Had to pull a good measure of gardening work on Saturday, so this turned into quite a crawl.
I ran it in reverse (clockwise on the map) and then took a shortcut in the forest along the line where the dark trees and the bright trees meet. Well, actually the shortcut turned into a small nap 
So today’s time is 1:31 for a mere 6 km run. 1645 kcals expended and an average heart rate of 147 bpm (172 bpm max).
Wohoo! Today was a warm and sunny day, so I went out and tried my newfound route again (last time it was very wet and I had a hard time getting through all the mud).
My previous time on this route was 1:38
Today, I did it in 1:15. Yes, I managed to cut off 23 minutes!
Average heart rate was 172 bpm (I think it’s good for the pace I had today), maxing out at only 186 bpm (no sprints).
Didn’t reach the 2 mcal mark this time, but with 1.7 mcals I’m pretty close =)
Just a little bit more and I can go for the 10 km / 1 hour pace again!
This weekend, I started playing Assassin’s Creed. It’s really a fantastic game and you can see all the experience from the Prince of Persia titles. For example, whilst running, you just have to control your character’s direction. He’ll intelligently navigate the environment like a free-runner, jump over obstacles, launch himself off of obstacles or jump from beam to beam.
The fighting system is also great. No as dedicated as that in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but you won’t get very far with button mashing. For example, you can deal light strokes and hard strokes with your blade, the hard strokes of course take longer to execute. You can break a move at any time and block, if you’re quick enough you can pull a last-second defense if your enemy tried to strike you while you tried to gain momentum.
Now once you’re used to this, you can learn new tricks. For example, when an enemy raises his sword to attack, you can press the left and right mouse buttons (in the default controls) to intercept his move and execute a counter-attack. Or when you see that the enemy is about to parry your own attack, you can left-click again to punch or kick the enemy. And if that worked, if you click again, you can deal a fatal blow.
It’s a really well done progressive system where you learn better and better tricks, one step at a time!
Now what about the post title? Well, I’m playing this on an Asus GeForce 8800 GTS 512 TOP, a factory-overclocked card. So far, it has worked great in numerous games. Assassin’s Creed, however, manages to overheat the card rather quickly.
I had to crashes yesterday, once with strange blocky artifacts on the screen (a telltale sign that your graphics card is either overclocked too hard or overheating) and once the system just froze. Looks like the default fan control settings aren’t adequate. The card idles at 70° C (158° F) and there was only a slight increase in fan noise at the time of the crashes (I don’t know which temperature it was at since I didn’t monitor it at this time).
Using NVidia’s nTune utility, I set the fan speed to 60% (that’s about the point from where onwards the fan’s noise level starts to exponentially increase), which kept the temperature at 60° C (140° F) during the game. No crashes anymore.
I’m just in the process of installing Windows Vista SP1. I had been using Vista SP1 before, but I had to install it as an upgrade after several other programs were already there and I feel it’s cleaner to start with a Vista SP1 installation medium from scratch.
Microsoft has finally fixed the KB929777 issue. Windows no longer shows a BSOD during boot if you have hardware that causes the storport.sys driver to be loaded on a 4GB+ RAM system. This was a real killer since I previously couldn’t get any further than the second stage of setup without physically removing half of my RAM.
Installed fine, renamed my Windows XP partition from D: to H: by changing the drive letter in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. I do it this way because Vista doesn’t allow me to change the drive letter of that partition otherwise.
After a reboot, I went to the Disk Management Console and tried to change the drive letters of the other partitions. Took quite long, so tried to do other stuff in the mean time, like giving my C: partition a name. That attempt hung the explorer window in which the rename was to take place. After 3 or 4 minutes with nothing happening, I pressed reset and started the installation from scratch.
Did the same as in the 1. attempt, but with some more reboots. This time the drive letter changes completed quickly and I continued with installing the latest updates, activating my system and installing the newest Daemon Tools Pro Advanced which I also activated online.
At this point I made a backup (so I don’t plaster the activation server of Disc-Soft (Daemon Tools) and Microsoft (Vista) with activation requests). Then I downloaded the .NET Framework 3.5 installer from Microsoft. It downloaded 29 MB of stuff and then proclaimed “setup.exe has encountered an error and needs to close”. This installation is now “unpure” (it has seen an error message ;)), so I restored my backup.
I tried to use the .NET Framework 3.5 installer from the VCSExpress directory of my Visual Studio 2008 Express DVD. I know from experience that the one in the VCExpress directory has the same bug, but the one in VCSExpress worked for me, so far.
