Category Archives: General

Baked Butternut Squash

Posted on 2010-09-16 by pappp

bakedbutternut_sm.jpg
I discovered the recipe for the squash a couple years ago, and it is amazing. The entire procedure is: cut butternut squash in half, remove seeds, rub flesh with salt, sugar, pepper, and dried ginger, all to taste. Place in baking dish with 1” of water. Bake at 350F for about an hour. It is excellent. The chicken is more of the same, just rubbed with rosemary, pepper, oregano, garlic powder, olive oil… and some other things that were on hand, then tossed in the oven in another pan with the squash. Good seasonal food.

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T60p Repair

Posted on 2010-09-16 by pappp

I opened up my old T60p for some repairs the other night, just posting to share what I did now that I’m reasonably certain it worked. The objective of this project was to do something about the relatively high temperatures and annoying buzzing noise coming from the cooling system. This particular machine is on it’s third cooling assembly (the assembly was replaced twice under warranty), and based on comments on from other owners, thermal issues and rattling fans are endemic to the model, mostly thanks to a few poor design decisions.
The surgery:

  • * Oiled (I used BSB Speed Bearings Lube, which is probably Sililcone oil with some adulterants to make it Shear thinning) the fan assembly, basically following msb0b’s guide. The only major deviation is that instead of cutting the aluminized tape, I just used it as a hinge and folded back the jacket. I also note that there is some foam insulation tape on my heatsink assemby, presumably added in later manufactured asssemblies to help with vibrations.
  • * Bent (compound bend) the heatpipe to lower the GPU section about 2mm, as some of the folks in this thread suggest. Basically, I put some thermal paste on the GPU, and bent and reseated until the contact area was appropriate. I was a little afraid bending the heatpipe would harm it (efficiency wise), or crack it from metal fatigue, but nothing was damaged and the contact is better. This is a logical fix- those thermal pads never provide very good conductivity, particularly where they are reasonably thick.
  • * Replaced the CPU thermal compound and GPU thermal pad with Arctic Silver Ceramique (my favorite for almost all thermal-conductivity needs). I left the thermal pad on the north-bridge intact, as there don’t seem to be any major thermal issues with that component, and the pad over it wasn’t damaged.

Based on some cursory tests, the system is running cooler (Both overall and CPU-GPU delta) than it did even with a new cooling assembly. Idle, I’m seeing 43/41c (5-10 degree reduction), and a half-assed “Stress Test” running SupCom for a few minutes only produced temps in the low 80s, with the GPU about 5deg hotter than the CPU– my recollection is that the GPU tended to be in the high 90s under similar conditions, and the CPU in the mid 80s. The big win is on noise; the irritating rattle is gone, and the fan is at most a tiny bit louder than a new one, based on a procedure I should be able to replicate for free.

The wonderful thing about Thinkpads is that they are designed to be mostly user-serviceable (Lenovo cooperatively provides the service manuals as PDFs online, and even allows FRU orders), and they are very common machines, so there are lots of other people playing with them and sharing their experiences, making things like Linux support and after-market mods particularly well explored and documented. Even with the slight design issue, the T60p was a solid machine for 3.5 years, and I far prefer serviceable and working well to being unserviceable and being “slicker… until it dies”. Speaking of vendors of unserviceable hardware, I’m considering setting it up as a hackintosh (at least on one partition) just for fun when I get some time…

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Kim Stanley Robinson on …Reality

Posted on 2010-09-14 by pappp

This Polygraph interview with Kim Stanley Robinson is pretty fucking amazing. It provides a clear, well educated, intensely lucid world-view, and a solid conception of where we should be going as a society… which I happen to mostly agree with. I’m especially into his thoughts about the scientific community and the political process (not quite as glib as “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” but the idea is the same); I find the amount of high profile anti-intellectualism lately really terrifying (We had a vice president seriously running on the “Those experts don’t know what they’re talking about, look at my folksy wisdom” platform. Come on.) so a clear conception of how the scientific community should handle the situation is an intensely valuable thing. The text of the interview unfortunately also demonstrates the problem with the interface between the scientific community and society at large; it is rather challenging to read

I’m very found of KSR; I’ve read his magnum opus, The Mars trilogy about three times now, and it has seriously shaped the way I think about the world. I think the first time through was when I was about 9, but the repeats were much more recently, after I realized just how much the first reading had colored my own world-view. They aren’t so much about the future as they are about society and the environment, and where it is about the future it is all amazingly plausible, to the point that many of the near-future predictions have actually come to pass. There is a wonderful sort of grim optimism to the whole thing; running on the view that the world is not inherently a nice place, but we can collectively choose to make it so (or not). It isn’t a quick read; the story spans about 2 centuries, 20 some major characters, and 1700 pages, but it is (I really hate this phrase) a life changing read.

