The Atheist’s Prayer

From something that really looks like a t-shirt:

Our brains, which art in our heads, treasured be thy name. Thy reasoning come. Thy best you can do be done on earth as it is. Give us this day new insight to help us resolve conflicts and ease pain. And lead us not into supernatural explanations; deliver us from denial of logic. For thine is the kingdom of reason, and even though thy powers are limited and you’re not always glorious, you are the best evolutionary adaptation we have for helping this earth now and forever and ever.

So be it.

So nice…

Free Stuff (apparently not here)

Recently I have been so bored that I’ve been checking out the offers in various competition sites, auction sites, “auction sites” and even in some “get-some-poor-sucker-to-try-these-and-we-will-give-you-a-prize” sites.

I have been looking for a Macintosh computers. I’m THAT bored. The first site type, competition, was fruitless. So far I haven’t win anything but instead I’ve only shared my personal information with various sites that will most likely use the info for direct marketing. Oh, I just hate telemarketers… (I tried to win The Sims 3, some HP netbook, some MacBook and a big LCD TV)

The auction site I’ve been visiting is actually quite nice. It’s just that the merchandise is used and there’s no guarantee that I would get the product after paying for it (or get something completely different). For quality products the prices go high so fast that I cannot afford them any more. Then there are the old Macintoshes whose prices are still way too high. There’s no way I would pay 200 € for 233 MHz iMac nor would I want one in the first place… It’s also funny to read entries posted by computer-illiterate people. One such entry was for selling a computer with 500 GHz hard disk and 6,3 GHz RAM.

Then the “auction sites”… These were kind of auctions that you pay so you can bid, but the price grows only by one cent per bid and there’s a time limit. If nobody bids higher than you in, let’s say, one minute, you win the item and pay the current price, which is remarkably lower than the actual value of the item. Currently there’s bidding going for “Apple iMac 20 2,66GHz” and the highest offer so far is 42,43 €. The Mac’s value is said to be 1 099 € on the site. The price of 42,43 € consists of 4 243 bids that you can buy in bundles (500 bids for 384,90 €). That bundle makes 77 sents per bid which in turn makes 3 266 € that the bidders have paid for the Mac. These kind of auctions are not even considered auctions in Finland and there’s investigation going on if these sites are legal at all.

Finally the “get-some-poor-sucker-to-try-these-and-we-will-give-you-a-prize” sites. I signed up to one site in hopes of a free iMac. The tricky part is that I would have to get 50 people to sign up and “complete an offer” to get “iMac – 24 inch Core 2 Duo”. I don’t know that many people and I really don’t know how to get anyone to complete any offers, but I was hoping that perhaps you could do it. I read somewhere about a guy who set up a fake MySpace-profile as a cute girl to get referrals, but I don’t want to trick people into anything. Maybe some of the readers of this blog entry would like to click the link that might make me happy someday (Goes to the FreebieJeebie site with me as your referrer).

Long lost love

Recently I have been checking the university’s “computer recycling area” in hopes of finding me a new ancient computer. I saw a couple of old machines in the student lab and after finishing my experiment I just couldn’t stop staring at them. They were so old and looked so nice. It was so nice, but then came a dude who took the machines from the floor and carried them away. I suppose they went to recycling, but they didn’t go the way newer computers go. Normally computers to be removed from service go to the IT department for some good blancking of the hard disks, the very same place decides if the machines go to other duties, to sale or to the “floor” where students and other people can grab them for free.

I though the two oldies would go to the same place and end up to the “floor” as the “MHz limit” for resale is about 1000 MHz, and any 386-machine is well below that limit with their blazing 16-33 MHz. Sadly though the machines never went to the department for judging, I even asked if they had seen those machines.

Afterwards I have been thinking more and more about my old Acer 1100SX, who, sadly, was sent to the landfill years ago. Now I want it back. I really want it back. I even checked local online action sites (by local I mean Finnish), but all the oldies there were too new for me. Ebay instead did have some 386 machines, but the prices… I really won’t pay $300 for a 20 years old computer (+shipping, of course). Crazy people… You can’t really do anything serious with it. It would just sit on the table (or floor) and look good. Maybe occasionally I would try to play or do something, get frustrated and shutdown the machine (that’s what I do with the other oldies I have).

I’m surprised that there’s no real information of the Acer 1100SX desktop computer on the net. Googling didn’t really reveal anything about the system. Except that it was Windows 3.0 compatible and that some companies claim to sell memory modules for it. There’s not even a picture. I don’t know if I would be more depressed if there were pictures of the system somewhere or, as it currently seems,  no pictures at all. Few pictures might make me want it back even harder.

