps are the same in Windows Vista and the theory's the same for Windows XP (except there's less steps). 
 
The default setting of Windows is to auto reboot when it blue screens.  That's great and all but it prevents people from getting the STOP error code to help troubleshoot what's wrong with your PC.  Following these steps will disable the auto reboot feature.  It won't harm your PC at all but you will need to manually physically reboot the machine if it ever blue screens again. 
 
First, click on the start menu, right click on "Computer" and select "Properties". 



Well I've switched over to Chromium
You may remember me posting about using SRWare Iron last month.  I've since moved over to a custom build of Chromium shortly after I posted that.  
 
What have I done... 



Bloody Hell
First Phelan, now my car...  I've been driving a 2nd generation RX-7 for quite some time now, about 8 years.  It's been one of the most reliable cars I've ever owned until the other day.  I noticed the temperature gauge skyrocketing up to hot whenever I took the engine over 3000 RPMs or had it under any sort of load going up a hill.  Well, today I decided to do some fishing and found both seal bits as well as metal shavings in the coolant system.  My guess would be one of the coolant seals in the engine disintegrated.  Either way, any sort of overheating is certain death for the wankel engine and now I'm left with a car that I'm not sure will make it to work in all the stop-and-go traffic on Monday.
Phelan, We Hardly Knew Ye
A few days ago I tried to SSH in to my Gentoo box, Phelan only to be greeted with connection refused/timed out errors.  Confused, I walked in to the store room (which felt significantly colder), hooked up the CRT monitor to Phelan and was presented with the following: 


 
I pulled the machine off the shelf, opened the case to see if there was any noticeable physical damage like a blown capacitor and to physically inspect the CPU.  Took off the heatsink and oh, hello. 



 
Anyway, that CPU won't be running folding@home (or anything else for that matter) ever again.  Farewell Phelan, we hardly knew ye.
Say Hi to Mishu!
Apparently I'm part of the Corgi collective now. 

Phelan lives!
I'm a total nerd. 
  
helushune@phelan /etc $ uname -a
Linux phelan 2.6.36-gentoo-r5 #2 SMP Tue Jan 4 19:21:01 PST 2011 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux     
 
Despite initial intimidation, Gentoo's really not that bad of an install and it's fast as a bat out of hell, even with not that much ram (I'm going to dump at least 8gb in to when I don't feel so constrained by money).  This would have all been done last night if I wasn't an idiot and compiled JFS support in to the kernel instead of a kernel module.  I was trying to play Bayonetta at the same time and missed the part where it's two spacebar presses for built-in support. 
 
Now, I just need a place to put it...  probably next to Fuzzy as long as it doesn't take up too much space under my desk.
A Week With SRWare Iron (a Chrome alternative)
I've always wanted to try out Chrome but I have a huge problem with its privacy policy and the amount of "usage tracking" the browser does.  This is also the reason why I refuse to use anything Yahoo related and don't have a Facebook account.  A little over a week ago, Tested user CLRH2O turned me on to this little gem of a web browser.  It's basically Chrome without all the usage tracking and some other improvements (such as no javascript).  Such as this list of "features" that has been gutted that I shamelessly stole from Wikipedia:
  • RLZ identifier, an encoded string sent together with all queries to Google or once every 24 hours.
  • Does not access Google search on startup for users with Google as default search.
  • A unique ID ("clientID") for identifying the user in logs.
  • A timestamp of when the browser was installed.
  • Google-hosted error pages when a server is not present.
  • Google Updater automatic installation.
  • DNS pre-fetching, because it could perhaps be used by spammers.
  • Automatic address bar search suggestions.
  • Bug tracking system, sends information about crashes or errors.

I have since been using it as my primary browser over Firefox 4 beta on my Windows, BSD, and MacOS home PCs to get a feeling for it.

What I Like

  • It's fast to boot up.  Significantly faster than FireFox 4.  I can't tell any difference when going to web sites or page rendering compared to FF.
  • The sync feature is brilliant.  I love that I can sync my addons, bookmarks, settings across all platforms with absolutely no hassle.  Seriously, this is great.
  • Minimalistic UI.  It took me a while to get used to the fact that I can just type what I want to search for in the address bar but now I find myself doing it when I use IE at work or fire up FireFox.

What I Don't Like

  • Bookmark management.  It's atrocious and a chore at its best, at least on the Windows and BSD/linux platform.  MacOS has a forced menu bar and there's a handy "Bookmarks" selection.  As someone who frequently uses my bookmarks, it's been nothing short of annoying.  Yes, I could enable the bookmarks bar but it's hideous.
  • Tab handling is not as good as FireFox, not yet at least.  I'd rank it better than IE though.
  • Addon/plug-in management.  FireFox really has this down.  I have FlashBlock and Adblock installed and have no idea how to configure them if I wanted to.  This really should be improved.
  • The complete lack of changeable options.  I get that it's a minimalistic browser but I would like to be able to configure more than just one SSL setting, have the ability to change application meta types, etc.
  • I've run in to several rendering problems but these may be limited to Webkit.  I haven't installed Arora to double check if it's just the rendering engine or something with Iron.
  • No SmoothScrolling.  Something I always enable in FireFox and Iron still has the clunky scrolling.  Totally minor and probably more of a personal preference.

Despite my list of gripes, I really like this browser and will continue to use it along side FireFox for the rest of the month (or at least until FireFox 4 final hits) and make a final judgement then.    You can give it a whirl by going to http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php