mirado's Profile

"In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine..."

I'll be the first to admit I often miss the boat when it comes to cutting edge ideas. I'll read about them, or at least know enough to carry out a conversation, but I usually get tired of waiting for certain aspects to become more stable or I forget about X until I see it appear in the news a few months later, that kind of thing. It's a bad habit of mine: I don't usually follow through on the latest, greatest ideas until they are, by internet standards at least, mainstream.

Bitcoins fell under that description. I heard about them very early on, but the concept of a "Peer to Peer Currency" sounded ludicrous. It still is ludicrous, if I have to be honest. Backed by nothing, a potential for insane deflation, at least two crashes already...

Yeah......

The Road to El Dorado?

So, why the sudden interest? Well, I'm bored! Simple as that. The Tested Folding Team has more or less imploded (not sure our marketing campaign of "Punch the shit out of cancer!" did the trick), there's a sort of weird lull in video game releases that I want to play (soon to be cured by BF3 and Skyrim, but not yet!), and I've been doing more and more work which means the vast majority of my computing power is sitting idle instead of being devoted to building troops to take over feudal Japan. Also, in a strange twist, AMD is ahead of the game when in comes to this implementation of that GPGPU stuff, and my two 6950s are actually quite good at it (I'm pulling 600 Mhash/s! Whatever that means!).

But, as in all things, I seem to have missed the boat. I'm not 100% sure how it works, but Bitcoins used to be a lot easier to get. A few intrepid souls have already made some posts here explaining how it works and the general idea behind it, so I won't get into it. The easiest description I can come up with is folding for money, with a catch: the more people mining for Bitcoins, the harder it is to...mine them, I guess.

Let me put it into perspective: The first, earliest and therefore easiest to mine BitCoins had a difficulty rating of 1 (one what? Not sure. Just consider it the base of this scale), and the entire network was humming along at slow 7 Mhash/s. As more people hopped on, the difficulty starting going up, but so did the network speed. Everything was working as designed. Around last July, something happened: the speed of the networked spiked. All of a sudden, BitCoins went from a difficulty of 45 or so, to around 140. By the end of October, it hit 3,100. Sometime in April of this year, it hit the 100,000 mark.

Now we're sitting at a difficulty of 1.75 million.

"My father worked the mines..."

What does that mean, in practice? Well, for one thing, you can't really mine coins alone and expect to make any money. The entirety of the BitCoin network used to run at a speed that was 100 times slower then my machine. Now it runs at 12.7 Thash/s (Yeah, tera-hashes). But there's a bigger, underlying problem: if you hopped on early, you're sitting on a mountain of coins. Since each block (the actual thing you are working on) is worth 50 coins, and it used to be a more or less trivial thing to do a few blocks a day, you've got people sitting on piles of coins.

And then you have those, like me, who are now working for fractions of a coin. I think we need to unionize, or something.

So, why bother? Well, for one thing I was challenged by a friend to buy this badge (which costs one coin and only accepts BitCoins). Seeing as I'm sitting on a whole... 0.0624258406 of a Bitcoin, it may take a little while. Then again, I've only been doing this for about three hours, so who knows. I'd also like to see what I can really get with my ~~money generated from wasted electricity~~ hard earned coins, as that neat little "What's a BitCoin?" video tells me I can get video games and...I don't know, maybe a pie out of the deal. (New idea: economy based around pies.)

So, question time: Has anyone bothered to give BitCoins a serious look? Has anyone actually bought something with their Coins? Does anyone want to help me work out the deflation issues in my pie-based economy?

Why are drivers such a crapshoot?

I am starting to get royally pissed off.

Just looking at it makes me want to punch something.

Backstory

If you didn't know, I just built a new computer about 3 months ago. I decided to go for the works; Sandy Bridge processor, 8GB of RAM, huge CPU cooler....and dual graphics cards. Now, I haven't put a million systems together in the past; in fact I've done relatively few upgrades to the PCs that I've had as well. Because of this, I've got no brand loyalty at all to either ATI (RIP) or Nvidia. When I was looking to put this system together, the parts I chose were simply the best from a price/performance standpoint. I wanted to spend about $2,000 on a PC that would tear anything apart; my goal was 60+ FPS @ 1920x1200 on the most demanding games like Metro 2033 and the original Crysis.

