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June 20, 2005
USB keyboards
dave
11:20 PM
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Now that I have the trifecta of popular Operating Systems here at home, I've noticed some surprising differences and failings among them. The most notable of these failings is quite unusual and very unexpected.
as I now have a Mac Mini, I got a USB keyboard. It's a very nice Apple Keyboard and it works flawlessly with both Linux and Windows under most circumstances. I thought, when I got it, that I might have had some problems with Linux. I thought that I might have some problems with my (older) motherboard (ECS D6VAA) on the Linux box and this new-fangled USB stuff; but it works just fine. I can change things in the BIOS on those rare occasions when I reboot the machine, and it's not even a slight issue that there isn't a keyboard plugged into the PS/2 port.
The problem is with the Dell Precision 220, the Windows box. Lord knows, it hasn't seen much use since I had both the Linux box and the Mac working. There's almost nothing I need a Windows box for now, apart from those very few websites which refuse to work on anything else, and the odd game. So far, this has only been Standard Chartered's online banking (which should actually work on the Mac as it has IE) and jobsdb.com, which is very obnoxious about only working on IE for Windows.
(It always amazes me that web-designers would go out of their way to make something which only works on a very specific platform. It's not difficult to make things work for almost every combination of OS and browser, as long as you adhere to the standards. I think that there's a bunch of 'web-designers' out there who've only learned a very limited set of skills on a very limited platform and insist on forcing that everywhere.)
Anyway, back to Windows: This Dell box refuses to acknowledge a USB keyboard until Windows is running. (And even then, it takes a good six seconds, as opposed to the Mac's two seconds, and the Linux box's three seconds.) This means that accessing the BIOS or 'Safe Mode' is impossible on the Windows box. (And it means that the Windows box feels like the least responsive machine when you're switching between the three.)
(And when you are switching between the three, the Windows box really starts to look like crap. The Mac has a great UI which lacks some ultimate configurability, which the Linux box has the configurability and the great response from the command line but the UI is a bit mediocre. The Windows box firmly falls between two stools by having a mediocre UI and a poor level of configurability or command line.)
Now, this may be the BIOS. After all, the Linux box is also an x86 box and I can use a USB keyboard to access the BIOS on that. The Windows box has a custom Dell BIOS with almost no options available for changing. Maybe it's just Dell that sucks beyond belief. My Asus P2-B motherboard I bought in 1998 can use a USB keyboard to access the BIOS. Is it too much to ask for a professional Dell workstation to not do the same thing?
UPDATE: - Having got a PS/2 Keyboard and booting up the machine again, It maintains that a USB Keyboard can be used to boot. This is just not true.
May 01, 2005
Firefox completely unusable
dave
12:01 AM
Comments (2)
This is completely ridiculous: Firefox crashes about once per hour now. It's almost completely unusable.
UPDATE: it seems to be caused by the SWF files flickr.com users have on their pages. Using ADBlock to remove those components from sight seems to have cleared it up.
April 29, 2005
Spam Karma
dave
11:43 PM
Comments (1)
OK, this comment:
Shandy, a G5 is the processor which powers the most recent Mac computers. It's an evoluton of the PPC architecture and is a RISC style architecture which is a bit more efficient than the CISC architecture of the x86 chips. It's much more efficient than the P4 chips, but probably on a par with the AMD64, P3 or Pentium-M chips. i.e., a 2.0Ghz G5/Pentium-M is roughly equivalent to a 4.0Ghz P4 chip.
Has triggered a Spam Karma rejection over at The Shaky Kaiser. Anyone got any ideas why that should be?
April 24, 2005
Firefox 1.0.3
dave
11:08 PM
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Since installing Firefox 1.0.3, I've noticed a very major decrease in browser stability. It's crashed half a dozen times on me in the last hour, which is very disturbing, as it would normally be open for weeks, if not months at a time. This is on my gizmo, my primary workstation, which is a dual 1GHz Pentium 3 box running Linux.
Also, there's a silly problem with the context menu — there's sometimes many blank lines in there. I just tried to take a screen capture of it but it seems to have cleared up. Weird.
April 23, 2005
Open Office
dave
10:21 PM
Comments (1)
You know, it's extremely irritating the way the default paste behaviour of Open Office changes with every new patch from Redhat. It seems to switch from 'insert cells' to 'overwrite cells' with each upgrade. Here's a hint guys: pick one behaviour and stick with it, and most people would like it to be like Excel, which overwrites.
