March 31: World Backup Day

www.worldbackupday.com

Please make sure all of the digital stuff you can’t live without gets backed up.  Camera, laptop, cell phone, all that stuff can be backed up pretty easily with free online storage.  Chances are you already have one of these accounts anyway, if not, sign-up, get your stuff backed up, it might save you one day.

Google: drive.google.com
Microsoft: onedrive.live.com
Dropbox: dropbox.com
Apple: icloud.com
Amazon: amazon.com/clouddrive

Chrome Pro Tip: Get Hacker News on your New Tab page with this plugin

Now you can get all your Hacker News (the best News) on your new tab page in Chrome with this plugin:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernews-default-tab/gofiefpdbkknjlkdhmlgnhloepilkmmp

Very pretty!

Dogecoin mining.

I wanted to be able to tip people on reddit with dogecoins, and for that I needed to obtain some, might as well go mining.  Unfortunately I have a trusty nvidia GPU, and not an AMD which is more efficient for mining crypto-currencies but that's OK, I don't want to profit, just make some coins so I can tip.

For that I need a couple things, a gpu miner designed for nvidia GPU's called cudaminer, and a pool (or two) to mine from.  Please visit the dogecoin subreddit for specific instructions.

My card is a Asus Geforce GTX650. I downloaded MSI Afterburner so I can fine tune the fan speed on the card and better monitor the temps.  I am going to up the gpu fan to 75%:

You are going to want to sign up for a pool (or two) in order to maximize your time.  A pool splits the mining workload amongst many miners and shares the payouts.  I signed up for hashfaster and netcodepool, but any from the litecoin pool list would work, as long as they support Doge.

The script to start cudaminer is going to do a few things, first, start the cudaminer program and tell it which card and settings to use to mine, and then specify the mining pool and workers to use for mining.  The best way to find the best settings for your card are to use trial and error as outlined in the main cudaminer forum thread from above.  I got my settings from the Litcoin Mining hardware comparison guide.

The script is in the x64 directory so it uses the 64 bit cudaminer.  Here is the script, replacing the worker with a fake one:

 cudaminer.exe -C 1 -H 1 -i 0 -l K6x32 -o stratum+tcp://stratum-us.doge.hashfaster.com:3339 -u worker -p password 

And soon enough we are in production!  We can also log into our pool to see the work we are doing:

Cudaminer does not support failover pools at the moment, once it does its a good idea to have a failover in case the pool goes down, and you don't loose out on mining time.

My List of 2048 variants

I have been hooked on 2048, its a great puzzler that's a mix between strategy and completely blind luck.  Here is a list of the original and derivatives that I come across (mostly from Hacker News.)

Single Player:

• The Original
• Evil 2048
• 2048 4D
• 16384 Hex
• 2048 Tetris
• 2048 for Physicists
• 6x6 Grid
• 8x8 Grid
• Circle of Fifths - Musical 2048

Multi-player:

• 1 v 1
• 2x2048
• HN Plays 2048

AI

• 2048 AI

My disk speed tests with a 10GBe network and SSD's.

Here is the equipment we will be doing disk speed tests on:

• 2 x Dell PowerEdge Generation 11 each with:
• 6 x Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SSD in Raid 6
• 1 x Intel x520-DA2 2 port 10GBe PCI card
• Synology RS10613xs NAS with SSD caching
• 10 x 10k SAS 600 GB in Raid 6
• 2 x Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SSD for caching (I believe Raid 0)
• 1 x Intel x520-DA2 2 port 10GBe PCI card

Each 10GBe nic card is using Intel SFP+ 10Gbe with short range (SR) fiber modules.  The fiber cables are Belkin 3' with LC connectors.  Each device is connected in a triangle (3 networks between them) with the fiber.  There is a separate 1GBe network for management, so my RDP sessions should not effect the tests.  The Dells are Hyper-V 2012 host servers.  The Hosts and Synology use standard folder shares (Windows SMB).

Some reference tests: Local SSD with two disks in raid 1 (pre-server build test):

Next test was once the servers were provisioned with raid 6, test taken from a VM, with the vhd also on the SSD's.  As you can see there is a bit of a tax to pay for raid6:

Testing with the gigabit network, Host to Host:

Gigabit network again, Host to NAS, even though they are 10k disks, still pretty slow:

10 GBe network, Host to Host with jumbo frames, now we are talking!

10 GBe network, Host to NAS with jumbo frames, these are some crazy numbers!  I wish I could explain such a high write speed, maybe it was a fluke but each test was ran a few times.  Maybe the SSD caching on the NAS had an influence some how.

Windows Pro-Tip: Opening a command window from an explorer window easily

This is one I need to remember: when you are in an explorer window hold down the Shift key and right click on a folder or in the white-space of the current folder and you have the option to 'Open command window here'. This is pretty brilliant, there have been tons of times I needed to do run a shell script with switches and opened a command prompt from the taskbar just to browse to the script I already had pulled up in explorer.