I based that criteria on a trend that I've been noticing in the PC world: regression. No one is trying to push the boundaries like those games did. No one is building a game that is impossible to max out and would remain that way for three years. Most companies are producing titles that are multiplatform, and most of the PC versions are designed to have an image quality comparable to their console counterparts. Take Crysis 2, for instance: it's a beautiful game but one that doesn't punish hardware or look as draw dropping as its predecessor. I can chalk up the improved performance to Crysis' poorly optimized code, but there's no denying that, at best, Crysis 2 looks as good as its 3 year old father, and never any better. With that in mind, I set these games as my benchmarks. If I could get hardware that handled those two at my required level of performance, I knew I'd be in the clear for at least two, perhaps even three years with little to no reduction in image quality.

Enter the 6950.

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun?

Codename: "Long and Strong"

I wasn't getting the numbers that I wanted out of a single card. It just wasn't happening. The 570 and 580 from Nvidia both wimped out when hit with either Crysis' Enthusiast mode (why in the HELL they decided that normal, high, and very/ultra high needed to be renamed will forever be a mystery) or Metro's tessellation-heavy maxed out firepower. And the (at the time) brand new lineup from AMD wasn't what people were hoping for. They positioned their highest end card, the 6970, against the 570 and not the flagship 580. This meant they posted even worse numbers, and sometimes were even passed off by last generation's GTX 480. But something interesting happened when you stuck two of them in the same machine. You see, AMD spend their time making optimizations to their Crossfire setups, raising them from the level of "totally worthless" to "kick-ass but impractical". And seeing as I wasn't building a machine for the sake of practicality, that was all right by me. I'll just let the numbers do the talking:

Fuck. Yes.

Now we're getting somewhere. $600 worth of hardware competing against $1000+. The scaling is just extraordinary, actually reaching double in some cases. 75% efficiency was unthinkable with last generations Radeons, let alone 90%+. The pricing was perfect as well; two 570s were just out of my budget, two 580s even more so. And with the ability to flash the 6950s and more or less turn them into 6970s, it seems like a fucking home run. So I bought the cards, picked up the rest of the parts, installed them all without a hitch (well, one or two hitches. You know what I mean.) and everyone lived happily ever after.

Right?

Wrong

Wrong.

Dead fucking wrong.

You see, I thought I did my homework on this. I made sure I had the PSU to handle it all. I made sure that my motherboard would split the PCI lanes in a more or less logical way. I knew, I fucking knew that Crossfire/SLI setups can be temperamental. I read up on all of the potential driver conflicts and hardware issues and weird clock speed mismatches and "microstuttering" (whatever the fuck that is) problems. Most of them I chalked up to user error, or to personal vendetta from a hardcore fan of the other company. I wasn't alarmed by the volume of topics simply because I applied the old rule: You don't post to say "Hey, everything is great! I love you AMD/Nvidia!", you post when you have a problem. And you do it loudly, loud enough to drown out the few voices that did bother to post and say they were doing just fine. On top of all that, AMD spend time making Crossfire suck less. The numbers prove it....right?

Well, they weren't lying about the numbers. Firing up Crysis, laying a bunch of explosives under a jeep, hitting the detonator and watching as my computer doesn't even fucking flinch is a great feeling. Rolling through Metro 2033's tunnels with my PC hooking into my 7.1 home theater system is an amazing experience. The problem is...I don't get to do that as often as I should. My roommate puts it best: "I get 20FPS all the time, you get 200FPS every six tries". It all started so subtly: some app crashes, perhaps the display driver would have to reset every once in a while, stuff that wasn't out of the ordinary even for a single card system. I was, and in some ways still remain, able to put up with all of it. The high points are just so damn high that I can overlook whatever little faults creep in and break the illusion.

But lately, things have been going south. App crashes proceeded to blue screens. Driver resets gave way to hard locks. I found myself unable to run CPU and GPU intensive workloads without the whole thing locking up (bye bye folding, at least for now). Sometimes a BSOD would cause the fans on the cards to kick up to 100% (which I would describe as sounding "leaf blower-esq", seriously you have to yell over the damn things), a value they NEVER reach under any load. Sometimes I couldn't even open the Catalyst Control Center (the CCC is a necessary evil if you want to use Crossfire) without it pulling up a BSOD. I began worrying that it was a hardware issue, but independently testing each card (as well as getting them both to run FurMark while Crossfire'd) have ruled that out. The worst part is the god damn inconsistency of it; I could go for DAYS without a single issue, but out of the blue it would crash five minutes after boot. Sometimes it would be a hard lock, sometimes an actual blue screen would appear, sometimes with the fans going crazy. There is no pattern to it.

