2012

Wed, Aug 8

<21:18 EEST> Before moving on to something completely different, I feel like reminiscing a little more on Saturday's event at Uuden polven museo. I had a pretty thorough artistic experience about the entire place, which is something coming from a person who goes to the theatre every once in a while.

Then again, I have a soft spot for old industrial milieus. I often wish people would have the sense to preserve disused factory buildings in a way reflecting their original glory, rather than bulldozing it all down for some bland contemporary boxen. I think technology is beautiful in its brutally honest functionalism, and any attempts to "tone it down", such as beige computer boxes, are just sheer ugle. The same goes for the opposite effect of "hardening" them, for example with racing stripes. Of course, simple honesty is something I appreciate about humans likewise.

Besides the impressive surroundings, the event itself had nice reflective elements, in that there were two other performances, giving something to enjoy for everyone including the performers. I was particularly taken by Olli Moilanen and the Ahoy trio, not the least due to their use of the churchlike acoustics. Despite his formal background in the pop/jazz academy, Olli showed some serious classical talent on the guitar, and the "harmony sisters" were no less impressive. Of all my musical acquaintances in the theatre scene, these guys are some of the most professional-sounding, and it is a wonder they have yet to tour or record in any serious scale.

But on to the brutal and honest issues of technology. Since completing the theatrical audio work last week, I have tried to get back to some geeking out before next week's beginning of the school year. I ended up catching up on some of the Bitcoin developments, and it seems a lot has happened during the past year. A businessperson might say there are a lot of disruptive developments going on.

Of course, I have followed the main issues superficially, and kept on mining and trading with the same setup since last September. It has been profitable enough, but not necessarily enough to invest in new hardware. One reason is that there is already too much heat generation in my single-room apartment. Power consumption alone means that GPUs are no longer a nice option, even if they pay for themselves. (Mind you, I buy wind power, so any extra consumption is actually good for the future of sustainable electricity ;)

So naturally, the FPGA scene has matured a lot since my clustering experiments. There are a number of commercial products available, so what the heck, I decided to order a Bitforce Single. At the moment it is the best bang for buck, and most importantly, I could pay in BTC. There are downsides to this company though, notably the wait time of several weeks. At the end of which, their ASIC miners might be ready for shipping, and they have promised to accept FPGA units, for their original USD value, in return for these :)

It is no surprise that ASICs are the hottest topic on the Bitcoin mining front right now. Since the first FPGA miners, it has been obvious that the next step would be a real mining IC, but only this year things have seriously started to progress. It will be interesting to see which company, if any, actually delivers these, because of all the hype and outrageous promises. On the other hand, there should be no technical hurdles. Personally, I am excited about the Open source ASIC effort, and not just because they have considered using my clustering design :-j

The open source part is not necessarily that exciting in a fixed hardware product, but it is a matter of principle. One reason I have been wary of many FPGA mining efforts, is that they use chips that require commercial licences for circuit development. I may not work much on FPGA miners now, but the same chip might be useful later in case Bitcoin (or just FPGA mining) somehow fails. Thus ordering the Bitforce goes against this principle, but I view it more like a way to diversify my investments, just one piece in the big puzzle.

Speaking of failure and diversification, I also started to dabble in Litecoin. It used to have a rather noble goal of discouraging GPU/FPGA/ASIC mining through a more RAM-intensive algorithm, but I am already late to the Litecoin party, and GPU miners abound. Not nearly in the number and efficiency of Bitcoin, but the point has been made. Some had argued that a more complex algorithm actually makes Litecoin more vulnerable to attacks, because there is no such distributed army of counterattacking amateurs, but this point is basically moot now.

The alternative algo reminds me of one inherent problem in the ASIC miners; should Bitcoin migrate from SHA256, possibly due to fundamental vulnerabilities, these devices would be worthless. But programmable miners would be OK, though FPGAs might have to wait a little longer than others. And it would again be open source that makes all this possible.

Mon, Aug 6

<19:06 EEST> It has been one heck of a fortnight or so, bringing the summer holiday near its end with a blast. The intensity of the last few rehearsals of a JYT production, punctuated by a long weekend in Russia. I have had a lot of good company to go through this all, so here is just an overview.

The Russian trip, my first foreign foray in seven years, had been in planning since early spring. My grandparents and their ancestors were from Terijoki (Zelenogorsk) near St. Petersburg, and a bus trip was organized by the eponymous society. Not unexpectedly, it was also a nice opportunity to see a whole bunch of more distant relatives and family friends.

In some ways, it did not feel like being abroad that much. This must have been in part due to the eerie familiarity between Zelenogorsk and the typical holiday resorts of the Mediterranean, particularly now as the weather was nearly tropical. It made sense in a place long known as a holiday resort itself, with all the beaches and spas. On the other hand, it was not that far away, a feeling which was highlighted by the bus trip. It was nice to be able to go abroad, without being treated like a terrorist by airport "security".

Speaking of which, border crossings were surprisingly smooth, and indeed I was positively impressed by Russia overall. The lack of urban planning, for example, was often made up by a general inventive attitude. In contrast, in Finland we seem to enjoy a lot of organization and infrastructure handed down to us, with little room left to individuality.

Not knowing much of the language was worth the excitement of feeling totally abroad. Knowing the local alphabet went a long way, though, as did some universal sign language. With my general interest in languages, I am naturally keen to learn some more beyond the few phrases I used, but there are probably few opportunities to study and use it in the near future.

As for the theatrical piece, I have indeed returned to JYT after a couple of years of inactivity. The coincidence of a relatively short gig with my summer holiday was a nice surprise, since JYT rarely does summer productions. Kyllä ihmisellä pitää olla is basically a teaser for a forthcoming series of short plays, and it premiered at Uuden polven museo at Säynätsalo last Saturday. There is only one other show scheduled so far, but possibly more to come.

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Risto A. Paju