Everquest 2 & Nvidia 3D Vision solved

I picked up an Nvidia 3D Vision headset about a month ago, and it's been very, very cool. The only problem is that while enjoy playing almost all video games, my favorite game (Everquest 2) did not seem to function properly with EQ2. The mouse pointer was in 3D but nothing else. I had searched the web, and even called tech support and nobody could tell me what the issue was. Latest drivers, game is patched, still no 3D. Well I was messing around with the settings today and there is a LETTERBOX function, which basically adds a strip of black to the top and bottom of the screen. This improves performance because the video card does not need to redraw, animate, anti-alias all of those extra pixels, and that area is full of spells, stats, and effects anyhow, so why not.

Well, after playing with various setting today I discovered that if you remove the letterbox completely that the 3D effects work perfect. This is great, because I shelled out quite a bit of cash for a new 3D card (GTX 480), a 3D monitor, and 3D glasses, so it was kind of miserable that it did not want to work with my favorite game. Anyhow, it's working now, just in time for a Double XP weekend :)

RAID 0 Good, SSD is great, but what about RAID 0 with SSD?

I had been putting off SSD for a while now, based on the high price, and the fact that most technologies need a bit of time to mature before they are worthwhile. Well, I finally broke down about two weeks ago and got my first SSD. I chose the OCZ Agility 2 based on performance / price combination. This model seems to be the best bang for the buck. Well, after adding it to my Alienware Aurora, which was already RAID 0 on WD 7200 RPM drives, I copied Everquest 2 to the new drive and launched it. Let me preface this by saying I had read many impressive reviews and my expectations were very high, however the SSD did not disapoint. My load times between zones were just great! When playing from a single 7200rpm drive on a different system a few nights later I realized what I must do next, and that was build a new box with 2 Agilty2 SSD's in RAID 0 .


Well the box has been built, I could try to describe it, but let my benchmarks speak for themselves. This is on an Asus P6T with onboard IHCR10 raid controller (nothing fancy).

BGP Looking glasses

I cover BGP in my migration course, however you don't really get the right feel for it in the small lab environment. I like to direct my students to various BGP looking glasses on the web to view what real tables look like. There is a site that contains a list of HTTP based data as well as live routers with public telnet access, this is much more interesting :).

Give it a shot, scroll down to category 2 and try to telnet into these devices. The "show ip bgp ?" command should get you started!

BGP Looking Glasses