Geekissues

Late last year I was given the option to install Windows 7 on my work laptop. Being a bit of an old laptop I was weary, though the buzz was that Win7 was great and performed well even on lower end hardware. I went ahead and installed it.

This isn’t a Win7 review article though, it really is a good OS blah blah. The biggest problem I ran into is that a good 40/50% of my CPU was constantly being used for “System Interrupts”. Even though it still seemed to perform really well considering the available hardware, it was a rather annoying situation to be in. I did the usual:

• Disable non-essential hardware
• Update all drivers
• Update OS
• Google like crazy
• etc.

Though nothing helped and there wasn’t really any good information out there.

Flash forward through the Christmas holidays and getting in to the office this morning 2 things in my brain crossed paths:

• The laptop’s battery is horrible and Windows 7 initially alerted that no battery was detected.
• I was still wasting a huge amount of CPU cycles on interrupts for no apparent reason.

As I thought of these things at the same time I knew it had to be the problem. Without even turning off the laptop I opened up the performance monitor, swung the laptop onto it’s side and whipped the battery out. System Interrupts instantly dropped from a CPU AVG. of 40/50% to <1%.

I gained a huge amount of available cycles whilst losing about 30 seconds of battery life, seems like a pretty good trade.

If anyone’s interested because of a similar issue the laptop is an Acer TravelMate 4220.

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General 4220, Acer, System Interrupts, TravelMate, Windows 7, Windows 7 system interrupts

My general blog consumption consists of loads of tech and loads of creative inspiration stuff. This suits me quite down to the ground as it’s what I do & what makes me tick.

But there’s 1 single blog I subscribe to that isn’t either of these by a long shot. A little while ago I saw a really interesting video interview Jonah Lehrer and just couldn’t help myself in following him. Unfortunately I don’t often take the time to read his articles as they’re intense and because they’re so different from everything else I digest it can be a rather taxing task, but this one in particular caught my attention: The Stress Spiral.

Some excerpts:

…experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating….

…In other words, the rodents were now cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers…

…an experimental exercise known as the “suppression task”. Subjects are given four random words, two of which are printed in blue and two in green. After reading the words, they’re told to forget all the blue words and remember all the green words. Then, the scientists provide a steady stream of “probe words” and ask the subjects whether or not each probe is one of the words they were asked to remember. Interestingly, Jonides has found differences between clinically depressed and control subjects on the suppression task. While people suffering from depression perform normally when trying to forget words with a positive association (“smile,” “sunny,” etc.), they’re much worse at forgetting words with a negative association, such as “hurtful” or “lonely”. This suggests that being depressed primes us to fixate on problems, on all the things that are wrong with us and the world. The end result is a recursive loop of miserable thoughts, which leads to more stress, and more misery….

There you have it, just snap out if it and you’ll be fine.

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General

The first time I went over the photos from this day (2008-05-24) I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he was doing. It had me baffled, the whole time I was taking photos every time we were face to face like this he’d pull the face.

Months later randomly browsing through old photos it struck me, he was copying my face. Bent over 4ft from the ground on one knee leaning to the side struggling with glare and battling to focus on the little moving target – that’s the face I was pulling.

It’s a pity I didn’t get the focus quite right on this one, you gotta love kids.

General

Dear blog.

Today Twitter got hit by a DDoS attack, but this means that Twitter was down during the attack.

I had no way of letting anyone know about the fact that I knew about the event…

I was lost, confused & scared.

Twitter’s still down so I don’t know how to tell people I’m lost, confused & scared without Twitter.

All lameness aside though; they’ve been really really stable for a long time now and it just goes to show how much of an integral part of my life it’s become. I really do feel weird not being able to check my feed.

General ddos, twitter

The dog that made me believe that dogs can be really cool got stuck in a snare last night.

RIP buddy, you were fantastic.

General

This post was originally written for NerdMag but I felt like re-posting it here as well as the fact it got a little edited over there.

A little while ago I decided that I enjoy taking photos. I enjoyed it so much that I’d save up and splurge on buying myself a toy.

So I did.

Like a good little boy I saved some pennies and bought myself a solid entry level DSLR; the Canon 400d. In the time since I’ve taken a little over 5500 photos on my toy and I still love it to death.

Like any good aspiring photog I enjoy the normal things.

I think sunsets are pretty.

I’ve gone for walks in the sugarcane with our dogs.

Even flowers caught my attention.

But it’s not what made me fall in love with making photos. It will always be people that pull at the emotion strings. The ability to capture a little piece of someone else’s life whilst it’s unfolding is what makes me weak at the knees.

This kind of photography is normally categorised as “street”.

Now on to the topic at hand! The 2 biggest hurdles I’ve had to battle while shooting strangers as they go about their business are as follows:

With a lens like a 18-55 or even the 28-90 I’ve been playing with lately it’s rather difficult to get close enough to make a photo worth while. By this I mean the point is to not be seen. I don’t want photos of people smiling at the camera; I want to capture a little piece of them; just being. Not to say that it never happens. Sometimes you do get lucky. It’s just not as frequent or easy as I would like; unfortunately there ain’t no such thing as an invisibility cloak.

Yet.

My second problem is one that’s rather ingrained in me. Like good manners or the ability to walk it’s just there.

I’m structured.

Straight horizons; rule of thirds kind of structured.

