Andrew Ebbatson's Blog

Hit an unusual problem on an Isilon cluster running OneFS 7.2 recently. We were rsyncing in some content from an older system that was attached to a Netapp. The logs of the rsync showed issues trying to sync a number of folders due to the fact it was “a read-only filesystem”.

The only common feature was that within all the affected paths was a subfolder named .snapshot. Not /ifs/.snapshot mind you, this was far down the customers directory structure and the path contained what looked like a valid SyncIQ snapshot path!

After worrying a little that maybe someone had somehow symlinked in some content from a snapshot I realised that it was simply the foldername .snapshot is reserved for, yup you guessed it, snapshot purposes.

Indeed try creating an empty folder and then creating a folder named .snapshot and you’ll find it already exists!

I was a huge fan of Elite as a kid. The scope of the game on the classic 8-bit machines was breathtaking, the line vector graphics were a canvas on which my imagination painted metals, alloys and battle scars.

I can retire my imagination with Elite Dangerous on Oculus Rift – the experience of looking out of your cockpit and craning your neck to keep an enemy in sight is the most immersive experience I’ve had in VR (DCS World Flight Sim comes close).

It does need a couple of tweaks though to render best on Oculus as it looks like the Oculus SDK can do a better job of super-sampling than Elite Dangerous’ native super-sampling.

First download the Oculus Platform SDK from the Oculus Developer Center and unpack to your drive, inside there is a Tools folder with a single application OculusDebugTool.exe

Every time before starting Elite Dangerous run the OculusDebugTool and set the “Pixels Per Display Pixel Override” to around 1.6 for a GTX 1070 or 1.8 for a GTX 1080. Yes you need to do this every time you play, the setting is not remembered.

In Elite Dangerous’ graphics options, set the Super Sampling to 0.65X, you only need to do this once.

The results should make drool come out of your mouth hole.

In what is likely to be the most impressive use of 4096 bytes this year, RGBA and TBC have created an entire world, in a demo called Elevated. It takes upto a minute to start, but simple looks and sounds amazing for just 4KB.

If your computer isn’t up to the task, you can watch a it on YouTube – but do try the real thing first!