The Demon Werx

So I am flying up to Seattle today – in just over 3 hours (I must get to the airport soon… so I can wait). The wife flew up on Monday and I haven’t really slept since then. On wednesday, the only day I was scheduled to work, I felt like Crap! I got to work and seriously debated turning around and calling in sick. I did however login and work for a few hours before I threw in the towel. I was told that it “didn’t look good” me going home early the day before my vacation started… all I said was – if i was going to call in sick today on purpose I wouldn’t have bothered even coming into work. Smart of me? Not really, but I hadn’t slept and needed too.

All in all I came home and got 2 hours of needed sleep and now I am joining the wife in Seattle so I should be able to sleep tonight… yes, I really had trouble sleeping in my bed alone I am man enough to admit that.

I doubt I will be able to post on vacation so I will resort to waiting until I get home later.

Paul

So I have begun the process of removing the old site from the internet.

Its interesting thinking about what I have learned over the last year playing with a little HTML or PHP and to see what has come about – mostly it was just me typing a whole bunch.

So now if you visit www.team-ramrod.org you will be redirected back to DemonWerx.

I will remove the rest of the directories and fun stuff when I get back from vacation on Tuesday.

It was a fun site!

Paul

Last night I stayed up to play a little Americas Army, its a great little game thats put out by the Army that you can download and play free.

The Wife needed to bring something for a potluck tomorrow and decided to throw a few things into our Crock Pot (first time in 4 years we have used it). What she put in was a Wild Rice Package thingy, some Ramen noodles, and chicken. I went to bed late but the whole time this incredible smell was creeping under the office door tormenting me. Lets just say that chicken was very lucky it made it out of the house this morning.

Crock Pots are good, I need to get a spare rib recipe.

Two years ago for Christmas we were graced by the presence of a Canon Digital Rebel.

The Rebel is an excellent camera for novice/amatuer photographers, and if it isn’t that… what matters is it is a fun camera to have. The Wife got setup with the Rebel and a Pro-grade 1Gb card for the camera and we have been shooting good pictures from then on.

Today at 4am GMT Canon released a New Digital Rebel! Here is the link to the article I read: Digital Rebel XTi. Man I want one for Christmas, but we are going to get a new 15.4in Mac Book Pro.

More on both of these to come.

Paul

The wife and I have been married for 4 years today!

Woohooooo!

Its my little Brother Matt’s birthday as well – happy B-day Matt.

I have come across the opportunity to work in a cool field of Computing. I should possibly rephrase the word “work” to play… I am going to assist someone in swapping out old work computers for newer computers and then acquire without cost these older computers (yes I possibly have too many computers, but not really(NEVER! the geek inside screams)).

I am torn between two ways to cluster these computers, both are desirable for different reasons. My options are: A Beowulf Cluster with FreeBSD or a regular cluster running Solaris 10 with Clustering software (3.1?). The two are very different because of the types of clusters and also the application. The Beowulf style is designed more for HPC or to be run as a parallel supercomputer with one or two head nodes and have the calculations split up one cycle per system at a time. The Solaris system has a lot of applications, most probably discussed when speaking with a Sun salesperson when your a big company or someone with more money than I do… However, I will run webserver applications on the cluster if I choose the Solaris route.

The original plan (before I realized my mistake) was to build a Cluster and run an Americas Army server on the server. I don’t think this is going to be possible being that I don’t know if AA is designed to run on a distributed or clustered system, not that I won’t check and possibly install it for fun.

Clustering is going to be pretty cool as it gives me a chance to work on something that is becoming quite popular and more and more needed in the world. Companies use clusters for a number of things, weather its for stability, distributing load, high performance processing, or just to throw huge amounts of cycles at large problems or work.

Real world experience and learning is a great way to pick something up.

Paul

Ok,

I was reading Google News (one of the only places I get my news) and I ran across a new land speed record set by the British on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The Team: JCB Dieselmax, the car: a wicked fast 2engine turbo’d BEAST! The Speed – (2 lap average) 350.092Mph.

Here is a link to the site and info about the car and driver: JCB Dieselmax. This is a killer site with pictures of the car that was pretty much only limited at hitting over +360Mph by the tires it was riding on. The company is pretty amazing as they built their own 4 cylinder diesel engine to put in their loaders and other vehicles and then to show off the performance decided to push it to the limits of physics. As we are still seeing what limits of physics are its going to be quite a show as the team thunders via diesel to higher speeds across the salt.

Just to mention the driver is the only man to breach the speed of sound in a car – thats Freakin Amazing!

Yay for Speed.

Paul

Welcome to DemonWerx!

This is my new site and your currently reading my weblog.

Thanks to the excellent hosting of Amok I have been able to get the site up and running and will continue to add content.

Right now the plan for the Werx is to put Nuke Evolution (RC1 or RC2), a gallery, and whatever else that sounds cool and does good stuff.

The forums running on Nuke will be for gaming, discussion, and projects (like the future Beowulf cluster I will be building).

Ok, I am done with the brief future overview!

Paul a.k.a. Demon