tkh’s blog

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Green Peace

February 27, 2003 on 11:13 pm | In General | 1 Comment

Recently I have seen Green Peace people several time. Once I talked with them a little bit, but didn’t understand what the benefits to be a member and I didn’t join. What are they actually doing? I saw they were on the boat to prevent the transportation of plutnium to France, but what’s their mission? Maybe I should have asked them about that, but I was busy and didn’t have time to ask. Maybe they are doing great things…

Emacs

February 24, 2003 on 1:54 am | In Computer | No Comments

Finally I set up emacs on MacOS X. I have tried several emacs flavors which use Aqua and none of them meet my expectation, but found that the X11 version is what I want. It’s very fast and treat Apple key as Meta key. Though I can use both vi and emacs, emacs is far more comfortable when editing TeX files. I still need to install some more elisps because fink doesn’t have enough elisp packages.

NCSA cluster

February 19, 2003 on 9:09 pm | In School | No Comments

I got a mail from HPCERC and finally got an account for one of NCSA clusters. Usually, NCSA machines can be used only if your proposal is accepted by NCSA, or your advisor uses the cluster for research, but I can use it for the term project for the parallel algorithms class. In this project, I’ll implement a pipelined parallel divide & conquer convex hull algorithm using MPI. It’s really exciting to use 512 CPUs.

Upgrade

February 19, 2003 on 9:02 pm | In Computer | No Comments

I upgraded MovableType to version 2.61. With this upgrade, I hoped to get the Japanese support working, but it still doesn’t work. I checked the settings of mySQL again and found that the current version automatically handles character sets other than iso-8859-1. So there must be something wrong with the MovableType configuration, but I can’t figure it out.

Comprehensive Exam

February 19, 2003 on 1:40 am | In School | 1 Comment

Finally I got the result of the comprehensive exams I have taken last month. I passed with conditions. I prefer to take courses rather than studying again until next summer. Now I can attend SIGGRAPH (a conference on graphics) and possibly go back to Japan for a couple of weeks in summer.

Cleaning

February 15, 2003 on 1:11 am | In Computer | No Comments

Today I bought an air duster to clean up my PC. Maybe I should state why I bought it. Recently, temperature of CPUs have been around 56 degree (in Cercius), and I have had no idea what’s wrong with it because temperature was around 49-50 degree when I built the machine. Finally I came to the conclusion that dusts are badly affect on cooling of CPUs.
After I cleaned up CPU heat sinks and fans, temperature got dropped to 49-50 degree. It’s really amazing. Seems I have to clean up my PC once a month.

Shell

February 13, 2003 on 11:56 pm | In School | No Comments

I’m working on the shell project. One thing I really hate the project is I have to use C, because the parser provided by the professor is written in yacc/lex and bison produces C codes which could not be compiled with g++. Well, I have implemented some of builtin commands. I still need to implement aliases, environments, path searching, job controls, redirection, and pipes.

Bicycle

February 13, 2003 on 2:46 am | In Misc | No Comments

I started commuting to school by bicycle because my parking permit at the previous work place had expired and I wasn’t able to get a new one on campus parking lots. It’s a good exercise and I like it, though it’s bit cold in the morning.

CG World

February 11, 2003 on 2:29 am | In Misc | No Comments

Suddenly I received an email from CGW stating the free subscription of CGW magazine. As I signed up for the free subscription at SIGGRAPH 2002, I had expected to receive it months ago, but I didn’t. I wonder why it took six months for them to process the free subscription offer. Well, I got it anyway. It’s not so interesting, but I can get it for free.

Leaky capacitors

February 9, 2003 on 1:32 am | In Computer | No Comments

I found this this article. In short, some scientist stole a formula which is necessary to produce some chemical material from a Japanese company, and sold it to a Taiwanese company. Then the Taiwanese company produced capaciors using that material, but the formula was incomplete and the produced material was defective. Looks like many hardware vendors used defective capacitors in 2002. I’m afraid if my mobo (MSI’s dual Athlon board) has defective capacitors because I bought it in last summer.