Rambling on since 1985… 
Yeah my ancient G4 PowerBook’s health is starting to go seriously downhill. The battery holds almost no charge and now the power port is starting to come unsoldered. So a did one of my favourite past-times and played around configuring my ideal computer/laptop. MacBook Pro 15″ 2.5GHz. Up the RAM to 4GB and add in a remote = £1734.01.
The new series of Top Gear started on Sunday on BBC2. They did a tongue-in-cheek look at fuel-economy and declared the Audi R8 the most fuel efficient supercar money can buy. I just thank god the hypermiling craze has not caught on in Europe yet. It’s probably due to the fact we haven’t relied on gas guzzling, huge displacement engines. I don’t necessarily agree with hypermilers, but as long as you do it safely and don’t present a hazzard to others I don’t see why you shouldn’t be allowed to eek out every last mile out of your tank. Just don’t do what Wired Magazine tell you…
They don’t call Wayne Gerdes the king of the hypermilers for nothing. Not only can he pull 200 mpg in a Honda Insight but he can coax 59 miles per from a garden-variety Accord. Gerdes says no single technique will max your mileage. You need the whole toolbox: No brakes! In traffic, maintain a slow creep instead of accelerating and braking. Ignore the horns. Drive with the engine off. Shift into neutral, turn your key back a notch so the engine shuts down, then forward a click, so you can still have lights. Draft. Gerdes urged us not to reveal this (dangerous) move. But we trust you: Inch up behind, say, an 18-wheeler, and kill the engine as you enter its slipstream (you’ll feel it). You’re drafting now, getting pulled along by the truck’s gas instead of your own.
Yeah Gerdes sort of urged you not to reveal the last technique because he knew you’d misinform the reader and endanger lives, good going Wired! You will gain an increase in gas milage from as far back as 100 feet from the trailer (as much as 10% in some cases), but what Wired don’t tell you is that to perform such a manouver, many seasoned hypermilers communicate to the truck via CB radio. Remember if you can’t see the truck’s wing mirrors he can’t see you.
Nope, you never get tired of seeing this.
Supermicro’s blade offerings are being touted as the best solution for a environmentally friendly clustered solution. CRN ranks their blades above the offerings of IBM and Dell. I’m anxious to see what other tricks they have up their sleeves. Obviously the answer is simple: Take their proven blade servers and shrink them even further to improve TCO and space management.
Obviously there are plenty of 4U blade servers out there, so when is Supermicro going to join the ranks? They already produce slim dual processor motherboards that feature in their 1U Twin servers, so two-thirds of the battle is already won. I’d definitely be waiting with the credit cards if a 4U blade was released. Maybe they could send me an engineering sample?
I’m in the middle of redesigning my home network (when I really should be in the middle of my uni work). One of the main points was sneaking a rack into the garage for a firewall, some servers and a beefy NAS. My new workstation has got me thinking of ingenious solutions to a big problem. My workstation is LOUD! Dual Xeons need serious cooling. I could just throw on a fan controller and throttle the two 120mm Akasa fans, but I’m getting back into the swing of Folding@Home and 100% across 8-cores is pushing it.
So the obvious answer is to move the workstation itself into the garage too! Wikipedia tells me the specification for DVI should be fine with the distance though the wall.
The maximum length of DVI cables is not included in the specification since it is dependent on bandwidth requirements (the resolution of the image being transmitted). In general, cable lengths from 1-15 feet (4.5m) will work for displays at resolutions of 1920×1200. Cable lengths up to 50 feet (15m) can be used with displays at resolutions up to 1280×1024. For longer distances, to eliminate the video degradation, the use of a DVI booster is recommended. DVI boosters may or may not use an external power supply.
Moving the box to the garage will solve more problems than just noise. Space constraints and heat issues would be solved. The CPUs could be watercooled using a large, passive external radiator.
I’d have to sketch up some designs, but a simple wall box containing two DVI ports, powered USB hub, FireWire and sound would be pretty simple. Imagine just moving all the I/O ports on the back of your PC to a wall jack. It’d solve the plug nightmare that is the corner of the living room too. Currently 10 devices all need a plug-socket with only one available? Oh god!
