Orange Planet

[21:46] I have a response now
[21:47] to structered procrastination
[21:47] I disagree
[21:47] I believe in discipline
[21:47] you need to discipline yourself
[21:47] to do the shit
[21:47] at the top of the list
[21:47] that’s how you become a better person
[21:47] no self-deception
[21:47] just fuckin do it
[21:47] this is what
[21:47] america
[21:47] needs
[21:47] on the whole
[21:48] discipline
[21:48] this is why the schools
[21:48] of every other country in the world
[21:48] is better than those
[21:48] of fuckin america
[21:48] cuz in america
[21:48] it’s ok to fail
[21:48] in america
[21:48] u get into college
[21:48] by writing fuckin essays
[21:49] every other place in the world
[21:49] you test into schools
[21:49] none of this equal opportunity shit
[21:50] everywhere else
[21:50] you need to work
[21:50] work
[21:50] and work
[21:50] for it
[21:50] and yes i know i’m being
[21:50] hypocritical
[21:50] to a degree here
[21:50] but the terrible american system has had an adverse affect
[21:50] on my self-discipline

That’s all folks. Have a good day.

So it’s not really mine, and it’s not really here, but details details.

My dad decided to replace my mom’s D600 with an E6400 about two weeks ago, and I took a look at the configuration options on Dell’s site. Usually it’s cheaper to configure the basic option to your preferred specifications unless one of the more expensive options is exactly what you want. This time around, the two most expensive configurations came with a Mini 9. I was pretty certain that modifying these two options would result in a significantly higher price tag than that of a modified base unit of the same configuration.

Dell isn’t giving this stuff away for free, right?

But I tried it out for shits and giggles, and it’s a good thing I did, too; it’s amazing how Dell’s pricing works at times. The E6400 of our preferred configuration cost the same with or without a Mini 9. That’s still nearly a three-hundred dollar value, free! And that’s the end of this short excuse of a blog post!

I was talking to a friend about waste baskets lately, because we were at Costco and they stocked this strange kind of garbage can which would open when you bring your hand near it. And now there’s this type of garbage can that responds to human speech (or a robot’s mechanical sound wave for all I know). But I want something that’s a sliver different. I want to be able to throw things at the garbage can (near the mouth, of course), and the can should open its mouth when the trash is near it. If my aim is terrible, it should calculate it before hand and move accordingly.

For example: I’m sitting at my desk, and the garbage can is about 5 meters southwest of me. I want to swivel my chair, toss the paper that I crumpled up into a neat bowl at the can, and it should gobble it up. Of course, I can have one that is open and has no lid, but that’s no fun. Ideally there would be a sensor that keeps track of the infrared changes nearby, and when there’s something that’s not too big in terms of the IR waves that it exudes, it’ll conclude that it is indeed waste and get ready to gobble it up. It might sense that it’s coming at a certain velocity, and calculate the angle, from which it can use Newton’s Laws of Projectile Motion to actually estimate where it’s going to fall, and move accordingly.

If such a can does become a reality, my room will almost always be clean. Maybe. It depends on how efficiently it can calculate where the trash is going to fall. If it’s good at it, my room’s going to be really clean. If not, then it’s just going to have redistributed trash. And I’ll kick the can.

Tuesday, the 10th to Thursday, the 19th was Suck Week. The first midterm was on the 12th, and the first drawing project occupied most of the first week. There was a drawing writeup, too, but the big concern over the weekend was the second problem set, due on the 16th. The second midterm fell on the 19th and studying for it was a pain and a half. I had to start the third problem set and the second drawing project before the second midterm. All the while I tried to make progress on a long-term project due in March, making little headway for the most part.

Suck Week is officially over, but there’s still work to do

But I’m going to shut up, sit down, and watch some fucking animu.

