I just benchmarked my CPU using the somewhat well-accepted synthetic integer CPU benchmarking method called Dhrystone. A Dhrystone is essentially just a single loop, a counter, and a time-counting routine. It's simple enough that a novice could program it in a language he's never used before.
Theoretically, the faster your CPU can perform a dhrystone, the faster your overall speed. However, this isn't necessarily so. Dhrystones measure the speed of integer operations, which means if you're going to do more advanced things with your processor, like 3D graphics (unless you're a fan of voxels) and physical modeling/simulation. For vector calculations, you need to do two different versions of the Whetstone test; one for single-precision, and one for double-precision vector calculations.
In my case, the average (mean) result of three iterations of the Dhrystone test gave me 4357780.67 dhrystones/s, which is about 0.2us per dhrystone. One run gave me as much as five and a half million dhrystones per second. For asinine comparison, I get 5004 BogoMIPS.
I used this shell program which was linked from Wikipedia to benchmark my system. To run it, you'll need to run 'sh dry.c' (without the quotes, obviously) in any POSIX-like environment. I used cygwin, since SiS hardware is too evil for my computer to run a real POSIX environment and I'm stuck in Windowsland. Just make sure you install gcc under the devel category when you install it. Go ahead, run it and send your results to me via comment to this post.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Wha...?
I'm about to release another album.
This time, it's going to be the soundtrack to Umihara Kawase, that little-known platformer game. I think this time I'm going to use Colors to make a nice watercolor-looking cover for this album.
The mixing and mastering is already done, having mostly been done within a single night. For this one, I drew a line and made the instruments sound sound more like they did on the Super Famicom, mostly by using the same techniques as the original artist. If I get everything done quickly, the album will be available within a day's time. In the meanwhile, I'll be firing up my DS to make the artwork.
This time, it's going to be the soundtrack to Umihara Kawase, that little-known platformer game. I think this time I'm going to use Colors to make a nice watercolor-looking cover for this album.
The mixing and mastering is already done, having mostly been done within a single night. For this one, I drew a line and made the instruments sound sound more like they did on the Super Famicom, mostly by using the same techniques as the original artist. If I get everything done quickly, the album will be available within a day's time. In the meanwhile, I'll be firing up my DS to make the artwork.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Earn Your Stripes
So you want to know what it takes for me to write something on my blog?
Extreme insomnia.
Also, I keep meaning to talk to Stephen sometime....
What ever happened to the concept of 'having time'?
Extreme insomnia.
Also, I keep meaning to talk to Stephen sometime....
What ever happened to the concept of 'having time'?
Friday, July 18, 2008
You Are Your Own Chef
I was going to go and finally make a full review of D2, Kenji Eno's Magnum Opus, but then I got my paws on something newer and more interesting. It's called Cooking Guide, a Nintendo-created (with assistance from the Tsuji Cooking Academy, which I assume is 'huge in Japan'.) cookbook with features crammed in every single bit of it's unnaturally large ROM.
For some reason or another, I got the UK version of the game. Er, DS Application.
It shouldn't make too much of a difference, but it uses all these strange English terms like 'hob' and the equally weird English spellings for words like 'fibres'. It's to my preference anyway, as I tend to use English-styled grammar myself.
When you first turn on your DS, you will be amazed at what you're hearing. Well, maybe not, but I was pretty impressed. Cooking Guide offers a little animated chef figure who actually talks to you. This is the first game on the DS to have feature a TTS (text to speach) engine (either that, or this dude just sounds really artificial). The next time you run Cooking Guide, the chef will greet you with the unusually appetizing phrase, "Can't decide what to eat? Let's make something tastey." The voice is as one of those steriotypical congested gourmet chef types, but it sounds very good. It is a bit quiet, though, so you'd might not want to run this on a DS Lite, because they tend to have quieter sound.
