Entries Tagged 'Science and Technology' ↓

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Well, I updated to ATI’s latest drivers, and then went through several days of wondering why the hell my goddamn video was so _slow_ until I eventually noticed that, for some damn reason, 2x anti-aliasing was on by default… -_-’

In the course of trying to figure everything out, I eventually uninstalled ATI’s drivers and installed “Omega’s Drivers”:http://omegadrivers.net, and just decided to keep them at the end of everything, since they seem to work just fine.
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In other news, Nina and I have a new place to live in and we will be in there by the end of the month, no matter what!

And next week, we’re off to see “My Chemical Romance”:http://mychemicalromance.com prance around the stage like a bunch of pixies! Yay!

…maybe he’ll look me right in my eyes… surely, time would stop, and the moment would drag on for what seems like forever.

After months of trying to learn out how, I’ve finally mastered the cpulimit library for linux! I learned about it many months ago while looking at add-ons for the “http://boinc.berkeley.edu/”:BOINC distributed computing project. You see, I needed a way to limit the amount of CPU power that BOINC used when it ran its computations — this is mainly so I can run it at work!

My computer at work is a fairly modern Intel system, so it has all sorts of fans and magic-step-up temperature controls and whatnot, and everytime I start doing anything even _remotely_ CPU-intensive, this case fan at the front of my desktop starts spinning faster, and faster, and faster, until it sounds like there’s a jet engine inside my cubicle!

Well, this just certainly won’t do. I’d love to use the idle computing power of my work PC (which is just being absolutely _wasted_ by me doing nothing but programming on it), but I can’t have somebody eventually getting suspicious because of the racket coming from my PC.

In steps the cpulimiter library. This handy dandy little _whatever_ (”process,” I guess) will only allow a process to use a limited amount of CPU power from within linux (did I mention I’m doing all of this inside of a virtual machine?). It wasn’t included with the “http://www.ubuntu.com”:Ubuntu 6.06 virtual machine I use at work, so I actually had to download the source and compile it myself! Yay! You betcha — it didn’t work at all!

The virtual machine version of Ubuntu was missing the _make_ compiler, not to mention the necessary C and C++ libraries necessary to do the compiliation. I managed to get the stuff I needed after just randomly downloading important looking libraries from the Synaptic Package Manager, and eventually got it compiled!

Now, I’m free to run BOINC on my work PC (which is actually pretty damn fast) whenever I choose. The Intel chip in my PC runs pretty damn hot no matter what (idle temperature is around 55° C!), but at least it’s not noisy.

[_Transcribed from my work blog_]

For the past few months on my work computer (and even longer on my home computer) I’ve noticed that my web browsing via Firefox has slowed to an absolute crawl. Firefox would take almost 45 seconds just to load up, and each page loaded with the horrifying speed of glass (which is actually an extremely viscous liquid — ha ha, science! *thrusts finger in air*).

I realized right away that this wasn’t Firefox’s fault. Why? Because I’d use other peoples’ computers with Firefox, and their copies loaded quickly, browsed quickly, and rendered quickly…

That left only one thing, right? It was an extension slowing me down. But which one?

I figured it was one of two — either NoScript or Adblock.

Now, Adblock used to slow me down until I figured out my tried-and-true-two-entries-only-blocking-list:

/[^A-Za-z0-9]ad[s]?[^A-Za-z0-9]/

/(2o7|a\d\.yimg|ad(brite|click|farm|revolver|server|tech|vert)|
at(dmt|wola)|banner|bizrate|blogads|bluestreak|burstnet|casalemedia|
coremetrics|(double|fast)click|falkag|(feedster|right)media|
googlesyndication|hitbox|httpads|imiclk|intellitxt|js\.overture|kanoodle|
mediaplex|nextag|pointroll|qksrv|speedera|statcounter|tribalfusion|
webtrends)(\d+[x]\d+)?/

These two lines stop almost all banner ads of any sort, and it’s easy for the Adblock engine to parse. The problem of a huge Adblock-list plagued me some time ago, but after replacing my enormous block list with these two lines, the problem went away.

Now about a year or so later, the problem has arisen once again, and this left only one possible answer: NoScript.

You would think so, eh? Turns out it wasn’t that easy. I’ve installed Firefox on new computers and added NoScript, and it ran with no problems — fast as can be. Then what was wrong with my installation, specifically?

Well, what was the difference between a NoScript installation on a new computer and my main NoScript installation?

