LevelsOfDetail

Finally got around to building Qian a PC of her own. Cobbled together pieces of my old P4 box (case, power supply), my newer desktop (my older monitor, 2GB of RAM [of which 1GB was inaccessible to 32-bit XP anyways]), and some peripherals she had for her laptop (keyboard / mouse), et voila, a $250 desktop (including tax!). And it runs pretty fast to boot, almost can't tell the difference w/ my desktop.

There were some new parts (little reviews for each):

• Intel Pentium E2180 Allendale chip (2.0 ghz)
  
  This is the new replacement for the Celeron. It's based on the same microarchitecture as the C2D, just with less L2 Cache. Definitely fast enough for non-gaming use.
  


• Intel DG35EC mATX G35 chipset mobo
  
  Main thing here was that it has everything I needed, including a DVI and HDMI output. This is a pretty complete board featuring the X3100 integrated GPU, ICH8 (which for some reason doesn't have XP 32-bit AHCI drivers?) and built in gigabit/sound. A little on the spendier side for motherboards these days ($100 off of newegg), and definitely not a OC'ers board, but that's exactly what I wanted. It comes back from standby very quickly (I'd say a second or so, feels like a Mac)
  


• Seagate 7200.10 250GB hard drive (3.0GBps SATA)
  
  This is pretty standard, though I see that they make them slimmer than they used to. Probably one has one platter.
  

The mATX case went into a recycled Lian Li Aluminum full ATX tower case. Which leaves for a very empty inside, especially with no extra PCI cards. This lets me keep the noise down by not plugging in any of the case fans. CPU seems to stay plenty cool with just CPU and power supply fan.

I was interested to see how power-hungry this minimal box would be. The other relevant part power-wise is the 430W Thermaltake power supply. It's not particularly quiet (two fans) nor efficient (not 80-plus). With all of it plugged in, my kill-a-watt tells me that the wattage from the socket is 70W at idle. That's higher than I would have liked, but it's fine for mostly-on-standby machine. My desktop with a Seasonic efficient power supply and C2D E6600 measured in at 110W idle, also higher than I expected.

I did the math to see how much this actually costs me. One watt of consumption left on 24/7 for a year comes out to about $1 on the electricity bill, at the SF standard 12 cents per KWh.

I'm still doing research to build on always-on home server. It looks like trying to get under 50W (ideally 40W) at idle will be the goal there. I know it can easily be done with a VIA board, but I'm not so sure of their Linux support.

I risk of starting to sound a little old, but it's amazing to think that you can almost buy a full pc for $300-400 these days. In 1992 dollars, that's about $200 (1992 is when I first started really caring about spending my own money to augment our home PC), and $200 maybe got you a new hard drive back then.

On a final note, I'm back down to one monitor again. Feels kind of cramped, and at the same time refreshingly simple. Dual monitors is nice, but always adds extra stress when managing windows. Maybe this will motivate me to resume my search for a new monitor.

I had another surge of motivation to switch back to FVWM, so I'm hacking away at my .fvwm2rc again.

One particularly useful trick I've come up with is to be able to map key combinations to focus specific application windows. This works even if I'm looking at a different desk. As I tend to only ever have one firefox window open, it's extremely handy to just be able to jump to it from anywhere.

DestroyFunc RaiseAndFocus
AddToFunc RaiseAndFocus
   + I Focus
   + I Raise

# Function to focus firefox if a window exists, otherwise launch firefox.
# firefox32 is my custom wrapper to run 32 bit firefox on a 
# x64 machine.
DestroyFunc FocusOrExecFirefox
AddToFunc FocusOrExecFirefox
+ I Next (Firefox) RaiseAndFocus
+ I TestRc (NoMatch) Exec exec firefox32

# Jump to specific applications. "4" is the modifier for the windows key.
Key f A 4 FocusOrExecFirefox
Key x A 4 Next (xterm, CurrentGlobalPage) RaiseAndFocus
# Jump to pidgin's chat window (not the buddy list window)
Key c A 4 Next (pidgin, !"Buddy List") RaiseAndFocus
Key v A 4 Next (vmware) RaiseAndFocus

Had a stupid problem with logging into Windows on my laptop for a while now. As soon as I finish entering my password and hit enter, the machine gets stuck at "Loading Personal Settings" for over a minute, with very little disk activity. I finally decided to try to fix it.