Of course it would be a great deal of hard work and investment into this project. For starters I’d have to fabricate a new case suitable for wall mounting. Feature check; wall mountable, light, sturdy, thin (2U if possible) and the operating environment would be quite a challenge. The I/O would be the next greatest challenge, I think the distances involved would be borderline for signal boosters on every bus (DVI, FireWire and USB would all need boosters over 4.5-5m cable length). I’d need a new external CD/DVD solution and it could be a pain to troubleshoot if something went tits up.
However ,the pay-off for such a project would be huge. Having a powerful, absolutly silent (but not in the garage!), ‘invisible’, always-on workstation would be fantastic. Time to check google to see if anybody has attempted/acheived this before!
Graduates Asked Not To Toss Hats via BBC News.
A university has asked students to refrain from throwing their mortar board hats in the air to celebrate graduation in case someone gets hurt.
Anglia Ruskin University, with campuses at Cambridge and Chelmsford in Essex, said a corner of a mortar board could hit someone as it falls.
Officials made the request in a statement on the university’s website.
“It is requested that graduands do not throw their hat up into the air,” the statement said.
The site also gives advice on protocol at graduation ceremonies and what to wear but makes a special plea about mortar board hat tossing.
“This not only causes damage to the hats but it can also cause injury if the corner of the hat hits the graduand or others who may be nearby,” the statement added.
A step too far perhaps? I’m sure we’ve all managed quite fine for a while with our normal graduation ceremonies.
Pretty busy for the rest of May then.
Photography
Computer Geekery
House Shenanigans
I hardly ever restart my ancient PowerBook, but when I do I can never remember the correct keystrokes for different startup procedures. Press these during startup:
Well yesterday I took the plunge and upgraded my WordPress version to 2.5. A simple matter of upgrading the wordpress automatic upgrade plug-in to 1.1 and then running it. After a few minutes I was using the nifty-new features of 2.5 to automatically update all of my plug-ins. I did discover one hitch, adsense manager no longer works correctly. But no big loss, I was going to get around to coding an alternative myself. Speaking of alternatives to plug-ins, I’m currently rocking 13 plug-ins with 9 being active so it looks like I’ll have to be rolling my own soon.
First impressions of 2.5? Nice, very nice. A lot of improvements have been made and most of the changes make sense and are very logical. The new dashboard is pretty slick and I took the chance to integrate wordpress.com stats plug-in into it. After never really bothering with it before (managing my wordpress.com account was a nightmare) I’m pretty impressed with the features. Will it replace Google Analytics or Clicky? For me, no. However I feel I can finally relax a little over statistics and not sweat the small stuff.
Overall verdict? A big step in the right direction, just a few more tweaks, but you can never have enough tweaks.
(Edit: Image blatantly snagged from the (mt) mediatemple weblog)
Okay, I’m a big F1 fan and the Melbourne GP was eagerly anticipated. After it came and went my first big impression? Damn the safety car sounds good! There’s something about the deep sound of the 6.3l V8 compared to the F1 cars 2.4l high-revving engines.
Initial thoughts post-race? A lot of errors from the drivers and teams. Not necessarily because of the lack of traction control, but just some random unforced errors. Maybe it was first race of the season type jitters, but some mistakes were pretty unforgivable. Barrichello going into the closed pit-lane for fuel was a good idea (better than letting him run out of fuel on the track) yet sending him out when the pit-lane exit was still closed was a bad error (and let’s not get into the whole ‘driving off with the re-fueling rig still on the car’ thing). In my opinion the rules regarding re-fueling and pitting under safety car conditions need to be revised. Being punished for somebody else’s error is not something that is in spirit with the sport.
All told, it was a pretty exciting race, however due to having so many retirements meant that there wasn’t as much real racing and overtaking attempts as there should have been. Ferrari looked like they would come along and dominate the entire weekend, but after a dismal qualifying the race was full of mistakes from their drivers. Honda surprised most people in qualifying and could have been in-line for some decent points, but their race went downhill from lap one. The only people that had a decent weekend was McLaren, the only team to bring home both drivers.
I think this season is going to be the best ever, once all the nerves have settled down, and new cars are released. All teams are now under pressure to perform in Malaysia, but only time will tell who has the best package. After all, one down, seventeen to go.
crushed-core.com is the home of a 23 year-old photographer and self-confessed geek. He's not very good at 'about' blurbs. You can usually find him on the internet.
