Death magnetic - Brisbane

When one of my friends mentioned Metallica is going to play in Brisbane. I wasn't quite interested in it at all. Their last couple of albums let down us big time. Trivium took over the place I've had for Metallica for years.

However, the years of fucking awesome metal provided by Metallica can't be easily forgotten. I made up my mind to attend the concert at the very last moment, around 1530hrs. It turned out to be a good decision. This was the second time I was attending a musical concert during this month of Rocktober.

lamb of god in action

Got into the train from Central station. But I wasn't quite sure whether I was on the correct train or not. When I heard shit loads of "fucks", I figured out indeed I'm in for a super cluster fuck. ;-)





I couldn't organise this with my friends since this was a last minute call. Tori of course out of the city for a few more weeks.

lamb of god

Metallica enters the stage

Nevertheless, I met a bunch of guys who accompanied me until the show was started. Three bands played with Metallica. Since I was busy outside drinking beer with these guys, we missed out the first band but got in time when "lamb of god" started to heat things up. Lamb of god did really well. It was absolutely brilliant.

Quite surprisingly I didn't see many goths whom I generally see at most of the metal concerts. It was a very good crowd. I know most people have their own criticism on heavy metal and its fans. Even so, they have to come and witness how wrong and stupid they are to come to such idiotic conclusions.

I was so lucky enough to grab a seat just a couple of meters away from the stage. I was at the lower ring facing the main stage, right in front.

The crowd erupted at around 2100hrs as Hetfield led Metallica jumped on to the stage. Lazer beams dazzled across the stage drawing a series of waves and waterfalls.


The sound engineers were fully responsible for the general fuckup they've had with the first song. It was horribly awful. Things were pretty much settled during the 3rd song.


This was one of THE best metal shows I've ever watched. They played some of my favorites, including 'One', 'Master of puppets', 'Unforgiven' and not to mention, 'Nothing else matters'.





It was just a couple of weeks since I have been to a concert of Simply Red. Besides their brilliant music, the interaction with audience, presence and presentation was so ironic. I've heard many people murmuring how rude Mick Hucknell was. They were disappointed over Mick's attitude. I'm pretty sure they didn't expect that from him.

General public however expect the opposite. The metal bands to be weird, arrogant and antisocial while soft musicians to be more kind and generous. But in reality it's a different story.




How these two metal bands responded to their audience and how they have shown their respect was quite significant. They always made us feel that we're a part of this big heavy metal family and admired our contribution to the music/metal industry as audience.

To my surprise, Metallica played good fucking 2.5 hours at its best. You can't expect any better. That was the finale of their three day venture in Brisbane. I want to thank all those guys and girls who accompanied me, shared the fun, beer and laughter also Metallica, Lamb of god for their music, it was a blast!!

Picking the correct laptop processor, in a nutshell

Picking the correct processor when buying a laptop or a desktop machine gets unnecessarily complicated due to marketing campaigns conducted by major CPU manufacturers, not many but Intel. We often try to buy one of the top range processors to be future proof or rather be on the edge, not knowing the requirements or actual usage. This often results being silly at the end of the day. Let's try to understand some of the features what mobile processors offer in general.


Processor cache:
Intel processors often talk about the processor cache. It doesn't play a big role anyways. The AMD processors in general doesn't rely on the processor cache but thick pipelines to fetch data between main memory and the processor. Let's take a look at the pros and cons of processor cache.

Processor cache can be explained this way. Imagine a public library. Where does the librarian keep frequently accessed publications ? Probably on the librarian's table, take this as Level 1 (L1) cache in a processor. The less frequent publications are kept on the drawer, consider this being Level 2 (L2) cache. As you know, the librarian could keep just a handful number of publications with him/her. The rest of the publications must go into the locked cupboards, this is the main memory.

This has both good and bad. The good is, the librarian doesn't have to access locked cupboards to offer frequently accessed publications when they're on his table. The information can be accessed and serve upon requests very quickly. This is the good side of having a larger cache.

But how about when someone requests a publication which doesn't exist on his table (L1 cache) or in the drawer (L2 cache) ? He has to get this book from the locked cupboard. So the time that the librarian has spent on searching for publications at his desk and in the drawer are an utter waste. This is the downside of processor cache.