Before we explore the titular 'Cooking Guide' section, let's explore the lesser features of the software. The settings screen contains the expected things, like sound controll, mic tests, and voice options (for both you and the chef). However, it also contains one unexpected feature. It's 'Excluded Ingrediants', which will warn you with a red box with an 'x' over the pictures of foods which contain those ingrediants. Excelent for crossing out allergies. I used it to warn me of recipeis which contain fish, simply because I can't stand any of it. Also included in this section, although I don't think it really belongs there, is a kitchen timer, for obvious purposes.
Also on the main menu is 'Cooking A-Z'. If you're a terrible cook, you should go about reading all of it. If you're experianced, like myself, just read 'Important points', which contains various information that you must keep in mind as you read and cook the recipes, such as to use 'dark' soy sauce, and all recipies with sugar use somewhat obscure johakuto sugar, and you can substatute dark sugar. As some of the recipies available on Cooking guide are fairly obscure, you may want to skim through 'Substitute Ingrediants'. Some things need bases which you may not be able to find pre-made, so there's a selection of simple base recipies available through 'homemade ingrediants', but those are also linked to the recipies that use them, so you'll be able to make it as you're preparing to make the dish that needs to use it. And on the bottom of the cooking A-Z page is a list of movies which show some basic techniques. Do not look at how to prepair squid. You will vomit.
The final feature, the one that's perhaps most useful to the end-user, is the Shopping list. It's somewhat automatically populated; when you look through the ingrediant lists of recipies, you can put a check next to what you need to buy, and it'll appear on the shopping list. Each ingrediant is listed alphebetically, with checkboxes so you can keep track of what you have already. A downfall of this list is that if you have multiple ingrediants in different recipies, it won't combine them. Luckally though, there's a handy calculator that you can pull up at any time while viewing the list. A benefit of the uncombined ingredients, however, is that you can see what it is that you need each quantity of it for, and go straight to the recipie from there.
Now, to the bulk of Cooking Guide: the Cooking Guide.
The Cooking Guide contains 214 recipies, which doesn't really seem like much. I still don't know if that's the big complex recipies or all the recipes, including basic ones like Stock. Cooking Guide has a multitude of ways with which you can find them. You can find them by what ingredients they contain, by keywords, by which recipies you have ingrediants selected from, by country, by ones you marked favorates, or by 'requirements', which is a search that returns results based on user set dependencies, such as if you wrote notes on it, if you've cooked it, how easy it is to make, how many calories it contains, or how it's cooked. You'd think it'd be overkill, but it's not; sometimes you want something different, and sometimes you want something you really like. The favorates system can mold from being foods that you want to try to being something you really love to make, and sometimes you do have requirements like a ten-minute cooking time.
My personal favorate is searching by country, which displays a broken-down scrolalble map where you can search by ethnicity (even though all the recipies are technically Japanese). There's a large selection of delicious-looking French food, including crepes and soufles. I'm personally waiting until we go shopping so I can make a good Indian meal of Keema Curry with rice and a side of Lassi.
When you select a recipe, you can add notes through Cooking Guide's interesting charicter recognition technique, where you write letters one at a time in two boxes, which makes writing much easier and faster. I don't think this is new; I think it was used in Level5's Professor Layton. You can also add it to your favorates at a single touch. The button to get into the main feature's cooking mode, 'Start Cooking', is actually three buttons. If this is new to you, tap 'View Ingrediants' to do it's titular tast. Or if you already have the ingrediants layed out, tap 'Cook'. For those of you who just need to reference a recipie, you can touch 'View Steps' and start cooking from a later step.
The ingrediants screen is nice; it shows ingrediants, utensils (which include pans and wraps), and servings (which you can alter to an extent, with all of the ingrediants following suite and changing quantity). The only real problem I have with this is that it's all in metric. Just ask your grocer for 550 grams of lamb mince.