My banned/allowed scripts list, of course. My *five-thousand-line-long banned/allowed scripts list.*

If you’re picky like me, you don’t like having ad farms deliver content to you. You don’t like being the target of “customer-orientated advertising campaigns,” you don’t like having “relevant marketing content” delivered to you, and you definitely don’t like being the source of “valid consumer visitation information” for companies. You like buying the things that you want to buy, not things that you’ve been subtly prodded into buying. (Trust me — just go to Tacoda.net and look at some of their “consumer profiles.” You’re not a person to these organizations — you’re not even a group of people. You’re just a line in a database somewhere.)

I stop almost every single bit of JavaScript that runs in my browser when I’m web-surfing, except for whatever’s coming from the main site that I’m visiting. (Trust me, I program JavaScript as a career. I know what it can do, and I don’t want it doing it!) Well, over time, my “blocked/allowed domains” list in NoScript had become very, very, very large. And everytime I started up Firefox or tried to load a new page, NoScript was having to check each and every bit of JavaScript against that enormous list… even clicking on the NoScript context menu to bring it up was starting to take a full *three seconds.*

So, what do you do? Well, it seems the makers of NoScript must have come across this problem, because they’ve included a feature to always allow JavaScript from whatever domain you’re currently visiting — this is something I always allow anyway, since the main culprits of JavaScript-delivered ad-farming are almost always off-site domains (tacoda.net, doubleclick.net, etc.). You’re pretty safe in always allowing the domain you’re visiting to run JavaScript on your computer.

I turned on this option, but I still had to get rid of that giant permissions list, now didn’t I? You can do that from within the NoScript control panel, but my list was so large that every time I tried to remove the entire thing, Firefox would lock up. Poor thing…
I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the extension… to no avail. Unfortunately, Firefox keeps the settings of whatever extensions you’ve installed. (There really should be an option to stop that!)

I wasn’t going to re-install Firefox, so what now? Well, on NoScript’s site, they talk about this exact thing:

_If you want to erase your whitelist you can either use the NoScript Options user interface (recommended option) or remove from the aforementioned prefs.js all the preference entries whose name starts with ‘capability.policy.maonoscript’._

The prefs.js file seems to be a collection of items in some sort of array, and the particular entry for NoScript was disgusting huge. So, I uninstalled NoScript first (just to make sure I wasn’t editing its prefs.js section while it was installed), took out the relevant lines from prefs.js, and turned on the “allow top-level sites” option.

Ah… browsing revisited. Running NoScript in this fashion — allowing all top-level JavaScript and only banning off-site scripts — is so much more efficient.

All right, that’s it. I’m getting rid of “Mootools”:http://mootools.net in favor of “jQuery”:http://jquery.com.

Why? Well, if it’s not Mootools’ horrible documentation, it’s the fact their entire API seems to change with *every single version they release*.

What ever happened to backwards compatibility? What are they, Microsoft?

Just posting this real quick to help out anyone out there who’s having the same problem…

Having trouble importing entries from another type of blogging software into TextPattern? Nina and I sure were. We looked everywhere for documentation — third-party sites, the official TextPattern website, the TextPattern Wiki — couldn’t find a goddamn thing.

Shit, TextPattern’s own importing page doesn’t even give any help — it’s just a page with a couple of options and an import button. You can select all the options you want, click on the button ’till you’re blue in the face — it won’t do crap all. It’ll just give you an error message on the return page and that’s it.

Eh? WTF, you know? I finally came up with the idea that it was looking for a type of import file somewhere in a folder (most scripts like this that don’t ask you to specify the file on the web page do), but there is _absolutely no documentation anywhere that says this_.

So, what did I have to do?

Go into the goddamn PHP code and examine it, line by line.

And there, I found it:

*//checks the existence of a file called import.txt on the import dir.*
*// Used when importing from a file*
*function check_import_file()*

Can somebody please tell me why it would’ve been so farking hard to put a little line saying “Oh, by the way, you need to rename your data you want to upload as ‘import.txt’ and ftp it to this directory?” Someone, anyone? TextPattern people?

Well, either way, we found the solution. Now to try it.

On Saturday, I wanted to experiment with sanding down a heatsink to a mirror finish, so I decided to try it on the heatsink that was on my old 9200se video card.

!http://farm1.static.flickr.com/157/378826091_02f67b8c73_m.jpg!:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/157/378826091_02f67b8c73.jpg
After taking it off and wet sanding it for a bit, it immediately became apparent that the heatsink wasn’t real copper (I really should’ve guessed) and was just coated in some kind of copper-colored metal. It really doesn’t matter what kind of metal the heatsink is made of, though, so I just continued with the sanding.

