Past weeks observations about price trends in oil & gas companies and the worsening economic conditions triggered some changes in my portfolio. Basically I sold all my energy stocks, which have given a good return.
I'm building firefox myself tuned for speed, and without the nasty fsync problem.
It's relatively easy following the build documentation, but there are some nice tricks for speeding things up. So basically what I had to was ensuring I had all the prerequisites installed.
My build system is debian lenny x86_64.
hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/ src
My .mozconfig file:
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser ac_add_options --enable-debug #ac_add_options --enable-static ac_add_options --enable-libxul export SQLITE_NO_SYNC=1 #here doesn't seem to work export CFLAGS="-gstabs+" export CXXFLAGS="-gstabs+" #arch selection #ac_add_options --target=i686-pc-linux
I added: "-DSQLITE_NO_SYNC" to: db/sqlite3/src/Makefile
Then compile with:
make -f client.mk AUTOCONF=autoconf2.13 MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS=-j20
And generate package with:
make package
Ok, my dual Athlon MP died, and after recieving some marketing about the goodness of Intel core duos from Ijuz, I bought a cheap AMD mainly because I saw them quite cheap and they have the power consumption in the BOX. Also I use a Core duo at work and although I don't doubt they are faster and nicer CPUS than newer AMD, most of the slowness in my box at work and my laptop at home comes from DISK IO and not having enough RAM. And most of the time one of the cores is idling and waiting for disk. So I don't see a point into going QUAD without a very good IO system.
So having decided to buy a new computer, I wanted to avoid the scenario in which I go for low end enterprise hardware to build a fast box and I end up spending a lot of money and the result is not much better than cheap desktop components. Which has happened to me previously.
So I wanted lots of ram, since DDR2 is cheap these days. And DDR3 has increased latencies. I could get 8GB for less than 150€, without ECC and not registered that is.
At first I made a budget with a Intel Quad Core Q9300 42nm and a Gigabyte X48-DQ6 Board.With also 8GB RAM and 2 WD raptor 10Krpm 150GB drives. One thing to note is that every desktop board claiming RAID these days is just FAKE SOFTWARE RAID, so you end up paying for something that just software in the BIOS. With these components the final price was around 1000€.
The price tag was a little too much for my budget, and also four cores seems a lot. Keeping 4 cores running requires very fast IO, or not so common cases in which you have tight cpu bound processing. (Most processing needs dumping the data at some point).
So finally I went for a cheaper X2 Athlon with the same amount of RAM, the final config is:
Athlon 64 X2 4400+ 2300MHz CPU with an ASUS M2A-VM HDMI board and 8GB RAM from Kingston KVR800D2N5 2G Ram modules.
This might not be the fastest cpu and chipset, but has integrated radeon board, which serves me well and saved me additional 80€. And the final price of the box was 600€. Mostly inflated because of the expensive WD raptors.
I have done some numbers and tests. Also I'm testing some overclocked setups. The multipliers in the Athlon 64 X2 are locked up but not down. I am able to overclock it by scaling the FSB up, and keep memory stable by lowering the RAM clock, so DDR2 frequency stays under 400Mhz (DDR2-800).
Currently I have it clocked at 344Mhz (DDR689). Which gives me about 3170 MB/s bandwidth. And the cpu is running at 2700Mhz from the nominal 2300Mhz.
I'm not a big fan of overclocking since I don't like strange surprises of bits flipping in memory. But in this case I decided to give a shot at it and get more bang for the buck. I have to say the CPU runs at 40C and doesn't seem to heat much even with the two cores at full load with 2 instances of "memtester".
I have found that memtest86+ and memtest86 hang if I put more than 4GB of ram, and I didn't get erros with 4GB with the FSB at 220MHz which were caught with 8GB and memtester under Linux.
Perhaps I'm spending too much time with this overclocking stuff, but until now is being relatively fun and I'm pleased with my new "elcheapo" box that loads KDE and compiles kernels so fast. I hope that firefox doesn't eat the whole 8GB at once and I have some left for computations and virtualization. I have been quite limited with my P4 laptop with 512MB of RAM the last year, but I managed to end the code for my thesis with it 
)
I've been linked from http://lapalabraperdida.blogspot.com/2007/12/blogs-oscenses.html as a blog from Huesca. I was a little surprised since I write this blog in english and I didn't expect any readers from Huesca asides from some friend or family member passing by. I'm not sure why I was tagged as a weblog from Huesca, this page is hosted in a server in Aplicaciones Informáticas, Jaca (Huesca) so maybe they used ip-location. Anyways, cheers to passers-by, although I don't write many things about Huesca here, perhaps some day I'll post pictures or info about my bike rides.
I just saw this interesting documentary: The Power Of Community How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (2006).avi. About how Cuba might help us understand how to adjust our lives to a global energy crisis. As it is show in the documentary, the adjustment process can be very painful, but the result might be a more reasonable way of life. What do you think about it? How are you preparing for the impact of a scarcity of cheap fuel?
I think Alan Greenspan is one of those guys that is nearly a caricature of himself. When I see this guy talking about irrational exhuberance when he lowered interest rates below inflation after the dotcom bubble, creating another housing bubble. One day he openly critiquizes Bush's government to sell his biography, and the next day I see a picture of him with Bernanke in the White House. Man, you gotta love bankers, they surely know how to do business.
Seem central money authorities try to avoid economic crisis at all cost by adjusting the rates to soften the economic cycle as much as possible. But is this working? are economic bubbles worse than crisis? To me seems that economic bubbles are a way that allows the richest to keep having their income growing while putting more weight into the less wealthy. There is a group of people that got inmensily rich with the housing bubble worldwide, a few of them might be stuck today and are going to have some loses for not timing properly.
The ones who will "pay the duck" in this case will be the home owners who will be left with mortgages for houses that depreciate. We have already seen how the FED lowers interest rates by 0.5% even with higher risk of inflation by oil price rise.
I'm very annoyed. At year 2000 I was studying in the university and couldn't make good income or a nice career on the high salaries of the .com age. Now I'm caught in the global housing bubble. People my age are having big trouble to get a decent place to live. So far, fucked two times. Prices scalate around, and perspectives of income are lower. I hope I can caught the next wave, at least not to be any more poorer.
The next wave will come soon, even as the hungover from the credit crisis is not still disipated. I see the world economic scenario as follows:
* Very few banks are going to get caught by this, and before it happens, many lifesavers are going to be thrown by government, central banks, etc. Some might get on fire if critical mass of people deciedes so, like Northern Rock.
* The financial companies that have their ass tight today, are going to be the high gainers of the following periods, for the huge debt most of the public has. So good time to invest in Banks, perhaps a couple of days late. Biggest banks the least risk, down to smaller institutions for the biggest risk.
* Next economic wave/bubble wathever is likely going to be energy. Its demand is very inelastic and seems probable that there is going to be more oil supply trouble. We have been whitnessing big corporate movements in the energy sector in Europe. Big players are getting in position, GazProm, Suez+Gas de France, EON, Endesa, Enel, Iberdrola. The party is about to begin, the cake to be splitted and everyone wants the biggest cut. Good time to invest in oil, gas, electric and perhaps biodiesel and alternative energiesfor the longer run.
Europe's largest computer is housed in my university in a chapel near the rectorate. I guess it could be a good place to look for God if it is a really big number. Very pretty, I wonder if it's running useful programs though. Afaik you can request cpu time for free for non-profits or research projects. 
Ahh! some pics of the nice biking adventure in Asturias. Don't mind me naked, thanks to Josep María for that. 
