New Intel Xeon Chips

Intel released their new ‘Pynron’ chips over the weekend, new Xeon Quad cores that were supposed to be much smaller (45nm) and use a lot less power and I was looking at possibly using them in future servers and virtual servers however Intel is still a waste of juice… the lowest end Xeon Quad Core uses 120W of power … the highest powered AMD Opteron Quad Core uses 55W…. thats a hell of a difference….  I don’t care if the AMD is slower (and not by much), it’s still 4 cores and over time 55W is saving a lot of money in power than using 120W processors

Come on Intel… I’ll stop using AMD when you actually put out a efficient processor 😉

-Scott

Fedora 8 Release & Review

I’m very happy to announce that he folks over at the fedoraproject have released version 8 codename `werewolf`.  It’s a very satisfying release, while I expect 9 to be the major step, 8 is very exciting, they’ve gotten a lot of work done on the ‘prettiness’ of the OS which it was a bit lacking previously.  I’m currently running the 64 bit version on a AMD Athlon 64 X2 here at the office and it’s absolutely flying and working beautifully.

Good job guys 🙂

-Scott

DVD Encoding, Burning Linux

To encode to 16×9 ratio (change the aspect= value to be 4/3 to encode in 4/3), please note you’ll need to adjust -ofps value based on the frame rate of the source

mencoder -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -srate 48000 -ofps 24000/1001 -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts  vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:keyint=18:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=4900:aspect=16/9:acodec=ac3:abitrate=192 transformers.dvdrip.avi -o Transformers.dvdrip.mpg

< Relax and go get a scotch or cigar as this can take some time >

if you need to merge files:
mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o “transformers.dvdrip.avi” “Transformers.disk1” “Transformers.disk2”

so lets say you have encoded Transformers.dvdrip.mpg and you want to write it to DVD, create a folder in the same directory as that file called ‘DVD’ or really whatever you want

then:

dvdauthor –title -f Transformers.dvdrip.mpg -o DVD
dvdauthor -T -o DVD

Now within that ‘DVD’ directory you have a AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folder just like a DVD

Ugh exercise sucks until you get in shape

Started a new (*cough*) exercise routine this weekend, and man does it make me realize just how fuckin’ out of shape I am.   The plan goes like this.. I work my ass off until I almost fall over and then hop in the shower and have a good breakfast.  So far this is what I’ve been doin’:

Bike 12-14 miles a day

50 sit ups

100+ bicep curls on each arm (I’ve only got 40lb weights at the moment, need to get bigger ones)

50 bench reps (I’ve only got 150lbs in bench weights… need to get more)

followed up by running a few miles in the evening.

The nice thing about it all is I pretty much sleep like a damn log after all that 😉

After typing this I realize…I need to go shopping and get some more weights!

-S