I have a penchant for strategy games but, I am unlucky enough to be horribly bad at them. Take chess for example, I love to play but readily get creamed because I sometimes fail to take into account all of the advanced intricacies like key squares, en passant, castleing and changing point values for advancing pawns. The biggest problem comes from my inability to see more than a move or too into the future. That visualization is probably the hardest part for most beginning chess players. Enter Thinking Machine 4 . It’s a Java applet utilizing Processing, an OpenGL style language used primarily for visualizing data. Thinking Machine is designed to have the intelligence of the average chess player so it doesn’t offer anything interesting on the playing front (unless you’re below average like me in which case it’s always a challenge). Its true power lies in its decision making ability. Before moving a piece, Thinking Machine draws every possible move and counter move for both players based on the current board positions. Green lines represent white moves and orange lines represent those beloning to black. The deeper the hue of a move the more likely it is to occur. Once all possible moves have been drawn, Thinking Machine makes its final decision. I have yet to beat Thinking Machine (which isn’t saying much) but it’s interesting to watch the thought process of a decent chess player from the most basic opening move to the more advanced end game.
Monthly Archive for February, 2009
So today I installed VMware Server on my work PC, and set up a virtual machine. In doing this, I had VMware Server allocate 12 GBs of hard drive space for use by the virtual machine. Immediately on doing this, performance on my PC took a dump.
The following is a screen capture I took after I defragmented the hard drive. The top line is “before,” the bottom “after.” The red parts in the first line are the fragmented parts, and the white space is empty space on the hard drive.
As you can see, it looks like Windows would have had to go out of it’s way to fragment files.
That gmail label already stresses me out.
None of these are “production servers” (i.e. I’m not losing money if they go down) and I’m not even sure if 5 minutes of “downtime” should even be considered “downtime.”
My home server went down because I was doing some Xtreme torrenting which consumed all the bandwidth for which I have been paying. (I was such a nerd I was monitoring it closely.)
This site went down because our hosting provider sucks. I’m not going to say who it is though, at least not yet.
I’m not sure why the other one went down though. It’s not doing anything, and the hosting company seemed pretty reliable. I’m going to set up a monitoring filter to run on google.com, to use as a baseline/control test.
Also, I’m going to be writing in here more. You have been warned.
And yes, “Enterprise” is referring to the starship, and not the car rental or Microsoft’s cash cow line of products.
That gmail label already stresses me out.
None of these are “production servers” (i.e. I’m not losing money if they go down) and I’m not even sure if 5 minutes of “downtime” should even be considered “downtime.”
My home server went down because I was doing some Xtreme torrenting which consumed all the bandwidth for which I have been paying. (I was such a nerd I was monitoring it closely.)
This site went down because our hosting provider sucks. I’m not going to say who it is though, at least not yet.
I’m not sure why the other one went down though. It’s not doing anything, and the hosting company seemed pretty reliable. I’m going to set up a monitoring filter to run on google.com, to use as a baseline/control test.
Also, I’m going to be writing in here more. You have been warned.
And yes, “Enterprise” is referring to the starship, and not the car rental or Microsoft’s cash cow line of products.
Sector930 was down for a period of 11 minutes this morning, from 11:19 to 11:28. It appears that the flange for our network pump broke, which prevented any internet from being drawn. Luckily, the wizard at our hosting facility was able to repair it, after casting Haste and using his Multitool of Power +3.
I would like to apologize to our thousands of loyal readers for the untold inconvenience you suffered this morning, and would also like to thank you for your continued dedication and patience. I assure you that all those responsible have been fired.
Well, there's your problem.
Sector930 was down for a period of 11 minutes this morning, from 11:19 to 11:28. It appears that the flange for our network pump broke, which prevented any internet from being drawn. Luckily, the wizard at our hosting facility was able to repair it, after casting Haste and using his Multitool of Power +3.
I would like to apologize to our thousands of loyal readers for the untold inconvenience you suffered this morning, and would also like to thank you for your continued dedication and patience. I assure you that all those responsible have been fired.
Well, there's your problem.
What the hell, man?
Ruiner of Meals/Lifestyles
I’m trying not to be a complete bachelor by making myself a nice meal here. But what do you do? You only cook my roast to 120 degrees. I’ve checked it FOUR TIMES. I ended up eating my rice out of the pot while sitting in front of my computer, waiting for you to cook my god damn meat at a respectable temperature.
Quit fucking with me.
-Sincerely,
Edwin
So I originally started writing a post here that was half-rant and half-discussion-of-my-findings-sofar. But I ended up fixing the issue, so I will explain what my issue was and how I fixed it.
So, I’m trying to use the webserver feature of FreeNAS. It’s a different instance of the webserver than the one used to manage the server itself. This one purely lists the files in a directory, allowing for easy browsing and downloading, and it runs on a different port. People outside the network could not get the page to load, even though the port had been forwarded correctly.
Here are the steps I went through to troubleshoot, and the results:
1. I could access it perfectly from inside the network, behind the firewall. This indicated that the service was running correctly.
2. After forwarding the port, I had people outside the firewall attempt to connect. Nothing.
3. I changed the port, in case my ISP was messing with my janx. Still nothing.
4. Forward a different port to a different machine with a different service. Nothing.
At this point, it looks like a network problem, even though I had looked at the router configuration for literally minutes.
5. The routing platform I am using, pfSense, includes a simple packet capturing utility. I fired this up, and with some tweaking, I was able to get a clean capture of the pertinent traffic. I was able to export it from pfSense and import it into Wireshark, which revealed the following:
What is not shown in that picture is that those are all SYN packets.
I’m going to stop here for the night, and will post the exciting conclusion tomorrow. If you have any thought as to what it might be, feel free to post them.
And yes, I included an animated .gif of Geordi La Forge diving like a badass under a slowly closing door.