Maeyanie.com

As some of you have noticed, my SecondLife “web 2.0″-style video sharing site, MaePPV, has been down for a few days.
Here’s my summary of the incident.

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I got my hands on VMware Workstation 6.5 Beta 2 today. I’ve been using VMware for a while, mostly for running Windows programs on Linux. This new one, all I can say, “neat!”

Right from the start, the new installer was nice. Not a command-line thing needing enter hit a dozen times anymore. Once inside, I found it supports hardware 3D acceleration right in the settings now, something only very experimental in previous versions.

But my favourite feature is something they call “Unity”

Full Screen Image

Yep, that’s right. Internet Exploder running in Linux, looking just like it belongs there. No virtualizer window. Not that Internet Exploder is an app I’d actually WANT to run in Linux, but it shows you what it can do. And you aren’t limited to just one virtual machine either, you can have several unified at once, each identified with its own colour.

Unfortunately being a beta it’s forced to run in debug mode, which means it’s HORRIBLY slow. But that’ll be all better once it’s released. Looking forward to it, VMware guys!

Being a MMO player, I run into a lot of people who honestly think they know what they’re talking about but really don’t. Today one such person claimed to have tested and proven SLI requires games to be specially written to use it, and most games get no benefit, just like multi-core CPUs.
Well, he’s right about multi-core CPUs. But completely wrong about SLI. To prove it, I grabbed a benchmark from before NVIDIA SLI was introduced (which was in 2004), 3DMark03.

These are my results with SLI disabled in the drivers (both cards still in the system):

And these are my results with SLI enabled, no other changes:

As you can see, there’s a HUGE benefit in every area where the 3D card applies, even something as simple as the fill rate tests. I strongly suspect the same applies to ATI’s Crossfire, but I can’t prove it, as I don’t have any of the hardware required.

However, this is the last time I spend over an hour jumping through hoops just to educate someone.

When Google made me accept their new license agreement, I happened to notice in it that they have AdSense Video now. Curious, I decided to look into that.
Basically what happens, I put an applet here which plays random YouTube videos, and they pay for it. I’m including one in this post. If it does well, it might become a permanent fixture. If not, it’ll vanish into the old posts archive, never to be seen again (except by spambots).
As always, 50% of any revenue this generates goes to charity.

I am seeing one problem right off though… it’s slightly wider than this column.

As some of you noticed, Hostmonster deactivated my account around a week ago, for having files on my account not complying with their terms of service.
After several back-and-forth helpdesk tickets where they searched my files for more things they didn’t like and I removed them, finally things are back up and running.
In other news, the ad on the left for them has been removed, as I would no longer personally recommend their hosting service.