After I copied the entire dotNetFramework onto my desktop, it proceeded to download components from Microsoft (shouldn’t do, they’re all there in the subdirectories). Then the usual “setup.exe has encountered an error and needs to close” message (behind the error message, the .NET Framework 3.5 proudly announces “.NET Framework 3.5 has been installed successfully”, which is untrue. Restoring my backup now…
My server (Windows Server 2008) shut down one of the RAID drives after I had mounted the Visual Studio 2008 Express ISO. One explorer window stoically incremented its progress bar, the other did nothing and attempts to browse the server took way to long.
I finally pressed reset and restored my backup once more.
I tried starting the .NET Framework 3.5 installer directly from the Visual Studio 2008 Express DVD (after making sure all drives were spinned up) with administrative rights.
Failed again. Two problem reports were generated. The first problem was that “.NET Framework 3.5 was installed successfully”. The second problem was that an installer named blabla-DEU.exe failed. I have an english Vista SP1 DVD but set my regional settings to german.
Got it! After switching everything in the Regional Settings to English, the .NET Framework 3.5 installer worked flawlessly. Continued with installing 7-Zip, WinAmp, VLC, EAC and SciTE, then created another backup.
Continued with NAnt, NUnit, Visual C++ 2008 Express and the Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. Then pulled another backup.
A new clean windows image in only 6 hours! I’m getting good at this! :-]
I’m just listening to some of my favorite songs on a new Creative Labs X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series sound card. Despite all the trouble with Creative Labs, after the price dropped to a reasonable level, I decided to go for the X-Fi.
As a side effect, I now can download official up-to-date drivers directly from Creative Labs. To get the newest drivers from Creative Labs, you need to have the newest product from Creative Labs. Too bad you need the latest drivers to get anywhere.
On Windows Vista x64, I couldn’t notice any chance in sound quality. The X-Fi sounds exactly like my Audigy 2 in every detail. Also had some blue screens again. I’m not giving up yet, I had planned a recreation of my backup image with Windows Vista x64 SP1 for some time now, maybe this is the right time to do it and get rid of any possible left-behinds of the Audigy driver.
On Windows XP, the installer had some trouble, but after that, the X-Fi sounded very different from the Audigy 2. I haven’t fully made up my mind yet, but I think I can make out more detail in the music than before. I’ll have to see whether this is actually due to better mixing quality or some stupid psychoacoustic music coloring technique (CMSS and Crystalizer are disabled, of course).
It can drive my Sennheiser HD-650 pretty good without any preamp. I’m not listening at a very loud level, but at least on WinXP, the output level is quite a bit higher than what I was used from the Audigy 2.
Yesterday, I got pulled a tooth, so I was somewhat unsure whether I should run today. There were no problems so far, so I decided to try the quick route (6.5 km) from last week’s Tuesday once more. Back then, it took me 58 minutes with an average heart rate of 157 bpm.
Today, I finished in 51 minutes, average heart rate 162 bpm climbing to a maximum of 191 bpm. The steep part (from the sharp bend at the southmost part of the route up to the 90 degrees bend after you’re out of the forest again) was still challenging, but besides a certain burning in my leg muscles, I didn’t feel bad at all. It think my condition is slowly returning to its normal level!
I’m somewhat worried that my maximum heart rate is so low. Some years ago, I was able to sustain a heart rate of 210 bpm for a few minutes and reached at least 198 bpm when sprinting uphill. Maybe this is simply age, maybe I’m not pushing myself hard enough. I hope the latter one is correct!
Today I tried an entirely new route. Well, technically, I already attempted this earlier in the year, but before I could finish, the sun was already setting and my shortcut back home ended up with me losing both my shoes up to the hilt in the mud. I had a hard time pulling them out again and the darn stuff was so sticky it almost pulled my socks of when I tried to get back my shoes
Now, with enough time, I avoided the muddy meadow completely. There was still enough mud to turn this into a small version of the british mud run and then some, but most of the time, I could get away with wet shoes by clever sidestepping.
Today’s Route was 8.6 km, took me a horrendous 1:38 (blame the mud!) with an average heart rate of 161 bpm throughout the run (maximum still low at 184 bpm).
May watch (a Polar AXN 700) says I’ve broken the 2 million calories mark with this run, time to throw in some lunch!
When it comes to music archival, I’m somewhat of a nutjob. Whereas everyone was (and is) using MP3, to me, it just doesn’t feel right to use a lossy codec and I’m not happy if I cannot be sure that the rip from CD was bit accurate. I’ve been using lossless compression and ultra-slow, bit-accurate ripping software for years, so I thought I might write a bit about it
First, there’s the problem of getting the music from your CD to your hard drive. In the beginnings, I used CDex but I let myself be convinced that Exact Audio Copy is the better choice (there was take about some specific types of extraction errors CDex couldn’t detect).
Exact Audio Copy also integrates AccurateRip. This is a system that calculates checksums of any audio file you rip and stores them in an online database. The idea is simple: if your CD drive introduces errors into the data during extraction, these errors will be pretty much unique for every user (a scratch here, a fluctuation there…). But if your CD drive manages a perfectly accurate rip, you will end up with the exact same data, thus, the exact same checksum as everyone else in the world who has ripped that CD.
