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Tuesday 19 August 2008

Holiday

By Daniel on Tuesday 19 August 2008, 21:33

My holiday has finally started (actually, it did last week, but I caught a fever): I have finished my Master's thesis, which was the last thing I had to complete for my Master's degree (pfew). Unfortunately, Liselotte has to finish a paper within a short time, so we had to postpone travel plans until the Christmas holiday. Things I am planning to do:

  • Late spring cleaning.
  • Catch up with the growing stack of albums I recently bought or got (Lumpy Gravy/Roxy & Elsewhere/One size fits all by Zappa, Trout mask replica by Beefheart, The Jewels/Grundstück by Einstürzende Neubauten, Modern Guilt by Beck, Double nickels on a dime by The Minutemen).
  • Maybe visit some concerts at the Noorderzon festival.
  • Continue my quest for regular climbing (mostly back to two times a week now).
  • Read the C++ GUI Programming with Qt4 book (I liked the Qt3 book).

Today I bought a new pair of climbing shoes. My previous pair was almost three years old, and it had not so nice holes. I'll snap a picture of both pairs ;). While I was at it I also bought 16 packets of chalk, oughta be enought for the next year :).

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Wednesday 23 July 2008

Buggy campaign?

By Daniel on Wednesday 23 July 2008, 14:15

Vista ad Microsoft is at it again with a $300 million dollar ad campaign to counter the bad reputation of Windows Vista. While I am not a Windows user, I guess they have received an amount of scorn that is slightly out of proportion. Anyway, I think their ad campaign is a bit entertaining. It shows a renaissance-era ship (though I am not an expert in history), with the text At one point, everyone though the world was flat.. While this may have been true in ancient times, that belief was quickly revised when the classical Greeks started to study the Earth's shape. The idea that people believed that the earth was flat in medieval times is in fact a myth. So, no, not everyone did believe the world is flat when they started exploring the world centuries ago. Though, I have to admit that the imagery and slogan is is nice, and probably effective because many people are not aware of the fact that it is a myth.

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Sunday 21 October 2007

Power use

By Daniel on Sunday 21 October 2007, 21:30

The other day I bought one of those power consumption monitors (only 12 Euro at an electronics outlet). Some results:

  • My Dell OptiPlex GX240 with an 1.5 GHz server with ondemand cpufreq (with p4-clockmod) and a tickless kernel: 38W (Idle) to ~80W (compilation). This suprised me, it uses a Netburst-based P4 CPU, so I was kinda wary to keep this machine running most of the day. But at 38W most of the day it is doing quite well, and it is still a pretty powerful machine (for e-mail, file, and shell serving).
  • My main work machine with a Core2 Duo CPU clocking at 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM, onboard video chipset (nVidia), and a 240GB harddisk uses ~120W with a 17" TFT monitor.
  • An eBox, with a VIA C3 800MHz CPU, and 256MB RAM, on-board video chipset (VIA) with an external USB consumes about 24W. This was intended to be my lightweight low-wattage mail server. Unfortunately, it overheats with an internal disk, and doesn't boot from some external USB disks.
  • Lamp in my living room: 0W to more than 200 Watt, depending on the slider setting. While it strong enough to light my living room, this one definitely needs to go.

I still haven't tested the NSLU2. Conclusion: I'll replace the lamp by one or two low-power lamps. The (low) power use of Optiplex was really suprising, and will be my permanent server replacing the NSLU2 (to slow) and the eBox (to many hassles/unreliable).

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Thursday 16 August 2007

Moving

By Daniel on Thursday 16 August 2007, 19:08

Yay, I am finally moving from a "student room" (studentenkamer) to a more spacious apartment. Fortunately, it's just across a little square that separates two buildings, so I can move all my stuff by foot. Though, my ADSL connection has to be switched over too, so I may drop off the net for a short while ;).

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