Intel processor cache:
Intel processors have a smaller L1 cache, which has redundant data in Level L2 cache. They call this approach "inclusive" principle. The downside is not just the redundant data in L2 cache, but also the replicated data won't be accessed as expected. The advantage of this approach is, the data requires to be updated at the L2 cache.

AMD processor cache:
AMD follows the opposite, which is the "exclusive" principle. The AMD L1 cache data won't get duplicated in L2 cache for it's costly given the size. AMD's L1 caches are quite big compared to Intel's. AMD processors have large L1 caches starting from 128kb,  so it does make sense for them to have this "exclusive" approach.


                                                                                                                                                           

CPU Cache

Make	Model	# Cores	Speed	L1 Cache	L2 Cache	L3 Cache
AMD	N 930	4	2GHz	512 kb	2048 kb	-
Intel	i7-720QM	4	1.6 GHz - 2.8GHz (Turbo Boost)	256 kb	1024 kb	6144 kb

Source :
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Phenom-II-X4-N930-Notebook-Processor.31536.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i7-720QM-Notebook-Processor.23035.0.html


Pros and cons of AMD/Intel approach:
The CPU cache becomes very handy when you run an application which requires to store data and access them quite frequently. For an example, a word processing application can be given. However, a bigger cache doesn't make any sense if you're performing a task, which doesn't cache information for later retrieval. An encoding decoding application is a better example for this. When you rip an Audio CD to MP3 format, it doesn't refer or access the cached data over a period of time. A larger cache becomes pretty much ineffective in this scenario.

I forgot to mention, why we require a processor cache. The main memory modules are pretty slow, catering the demand what the processor has. So having a processor cache appeared the best solution for this issue to minimise round-trips to the main memory.


Memory access speeds:
The AMD processors are the least to suffer from this, given the high bandwidth they have between processor and the main memory. AMD doesn't heavily rely on processor caches, given the bandwidth it has. Let's get some facts :


                                                                                                                                                           

CPU Comparison

Make	Model	# Cores	Clock Speed	Max Memory Bandwidth	I/O Bus Speed	TDP
AMD	N 930	4	2GHz	35.7 GB/s	3.6 GT/s	35W
Intel	i7-720QM	4	1.6 GHz - 2.8GHz (Turbo Boost)	21 GB/s	2.5 GT/s	45W

Source :
http://www.amd.com/us/products/notebook/platforms/home/2010-mainstream/Pages/2010-mainstream-platform.aspx
http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43122&processor=i7-720QM&spec-codes=SLBLY



Processor speed :
In a nutshell, none of the processors in the market run at its optimal marked clock speed. For an example, if you take a look at a processor marked at 2GHz it starts hitting the 2 GHz mark ONLY when you run processor intensive operations. Actually this is govern by the operating system + processor. The processor informs the min and max clock speeds to the operating system. Which defines and dictates what's the clock speed should be, based on the load. Which means, the operating system uses this information to increase the clock speed on demand.(based on the enforced cpu policy)

Even though you have the best processor in the market with having a very high clock speed, what if your system doesn't hit the line ? What if you don't require that much horsepower ? It's an utter waste of money and resources. You've been just bullied by processor manufacturers ;-) Which is the ultimate truth, the reality. If you have an Intel i7 840QM processor and just uses it at 1100Hz at 90% of the time, what does it mean to pay extra $$$$ for ? You would have achieved your tasks with a lower end processor without any lagging while saving some big $$$.

Let's get some facts right. I'm using and AMD QuadCore N930 2 GHz Quad Core processor. I'm using Debian Squeeze, the it reads following CPU stepping speeds 2.0 GHz , 1.7 GHz, 1.4 GHz, 1.1 GHz and 800Hz. I ran following applications during this test  :

• Eclipse with JBossTools 3.x
• Netbeans 6.9.1
• PostgreSQL 8. database server
• MySQL 5.1x
• JBoss-5.1 Application server
• HornetQ JMS broker
• Linux shell
• Galeon web browser with multiple tabs
• Iceweasel web browser with multiple tabs
• Skype
• Pidgin (MSN/Yahoo/GTalk)
• gedit
• File browser
• SSH and the default system services

During one of the busiest days, my CPU statistics read as follows :