!http://farm1.static.flickr.com/184/378826181_55a92dc982_m.jpg!:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/184/378826181_55a92dc982.jpg
Here is a picture taken after I was finished sanding with 400-grade sanding paper — as you can see, it’s just barely starting to get reflective.

!http://farm1.static.flickr.com/159/378826358_a4db801f47_m.jpg!:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/159/378826358_a4db801f47.jpg
Here it was after I was done sanding with 800-grade sanding paper — at this point, it wasn’t really any more reflective, and I was starting to wonder if it was working… at least I was starting to sand off more of that copper-colored metal coating.

It’s a very tiring process, lapping a heatsink. You have to constantly “cross-hatch” your sanding — basically, you have to make sure that you’re always, always sanding _against_ the grain in order to get an overall smooth appearance. What this means is that you have to remember to turn the heatsink a 1/4 turn every minute or two so that you’ll always be sanding against the direction that you just were. Got it? Good.
Well, I really didn’t know what to expect at this point, until…

!http://farm1.static.flickr.com/184/378826943_bc097df255_m.jpg!:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/184/378826943_bc097df255.jpg
Wow. There’s quite a difference now, isn’t there? Turns out that nothing really changes all that much until you get to 1000-grade sandpaper and get to sanding with _it_.

The jump in reflective quality at this point was amazing.

!http://farm1.static.flickr.com/159/378826778_547e5bc070_m.jpg!:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/159/378826778_547e5bc070.jpg
Here’s another view, taken from a slightly different angle.

!http://farm1.static.flickr.com/168/378827554_0050784b38_m.jpg!:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/168/378827554_0050784b38.jpg
…and here’s my trusty old ATI 9200se. While it was never a powerhouse, it gets the job done. (And it’s far better than any laptop graphics. ) I’ve put a couple of big-ol’-honking heatsinks on the RAM chips, because I’m planning on overclocking the hell out of it — don’t worry, it can take it. I’m almost certain the card was severely _underclocked_ when I got it (166mhz core and 166 memory).

!http://farm1.static.flickr.com/152/378827863_79dc418c54_m.jpg!:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/152/378827863_79dc418c54.jpg
Here it is with the heatsink attached. What’s that bread-tie wrapping around it for, you ask? Well…

!http://farm1.static.flickr.com/135/378827974_8f4ff4303e_m.jpg!:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/135/378827974_8f4ff4303e.jpg
Okay, okay, okay — I know, it looks like shit. However, this was the only solution for now. (le sigh…) The heatsinks were too close to the motherboard’s RAM, and I had to “bend” one of the GPU’s heatsinks down a little bit to get it to fix. Of course, by this point, the thermal adhesive that it came with had already lost its adhesiveness, and I didn’t have any of my own, so… hey, it works, okay? It’s better than not having one on that chip at all.
All in all, it took about an hour and a half, but that’s just because I took my time with it. I’m thinking about doing it to the heatsink on the Titan’s CPU, just for the hell of it.

Why did I do this? I must admit, it makes absolutely no noticeable difference in anything performance-wise, and I can’t even tell if it’s lowering the temperature any (since the 9200se didn’t have an internal temperature monitor).

Doesn’t matter — it’s the _thought_ that counts, people!

Problems, problems, problems. Or not — who knows.

The installation and setup of Windows on the Colossus Server/Gaming PC went okay, but it’s been a bumpy ride. It’s mostly my fault, though — I tried to start things at a _high_ level of overclocking, instead of completely neutral, like I should’ve. -_-’

I’ve now got it running at just a base 100 FSB, but I’m planning on stepping it back up now that it’s relatively stable.

The video card has been funky, to say the least. It’d keep freezing up during 3d rendering, and then one time it stopped rendering 3d altogether. It might’ve been the Modded “Omega Drivers”:http://omegadrivers.net I was running, but then I switched to the official ATI ones I kept getting the same problem. However, I changed a couple of other things that might’ve been causing freeze-ups, and the freeze-ups apparently went away. Who knows, you know?

That being said, what’s with all these freaking “CLI.exe” services that run when you’ve got the official ATI drivers installed on your system? Beats me. All I know is this — turning them off doesn’t do anything (except that sometimes your Catalyst control panel doesn’t come up). On top of that, turning them off actually _increases_ my frame rate and scores in “3D Mark”:http://futuremark.com… anyone guess why that might be?

If you’ve got a sec, check out my little accordian-type interface for the shit to the right — took me a freakin’ day to code that crap, so you better have fun with it!

Once you load the Moblog object, it gets kind of screwy, but I’m working on it.

