That’s right! Althought I missed the 100 days anniversary, I am still very happy to see that my server has gone through over 115 days of labor without a single hiccup, error or restart.

So, hopefully, at the very least another 115 days will come by without any issues what so ever.

I’ve finally received all the parts for my first render slave and immediately got into assembling and installing it. The rig is quite simple, very mainstream and very affordable. A standard ATX board placed in a 1U rack chassis, a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, two drives, one primary for the system and software and the other for buffering stuff, no DVD drive, no GPU, 350W power supply and that’s it. All running 64bit Windows 7 Professional.

I was kinda curious how this baby would perform once installed in the rack and how it’ll compare to my workstation, which is also a Core i7, 12GB of RAM, tons of HDD space (about 4TB), GeForce GTX285, some BD and DVD drives and other stuff all crammed on a standard ATX main board.

Here’s a quick video of the setup and of the first benchmark, for which I used the latest 64bit FryBench renderer. Quite surprisingly, the render node performed a bit faster than my workstation (might be due to the fresh install, though). It rendered the glass scene in 00h:07m:12s.

Music © Frank Klepacki

My workstation finished the scene in 00h:07m:29s.

I’m quite pleased with not only the speed of the render node, but also how cool it is. The temperature never went above 70°C, which is very, very good! Especially in a crammed rack setup. But obviously, the more nodes in the rack, the more heat they’ll produce and I’ll certainly have to deal with that later, especially during summer.

The entire studio ethernet ran on a standard 100Mbps line, 100BASE-T Fast Ethernet, which used to be enough. However, with the addition of a render farm and a fast centralized storage, I needed an upgrade. Thankfully, nowdays, a Gigabit Ethernet is becoming pretty mainstream as well, so I didn’t really have to put too much money into the whole network. All the standard, mainstream, main boards come with a 10/100/1000Mbps network cards integrated, the 1000BASE-T switches and routers are also pretty cheap, so all I really needed was a new switch, a bunch of CAT6 cables (however, CAT5e would have been enough as well) and a bit of re-wiring. The new network topology can be seen at the top.

Here are a few shots of the setup when I was working on it (I have a habbit of documenting a lot of stuff, when I come to think about it. ).

Anyways, we’re on a 1Gbps line all across the studio now and when I tested to copy a 14GB file from one PC to another the average data transfer speed was about 35MB/s, which took about 7 minutes or so. Not too bad. Obviously transferring tons of tiny files will always be an issue, but it should help with the larger ones, such as the scenes, source textures, renders, point caches etc…

Hell yeah! After a few months of putting the gear together, getting all the paperwork done, installing the electrical and network cabling, we finally run our own data management platform with an added bonus of a private render farm. How cool is that?!

I finally started building the render slaves for my studio. The first dedicated render node I built is based on basic mainstream parts, nothing fancy, but with enough power so that the render node does make sense to be placed in a rack installation.

The basic idea, obviously, was to build as powerful a machine, as possible for the lowest price tag, as possible. Since I’ve been an Intel user since, well forever, I based the machine on a Core i7 860 (Lynnfield) CPU, DDR3 memory and the rest is pretty much optional. But for my purposes, I wan every machine in the studio, to basically follow this idea of having a dedicated hard-drive, preferrably pretty fast, for the OS and a dedicated one for all the offline data. So, each machine, including the render nodes, will host a C: drive with all the software and programs on and a D: drive that’ll be setup to support all the files that we’ll work with. The workstation will have some other HDDs optionally, but these two drives are neccesary in order to rule out variables in the pipeline I’ve been building for a few months now.

Anyways, the render node’s config is a Core i7 860 (Lynnfield) CPU, 8GB of DDR3 RAM (I couldn’t get 16GB, 4×4GB, sticks unfortunately, but the mainboard supports them), Corsair I believe, a Gigabyte mainboard (H55M-UD2H), Western Digital hard drives, one 10krpm 74GB VelociRaptor and the other is the same as I have in the PowerVault MD1000 DAS, a 500GB RE3 HDD. The case is a Chieftec 1U chassis. That’s about it. No graphics card, no nothing.

I’m still waiting for the 1U coolers, which will be Dynatron K199, hopefully enough to cool down the CPU in such a tiny space. And a few more misc bits, like a rack shelves or flexible PCI-e riser cards that’ll allow me to temporarily place a backup graphics card in the case for installation, which’ll be removed from the system after that.

The OS of choice is, none other, than Windows 7 Professional x64. I have several reasons for this is:

1. Win 7 is pretty fast
2. It’s modern and flexible, meaning I can further enhance the performance by disabling tons of stuff and it’s gonna support the latest HW
3. Win 7 will communicate better with the Windows 2008 Server I have running my entire pipeline tools
4. And NO! I can’t run Linux on any of my machines!

I’m planning on experimenting with AMD CPUs as well, to see which ones perform best in the rack installation. The plan is to buy a new render node each bi-month, so by the end of the year, I should have at least 6 of these installed and online in the rack. For now, however, I’ll have to wait for the last parts to arrive from the US and then perform some benchmarking. I’ll keep you updated, of course!

