Category: 電腦 / Computers

The Optimus Maximus keyboard is emerging from the vaporware. This is the full size keyboard where every key contains a full color display so that the mapping of keys and what is shown on them can be redone at whim. They are now saying the should have it around year end.

The bad part… $1490 for a keyboard. And yes, that’s US DOLLARS.

Still, looks sweet.

I wrote an updated report on the early days of Spamdexing which I believe I was first to invent:

Refer Madness: An Early History of Spamdexing

One problem with laptop computers is that they aren’t really designed to be used as ‘laptops’. At best you’re going to end up with your leg getting a bit warm, at worst you will overheat your CPU and sterilize yourself. My current laptop computer has a Pentium M chip, and I run Speedswitch XP to make sure it throttles down the speed when not under load, so it actually runs fairly cool.

However, it has one design feature which is a bit annoying. The vent for the CPU fan is on the bottom of the computer. It’s also over towards the right hand side on the bottom, which means that if you actually use it on your lap, you are almost guaranteed to block the vent, risking overheating the CPU.

I’ve looked at several of those ‘lap saver’ devices which have come out in the past couple of years, but never found one that I liked. They come in sizes that don’t match my computer. They come with all kinds of extra crud like USB hubs and extra fans (again venting out the bottom… duh) that I don’t want and jack up the cost. And more often than not they look stupid. Really, all I need is some flat board to put the computer on so that there’s room for the air coming out of the vent to circulate.

For a while I was using one of Emily’s over sized children’s picture books, but it wasn’t quite the right size either, and probably wouldn’t stand up to extended use. Still, it did work OK. I took the measurements of my laptop and committed them to memory and then left a little note in my subconscious to be on the lookout for hard flat things that size.

A few weeks later I was in IKEA and my subconscious finally screamed out “Look! Over there! Flat hard things that size!” just as we were passing by the cutting board section. Sure enough, there were two cutting board styles that were almost exactly the right size. The first was a plastic one at TW$49 each (US$1.50), but it was a bit too thin and bendy. The second choice was a set of two wood cutting boards for TW$99 total (US$3.00). The bigger of the two in the set was just the right size, and sturdy enough as well. So into the shopping bag it went.

Let’s look at what was found:

A set of two cutting boards.

The big one is about the same size as my laptop.

And now with the laptop on top of the cutting board. The cutting board is slightly wider than the laptop but the depth is almost the same.

Click: Full set of pictures

As you may remember, I had been having all kinds of problems getting a D-Link DGS-1008D gigabit ethernet switch to work reliably. (You can read the previous episode in that saga.)

Unfortunately I had not been able to find anyone selling any other brand of switch than the D-Link ones. Through Google I was able to find some other options available in Taiwan. I finally was able to purchase a PCI FXG-08TXJ 8-port gigabit ethernet switch for TW$3100 (US$94). (You can read about my search over on Forumosa.com.)

Many of my readers probably don’t recognize the PCI brand name. It’s a Japanese company who primarily sell in Japan, but many of their products are also available in Taiwan. I had previously had an 802.11b PCMCIA card from them long ago. Their full name is Planex Communications Inc. The one drawback to their products is that most of their written materials are in Japanese. That’s not too big a problem considering the main alternative here is to get something all in Chinese.

The PCI switch itself is enclosed in an all-metal silver colored case. It feels nice and solid, whereas the D-Link has a plastic case and feels cheaply made. The PCI switch has the ethernet ports and all LEDs on the front panel and the power jack on the back panel. The D-Link had LEDs in front and ethernet ports and power in back. Personally I prefer both ethernet and LEDs in front. As a nice touch, they also include a small pigtail for the power brick so that you can only use one power outlet on your power strip.

Plugging everything in, it all worked right away with all computers linking at gigabit speeds. I’ve been using it for one week and there have been zero instances of link being dropped and no other oddities noticed. It just works. The switch supports up to 9.5K sized Jumbo Frames. After installing it I reconfigured the systems with Realtek 8169 cards to use 7K Jumbo Frames (the max size they support). My laptop has a Broadcom 5788 gigabit chipset which does not appear to support Jumbo Frames, so it was left at the standard 1500 byte frame size.

