What is the best way to kill time when you have close to nothing to do ? Easy, run Super-pi 32M using an CPU which takes more than 20 minutes to complete each run…so I did it and killed with easy 8+ hours trying to pull, tho without success, a sub 21 min 32M run with my trusty Opteron 148. Anyway, the result is still kinda worth to be posted here. …

Yesterday Crucial released a new firmware for its M4 SSD series, the new version (codename 000F) is supposed to address some issues which used to appear when using the SSD connected to certain SATA/SAS controllers and generally improve stability and reliability. Changes between version 0309 and 000F include the following changes:

Ten days ago I had an LN2 session together with this Opteron 148; finally today I’ve the time to write a post here and talk about that. .:. SETUP: CPU: Opteron 148 cabrio @1.5*123% volt – CABYE 0536GPMW cooling: Guglio’s CPU pot 2.0 (CPU) and 1.0 (RAM) MB: DFI nForce 4 Ultra-D – bios 623-2 RAM: Corsair PC3500C2 2×256 MB :: Winbond BH-5 – yellow slots VGA: nvidia 6200 LE 256 MB PCI-E …

This is the moment we are all waiting for (ok, maybe not really everyone 😀 ). Anyway, after approximately 10 hours of tweaking I came up with a quite interesting result. .:. SETUP: CPU: Opteron 148 cabrio @ 325×10.5 1.5*123 volt – CABYE 0536GPMW cooling: Single Stage phase change MB: DFI nForce 4 Ultra-D – bios 623-2 RAM: Corsair PC3500C2 2×256 MB @ 260 MHz 1.5-2-2-3 1t 3.7 volt:: Winbond BH-5 – yellow slots …

Two weeks ago or so I bought a DFI nForce 4 Ultra-D, when it was here I had some fun playing with an old Athlon 64 3000+ core Winchester and some crappy DDR modules. I had also a bunch of Winbond BH-5 kits, too bad they are all dead or semi-dead, so I had to stick with a kit of Micron value PC2700 cas 2.5. Luckily a friend of mine was so glad to send me a kit of Corsair PC3500 cas 2 BH-5, so in the next few days I will have a decent kit of RAM to play with super-pi. …

In the last exams session I had to write a simplified URI parser in LISP. LISP has the well known ability to melt people’s brain, but when you manage to wrap your head around things it becomes quite interesting. The projects for this course are always quite similar, so I assume someone could be interested to see how I did it. Please note that I did everything in no more than 3 or 4 hours, so surely it could have been done better (for example without using defparameter instructions). …

As you can see, it’s quite a long time since my last overclocking related post here. Even the one I’m writing now is not about overclocking, nothing of the latest hardware is interesting at all, so I don’t really bother go out and buy something. When nothing interesting is on the market the things I do is: upgrade the daily use rig. I’m not one of those interested in uber dupah performance, I’m alot more focused on reliability, so I never use the latest stuff for my DU rig…better to have 20 % less of performance but well tested and widely used components. …

Think I never mentioned it but I have a small home server, it was built with a c2d E6600, an Intel G965 mobo and some HDDs. Since 2 weeks ago I was using Ubuntu then I decided it was time to try something better and more challenging than Ubuntu, my choice was CentOS. Why use CentOS ? Because it’s one of the best enterprise class distro with 7 years support and have a good ammount of interesting features like services GUI manager and iptables GUI. …