Anyways, the server room is finally plugged to the local central switch. It is not online yet, T-Systems will have to go through yet another buerocratic procedure prior to setting up the line. But, the hard work is done and all I need now is an electricity revision and the T-Systems green light.

I took some shots with my phone this time as I forgot my camera home. So, please, excuse the terrible quality.

We finally got to the first stage of installing and prepping the server room this weekend. The first stage was to get electricity to the computers. The problem with this is, firstly, the power drain, then the network connection. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any other choice but to place the server with the DAS and the render slaves in a storage room, located on the ground floor in the building my studio is placed in (former flat). The room is great since the server and the running machines don’t bother anybody, but, it’s not properly air conditioned, it didn’t have any electricity power (except for the light) and it wasn’t connected or even remotely being able to be connected to the LAN switch.

I’ll deal with the air conditioning later, since it’s pretty damn cold here nowdays (below 5 degrees Celsius) and thus the temperature will be fine up til about April or so. But power was the first major issue. So this was the first step I had to take care of. I filed tons of paperwork, dealt with the local bureaus and finally hired the electricity gurus (pictured) to connect the storage room to my flat fuseboard. This presented several challenges. The first one was the power input. It had to be upgraded so that the fuses would sustain the higher power drain from the computers (both in the storage room and in the studio). Then we had to figure out how to connect the fuseboard, located about 20 meters behind three walls, to the storage room. The last bit will, yet again, be all about paperwork and bureaucracy. I’ll have to deal with that this week.

The second step will involve T-Mobile and their T-Systems (its subsidiary company, our internet provider) to connect the server’s switch to the local LAN switch, that is located in the underground level (the garage), also about 20 meters away. That’ll be another story and I still haven’t received the date the installation will be done, yet. But I’ll cover that as well, don’t worry.

Anyways, I thought some might be interested in this whole process of “putting stuff together to run a small studio”, so I took quite a few photos during this first installation. All this took about 9 hours of continuous labor, by the way. And for those who understand electricity, the fuse box we had to install in the fuseboard was a 32 amp (upgraded from the standard 25 amp), 3 phases, 240V for the rack (it should sustain about 30KW take-off), or so I was told.

The fuseboard was alive! I wouldn’t even dare to undo the cover, let alone reconnect the cabling! Anyways, as I’ve said, this is only the first of several steps. I’m still missing a special type of a socket outlet in the server room for the rack, that should come in about a week or so. Then a complete electrical revision. Then some more paperwork. Then the LAN switch interconnection. And that should be it. We should be able to access the server and its data storage and the render slaves from the studio, 5 storeys away. Hopefully all will be done in two weeks, tops. I’ll keep you updated.

I bought an aging file server, HP ProLiant ML350 G-5, and I want to transform it into a modern workstation that’ll be used for compositing tasks (Nuke, Photoshop and maybe After Effects). However, I’ve ran into some issues. Mainly, the server doesn’t have a dedicated PCI-Express 16x slot used for modern graphics cards, it only sports 3 PCI-e 4x slots, which sucks (how much it suck I’ll know after some benchmarks). The server also has only one CPU, a quite old and slow one. And, only 2GB of DDR2 RAM. The RAM is the least of an issue, the CPUs are quite expensive to upgrade, so I’ll keep the one already in there for the time being. But the GPU is the bummer! I’ve documented an approx. 15 minutes long video of “hacking” a regular graphics card in the PCI-e 4x (actually of the 8x size) slot, for those curious ones out there (I sure was!)

After spending the whole day with the most awesome phone on the market (all right, a bit biased here, but I’m really loving it! ), tweaking the shit out of it, installing gazillion apps and customizing it exactly to my liking, what has the experience been like?

A lot has been written and said about this gorgeous gadget in the past months. So, I won’t bother you with yet another review, rather I’ll give you a subjective point of view of, perhaps, the most demanding user there is, me! No really, I’m very demanding and almost bitchy about what software, hardware or gadgets I use. I want them to do EXACTLY what I want/need them doing. If it’s not done my way, I am, simply put, unsatisfied, if you know what I mean. That’s also been one of the reasons I’ve exchanged about 5 – 6 smart phones (PPCs) in the past 2 years.

Anyways, for those of you highly demanding as I am, when you pull the beauty out of its box it’s great, gorgeous, fast, massive and generally uber-cool. However, as it always seems to be the case, once you really start using any device, it’ll show its strengths as well as weaknesses. Paradoxically, one of the weaknesses as well as strengths is the gorgeous 4.3 inch screen. It’s purely capacitive, which means you can forget about a stylus, or, sometimes a tablet pen, if you need to type quickly something. Also, it’s overly sensitive. Really, it’s so sensitive you spend more time deleting what you’ve misstyped than actually typing. Even though HTC claims they’ve “fixed” this in the latest ROM version, it’s still overly sensitive. Another little hiccup were the three huge buttons on the home screen. Why only three? If only there were, say, five, these would be much more handy. The whole matrix could contain more smaller buttons. The Start menu “honeycomb” could too utilize a bit more columns. And then there are the functionality quirks and minor annoyances here and there. Such as the WiFi going out when the phone goes to sleep. Or a missing quick Bluetooth toggle button. I also missed the good old HTC task manager in the upper right corner and the option to close a running process by tapping the “X” button. The list could go on and on.

