Computer and technology related topics
I ran some benchmarks comparing the Intel DC S3500 vs the Intel DC S3700 when being used as a SLOG/ZIL (ZFS Intent Log). Both SSDs are what Intel considers datacenter class and they are both very reasonably priced compared to some of the other enterprise class offerings. Update: 2014-09-14 — I’ve done newer benchmarks on … Read more
Well, my ASRock C2750D4I Build has not been doing so hot… I woke-up one morning to find VMware crashed with a PSOD (Purple Screen of Death)… and then the next day it crashed again. Over the next few days I had several crashes, often after only an hour of uptime. Here’s a sampling of the … Read more
I’ve been very happy with the BaoFeng UV-5RA, but BaoFeng has released some newer models on the market so I thought it was time to take a look at the current offerings: of the new models it looked like the best new models were the UV-B5 (or nearly identical UV-B6), and UV-82, so here they are: … Read more
SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Licensing Efficiency on Four Cores Microsoft Core Licensing Microsoft pricing per core is $13,748 (your price may vary depending on your licensing program) per set of two cores, with a four core minimum per processor (a dual core counts as a four core so it doesn’t make sense to go with … Read more
Energy Efficient and Quiet Trying to cut down on the noise and power usage of my old AMD Radeon 6870 (which uses about 130 Watts idle and 250 under load) I upgraded my GPU to the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti (~$150 depending on model), I decided on MSI’s version which has a massive heatsync and dual … Read more
Yesterday I moved this site to DigitalOcean (referral link). I had been running on Verzion FiOS at Jeff’s house, but I think that little N54L was too overloaded. So I signed up for the cheapest DigitalOcean plan at $5/month and setup an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server with Nginx. I put it in Google’s NYC data … Read more
The other day I got a little frustrated with my Gen 8 Microserver, I was trying to upgrade ESXi to 5.5 but the virtual media feature kept disconnecting in the middle of the install due to not having an ILO4 license–I actually bought an ILO4 enterprise license but I have no idea where I put … Read more
I’ve had a few people ask for more details on my rural internet setup with Verizon, so here it is… Update 2018. It has been 4 years since I wrote this post. I would suggest getting newer equipment than what I blogged about, I know a few people running the CradlePoint MBR1200B which is what … Read more
The other day I was writing an ETL where I expected duplicate data to be accidentally sent over quite often so I needed an SHA-256 function to guarantee that a set of incoming rows were unique (notice I said the set of rows, not individual rows so that rules out using an index to prevent … Read more
Update 2013-12-23: Using the internet access on my phone I’ve moved the website to another server (thanks Jeff!) So the website is back up. My internet is going down until Jan 1st. Looks like I forgot to disable my CrashPlan backup again (unfortunately CrashPlan doesn’t offer a way to stop backing up to CrashPlan … Read more