Cooking mode is great, especially because it's so minimalist without actually being so. The speach recognition isn't as great as it could be, especially, as I'd imagine, in a loud noisy kitchen. Particularly, "More Details!" didn't work. Then again, this may just be because I'm not English. The Cooking Guide chef sounds really nice, and he really shouldn't be turned off. He gives extra tips when he talks, and he doesn't just read what's on the screen. And he sounds all nice, like he would be fun to hug. The steps are simple; even an idiot would be able to follow it.
And now, as it's late at at night, I stop before I get to my feelings about the software. I just said that someone would be fun to hug, what do you expect?
For some reason or another, I got the UK version of the game. Er, DS Application.
It shouldn't make too much of a difference, but it uses all these strange English terms like 'hob' and the equally weird English spellings for words like 'fibres'. It's to my preference anyway, as I tend to use English-styled grammar myself.
When you first turn on your DS, you will be amazed at what you're hearing. Well, maybe not, but I was pretty impressed. Cooking Guide offers a little animated chef figure who actually talks to you. This is the first game on the DS to have feature a TTS (text to speach) engine (either that, or this dude just sounds really artificial). The next time you run Cooking Guide, the chef will greet you with the unusually appetizing phrase, "Can't decide what to eat? Let's make something tastey." The voice is as one of those steriotypical congested gourmet chef types, but it sounds very good. It is a bit quiet, though, so you'd might not want to run this on a DS Lite, because they tend to have quieter sound.
Before we explore the titular 'Cooking Guide' section, let's explore the lesser features of the software. The settings screen contains the expected things, like sound controll, mic tests, and voice options (for both you and the chef). However, it also contains one unexpected feature. It's 'Excluded Ingrediants', which will warn you with a red box with an 'x' over the pictures of foods which contain those ingrediants. Excelent for crossing out allergies. I used it to warn me of recipeis which contain fish, simply because I can't stand any of it. Also included in this section, although I don't think it really belongs there, is a kitchen timer, for obvious purposes.
Also on the main menu is 'Cooking A-Z'. If you're a terrible cook, you should go about reading all of it. If you're experianced, like myself, just read 'Important points', which contains various information that you must keep in mind as you read and cook the recipes, such as to use 'dark' soy sauce, and all recipies with sugar use somewhat obscure johakuto sugar, and you can substatute dark sugar. As some of the recipies available on Cooking guide are fairly obscure, you may want to skim through 'Substitute Ingrediants'. Some things need bases which you may not be able to find pre-made, so there's a selection of simple base recipies available through 'homemade ingrediants', but those are also linked to the recipies that use them, so you'll be able to make it as you're preparing to make the dish that needs to use it. And on the bottom of the cooking A-Z page is a list of movies which show some basic techniques. Do not look at how to prepair squid. You will vomit.
The final feature, the one that's perhaps most useful to the end-user, is the Shopping list. It's somewhat automatically populated; when you look through the ingrediant lists of recipies, you can put a check next to what you need to buy, and it'll appear on the shopping list. Each ingrediant is listed alphebetically, with checkboxes so you can keep track of what you have already. A downfall of this list is that if you have multiple ingrediants in different recipies, it won't combine them. Luckally though, there's a handy calculator that you can pull up at any time while viewing the list. A benefit of the uncombined ingredients, however, is that you can see what it is that you need each quantity of it for, and go straight to the recipie from there.
Now, to the bulk of Cooking Guide: the Cooking Guide.
The Cooking Guide contains 214 recipies, which doesn't really seem like much. I still don't know if that's the big complex recipies or all the recipes, including basic ones like Stock. Cooking Guide has a multitude of ways with which you can find them. You can find them by what ingredients they contain, by keywords, by which recipies you have ingrediants selected from, by country, by ones you marked favorates, or by 'requirements', which is a search that returns results based on user set dependencies, such as if you wrote notes on it, if you've cooked it, how easy it is to make, how many calories it contains, or how it's cooked. You'd think it'd be overkill, but it's not; sometimes you want something different, and sometimes you want something you really like. The favorates system can mold from being foods that you want to try to being something you really love to make, and sometimes you do have requirements like a ten-minute cooking time.
