Having had my new PC up and running for a month now I recently treated myself to an 8GB RAM upgrade to bring me the the insane amount of 12 GB total. I did this with a plan in mind. The plan was to use some of the RAM as a RAM disk for use with VMware workstation. The idea being to create a RAM disk and install Windows XP or Linux in to the RAM disk.

Now a RAM disk isn’t all that much good because the moment you shutdown your PC or it crashes or the power fails then you will lose everything. But this wasn’t bothering me that much. What I did was setup my VM using a 6GB RAM disk for storage. Once I had it all setup and up to date I shutdown the VM and simply copied the directory over to the hard disk. Now I had my backup I fired it up once more and played around a bit.

In addition to this I added a second virtual disk on the VM which is always on the hard disk so applications and permanent data is to be saved either there or on my NAS.

So what’s it like? First off I tried it on Windows 7 and didn’t have much success. There are several free RAM disk solutions available but when I got my VM up and running I started seeing a lot of “fragmented disk” errors and after rebooting I had files missing and it wouldn’t boot fully. All the hallmarks of disk corruption or in this case RAM disk corruption. Pondering about it for a bit I figured that maybe this would only work with Error Correcting memory (ECC). I was about to give up but I decided to boot into Ubuntu and try from there.

This was a resounding success! No errors of any kind. XP installed from an ISO in less that 7 minutes using an automated install. XP boots up in approximately 8 seconds from end of BIOS to desktop and the performance is absolutely incredible. Installing Office 2007 took about 5 minutes and  clicking on Firefox has it opening in about 1 second!

What makes this all the more interesting is that VMware workstation has a feature called “Unity” which runs the VM in the back ground and provided a start menu on Gnome. This makes for a very interesting way to seamlessly integrate Windows appications into Linux.

After poking about the usual sites I settled on a bundle offered from Dabs.ie made up of the following:

CPU: AMD Phenom II 1090T Black Edition. 6 Cores at 3.2Ghz.
Motherboard: ASUS M4A87TD EVO.
RAM: 4GB DDR3
HD: Samsung Spinpoint 1TB
Case: Antec Sonata III with 500w PSU.
Video: Gigabyte nVidia GeForce GTX460 with 1GB RAM.

The total came to just a shade under €700 including shipping which was bang on my budget. The parts had all arrived last friday so after a week of having it up and running I have to say I’m very impressed with the performance of it.

This is actually my first PC that has an AMD CPU. I was initially planning to buy an Intel Core i7 but from reading various reviews the Phenom II seemed to be almost on a par with the i7 I was looking at and was a little bit cheaper too. The motherboard and the CPU support overclocking too but I haven’t gotten around to trying that out yet.

Other factors that led me to decide on this combo was the motherboard supports USB 3.0 with four slots. It also has 6 SATA connectors one of which is connected to the eSATA connector on the front of the excellent case. The case with its 500w PSU is nice and big, easy to access with plenty of room for more disks with 6 x 3.5in drive bays. My plan is to start stuffing these to capacity over the coming months. Also the case comes with a front air filter which is very handy as I’m a smoker! The PC it’s replacing is rather filthy inside to say the least. Also the case has a nice large exhaust fan which is very quiet and has a switch to allow you to choose between three speed settings.

I also opted for just 4GB of RAM in 2 x 2GB modules in keeping with a view to upgrading in the future. My primary reasoning behind this was that Windows 7 flies along nicely on just 2GB of RAM and in keeping with my budget 4GB for the moment is plenty.

As always with a new PC the immediate performance is stunning. Over the Christmas holidays I intend on putting it thorough it’s paces with a few games that I am going to treat myself to but already I’m very pleased with my purchase

Well I’m back now. Miss me?

How often I post here remains to be seen but the keen eyed of you may have noticed that this site has a new address. The old one still works but in a nice egotistical manner, this site can now be reached at any of the following addresses:

robertsweetnam.ie
robertsweetnam.com
robertsweetnam.net
robertsweetnam.org
robertsweetnam.me

All thanks to Blacknight and their fantastically cheap domain offers.

So what’s happened since my last post? Well I’ve finally found myself gainful employment. After three and a half years it has been a bit of a shock to the system but for those of you who don’t know exactly with who I’m working for and what and I doing there; I’m working for this crowd and I’m working specifically on this.

So there you go. Time to head off to think what I’ll write in my next post.

I think that in the not to distant future this blog might be subjected to the mighty powers of “rm -r -f /home/blog*”

In the meantime I’ll leave this here:

For example when you see it written or hear it being mentioned you might not think that there is much of a difference between a million or a billion. What I mean is that both words just slip off the tongue. We know that they are both large numbers especially if money is being referred to, but I think most people just don’t realise how large it actually is. For instance the media will alway say “11bn” or “11 billion” . If you happen to read a newspaper then you may read about someone being fined “€10,000″. If like me you look at the 10,000 written in numbers then it seems to be a large amount. So how about a million? We all know there are six zeros in a million. There are 9 zeros in a billion so written out numerically a million = 1,000,000 and a billion is 1,000,000,000.

