Weblog Archives: March 2008
I finally finished it. Hydrous is now a text blog
and photoblog, giving me the ability to convey my creativity, or lack thereof, in more forms than ever. On the text side of things I will be rambling about lots of various topics, most of them very geeky, such that I can try to "give back" to the inter-tubes that have been so generous to me.
My LiveJournal will still be the place to find more personal journal ramblings; this blog is meant for more formal subjects.
Play around, break things, and let me know if you run across any bugs. With this new site, Hydrous has moved to a completely new, dedicated server provided at a great price by
CoreNetworks. The backend is all completely custom atop the ubiquitous LAMP architecture, but I'll be posting more about that in the future.
Some points of interest:
- All the old photoblog posts are still around, refusing to die
- You can navigate the photoblog using the left and right arrow keys, a la Facebook
- You can generate desktop versions of photoblog images at many different resolutions. New resolutions are created on-the-fly and cached for future visitors. How cool is that?
- When you first leave a comment on the weblog or photoblog, your comment will be held for moderation. Once you have an approved comment, all future comments will appear immedately. (This state is saved in a cookie, so it only applies to one machine.)
Last week I bought the parts to build a new computer and get myself up to date. His name will be
Colin, after the tiny spherical bot that helped Ford escape the offices of the Hitchhiker's Guide. He will replace
Hactar, who has served me well for several years.
Specs!
This machine is similar to the one I helped Matt build, and if his is any indicator, it should be awesome. The primary goal of the upgrade is to have a bit more power to play
The Orange Box, to have better support for HD video playback, and for processing photos.
I had trouble recently getting the Remote Desktop client to open by default on my second monitor. I ran into a
post on Coding Horror that got me part of the way, but I had to add some steps to make it work for me. Here's how to do it on the latest Remote Desktop client:
- Run the client and get it set up the way you prefer, or Open your saved RDP file
- On the Display tab, choose a non-fullscreen resolution.
- On the General tab, click "delete these credentials", if possible.
- Click Connect.
- You will immediately get a local login dialog. Leave it blank and click OK.
- When you are connected and the remote login dialog appears, drag the window to the desired monitor.
- On the remote login dialog, click Cancel. The settings dialog should reappear locally.
- On the Display tab, you can now choose fullscreen.
The process is slightly different for older Remote Desktop clients:
- Run the client and get it set up the way you prefer, or Open your saved RDP file
- On the Display tab, choose a non-fullscreen resolution.
- On the General tab, remove your login information.
- Click Connect.
- When you are connected and the remote login dialog appears, drag the window to the desired monitor.
- On the remote login dialog, click Cancel. The settings dialog should reappear locally.
- On the Display tab, you can now choose fullscreen.
You're done! You can now save your session with the
Save button on the
General tab, as well as save your login credentials. The hardest part of this process was figuring out how to get the settings dialog to return after I'd connected to the server and moved the window. Clicking the
Cancel button on the remote login dialog was the only way I could find that allowed that to happen.
I discovered
dmidecode a few months ago when trying to determine what type of RAM was appropriate for my desktop Linux machine at work. It's the Linux equivalent of Windows'
CPU-Z (a.k.a. CPUID). When you run it (which you have to do as
root), it will list all the
DMI-controlled components in your system. This means that it will tell you the type of CPU and which features it supports (such as MMX or SSE), CPU cache details, the type of RAM in use, the state of each RAM slot, USB interfaces, and most other devices that you would see listed in the device manager if you were running Windows.
It's a great tool for getting details about your dedicated server hardware, too. Of course, if you're a Windows user and you've never checked out
CPU-Z, you should do that! It serves up some juicy hardware details.
Here are the sorts of details you get from
dmidecode (these are the CPU details on my server):
Handle 0x0000, DMI type 4, 35 bytes
Processor Information
Socket Designation: LGA 775
Type: Central Processor
Family: Celeron
Manufacturer: Intel(R) Corporation
ID: (redacted)
Signature: Type 0, Family 15, Model 4, Stepping 9
Flags:
FPU (Floating-point unit on-chip)
VME (Virtual mode extension)
DE (Debugging extension)
PSE (Page size extension)
TSC (Time stamp counter)
MSR (Model specific registers)
PAE (Physical address extension)
MCE (Machine check exception)
CX8 (CMPXCHG8 instruction supported)
APIC (On-chip APIC hardware supported)
SEP (Fast system call)
MTRR (Memory type range registers)
PGE (Page global enable)
MCA (Machine check architecture)
CMOV (Conditional move instruction supported)
PAT (Page attribute table)
PSE-36 (36-bit page size extension)
CLFSH (CLFLUSH instruction supported)
DS (Debug store)
ACPI (ACPI supported)
MMX (MMX technology supported)
FXSR (Fast floating-point save and restore)
SSE (Streaming SIMD extensions)
SSE2 (Streaming SIMD extensions 2)
SS (Self-snoop)
HTT (Hyper-threading technology)
TM (Thermal monitor supported)
PBE (Pending break enabled)
Version: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.80GHz
Voltage: 3.0 V
External Clock: 133 MHz
Max Speed: 4000 MHz
Current Speed: 2800 MHz
Status: Populated, Enabled
Upgrade: Other
L1 Cache Handle: 0x0001
L2 Cache Handle: 0x0002
L3 Cache Handle: Not Provided
Serial Number: Not Specified
Asset Tag: Not Specified
Part Number: Not Specified
And here is what CPU-Z says about my new desktop:
Pretty cool, eh? Oh, and Happy PI Day, everyone!
*tear* !
G-Wayne has been
our President for more than thirteen years (according to his
Wikipedia entry), and today he announced that he will be stepping down to become the Secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution. Of course I assumed this was an important role (it's capitalized, after all), but then Jennifer pointed out
an article on the New York Times website that reveals it's the
head honcho role. I love visiting the various Smithsonian museums in DC, so now I can think of Clough when I'm there. I'm very happy for this opportunity, but sad to see him leave Georgia Tech.
I saw a lot of amazing developments during my time at Tech, and I know that there are still many projects in progress that can be credited to Clough. Almost the entirety of Tech Square was built during my 6-year tenure as a student, as well as the CRC, and the Klaus, Whitaker, Ford ES&T, Petit, Love, MDRC, and Molecular Science buildings. Those are just the ones off the top of my head. We complain about construction on campus, but we've seen incredible growth and the construction is a pretty good indicator of progress being made.
Have a drink for Clough and toast to his future success at the Smithsonian. Here's also hoping that Tech can find someone of like talent to fill his rather sizeable shoes.