April 16, 2005
Cheap KVMs
dave
08:29 PM
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As I have previously had older and larger computers at home, I have been able to get by with a KVM which handles VGA and PS/2.
Right, I just lost half the audience. OK, a KVM is a box which takes as input the Keyboard (K), Video (V) and Mouse (M) connectors from each computer you have and sends as output the K, V and M signals from the currently selected computer to your Keyboard, Video and mouse. This allows you to have only one Keyboard, Monitor and mouse on your desk and control many computers via a KVM box.
These boxes come in two types: cheap amateur crap and serious professional kit. The cheap amateur crap generally have very poor video quality, mechanical switching and are not chainable.
Chainable? Whassat?
The serious professional kit has reasonable to good video, electronic switching and is controllable from keycodes on your one keyboard. They're also chainable, which means that each 8-way KVM can control eight other KVMs. This is what you need in a server room with racks of servers all controlled from one keyboard, monitor and mouse.
Unfortunately, these things tend to be designed for very specific tasks, the usual one being to control a server room full of racks of servers. Not, for example, a situation where someone wants to connect, say, a Linux box, a Windows box and a Mac Mini to a dual DVI monitor setup with a USB keyboard. A single DVI switcher from ATEN cost about as much as a Mac Mini. The dual model, well, it would be cheaper to buy another set of monitors.
So what am I to do?
I was looking at the various KVMs in the usual places today (Sham Shui Po Golden Arcade, Wanchai Computer Centre, etc) when I thought of something. What I really needed was just to share the USB over the various boxes. The Windows and Mac boxes don't really need more than one monitor each as the Mac can't drive more than one and I mainly use the Windows box for games which are always less hassle on a single monitor anyway. As each monitor has two inputs, that means that I can have Windows on Monitor 1, OSX on Monitor 2 and Linux on a dual screen Xinerama solution. As the monitors have built in USB hubs, all I need is a USB switcher. They're normally for switching computers to USB printers, but they work the other way around too. And they're very cheap. I got one for $49. Hong Kong dollars. About US$6 or US$7.
So, now I have three computers plugging into the USB switcher, and my nice new Apple keyboard and generic USB mouse plug into the hubs on the monitors. Far less cabling, and I've been able to remove the huge KVM switcher from the rack as well, so I now have a place to put my nice shiny new Mac Mini.
April 14, 2005
Mac Mini
dave
11:16 PM
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Well, it's here. My new Mac Mini arrived at the post office yesterday and i took the afternoon off to go and pick it up.
First impressions are :
- Wow! It's tiny!
- It's really cute!
- Mac OSX looks gorgeous, where's the command line? Ahh, that feels better.
- It's really small.
I also treated myself to an Apple Extended Keyboard as I didn't have a USB keyboard. That's a nice piece of kit. I also got a mouse with a scroll wheel (and a second/third button) as the lack of a scroll wheel with the standard apple mouse is a real deal breaker for me.
My Mac Mini is pretty modestly specified: 256MB RAM, 1.25 GHZ G4 Processor, 40GB disk. It does have bluetooth and wireless. While the processor speed is low compared to today's screaming Pentium 4 monsters, it's actually faster than my Linux box and my Windows box, both of which are dual 1Ghz P3 machines. In use, it certainly doesn't feel like the processor is slowing things down, but I haven't tried to make DVDs or anything yet.
I'm running it through one of my L685 Eizo monitors at 1280x1024 and the quality of the display is very nice. I love all the special effects. They work, unlike the stuff that WinXP does to try and look pretty, the drop shadows and window opening effects in Mac OSX feel more coherent and feel less like cheap add-ons.
(This keyboard is really nice.)
For some reason, I can't plug a second USB device into the keyboard hub - OSX complains about the second device dawing too much power. Seems a bit odd. Is it my keyboard? Hmm, it appears that the keyboard port may not provide enough power for other devices (like a neon-lit mouse). I'll have to set one of the monitors up as a USB hub.
February 16, 2005
IDN bug workaround
dave
09:03 AM
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A workaround for the IDN spoofing issue: Tech.Life.Blogged | Workaround for IDN Spoofing Issue
November 25, 2004
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
dave
12:18 AM
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The winner of this year's moronic programmers awards goes to Lucasarts for this error message.
I might be able to play the game because I only have half the RAM they reccomend, but I definitely won't be able to play it because my CPU is 0.7% too slow. However, I will definitely be able to hear the game because I have a video capture card installed.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Over.