A new problem prompted me to post this; 2D rendering in fullscreen applications was fucked up. Despite not changing any settings, a game like TF2 or Borderlands would have very low-res textures and blocky shadows. No setting change could fix this, either in the game or in the CCC itself. I resorted to switching drivers to the new 11.4 preview that AMD pushed out a while back; that only proceeded to fuck up text rendering in Firefox (not the desktop, just in Firefox). After wasting a good two hours uninstalling and reinstalling and BSODing and booting into safe mode and trying the old drivers (now the text bug was present there as well), I finally got the damn thing back to square one, at least in terms of the text.

I could take a card out, but that would mean a) I've wasted $300 b) I won't get the performance I want and c) I would be admitting defeat. I'd appreciate any insight or even some similar tales, good or bad. Just don't mind me if I don't respond immediately; I could lock up at any moment.

Are you a good driver?

There's no easy way of saying this: I'm addicted to speed.

This kind not...never mind.

So you have some twisting, deserted roads that cut through some breathtaking scenery (if you are into trees and mountains and haven't seen it a million times) with little to no cops. There's almost nothing preventing you from pretending your Hyundai Elantra is a Bugatti Veyron. I know I do it, and that's the thing; lately I've caught myself taking that stretch of roadway faster and faster. When I first started driving it, I averaged 75 Mph (the limit is 65 for 95% of the way). I now average, average 90. That includes the in-town bits at both ends with red lights and such.

There's one bit of road that I would have to define as perfect; a three mile long, more or less straight piece that goes through an area where they had to blast the side of the mountain off to attach the interstate to it. The opposing lanes on the left are elevated a good 30 feet above you and with the sheer cliff at your right, there's no room for speed traps at all. This right here is my designated spot to open the taps, to really, really floor it and see exactly what my car can do. My last trip through I achieved 127MPH. And in a car with a 2L straight 4 which isn't all that aerodynamic on PA roads, I can say that it's equal parts impressive and terrifying.

And every time I do it, the better it gets and the faster I want to go. (Drive I mean, not...*sigh*)

But does that make me a bad driver? I have never caused an accident; the only one I was ever involved in was ruled not my fault and I haven't had anything happen either way in two years. I don't run red lights and I don't skip stop signs (I've been berated by friends for stopping at 3AM, for instance). I drive a reasonable speed in towns (within 5 of the limit unless it's a 25 in which case they can go fuck off!) and never attempt what I mentioned if there is any sort of congestion on the motorway. Hell, I don't even tailgate people as I know they are more likely to cause a crash then I am. And yet I get this "Oh my god you are a maniac" type of response out of people whenever I mention how I am on the interstate.

So, am I a bad driver? Are you a bad driver? Do you do anything similar to what I do, and do you believe (like me) that it isn't speed that kills, it's poor reaction time and bad decision making....speed just makes it worse. :D

Dance Yrself Clean: The End of LCD Soundsystem

So, James Murphy decided to call it quits. I can completely respect his decision (to get out because you're getting too big) even if I am envious of his position. How many people can say they've retired because they're getting too famous? And in classic LCD fashion, things ended with a bang...a weird, spaceman choir filled bang. Let me walk you though the night as I experienced it....

....but first: pizza.

Pizza

I just realized that macro shots of pizza are pretty damn creepy!

I arrived in New York as I arrive almost anywhere I go: hungry. Luckily, Waldy's Pizza was there to fix that with one of the best dishes I have ever had. I consider myself something of a pizza connoisseur (if I'm allowed to use a French word with an Italian dish), having eaten so damn much of it over the course of my various international travels, but this one ranks in my top three. Everything was just so damn fresh right down to the oregano and basil that you can clip yourself to season your meal. There wasn't much seating but this place is definitely worth the wait and since it's right near MSG you have no excuse for missing it if you are going there to see a show.

Not Pizza

Guess they weren't that popular after all!

That's...that's a bit better.

very quiet and low-key right to a full on electronic crunch with no transition in-between; the first time I heard the song in my car I nearly took a heart attack as I had cranked it up to hear the opening! Still, it's perfect for a concert; once that bass kicks in the entire place was jumping for the whole song. If you haven't heard it (or haven't heard it live), here's a great video which shows it off close up (Skip up to 4:00 if you don't want the whole intro, but the effect is better right from the start).

What a night!