Performance Testing:

Computers:
minquan: Solaris 10 6/06 P4-3.0ghz 1gb Realtek 8169 MTU7000
jinzhou: Solaris 11 b41 P2-450mhz dual CPU 384mb Realtek 8169 MTU7000
songjiang: Windows XP SP2 P4-2.53ghz 2gb Realtek 8169 MTU7000
noraneko: Windows XP SP2 PM-2.0ghz 1gb Broadcom 5788 MTU1500

Testing Scheme:

server: iperf -s -m -M 100000 -w 1M -l 24k
client: iperf -c server -m -M 100000 -w 1M -l 24k -t 60

With minquan as server:
jinzhou: 268 Mbits/sec
songjiang: 578 Mbits/sec
noraneko: 493 Mbits/sec

With jinzhou as server:
minquan: 774 Mbits/sec
songjiang: 558 Mbits/sec
noraneko: 432 Mbits/sec

With songjiang as server:
minquan: 580 Mbits/sec
jinzhou: 265 Mbits/sec
noraneko: 332 Mbits/sec

With noraneko as server:
minquan: 612 Mbits/sec
jinzhou: 255 Mbits/sec
songjiang: 284 Mbits/sec

Performance testing was a bit interesting. The ancient 450mhz system did quite poorly as a client but quite well as a server. (Note: In iperf the definition of client and server are kind of backwards. The client sends data and the server receives.) I read elsewhere that the Realtek chipset is very CPU intensive compared to others, and indeed during heavy network usage I see that the CPU is pegged on jinzhou. Apparently the Intel chipsets are the most CPU efficient and also can more easily attain speeds above 800 Mbits/sec. They are a bit more expensive though. This system really needs a motherboard/cpu upgrade.

The laptop system (noraneko) does better but still nothing spectacular. The lack of Jumbo Frames support is probably what is holding it back. songjiang and minquan both turn in quite respectable benchmark results. Also of note, the Solaris scores tend to be better all other things considered. Keep in mind that these are just informal performance tests of raw network performance and don’t take into account actual performance which would be affected by disk speed and protocol efficiency.

All in all a pretty good result this time. I might replace the Realtek boards with Intel ones at some point, though they do pretty well for being 1/3 the price of an Intel board.

The busted-ass D-Link switch replacement is still having problems:

On the main solaris box dropped link 4 times since last night

On the secondary solaris box dropped link 4 times since last night

On the windows PC I don’t have link stats but it dropped 31 packets to the router in that amount of time. 31 may not seem like much, but it’s about 31 higher than it should be.

Anyone have any ideas where to look for a non-D-Link gigabit switch in Taipei?

For those who missed the previous episode in this saga here’s a summary: 1) Bought D-Link DGS-1008D 2) It dies 3) Return to shop for replacement 4) It dies.

I sent the second one in for repairs and got back a replacement (different serial number) for it yesterday. It’s still alive so far.

I also got the Gigabit card in my windows box working reliably. Previously it would cause noise on the sound card and give erratic performance. After poking around I found that the Realtek gigabit card and my M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card were both insisting on latching on to IRQ 21. After moving PCI cards around and disabling some unused devices in the BIOS, the Realtek decided to try out IRQ 16, and now no longer causes my sound card to make rude noises.

Performance between my XP box and main Solaris server are pretty ripping now. However, my older Solaris server barely breaks 200mbps, just about double a plain old fast ethernet board can do. It’s an old Pentium 2 450mhz system, so I guess that’s about all one can expect from such ancient technology. I guess I’ll have to get a new motherboard/cpu to build the RAID-Z file server now. (The main Solaris box is a small-form-factor PC which only has room for 2 hard drives, so it can at best do RAID-1.)