Let’s at least put some specs up

Acer 1100SX

• 386SX-processor, 16 MHz
• 2 MB RAM
• 3,5″ 1,44 MB floppy drive
• 5,25″ 1,2 MB floppy drive
• 40 MB Hard disk
• Integrated VGA graphics card
• 14″ VGA color monitor
• 4(?) ISA slots
  • 1200 bps modem
  • Game port extension card
  • Diamond Sound Something sound card (I added it later)
  • Allied Telesyn AT-2000 Network card (this one too)
• AT-power supply (surprise!)
• manufactured 1989
• I also got an Epson-matrix printer, I loved it

The machine was bought used in 1996-1997 I think. The monitor’s power switch broke 1999 and dad thought that we could replace the whole machine with a brand new model. I still used the machine more or less actively for a couple of years while my brother was playing with the new one. As time went by I used the machine less and less. Finally it just sit in the corner looking sadly at me until mom decided to throw it away.

It had MS-DOS 3.33 and Windows 3.0 installed including some Microsoft entertainment pack. It was all in English so I had to buy a Finnish-English-Finnish-dictionary to understand the system Later my cousin gave me MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. The Windows was in Finnish this time Due to the DOS 3.33 limits the hard disk was originally partitioned in two partitions, 32 MB C: and 8 MB D:. The D:-drive contained all the games the machine had, and I still have kept the same partitioning: C: for system, D: for games

When the machine was about to be thrown away, I took several components from it to remember it by. Most notably the RAM-modules, power supply and the cool 5,25″ floppy drive, that I put on the Compaq P733 I told about in some earlier post. (The newest computer didn’t have BIOS support for it. I wonder why…)

I think the machine was originally equipped with only 1 MB RAM as the other four of eight 256 KB modules looked different than the other four. I also got 5,25″ floppies including MS-DOS 3.33 and Windows/386 for which I even have the user manuals. Sadly I didn’t have floppies for the Windows 3.0 nor the WordPerfect 5.2. There were also some Acer setup utilities that could lower the CPU speed to 8 MHz and other tool to park hard disk heads to the designated parking zones. I think there was also a text mode tutorial program on what exactly is a computer and what you can do with it.

Edit 12.07.2009:

Acer 1100SX Specifications

Acer 7013A Specifications (the monitor)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2009 to everybody who has managed to reach this blog site. Especially for those who have commented the Intel 945GM article.

Thermophysics, the experiment 1

Today I had a measurement to do in our university’s physics student laboratory. I had a kettle full of water of 80 degrees Celsius, an aluminium rod and a smaller pot of room temperature water.

The idea was to conduct heat from the bottom of the hot kettle through the rod to the pot. I had temperature sensor in both the upper and the lower end of the rod and in the little pot. The temperatures were read to a computer running some Matlab-script. I was supposed to measure the temperatures for 10 minutes with 1 minute intervals and write them down (It cleary would have been too little work for us if the script had had a for-loop to do this too).

So, for ten minutes I wrote the results down and changed in a copper rod and did the same things to it too. In half way of the second measurement set, my instructor took a look on the first results and was a bit puzzled.

Somehow the upper end of the rod heated as expected, the water in the pot heated as well. But the temperature of the lower end of the rod got lower! How is this possible?

(this is an “I want comments”-post and the real answer to the question above will be revealed later, unless someone finds it out. >:-) )

Slacking once again

No, nothing to do with Slackware this time. For some reason I just don’t want to do anything. Just few days ago I entered my Prospekt Linux chroot environment and spent there less than 2 minutes and began to feel angry so then I just left to Firefox and StumbleUpon. Still haven’t stumbled upon on something I really want (secretly)… I guess I can’t get one from teh internet, which is scary

I did try to take look on the JPM sources again and then thought that I should have done it with Java as it has a friendly compiler telling me I’m doing something wrong with the data (structures), I guess sometimes dynamic data typing isn’t fun… or I’m doing something terribly wrong (quite likely, actually)…

On the other hand, you have different fingers. As school is out and has been for weeks actually and nothing better to do, I have been hanging around in our city’s market place or nearby my apartment with a friend. It’s almost weird, we just stand there for couple of hours talking about various stuff but mostly about computers. Weird or not, I has been really fun and different. It’s really nice to be outside for a change and “it is time better spent” than normally just sitting in front of a monitor.

