March 27, 2007
Even more speeeeeed!
I haven't really gotten used to the 1 Mbps goodness available all day and would you look at that! Yesterday after a friend's hint I reset my modem and when it rebooted there I was, riding my shiny new 4 (FOUR!) Mbps cable connection. Wow! The funny thing is that honestly, I have no idea what to do with it. 1 megabit per second was more than enough for my needs, even if they used to call me Mr. Downloader back in the day when 64 kbps was all the (exorbitantly expensive) rage and I was getting on everyone's nerves clogging up the tubes... And now they didn't just double that 1 Mbps. Nope, they went ahead and quadrupled it. What can I say? Many thanks for the free lunch.
March 23, 2007
The Knife - Pass This On
If you're a reader of this blog you might have noticed that I'm not the one to post copy-paste videos. But when I happen to stumble upon something this cool I just can't help myself. As a side note: this is the only video in which the brother and sister show their faces, Olof being the guy in the blue jacket who starts dancing first and Karin the girl with who stares at the end of the video.
March 20, 2007
PlayStation2 network adapter wanted
Anyone got one for sale? I can't find any (and I've looked and searched hard) and "experts" told me they're nearly impossible to get by now. I still have some hope though. My PS2 has been laying uselessly for more than half a year now because of the effed up optical unit... But now that God of War 2 is out I'm having the itchy fingers symptom all over again. A network adapter would come in handy as it also provides an IDE interface so I could play backed up games from any IDE hard drive... Please help a casual gamer in need.
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March 14, 2007
The masterpiece is (almost) complete!
I haven't written any updates about the hardware situation around here. Although a lot has changed. But it's never too late...
To make it short at the beginning of February I received the missing puzzle pieces from my new computer. These were the CPU (Intel Core 2 Duo E6600) and the motherboard (ASUS P5B-E Plus) picked after friend's recommendation, tedious research and review munching. As you might know I had the rest of the components since December and I was kind of forced to order these remaining parts a little earlier than I wanted to and my budget permitted because my old computer gave in one evening after performing sluggishly for several weeks. And this happened of course while I was in the middle of a project. The next day after the nasty brake down I borrowed some serious funds from where I could (respect Ioana and my parents) and passed an order on eMag. The box arrived a little late because they didn't have the motherboard I ordered stocked but I remember receiving it on a Friday morning. So I fetched some tools and put everything together with a smile on my face. And it was a real joy working on it given the excellent quality of the case and motherboard. Everything just fit.
The first surprise came when I booted up. The case and the power supply I got in December were advertised as silent computing solutions and as they were both Antec products I had great confidence that they really were silent. So I pushed the power button for the first time and voooooooom the cooler on the video card ruined my day. As it was one noisy fellow. I later tried starting up without the video card plugged in and the noise level difference was HUGE. From "I can't hear whether my computer is turned on" to "oh shit, shut it down, I'm going deaf!"... Next disappointment was the time it took Windows to boot up. It was longer than I expected. So one of the first things I downloaded was SiSoftware's Sandra Lite. And the next shock came! My computer was performing at half of the expected speed. Panic mode on! I quickly got ahold of a "hardware expert" friend and called him over. I tried tweaking some stuff by myself using the otherwise excellent ASUS overclocking utilities but I had no luck whatsoever in pushing the performance up - I didn't overclock 1 MHz though. The funny thing was that games were working perfectly smooth. Anyway, the next day my friend came over and after fiddling for a while he noticed something. Turns out that I was comparing my dual core computer's performance to quad cores. Eeek! Of course it was halved... I felt like some ears will suddenly grow on my head and I'll start making donkey sounds. After some proper comparing it looks like it actually performs a tad better than the comparison systems from Sandra. Yey!
So I calmed down and started installing the usual tools and working on it. And I must say that it works great. Lightning fast actually. At least compared with my old system. The one problem that still remained was the VGA cooler which wasn't performing too well despite all the noise it was making. I've been eying an aftermarket Zalman cooler (the VF900CU) but I just didn't have the money to buy it (I forgot to mention that I went through the biggest personal financial crisis after I bought the new components - I survived thanks to Ioana). Until yesterday that is, when I finally got it, mounted it and sat down and enjoyed the silence. Now I have a powerful yet very silent system. Yuppy! I'm happy!
