Past Friday’s afternoon, around 3 pm, I was at university, specifically I was in one of the libraries and I was reading a book titled Concurrency; it’s about engineering concurrent systems using the modelling software LTSA and then write the actual program in Java. While reading I was also talking with two friends of mine about a problem another friend found on a book; to make a long story short, the problem was about balancing a predefined non-balanced random function. One of these two friends showed us how he solved the problem, the algorithm he wrote was written in Python. When some hours later I was back home I did thought it was finally the time to install a Python interpreter and start playing with it. So I did it. I got myself the latest release of Python interpreter and the Pydev plugin for Eclipse IDE, installation and configuration on Windows is incredibly straight forward, just a matter of pressing install and next 2 or 3 times. I don’t have any Python book then as first programming guide I used the well known (at least here in Italy) html.it site, if you are not Italian just google Python and you will find a huge amount of interesting PDFs and guides of any kind. After had digged trough the html.it Python guide in a bunch of hours (guess not more than 2 or 3) I felt myself just like the guy in this comics: …

Yesterday’s afternoon and today I had a LN2 trip with two AMD setup. I was aiming to break the 7 GHz wall with the trusty Phenom II 955 B.E. and improve my precedent results on socket 939 with the Opteron 148. I failed in reaching 7 GHz with the 955, tho I managed to improve just a little bit my Super-pi 1M score…still not satisfied with it but it is better than nothing. Also got the time to play with UCbench in which I got quite easily the first place on the bot in the 955 B.E. category. …

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 HDD: Kingston SSDnow 60 GB sata2 PSU: PCP&C 1200 OS: 2k3 server TW …

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 VGA: nvidia 6200 LE 256 MB PCI-E HDD: Kingston SSDnow 60 GB sata2 PSU: PCP&C 1200 OS: 2k3 server TW …

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. Other than this, 1 week ago I bought an Opteron 148 for 8.49 € plus 1.50 € of shipping cost, yesterday it arrived. At a first try it was good for 3200+ MHz aircooled, so definetly deserves a try at lower temperature. …

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). Anyway it got me a pretty high mark, so I am OK with it. Here is the simplified syntax I had to follow: …