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August 23, 2006

GTM -8:00

Sea Otter

2:23 PM

A snapshot of a postcard I've bought.

Otter

descriptions on the back of the postcard:
The sea otter is a playful animal that eats, sleeps, mates, and gives birth at sea. It feeds on abalone, sea urchins, crabs, mussels, and fish. When diving for food, it will bring up a small rock, place it on its chest and crack shells against it. Protective of her young, the female will tuck her pup under a foreleg and dive for safety. Photographer-F.Sturart Westmorland

Dual Core or Not?

2:13 PM

Recently having a chance to play with computers with dual core. So is it really worth hunting for dual core blindly? I'll say yes and no.

Yes - if you do a lot of cpu crunching (chances is unlikely for normal users)

No - even if you do a lot of cpu crunching... if the process involve a lot of disk IO (data reading and writing from hard disk), the effectiveness of dual core is not noticable at all since disk IO is always too slow comparing to cpu crunching. You might as well put the money to get urself more memory instead.

It's interesting intel promote their new CPU saying it's way faster than single core when multi-tasking. Yes, maybe in some certain scenarios, but no, it's not as great as it claims for normal usage. The hard disk technology is way behind in terms of performance improvement over the years. Although the 320GB disks is pretty common nowadays, but the read and write time is still the same. Maybe they should come up with some new ideas to develop new fast storage devices that supports "dual read/write" to match up the "parallel tasking" scheme and faster read/write speed.

Anyway, let me summarize all the craps above into 8 words: "dual core is an asset, but not necessary."

August 8, 2006

GTM -8:00

bunny!

5:20 PM

a friend sent me this cute little bunny pic

Computer Problems
(Don't read it if you don't like reading wordsssss)

5:13 PM

so here's the story...

a week ago, my xc cube's usb got toasted, so i sent it back to the shop to get it fix... however it gonna take quite awhile (a month? 2 months? don't know yet).

so now i'm using my mom's computer. Since the comp is from the P3 generation, it lacks usb2. My previous attempts to install a usb2 PCI card failed (a year ago?) due to suspected motherboard hardware clashes.

also another problem is the constant system froze after the computer starts up. Since i'm a CS guy, it is easy to distinguish that it is not a software clash. So i suspect it's hardware problem. The possibilities are:
1. power supply (PSU) getting old and not working efficiently
2. after monitor the hardware temperatures, it is possible that the hard disks are too hot which causes system hanging.
3. again, motherboard hardware clash

so i decided to give the poor old comp a big big fix and solve and reinstall and hardware swapping and adding, etc.

1. i swapped the loud 300W psu with an older 250W psu which now the computer runs WAY MORE quieter (gee, i wonder how the psu manufacture manage to make such a loud 300W psu, which you can hear the fan running with 2 doors in between you and the computer)

2. added another stick of old ram now at 256 + 256 + 128 =)

3. added a cd-rw rom

4. debug the AGP and 5x PCI slots and see which one's conflicting...
a) the sound card can't be placed on the first slot else it will clash the AGP display card
b) the network card can't be placed on the 5th slot else it will clash anything on the 3rd and 4th slot
c) the usb2 pci card can only be placed on the 3rd slot
d) the parallel port pci card cannot be placed on the 4th and 5th slot.
if the above 4 conditions are not met, the system will hang after a random period of time within 1 hr. so this is why it took me 2 days to debug.

5. o ya, I now finally successfully manage to add the usb2 pci card which I've bought a year ago. YEAH, I HAVE USB2 BACK =D

If any more problem creeps up, i'll just go and upgrade the motherboard and get a new cpu. But anyway, hope the system won't die b4 my xc cube comes back. I miss "u" so much.

July 23, 2006

GTM -8:00

My Days Lately...

10:07 PM

the heat and humidity have been driving me crazy lately.... never've been so hot ever since I live here in Vancouver...

so here's what i did lately to avoid the heat...
1. hide in office (my part-time job) for AC
2. went to Whistler yesterday (AC in car, cooler @ higher altitude)
3. hide in shopping malls (AC AC AC AC AC)
4. just bought a mini oscillating fan (Bay, $39.99) to blow blow blow blow blow
5. coke~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Rainbow Beach @ Alta Lake in Whistler. The baby is enjoying his milk in the shade. It's really really comfortable sitting under the shade. The wind, the lower temp, the warm lake water all makes it an ideal place for escaping from the heat.

Think it's a bit too pricy and it's not powerful enough to blow any further than 3 feet... but o well. (may refund it if i can find more reasons not liking it)

Found a good place to shop today --> Lougheed Town Centre in Coquitlam (yes, i haven't been to coquitlam for at least 4 years). On North Road 2 blocks north of Lougheed Highway. It's almost twice the size of Oakridge mall and most important of all, there are way less ppl than Metrotown or Oakridge or Richmond, and even lesser ppl than Park Royal.

July 12, 2006

GTM -8:00

Resume ReDesigning

1:13 AM

the original design

the original resume from a year ago was pretty crowded looking... and now with quite a number of newly added stuff, it turned out too heavy looking. So i spent the night graphic designing my resume, and dada~~~ the new even crowded yet less heavy looking version ^^ (o ya, i have to take the UBC co-op header away)

the new design

I'm pretty satisfied with the new design...
1. the name on the header looks like printed using a chop
2. a combination of black grey and white, my expertise and favourite :D
3. the boxes and border lines are carefully adjusted to make it look more organized and clean. If you squint at the tiny pic, you'll realize it's not small boxes inside big boxes.
4. *impressed impressed* i'm such a graphic designer~

May 3, 2006

GTM -8:00

March of the Penguins

6:40 PM

Definitely worth watching.

ExplorerXP

12:41 AM

Are you being annoyed by your window explorer starting up in My Documents everytime you open it up?
Or are you being annoyed you can't open multiple folders in one window explorer window?

kk, here's something you can try. ExplorerXP.

FEATURES

Tabs browsing for opening multiple folders

Remembers the folders you opened last time

Drag and Drop just like what explorer does.

Same right click menu

Create your groups of folders

Tile / Cascade multiple windows

Customize your shortcut keys

Multiple file rename (eg. testfilexxx.jpg where it will replace the xxx with sorted numbers).

As fast as window explorer (but you may want to turn off the "Display Folder Size" option first)

INFO
Name : ExplorerXP (now version 1.07)
Plateform : Win2000/XP
License : Free non-commercial use
Install Size : 1MB
Download : http://www.explorerxp.com

hahaha, my blog will soon become a tech blog :p

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