tkh’s blog

El Morro

I went to El Morro National Park today. It is close to another national park El Malpais which is one of my favorite places. It was very beautiful and I took lots of pictures. I also took my first panoramic photo from the top of the rocks. After stitching a set of photos into one large photo, it looks pretty good. I was never able to capture the scale of scenery with my camera, but with panoramic photos, I think I can do it. Here is the photo:

There are only two trails in this park, and I took the longer 2 mile one. I saw several kinds of birds, and as usual, they were not afraid of me. I also saw a cotton tail rabbit, but it was afraid of me and quickly went away. The following is some of pictures I’ve taken. I’ve also put lots of pictures in my photo gallery, if you want to see them.

Lambda Calculus

Finally finished implementing a lambda calculus interpreter in Ciao Prolog. It has the web interface and the code is written entirely in Prolog, including the CGI stuff. I can go somewhere to refresh my brain on the last day of Thanksgiving holiday!

The Elegant Universe

I watched the first chapter of the NOVA program on unified theory. It’s very interesting, and no math is required. I feel I have to read a book on quantum mechanics.

OO scripting languages

As a rest from working on the term project, I read a short paper called A comparison of object oriented scripting languages: Python and Ruby. The title tells everything. Though new features might have been added since this paper had been written, I think it makes a reasonable comparison on key concepts. There are several points that I don’t like in Ruby, but its pure object orientation attracts me a lot. I’ll stick with Ruby.

NVIDIA’s driver

I was reading comments to the slashdot article that reports the release of the kernel 2.4.23, and posted a comment that I can’t upgrade to 2.6 until NVIDIA releases the graphics driver for 2.6 kernels. I soon got replies to my post and they point to a web site that has patches that support 2.6 kernels. The author of the patches used to work at NVIDIA as a summer intern and worked on the graphics driver for Linux and FreeBSD, so his patches should be reliable. Once the 2.6 kernel is officially released, I’ll give it a try.

kernel

Linux kernel 2.4.23 has been released! I want to upgrade the kernel, but I have to wait until SGI will release the XFS patch set for 2.4.23. Hope they will release in a few days, but it’s Thanksgiving holiday. Oh well…

Ears

After four days of dropping the medicine to my right ear, I went swimming last night. I was little bit worried if I feel pain, but I didn’t at all. So I was able to swim 2000m. Probably the pain was caused by too much use of cotton swabs. It probably removed excessive amount of earwax. Cleaning ears is one of my addiction, but I have to limit the use of cotton swabs.

Street name

I found an interesting thing on the envelope from AMD. Their address (probably HQ) is “One AMD Way.” It seems that AMD’s HQ is big enough to have its own street name. Obviously M$’s address is “One Microsoft Way”, and Apple’s address is “One Infinite Loop.” What the heck is this? Is there a road looks like a mathematical infinity symbol in front of Apple’s HQ?

Replacing CPU heatsink/fan

Finally I’ve received the CPU heatsink/fan from AMD. Here is the picture of two fans. The right one is the new one.

It is bigger and the fins are thicker than the ones which came with the CPUs, but the fan’s dimension remains the same. First, I removed the phase transition material from the new heatsink by scratching it with my nails. As it is new, it was really easy to remove the paste. Then I used alcohol and cotton swabs to clean up remaining material. Here is the interface of the heatsink before and after removing the material. I also cleaned up the CPU die.

Then I put the silver thermal paste on the CPU die and placed the heatsink/fan.

I fired up the machine and entered the BIOS to see the fan speed. It’s around 5100rpm, and temperature is almost the same as with the old fan. As the fan speed of the old fan was around 6000rpm, the noise level should be reduced somewhat, but I can’t tell the difference. I’m very happy that I can use my workstation again.

Network

I’ve written a bunch of Prolog predicates and debugged, but I can’t test them on the machines at the school. Looks like there is a huge delay in campus network. What happened? It may be under DoS attack, but who knows. It’s just a waste of time, so I’ll go to bed and work on the project tomorrow.