CPU Usage

	Core#	Usage @ 2.0 GHz	Usage @ 1.7 GHz	Usage @ 1.4 GHz	Usage @ 1.1 GHz	Usage @ 800 Hz
	0	2.59%	0.08%	0.13%	0.27%	96.94%
	1	2.53%	0.09%	0.17%	0.15%	97.06%
	2	2.89%	0.10%	0.14%	0.15%	96.73%
	3	2.55%	0.10%	0.12%	0.15%	97.08%
Total CPU usage		2.64%	0.09%	0.14%	0.18%	96.95%

Common properties for all cores :
hardware limits: 800 MHz - 2.00 GHz
driver: powernow-k8
available frequency steps: 2.00 GHz, 1.70 GHz, 1.40 GHz, 1.10 GHz, 800 MHz
available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance
current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 2.00 GHz.
                  The governor "ondemand" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.


Even though you have the fastest processor in the world, it doesn't mean anything if the applications you run don't require that much power. What's the point spending bug $$$ on high end processors ? To make processor manufacturers rich ?


Intel's hyper threading :
Intel's two threads per core mechanism doesn't scale really well in some aspects, as you already aware each thread requires a CPU cycle. This has some concerns when dealing with large caches, known as cache pollution. Besides security, the power consumption has proven to be high as well. Although Intel claims a 30% performance boot, the downside takes its gloss away.


WTF ? Then, how come Intel outperforms AMD on certain laptop models ?
Fair enough, how does the Intel's i7s outperform AMD's QuadCore then ? Just one word, simply by "over-clocking". Intel calls this 'Turbo Boost', quite strangely. I managed to get my hands on a Dell laptop, which carries an i7 720QM processor. It worked well for a while, but not when I started to run some heavy processor intensive applications. Needless to mention the overheat it generates, when it gets into the turbo boost mode. The overheat often throttles the clock speed to run down. This 45W watts processor, promised to deliver goods under load at 2.8GHz (on demand) but sadly I've experienced the opposite. The usual story I've suffered with their older Core2Duo family processors continues. The clock speed went down to cope with the overheat. I was not alone :

http://communities.intel.com/thread/9079
http://communities.intel.com/message/99568
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/26/core-i7-equipped-macbook-pro-hits-100-degrees-celsius-your-lap/
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/172791,macbook-pro-helps-core-i7-hit-100-degrees.aspx

Simply Red bids farewell as we're holding back the years

"No one has to tell me when to leave a party", was what Simon Cowell quoted when leaving American Idol. Perhaps it could be the same for Simply Red as they prepare to quit after 25 years long journey with music, another great English band.

We're going to witness to an end of one of the greatest soul, pop bands of our time and it's sad to say them go this way but perhaps it could be the most cleaver decision they've made considering their recent success as a band.

Mick Hucknell, the lead vocalist has decided to persuade a solo career when they disband later this year.

'Holding back the years' was their first memorable single I've heard. I could still remember how the day looked like when I first heard it. Music and life aren't two different things but one since it has become part of my life and in everything I do. Just like we feel the breeze, I feel the music in my day to day life and it has its own footprint in its own way.... in my past..

Irrespective of the situation I've been thru, music has always been there and so the music of Simply Red. Their 'a new flame' album was one of such albums which hooked up in some of my personal experiences. It was an album which connected to me in the right substances and essence.

In my personal opinion, that's their BEST album to date. I've been listening to this album for 15 years and still love it and the music sounds very much current and the lyrics.. Love lays its tune, You've got it and More are  some of my favorites.



With the release of 'stars' they started receiving much appreciation from general public, and recognition which was followed by commercial success. But started to drift away in terms of quality. No matter how far they've drifted away from what they were, their music always carried their magic touch.

For the last time in their long journey, Simply Red is playing for the very last time this year and this has been labeled as the 'Farewell Tour' and playing in Brisbane on 1st of October at the convention and exhibition center. I didn't hesitate to buy a premium ticket to witness another sad farewell of one of the greatest bands in our time. Mick and Simply Red, thank you for the music and its inspiration which at times helped us to loosen the loads we carry and cherish life..