We’ve been playing Synergy too and we are on the second round on the big map pack and desperately waiting for the Orange Box version so we could co-op through HL2 Episode Two.

Shopping for a new stuff

Today I kinda went shopping with my friend. I just got some urge to get a microphone for my computer so I could make weird voices and comments too while playing Synergy. There were few microphone models but I couldn’t decide so I went to look some keyboards and ended up buying a one too (Logitech Cordless Desktop EX110, comes with a mouse too) and then went back to the microphones and took one manufactored too by Logitech.

The keyboard seems to be better than the old one (Microsoft ComfortCurve 2000, which wasn’t that comfortable to me). The weird thing is that this Logitech-keyboard doesn’t have Scroll Lock-key and the Insert/Home/Pg U -keyset is a 3×2-keys not the ordinary 2×3-keys matrix, also they have moved the insert-key away from this set and put it in place of Scroll lock.

The microphone was a bit of disappointment but thats probably some driver problem. Currently I have to yell at the microphone to get Windows Sound Recorder to catch anything and the same goes to everything else too. If I turn on the mic boost, there’s a lot of background noise but I can record with my normal speaking voice, but the noise is unacceptable! Is this due to Asus P5N-E SLI motherboard and its drivers? I bet it would work in Linux >:-) This current situation means no funny voices on Synergy. God damn! Has anyone else had this same problem?

So Proud of Myself

Today I finally managed to repair my A-Link RR24AP(c) adsl-modem. The problem was that the wireless side didn’t function at all because the boot environment of the modem was corrupted. The corruption was my fault as I accidentaly used a wrong power source which wasn’t powerful enough, all I could see was the lan-connection light flickering.

Few weeks ago I contacted A-link’s tech support and they told me to send the modem to their technicians, but I didn’t bother to that as the warranty period had ended quite some time ago.

The modem accepts ssh-connections for controlling it and a linux shell/toolset, busybox. Boot environment configuration can be accessed through /proc/ticfg/env -file. A quick look into it and some knowledge from RouterTech’s forums and the modem’s system log revealed that WLAN_EEPROM-values were missing. I don’t know exactly what these values are but I do know that without them the wireless doesn’t work.

I found a recovery software through the same forums but the program didn’t start. I crashed immediately. I was very disappointed as it was my only hope. As I knew that I needed those WLAN_EEPROM-settings so it came to my mind to take a look on that program with a hex editor (Notepad++ with hex editing plugin, in case you want to know…) and indeed there they were! Apparently it was a template of the eeprom-settings, but still I got my hopes up again!

I didn’t expect this template to work directly which was then confirmed when I tried it. Again the answer was found in RouterTech’s forums. Some other guy had the same problem of missing/corrupted WLAN_EEPROMs and some other guy told him that WLAN_EEPROM8-line contains a hardware specific id in REVERSE order (12 34 56 would become 56 34 12). Modifying that line did the trick! The WLAN-led lit up! I had restored the right WLAN_EEPROMs (WLAN_EEPROM0-WLAN_EEPROM14) and I had a working wireless access point. One problem, though, the modem though that the BSSID was 00:00:00:00:00:00 THAT IS NOT RIGHT! (and only my laptop’s Intel 3945 detected it, my buffalo usb-wlan stick didn’t see anything).

And to the Google we went… it turned out that WLAN_HWADDR0 should be set and contain the MAC-address of the wlan-system.

Now the modem is under testing and seems to run just fine.

(I don’t publish the WLAN_EEPROM-values here because I don’t know if  that would be legal)

New Computer

I finally got around to buy me a new computer as the old one really started to feel old. Now I just have to cut in some “expenses” as it was rather pricey for a student budget.

This is what I had before:

• AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 2.0 GHz processor
• 1 GB RAM (DDR-333)
• Asus A7V8X-X motherboard
• 200 GB HD by Seagate
• Geforce 6600 GT (AGP)
• Some cheap DVD-drive that cannot read cd-rw-disks it burned
• 1,44 MB floppy drive
• 1,2 MB floppy drive  (I don’t really use it… It just looked cool)

Hmm.. funny… I don’t remember what components I had on it…
Anyway this is what I got now:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6750, 2.66 GHz
• Asus P5N-E SLI motherboard
• Corsair Twin2x  1 GB DDR2-800 memory kit, total 2 GB(TWIN2X2048-6400C4 G)
• Western Digital Caviar SE16 320 GB HD
• Gigabyte GV-NX88T256H graphics adapter based on NVIDIA 8800 GT
• Antec Sonata III case with 500 W power supply

