dreaMING of Fusion

Since everyone are talking about Live Earth and global warming recently, I have decided to check my personal power consumption. Other than my car, I guess the second most power consuming device is my PC. So I decided to measure how much power it consumes. Especially as I have recently discovered the cpufreqd that can adjust my Pentium 4 processor speed from 2.4GHz down to 300MHz. Unlike some hardware review sites where they could afford to buy good quality power meters like the Watts Up , all I have is just two multimeter laying around my toolbox and they can't even measure AC current. So, I also can't measure power as the method described in the article in TwistedMod . I has to create my own method to measure the current that goes into my PC. The circuit is as shown below: The resistor 5.1ohm, 5W was used because it is the only suitable resistor that is in my toolbox. Basically, any low resistance high power resistor should be suitable. The power dissipation of the resistor m...

An interesting and lively discussion thread has popped up at Ubuntu Forums with a title that is sure to invite a large reaction among the group of highly enthusiastic Ubuntu users in the forum: *deep breath* For the most unpopular opinion of any Ubuntu user, please click here. In summary, the original poster's opinion was that Ubuntu should be made closed-source so that programmers can make a lot money and improve their lives. He/She also said that by closing up Ubuntu, its quality will improve because paying more money will make things better. It is unfortunate that he/she has such opinion, which makes many other posters in the thread believe that he/she has very little understanding of the dynamics of open-source softwares. Later in the thread, he/she has indicated that he is still in college and he would wish that the software industry would be a huge money pot for everyone to join. So, I guess he/she can be forgiven for being less knowledgeable in the dynamics of the software i...

I just found out that the guys at Mono has hacked up a version of Linux clone of Microsoft's Silverlight that was just release a couple of months ago. They called it moonlight . Another interesting fact is that the it was done in just 21 days of intensive hack-a-thon ! Working on a project that uses.NET Framework 3.0, I find that the XAML and WPF is pretty interesting technology for GUI as it allows "declarative programming" where UI design is separated from coding. While some may argue that Qt's ui files and GTK's Glade already offers such capability, XAML seems more easily readable and could be manually edited with notepad to create pretty powerful effects without a designer tool. It would be interesting to monitor the progress of this project and also the future of Silverlight, if it will revolutionize the Web as claimed by Microsoft. Another interesting component in .NET Framework 3.0 that I would really like to see on Linux is Windows Cardspace which provide...

My colleague recently introduced me to a little flash game call Desktop Tower Defence . At first look, it seems to be a pretty simple game. Just place the defence towers and shoot down the creepy little creatures that tries to travel across the desktop area. After one round, I got hooked. If you just google for Desktop Tower Defence, you will realize how many people got addicted over this simple flash game. Usually, I'll just pass after playing most online flash games for 10-15 minutes but this got me hooked for hours and hours for days! It is challenging, fun and somewhat stress relieving! Try it out. After one week, I have finally completed the Hard level with 4689 points! Hint: Be familiar with the keyboard shortcuts in the instruction section. You will need it when action heats up!

Finally I have installed Kubuntu Feisty Fawn! But I have to admit that the journey was not exactly smooth. Initially, as I do not have a really reliable connection, I have downloaded the Alternate CD and tried to execute the cdromupgrade script. However, I found that it needs gksu which it not installed. Trying to cheat it. I changed that to kdesu and it successfully launched the Distribution Upgrade tool, but quickly failed due to a bug I discovered in DistUpgradeViewKDE.py and I submitted a bug report . Next, I tried a new attempt using the new Kubuntu Distribution upgrade tool as described here . But it failed during the "Modifying Software Channels" stage due to some gzip error. After some googling, I found that I could modify the /etc/apt/source.list to point to mirrors instead of the official source at http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/. To my disappointment, there are no mirrors in Malaysia. So I looked for mirrors in Asia. As I thought Thailand would be the closest nei...

I have just rediscovered KTorrent and I find it as a great alternative compared to more mainstream Bittorrent clients. Previously, I was using Azureus as it is feature packed and portable. I have been using it for a couple of years when Windows was still my primay OS and Linux was mainly for fun. It has I have tried KTorrent earlier but it was not stable has less features. After installing Kubuntu, I tried to reinstall Azureus and it worked with gcj/gij implementation of JAVA but it was somewhat slow and unreliable. But I was a little lazy to download real Java runtime from Sun. So I decided to try the KTorrent that is part of default installtion. It is KTorrent 2.1 and 10 minutes later... I loved it. It has all the feature that I need from a Bittorrent client such as: PeerGuardian IP blocking Protocol Encryption DHT, which is compatible with mainline version Web UI and it's UI is more responsive that Azureus So, if you are using KDE, try it out!

I have just bought a new Caviar SE 250GB EIDE harddisk. I am quite satisfied with it. It run quite and cool just as advertised at it's website . hddtemp shows 34°C when it is under light loading while my room temperature is 30°C: $ hddtemp /dev/hda /dev/hda: WDC WD2500JB-55REA0: 34°C It is currently cooled with a standard 5cm case fan. Even without the fan it seldom reaches 40°C. Anyway, these are some performance numbers which is pretty average and definitely nothing near high performance drives like those 10,000 rpm Raptors $ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 174 MB in 3.03 seconds = 57.48 MB/sec $ sudo hdparm -T /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 1172 MB in 2.00 seconds = 585.58 MB/sec BTW, I have now switch to Kubuntu (yeap, I prefer KDE compared to gnome). I have been using many different distros in the past from Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake, Red Hat 9.1, openSUSE 10.0, then SUSE 10.1. All of them are uses Red Hat/RPM based package management. ...