We need more KSRs and fewer Sara Palins. Can we elect this man to a position of power instead of the current selection? I’d vote for him.

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HPDL Displays

Posted on 2010-09-09 by pappp

I was fiddling with an old Logical PROMPRO-8 PROM programmer in the lab I teach in while waiting for one of the students to do something which required intervention, and noticed it had some really neat old character displays on it:
hpdl_sm.jpg
They are absolutely fucking captivating looking in person, in that “It isn’t clear what kind of light this is” sort of way, especially with the red filter lifted off so the dies are visible under the lenses. I was interested enough to closely investigate and make the unit go through some of it’s functions just to figure out what the displays are capible of, then asked the great google god to identify the design. I’m reasonably certian they are Hewlett-Packard HPDL HP-2416 displays (or one of their siblings), which are among the earliest single-die segmented LED displays, before the familiar (7- 14- or 16-) block arrangements became standard. Each package has four tiny 17 segment digits under individual epoxy bubble lenses, and an internal ASCII decoder, character generator, and memory, which should make them really fun and easy to interface. It looks like the division of HP that made the parts went to Aglilent when HP dismembered iteslf, and then was spun off as Avago with most of the other semiconductor buisness in 2005, although Litronix may have been making clones/second-source compatible parts in the 1970s as well.
…I sort of want to find some (which would mean NOS or pulls) to build a funky clock or RSS gadget or other useless status display, just to marvel at them. Sadly, it looks like that would be prohibitively expensive, as the later production drop in compatibles are “boring” 5×7 grids with similar capibilities, making originals exotic enough to be on the order of $20 a piece.

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Myrias Research Corporation

Posted on 2010-09-04 by pappp

myriaslogo_sm.jpg
The current incarnation of my unhealthy love of computer history is a mild fascination with Myrias Research Corporation (1984-1990), precipitated by seeing some of their marketing materials (now misplaced) in my advisor’s collection of old computing ephemera after finding a reference to some of their programming tools in my research.

Myrias was, roughly, a spinoff from the University of Alberta in the early 80s, right in middle of the golden age of supercomputers*, who made moderately interesting M68k-based parallel supercomputers. What I find really interesting is their focus on programming models and tools (You know, parallel programming tools, like that thing I’m working on for my masters’ thesis…), which they built in a neat POSIX-ish (POSIXy?) environment. Also catching my interst, like many of the supercomputing vendors at the time, they had bitchin’ industrial design (Go look at Tamiko Theil’s CM-1 design for Thinking Machines for the canonical example), using chassis that appear to be enormous granite-colored corian blocks with a 45deg clip on one corner. Their major lasting impact was in their parallelizing compiler technology, of which pieces apparently still persist in several modern commercial compilers. Their software designs also seem to persist beyond their code base, in that my original interest came from noticing some striking conceptual similarities between LLVM, which I am currently working with, and the G ISA virtual machine and tools from Myrias 20some years ago.

To collect them for my reference, and for others engaged in similar clicktrances, the online resources I am aware of are:
This flickr photoset of some marketing materials from one of the original team members.
This everything2 article by the same individual.
A number of scholarly publications 1, 2, 3, 4, which are extremely informative , but not visually interesting. There are also a number of boring application (”$Pet_app on the SPS-2”) papers to be found.
I’ve also come across some, mostly passing, mentions in the computer press from the late 80s, mostly via paywalled newspaper aggregatiors.

If anyone knows where I could find pictures and/or marketing materials, particularly chassis photos of an SPS-1 and/or SPS-2, that would be amazing.

* “The golden age of supercomputing” is one of those rough consensus terms, I take it to mean from the 1960s, when technology first got small and fast enough to make serious machines, until about 1994, when less radical designs based on commodity PC hardware caught up to and mostly destroyed the market for novel machines. Of course, no one I know was involved in precipitating this transition.

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Class Impressions: Fall ’10

Posted on 2010-08-31 by pappp

Another semester has begun, and it is thus time for my class impressions post. The chain to previous semesters’ before/after posts begins here. I have only the one class left toward my masters’ degree, plus working on the project, and teaching.