AMD Quad Core N 930 (mobile) Experience

We've complained about overheat problems on AMD notebook processors, well now it's all history. With the introduction of their new 'vision platform' processors, I believe they may have just turned the tables. :-)

AMD introduced a bunch of multicore processors to prevent a possible extinction from mobile processor market. Looking at the processor specs and what was seen on forums, I was just curious to see what they look like. I very much wanted to buy HP DV 6 3050 with N930 but sadly it's not available in Australia. However, I managed to buy a machine with AMD N 930 Quad Core 2 GHz processor.

What surprised me was the processor temperature, which never crossed 57 C mark, when running multiple heavy applications, stressing the processor. Such as compiling the kernel while running two JBoss instances, eclipse ide, MySQL, PostgreSQL along other default servers and services. The cooling fan doesn't spin like a wild donkey causing an irritating buzz but very very quite. Take my word on this ;-)

I've been using this laptop for almost a week now and truly impressed with the power it offers. This is well ahead when compared with Intel processors in terms of power for wattage + value for money. The processor performs really well when you run applications which utilise all four cores.

I've had a few Intel C2D laptops. A Core2Duo 1.86 GHz, another Core2Duo 2.2 GHz C2D (T7500) with 4MB cache per each core. All suffered overheat problems. The only success I've had with Intel was with Lenovo T 61, the same T7500 processor.

Most laptop manufacturers integrate AMD processors in their low end range. These low budget laptops come with a poor built quality resulting overheat due to lack of ventilation and bad design. As a matter of fact, AMD processors suffered down the line than what was due. I have seen both Intel and AMD suffering from this and what was given above was a perfect example.

I have used  over 10 laptops during the last 3-4 years. All I could say is, AMD has finally delivered a good laptop for for the hard core developers... ;-)

Uruguay down under ?

I've been watching/following Uruguay since their FIFA 2010 qualifying campaign. They don't have stars.... big names .. media isn't pushing them up the way they do on crappy Brazil team but they play as a single unit.

The team spirit is high, the motivation is just there as they inching towards the moment of glory. Two times worldcup champions, I'm really impressed how they've been playing so far. Even though the things look very much written for Uruguay, their ride towards worlcup quarter finals wasn't that easy.

I would like to recall their last qualifying game for the FIFA 2010, Uruguay vs Argentina at Motevideo. It was a tense game and Argentina was in a must win situation to book a slot for the FIFA 2010 in South Africa. I'm an Argentine fan, not because my 'ex' is an Argentine but I lover their soccer. ;-)

Argentina hadn't won a match against Uruguay in Motevideo for 36 years. But they did it in style, winning the match 0-1, thanks to Bolatti's classic goal; which was an outcome of a free kick at the 83rd minute.  Martin Caceres of Uruguay was sent out as a result of that foul.

Argentina won the match and qualified for the FIFA 2010. Overjoyed Maradona spoke to media, "this victory doesn't belong to one group, that's the local media. now come and suck my cock. we've done it, the media didn't speak any good of me or my team. they condemn us".

Now, Uruguay had to play two matches against Costa Rica to book a slot in FIFA 2010. They won the away match 0-1 and drew the home game 1-1 . So they made it :-). Thanks to Forlan (FWD), Suarez(FWD) and Perez (MID). Forlan, without him, they wouldn't have made it at all.


The Forlan factor
Apart from Messi, Forlan is the only other player I truly like to watch. He's indeed a class act, an ambassador for the game, who's playing for the team leaving his individual ambitions aside. He's a genuine gentleman for the game compared to the wild beasts of Brazil and Ghana teams. Forlan, a tennis player changed his direction towards soccer is undoubtedly a class act. Besides his classic playing, what truly impressed me was his attitudes.

Forlan is getting a good support from Suarez, the guy who got a red card on his debut game against Columbia and also from Perez. Ah Perez, the hard core dynamo.. who continued to play with a bleeding eyebrow when they played Mexico. After beating Ghana, now they have to play Holland. The absence of Suarez would surely have an impact on this game. I don't know how far they could go.... how much they could stress Forlan and Perez.

I can't comment on the upcoming game, Holland vs Uruguay. Holland is playing some good soccer. However, no matter what the outcome would be... Uruguay and their FIFA 2010 journey will be remembered in the years to come.. and Forlan... he'd remain not as a star, but a good player with great humanely qualities in all our hearts...