The most helpful bit of info I came across was a registry setting. Adding a DWORD at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ policies\ system\ verbosestatus

After adding the value, I saw that the delay was at the "reconnecting network drives" stage, which was a dead giveaway. After logging in, I checked My Computer and saw a mapped drive to a drive that was only available on the company network (not at home). Unmapped it, and now back to normal.

If there's something I've learned from work, it's to start small. At the beginning, use pieces that are available to you already. Build quick prototypes, and only work on the hard parts as you really need them.

I've spend a considerable amount of time working on blog systems, but in the exactly opposite manner. I worry a lot about what system to use (I've switched between MT, Textpattern, and Wordpress) and through each iteration, I don't even come close to using the full feature set. Also through each iteration, I constantly neglect to keep the blog engine up-to-date with respect to upstream releases and security fixes.

I've mostly given up on tagging and categorizing, because after staring at my analytics stats for a while, I realize that the vast majority of my organic traffic is from searches. I'm sure google can index my site much better than my tags can, or MT's search engine for that matter. If people really want to know all of what I say, they should just subscribe to the feed, but as there aren't too many subscribers as far as I can tell, there's no point optimizing for that as well.

So my new consideration is to minimize the effort needed for this blog as much as possible, by moving to a system that is mostly hands free. If I move to blogger, then I get a pretty good blog engine, enough customizability for me to add adsense and analytics (the only things I usually add anyways), and I don't have to worry about upgrades. Besides, if FSJ can succeed using blogspot, then there's no reason I should have to worry about anything more complex right?

Let's just hope there's a MT4 to blogger script...

The continuous onward march of technology benefits everyone right? Well, I thought so too, but recently I've run into a counter-example: wide-gamut monitors.

First let me tell you about why wide-gamut monitors suck.

For ages now, except in high-end scenarios, the color response of your desktop monitor has been assumed be effectively represented by the sRGB color space. (Actually, that was a little backwards... monitors existed before sRGB did, but the standard became widely accepted because it was easily displayed on most monitors and was a close match to the capabilities of all the monitors that mattered). The assumption of sRGB has many consequences. Most notable is that non-color-managed applications (i.e. most apps, which just send 24-bit RGB values to the framebuffer) assume that a particular color value is actually the value in the sRGB color space. These apps aren't actually aware that they output to sRGB, they just assume it.

Run the same app with a machine hooked up to a wide gamut monitor. Uh oh, now the assumption is false. And you can't do anything about it until the author of the app actually updates their code to use complex color management API.

If that wasn't bad enough, most of your desktop UI isn't color managed. Neither is the web. Sure Firefox 3 supports proper rendering of colorspace-tagged images, but that's just one app. Reboot into linux? Fail. You're slightly better off on a Mac, but life isn't perfect there too. You'll pretty much have to live inside color managed apps. Games? I don't know of any that are color managed. They're usually programmed to deliver bits to your frame buffer as fast as possible, so I'd be suprised that they'd want to interject a complex processing step in between to correct for colors.

Worse yet, it's not entirely clear that having wide-gamut is beneficial. Your software and graphics card and dvi interface are all 8 bits per channel. So you're distributing your 16.7 M color values over a wider gamut. Sure you can express more of the colors on the far ends, but you're also losing resolution in the middle. Which is more important? especially when sRGB is big enough for most printing gamuts anyways.

But it's too late. This feature has become a checkbox on all the latest monitor's feature lists.

I wouldn't care normally, I'd just wait until 10bit interfaces and gfx card and software caught up. Except that I'm in the market for a monitor. I was considering the Samsung 245T because of its good reviews. But it's wide gamut. Now I may have to go with the NEC 2470WNX which has the same panel but is not wide gamut. But it costs $100 more. So I'm paying more not to have the feature .Lame.

Had family in town so we went to Golden Gate Park. Managed to snag a few photos that turned out pretty good.

Click to see the entire set.