This is great and all; for the most part I like being anal about details, composition, focus, light and all that sorta thing. But it can make for rather sterile photos. And where’s the fun in that?

A little while ago I decided to shoot more from the hip. I’m at the point where I’m fairly comfortable with knowing what settings I should be shooting with for the amount of light or whatever the case is; along with the ability to nudge settings in post regardless. I wanted to “let my hair down” if you will.

In the same way that scars make us interesting and we learn from mistakes. I wanted to intentionally make photographic faux pas; and reap the rewards. The only way I could force myself to experiment with composition tools like negative space, angles and the likes was to literally not look through the viewfinder while shooting.

Walking down Brooklyn Bridge I see a girl getting ready to take a photo of her friends. From the back I see her jiggling with her camera while the 3 friends stand a little closer and prepare their smiles with awkward side hugs. I’ll be passed them before they’re ready.

It’s kind of cloudy; ISO400 to be safe. Keep walking.

With my camera at my side I flick the F settings wheel to compensate for possible bad auto-focus. There should also be a good backdrop but I don’t look. It’s part of the experiment.

One. Two.. Three more steps and guess the angle.

In the time it takes for another step I half press and feel the tiny vibrations of the lens fighting to focus on something.

That was fun. Again.

A week later I’m in Toronto and surprised by the number of homeless people in the city. Apparently Toronto has the highest population of homeless people in the whole of Canada.

I walk around the city for around 2 hours.

Guessing the light.

Estimating depth of field.

Tiny vibrations and a hearty click.

The ancient American Indians used to think that photographs would steal a little piece of their soul and maybe they’re right. I love the fact that these from the hip photos aren’t perfect. But they capture reality.

Verbatim.

General

Dear Digg.

When the “Diggbar” was first released I cringed. I thought “oh great they’re hijacking my browser how annoying”.

I was therefor rather confused when I noticed that it actually makes sense. I can cut down my tabs by being able to interact with Digg (usually by digging/burying the article in question) because that functionality is available in the bar. In general I won’t read the comments until after I’ve actually seen what it’s all about (as everyone should).

My request is simple – change the RSS feed(s) to link directly to the article.

By making this little nifty bar, there is no point to go to the Digg page and the extra waits / clicks / tabs are annoying. You are a victim of your own success and I’m very sorry this change will impact your advert impression numbers. But seriously – we’re all using some sort of adblocker anyway.

Regards,
Nic.

General digg, diggbar, rss

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General

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General

After answering @SheBeeGee’s short notice plea and writing a rather niche opinionated article “TF2: A journey to above average” for her new project Nerdmag yesterday I noticed that I never write anything about gaming. I recently stumbled onto some pretty interesting stats that Valve have been capturing via their Steam platform. Combine these two findings and you get my first Geekissues gaming article!

To quote the team themselves: “At Valve, we’re always striving to make our products better. We’ve traditionally relied on things like written feedback from players to help decide which improvements to focus on. More recently, Steam has allowed us to collect more information than was previously possible. Episode Two includes a reporting mechanism which tells us details about how people are playing the game. We’re sharing the data we collect because we think people will find it interesting, and because we expect to spot emergent problems earlier, and ultimately build better products and experiences as a result.”

At first I was a little taken aback – you mean you’ve been SPYING on me? Yeah like that’s a huge surprise these days. But then I had a browse through what they’ve been capturing (at least what they’re making public) and it’s very interesting high level information; all of which having a very practical use. I’m going to briefly discuss a few of their stats for Half-Life 2: Episode One & Half-Life 2: Episode Two. The entire collection can be found here.

First up: “Sessions played“:
Episode 1: 4′650′952
Episode 2: 4′149′046

Unfortunately they don’t give an exact number of units sold, but this number gives a great indication of the “legs” for their product. Imagine you sell tennis rackets. I bet you have solid figures for the number of units sold; do you know how many games of tennis the average racket gets to see? Nope!

“Average session time”
Episode 1: 0h 35m
Episode 2: 0h 41m

Each time average Joe gamer sat down to play episode 2, he did so for a full 6 minutes more than he did when he played episode 1. That’s an increase of ~17%. At first I wrote this sentence next: “One could argue that this bump in average playing time makes up for the drop in “sessions played” and it’d be an interesting debate, but I don’t want to commit to that long shot without a little more data.”. Then I decided to stop being silly. If you take “sessions played” times “session time” you get the following:

Episode 1: 162′783′320m
Episode 2: 170′110′886m

How awesome must it be to be Valve and have the ability to sit back and say – “ep2 was played more than ep1 so we did a good job” without relying on opinionated reviewers or sporadic tester information.

Note: I know the session time is an average so these numbers won’t be exact, but it’s to prove a point.

Moving on to less back patting and more useful information have a look at the average number of deaths graph for ep2 along with the death maps. This sort of information will become invaluable for game developers as they release updates, fix bugs and try to keep the game-play experience as balanced as possible. You can see a clear trend with the number of deaths across the whole graph except for 2 places with noticeable jumps. Correlate those jumps with the fact that there’s a noticeable drop off of percentage of players that made it past ep2_outland_12. What’s the money that this information will bring changes to those specific maps? No one wants to play a game that is SO hard you don’t want to finish. You want a steady challenge.

With all this useful data to play with – I really like the fact they spied on me! Go Valve, go make my gaming experience better.

General gameplay data, Half-Life, Spying, Steam, Valve