My personal favorate is searching by country, which displays a broken-down scrolalble map where you can search by ethnicity (even though all the recipies are technically Japanese). There's a large selection of delicious-looking French food, including crepes and soufles. I'm personally waiting until we go shopping so I can make a good Indian meal of Keema Curry with rice and a side of Lassi.
When you select a recipe, you can add notes through Cooking Guide's interesting charicter recognition technique, where you write letters one at a time in two boxes, which makes writing much easier and faster. I don't think this is new; I think it was used in Level5's Professor Layton. You can also add it to your favorates at a single touch. The button to get into the main feature's cooking mode, 'Start Cooking', is actually three buttons. If this is new to you, tap 'View Ingrediants' to do it's titular tast. Or if you already have the ingrediants layed out, tap 'Cook'. For those of you who just need to reference a recipie, you can touch 'View Steps' and start cooking from a later step.
The ingrediants screen is nice; it shows ingrediants, utensils (which include pans and wraps), and servings (which you can alter to an extent, with all of the ingrediants following suite and changing quantity). The only real problem I have with this is that it's all in metric. Just ask your grocer for 550 grams of lamb mince.
Cooking mode is great, especially because it's so minimalist without actually being so. The speach recognition isn't as great as it could be, especially, as I'd imagine, in a loud noisy kitchen. Particularly, "More Details!" didn't work. Then again, this may just be because I'm not English. The Cooking Guide chef sounds really nice, and he really shouldn't be turned off. He gives extra tips when he talks, and he doesn't just read what's on the screen. And he sounds all nice, like he would be fun to hug. The steps are simple; even an idiot would be able to follow it.
And now, as it's late at at night, I stop before I get to my feelings about the software. I just said that someone would be fun to hug, what do you expect?
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Victory Over Google
It was such a victory that I was able to upload Ending from Beyond the Beyond, I thought it deserved a second post. I did it by compressing it with ogg vorbis with a 128KB/s bitrate. So all of you suckers who can't play Vorbis, get a real media player.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
More songs
Greasy Rhythms isn't selling too well. It's infuriating. So here's two Motoi Sakuraba songs. One is crap. The other one should have made it to the album.
I was supprised that there was a Motoi Sakuraba song I could do anything with. He's much like Yasunori Mitsuda in the respect that his albums are too good to make anything out of. But since Sakuraba only released an album of remixes from Beyond the Beyond, I finally had the oppritunity to tackle some of his works.
The first song is Flying.
It's a pretty good melodic piece. This is the one that I wouldn't release professionally. The problems are few, though, and easily fixed. I'm just too lazy to do it. The biggest problem is a small pause before the song repeats. There was also a problem with the mixing of instruments; the harmonic pieces tended to be too loud to hear the melody, which is never a good thing.
The second song is Ending.
This is a damn good song. I love it to death. There's only one problem with this, and it's just that I'm not happy with the string harmony. That part of the harmony is important to the song, and the samples I'm using hold up, but it's not up to my higher standards of quality. I made a change to one of the instruments did not seem to have the power needed to maintain the emotion of the song. Seeing as it was an aspect of the melody and the harmony, I fealt that I had to change it in order for the song to have its proper effect. Originally, it was a music box, but that was just way too weak. If I recall correctly, I changed it to a chorus of a special organ and a simple waveform (probibly square). The waveform enhanced the organ and made it sound simply fantastic, and made the song more victoriously ecstatic then it was in Sakuraba's original rendition.
(note: I'm having problems uploading this song. It's rather long at 16MB)
(Edit: Google Pages doesn't allow uploads bigger then 10MB, so it won't get uploaded.
As a side note, Ending did not make it into Sakuraba's Beyond the Beyond Album.
I was supprised that there was a Motoi Sakuraba song I could do anything with. He's much like Yasunori Mitsuda in the respect that his albums are too good to make anything out of. But since Sakuraba only released an album of remixes from Beyond the Beyond, I finally had the oppritunity to tackle some of his works.