EE611: Deterministic Systems/ Zhang
This class is looking a lot like a warmed over version of the first 2/3 of controls, which I took several semesters ago as EE572 Digital Controls from Dr. Walcott. It took me about half the semester to get the hang of things in there, so another opportunity to solidify my understanding of systems manipulation isn’t a bad thing. The early indications are that the lectures are …discombobulating… rather than useful, but between the book, notes, and materials from last time I think I can handle it anyway. It doesn’t look to be unreasonably difficult, and the elastic grading policy puts a safety margin in place in case it turns out to be. Somewhat disappointingly, this class glosses over the modeling process too; I’d love to actually learn how to formally develop models of existing systems so the analysis/control techniques are actually useful, rather than just elaborate exercises in linear math.

EE281:Digital Logic Lab /Me (+Jeff Ashley)
Based on feedback from students and faculty, I seem to have the system down pretty well for running this lab, and actually do feel like I have a pretty good handle on it. With a few changes to the class to address problems that cropped up last time (no, you can NOT start that lab from 5 weeks ago that you never made up…), I think things should run pretty smoothly. Dr. Ashley has indicated he’ll be a little more hands off this semester, and I think I’m up to the greater autonomy. I’d like to make a few changes on the same scale as last time, and now that I have some of the nontechnical matters situated more to my liking (ex: my nice formal (work saving) grading scheme), the changes can be more material-oriented. Perhaps getting HD44780 character displays (nice, simple parallel protocol with good visual feedback) into one of the later labs, or some similar practical tools with good theoretical underpinnings. I have every expectation that I will be spending an absolutely obscene amount of time in the lab again, but I actually feel good about the whole thing. I really rather like teaching.

My research is starting to make decent progress, I’m optimistic about teaching, and the remaining class looks perfectly tolerable; it should be a good semester.

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New Laptop!

Posted on 2010-08-27 by pappp

My new laptop arrived thursday, and it is a beautiful thing.
t510t60p_sm.jpg
(It should be pretty apparent which one is the new one…)

It is a Lenovo ThinkPad T510 (4313 Chassis), with a Core i7 620M (2 cores at 2.66Ghz, Hyperthreaded to 4), 8GB of RAM, a 15.6” 1920×1080 LED Backlit screen, Nvidia Quadro NVS 3100M graphics, 500Gb 7200RPM HDD, and lots of doodads)

Like a good geek, the first two things I did, after booting it up to check that everything worked, were opening it up to poke around and upgrade the RAM (Like all OEMs, Lenovo WAY overcharge for RAM), and blowing away the included Windows Whatever(tm) install for an ArchLinux system (and a smaller partition with a …”fixed”… copy of Windows 7 for games and such).

It is tentatively named “Ahu” in keeping with my “Man made stone structures” naming scheme for full sized computers. (Current active machines are a Lenovo T60p named “Monolith” and a used, modified Dell Optiplex GX280 named “Dolmen”)

Just to keep them together:
Things I like:
* The screen is GEORGOUS, bright, good colors, and 1920×1080 is a whole lot of pixels. Way, Way better than the T60p, even when it was new.
* This thing is a powerhouse. Not “Mindblowing” fast, but close, and 8GB of RAM covers a multitude of software sins.
* nVidia graphics, simply because the nVidia drivers are a lot less of a hassle than the ATI ones under Linux.
* SD Slot – I have lots of SD-using devices, it seems to be the defacto standard, having one built in is super handy.
* Build quailty – It feels sturdy. Actually, even sturdier than the T60p, no squeaks, rattles, or flexing.
* Rounded edges – They screw with the classic Thinkpad aesthetics a little bit, but it means the angles where the palm rest has a sharp edge in your wrists are gone (except for one spot on the right where the latch sits).