Of course you should use the EAC offset test CD and the AccurateRip offset validation options and find out exactly whether your drive is capable of doing C2 error detection (which to find out requires a scratched CD). You shouldn’t use anything above 4x read speed for ripping and set EAC to high quality error recovery. You can also configure EAC to rip every song twice. It will automatically tag a song a broken unless both rips are absolutely identical bit by bit which provides another level of security.
Ripping a whole CD at these settings takes at least 1 hour, but that’s a price I’m happily paying. In the end, you’ll only rip a CD once and listen to it many times!
To archive my music I use lossless compression. Storing plain WAVE (.wav) files would serve this purpose, but using a lossless compression format does save some disk space, adds checksums to the files, allows me to tag my music and provide replay gain per song and album. Replay gain calculates the overall loudness of an album, if your player supports it all albums will have the same average volume and you don’t need to adjust the volume when listening to different CDs.
There are various lossless formats available. Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio has a lossless compression variant and then there are many Open Source codecs, the most popular ones being Flac and WavPack. I chose Flac because has the best support (WinAmp has a built-in Flac decoder as do many other players, even some car stereos and mobile players support Flac).
As before, I don’t see any sense in going for anything but the best possible compression achievable, so if there’s an option in Flac that promises a 0.001% gain in compression ratio but makes the encoding take twice as long, of course I enable it :). So if you’re looking for the most insane combination of command line arguments for Flac, take this:
--verify --replay-gain --blocksize=4096 --mid-side --exhaustive-model-search --max-lpc-order=12 --qlp-coeff-precision-search --rice-partition-order=0,8 --apodization="bartlett" --apodization="bartlett_hann" --apodization="blackman" --apodization="blackman_harris_4term_92db" --apodization="connes" --apodization="flattop" --apodization="gauss(STDDEV)" --apodization="hamming" --apodization="hann" --apodization="kaiser_bessel" --apodization="nuttall" --apodization="rectangle" --apodization="triangle" --apodization="tukey(P)" --apodization="welch"
Always rip a whole CD first and then specify all the extracted .wav files at once so Flac knows which songs belong to an album. This allows Flac to calculate the overall album gain in addition to the replay gain per track.
Compressing a complete CD takes between 1 and 2 hours with these settings, but since this is something you only do once, well, why not!
Of course, after all this effort, you don’t want to listen to your music using your on-board sound card or other cheap listening equipment.
To my knowledge, the highest playback quality at the time can be achieved with Creative Labs’ X-Fi sound cards. You might want to try the Auzentech X-Fi Prelude, it uses the X-Fi chipset, but extends on the original design specifications and uses better parts to exceed the already great quality. Auzentech had previously created the Auzentech X-Meridian on its own, a now no longer produced audiophile quality sound card.
Regarding headphones, I can wholeheartedly recommend either the Grado RS1 (price tag about $700) or the Sennheiser HD650 (price tag about $500). Both are very comfortable, offer excellent production quality and, of course, deliver crystal clear sound on an audiophile level.
I could still feel my legs from sunday’s run but because this was one of the few sunny days in the year so far, I decided to do a light jog through the forest today anyway. Contrary to that plan, at the end of my planned route is a step hill that has been troubling me for some time and I set my mind on jogging it up
The first 30 minutes were okay, then my thigh muscles started feeling quite weary. Right before the hill I had planned to jog up. It was an interesting experience forcing myself to keep jogging. Maybe you know this from yourself, you’re already exhausted at the beginning of the chicane and try to get your mind back to the “I think I can” side while your unconscious cleverly tries to stop you by extrapolating how wasted you would have to be after the next difficult section.
Well, now I can proudly say that for the first time in maybe 4 years, I’ve done that hill again. Not at full jogging speed, but it didn’t degenerate into walking. Hugh!
Today’s route was 6.5 km. Time taken: 58 minutes!
Surprisingly, even though I hadn’t completely recovered from Sunday, my average heart rate was only 157 bpm (today’s maximum was 189 bpm). I didn’t feel any effects of having a cold anymore, maybe Sunday’s run killed it off =)
I’ve discovered a cool use of google maps, a website where everyone can enter his own running routes: runmap.net
I think this is a very nice idea, since it allows me to exactly determine the length of my running routes. Plus I can try out other routes in my vicinity and perhaps even make contact with other runners (well, once my fitness is on a competitive level, that is, I don’t want to embarrass myself :)).
Today I ran this route. From start to finish it took me about 1 hour 18 minutes, with my heart rate averaging 168 bpm (max 190 bpm). The route is about 8.4 km long and, as you can see, includes some cross-country running.
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