The specs for my first machine seem quite mundane compared with what exists today, but this machine was totally awesome for the time. As this was my college computer, my parents helped out with it some, but I also paid for a good deal of it from summer jobs and savings – at this time in my life, building a computer from scratch and having it work well was my pride and joy:

• Tyan Titan ATX S1668 motherboard
• Pentium Pro 200Mhz, with 256kb onboard cache
• 64MB of ECC EDO RAM
• Mylex dual channel fast SCSI-2 card (2x 20MB/sec channels)
• Micropolis 4GB Tomahawk 7200RPM hard disk
• SCSI CD-ROM
• Matrox Millenium 8MB video card
• Iiyama 17″ trinitron (Sony tube) monitor

To give you an idea of what the computer options out there were in the summer of 1997, the Pentium II had just come out, and there were very few good multiprocessor motherboards available and it had a huge price premium because of it’s newness. The PII also ran it’s cache at half the processor speed, whereas the Pentium Pro ran it at the full speed, so the PPro 200Mhz was often faster in cache-intensive tasks than a comparable PII 233Mhz.

I bought this machine for running Linux, and so the Pentium Pro’s poor 16 bit performance that pushed Windows 95/98 users away from it wasn’t a concern for me. The original Pentium was still out there, but the price/performance ratio wasn’t as good as the Pentium Pro, and the motherboard chipsets
that existed for it had tradeoffs in terms of supported memory or SMP capabilities.

The peripheral devices I had were also a bit exotic. When I bought it, I had no idea that Micropolis had just gone under, so the warranty on my hard disk was pretty much moot at time of purchase. On the upside, I never had trouble with it, and it was very fast compared to the IDE disks on the market, which had generally horrible performance on a multitasking operating system.

The Matrox Millenium was probably the part I was most proud of. It was fast, well supported by X11, and had 8MB of VRAM. This was a time before 3D acceleration was common – the first functional 3D card, the 3dfx Voodoo 1 was available about this time, and only had 4MB of RAM split between framebuffer and texture storage (some manufacturers made 6MB Voodoo 1 cards with 4MB of texture storage – those were hot items). The Millenium was able to run the Iiyama monitor at 1600×1200 resolution, which frankly was fuzzy and tiny, but at the time I didn’t mind much – having a lot of pixels meant a lot of xterms on screen. This card cost about $400 at the time, and was the most I’ve ever spent on a video card.

When I first assembled that machine, I only had enough money for one processor – back them a 200Mhz Pentium Pro ran about $500. In the summer of 1998 (thus the 10 years in the title), I had enough money to buy another Pentium Pro – by this time the PII was established as the dominant processor architecture, and the prices on a PPro had dropped to more reasonable levels. I was running Redhat Linux at the time, and if you compiled it from source, the 1.3 kernel series finally had somewhat decent SMP performance rather than single lock over all the kernel.

Later on, when the Pentium Pro was nearly obsolete I bought two 1MB cache processors, which were a slight performance boost, and upgraded the RAM to 256MB. I still have most of the parts to this machine lying around somewhere.

The multiprocessor boost was much more noticeable back then – on a single processor system, you’d hit the “performance wall” when running more than one process. This was mainly due to the fact that most systems would only interrupt the running process 100 times a second or so (see discussions of setting the “hertz” in the linux kernel), which resulted in a degradation perceived performance. Having a second processor lessened this to a great deal – once you were running a few processes, it didn’t feel like you hit as much of a wall – performance tended to degrade more gracefully. Things would get slower but they wouldn’t chug.

This machine was my main machine for all of college – eventually I bought a laptop, but for the most part I didn’t really need more. Having that second processor extended the life of the machine to nearly 6 years. For this reason, I’m thinking a lot of the current crop of multicore computers are going to easily last 5-7 years (especially the AMD64 processor architecture ones with 4+ GB of memory support), much longer than the 3-5 year lifecycle that their single processor predecessors had.

That computer was a fun adventure, and a total joy to cut my computer building teeth on. I kinda miss it.

Customers, non-immediate relations, random people I meet…

Amy just got a birthday card addressed to “Amy and Josh”.