Set two was mostly 45:33, the Nike commissioned piece...and spacemen. More specifically, I assume it was Shit Robot but just dressed as a glitter alien and all vocode'd. Anyway, this part was overall the weakest of the three (or four? It's all a bit fuzzy) but with that being said there were still some great moments like Reggie Watts and a fuckin' horn section. Set three was a great outro; Losing my Edge had all of the different bands he mentions flashed up on a big projector (Gil Scott-Heron!) along with a bit of Daft Punk's "Da Funk" thrown in there, and it even included a cover of Harry Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire". The finale couldn't be anything other then "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down", in which James (after a full week of concerts and now the weight of his last song) couldn't help but give in to the emotions. I don't think there was a single person in that whole place who could keep it in, for that matter.

All and all, unforgettable. No matter his reasoning it's sad to see good bands go, and they will be missed.

How To Keep Your Passwords Safe In Two Easy Steps

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume we're all reasonably smart people. A hunch like that keeps this blog post from turning into "How to Keep Your Passwords Safe in Seven Hundred Easy Steps" by eliminating such things as "No, clicking on that won't win you an iPod" or "That's not really a Nigerian Prince". I'm also going to assume your computer is virus free; it doesn't matter if your password is a hundred characters long if there's a keylogger recoding everything you type.

I'm also going to admit that this title is misleading; I should really write: "How to Keep Your Passwords As Safe as You Possibly Can On Your End, Keeping in Mind That I May Be Missing Something Major and That These Are The Two Easiest Steps That I Can Think Of" but that doesn't really roll of the tongue and "HTKYPASAYPCOYEKINTIMBMSMATTATTESTICTO" is a horrible acronym. Finally I want to thank Bane for giving me the idea (well, posting his idea so I can cop it, but whatever).

Use A Password Manager

This is by far the easiest step, and the one I'm shocked most people don't do. Managing passwords is hard; it isn't realistic to keep ten different passwords in your head, at least not ten passwords of a sufficient length. So what do we do; use one password for everything, that's what. I'm guilty of it, in fact I did it for years until it finally bit me in the ass when my Gmail password got lifted. That would have been fine, but my iTunes password was the same and someone proceeded to buy $500 in gift cards "For my GF". I got the money back, but I had to cancel accounts and credit cards and a whole mess of things that could have been prevented by simply using better passwords.

But using a bunch of passwords is hard!

No, I refuse to believe that you would rather go through the experience of calling up anti-fraud departments instead of changing a few passwords. I don't care if you have a hundred websites, it's infinitely easier then dealing with identity theft. Changing them is easy; remembering them, now that's the trick. So enters LastPass.

This is LastPass. Well...the icon for LastPass.

LastPass is a free service that manages, generates, stores, and autofills all of your passwords. Go to their site, sign up, and create a master password, which (as their slogan states) is the last one you'll ever need. I suggest you download the extension for your browser; while the service works fine without it, it's much easier when it's all integrated. With that setup, all you need to do is let LastPass generate random passwords whenever you go to sign up for a new site, and then tell it to autofill them every time you visit. That's it; you're now a billion times more secure then you were with "aaaaa" as a password for all of your accounts.

But I already have strong passwords, and I save them all in Firefox/Chrome! Why should I bother?

For one thing, a lot of those passwords may not be encrypted. They're just stored in a plaintext file somewhere on your computer, while LastPass encrypts everything it stores. It will even detect and import any passwords that is unencrypted; and if it can find it, any piece of software can. Even if everything is already encrypted, using LastPass will help you constantly make strong, randomized passwords thanks to their generator.

I don't want to install anything!

You don't have to, really. You can use their website exclusively (which is great for when you can't install/are on a public computer) if you so choose; all of your passwords are stored in the cloud, and encrypted to the point that they specifically warn you that if you lose your master password, there's no way for them to get your passwords off their server.

http://howsecureismypassword.net/ says my password will last 100 trillion years! Why should I change them?

Well, the first thing you need to keep in mind is that RateMyPassword only checks against brute force attacks, which is usually the last method anyone would try. In all reality (and as they correctly state), the first attempt would be a dictionary search, which hits every word in the dictionary in a few seconds. So while "antidisestablishmentarianism" might appear to last "About 527 sextillion years", it's really only good for about 10 seconds. You want random jumbles of letters, numbers and symbols, and that's exactly what LastPass gives you.

So you've got a bunch of secure passwords. Now you face your greatest threat: flaming sheep.

Use HTTPS Whenever Possible

Firesheep was a bit of a wake up for anyone who thought that by using strong passwords and only personal computers that it didn't matter what network they used or who was on it. And while it was by no means the first, Firesheep is by far the easiest way of nabbing usernames and passwords off of an unsecured public network. It grabs the login data from your browsers cookies, meaning that it completely bypasses the hassle of cracking your password directly; it simply plucks it right out of the air. The first time you download the simple Firefox add-on, go to a crowded Starbucks, and see 20 Facebook logins pop up, it's sorta scary.

