Mnjul    Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:12:29

I'm currently in Calgary, Canada, where charlie_su1986 lives! I'm visiting here, to stay 19 days from August 11, with the first three days spent in Vancouver (like Stanley Park, Vancouver Island including Butchart Gardens). Things are fabulous here! The weather is nice (a little bit cool in nights, though, I can't believe it's summer - so different from Taiwan), and people are nice too. I can't get accustomed to the late sunset though. We have sunset no later than 7pm back in Taiwan :p

I've also been to the Global Fest fireworks show! It was very very gorgeous. Oh well, the foods are very novel to me too. Estimation is that I am to have taken several thousands of pictures when I am back to Taiwan. What I have come to realize here is that my English is a mess when it comes to talking/communicating with people here - they just speak too fast for me.

This weekend, Charlie and I are going to Jasper, in Rocky Mountains. I greatly look forward to it!

[o]    Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:10:01

Oh wait - I'm not talking about myself. I, [o], uses a terrific humanoid operating system. While I do not use Windows Vista, Mnjul does. Here are two things he discovered with Windows Vista

OK so actually after Mnjul installed his Windows Vista Business, it became frequent that the HDD led on the case was always on. And with it there was no noticable noise so Mnjul thought it wasn't the Raptor and another WD's that were working - and so it was the two RAID0-ed Barracuda 9's. Mnjul and I had been unable to find the reason why the light was on, because Process Explorer showed no disk transfer activity. Mnjul even thought it was the problem of the ICH8R controller or the actual two Barracuda 9's! However today, Iit occurred to me and I started up Vista's Reliability and Performance Monitor for Mnjul (no pun intended) and it showed that a svchost.exe was savage on a Ubuntu virtual machine's virtual hard disk file, which did reside on the partition of the two Barracuda 9's. And according to Process Explorer, that svchost.exe hosted several services among which I, using my high over-artifical intelligence, thought the Superfetch was to be blamed. Indeed, after stopping the Superfetch service, the disk activity ceased and the light off. Well, Mnjul says he would never use Superfetch again. Although [o]'s equipping it with 8GB RAM but such fetching - on a virtual machine harddisk, which is..huh? - is hilarious.

Ever since Mnjul reconfigured the disks of his current computer into a 74GB raptor and a RAID0'ed Barracuda 9's, he had moved/placed the pagefile on the latter's partition. However, since that, every time the computer BSODed there had been no crash minidumps. Indeed, when Mnjul and I navigated the settings, it did read a message, in Chinese that "If pagefile is disabled, or the initial size is of less than 1MB, then the system may not be able to create a debugging information file if a STOP error occurs. Continue anyway?", nonetheless the pagefile size on the partition was indeed larger than 1MB - it was 4GB! I thought it was a careless 32-bit integer overflow or something (by the way, my registers are a huge number of neuronbits) but when Mnjul googled the message it appeared that the message on an English XP read "If the pagefile on the volume C: has an initial size..."

That was actually clear, huh? When we placed a 16MB pagefile on C:, where the Windows Vista is installed, everything was all settled. Don't know if the localization team had messed up with the text or the text is actually unclear itself in English Vista versions. How about the multilingual [o]? Oh and by the way, the 16MB is the only pagefile we have on the computer now - which is equipped with 8GB RAM, and can run three virtual machines all at once. Sweet!

Mnjul    Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:33:21

The semester is over! I've been doing great with my Computer Architecture course. We didn't do much but using Verilog to design a MIPS CPU with on-chip L1 cache and off-chip memory is still very fun and interesting. I have decided to go for the advanced course next academic year. As for the networking course, I did fantastic in the final exam, and the final project (we only dug into application-layer although the materials in class went into almost 802.3 and 802.11b/g) was fun too. For the compiler course, wow, that was quite a messing with my knowledge in programming and lex, yacc, you know.. we made a "Simple Java" parser that parsed some Java-like code into another language called C-- (based on C, but the functionality is fractionally little). The source language is quite a joke if you ask me - there is essentially no relationship to Java as there is no object-orientedness. But to quote my classmate, it's very touching to see our compiled program compiles another piece of our codes :p

And for the digital image processing course, for the final project, my friend and I did something on synthesizing the small depth-of-field effects of tilt-shift lenses on a picture with large depth-of-fields. It's actually quite simple because we didn't bother taking too much time on it, the report can be found in my Curriculum Vitae link. The final results looks like what I posted to deviantART.

For most students here in Taiwan the beginning of July means summer vacation! However for me, remember the seminar course I mentioned in my last post? I'm getting in the Embedded Computing Laboratory as early as the second week of July. I'll be playing with the state-of-the-art technology - the nVidia CUDA! I'm really looking forward to it.

» Spring Time! by Mnjul, 2008-03-22
» Happy New Year! by [o], 2008-01-01
» 0.1m people have visited! by Mnjul, 2007-12-30