Why “Josh”? Is there something about that name that makes people apply it to me?

Why is it ALWAYS “Josh”, and not “Steve” or “Greg”?

Do I look like a Josh? Are there other computer people named Josh out there?

Do I transmit secret “Josh waves” that make people think that’s my name?

It’s a mystery to me…

This time around, I’m riding the bike for 25 minutes (works out to about 7-7.5 miles) while watching episodes of Stargate SG-1 – I got the entire series from Amazon for half off during a recent sale. Generally I ride for 50 minutes (2 episodes) on evenings that I’m home, and so far we’re to episode 17 or so.

As for the diet part, we’ve been eating at home more frequently, which is a good thing from both a financial and health perspective.

I haven’t lost a whole lot of weight yet – whenever I start exercising, I lose fat and gain muscle for a while. My end goal is going to be to get to somewhere close to where I was in college, when I went to the gym every day of the week before my first 11AM class.

This Phoenix Requiem webcomic totally got me (ask Lucas – me being an idiot gave him quite a laugh). Because it was so geeky and because the person who writes it is in New Zealand with a time zone difference, when the update arrived last night I wasn’t on-guard against it.

Man, I can’t wait to read Take Control of Quilting Hawaii and Stuffing It Topographically.

I will admit that a Legend of Zelda Movie would probably sell a whole lot of tickets, although this is so obviously fake. Can’t be as bad as Super Mario Brothers!

You know someone is going to have to add the Tauren Marine back into the final version of Starcraft 2.

Get you daily fill of Mac OS9 Hints.

On an unrelated note, I also updated this blog to Wordpress 2.5, which hopefully won’t be a joke

Men

• Just themselves: 9
• In a public situation with others: 3
• In formal wedding attire: 2
• With spouse: 2
• With pet: 1
• “Artistic rendition”: 1

Women

• With spouse: 2
• In formal wedding attire: 1
• In formal wedding attire with spouse: 1
• Just themselves: 1
• With pet: 1
• Obviously photoshopped: 1
• Landscape photo with nobody in it: 1

What I can gather from this is that if you’re male, you’re much more likely to put a picture of your manly bod or something that portrays you as being cool or social as your profile picture.

If you’re female, you’re likely to put up a picture that indicates that you’re “taken” (if that’s the case). On the whole the women put up more a more diverse, creative set of pictures.

This analysis is probably skewed by my particular data set, but it’s just interesting nonetheless.

This swimming contraption looks pretty neat – basically a rubber band that holds you back so you can swim in place. For the price I’d definitely give it a shot – if we had a pool.

I bought a new chair – it was a great deal after being on sale and having a 20% off coupon. After a few days of use, I’m quite happy with it.

And now a moment of surreal public television.

An automatic screen cleaner for your computer. Shows one of the only good uses of Flash outside of tower defense games and StrongBad.

Additionally, you’ll notice that I added last.fm support to the blog. The actual program (audioscrobber) is a bit buggy and sometimes crashes or goes into a processor sucking loop, and still won’t scrobble songs I play on my iPod, but other than that it works pretty well. I’m in the middle of a multi-day random music binge, which should explain the eclectic nature of my playlist.

I’d write more, but work calls…

It’s a step up from our previous table, which belonged to my parents for about 10 years before I inherited it. My Grandmother got that one about 6 months ago, and we’ve been using a plastic folding table for a while.

Needless to say, this is quite the improvement. Lionel think’s its a bit strange, as he’s not used to being able to look up through the table at us while we’re eating.

Some of the games I’ve been playing:

Desktop Tower Defense

A “Tower Defense” Flash game – you set up a bunch of towers that shoot at the bad guys who are trying to get from one side of the board to the other. Relies greatly on making a maze to hold up the enemies, and attack them while they’re being restrained.

Flash Element TD

A similar game to the one above, but the path is fixed. There’s also a neat interest mechanic, and your score is based on the amount of gold you have, so to get a high score, you should build as few towers as possible to get the job done.

No Gravity

This is a PSP homebrew (that is, it runs on all PSP’s that have firmware 1.5 or one of the newer Dark~Alex open edition firmwares) 3D space shooter game. You fly around in space, shooting at other ships, picking up stuff, etc. It’s quite fun, and very polished, with lots of different weapons and great graphics.