October 30, 2004
Happy Birthday Internet!
dave
11:00 AM
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From this article we learn that the Internet is 35 years old today.
Who knew, 35 years ago, that their grand project to make all information accessible at the touch of a button would lead to people being able to read blether like this? Magic, really.
October 15, 2004
G400, X.org, Dualhead
dave
12:09 AM
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To get dual head working on a G400 with Fedora Core 2 and X.org, you need to do the following.
- download the latest linux drivers in source form from www.matrox.com
- install the src RPM for x.org.
- unpack the matrox drivers and copy the mgaHALlib.a file to /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
- modify the xorg SPEC file as per this posting: Note that I didn't change the version number of x.org, but instead added "_mga" to it and I had better success.
- follow the other steps above; i.e. recompile the RPM and update your installed version with rpm -Fvh ...
- download the binary linux drivers from Matrox and install them. I had already done this, so I knew that the libraries were all in the right places.
- Restart X
That should do it, assuming that you have a properly setup xorg.conf, of course.
Fedora Core 2 should come with a warning: Serious Geeking required to get this to work.
Oh, and if you're using PostgresQL for anything, make sure that you have a dump of your database using pg_dump first, before you find yourself trying to uninstall postgres at 1 AM and reinstall the older version so that your website and spam filtering systems actually work.
Honestly, if it is known that a paritcular upgrade will require backing out of that upgrade so that you can make the requisite backups to complete the update, I think that the installer should abort with a message telling you that you'll have to dump your databases using pg_dump before upgrading rather than giving you a cryptic error message at boot and leaving you to figure it out yourself. Hunting around for the previous OS install disks so that you can install the older package so that your entire production systems still work is not a great deal of fun. Especially not at 1 AM.
June 17, 2004
Dual Screen stuff
dave
09:51 PM
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As I've mentioned before, I run a dual screen setup here. I have two LCD monitors in a side by side configuration to give me a screen of about 31" x 13" with a resolution of 2560 x 1024.
On the Linux box, which is my primary workstation (and also the server you're reading this on), both of these screens are identically sharp. The VGA card is a Matrox G400 with dual analogue outputs. I get a 75Hz Vertical refresh rate.
On the Windows box, both screens are noticably different. I have an Nvidia card with one DVI and one VGA output, both of which give a 60Hz refresh rate. The analogue output is noticeably more fuzzy than the digital output. Strange.
Alas, although the primary purpose of the Windows box is game playing, two screens isn't all that useful for gaming. While many games will support a widescreen view, the dividing line between the screens is then right at the centre of attention and is very distracting.
A three monitor setup would be perfect, but onle one card supports that — the Matrox Parhelia — and that really doesn't have the oomph for proper gaming.
May 21, 2004
Cambridge Z88
dave
12:52 AM
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I remember when one of these was the bee's knees in portable computing technology. It's probably still got some uses today. 20 hours of battery life in use!
Tempting though it is, I'll stick with my 16MB Palm Pilot...
(As seen on Charlie Stross's Diary)
January 30, 2004
Toshiba Tecra 510CDT
dave
02:46 AM
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I've managed to upgrade my Toshiba. This laptop was given to me by a friend some years ago. It's large, grey and heavy and not very quick. One of the problems with it has been the size of the disk. The standard disk is a 2.1GB disk, which was fine for Win95 way back in 1997 when it was made, but which is a little small for even a minimal Linux installation these days.
(Sigh, my first computer had a whopping 64k of RAM. That's kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes, and managed to fit BASIC, a spreadsheet, a wordprocessor and an OS in anyway. Had some good games too.)
I normally use the Tosh as a terminal to the main server so I can sit in the living room and read email while having my children trip over the network cable.
However, as I'm going to be away from home for a while, I decided to try and fit a bigger disk into it, so I can hopefully write a bit when I'm away.
I picked up a 30GB Toshiba disk today, but wasn't sure it would fit. some old BIOSes won't recognise large disks. I was worried that my Tosh would only recognise up to about 8GB, which is apparently the largest disk size you can fit in the model below mine.
It was, however, just plug and play. I swapped out the disks, noting that the new disk is half the thickness of the old one, despite having 15 times as much storage, and powered up. Starting up the RedHat install showed that my Tosh was now equipped with a 30GB hard drive. Pretty cool really, for a Pentium 133.
But, speaking of Plug and Play, the Tosh has an infrared port which is only activated by Windows. I've tried setpnp to get it going, but not had any success. Apparently 2.6.x has better PnPBIOS support so I'll try and get 2.6 running on it and see.