There's still room for improvement obviously. What it still needs is a spacious and fast SATA hard drive as I have 6 + 1 SATA ports and only one IDE port on the motherboard and I'm using 2 hard drives plugged into an IDE cable and no SATA drives at all... And one more gig of RAM. In this order. As my budget will permit.
March 13, 2007
The great Dreamhost bandwidth test
My last post is kind of an experiment as that one image made an absolutely huge traffic back on Deea's blog before we took it down in a hurry fearing the huge extra bandwidth usage bill from Media Temple that never came... But as DreamHost is offering more bandwidth than I could ever consume along with weird outages (like the one I had yesterday) I thought I'll give them a run for their money as kind of a revenge. However it might not be so successful this time because when Deea posted it that owl was all the rage on the Internets and besides it somehow got a great score from Google as it was showing up around the 3rd place in their image search for "o rly". Hmmm, I guess we'll live and see.
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Informative Resource: Never has 70-272 or PMI-001 been this easy. All you need to do now is clear 642-812 and 640-802 and you will be eligible to go for 1Y0-327 as well as 350-018.
O RLY?
Animated GIF version.
81 frames of classic owl fun.
Credits belong to the original author(s).
Want more?
March 9, 2007
roblogfest 2007
In a nutshell: I shamelessly nominated myself for two categories, didn't vote for self, actually didn't vote at all, came in 60th for the most informative blog with one negligible vote and 26th for the best designed blog with 7 votes. Those 7 votes were a real surprise and I would like to thank everyone who clicked for me. However, most of the credit for this blog's design goes to Mr. Adnan for the priceless advice and color picking back in 2003 I think... Thanks again!
How to find the username associated with a given UID
In Unix based systems, obviously...
I was curious one day to find where do some of the queued e-mail messages on a server originate from and since qmail only outputs something like "qmail x invoked by uid y" (where x and y are numbers obviously) I had to find out which user corresponds to y. After fiddling for a while without getting anywhere I resorted to asking around. And as usual the answer came quick from a good friend:
grep y /etc/passwd
Hmmm. Magic!
Code Monkey not crazy, just proud
I found this song by listening to net@nite (with Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur) and I must say it's one good dose of fun. Not to mention how catchy the tune and true the lyrics are. I quickly passed it on to my coder contacts on IM and of course they all had their share of fun. Because, did I mention the song is catchy, fun and true? Oh yes, I did.
Another thing I kept hearing about in Leo's shows (TWiT and net@nite to be more precise) is Twitter. So today I gave in to my curiosity and created an account on this service created by the founder of Blogger and Odeo. What is it? It's an "away message" site. What do I mean by that? Well, you must have at least one contact on your IM who sets away messages like "eating", "taking a shower", "out in town" basically letting everyone on their buddy list know about every small step of their life. Well, Twitter is a dream come true for them. And not only them. In a nutshell: tell the world what you're doing in less than 140 characters. The nice thing about it is that you can do this either by going to their site, by sending an IM or by sending an SMS. So you can keep everyone posted even while you're offline (but in cell coverage area). Pretty neat!
And one more thing. About those long promised snowboard reports. If I'm so late with them, what the heck, I'll just wait for the season to end and I'll post one final but comprehensive review. And as much as it hurts saying this I'll have to say that it's more than sure that this season will end this weekend. And that is just not fair. Winter is supposed to be 3 months plus extras not a measly 1 month. Bah!
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March 6, 2007
They can't complain now
Luci gives spammers a chance to express themselves. But there's a funny catch. So funny that I didn't get it at first... :)
March 4, 2007
(Snowboard) movie time
This was yesterday.
And yes, I know still own you a bunch of snowboard reports...
March 1, 2007
More news from the RDS planet
It looks like upload is now 512 kbps. That's double the old limit of 256 kbps. A much welcomed change as I don't have to wait AGES to send something to somebody or to upload a site or whatnot. Wow, I can't believe it but I couldn't really complain about anything concerning RDS's service lately. Actually I'm stating here and now that I'm more than satisfied. Touch wood.
Offering 1 (one) Joost invite
Leave a comment. I need need your first and last name plus e-mail. First come, first served. Hurry!
Oh, and don't bother asking if you don't have at least a 1 megabit broadband connection.
Update: And we have a winner.
Another update: Hmmm, more invites available. Please comment. The first come - first served rule still applies... :)
LATEST UPDATE: I have no invites for the moment but as soon as I'll get some I'll start sending them out in order.
UPDATE (April 3rd): Got 5 more invites. Sent them out quickly... The last to get one was Josh.