soapbox

I was poking around yesterday reading about how to save energy with computers. It turns out that, under linux at least, you can do a huge amount to save power just by changing some kernel options.

Dactyl isn’t a powerful computer, the processor is an 800 MHz VIA C3. However, with some of the tweaks I just did, it now hangs out pretending that it’s a 400 MHz computer right up until it has to serve a web page or actually do something. That saves half of the energy it would have otherwise been using!

Side note: for dactyl, this isn’t that impressive… it’s like 3 watts instead of 5 watts.

  

So, it’s really just a matter of time before dactyl bites the dust. Given, that amount of time might be 3-5 years, but it’ll still die sometime.

Luckily, Intel just released something that makes me salivate… another mini-ITX motherboard with an Atom processor on it. (Atom is Intel’s line of very low power processors.) The board itself draws basically the same amount of power as dactyl, but has perhaps 10 times the performance and has some neat features like SATA and the ability to use real memory. It’s also cheaper than the motherboard for dactyl.

So fear not! If and when dactyl dies, something will rise from the ashes. (Oh, and the blog is backed up remotely on a regular basis too, so if dactyl dies, everything can be easily ported.)

I have a question for the people still back at Dartmouth. Does anyone want to be listed as the official contact for dactyl with the computer folks? After I graduated, Michael became the official contactee and we should probably switch to someone who’s actually on campus. The job doesn’t require any work at all, all the updating and administering of dactyl happens remotely.

  

I’m sad to announce that dactyl’s second hard drive has bit the dust. It’s not a huge issue since the second hard drive wasn’t actually doing anything, but sad all the same.

Actually, it ends up being an excuse to upgrade. Is there anyone up there at Dartmouth who would like to do some computer surgery in the future? It’d just require a quick trip to best buy to get whatever hard drive they have that’s the cheapest, powering dactyl down, replacing the hard drive (it’s the one that isn’t even screwed in), and then turning the power back on.

  

The blog is now running on WordPress version 2.5 so things will look a little bit different when you go to write new posts. For the moment, the external appearance of the blog shouldn’t change at all. However, I did recently buy “WordPress for Dummies” specifically so I could play around with the formatting and look of the blog. Those changes are going to be a couple of weeks away though.

Let me know if anything is broken, if there’s anything that you really like know, or if there’s anything that you really hate.

  

Warning: fopen(/var/www/dactyl/wordpress//wp-content/cache/tex_c51d7e23458ca0e7373a8ed6ab56b2b9.png) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/dactyl/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/latex/latex.php on line 100

Warning: fputs(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/dactyl/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/latex/latex.php on line 101

Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/dactyl/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/latex/latex.php on line 102

Warning: fopen(/var/www/dactyl/wordpress//wp-content/cache/tex_f2f29c67ca26275d9bf70c20c7d5126d.png) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/dactyl/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/latex/latex.php on line 100

Warning: fputs(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/dactyl/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/latex/latex.php on line 101

Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/dactyl/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/latex/latex.php on line 102

Warning: fopen(/var/www/dactyl/wordpress//wp-content/cache/tex_f2f29c67ca26275d9bf70c20c7d5126d.png) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/dactyl/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/latex/latex.php on line 100

Warning: fputs(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/dactyl/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/latex/latex.php on line 101

Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/dactyl/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/latex/latex.php on line 102

I know everyone desperately wants to be able to use in their blog posts, so hopefully this will work. (As opposed to all of the previous attempts.)

Here are the instructions:
$$\int e^{-x^2} dx$$
gives as an inline version

$$!\int e^{-x^2} dx$$
gives

as a single line version

$$\int e^{-x^2} dx!$$
gives $$\int e^{-x^2} dx$$ as source.

The difference in the three cases is just the existence and location of the exclamation point.

  

I just wanted to tell people about some heavy duty lifting that dactyl’s been doing lately.

1.  Wordpress, the blog software, has been updated since the old version had some security holes.  Let me know if you find anything that you particularly like or want changed. 

2.  The underlying linux distribution running on dactyl has been completely refreshed.  This actually took 5 solid days of compiling with dactyl running at 100% the entire time.  You might have noticed that the blog seemed a little slow.  Anyway, everything is now completely up to date and the compile itself had no problems.  That says very good things about dactyl’s stability.  Again, if there is any special software that you’d like to use on dactyl, just let me know. 

  

So, after a stint away where I forgot my login pwd, I’m back in blog land because I realized that my work PC remembers my login. So it is now something I remember, and I am now able to post again. Now to try to remember all those things I had hope to post …