Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

AMD64 Shift - Jojo Paderes

I’ve been meaning to do the same since I’ve heard these quite a while ago, way back when I played PC games to kill time (like I don’t nowadays, but I now play for a different reason, worth another blog entry…)

I’ve been reading stuff on the AMD64 straight from the source, and it seems that there really is only one reason why you would want to play (and work) on an x86-64: 64-bit machines can run apps fast. Don’t worry if your existing apps are 32-bit: apparently AMD has done a neat job of using the existing x86 arch and extending its capacity to 64-bit (hence the machine hardware technical designation x86-64), essentially bridging the gap Intel has been struggling for some time, wishing that corporate consumers would take the lead in the utility of 64-bit computing.

Why so fast? Well, in a (very inacurrate perhaps, but still descriptive) nutshell, when the processor sees 32-bit instructions, it can feed those into its 64-bit bus, effectively allowing for two instructions to be processed at the same time. Forget about Pentium 4’s hyperthreading: this is faster. And it altogether saves more power, as the AMD64 is built on the same copper-based core as the breakthrough K6s and Athlon K7s.

But, of course, everything I just wrote isn’t even new. If I were you, I’d wait, like what they say, “good things come to those who wait.” There’s a lot of buzz about them processor giants releasing dual-core processors, and that would be nice, since that would most likely bring prices down and make us all happy…

Sometime before lunch I sat down with Father Joe Julian and my Dad as they were having a discussion on the upcoming Cenaculo / Passion Play this Holy Week. During the talk, Fr. Joe asked me about my recent datamining work for the Diocesan Survey, and I told him that, since I’m the only one really working behind the project, I would really like to assemble a team of volunteers (namely, those from the Corinthian Youth Movement) to help me get this project moving forward. As of now, I’ve managed to encode some 700 of the 6,000 survey forms, a somewhat small number for the big leagues, but very big for someone who just happens to learn enough Perl to cobble up a script to interface with the MySQL database. (pusakat from #PLUG tells me to learn PostgreSQL instead. When I get out of this rut, I will

The problem stems from the survey instrument itself. It isn’t as well planned as it should be; rather, it looks like it was originally from someone’s (not-so-well-thought-of) college thesis. In fact, the entire project can be compared to such, including the way it was organized and executed. At the very start, the survey doesn’t seem to (or fails to do so accurately) answer the questions the Diocese asked, like how many people or families out there that receive the Eucharist, or how often they hear Mass. Also, some of the questions themselves are really questionable, as most of the other data not pertaining to Church matters are easily obtainable through other means, such as consulting the archives of the local Census Bureau, or by aggregating data from smaller, parish-wide surveys.

Father Joe then told me to replan the whole thing, Diocesan affair though it was, as the Parish of St. John the Baptist is the largest in the province, and it has an even larger number of respondents to worry about. Specifically, we needed to replay the survey, stripping out all those that seem unnecessary, and to rework the database program. Dad even suggested to do it all over again in paper, something that he had already brought up during the first meetings on the project months ago, but wasn’t heeaded as many though this as a “throwback to the Stone Age”, though this wasn’t a bad idea really, now that we wanted to bring this altogether to a close really fast. Then by next week, we can assemble a team and start finishing this, and probably be done sometime before March, hopefully before I take my exam.

The morale: don’t even think about surveying the populace when you don’t know what the hell you want or need to know…

…especially when the Head of it all is due to retire in May.

Amen to that, btx (over #PLUG): Datamining sucks.

Seen from /.: Animal-Human Hybrids Spark Controversy

Quite suddenly those biker mice from Mars came out of my head…

Ran Like Hell - Cha Gascon

… I used to run very often, most of the time to enjoy myself, and quite later, to be at class on time. Not that I wasn’t in class very often, but when I do get late, I try my best not to be noticed. Either that, or it’s to the Lib for me…

Now I’m pending my examination for taking the UP Open University’s Associate in Arts program this March 5. I really should be reviewing my high school and all, and I’m doing just that, plus more. I hope I pass…

… and from there, I woudn’t miss another of life’s narrowly-passed hallways.

Spark Fun Electronics’ Portable Rotary, from Hanna Wallach’s post - Very inventive. Reminds me that I still have an old pulser back in my apartment in Makati, and it still has its ringer. Classic! I might as well recycle it.

