A Three Hour Tour

Isn’t it odd how our brains notice things? For example, I seem to have a habit of looking at the clock at exactly 11:34, which when turned upside-down spells out “hell”. Now do I really have that habit, or do I just happen to notice those times because 11:34 has a (somewhat immature and meaningless) significance?

Recently the MacBook Air computer has caused some issues on airport security: http://www.michaelnygard.com/blog/2008/03/steve_jobs_made_me_miss_my_fli.html

To make a long story short, some ppor traveller missed his flight because the TSA didn’t know that the MacBook Air was a real laptop.

Recently the TSA gave their explanation for the whole issue in a blog post: http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/03/apple-macbook-airs-are-cleared-for.html

Basically what happened was that this traveller was simply trying to bring his laptop through security. Quite simple… not a problem. Certainly not intended as an attempt to bring down a plane.

To the TSA agent, however, this was a unknown traveller bringing some odd-looking electronic device through a checkpoint. And if it’s your job to make sure that no dangerous devices make it on the airplane, you sure aren’t going to let an odd-looking device through without further investigation.

Unfortunately for our poor traveller, being pulled aside for a secondary screening, and missing his flight, sure seems like overkill for what was an innocent piece of luggage. But the TSA agent didn’t know that, and if the “device” did end up causing a tragedy, even if he wouldn’t be legally responsible, he’d certainly feel terrible.

So next time you fly, and get hassled by the TSA, remember that they are just trying to keep people safe. And keeping people safe requires that if there’s even a shadow of a doubt that something might be dangerous, it must be treated as a real danger.

Something to think about next time you go to an airport.

So I migrated servers a long time ago, and never completed moving the database that runs this blog. So for a long time, this has not been functioning. For a looooooong time. Well hopefully I’ll have some time to actually post to this now.

Well if you read in Building my first PC, you’d know I was having video card issues - the GeForce 7200 card was running too hot.  My case doesn’t get much ventilation down there.

So I bought a Zalman VGA cooling fan, thinking I’d hook it up to the card.  A large fan would provide better cooling and be quieter than the tiny excuse for a fan that comes with the card.

It didn’t fit!  Despite claiming compatability with the GeForce 7xxx series cards, it didn’t fit the 7200!  So I did the most logical thing and returned the video card.  The video card?  Now that I had a fan, I wasn’t worried about those tiny noisemakers from before.  I now have a GeForce 8500 card, with DirectX 10 support, and a nice quiet fan.  My graphics performance subscore jumped to 4.8!

All in all, I’d say I have pretty good performance for the price.  I still need to run some tests on it (Prime95) and perhaps try overclocking it a bit, provided it doesn’t become too hot or less stable.

I’ve recently embarked on a mission to build my own PC, which is disappointingly less technical than it would seem.  I opted for a middle-of-the-road PC, trying to get the most for my money (ie. no $500 graphics cards, sorry).

I am now typing this on the new PC, it’s up and running.  Some specs:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6400: 2.13 GHz, 64-bit, virtualization support (the OS developer in me is drooling about now)
• Gigabyte GA-965P-S3, 6 SATA, plenty of USB, 3 PCI, 3 PCI-X x1, 1 PCI-X x16, serial port (for OS debugging), high-def audio, up to 8GB RAM.
• 2GB of RAM
• 300GB 7200RPM SATA hard disk
• Antec Solo case, Antec Earthwatts 80+ 380W PSU
• eVGA GeForce 7200 fanless video card
• SATA CD/DVD-RW drive
• 3.5″ internal USB memory card reader

I’ve installed Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit on this, and so far it’s running perfectly.  The provided Intel processor cooler seems to have trouble starting up - the fan takes a while to get going.  I have a feeling the motherboard isn’t providing enough voltage until the chip heats up a bit.  But the thing idles around 30C, pretty good.  The video card is another issue entirely.

The first video card I got was the eVGA GeForce 7600, which was only $20 more at my local Frys.  I stuck it in the motherboard and booted up, and was dismayed to find a snake in my computer.  The video card hissed like a snake.  Try clenching your teeth, opening your lips, and blowing.  For me at least, that’s what the fan sounded like.  It seems to be because the fan is blowing air through the narrow slats of a heatsink.

 Without the fan noise, the computer would be almost silent.  Given I didn’t need a super-high-power card anyways, I returned it for the 7200.  A fanless card obviously will be silent.  And I was pleasantly surprised by its performance, although it tends to run rather hot.  But that’s to be expected of something passively cooled.

Vista’s performace statistics are:

• Processor: 5.0
• Memory: 5.5
• Graphics: 3.6
• Gaming Graphics: 3.0
• Hard Disk: 5.7

Because I do also run Linux (now Ubuntu Feisty - sorry Dan!) I made sure to install Ubuntu on it and give that a try.  Didn’t have a chance to see if XGL would work, although with an nVidia card I’ve got a chance.  Maybe I’ll set up a dual-boot configuration sometime.