So yeah, I hope you waste a few hours playing these – just don’t blame me!

Well, this time, I went after a customer visit on Friday, to a different location than I usually go to. I got processed fairly quickly and got in a chair – sometimes that’s a problem because my heart rate can be under 50bpm at times (due to genetic and exercise factors). The guy helping me was nice, but he… well, he had shaky hands, possibly because he was nervous or maybe because he was older – needless to say, that was about the last thing in the world you want to deal with when someone is going to stab a needle into your vein.

It took him a while to get the needle in me, but once it was in, the time went quickly – I usually fill the bag in short order. Then came the tubes that they use to check your blood to make sure you don’t have any diseases… that took a long time.

Right before the last tube, I passed out. What happened after that, I’m still fuzzy about.

I know I sometimes get light headed when I give blood – that’s always been a problem of mine that I got from my mother – she’s passed out by having her legs crossed weird before. When I got really sick back in 2001, they did some blood tests on me, and I almost fell out of the chair.

It was surreal – one second I was doing fine, the next, I’m coming to in pain and with blood all over me. The needle was out of my arm, but apparently they managed to pull the tube out, leaving the needle in me, or there was blood still in the part of the tube before the clamp, because all that blood had managed to spray up and down the left side of my shirt and pants. My calves, chest, and back muscles all hurt – after a few seconds I knew it was surface muscle pain (like if you cough too hard or fall on your back), which made me rule out having a heart attack or other internal problem.

At this point, they had me pump my legs to get blood moving. I started feeling better so they excused me to the waiting area, where I drank a bunch of free juice and ate snacks. I ended up sitting at the same table as a very nice person who works for a Tucson city council member – go figure.

I got two T-shirts out of the experience (they’re good to run in). The blood came out of the shirt I was wearing (thanks Mom!), but the pants didn’t fare as well – it came out of the flat parts, but the edges that had multiple layers of fabric are still slightly stained.

I’ll probably give again, but next time I think I’m going to specify that I want someone who can poke me fast and get it over with.

So…

1. I created a twitter box for Hemingway’s Bottombar. I did this by loading Alex King’s Twitter-tools plugin, and making a small hemingway block for that – here’s the code:

<h2>Twitter</h2>
<ul class="twitter">
< ?php aktt_sidebar_tweets(); ?>
</ul>

Put that in a file in your wp-content/themes/hemingway/blocks/ folder, and then reload the Hemingway Options, and you will be given the opportunity to add it as a block, then drag it wherever you want.

2. I have the number of Akismet blocked spam messages in the footer. The standard counter uses a bunch of div’s and span’s to make a nice HTML box, but I just wanted the number. This function gets you just that number:

function akismet_counter_nohtml() {
  echo number_format(get_option('akismet_spam_count'));
}

Add that to the end of the wp-content/plugins/akismet/akismet.php file, and then put some code in the footer like this:

 <a href="http://akismet.com/">Akismet</a> has removed < ?php akismet_counter_nohtml(); ?> spam messages so far.

3. Flickr integration is built into Hemingway. All you have to do is install the FlickrRSS plugin, and it just works. I’m using 9 square images, with nothing before and after each image, and it makes a nice box.

MarsEdit makes it very easy for me to posting multiple weblogs, safe drafts, etc.

I also dug out my old copy of iListen, which lets me dictate directly into any text window on my Mac. This never worked that well on my older PowerBook because it just wasn’t fast enough and but on the new iMac it works great. I had to upgrade it to version 1.7 which is a universal binary, but well worth it.

Overall, the new system works fairly well. I’ll probably refine it in the coming days and weeks. His

What I’ve been doing every other morning is loading up an episode on the TV and watching it while running on the treadmill. Each show is about 24 minutes, which is enough time to get up to quite a sweat. This morning I did a mile and a quarter at five miles an hour then slowed down to three miles hour, then did another quarter mile at six. My biggest problem previously when running was that I focused too much on my physical condition and would wimp out after 15-16 minutes.