I only hope I could get the bits for doing SMS and GPRS right… :p

Linux: New -as Patchset, Security And Obvious Bug Fixes - From what I gather, this is supposed to be used in future Debian kernels as an additional security measure. I upgraded my kernel to 2.6.10-as2 five days ago, and all seems to go well.

Except today, that is. I was tracking some discussion on debian-devel and found a thread talking about rcconf and file-rc. I decided to dselect install file-rc and play with it a bit, and when I finished, too a look at my /root directory to look for clues on what daemons I have enabled/disabled that are not on the Debian proper. It was there that my eyes strayed upon the evil code that plagued 2.6.7. Without thinking, I ran ./evil, and with only little warning via the programs alternating dot-and-asterisk output, my desktop froze. Yes, it froze.

And to think future kernels are safe from old exploits. I’ve told Andres Salomon about this. I haven’t checked this on a vanilla 2.6.10, though, so I’m still looking on it.

Just so you folks who read this may know.

Mosaics at St. Monica Catholic Church in Mobile Alabama - Very cool. They’re very beautiful, and even the flow of the fabrics on the Bible characters are pulsing with life and energy. Perhaps that’s just what we need for the reconstruction of our very own Parish of St. John the Baptist here in Daet.

I wonder if there’s anyone here in the locality who can do those kind of mosaics.

… doing not much, just regaining my strength.

I figured yesterday’s sickness was caused by a bad mix of tocino and virgin coconut oil, which reacted badly with my insides. I’m okay now, no fever, though my appetite’s still low.

Now I need to read my 100+ emails. Thank $DEITY for Gnus scoring.

… but not too sick, if I may add.

After doing last night’s hardware hack I went to sleep after twelve, as I was lol-ing my way through the night with ABS-CBN’s “The Prince of Pop and the Comedy Concert Queen”. Sometime later, I felt very cold and tired, forcing me out of the tatami and getting myself another shirt, socks and an extra blanket. Yet it was still so cold!

Then I went to the bathroom. I was about to to the jingle, when suddenly I felt my stomach ache, and what I ate in dinner (tocino and rice) came up. I barfed. And I let go at the wrong side, as those would-be-shit came a-crashin’ in the bathtub, not in the toilet. After cleaning it up for what seemed like hours, I got back to bed, feeling a little woozy, but okay enough.

Today, I’m okay enough to be online, probably okay enough to continue my programming.

Last night, I installed a brand-spanking-new LG 52×32x32×16 DVD Combo drive in my uncle’s aging Pentium-II based Acer desktop. It was quite a job, considering that I had to clean the inside of the CPU (which hasn’t been opened for at least 4 years,) and had to figure out the weird wiring of the IDE channels and power cables. I was meaning to change the arrangement of the drives, switching the floppy and hard disk drive places, so I could optimize the IDE array and bring a performace boost while burning CDs. In the end, I had to do with putting the HD in IDE1, while putting both the DVD combo and the (old) CD-ROM drive in IDE2, despite almost stretching the cable.

But that wasn’t half the trouble. It is trouble enough installing new, high-end parts in an old, already-way-past-its-deadline machine; it’s more trouble when you’re installing on a mixed-up, CMOS-checksum failing, Bad-cluster ridden Windows 98 system. Chief among it’s signs of old age is the CMOS checksum failure, which probably is the work of accumulated, ionized dust, and a bad battery. It has become normal to reset the system date and time - twice - once at system startup, then another when Windows fails to get the time. The other problem with the machine is its “flaky” DMA support, which seems to be caused by the fact that the BIOS firmware was pre-1999, whereas the DVD drive required a post-1998 BIOS to fully allow CD-to-CD/RW copying. Since the designers of this system thought that there wasn’t much to upgrade, they locked the system so BIOS updates are next to impossible. Last, but not the least, the machine’s SDRAM memory is 64 MB, meaning that upgrading Windows and other software to later versions wouldn’t be desirable (but not impossible - I was able to install XP with service pack 1 on a Dell 64 MB laptop.)

*sigh* Well, not all PCs are what you want to be. The good thing is, I was still able to duplicate an audio CD, as this was the primary reason why my uncle bought the drive, to make more copies of his CD collection. I only hope he does get a brand-new PC, or a CPU at the very least.