Resurrection of the blog

Back in Vancouver for Christmas, I'm finally getting around to this blog that I started when I first enrolled in McGill. Just some update: I've done my courses, and currently doing my thesis at NRC. This post would be about computers. My parents bought a laptop in China, for slightly more than the before tax price of a similar laptop in Vancouver. It's a Asus tx 2000 14 inch laptop, designed for the Asian market. With 1G memory and T5550 CPU, it's not exactly a performance model. Bought recently for a bit more than 5000 yuan, it would be slightly more expensive than an Acer or Gateway at Futureshop. Part of this can be attributed to the included tax in the price, and another part could be the increased cost of Chinse Window Vista built into it. Overall it's what you expect from a budget notebook. The native resolution is 1280x800, which puts it in the widescreen territory. The graphics card is Geforce 9300m G, which is somewhat of an upgrade compared to standard offerings in Vancouver. My guess is that more people use their laptop for gaming in China. Otherwise, the interesting thing is how natively Chinese the Windows Vista seem. Many folder names are in Chinese, and when I log into McGill exchange email server, many buttons are in Chinese, suggesting that Microsoft has multi-lingual support built in, includin support for east asian language. It should be interesting to see how Office files turn out when I open the reports in an English-only computer.

What's with ulra-wide LCD monitors?

I just got a new LCD monitor at work. For a graduate student, I don't get these toys very often. The monitor is nice and bright, but the screen resolution-2048x1152, is driving me nuts. That's almost 2:1 ratio! You know, some people actually need monitors for work, or read text, rather than watching movies. But manufacturers seem to think that the wider, the better. Since it's not rotatable, reading text or surfing net on this monitor is quite distracting. For now, I'm trying to get used to having two almost square screens, and learn to ignore one of them. At home, I have a 1680x1050 monitor, and I consider that pretty wide. The newer LCDs seem to have one use in mind- watching movies. Or, more realisticly, to allow vendors to say it's 2x inch, with x being the higher the better.

Canada day at Parliament Hill

Canada with Sean, my friend, at parliament hill.

Death of my laptop

My laptop of 3 and half years is now dead. Most components are working, but the keyboard apparently has one or more stuck keys that I can't fix. As usually, the cheapest component on a laptop is the first to break. First it's the connector to the charger, then it's the keyboard. So far, I haven't been able to disable it and use a USB keyboard. When I disable it in Windows, windows xp restarts, and installs the keyboard upon restart. If I can't find a work around soon, the laptop is gone.

But first thing first, I need to buy a portable harddrive, to backup my laptop while I can get to my stuff. Lesson learned? My next laptop will be a heavy one, not a flimsy light one.

Valentine's day gift, continued

Here's another picture of my valentine's gift, a box of chocolate wrapped in a jean fabric package. It really reminds me of my girlfriend.

Valentine's day gift

box of chocolate, packed in newspaper to preserve integrity. Then there's this gingerbread man, with a lead broken in transit. Yummy.
Just got my surprise gift from my girlfriend in Vancouver. I got a

laptop revived, temporarily

A week ago, my 3 year old Averatec laptop's charger died on me. Not the note book, the charger. I thought the metal wire inside was broken, so I ordered another one. Now I find how how much of a pain it is to find accessories for small brand electronics. Futureshop, where I bought this laptop, no longer carries this brand. So I found a charger claiming to be compatible on Amazon. Opps, doesn't ship outside US. Then manufacturer's website, still no luck. I finally bought one on eBay, and it's now shipped. But the estimated shipping time was 22 days. Sigh...

They say you only realize how important something is until you loses it. It's true in the case of my laptop. Being the only one in my computer class who doesn't have a laptop is not fun. After a few uncomfortable classes, I attempted to fix it. Turns out it's the metal contact on the top of the connector that got worn out. No wires were broken. So I cut away a bit of plastic, and it's now possible to connect it as long as I apply a bit of pressure at all time. Anyways, I just made the attempt of fixing it. Will have updates and pictures soon.

Ubuntu problems

After installing Ubuntu on top of existing windows harddrive and enjoying it for a few days, it looks like I have to reinstall Ubuntu again. Somehow I messed up some boot variables, causing the computer to be unable to shut down properly. It either runs through a million lines of error code, or hangs on a certain step. It could also just be my harddrive, which I shipped to Montreal in my luggage. The hard drive's sounding louder by the day, reminding me to replace it. Plus, it's an IDE harddrive with 80G capacity. Ample for my use, but a replacement of 320G is not terribly expensive.

Back to Windows, for now.

