Sinabro: Projects

Many things listed here really don't deserve the name "project". But nonetheless, some of them proved useful in my job or class, and I'd like to keep them collected in some place, so here they are. They are sorted by type (if programming, by programming language, if not, whatever seems best to me at the moment).

In Progress/Planning

These are some projects (some related to the work I do, some not) that I am meaning to work on. I keep a list here so that I don't forget it later. They are list in no particular order.

• Analog Processing Unit: Otherwise known as APU. It might be useful to have a box (or board) of electronics that'll do some basic arithmatic operations on analog signals. Why? For speed, of course. It's not easy to do calculations at 1 MHz if you have to digitize it first—well, you probably can, just not with anything commercially available (I have yet to see an oscilloscope that can do multiplication/divisions), and I'm not sure if digital circuits with all the logics necessary for floating point calculation is an amateur project.
• C++ port of "pressure converter": Done in Python instead.
• Clebsch-Gordon coefficient calculator
• Plagiarism Detector: Given two texts, this would compare them for significant similarities. The first "algorithm" (if it can be called that) I can think of is of order O², I think. I'd like to come up with something to linear order or better.
• Discommendator: inspired by this joke; It should accept input of a normal letter of recommendation and produce a grammatically correct letter of discommendation.
• Blog/journal crawler: Well, not really for crawling other people's journals, but more for crawling my own. I'd like to aggregate all that I've written so far into one place (probably here), and, well, I don't really want to do that by hand.
• ... and the list goes on.

Research for new laptop

I did buy my laptop a while ago, but I hadn't gotten around to updating the website yet. So, I ended up going with MSI (who was just about the only ODM that carried an AMD whitebook), MS-1222, and I bought it through RKC computers. Just to summarize what I'll say below in short, I like my laptop, it's fast, the webcam (and the microphone) is nice—something I didn't even know that I'd appreciate—and everything is perfect, except for two things: battery and the heating issues.

On battery, both RKC and MSI really dropped the ball on this one—they sent me a defective one initially (the battery holds 2 hours' charge, rather than the 3.5 hours expected), and when I finally got them to do an RMA, the battery I received had the exact same problem (and, no, I know for a fact that these are not how new batteries should be acting). From a practical point of view, this doesn't really matter to me since I usually use my laptop at my desk or somewhere I will always have access to an AC power outlet, but I feel that I've been cheated by RKC and MSI, so I do not recommend RKC or MSI to anyone. I just hope some other ODMs carry AMD whitebooks when the time comes for replacement of this laptop.

As for heating issues, that's something I realized only now. At the beginning, I had some random lock-up issues, which I thought was maybe due to bugs in the Linux kernel. But, now I know for a fact that it's the CPU overheating. I don't know whether it's the standard OEM thermal paste applied by RKC (perhaps they did it wrong), or whether it's in the design of the laptop. When the CPU is fully utilized (2.4 GHz, no idle cycles), the cooling system simply cannot keep up. When the laptop is placed at an angle in order to allow better ventilation, I can clock the CPU to about 2.2 GHz (again, no idle cycles, as I run BOINC in the background) and keep the CPU below 92 to 94°C. At the moment, I clock it at 1.80 GHz and the temperature is stable around 80°C.

I just ordered a cooling pad, and when that arrives, I will see whether I can run the laptop at full clock (2.4 GHz) with the cooling pad. And I might try changing the thermal paste to Arctic Silver at some later point, although it does not appear to be a panacea.

Cost-wise, this laptop ended up running more than I'd have liked (around $1200), but if you consider what's in it (latest AMD Turion X2 CPU, for one), I probably paid only about $100 to $200 more for avoiding Intel and Windows tax specifically. If you want to see the previous information that have been here, it's still on this HTML page, just commented out.