General Computer Stuff

Second Life RAM Disk

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You probably know that most of the data in our computers is saved to magnetic media hard drives that have spinning disks inside. The disk has delays as the read heads must wait for the disk to rotate the wanted data under the read/write heads. It can take the heads 4 to 12ms to find the data. Then the data can only be read as fast as the next bit of data comes to the read/write head.

Inside a Typical Hard Drive
Inside a Typical Hard Drive

Newer solid state drives (SSD) have no moving parts. So, there is no delay waiting for disks and/or read/write heads to rotate into position. So, rather than waiting several milliseconds the data is available in less than a millisecond. If you put your Second Life cache on an SSD, you will have a faster more responsive cache… places you have previously visited will render faster.

While conventional hard drives are cheap and can store terabytes of data on a single drive, the SSD’s are expensive. The cost per gigabyte of storage is about 100 times more than for conventional hard drives.

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Login2Life Video

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If you have not yet seen this video, check it out. This is about how people are using Second Life™ and World of WarCraft™ virtual worlds. The video runs 1:27 hour:minutes. This is primarily in German. But, most of the people are speaking in English and the video provides German subtitles. Unfortunately the German, Japanese, and other language parts do not have English subtitles.

I’ve placed a trailer first. It is all English. It runs 2:31 minutes.

[youtube BFalissUWGE]

There are apparently some legal issues with the display of the main Login 2 Life video on YouTube. I didn’t understand what that was about, other than I am NOT supposed to say who tipped me off to the video. But… thanks for the tip.

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Crazy Fish Test

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Ener Hax has a post titled: use fish to test your hardware graphics! With a title like that I had to look. Ener has found a site with a test for graphics processing of HTML5 graphics. It uses fish as a test of hardware handling of HTML5.

HTML is the Hyper Text Markup Language and the ‘5’ indicates the version. I think the HTML5 test gives us an excellent way to compare desktops and mobile devices.

Comparing Performance
Comparing Performance

Your web browser knows how to render HTML. In most cases that means displaying formatted text and pictures along the lines of what one would see in a magazine. HTML had its beginnings in 1980 and the concept originated with Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at CERN back in the day. Tim implemented a browser and server that could display, deliver, and react to HTML. By 1995 the use of HTML was spreading.

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Block Specific Addresses with Windows Firewall

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Recently I’ve had periods where my computer or Internet connection seems to bog down. I started looking to see what was happening and found I had a security problem. So, if you use Remote Desktop or have your Windows Login Service exposed to the Internet for other reasons, you should probably read this.

System Explorer History - click to enlarge
System Explorer History – click to enlarge

I’ve heard the news and seen the articles on the Cyber War. I have my firewall and anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-etc… So, I feel pretty safe. But, I do use Windows Firewall in Vista. It is a decent enough firewall even if many do knock it.

But, I kept having periods where my computer got sluggish. Also, recently my Internet connection speed would shift into s l o o o o w motion. So, I started looking to see what was happening.

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Second Life Crashing SkyDrive Problem

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Crashing when uploading textures and several other assets is caused by having Microsoft’s SkyDrive and similar software installed. There is a possible fix for SkyDrive. I assume a similar fix for other cloud drives would work.

Windows Registry - Skydrive
Windows Registry – Skydrive

I first saw MartinRJ Fayray describe the fix in the SL Forum. The fix requires editing the Windows Registry. If you are not familiar with editing the registry and the associated problems, avoid these steps until after you have read up on registry edits and have decided you are up to it. 

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