Mircea Bardac /random_thoughts

Today was the day. My brother bought a new computer for him so our old computer got the chance of becoming our server. We have been using successfully for some time an old P3 @ 450MHz. We have an extra 100MHz now

Big deal some of you might say.
The actual advantages this piece of hardware brings are:
* silent HDD (the HDD in the old computer has a terrible metallic noise)
* bigger HDD (20GB instead of 8.6GB).
* tons of RAM, for what it is going to be - this computer was turned into a PC133 RAM deposit: it currently holds 256+128+64 MB of RAM - I’m not sure what I’m going to use them for

The upgrade process ate half of this day:
* the muscle part took 1h: I had to carry computers around the house, trying to cross wire IDE cables (the 8.6GB HDD is strangely placed in its anciend case and I couldn’t take it out), changing jumpers and so on
* copying Linux from the old HDD took another hour - something might have been wrong about this, it took too long.
* getting Linux to boot took some time - I actually forgot that the “new” server hangs if it’s set to boot from CDROM,C,A, with no CD in the drive - I’ve played a bit with lilo… pretty annoying
* by far the most annoying and time expensive procedure was tweaking a computer which boots perfectly. Fortunately, I was pretty patient. This was the part where: in order to work it needs to be put next to the wires, in order to change it needs to be moved next to the monitor. I’ve moved back and forth a few times only because I forgot to change eth0 < -> eth1 in the DHCP server config and in the firewall script. I didn’t want to change the cables because I had the network cards tagged. Oh.. sure.. I could have chaged the tags - this just crossed my mind - a tad late.
* I’ve also experienced electricity going through my finger, while trying to fit the network wire into the external interface network card - I believe the network jacks (if that’s the way they’re called) are not fitted right to the wire

Anyway, it was an interesting experience. I’ve remembered some of the “joys” of playing with networks.

Everything made me wish I had a barebone computer as a LAN server. Unfortunately, nobody thinks of making a barebone for low-performance computers running Linux. We’ll see about that in the future…

A pack of good news for the Open/Free Source Developers:

• June 28, 2005Trolltech released Qt4, the first Qt version to be dual licensed for Windows (Commercial License for Commercial applications and GPL for GPL applications) - I can almost see a glimpse of KDE in Windows right now…
• July 05, 2005 - Orange France Deploys Jabber - one more proof that Jabber is the future
• July 06, 2005The European Parliament finally rejected the software patent directive with 648 of 680 votes - the right way

My T610 mobile has one more day until it celebrates 1 year staying my custody
I wanted to take it to the service to get it checked before going over the one year guarantee.

I’ve spent some time in the last days backup-ing almost everything out of it:

• contacts - this was the easiest part: I’ve send via Bluetooth all the contacts to a T630 at home.
• themes and sounds - I’ve send them via Bluetooth to the T630 mobile
• pictures - I’ve e-mailed all of them via CSD, during the night, at approximately 1KB/sec - I believe they were about 50 left on my mobile.
• messages - I’ve stored some of them on the SIM and.. here comes the fun part… I’ve written the others on the computer. Why so? Well, I’ve kept during the time lots of messages from Christmas, New Year, Easter, my birthday. Some of the messages are really interesting. I’ve got some really creative colleagues. Thereofore, I’ve created a small list of messages received on different occasions and freed my phone from storing them

The only things I couldn’t backup were profiles.

I took the mobile to my mobile provider service and they had a look. The mobile was blocked in their network so I assumed they also do service for them, like they did for my old mobile. They advised me to do turn off a setting to have more stability in the network. They also said I could leave the mobile for a thorough check (just like I initially planned). Unfortunately, I overlooked the fact that their service was not put in the list of authorized services to provide guarantee in the mobile’s papers.

My mobile has been working quite well ever since I’ve bought it. It only had a few network glitches some time ago and it didn’t go through that again. I hope the advice the service engineer gave me will definitely eliminate any possible problems for a long time (as we all know, not everything is everlasting).

Editing note: back-blogged entry on July 10th

I’ve noticed a strange pattern in my blog entries about semester endings. I always said “the most difficult semester I’ve had until now ended”. That doesn’t mean I’m complaining. It’s pure reality. I will have to repeat myself this time though. This was indeed the most difficult semester of all, of all semesters that passed and of all semesters that will come.

Statistics (& history) tell us that the 2nd year (of all 5) is the most difficult one. I one am happy to have finished this one, continuing to hope that in the next years we will learn some computer science, because I’m a bit fed up by subjects with a low usability in the future, according to my dreams/desires. I’ve actually asked some graduates if some difficult subjects are useful. The answer came naturally: no.

Also, statistically, as far as I’ve noticed, in the Computer Science and Automatic Control Faculty (my faculty) people fail exams at the subjects which are not in their specialization - such as the tons of electronics, while, at the same time, students at the Electronics and Telecomunications faculty fail similar electronics exams - their specialization. A bit weird, don’t you think? Not to mention that they have many more electronics subjects in the curricula than we have computer science subjects.

Oh, you might say now that computer science is not informatics. That’s true. We need to learn about how computers work. And I mean computers, not transistors, not bi-polar transistors which are no longer used. We need to know how computer components work, not how each electron moves between resistors, diodes, transistors etc. Well, it seems I’m sliding towards another post of mine. The same ideas seem to come up over and over while thinking of these first two years.

Some subjects to remember from this year:

• Assembly Programming - everybody says that the circumstances were not favourable in order to study this appriately; to much electrotechnics, electronics and physics eating up nights
• Numeric Methods - what can I say? lots of Mathematics, Matlab is powerful - very good for number crunching - this is not what I would call great subject, especially because of the tons of formulas I need to remember, but it’s nice to know there’s something specialized in doing Advanced Mathematics for you
• Object Oriented Programming - well, Java all the way (see my comments after the final exam)
• English - 2 semesters - I liked it because it was speciality-oriented, or at least it tried to be

Not much, isn’t it? Pretty dissapointing, IMO.

I could also add Psychological Education - a subject which is not in our speciality, but I must admit it was the in the needed dose for a computer science faculty; I really like this subject and the way the seminars were held.

As I said above, I hope the next years will bring what we’ve all been waiting for from this faculty. It might not fit exactly our dreams, but it try (I hope) to get close to them.

I wish I had a Smart Computer Power Source which would act like a 1-2 sec UPS during a Power Failure.

Power Failed 2 times today. Very odd. Each time it took less than 1 sec. The lights went down and up… and that was it. All the computers got reseted, except for the laptop (guess why? ) and surprisingly my old computer (P3 450MHz) which is running as a LAN server.

I don’t need a full-blown UPS. Or… maybe I do, but I don’t find the immediate use of it since I already use a Power Surge protected sockets. I don’t want the computers to reset at each minor (micro) power failure. I want them to support a 1-2 sec failure. I personally believe there are some better (simpler) ways of overcoming this kind of problems instead of attaching a backup battery to the power source… future will tell.