So, I have a twitter account. But when I think about it, why do I even have one? I perhaps became a consumer whore and just got for kicks. But upon serious consideration, there’s no reason for me to twitter (twit?). First off, I don’t have the time. Secondly, I am not really following anyone noteworthy. Thirdly, if I *do* follow like a thousand people, and if I know that “oh they’re doing x,y and z” I probably won’t have anything to say (unless of course, it’s something that I have interest in, but honestly I can only see people saying inane things to which I have not even the slightest response). Now if it could relay stuff to my phone free of charge, and if I had all my friends there, then it’d be like a free SMS service. But that’s not happening, considering how shitty the US cellular system is. So forget that.

Basically, all I’m saying is that I don’t get twitter. As a college student, I don’t have the time to update what I’m doing. I’m also very spontaneous, so I do things just because. And for no reason. Nothing’s planned. I won’t remember to update my status every hour. I just think it’s pointless. More ranting on twitter later.

Well, the title pretty much sums it up; this is a pretty poor excuse for a blog post.

I had an old school Dell mousepad that was wearing out. I wanted to buy something of a relic like my Model M but there isn’t much choice in ancient mousepads.  I have another cool pad that says “IBM Global Network“. No, that link doesn’t work; IBM sold the Global Network to ATT in 1998. In the grand scheme of things, the mouse hasn’t been around half as long as the keyboard.

Thus I went to eBay and typed in the fairly generic search terms “anime mousepad”. I didn’t really want to get series-specific as I knew I’d never be able to decide on anything at that rate. Out of maybe 200 results, there were about 5 that were ok and I narrowed it down to two at $5.99 each. Those are the two shown above. And yes, I am actually using the funky ball-mouse in the upper right. It is quite frankly terrible as a mouse.

So I didn’t really find another relic of a mousepad, but these are cool as well.

EDIT: Holy shit, I cannot spell; “choice” != “choise”.

ひさしぶりだね～

今週は僕「日本語で日記を書きましょう」と思ったんだがとっても忙しいですのでけっきょく「o.rangepla.net」はアップデートしなかった。ごめんなさい。

ええと、今週は僕のクラスが始めた。ISE130はとっても詰まらないクラスです。EE98とGEOG10はとっても楽しいです。EE97は毎週木曜日だけです - でもすごく長いのであまり好きじゃない。僕は大学の図書館は大好きです。外で見るととっても大きいなたてもの、中に入りからとってもひろい。

じゃ、何を書くとはわからないのできょうはこれでやめよ。

Everything comes down to the fact that the U7600 just isn’t ULV enough.

You turn the machine on and let it sit there for a while. It idles at your desktop for about ten to fifteen minutes before a whiny little fan kicks in and runs for another ten to fifteen minutes. Then the cycle begins again. It’s not that it’s extremely loud or anything, just whiny and annoying. It can’t be good for the battery life either, which is already mediocre at best.

I took some power consumption numbers with my Kill-A-Watt and they are actually quite interesting:

TC4200        XT               E6400
11 (8)           15 (12)         13 (10)
16                18                16
26                24                36
44                42                55

The first line is the “full idle”, power draw at the wall. The screen brightness is turned all the way down. The second line is full idle with the screen brightness all the way up. The third line is full processor load with max brightness. These nine figures are in Watts. The last line is battery capacity in Watt-Hours. There may be a significant margin of error due to the inefficiency of the respective power supplies.

Subsequently, there is a bracketed number on the first line, RMClock’s estimation of power draw; the real figure is probably somewhere in between. The TC4200 at idle and load is undervolted by about 0.3V, and the E6400 is undervolted only at load by about 0.2V. Now it seems somewhat ridiculous that XT, an ultraportable with a ULV processor, draws more power at idle than the full-sized E6400.

While I admit that the TC4200 has a significant advantage through undervolting, the E6400 idle should be very close to stock. It does have a 45nm processor, but it also has a larger screen, discrete GPU, optical drive, etc. I just don’t understand how Dell built such a power-hog of a twelve inch tablet. I’m extremely frustrated that Intel does not allow any sort of undervolting on the U7600. They can suck their ULV crap.