December 30, 2003
Some CSS goodness
dave
12:38 AM
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I've been doing some web design for a friend of mine. The previous design she had involved all sorts of bletcherous IE specific stuff and a metric buttload of javascript and cack to get image popups working.
I've recreated that effect with pure CSS on Vicky's pages. It wasn't easy to get IE to play along, but I got it in the end. If you look at the CSS, the key to the image popups is:
DIV.thumbnailbox A:hover { display: inline; }
DIV.thumbnailbox A:hover SPAN { display: block; position: absolute; top: 0em; right: 0em; z-index: 102; }
/*Hack to stop IE being a pain in the butt*/ /* This moves the popups over to the left because IE gets it wrong.*/ *html DIV.thumbnailbox A:hover SPAN { right: 15em; }
This turns off the SPAN, which is itself an image, until you mouseover it, when it appears in a fixed location.
The key to getting it to work in IE involves the A:hover declaration and the hack selector at the bottom. without the first, the images don;t appear at all, and without the second, they get absolutely positioned to the parent element to the actual containing element, for some strange reason and need to be repositioned with the hack.
It works perfectly well in Mozilla without those hacks, but IE is what most people use, so it has to work in that steaming pile of cack.
December 28, 2003
Blogging
dave
02:52 AM
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Having used Grey Matter for a few weeks now, I must day that I really don't like the interface. Typing into a webform just feels very, very wrong to me.
This just feels wrong, dammit!Not being able to break up entries with proper HTML also feels wrong, although it is possible, as the callout shows.
I really got used to being able to edit entries with vi, and having a nice, solid Makefile to regenerate the whole site. By contrast, Greymatter seems to take an age to regenerate the site. It takes five minutes or so, as opposed to the twenty or thirty seconds which my Makefiles did. OK, Greymatter is doing quite a bit more, but it still feels very awkward.
I also stand by my earlier comments about the sheer mind-boggling stupidity of the storage format. Why oh why is the data not stored in XML files? What possible reason could there be for storing the date in eight fields when one would do just as well?
Gaah!
I'm looking at MovableType at the moment. Maybe that'll be closer to what I want and I won;t have to go and develop something from the ground up.
December 17, 2003
Content Management Software
dave
01:24 AM
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I've just been poring through the source code for Grey Matter, the software which manages the bloggier aspects of this site and I have to say I'm stunned by some of what I see. 'Music', 'Mood', 'Emoticons'. It makes me want to barf. There's a lot of things, well, not wrong, but which could certainly stand improving.
The primary focus of the software is very clearly managing a personal weblog. There are some pretty powerful things in here, don't get me wrong, but there are an awful lot of hardcoded decisions by the programmer as well. These are things like forcing two 'adjectives' for every post — Music and Mood — rather than letting the blog-author specify a number of additional attributes when setting up the blog. It wouldn't be very hard, for example, to replace the 'Music' or 'Mood' templates with generic templates, so authors could have whatever they wanted as descriptors for each post. A blog about wines could have descriptors relating to vintages, grapes, vineyards, regions, etc, while one about food could have descriptors relating to ingredients, ethnicity, spiciness, carnivorous or vegetarian.
Possibly one of the worst things is the way dates are stored in the database. Not, as you would imagine, as a timestamp, but as a collection of strings with (and this is the stupidest thing) AM or PM specified. sure, this makes it easy for the programmer to patch up a defective entry later, but it means that you now require eight fields to store the posting time when it could be done easily with one. All Unix boxes have a counter of seconds since 1970, which functions as the system datestamp. This one counter specifies the posting time in UTC to the second, and is easily convertable to local time in Adis Adaba or whatever.
The data files are stored in a glob-delimited form ('Glob delimited' means that there's a non printing character which separates the various items of data) and this glob changes &emdash sometimes its the vertical bar character, sometimes it's a newline. The more logical choice of flat file storage would be an XML file, which is how my own Content Management System stores the rest of the site. The concept of splitting the body text with <br /> tags is inherently wrong as well. A paragraph is defined as something between <p>...</p> tags, not one lump of text with breaks scattered through it.
One aspect of the GM software which really annoyed me was that there are some components which are completely hardcoded and not changeable without editing the Perl code. Everything which is output to the HTML file should be definable by the user. My site is valid XHTML - I don't want someone else's stuff in there screwing up the validation.