As I don’t have a car, I had a bit of problem on how to get it into my apartment from the local post office, but my two friends from the university helped with it. I don’t live too far from the office so we brought the three packages over by our bare hands

The case was the heaviest package and I had to carry it as far as the first traffic lights until my friend told me I looked ridiculous carrying the heavy big package so we switched and I got the lightest package

Building the computer wasn’t so easy as I thought it would be. After putting every component where they belonged the computer booted fine. Then the problems started. My old Windows XP installation cd didn’t contain any sata-drivers as they were supplied in Service Pack 2. I had created the sata-driver floppy but the installation halted on STOP-error “PAGEFAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA” or something like that and a reboot later it told that the installation structures were damaged and it refused to continue. I restarted the installation several times just to get various different STOP-errors until I gave up and tried to install Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu installation didn’t start very well as I saw some error messages from the linux kernel, at this point suspicion rised. I rebooted and selected the memtesting from the boot menu of the Ubuntu dvd. What I was encountered with was various memory errors and a lot of red colored characters. OK, my memory chips weren’t working properly. Maybe one of the two Corsairs was broken? I tested them individually and neither of them failed testing. As I put them both back on the motherboard, the failing began again. I wasn’t thrilled at all. Apparently the motherboard fails to recognize the memkit and give them proper settings. Some googling with my laptop revealed that others have had the same problem. I had to manually set some timing and voltage settings in the BIOS. Tadaa! It didn’t fail anymore.

I think it was this site I got the working settings from:

Bios Settings:
SLI-Ready Memory = Disabled
Memory Voltage = 2.085
tCL = 4
tRCD = 4
tRP = 4
tRAS = 12
CMD = 2
Advanced Memory Timings

tRC = 22
tWTR = 15
All other settings = auto

Now I have Windows XP Professional, Windows 2003 Server and Ubuntu Linux installed (I got the Server from MS’ DreamSpark-service for students). Everything seems to working alright

As for performance… well.. none of few games has any performance issues. It was an interesting experience to play Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode Two without any stuttering or glitches. My SimCity Societies is still waiting to be tested as for some reason it keeps telling me about conflicts with emulation software even though I don’t have any emulation software. It seems like someone is going to get cracked.

(The HL2:EP2 achievement about squishing 333 grubs was only 3 bugs away… >:-()

Hello? Are you still standing there?

[DIARY ENTRY WARNING] 

Who can guess where that line is taken from? Here’s a hint: It’s a computer game and it’s name starts with P.

Apparently I have got a new obsession related to that game. I hope it’s nothing serious, though. I still want a big blue tower.

On the other news, it seems there’s something wrong somewhere as my laptop’s hard drive seem to be under massive use in both Fedora and Ubuntu. I have no idea what’s going on there, the system just uses hard drive. I suppose it’s somehow related to swapping, but it didn’t do that in previous versions of Ubuntu. Also, when ever it’s updating/installing/removing packages (aka using the hd) the whole system goes nearly unusable state. It’s not nice at all.  I already downloaded a Vector Linux installation cd image as they say it’s a lightweight distribution, but if the problem lies some where in the hardware changing distro won’t help.

I don’t remember having this sort of problem in my personally built Prospekt Linux. In case I get tired of Vector too Prospekt is the next installation. Hmm… I should write some sort of installation program for it…

I had to do a practice work (in Java) to the programming course I mentioned in an earlier post. So far I have a working implementation of “program that calculates the age of a person in months and years. Current date is taken from the system.” I still have to do some testing, write API documentation using Javadoc and a small report containing the testing material, short instructions and stuff. (How much instructions users need for a program that asks their birthday?)

Last Friday the teacher did a small review on the current state of our projects. He told my program was great (I’m not really sure how to translate the adjective he used) and needed only testing. I was quite sure that wrong input format wouldn’t crash it, but he still managed to do it. Apparently I never tested what would happen if there’s some extra spaces before the actual birthday. It was quite easy to fix, though, and I’m somewhat proud of it. Now it “cleans” all extra space from the input string by utilizing Java’s StringTokenizer-class.

Yet another news: I’m sick. My throat hurts and I’ve got fever. Usually I’ve been sick around December 6th, but it came early this year, it seems. A quick check to my calendar shows that the 6th day is Thursday and we’ll have final test in Calculus III on Friday, so I guess my immune-system predicted the test and decided I must get sick this weekend instead so I can attend to the test. It also knew that getting sick next weekend would have compromised the final test in Fotonics or my possible moving to Joensuu.