If you crunch the numbers, the XT gets just under three, the TC4200 gets just around four, and the E6400 gets just over four. That’s kind of ridiculous. Furthermore, the TC4200 and the E6400 are both completely silent at idle. The TC4200 can watch most SD anime without turning on the fan, and while the E6400 isn’t quite as good with noise, they’re both helluvalot better than the XT.

There are good things about the XT too, but I value power draw and noise enough such that it’s going back on eBay.

So I’ve started my search for housing, almost exclusively via craigslist. My first attempt yielded a 50% success rate - I emailed 4 people, 2 of them got back to me, and with the help of my friend Raymond, I was able to check out both of them. I liked one, and I submitted an application on Friday (I saw both places Wednesday). Optimistically, the earliest I’m going to hear from them is Monday. 

On Leg 2 of this search, which will start Tuesday, I plan to see about 4. This mighty accomplishment will not happen if Raymond wasn’t willing to help out. I feel like I’ve been bugging him too much, so this will be the last time he’ll be on this mission with me. In perparation, I’ve emailed ~10. Actually wait, let me go get the actual number. Okay it’s 9. Close enough though, right? Now keeping the success rate as before, that should yield me 5 results (4.5 rounded up), and so far there’s 2. One at 10am and one at 2:30pm. Now let’s hope there are 2 replies from the rest. 

Actually I just want the house that I turned in the app for. That would make life much easier, and I can start moving in by Jan 1. Here’s hoping for something good to happen. Knock on wood.

What is that you ask?

Well, it’s a photo of an SSD.

Ok, fine, it’s photo of a small corner of an SSD.

A rather expensive, Samsung SLC SSD, I might add.

You see, early Wednesday afternoon, after I took my last final, I was perusing the NBR Marketplace, and I came across a post that nearly made me wet myself. I initially feared that I might have been getting scammed, but I hopped on it nonetheless and hoped for the best. ultimately, the crux of the matter here is that I bought this rather expensive, Samsung SLC SSD for a mere one hundred and ten dollars - shipped

And yes, that implies I did not get scammed; in fact the unit arrived on Saturday and I took some time to put it through its paces. I plugged it into my E6400, installed my fancy-pants Dell OEM XP Pro with SP3 (in fifteen minutes no less!), and ran two benchmarks: the standard HDTune and something new I found called CrystalDiskMark.

The graph for the Toshiba MK8052GSX (default drive in my E6400) was taken some time ago while I was playing music, hence the intermittent spikes in HDD speed. The graph for the Samsung was taken with a clean install, so it’s not a totally fair comparison, but it should get the point across. An HDD obviously slows down as it fills up, and an SSD rapes everything else in access times. Ok great, moving on.

Sequential Read : 51.705 MB/s
Sequential Write : 51.001 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 22.201 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 25.963 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.297 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 0.948 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB

Sequential Read : 94.794 MB/s
Sequential Write : 86.774 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 92.378 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 68.579 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 15.583 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 5.387 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB

CrystalDiskMark really gives us some more interesting numbers to look at, as it tests sequential reads, sequential writes, random reads, and random writes. As HDTune already made clear, an SSD (even the cheapo MLC ones) really flies when it comes to random reads; for blocks of 4KB, the Samsung is something like fifty times faster than the Toshiba. It does not tell us that most SSDs (especially the cheapo MLC ones) are NOT that good at random writes; for blocks of 4KB, the gain in speed is ten times less.

Conclusion? There are theoretical gains all across the board for the Samsung. Furthermore, it makes less noise, draws less power, and has a far greater (theoretical) lifespan than a standard spinner. And did I mention durability? Supposedly you can drop this off a three story building… Of course, for a piece of hardware typically worth more than many laptop computers, I wouldn’t expect any less!