There are many things which are excellent about GM - the simplicity of setting it up and the way it stores everything in flat files is good. The way it generates flat-files for the html is perfect for a site like mine where the content changes less often that the number of page-visits. If the content is changing more all the time, then of course a database backed site is ideal, but there is a risk of increasing the load times for each page. with my hourly hits going between 50 on average and 500 during the peak SARS traffic time, having the pages regenerated each time would have overloaded my server.
So, while I like GM enough to continue using it, I'm working an adapting it to use XML files for storage, better date storage, completely user-defined output and multiple generic descriptors. In fact, adapting it is the wrong phrase. 'Seeing how it does it, and then sorting out how to do it right ('right' being 'right in my particular context', of course). Just don't expect this to happen quickly, or even completely, or even to result in a product which would be useable by anyone except the author. I'm doing this to scratch a very specific itch.
And did I mention that the preview uses GM's own styles instead of the blog's styles? How chuffing useless is that?
October 18, 2003
Before the brain transplant...
dave
08:51 PM
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processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1000.048
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 1992.29
October 08, 2003
Recovering Excel Spreadsheets
dave
08:46 PM
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Ever had an Excel Spreadsheet suddenly refuse to load? Got the error message on the right? I had that today, and after quite a bit of research I managed to recover a file.
After reading page after page about how to recover formulas and data by referring obliquely to them in formulas, I saw a comment that often, opening the spreadsheet in a later version would do the trick, or fail that OpenOffice.org would work.
I put the spreadsheet on a floppy and brought it home. Excel 2000 at home was no good. Finally I transferred the file to my main Linux workstation and Voila! It opened straight away with OpenOffice.org, a free office software suite. There is a version of this for Windows too, so you don't have to have a Linux box to rescue your files.
August 15, 2003
American Dialects
dave
10:21 PM
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These maps show American dialects over the lower 48. Fascinating. From Making Light.
August 11, 2003
Seti At Home
dave
12:15 AM
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Jeez! I leave my Windows box on for a few days, having remembered to reselect Seti At home as the screen saver and I clock up another 50 units! You can Checkout Dave's SETIATHOME stats!
This is all on the dual PIII 1Ghz which was my office machine, which I recently acquired. It's kind of funny that, even though this machine has been SETIing for not very long (288 hours), it's better than 76.819% of other users. What do people do? Sign up and never run the screensaver again?
May 15, 2003
New Processor
dave
10:17 PM
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OK, I've replace the PIII with the Celeron and bumped up the FSB speed a bit:
processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 11 model name : Intel(R) Celeron(TM) CPU 1300MHz stepping : 1 cpu MHz : 1564.721 cache size : 256 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 2 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse bogomips : 3119.51
That's a 20% increase in speed from the stock speed, and it's close to 56% faster than the PIII!
Processors
dave
09:18 PM
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Well, I put a Pentium III 1 Gigahertz processor in Gizmo (the web server box, and currently my main workstation), because I assumed that, at something like three times the price of the Celeron 1.3 I had in there before, it would be a faster chip. I looked at the 133 Mhz Front Side Bus (FSB) and concluded that memory access would be faster and overall performance would be more solid. It was certainly like that on my Windows box, when I had two of them. However, what has really happened is that the system feels more sluggish (only slightly) and the total heat output has gone way up. The CPU temp, which used to hover around 40 C, has gone to 55+ when working hard. The SouthBridge Temp has gone up too. I'm going to put the Celeron back in, and overclock it to about 115-120 Mhz FSB. I had it there before. That's about 1.5Ghz overall. The SDRAM is all p133, so is fine and stable at those speeds.
May 12, 2003
State of Mojo
dave
12:16 AM
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Well, I've pretty much given up on resurrecting Mojo for the moment. For the last few weeks, I've only had a functioning Linux box at home. The only thing I really needed from my Win2k box was all of my spreadsheets and documents. However, I moved the hard disk from Mojo to Gizmo (sacrificing one of the CDs) and I now can read all of the stuff that was on my Win2k box. Even better, OpenOffice can read Excel Spreadsheets! And understand the macros! RedHat 9: go get it now!
May 09, 2003
Pop-ups
dave
11:48 PM
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One of the really nice features about Mozilla is that you can block those irritating pop-up windows from some web sites. simple right-click on the window and you may see an option right at the top: "reject popup windows from this site". Click on this and that's one less annoyance while browsing the internet.