11 billion = 11,000,000,000

All of a sudden it looks much more significant! So let’s apply it to what is going on in our unfair isle, all the below in euro:

196 – Amount a single person gets in unemployment benefit/assistance per week.
10,192 – The amount the above receives in a year
30,000 – The average industrial wage.
100,191 – The basic salary of a T.D.
213,183 – Average price of a house in Ireland December 2009
311,078 – Average price of a house in Ireland February 2007
11,000,000,000 – The amount paid out by the government to Anglo Irish, AIB and BoI to date.
77,000,000,000 – The book value of assets that will be taken over by NAMA.
397,557,000,000 – Net loan book value of Irish financial institutions covered under the guarantee scheme.

It looks quite a lot more forboding now doesn’t it? Just to give you another example, How long would it take a single person on the dole donating every cent that they get to repay some of the above?

3 years to earn the minimum wage
10 years to earn the same as a T.D.
21 years to buy a house
1,079,277 years to match the amount paid out to the big three already.
7,554,945 years to match NAMA’s assets book value.
39,006,770 years to match the net loan book value of the guaranteed financial institutions.

Yep, over 39 million years! Now if you are bored by the numbers how about what Anglo Irish Banks losses would look like in €100 notes? Head on over to thestory.ie to have your mind blown.

Almost 5 years later and now this blog has a new home. Back in February I installed a dedicated server into a datacentre in Cork and it is from there you are now reading this.

About the only advantage is that this and my other blog along with my wiki should be much faster. Unfortunately it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will be posting entries more regularly but keep checking back just in case.

I got a call the other day from my friend’s wife who was having problems receiving mail from her eircom.net account when using POP to retreive it. Sometimes she would get some mail and other times none. Using the webmail interface to her account she could see her mail there. All this started she claimed around two weeks ago.

Strange thought I, but then she mentioned that she had gotten a few spam reports in her mail.

Even stranger thought I, so I asked her to forward one of them on to me and here’s what I saw:

This mail was generated automatically from Endian Firewall, which runs on
efw1-oceantelecom.localdomain.(none) for scanning all mails for spam and viruses.

In a mail sent to you a virus has been found.

Virus name: Suspect.Bredozip-zippwd-2
Sender of the email:  “DHL Manager Felipe Dove” <shipping@dhl.com>
Subject: DHL delivery problem number 25130.
Connection date: POP3 from 149.5.34.3:11778 to 159.134.198.135:110
Message File: Per instruction, the message has been deleted.

Instead of the infected email this message has been sent to you.

Regardless of the fact that it was a virus, it was the very fact that it had been intercepted before it got to her PC was annoying her. Her POP session to eircom’s mail server was intercepted by her ISP. Her ISP acted as a POP proxy without her permisison. Therefore her ISP is effectively snooping on her mail. You can see clear as day in the report above that their firewall intercepted her connection to eircom’s POP3 server.

As you can imagine this really, really annoyed her so she rang ComReg (Ireland’s Communications Regulator) to find out if OceanTelecom were allowed to do this. ComReg said it was a grey area and advised her to contact the office of the Data Protection Commissioner which she duly did. The advice she received from the DPC was that they should not be snooping on her mail as her mail is not being hosted by her ISP.

With this information in hand, she rang OceanTelecom to compain and promptly received torrents of abuse from the owner! Ranting and raving about how he is protecting his network, etc, etc and if she didn’t like it she could cancel her account! How about that for customer service?

But when she informed him that she had already contacted ComReg and the DPC he terminated the call! He hung up a call from a loyal customer of over two years!

She rang me yesterday to tell me what had happened and that that she was naturally going to change her ISP which is only right IMHO.

So, for anyone looking to choose an ISP keep this information in mind. An ISP is an internet service provider. Their only obligation should at it’s most basic level to provide you with access to the internet and nothing else. Everything else should be optional. How you use your internet connection should be of no interest to your ISP once you keep within the terms of your contract, the laws of the land and adhere to their fair use policy. You can view eircom’s policy here.  Some choice quotes from their policy are:

eircom net will use its reasonable endeavours to prevent unauthorised access to the Service by third parties, but shall have no liability to the Customer for any unauthorised access to the Customer’s computer system. The Customer is responsible for selecting and properly using any security procedures made available by eircom net as well as other procedures and measures necessary to safeguard and back-up the Customer’s files, data and programs or any other form of information

and

You acknowledge that eircom net has no control over the information which can be accessed by using eircom net services and that we do not examine the use to which you or other users put the Services or the nature of the information you or they are sending or uploading. We therefore exclude all liability of any kind for the transmission or reception or such information of whatever nature.

Pretty much common sense. The onus is on the customer to remain secure, eircom as an ISP only provide a service which is more than can be said for OceanTelecom.

However I understand that OceanTelecom is a privately owned business and ultimately it is their network and they can pretty much do what they want but I would not have expected that to include interfering with clients  e-mail that is hosted elsewhere. I certainly wouldn’t like my ISP reading my mail before me. Some serious privacy implications there.

If you are an OceanTelecom customer or are considering becoming one, based on the above I would suggest you avoid them or terminate your subscription. If anything the shocking and abusive customer service alone should be good enough reason.

Many many years ago the communist journalist Claud Cockburn described Youghal as “standing at a slight angle to the universe.” I’m beginning to understand what he means now.