And yet, there's an easy way around all of this: using HTTPS. As that "S" implies, it's a secure version of the usual HTTP that most sites employ for their login pages. However, more and more websites are starting to have the option to use it on every page, which is the perfect tool to defeat Firesheep and most other methods of packet snooping. The advantages are obvious; end to end security. The disadvantages? For one, most sites bury the option to enable HTTPS somewhere deep, and many aren't using HTTPS at all; not a real problem if you're just browsing or on a home network, but I'd be careful about logging into any of those on a public network. It's also annoying to remember to enable it for every site you visit; if you're on Firefox then HTTPS Everywhere has you covered, but otherwise you'll have to look for yourself. Keep in mind that some sites only use it for login pages and that the rest may be unencrypted and vulnerable to something like Firesheep, but as long as the site supports it, HTTPS Everywhere will enable it on every page.

You sound really paranoid!

I put this here because I get that a lot, and it's really not the case. Even if my identity wasn't stolen, I would still do these two things as they take little time and actually make my life more convenient in some ways (I only have to remember one password, for instance).

So doing these two things makes me bulletproof?

No, but it removes a good chuck of the personal blame that most "stolen password" situations are caused by. There's not much you can do if your bank or Twitter or Facebook loses a ton of passwords to hackers, for instance, but why would you worry about something that you can't control? On top of that, you don't have to worry about that happen with only your password stolen as a result, which is really what I'm trying to cover here.

That's my little safety tip for the day; feel free to add your own/point out what I missed/ask some questions. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to see if I can get that HowSecureIsMyPassword site to post a number bigger then "About 717 quattuorvigintillion years".

Really Bad Sleeping Habits

Now I'm in college so it's possible (if not a certainty) that it just comes with the territory, but my admittedly poor sleeping habits have now completely spiraled out of control. It's 11:30PM and I'm just waking up, if that's any indication of how literally backwards my sleep patterns have become. I'd love to say "It wasn't always like this!", but although this is probably the worst it's ever been, it's a culmination of a lifetime of bad habits and unfortunate circumstances.

It all started...as far back as I can remember, actually. Back before I was old enough to be in school, my parents both worked night shift and would send me up to my grandparents (conveniently located within 5 minutes of their job) to spend the day. It was all a lot of fun (I was spoiled terribly, those were the days) and it tired me out the same way it would tire any three year old out, and so I'd fall asleep by 8PM. But, and here's where the trouble starts, my parents wouldn't get out of work till midnight; not having seen them all day (and already having a good four hour nap in), I would bolt awake and become an absolute nightmare to get back to sleep. By the time they did put me out, it could be nearly 4 AM; in a way, that made me the luckiest kid around, as I had a later bed time them most people ever would (no matter how old)! And seeing as they didn't leave for work until 2PM, I would be completely recharged by the next day, and the cycle would begin again.

Starting school didn't really change much of it; my mom switched shifts so I could get home at a reasonable time, but I'd always try and wait up to see my dad. This lasted until 7th grade or so, and the resulting near-decade of 6 hour sleep cycles trained my body to run off of very little sleep. It didn't help that school was a joke; up until high school I could run on 1/3rd capacity and cruise right by. When high school hit (and my dad retired), I didn't have any reason to stay up the way I did; I just found it impossible to change. My parents were (and still are) sympathetic, mostly because they are directly responsible for how it turned out. I can't blame them, though; this was their lifestyle for years before I was born, and I believe it would be just as impossible (if not more so) for them to have changed even without their job keeping them locked in.

It has it's perks; I've never had a curfew at almost any point in my life (I think the closest was "get back by 7AM, your mom needs the car for work"), and I was never yelled at for sleeping in, since my parents often did the same. But now that I'm in college and away from home, what little thread of control I had seems to have completely frayed. I now find myself pulling 36 hour days; not because I have an overload of work, but in an attempt to jolt my sleep cycle back into place. It works for a good four or five days, but I slowly find myself slipping; first it's 2AM, then 5, then 7, and before I know it I'm back to staying up right through class and going to bed afterward, at like 5PM.

So, now that you know how much of a wreck things have become, I'm curious; anyone do something similar? Have any of you found your natural schedules go all over the place, and what have you done to try and correct it?

Now if you excuse me, it's midnight and I need to get some breakfast.