Today officially started my summer holiday, 5 days ago I had my last exam at university and now finally I’ve the time to do all the things I can’t find the time to do the rest of the year. The majority of the people on earth awaits the summer holiday to completely stop doing what they do the entire year, pack things up and go away from home for as much as they can. On the contrary, I like what I do the entire year and I don’t feel the need of doing something else; I just want to have the time to play with computer in a different way of what I have to do for university. While everyone is thinking about sea, mountain, sports, etc etc I think what kind of program I may develop, what system I would like to build and so on. This year my summer holiday is two weeks in Livigno; as usual I could not resist to get with me my laptop (actually there are two, mine and my father one’s) and a bunch of other hi-tech stuff. So, this is what my setup will look like for the next two weeks: …

OK, not exactly an upgrade, but still an improvement over my precedent configuration. You have to know that I used for a long time – years – a dual monitor configuration, something like 6 months ago one of the two monitors went nut and I had to replace it. Obviously it was already discontinued by some time so I had to replace both my monitors, I decided to buy a single Dell U2412M (here is the post I wrote). Nothing to complain about the monitor itself, also, I’ve no problem to say that so far it is one of the best purchases I ever did; the problem is that one monitor can be as big as you want but two smaller monitor are always better than one. Explain why two smaller monitors are always better than a bigger one isn’t simple at all, but trust me, everyone who have used at least one time a multiple monitor configuration will be of the same thinking. So today, after had used for 6 months or so a single monitor I bought another one; Below you can see a photo. …

Today I had the bad luck to have to deal with a damn Macbook Pro on which I need to install a retarded software (IBM Rational Software Architect). Despite RSA becoming one of the worst piece of crapware I’ve ever seen this time it wasn’t the problem. The Macbook was one of the latest model, a 13″ one equipped with a Core i5 Sandy Bridge CPU and an awesome a certain amount of GB 5400 RPM hard disk drive…everything sold at the fair price of 1200 or so €. As long as you use it just for what close to every Apple user use it – going on Facebook, synchronizing music tracks on an IPod and iCloud – everything is fine (tho, you can do these things with every PC/MAC/whatever-you-want not older than 6 or 7 years). Anyway, if you happen to be one of those bunch of unlucky people on earth who pretend to use it for something different you will quickly face with the complete inability of this, I repeat, 1200 € worth machine, to provide, at least decent performances. Starting from the point that many programs (like RSA) don’t exist for OSX you have to virtualize a Windows or Linux OS, and here comes the problem. The 5400 RPM HDD is so crappy that when you fire up the virtual machine everything slow down to a level similar to a 10 years old PC with a P4 Willamette and a 20 GB PATA HDD. I really don’t get why people keep buying those completely overpriced piece of garbage apple is selling; this Macbook Pro hardware wise is very similar to my Thinkpad but it costs much more (something like +80/90% over the price of the Thinkpad), is way slower, have an higher weight and miss some important features (like external battery, UMTS module, matte display, trackpad, etc etc). Keep up the good work apple… …

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 …