iPad review

This device needs multitasking badly and yes it will be coming towards the end of this year according to Apple (we'll see how that turns out to be). Push notifications for IM and the inability to properly stream Internet radio whilst browsing the web further reinforce this statement. There are workarounds for the streaming part, however no real solutions until multitasking's out.

Contrary to what people reckon App Store has plenty of free an usable apps such as: WordWeb, RDP, VNC, IM+, StreamItAll, GoodReader Lite, Google Earth, Fring, Nimbuzz, LinkedIn, Opera Mini, Wikipanion, APOD and so on... Put in other words you'll fill up the desktop with app icons easily just with free (and useful) apps..

I've never been a fan of touch screens on mobile phone sized devices (eg. iPhone...) however the screen size of the iPad makes it usable for me.

Who needs to sit in front of the noisy desktop computer when you can VNC/RDP into it from the comfort of the couch with your iPad...?

New PC Rig

An upgrade which was long time coming (5+ years). Replaced my old trusty Athlon XP 3200+ on a GA-7N400 Pro nForce2 Ultra400 (including legendary SoundStorm audio) with:

• ASUS P6X58D Premium
• Intel i7-930 (running OC @ 4.00GHz)
• 12GB of DDR3-1600 G.Skill F3-12800CL9T-6GBNQ
• Two ATi HD5770 1GB GPUs in CrossFireX config (2xPCIe 16x)
• 4x Samsung HD103SJ (on an ICH10r in RAID-0 and RAID-5 groups)
• ASUS Xonar Essence STX

The main purpose of the high specs was simple: VMware.

This build supports VMware ESXi straight out of the box (including things such as VT-d). Only the onboard Marvell 88E8056 NICs needed to have special oem.tgz injected into the ESXi disk in order to install (since ESXi will not install without seeing a MAC address on a NIC). Note that ICH10R's RAID is Not supported under ESXi (this is the case with any onboard RAID controllers).

I must admit expenses were high but are well worth it for running various VMs under VMware. Finally PCs have become powerful enough for properly running ages old VMware (and virtualisation concepts in general). VMware makes experimenting with various OSes and software stacks tremendously easy and flexible. Creating an Active/Active Veritas Cluster Server with SCSI3-PGR iSCSI fencing compliant storage no longer requires hefty non-x86 CPUs and hardware RAIDs.

Some very exciting benchmarks follow for 4x Samsung HD103SJ on a ICH10R...

Read/Write test of RAID-0 (striping), 128K width, with write back cache ON, NTFS filesystem benchmark (4096 allocation unit size):

Write test of RAID-0 (striping), 128K width, with write back cache OFF:

Read test of RAID-0 (striping), 128K width, with write back cache OFF:

Write test of RAID-0 (striping), 128K width, with write back cache ON:

Read test of RAID-0 (striping), 128K width, with write back cache ON:

Write test of RAID-5, 128K width, with write back cache OFF:

Read test of RAID-5, 128K width, with write back cache OFF:

Write test of RAID-5, 128K width, with write back cache ON:

Read test of RAID-5, 128K width, with write back cache ON:

Alan Wake

Well what can I say... I'm disappointed that the game is not available on PC as Remedy have originally intended. Those who know me also know that I've always played games on consoles but at the core I'm a die hard PC fan. The ending is quite sudden and lots of the storyline remains quite open-ended (no surprises here, it seems to have become defacto mechanism for setting up sequels). This no doubt will have something to do with the upcoming downloadable add-on episodes from Xbox Live and probable release of Alan Wake 2.

Both in-game episodes style of storytelling and cut-scenes have boosted overall cinematic experience which Remedy have started off with the Max Payne series. The level of detail within the game ranges from realistic star skyline to the actual light switches used within game's location (north west US). One can only appreciate the various level of detail once storyline and time-line are well understood by the player. This is not something obvious on the 1st attempt at playing the game. On the other hand the graphics lack detailed character modeling and animations which Heavy Rain far surpasses. This is probably due to the fact no facial motion capturing has been done for Alan Wake as well as the fact game is predominantly focused on outdoor environments. In either case this shows off relatively badly in the cut-scenes. Foliage textures within the game are not of high resolution and not varied. I suspect this is predominantly due to the relatively limited storage capacity of Xbox's DVDs (as compared to the potential of PS3's Blue Ray disks). Enemies fast become more annoying than scary and fairly repetitive.

On the brighter side graphics lighting effects, dynamic weather environment and well made ambient sound mix have worked quite well towards game's overall atmosphere. Terragen fans will appreciate the vast landscape visuals which were once upon a time only feasible for non-real time wallpaper renders. It was also refreshing to see various forms of references to Remedy's past games (Max Payne, Death Rally) as well as famous moments in movies such as The Shining. Limited edition also includes a very interesting documentary about Remedy and development side of their games (working there would be great).

Now comes the waiting for next episode, I wonder how the whole "episodes result in faster and more frequent releases" concept will work with Remedy given that Valve seem to have totally forgotten about it for the Half-Life 2 series...

18c and snow?

Severe weather leads to funky weather status: