I bought an OCZ-520ADJ SLI 520W power supply in March, 2006. The power supply had a three year warranty – over the last few months, one of the fans inside has been failing. It’s pretty noisy and isn’t spinning very well; the fan will die completely soon if it’s like any other fan that I’ve seen go through this.
Anyways, I requested an RMA with about a month left on my warranty. They asked me to send it in, I asked if I could get them to cross ship it so I wouldn’t have to deal with a long period of downtime. They did. The replacement just showed up today – it’s an OCZ700MXSP. Wow!
So I traded the ability to adjust the voltages of the power supply (that I never used) for modularity and a higher power rating (my old power supply technically didn’t have enough amps on the +12v line for my Nvidia GTX 260). I have yet to install it, but it looks promising. Thanks OCZ!
It got up to 54 today, so Nick Pegg and I decided to go out for a ride. Nick’s got a scooter, I’ve got a 250 Kawasaki Ninja. After I shoveled the ice out of our steep driveway, we brought ‘em out of the basement. We rode around town for the most part, and I left my blinker on a couple of times which prompted Nick to pull over thinking I was in distress (oops!) I haven’t ridden since the end of November, so it was a blast. It’s not supposed to be this warm until next Friday, but I’ll probably take it out again then.
I got a new jacket as a birthday present – my original jacket is a mesh jacket with a waterproof / wind breaker insert. Riding in the original jacket under 70 was chilly, and under 60 was downright freezing. The new jacket is a textile jacket, and it goes further down my body – it’s made for riding in cooler weather, it’s supposed to be more water proof. Well, riding around town with Nick, my jacket kept me really warm (but never too warm). When I went out on the highway, my feet / butt were getting really cold since my shoes and jeans weren’t doing much for me, but my chest and arms were really warm. Towards the end of the highway ride, I could feel my arms cooling down a bit – this was my first time with the new jacket and I didn’t spend much time putting it on and adjusting it so I’m going to chalk it up to that.
Anyways, it was a good ride.
I’ve been learning OpenGL and the SDL over the last few weeks so I can build the visualizer for the Missouri S&T ACM MegaMiner AI tournament. It’s interesting, but not as conceptually interesting as my foray into device drivers / kernel modification / rootkits. In practice though, I am able to see the results of my work. With the basic rootkits, I could see a process disappear from the task manager or get a response to a packet from code I had embedded into the Windows kernel, but the feedback wasn’t nearly as fun to look at. I wrote a 3D Sierpinski Gasket generator, then I wrote a really basic simulation of a ball bouncing – even though they’re simple projects, the end results are rewarding and keep driving me to do more.
I’ve been following Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach Using OpenGL (4th Edition)
pretty closely – I feel like I’ve learned a lot. It covers everything from the just getting started, to the conceptual stuff, to the nitty gritty math details, to the OpenGL API usage – it’s pretty nice. I remember the basics of the linear algebra, and I’m seeing a lot of familiar terms from Linear Algebra class… but this book brought it all together. Now a lot of the transformations make sense… things like projections, rotations, etc.
This week Berto and I are going to start working on one of my project ideas. I don’t want to go into great lengths about it since all we have is a basic idea and some prototype code I wrote over break, but it deals with stock markets, automation, and genetic programming. It will be interesting to see how far we get with it.
I was desperately in need of a new drive, so I bit on another Seagate 1.5tb drive. My old drive was making weird noises and had seek/read/write measurements at about 2x (so half for read/write) that of my current storage drives. What made it worse was that it was my primary drive (Apps, Windows, etc).
The new Seagate drive seems to be holding up fine now. It came with revision SD17 firmware on it, and Windows installed without any hitches without updating the firmware. I updated the firmware to SD1A after the Windows install so I wouldn’t have to deal with it in the future, and so far everything is going well. I’m settled in on the new drive, but I’m keeping the old drive around just in case…
I ran into a problem with Google Reader. I was working on another WordPress installation for my ACM chapter (http://acm.mst.edu/) – I wanted to have a calendar with our upcoming meetings on it. The plugin that did the closest thing to what I wanted was Event Calendar 3, but it doesn’t do it quite how I wanted the ACM site’s calendar to behave. It has the ability to put future events on the calendar. But all calendar events are tied to posts on the site. I don’t really want to make a post for every meeting / activity we will be having and have those posts show up on the main page all at the same time. Fine – there is an option in the plugin to hide posts that are in the “Event” category. The problem with that is that I’d have to have two posts for every meeting – one that contains the calendar event, and another that is published later that is our advertisement for the meeting. Having two posts would mean a lot of duplication of content and effort (calendar event posts still need information about the event, but the real meat of the information ends up being on the announcement/advertisement pages). I tried adding posts that would be published in the future so that the events would show on the calendar, but the posts wouldn’t show on the site until the publish date – no go.
What I eventually ended up doing was adding the “The Future is Now” plugin so that all posts are published regardless of their publish date. Then I modified my theme to not show posts on the main page that have publish dates in the future. Ok, great. I added all of the future dated posts for the upcoming ACM meetings, and it was working like a charm. Then I clicked my live bookmark in Firefox – all of the future dated posts were in the feed! I quickly realized my error and went in and edited WordPress’ feed functions to not show items that are in the future. My live bookmark reflected this change.
The next morning, I got an email from another officer explaining that all of the future posts were on the feed. I checked my live bookmark again, and it had the correct entries. I eventually figured out he was using Google Reader. Welp. Google Reader cached all of the feed entries as soon as they went up. Apparently Google Reader caches feeds then never uncaches them (this is due to a shortcoming in the Atom/RSS specifications apparently – if a post disappears, Google has no way of knowing if it just fell out of range, or if the post was deleted). So now anyone that uses Google Reader gets an RSS feed full of future events – the info isn’t private (all of the pages are accessible through the calendar anyways) – it kind of defeats the purpose of a feed though. Now when new posts are added to the feed, they’ll be added below the future dated items – essentially hiding them from the user that checks the top of the list for new entries.
I put in a request to Google to purge the cache – we’ll see if that gets anywhere.
Thought I’d post up some random interests… I don’t remember why I was going to do this, I got distracted by another Seagate post on SlickDeals… then I came back to this.
Technical interests: machine learning, genetic programming, 3D graphics, automation, and parallel computing.
Non-Technical interests: travel, sleep, motorcycles, cooking
I recently purchased a 1.5 TB Seagate drive to move onto. Big mistake. I had read that the drive had a tendency to freeze up completely for periods of time, but that a firmware fix had been released for it. Specifically, SD17 was the bad one, and upgrading to SD1A was the path to follow. It’s hard to get the firmware from Seagate directly, so I had to get it from Newegg’s page for the drive. I flashed the new SD1A firmware onto the drive then attempted to install Vista. It hung before there was any UI to interact with. I tried again, left for half an hour and came back and it was ready for me. I had to wait a few minutes after each UI interaction before anything happened, and the installation failed at 30% (the computer froze up completely). I booted back into my old Windows install and tried a file transfer to the 1.5 TB drive. Things went smoothly for a few minutes, then the entire computer froze. This happened several times in a row, and it even happened a few times without any file transfers going on.
What’s up with companies these days thinking it is OK to release products that don’t work? Now I get to ship the drive back to TigerDirect at my expense and wait for a refund so I can hopefully find another good hard drive deal on a more reliable drive/brand. There’s no way this should have made it through QA – it’s ridiculous.