So yesterday I was lifting big, heavy things and then resting between sets by powering up an assortment of CPU and motherboard combinations and measuring their power consumption. Typical activity here at the treehouse.

I picked up a P3 International Kill-A-Watt Power Meter for measuring the power consumption at the outlet and, apart from the motherboard, CPU, and memory, the only thing hooked up is a DVD-rom with a Slackware Linux boot disk in it. For a power supply, I used a Macron MPT-400, not because it's especially good, quiet, or one that I would be likely to use in any of the new server or workstation machines--it's just been on my test bed since 400 watts was big for a power supply, so why waste one of the particularly good and quiet power supplies I've bought since just for testing purposes.

Oh, wait--this is not a P3 International Kill-A-Watt Power Meter I'm picking up here

I let the systems boot up and then logged in, but that's about it. Not a very stringent test, but a quick and dirty one. Maybe too dirty.

Which is really a lot tighter clustering than I would have expected. Even the big EATX Supermicro server board with 2Gig of ECC registered memory and 64-bit PCI-X slots doesn't require significantly more power with two PIII CPUs than the single Core Duo laptop CPU on a little, frill-free MATX motherboard that's theoretically intended to be a low-power platform. I ended up leaving the Supermicro dual-CPU system running for a few hours while I was working on other things and when I came back, it was then showing 45 watts of power consumption. I didn't go back and test what happened over similar spans of time with the other boards.

So my grand hopes for slashing the power consumption across the board on the servers out here might be a little dotted if not actually dashed--but it does look like "upgrading" lowlier machines like the DNS servers from Pentium-II platforms to even a mobile-on-desktop solution would increase rather than decrease power consumption, and the DNS servers just don't need that much oomph.

Unfortunately, I didn't have any of the hungrier system boards I've been using set up for easy testing on hand--I've got some dual Athlon MP boards and dual P-IV Xeon systems in service, but no extras just standing by already assembled with CPUs and ready for this test. For that matter, I have plenty of dual PIII Xeon systems and a couple of quad PIII Xeon systems that I could check out, too, but my enthusiasm hasn't grown to that level yet.

Because, at that point, I noticed an undesirable rattling and scraping sound coming from my own webserver (the one you're reading this off of) which, upon inspection, was suffering from a CPU cooling fan about to go out. I think it's an all-too-serious case of "if it's not broke, don't fix it" thinking that has resulted in the main webserver still being a dual 266MHz Pentium II system with 384 meg of memory. State of the art stuff...about ten years ago.

So I figure I'll turn in early and get up in the middle of the night to fix it. Except after I replace the CPU fan, it won't reboot--the power comes on and then immediately shuts off again. Strangely, it will power up as long as I disconnect one of the drives, so my first thought was that there was a short between the SCA-to-68-pin adapter on that particular hard drive.

But replacing that didn't help, nor did replacing the drive, nor the cable. After trying many combinations of swapped-out components, it finally turned out that replacing the power supply would allow it to boot up *with* all the drives connected whereas the old power supply would shut down after half a second unless one of the drives was disconnected.

So, now being able to reboot the webserver (which had been running for nearly a year since the last time I'd rebooted it--on a power supply that, according to the date on it, was from 1998), it let me know that one of the drives in the operating system array had failed. (Yes, it's still using an array of 1-gig narrow SCSI drives for the operating system.) Fortunately, I had five drives of the same model on hand to replace it with (even though I'd given away almost all the small SCSI drives in the last few years). Unfortunately, even though they were the same model, they were slightly newer drives and were 8 megabytes smaller than the older drives of that model. (Seagate likes to do this a lot. This apparently serves no purpose except to prevent you from using newer drives to replace the older drives in RAID arrays.)

Since the drives were 8 meg smaller, the RAID controller refused to use them and I finally found a drive in my spares cupboard that wasn't smaller--a 4.3 gig drive. So the smallest replacement drive that I had which the controller would accept was bigger than the enire array.

At which point I rebooted the system and found that the partition table of the data drive array had been overwritten with all zeros. So I ended up repartitioning, reformatting, and restoring that array. And now we're back.

So even if the newer and greater hardware I was testing yesterday isn't going to save a lot of power over my ten-year-old current webserver, maybe this is just nature's way of hinting that there may be other reasons to upgrade that box.

So how was your morning?

Yesterday was Tuesday, May 8th, the official DVD release date for Backslash: The Ultimate Internet Predator distributed for your viewing enjoyment by Central Park Media's new distribution arm, Below the Radar Films. Speaking as someone who puts a lot of time and effort into keeping films above the radar, I think "Below the Radar Films" is an odd name for a distribution company, but the fact of the matter is that I'm seeing Backslash available in most of the big-name online DVD stores and at least the online versions of the major brick-and-mortar stores (Best Buy, Circuit City, Barnes and Noble, etc.)--so they're doing a decent enough job of lifting their films above the radar. The other title in their lineup (like I said, it's a brand-new distribution company) is A Perfect Fake, an hour-long documentary on Mannequin Fetishism, so they're covering a pretty broad spectrum right out of the starting gate.

(from the poster shoot for Backslash)

Several parts of Backslash were filmed right here at the treehouse, including a few parts right in the spot where I'm typing this. At least this room got all cleaned up a while back; I still have a few stray spots of fake blood here and there in the kitchen left over from the shooting. Not a lot at this point, but I just haven't had a moist rag on hand when I've noticed them. Usually I'm actually pretty good about getting the blood spatters cleaned up.

(Oh, and as a random 'helpful housekeeping' hint, try to get those unsightly blood spatters cleaned up sooner than later; not only is it a lot easier and less likely to leave a stain, it cuts down on the uncomfortable questions you're likely to face later on.)

One of the questions I've been getting the most often these days is how hard it is to do green-screen work where the set and often the rest of the actors will be all added in later on a computer. It's just you, a camera, and a couple of blank blue or green walls going through the motions...but it all has to end up looking natural and 'right' when it finally gets edited together.

The truth is that it's not *all* that different from any other movie. I've done plenty of scenes where the other actor or actors weren't there at the time and their actions and lines were filmed later and edited in--but you wouldn't ever guess that from watching the finished movie. I had one such scene were the other actor hadn't been cast yet nor were any lines (other than mine) even written. That was tougher than going through the motions solo but at least haviung a general idea of what the rest of the scene is supposed to look like when it's edited together. I usually draw a comparison to this scene with Jill Uden in Backslash: The Ultimate Internet Predator in which she has a sex scene where not only is the other actor *not* there, in most of the takes, her partner in the movie universe *couldn't* be in the scene because the movie camera lens is where he would be. ("My, that *is* a big lens you've got there!")

(Director Kevin Campbell with Jill Uden)

In any event, I'm glad to see Backslash hit the streets! Congrats to Kevin and all the gang!