In other news, I’m installing WoW on my gaming PC as I speak! I finally got it up and running, thanks to the honest-to-goodness 256 MB Low-Density SDRAM chip that I got from “StarMicro.net”:http://starmicro.net — in case your wondering what the hell that is (and you probably are), it’s a special type of RAM that’s not even made any more that’s required if you want to use larger chips (such as 256 MB ones) in a select few older motherboards (like the one I’m currently building with). They’re hard as hell to track down, and when you do, they’re usually found with sky-high prices, so I really, really lucked out when I found this one for only $22.

Although, I’ve been having a bit of trouble getting the system running stable at anything above a 100 Mhz FSB (the “FSB” is the “highway” that all your little computer bips and bops on the motherboard communicate to each other with). My brother, “Thomas the Mighty”:http://gardens.tmanime.com, had success running this motherboard as high as 124 Mhz, so I’m still at a loss as to what I’m doing wrong… but, there’s lots of variables that are different in my case: different RAM, different CPU, different GPU, you name it.

Well, even with its Tualatin CPU running at 1300 Mhz, it’s still a bit faster than my laptop, so off I go to play!

Just a little something I found whilst perusing some parts sites…

Asus A8S-X Socket 939 Barebone Kit / AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 OEM / CPU Fan / ATX Mid-Tower Case / 500 Watt Power Supply

All that for $399! I haven’t taken the prices apart and seen just how good a deal it is, but at first glance it seems amazing. That chip alone is worth almost $400. All you’d need is your own memory and hard drive (and video card), and you’d be set — but then you’ve probably already got those things lying around in other computers, like me, right?!

This definitely isn’t for someone who’s making their first computer — it doesn’t have half the shit you need to start out with, so unless you like to tinker with computers like me, don’t bother buying it.

So, what’s been going on in my life, eh?

Well, I’ve been working on this site a little, and programming at work a lot.

I’ve gotten all my tax information, and am currently trying to find every single deduction I can so that I don’t owe Uncle Sam a damn cent.

I’m still trying to put myself together a gaming PC so that I can wipe my hard drive on my laptop and start running “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com on it (since I only have windows on it anymore because of gaming).

I’m shooting for a system running a Tualatin Celeron running at about 1600mhz (overclocked quite a bit) and _at least_ 512 MB of RAM. That’s bare minimum RAM to run “WoW”:http://worldofwarcraft.com, thought I’m hoping because it’s a desktop system it’ll be passable — PC133 and PC100 RAM is getting kinda pricey these days, because it’s almost descended into that dreaded computer world of _obsoleteness_…

This, combined with my trusty old ATI 9200 SE (X!) that I’ve custom tuned to run some 60% overclocked above normal, should be enough. “WoW”:http://worldofwarcraft.com is made so that it doesn’t require the latest graphics hardware to run (a genius marketing move on the side of the company), and it’ll be a damn
sight faster than the GeForce 2 Go chip that’s in my laptop (which just so happens to be the _very_ lowest chip that’s compatible with the game!).

I should have it running by next weekend, at least. Wish me luck!

I know it’s cheesy sounding, but I didn’t have anything to else to talk about, so I wanted to show you some great deals I’ve found on the intarwebs during my browsing sessions the past week or so:

nVidia 6600 GT AGP for below $100 at 3B Tech

While I’m personally an ATI guy myself, I have to pay obeisance to the raw power that was the nVidia 6600 GT in its time. This card was — and for the AGP slot, still is — one of the fastest cards that was ever produced. It was like a fire-breathing dragon, eating up any benchmark or performance test you could throw at it.

And now it could be yours, for below a hundred bucks. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must’ve cost brand new back in the day.

!http://www.starmicro.net/images/PIIIFCPGA2.JPG!
Pentium III-S Tualatin 1.26GHz for $25 at StarMicro

Well, this site has a weird name (and their layout is rather… spartan), but they have great reviews on “Pricewatch.com”:http://pricewatch.com, so I trust it.

What you’re looking at is one of the “Tualatin” core CPU’s that Intel made in the waning years of the Socket 370 platform. It was the last inception of the Pentium III, introduced in 2001-02, and it was by far the fastest — faster even than many inceptions of the Pentium IV (I’ve tested this personally myself).

Right now it’s a _damn_ good deal because, with a simple slot adapter, you can put one on many old Socket 370 boards (all of we computer aficionados have a couple of _those_ laying around). Doing this will give you a computer just about up to par with anything you could have today (save the fastest and most expensive new chips).

This site, “http://starmicro.net”:StarMicro.net, also has a good selection of PC133 SDRAM, including some hard to find low-density chips… those are getting harder and harder to find these days.