Angelo’s blog

Company of Heroes is actually quite a cool game! It’s an RTS (like command & conquer), but with a little better AI, better graphics, etc. Too bad I can’t run it with full graphic options.

I’m still running Vista build 5536 on my workstation, which can only use the windows drivers for my GeForce 6600, and I don’t have any fance drivers for my Audigy2 ZS as well.

Finally, I found out Call of Duty 2 for the Mac was released. I downloaded a ‘trial version’, and it seems to run very smooth on my MacBook Pro! I put everything in the graphics option to the max, and I still get a decent framerate.

I updated to the latest version 1.3 (who thinks up these version numbers anyway), so I can play on the servers I was used to play on before I got my Mac, Fulton.

Now I can shoot my frustration out in bed, in the living room, etc

Wow, finally, FreeBSD can run as a guest os on VMware ESX server. I’m really excited about this, because I’m a bit in love with FreeBSD, but my play-box at home is a VMware ESX 3 server, and I don’t want to spend extra money on more physical servers. Or at least, the power they use..

Now I am happily running a few instances of FreeBSD 6.2 on my ESX box, without a sweat! You’ll have to install using a snapshot CD at the moment though, and then you can update to the latest version of RELENG_6.

The problem that was keeping FreeBSD from installing, was in the LSI Logic SCSI controller driver, and something with LUN id’s. The FreeBSD driver maintainer, mjacob, fixed this issue, so off we were! Read about it in the VMware forum:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=40606

Last week, I got a 250GB FreeCom USB2 harddisk at work. We were going to ship the disk to a customer, and the customer would send it back, with confidential data on it. Usually, I’m not that paranoid, but I like to keep my customer’s mission-critical confidential data secure, especially if I’m shipping the disk using normal low-cost shipping service. With TPG Post here in the Netherlands, it’s not that uncommon for packages to just go missing.. And even if it doesn’t go missing, I still don’t trust all postal service employees..

A logical thing to do, was to create a TrueCrypt volume on the disk, and place the data in that volume. I wanted to convince my customer that TrueCrypt is not only a secure, but also a fast tool to secure data.

The funny thing is, I couldn’t find any basic benchmarks on USB2 disks, let alone in comparison to encrypted volumes. So I created a volume myself, and benched it with ATTO Disk Benchmark.

This is the disk attached to my Dell Optiplex GX620 (Dual Core 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM). I didn’t tune anything, just plugged the disk in the back of my computer, and went ahead. The disk is formatted as one big NTFS volume.

Then I created a 100GB TrueCrypt volume, using default AES. Took a while to format the volume, but that’s not the strange considering the fact that a 100GB of data has to written. After that I mounted the volume, and did the same test:

Reads perform at 63%, and writes perform at 69% of the speed on the unencrypted volume, looking at big files. In this case, my client’s data consists of one huge file. In my opinion, these rates are quite acceptable, and I feel confident to tell my customer that this solution is ‘fast’ as well.

I just found out the great English dictionary me and my girlfriend often use (in book-form and on cd-rom), the ‘Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English’, is available online. And best of all, it’s free! The are some features that are only available from cd-rom, but still! Also great to find out the difference between American en British spelling.

http://www.ldoceonline.com

To my homepage. There’s not much to tell right now, but I hope that’ll graduatly change.