phillhutt

Well, after watching episode 404 of Hak5, I went and had a look at some of the tools they used in that episode. They all seem to be free, and they all seem to do what they do very well. The ones I had a look at in particular were process monitor and process explorer. Process explorer in particular seems very handy. It is a very detailed version of task manager basically. It lets you drill down and see exactly what is running and where it is running. For example, many of the processes running are running as services, but a few were running as a process started by explorer. It also gives you decent descriptions of what each of the processes are. If you want to get detailed, you can double click to see the properties. I had a look at my FireFox and found that it has used 30 minutes of kernel time and I could see each of the individual threads it had running and how much CPU time they each used, in real time. This is probably far far too much detail for 99% of users, but if you are trying to debug a program and you are wondering what is eating up CPU or memory or something, it could be pretty handy.

Also, I recommend watching that episode of Hak5, if not all of their episodes. They use those tools to have a look at what a few viruses do to your machine, and how they can be useful to try and stop them (your probably fucked if you get one/some of those viruses).

So, lately (and you can call me a noob) I’ve started using the Windows Run command a lot more. Or just Win + R (not that noob). I’m starting to see how handy it is. Especially when I’m forced to use laptops with that stupid little pad for the mouse, or even that little joystick thing in the middle. They really start to hurt my hand after a while.

So, I had a quick search for adding commands to the run command. You know, you can type things like mspaint, calc, msconfig etc, and it knows where to find the executable. Well, first page I looked at was this. It has a nice little how-to on how it works (pretty brief) and adding new commands. When I had a look in the registry (shown below) for what commands are already there, I was surprised to find just how many programs put stuff in there. I’m not sure if it is used by anything else, but things like quake3, iTunes and avast anti-virus are in there. Random. Cool thing is you can change them to make them shorter (again, not sure if this will impact anything else, apparently not). Have a look at the site and some of the comments as to where it finds other places to look for shortcuts and what not.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
  SOFTWARE
    Microsoft
      Windows
       CurrentVersion
        App Paths

Here is some more google action. It’s about google Android, the google phone OS.
Originally “google announced that it would give $10 million worth in prizes to software development companies to develop innovative and useful applications for their open source mobile Android platform”. Some of the ideas are pretty sweet. Almost all of them seem to use either google maps and or the GPS function. Two of them remind me very much of the “Aurora: Concept Video Part 3″. “GoCart” and “Compare Everywhere”. It’s funny because that was one thing that I thought was least likely to happen anytime soon.

Here is quite a cool little site I just found: http://www.socwall.com/.  “is a public effort to classify, rank, and distribute high-resolution images for use as desktop backgrounds.”

I had a quick look through the “widescreen” ones and quickly found a 1680.1050 image that I liked enough to replace my current wallpaper. Nice, thanks socwall.com

Recently I have seen a couple of posts about solid state drives.

The first one, here, is about intel testing a 4-terabyte solid state drive array. 4TB. Pretty cool. I think the main reason why it is a big deal is because they are going to be really really fast and use a lot less power. Another good reason why SSD could be really good for commercial use is that it is fairly predictable. They know that the drives will not last forever (especially if they are being used 24/7/365) but neither do current HDDs. However, you can never really be sure when a HDD will fail. SSD drives have more of a definite life span, they have a certain number of expected read/writes before they start to fail. This could mean a lot more pre-empting disk failures, meaning less downtime? It is always good to be able to predict things. Good for budgets too.

Currently as per this article it seems that Intel is currently offering a 3.8TB SSD rack consisting of 120 drives. Thats a lot of drives. If you compare with a 120 drive rack of HDDs (8.8TB) you use 5 times less power and get 115 times faster (apparently) IOPS (in out operations per second). So, it seems like half the storage space for much more performance and lot less power. As for price, I don’t want to know what 120 ~3GB SSDs would cost. If you were really interested in performance I guess it would be worth it. Have a look at the second article at least, there is a nice graphic with the differences between the HDD rack and the SSD rack.

As for the new 4TB SSD array I’m not sure how many drives that is supposed to consist of.

Ok, I just had a read of the Fusion io website where the SSDs for the speedy 4TB rack come from. I had a look at one of the drives they have. They have an FAQ with more details on my previous statement about limited read/writes to a flash drive.

Doesn’t NAND flash have a write limit? How does that effect the lifetime of the ioDrive™ ?
NAND flash has a limit on the number of writes that can be done to an individual cell. The particular limit
depends on the type of flash used. For Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND, the limit exceeds 100,000 writes to a
cell, whereas for Multi Level Cell (MLC) NAND, it is on the order of 10,000 writes. Hence, in order to exceed
the limit of a single 80GB ioDrive™, you would have to write almost 80PB (Petabytes) of data. Streaming data
at 800MB/s to the card, it would take you 3.4 years of writing data non-stop to exceed the SLC limit.

So there you go, not too bad really. With heavy use you should get a few years out of it. I wonder what their unexpected fail rate is. That was actually the next question. Apparently since it doesn’t have any moving parts major types of failure (e.g. total disk failure) are extremely rare. Also, it is possible for individual chips to fail, but it automatically writes to the next adjacent chip with no data loss and only a slight reduction in overall storage capacity.

The other cool thing (maybe) is that it runs from a PCIE 4x slot. It acts just like another hard drive to the OS. So, I imagine if I had some money I could get one of these drives and push it straight into my desktop PC. It looks like they have 80, 160 and 320 GB “configurations” available.

Well thats enough for today.