My only regret is that the case is shiny - I was expecting a matte black finish.  Oh well, it’s good enough and not worth the hassle of sending it back to Newegg.

As for dual-booting, I’ve got a few tricks about that (including how to keep Windows happy) that I don’t see anywhere else on the internet.  Expect a post coming up about that.

It is no surprise to any college student that final exams suck.  They don’t just suck, they suck like a heavy-duty industrial vacuum cleaner rewired by Tim “the Toolman” Taylor.  Well, not really.  Further proof I shouldn’t ever think of being an English major.

The first of my three finals this quarter was for CS 33, the introduction to (MIPS) computer architecture and assembly language.  The final had very time-consuming questions on it - not hard ones, just time consuming ones.  For instance, I had to find the five errors in an eight-page program.  Pure evil, especially when four of the five were near the end!

The next final was the exact opposite - Math 33A, Linear Algebra.  I finished in an hour, checked my work, and turned it in.  Easy stuff.  Which was good considering the final started at 6:30pm and could have gone until 9:30.

Now I have a day off until I get to enjoy the thrill of waking up at the ungodly hour of 6 am to get ready for my final at 8.  Differential equations.  Good stuff.

For anybody out there who uses Gentoo Linux, try using emerge -atv package if you don’t already. It will print out all the packages that will be merged, including dependencies, and ask for your confirmation first. This is good for checking out USE flags.

Here are some packages to try it out on:

eix

A package database, very fast, and useful to see what’s available, what you have installed, and what use flags are in effect.

gentoolkit

Contains euse, a simple but incredibly useful script to update your USE flags.

euses

Ever wondered what that USE flag does? This program will tell you.

pciutils and usbutils

Two very useful programs that tell you what devices are attached to your computer. Indispensible for kernel configuration.

This is probably old news for longtime Gentoo users, but for anyone getting started with Gentoo they help a lot.

I have talked to many people who, well, dislike Gentoo Linux - to put it mildly.  For those who have never used it before, in Gentoo, nearly every package you install is built from source code.  This allows misguided speed freaks to micro-optimize their system by tweaking the compiler’s optimization settings.  And believe me, building OpenOffice isn’t exactly fun.

 But I don’t use Gentoo for the supposed speed boost.  I use it because I also use Windows.

 Huh?  How does that follow?

With Windows, you stick a CD in the drive (or in the case of Vista, a DVD), boot off of it, wait half an hour, and you’ve got a functional system.  With Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, or other distros, you get basically the same experience.  You stick the CD in the drive, give it some configuration options, hit install, wait, and you have a booting Linux install.  And since I received Windows Vista free through the UCLA School of Engineering, the cost to me would be the same.

With Gentoo, you boot off of a CD, partition your hard drive manually, configure and compile a kernel manually, install a bootloader and other essential system tools, and reboot.  In about forty-five minutes of work, you have a barebones system that can’t really do much.  Everything has to be installed and sometimes configured manually.  So you put a lot of effort into your computer, understand exactly how the darn thing works, and get exactly what you want and nothing more.

Granted, this assumes you already have a good understanding of how computers work.  I had that experience, but had no experience with Linux.  I’ve been dual-booting Windows and Gentoo for the past six months or so and have learned more about Linux than I thought possible.

So if you know how computers work, have a fairly fast machine, and want to learn more than you ever wanted to about Linux, I encourage you to try Gentoo.

So it seems there’s yet another scene in Gilligan’s Island filmed here at UCLA… the Third Season episode, The Pigeon, includes a brief scene filmed from the roof of a building somewhere on campus.  Royce Hall and Powell Library are visible in the background (from the Janss Steps side).  It’s too close to be, say, from the roof of Sproul hall; it looks more like the roof of the John Wooden center.

Yet another scene?  Does that mean there’s another one somewhere?  Yep… In the Rescue movie, there’s a scene where the two Russian spies are chasing after the Skipper and Gilligan on the IM (Intramural) field on campus.  Sproul hall, Reiber, and Dykstra are visible in the background.  A very old Wilson Plaza, with the Janss Steps area covered in shrubs, is also visible for a moment.

So is there supposed to be some meaning to this?  Why is this useful?  Short answer: it isn’t.

Anyone ever wondered what the spring constant of a slinky is? Me neither. But evidently it is 0.9267 N/m in the case of an original metal one.

Thus one of today’s most pressing physics questions has been answered. Now to work on the other: calculating the moment of inertia of a penguin.

So I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do here, but I wanted to put this on my new website… which if you have tried to see the thing is very much under development.  Any title suggestions?

So for now this is it; sometime when I have more time I’ll get around to making this better.