May 06, 2003
Installers
dave
11:55 PM
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I'm still trying to get my windows box back on its feet. It turns out that the PIII 1Ghz won't stay running for more than a few minutes and the motherboard can't reliably detect all the RAM. I guess the first problem is due to overheating (there's no thermal paste on the processor, and it's not one with a heat spreader. Also, there's no thermistor, so I have to sort out a P2T at some point to see what that thing actually runs all.), but the second problem is much more serious and indicates that the BX chipset is not stable enough at 133Mhz FSB. That is a very old motherboard (Rev 1.04, dating from mid 1998), so I shouldn't expect miracles from it. I guess my best budget is still to find a S370 motherboard somewhere. With that in mind, Mojo is now running the PII 350 again. This is still the most stable processor I've ever encountered. Even at work, my main Linux box is a dual PII 450, which just bloody runs and runs and runs. Hmm, I just had a though that I have a few spare Celeron chips, which have a 100Mhz FSB, so they wouln't be affected by the RAM issue.
Meanwhile, I started attempting to revive the Win2k installation on the box. Forget it. An SMP (multi-processor) Win2k install barfs when finding only one processor. Digging out the CD revealed the world of pain which is a windows install. Honestly, I don't know what people are on when they say that Linux installs are too difficult when compared to Windows. I know that they've certainly never installed Win98, and probably never installed Win2k.
I gave up on the enormous pain in the butt which is installing windows, and decided to install RedHat 9 on one of the spare SCSI disks in Mojo.
- Put CD in drive
- Reboot
- Answer a few simple questions (Workstation? Server? Which Disk?) and sit back and watch it.
- Reboot when finished
And it doesn't look as if the guy responsible for the CGA card colour scheme was in charge of the graphic design of it. The last few RedHat installs (since about 7.0) have been bright and colourful, or have a text only option, because almost anyone with a video card has more than 16 colours. And if they don't, they're going to choose the text install anyway. With a Windows installer, on matter what video card you have you get the same 16-colour display. Reboot into safe mode, if you want to see how it works. Or, alternatively, smack yourself in the head a few times, shoot yourself in the foot, and ring up Bill Gates and get him to come around and insult you for a while.
At work, all I have to do is copy the RedHat install CDs to a network drive, make some boot floppies and I can install RedHat at the speed of the Network card. Takes about 30 minutes for a full install, plus some post first-boot configuration. (Then there'll be some local configuration issues, like which NIS server to use, that sort of thing), but even most of them get picked up when doing an upgrade.
May 05, 2003
Rebuilding Mojo
dave
11:43 AM
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I've managed to get Mojo started up again. I've put one of the PIII processors into the old Asus P2B board which used to have a PII 350 in it. The PIII runs at a faster FSB too, so there's probably going to be a lot of heat generated. There's no thermal sensor on for the CPU on the P2B board, but there are headers for them. I may be able to make some from one of the little electronic thermometers I have lying around. Are thermal sensors a standard part? Will I need to calibrate it? I've seen some P2Ts for sale on the web for US$6, but the shipping costs to here are silly.
The trick to getting a fast PIII to work with the P2B is to set the CPU core voltage (Vcore) to 1.8 on the slot1-S370 converter (Slocket). This is as low as the Voltage generator on the motherboard can handle. This is slightly too high for a PIII 1GHZ, but only by 0.05 volts, so I'm not too worried. I used an Iwill Slocket II, mainly because I had one lying around.
Having the latest BIOS probably helps too - Asus Web Site has plenty available for download, and I'm using a recent beta 1013a7. There's a 1014b3 out, which may or may not be any better. Haven't installed it yet as I don't seem to have any functioning floppy disk drives!
October 29, 2002
Disregard previous
dave
12:00 AM
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I've changed to monitoring package from mrtg to rrdtool. There are some new pages here. These new pages monitor various aspects of the home network, including:
- Total network traffic through the router
- Total network traffic to and from Mojo, the win2k box
- Operational details from Gizmo, the Linux box
- CPU load, Fans and Temperatures from Gizmo (also, CPU load from Mojo on that page)
- Router traffic (also, CPU load from Mojo on that page)
- Router traffic by ports (also, CPU load from Mojo on that page)
The Gizmo details are produced with RRDTOOL, which is better and more customizable than MRTG. Expect to see lots of those graphs turning up all over.
February 26, 2001
Some Validation
dave
12:00 AM
Comments (0)
OK, the style sheet now checks out as valid CSS and the pages check out as valid HTML4.01! 