The best thing about anime is that it is subtitled. When I watch it I don’t necessarily have to listened to the audio, which is very important when you’re pounding away on a noisy treadmill. I would assume you to do the same thing with other subtitled video.

I’m going to see how well this works – so far I’ve been very happy with my progress.

Here’s the thing – the whole game is “find somewhere to hide behind, then wait until someone goes out into the open, then shoot them”. In an FPS, that’s called camping, which is almost universally reviled by most game player. Everyone has a gun with a fairly high rate of fire, so trying to reposition is suicide most of the time.

I think I’d prefer the game if it was like this:

1. A very thick, overgrown field, with a lot more cover.
2. All the weapons can fire a single shot before being manually recocked, but they’re more accurate weapons

This turns the game into a skill game, not a “Camp, and wait for other people to be dumbasses” game. In the revised game, you can run out into the open, and if someone is prepared, they can shoot at you, and are more likely to hit you. You can start using strategy – for example, someone could run a fake across the field, drawing everyones fire, which would let other people run for new places while the opposing team cocked their guns. Because there was more cover, it would be safer to move around, instead of just camping.

Addendum:
In talking this over with Amy, she pointed out that a game like I described wouldn’t go through 1,000’s of paintballs, lowering the amount of profit made off of paint. Ah, economics, making everything suck more.

I think I have some occasional compulsion about cleaning – sometimes it hits and I can’t stop. For example, Amy’s relatives from out of state came over, and our house was a mess, and had been for months. This was mainly because of a water leak we had in the front bedroom, which necessitated removing the carpet and everything else from the room in order to fix the problem. So, as there was a bunch of boxes and crap in the hallways, we didn’t clean for a while.

So, two fridays ago the house was finally back together – the carpet got replaced, and we had no reason not to clean up. In the days that followed, Amy did a lot of the house, while I dealt with taxes and cleaned the toilets, hung pictures, and organized and cleaned my office which was frankly a sty. I had paper everywhere, computer parts and other random stuff throughout. Now it’s clean, and I like it so much better – I feel like I can get work done faster now that there’s order. The weird thing is that until I was done, I had monomania – I would pick something up, and until it was in the right place, I couldn’t put it down. Unfortunately, sometimes “the right place” for things was after doing work on them, which I had to stop myself from doing when the work was paperwork that would take a while to do.

Order energizes me, and lets me be sure of myself. I still have a lot of the previously mentioned paperwork in piles on my desk, but at least it’s in slightly more order than before.

I’m still working through the broken bits. I swapped the theme with the Hemingway theme, and it doesn’t seem to like my Blogroll, so that’s disabled.

Next up is the Flickr plugin, and various other things. I think I’ll reskin the site when I have time…

I’m happy with how bright they are – they have 9 white LED’s on them, and are powered by 3 AAA batteries, which clip into a holder that wires them in series. The majority of the weight is in the batteries, but even with them installed it’s a very light unit.

I wanted to see how long they would run, so… here’s that math:

1 AAA battery alkaline battery = 1.5V, 1.25AH (from http://www.pacificsites.com/~brooke/batt.shtml)

3*AAA = 4.5V, 1.25AH, thus 5.625WH

9 LED flashlight uses 0.28A (280 milliamperes) continuous (as per my measurements), or 1.26W at 4.5V

5.625WH/1.26W = 4.464 hours (I could have left all the measurements in amps)

Assuming the LED’s will light for 80% of the life of the battery…

4.464*0.8 = 3.57 hours runtime.

Pretty good for a cheap little $4 flashlight, although the vendor claims they will run for 24 hours. If I knew the cutoff voltage for the LED unit, and at what point the batteries would drop below that voltage, I could probably get a better estimate of the total runtime.

Raising the minimum wage put her in a different wage category, which makes her ineligible for other state (basically, you have to be below the poverty line to get anything, and spend all your money until you can get them).

So, some people like my dad are trying to change this issue for people like Sarah. There’s an article in todays Tucson Citizen about the issue, which I recommend you read.

Probably about 2cm or so of snow. Hopefully some of our plants will survive this. Amy said it tasted good and ate a cup.