After a frustrating attempt of installing Matlab on Linux, I'm back to Windows as far as lab report goes. I have to say, my undergrad education gave me a tad too much background in Windows, making a last minute shift to Linux too painful to endure.

Hopefully, I will have time to sort everything out once I finish writing this report. By then, I should have an idea of what softwares I need for lab report, and can dedicate some time to installing them on Linux.

Ahh, the joy of a desktop

Having used a 12 inch laptop for 4 months, I'm beginning to appreciate the advantages of a desktop. Even for a cheap set up with a second hand 15 inch monitor, a desktop has something that a laptop can't easily offer.

The first thing is the monitor. Unless you get a high end laptop, an AC powered monitor just seem so much better than a monitor that can run on battery. The next is the keyboard. When I use a desktop, I move the keyboard all the time to sue my taste. On a laptop, I adjust my posture all the time to sue to keyboard. And the last one, noise. My 12 inch laptop produces a high pitched sound, due to its small fan spinning fast to remove the heat. My desktop has a CPU fan that runs at half of its stock speed, producing noise that can only be noticed on a quiet night.

I have to say, desktop computers will always have a place in my life. Doing all my work on a laptop just seem too strenuous for me.

Wireless and Linux -- They don't mix well.

I've heard enough warnings about wireless internet under Linux, but decided to give it a try, in USB nonetheless. Well, I got a USB wireless adapter lying around, so might as well try it. The result has been OK. The Linksys USB adapter, which came with a wireless router that I bought, worked without extra driver download. The liability though, left something to be desired. Once in a while, on certain websites, the wireless will completely stop working. Restarting browser and going to other sites doesn't help. I just get no wireless signal. Simply logging out or warm restart doesn't solve problem either. I had to shut down, and manually press the power button for the system to find the USB adapter again. It's annoying, but I will live with it for now. I'm sure there are solutions for it, but the problem doesn't pop up frequent enough for me to bother with it. So far Ubuntu has been pretty good, especially when it comes to LATEX.

Rave for Q-fan

Even though I have built several computers in the past, I've never turned on fan speed management on a desktop before. Attempts of fan training on my laptop has not been very successful, as that thing just run hot all the time. On my new tower though, the Asus Q-Fan seem to work wonders. With Q-Fan on, PC probe II shows the fan running at 1400rpm, rather than the stock 2600 rpm. The noise reduction is orders of magnitude. Now the noise is hardly noticable on day time, but still too loud to sleep with the tower on. Now if I figure out a way to reduce that, maybe I can finally have tower on 24/7...

Finally got the desktop effect working

When I first installed Ubuntu, I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't turn on the fancy desktop effects, even after installing the proprietary ATI drivers. For the record, my graphic card is an integrated AMD/ATI 690G. It's the fastest integrated video card available at time of writing, as far as I know. The chip set was designed as "Vista Certified", meaning that it could run Windows Vista with the special effects. Therefore, it is certainly capable of running enhanced desktop for Linux, what remains is the compatibility.

After installing windows and playing WoW at decent frame rates (1024x768, 30fps), I decided to give Ubuntu another try. Installing Ubuntu on exisitng windows harddrive worked pretty well, and I managed to find this instruction on enabling desktop effect for ATI graphic cards. It's somewhat complicated, for someone new to the Linux world. But at the end, it seemed to work all right. I have to say, even Ubuntu is not really idiot-proof yet.

The above image is an example of special windows effect when I drag the window slowly. From the folders listed on the window, you can see that I have EGSnrc installed. In fact, that took me a while as well, but that's another post on its own.

Another snow storm

As soon as I got back from Ottawa, another snowstorm arrived. This time it's about 15cm of snow. Third snow storm in a month. I'm beginning to get used to this. Actually, snow's not too bad, as long as the wind stay relatively calm. Here's a picture of my apartment building, the day after the snowstorm.

New Computer

I'm finally fed up with my ultra-portable laptop, and decided to build a new desktop tower rather than upgrading the memory of laptop further. Here are the components:

AMD dual core 4400+
Kingston DDR2 2 x 1GB 800MHz RAM
Asus M2A-VM motherboard with 690G integrated graphics
Generic black Case
LG DVD+-RW
Logitech stereo speaker (from Canadian Tire)
Second hand NEC 15 inch monitor (MultiSync 1550v)
Western Digital 80G harddrive (I brought it with me from Vancouver)

Most components are from Microbyte, a chain store in Montreal. The assembly was fairly easy. The case has a side fan on it, and it's pretty loud. I would probably turn it off once school starts. So far I don't really see the need to the extra cooling, as no discrete video card is used.