Things I dont’ like:
* The textured, flush touchpad is TERRIBLE on first use. It is clumsy to use (different resistance pushing and pulling), feels bad, and doesn’t have recessed edges to put your finger against when scrolling. I’m one of those weirdos who actually likes touchpads, and the one in my T60p is excellent, so this is quite a disappointment. I seem to be acclimating, but it still isn’t as comfortable as it’s predecessor.
* The machine is bulky; If I could have a new 4:3@15” with decent (>1050 vertical lines) resolution I would have gone for that, but they simply don’t make them anymore. 16:9 is a stupid shape for computers. Unfortunately, all my stuff is sized for 4:3@15”, so despite my careful purchase of a matching sleeve, the damn thing doesn’t fit in some of my normal bags and accessories.
* There is a cutout in the palmrest for some part I don’t have, I think a pantone color calibration sensor? or possibly the fingerprint reader? with a blank cover in it. My fingerprint-reader-less T60p has a smooth palm rest with no slot, I was hoping for the same.
* No ThinkPad goodie bag. My T60p came with a variety of extra Trackpoint (eugh) nubs, some “security” (Torx) screws, and some other trivial accessories. It was a nice touch, that is now gone.
* Exposed optical eject button: This thing is so well designed it’s really noticeable that there is an oversight in that the eject button is placed where it is pressed when picking the laptop up by the sides.

Most of the gripes are incredibly minor, and I’m really, really pleased with the machine. I’m Currently in the process of taking it from “shiny new piece of hardware” to “home,” which takes a while for me. Most of the configuration is working well, even the parts I’m doing differently (trying to avoid tpb and use direct acpi or xfce features). Convienently, Arch just added a proper multilib repository (literally the day I got the machine), so none of the old 64 bit OS disadvantages are asserting themselves.

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23!

Posted on 2010-08-17 by pappp

Another year older and… roughly the same.
Last year’s birthday entry still holds, with some additional support: Now I KNOW I like teaching well enough to do it in the long term, and I have a “real” publication out the door based on my masters project (which is actually progressing, albeit slowly).
To put it simply, I’m still enjoying what I’m doing, I’m still being rewarded for doing things I enjoy, and I should be able to continue in such a state for the foreseeable future. That last step does, however, involve starting PhD applications, which is terrifying.

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Brauner

Posted on 2010-08-01 by pappp

I picked up a new and excellent bad habit from Vienna: The Brauner. Vienna is famous for it’s coffee, and Austria in general is more into their coffee than even the stereotypical French and Italian coffee cultures, meaning I got to indulge my excessive affection for coffee while I was there.
A Brauner (lit: “brown one”) is a shot of espresso, served with sweetener (usually sugar, sometimes chocolate) and cream (usually on the side), and a glass of still water. It is basically the perfect expression of coffee. In Viennese dining culture it is perfectly normal to have one after every meal… and for the most part, I did. The best way to go about consuming a Brauner is to splash cream in until it’s roughly 1/4 of the volume, stir, taste, and then adjust. If it’s a preternaturally perfect shot and good cream, it won’t need any sweetener, otherwise sweeten until it has the same creamy, rich, and slightly bitter aspect as good dark chocolate. Most cafes offer Kliner Brauner and Großer Brauner as separate items, for one and two shots respectively, although drinking a double with every meal would be a truly unmanageable amount of caffeine.
This is how they usually come at a cafe (already started in on that one before I thought to take a picture, sipped the crema off) :
brauner_sm.jpg
And this is what I’ve been having with breakfast almost every morning since I got back:
mybrauner_sm.jpg
I even went and bought some proper espresso spoons because I was afraid I was going to break something mixing in the little 2oz cups. Easy to make (If you already have espresso equipment), and very, very tasty.

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Summer Projects

Posted on 2010-08-01 by pappp

I haven’t been posting much lately, most of my time has been sucked up by a variety of summer projects, both personal and school related, and most of them haven’t been terribly externally interesting or photogenic.

Several of the projects derive from the research group inheriting a heap of hardware from the departure of the last member of UK’s Cluster Fluid Dynamics group, which we are currently in the process of sorting out. One part of the heap is 30 little Dell SX260s (cute li’l SFF Pentium 4 boxes from 2003 or so), and some associated server and network hardware. I’ve spent a couple afternoons building and configuring a portable (ish) cluster from the pile, and the result is PIK (Pentium/Intel Cluster in Kentucky, following our current naming scheme):
pikfront_sm.jpg
And check out my OCD wiring job:
pikback_sm.jpg
Unfortunately, six of the small nodes and one of the servers seem to be dead, all apparently due to bad capacitors… which is sadly entirely unsurprising on for hardware from around 2003. There is still a discussion if it would be worthwhile to replace the caps, it is apparently not too difficult on these motherboards.

On another front, I still haven’t managed to get my 500-some photos from Vienna sorted out; I think only a few of those will end up getting posted as they relate to other things — the urge to just shoot with a little digital and a large memory card creates a really unmanageable number of photos.

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