Beginning of the end

I was shocked to hear the latest earthquake took place in Western Australia. We've witnessed many earthquakes and famines in the recent past like never before..  the frequency of such have increased dramatically... raising the alarms ..

I'm seeing more and more things which I have already seen in the bible becoming true., in real life. Yes, the end times have arrived.. it's the time ..  we could only cheat ourselves by ignoring what's written in the bible. But if we pay a bit of attention to what the bible says, we could easily understand where we're heading towards.. 

This is what's written in the book of Matthews , chapter 24, verse 3-14.
The Signs of the Times and the End of the Age
  
3 Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?”

4 And Jesus answered and said to them: “Take heed that no one deceives you. 5 For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many. 6 And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. 7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.

9 “Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name’s sake. 10 And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. 11 Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. 12 And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. 13 But he who endures to the end shall be saved. 14 And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.

So, how can we deny the fact that these are the end times, when we have facts and evidence ... confirming its destructive agenda.. awaiting to unfold ?

The essential Billy Joel

Last saturday I had to visit "vibrations", (a popular original cd/dvd/blueray store in Sri Lanka) to get couple of cds, some classics to listen during my stay in Sri Lanka. I bought three two cd sets, Byrds, Carpenters (to replace Nishad's cd) and Billy Joel's.

Billy Joel has been one of my favorite vocalists. A song writer, vocalist and an amazing pianist. The "Essential Billy Joel" album I bought contains 36 great tracks. You never want to touch the receiver or the player when these cds are on. Although I have listen to all of his hits, I got myself hooked like I have never heard him before.

True, this album doesn't contain some of his great performances. But it doesn't take the gloss away from this great two cds. An album is all about having its music connected to you. His music has been the background music for all the great days in my life. In general, I love music a lot as it's my secondary dietary intake.

However, the best album I've had of him was "The bridge". This dual disc album also contains a number of tracks from the said. The songs simply don't bring just the memories of all the good times but also what music is all about. There are couple of over heard songs included, but besides the fewer such vast majority of songs are off 80's. I love the music of 60's, 70's and 80's a lot than the crap.



'This is the time' is one of my favorites! I love this track a lot as much as I like 'A matter of trust', 'Piano man', 'She's always a woman' and all of them .. ;-) Yes, I love adult contemporary music a lot....

Back to music with Sennheiser IE 6

Finally, I managed to buy a pair of Sennheiser IE 6 last week, during my visit to London. I have used many brands from JBL, Shure, Bose, Klipsch and to a few Sennheiser's. I have to admit that, this is one of the best piece of in ear headphones I have ever used up to date.

To give you some idea, these are the headphones I have used in the past :

Brand	Model	Score	Price
Sony	NC-22	1/10	USD 120
Bose	Triport	3/10	USD   89
Klipsch	Image S4	4/10	USD   85
Sennheiser	CX 300	4/10	AUD   80
JBL	410	6/10	USD   79
Bose	Quite Comfort	6/10	USD 285
Sennheiser	CX 95	7/10	AUD 179
Sure	E3C	7.5/10	USD 240
Sennheiser	IE 6	10/10	AUD 339

I bought my IE 6 from HMV store at Piccadilly, London. I managed to burn them to the perfection while using them in flight at a high volume for over 20 hours. I had to fly ~22 hours from London Heathrow to Brisbane. To get the optimal performance (good thumping) you need to burn them for a period of time at high volume.

The IE 6 provides deep rich bass, detailed highs with vibrant mids. The sounds are crisp clear as one could ever imagined it to be. It would surely blow you away. I stopped using my iPod for a while, for its incapability to handle the "loudness war". But with these IE 6 headphones, I'm back on track listening to music like I did during my school days. ;-)

the IE6 comes with a half dozen of different ear plugs, so you could pick what's best for you. To suite your ear canals. The default ear plugs provide moderate bass with bit of highs. I went one size up to get my blend of music and it was awesome. I have never enjoyed music over 3-4 hours continually , using headphones.

But I truly can't take these headphones off my ears. The apple Australia site advertise them at A$ 339/= (LKR ~ 34,500/=) and indeed it's worth the money. You won't regret ... just be yourself.. just listen to your ears.. they would be pleased with these ;-)