May 20th, 2010
Entry posted by Drew_Benton ·
2,539 views
I guess it's been a while since I added a blog entry. Since I don't have anything specific to write about, I've stuck with a generic boring title.
I spent all week working on backing up the past 5 years of my computer life to an external hard drive (WD Elements) as well as another internal one. One of my hard drives has been having some problems lately and I've ignored it for over a year. I decided to stop chancing it and simply put in the time to save all my stuff that I've worked on and accumulated over the past 5 years. It was really time consuming, but now I can work in peace without the worry of losing my stuff.
To help make copying easier, I used Teracopy. It's an excellent little utility to help manage larger file copies. I did run into some problems with it since I was moving hundreds of GB and 100k's of files at a time, but it was manageable. Most of the problems I think I had weren't with the program alone as much as with Windows and the hard drives themselves. Who knows though, at least the task is done now!
Last week, I decided to give some new technology a try. I got a Zotac Mag to give a whirl. My ideal use for it is to run as a low power, noise, heat server for some of my future programs. So far, I'm loving it! I first put on XP and it all went really nice. However, I didn't need XP for the server stuff so I put on Sever 2003 instead.
I'm very impressed with it. It "feels" fast and while I know a lot of that has to do with not having that much stuff installed on it, it still seems to be able to handle a lot of things I'd thought it'd struggle with. It does have support for 3D hardware accelerated graphics via the Nvidia Ion chipset, which makes it far more useful to me than any of the intel integrated stuff that can't really do much. In fact, I can ran Leadwerks just fine on it although the framerate is around the 20s in the editor most of the time, but it's still very responsive and usable.
I am very satisfied with the purchase and will be looking to see how I can fit such machines into my deployment strategies if I ever get something to "ship". The only thing I am not happy about is the cost of laptop memory. It requires that style of DDR 2 800 and that would set me back another $100 for 2 x 2GB sticks. I figure it's not worth paying 30% more of the price for the resulting performance increase, which won't be that much currently. Eventually though, I'd add more if I had the need. I even thought about throwing in a SSD, but that too won't even give a decent ROI since it's just a light weight server that won't be even using the HD that much.
In other exciting news, NetDog 2.X.X is here! I didn't get too far into 1.7.1, but it looks like the new version 2.X.X is going to help make development a lot more fun and exciting. I'll probably start looking into it soon to get down the changes and reevaluate some of my current projects I wanted to use it in to see how much more they could benefit with it as opposed to trying to do it myself. I really want to get a working prototype done sometime in the next few months, but I don't think I can focus on that long enough to finish.
I still need to go back and finish my cegui tool as well. I'm not in any rush though because I still don't want to lock myself into one version of Leadwerks with 2.32 around the corner. At some point, I'm just going to clamp down on versions and just get something done, but I have the luxury of not having to now, so I won't. I think that's my biggest problem to productivity, luxury of time. Oh well...
I have another project I am working on right now, but I guess I'll save that for another day.
I'm waiting for my last folder to backup as I write this. Then I can remove all the hard drives attached to my system and finally get back to programming, although I might just call it a day soon. The whole backing up files and verifying stuff has been really draining to me, not to mention boring. But it must be done, so that's that.
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