The first song is Flying.
It's a pretty good melodic piece. This is the one that I wouldn't release professionally. The problems are few, though, and easily fixed. I'm just too lazy to do it. The biggest problem is a small pause before the song repeats. There was also a problem with the mixing of instruments; the harmonic pieces tended to be too loud to hear the melody, which is never a good thing.
The second song is Ending.
This is a damn good song. I love it to death. There's only one problem with this, and it's just that I'm not happy with the string harmony. That part of the harmony is important to the song, and the samples I'm using hold up, but it's not up to my higher standards of quality. I made a change to one of the instruments did not seem to have the power needed to maintain the emotion of the song. Seeing as it was an aspect of the melody and the harmony, I fealt that I had to change it in order for the song to have its proper effect. Originally, it was a music box, but that was just way too weak. If I recall correctly, I changed it to a chorus of a special organ and a simple waveform (probibly square). The waveform enhanced the organ and made it sound simply fantastic, and made the song more victoriously ecstatic then it was in Sakuraba's original rendition.
(note: I'm having problems uploading this song. It's rather long at 16MB)
(Edit: Google Pages doesn't allow uploads bigger then 10MB, so it won't get uploaded.
As a side note, Ending did not make it into Sakuraba's Beyond the Beyond Album.
Monday, July 07, 2008
Learn to compress!
Every time I download large files from the internet, they're compressed in RAR files. Worse, they're in multi-part RAR files, which means that there's a chance that the archiving programs I have will be able to extract the data from them. For this reason, I have WinRAR installed on my computer. I don't want WinRAR. It puts all of those stupid little extras on context menus.
What's worse is the fact that people are not using the best possible compression techniques for large files. For those of you using RAR, I highly implore you to explore 7zip. 7zip is free and open source, as is it's compression and encryption algorithms. As such, it has higher ubiquity with 'bundle' multi-format archival software.
Further in my 7zip arguement is its higher efficiency. In my experiance, using 7zip has always been able to give lower compression ratios then any other method I've seen, which leads into smaller file sizes and, therefore, less bandwidth usage for digital distrobution. I'll admit, using 7zip's 'ultra' setting is memory-intensive, but this is hardly a problem today, as it's hard to find any computer with less then 2GiB of RAM.
Also, most every official distrobution of 7zip (the program, not the algorithm) can compete directly with high-end commercial archival programs such as WinRAR, often with better results. 7zip can create split archives; it can split and combine parts of archives even after it is compressed, even. And it's password-based encryption is unbeatable, unlike some encryption methods I've seen.
With all of these benefits, the only downside to 7zip is that it's not as well known to the internet idiots (read: everyone on The Pirate Bay). But with an application as portable as 7zip, there is no excuse to continue to use outdated compressors such as WinRAR.
What's worse is the fact that people are not using the best possible compression techniques for large files. For those of you using RAR, I highly implore you to explore 7zip. 7zip is free and open source, as is it's compression and encryption algorithms. As such, it has higher ubiquity with 'bundle' multi-format archival software.
Further in my 7zip arguement is its higher efficiency. In my experiance, using 7zip has always been able to give lower compression ratios then any other method I've seen, which leads into smaller file sizes and, therefore, less bandwidth usage for digital distrobution. I'll admit, using 7zip's 'ultra' setting is memory-intensive, but this is hardly a problem today, as it's hard to find any computer with less then 2GiB of RAM.
Also, most every official distrobution of 7zip (the program, not the algorithm) can compete directly with high-end commercial archival programs such as WinRAR, often with better results. 7zip can create split archives; it can split and combine parts of archives even after it is compressed, even. And it's password-based encryption is unbeatable, unlike some encryption methods I've seen.
With all of these benefits, the only downside to 7zip is that it's not as well known to the internet idiots (read: everyone on The Pirate Bay). But with an application as portable as 7zip, there is no excuse to continue to use outdated compressors such as WinRAR.
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