Thankfully, and this is one of the strong reasons I like sticking around, admittably aging, Windows Mobile OS. There is always a solution to any problem you might ever have. Be it in a form of unintuitive and user unfriendly Registry tweaking or in a form of a freely or even commercially available piece of software. Once again, I’ll only highlight stuff I’ve personally installed and am actually using, so, hopefully you might take advantage of the same modifications and tweaks as I have. Also, to save you some precious time, at the end of this article I’ve put a link to a package of all the plugins, tweaks, patches and programs I’m mentioning here, so you can go through them and choose whichever you like to use yourself.

• Obviously, I’m using the latest ROM with all the official patches. (Except for the large ROM, the files are included in the archive)
• Another, obvious one, was the start menu item quantity as well as the number of home buttons extender tweak I applied. (20shcut.cab)
• A 3G toggle button. (add_3g_commmanager.cab)
• A Bluetooth toggle button. (bluetooth_toggle.cab)
• BsB Tweaks app. is a great way to quickly and conveniently tweak very common registry entries to enhance functionality and fix some annoyances. (BsB Tweaks 1.5.cab)
• Bear in mind that the BsB Tweaks app. requires the latest .NET Compact Framework from Microsoft. (NETCFSetupv35.msi)
• The latest (beta!) Total Commander for PPCs. (cecmd.arm_b2.cab)
• The 3D graphics enhancer toggle. (chainfire-hd2-3d-driver-patch_1.1.2-test.cab)
• A tweak for minimizing accidental link clicks when rolling menus. (disable_accidental_link_clicks.cab)
• The beloved HTC task manager. (duttys.task.manager.for.leo.v2.1.free.cab)
• A fix for displaying Flash in Opera. (fixOperaFlash.exe)
• A tweak for disabling the always present home clock flip effect. This doesn’t disable it completely, only when you’re switching back to the home screen the clock won’t flip. (homescreen_flip_clock_off.cab)
• A tweak that allows for quick locking of the device by holding the send key for a few seconds. (longpress_sendkey_lockdevice.cab)
• A tweak to add “Mark All Read” to the menu in the mail app. (markallreadinbox.cab)
• An enhancement to the audio driver. (srs_wowhd_v1.5.1.0_sector.cab)
• A tweak that removes the WiFi disabling feature when the device goes to sleep. (starbase64_wlan_suspend.cab)
• This is a fun one. This tweak allows to use the LED flash as a torch light. (TorchButton_v2.3.cab)
• This little helper shows the amount of battery in percent on the upper bar. (Touch_X_1_percent_battery_LEO.cab)
• A tweak to show four rows in the Start menu instead of the default three. (Touch_X_Hexagon_4_row.cab)
• Should you need to add a quick link for a soft reset of the device and a WiFi toggle, this is it. (Touch_X_reset_and_wifi.cab)
• An obvious one, Skype. (SkypeMobile.cab)
• And an alternative soft keyboard called FingerKeyboard, which I got used to using. (FingerKeyb-2.1-WVGA_2_.cab)

That’s it. These are the 3rd party apps and tweaks I used to modify my HTC HD2. I’m very satisfied with the way my phone looks, behaves and works right now, which means something! Considering… So, if you’re like me and love to tweak the hell out of your gadgets and happen to own this fantastic device, go for these. You can, of course, install only those that you personally find interesting or handy, but I though I’d give you those in one, convenient, package.

I should add a disclaimer here as well. In no way am I responsible for any damage should it occur to your device! Even though I’ve installed all of these packages and have absolutely no problems what so ever with them. Also remember to BACKUP all your data, your contacts, calendar entries, mails, messages and what not, should you need to flash the phone from scratch! Don’t install any of those if you don’t feel comfortable modifying or possibly flashing your phone! And a credit: most of those tweaks come from a great, Czech, site WindowsMobile Mania, so, if you understand Czech, pay them a visit.

And as promised, here’s the full package (57.28 MB) containing all the above mentioned installers. Enjoy your HD2!

Ahhh! Finally, the courier has arrived and after 14days of waiting, I’ve got my new phone in my hands!

Yes, none other than the icon of pure awesomeness, HTC HD2 (Leo). So far (only a few minutes) the experience has been beyond fantastic. The phone is very snappy, huge and uber-powerful. I’m simply loving it! Besides, I wouldn’t settle for anything below high-end, so, this phone was a clear winner.

One little hiccup, though. The Mini (perhaps micro?) USB port on this device is slightly different to all the previous HTCs I’ve had, so I have to change the cable leading to my PC. But I’ll do it tomorrow and besides, it’s really nothing.