Wednesday, May 27, 2009

CUDA rig status: Started

I finally got round to starting on the CUDA rig. Build pictures:




Components:
  • Case: Coolermaster CM690
  • Power Supply: Corsair HX1000W
  • Motherboard: DFI Lanparty 790FXB-M2RSH
  • CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 940
  • Memory: Kingstom ValueRAM DDR2-800
  • System disk: OCZ Core V2 30GB SSD
  • Test CUDA Card: XFX Geforce 9800GT

Monday, April 13, 2009

Adblock in SRWare Iron

While Chrome does not (yet) support adblock-like features, this has been implemented in SRWare Iron already. Download adblock.ini from SRWare's news page, and use it to replace adblock.ini in your existing installation.


I haven't tested it extensively to see if it works as well as Firefox's AdblockPlus extension, but so far none of the advertisements on Engadget are showing :)

Friday, April 3, 2009

Porting search engines from Firefox to Chrome/Iron

This is a quick method for those seeking to improve the functionality of Chrome/Iron/other Chromium variants on their system.

If you already have Firefox installed and have been playing around with it, then you probably have quite a list of search engines already added. you can, with some expenditure of effort, bring them over to Chromium/Iron. Here's how.

  1. Browse to your Firefox profile folder. On most systems, this should be something like C:/Program Files/Mozilla/Firefox/profile (I'm using a portable build so I can't verify this).
  2. You should see a folder labelled searchplugins. If you see a number of files with extensions ending in .xml, then you've hit jackpot :) Those files are search engine configurations, and should be named according to the search engine they are configured for.
  3. Right-click the appropriate .xml file, then "Edit" (or just open it in your text editor of choice). Look for a line with the following:
  4. From the same line, copy the URL that comes after template=, without the quotation marks.
  5. Right-click on the Location bar in Chrome/Iron, and select "Edit search engines...". Click "Add", and a dialog box for adding a ne search engine should appear.
  6. Type in a name and keyword of your choice in the first two text entry fields. In the third entry field, paste the URL you copied earlier. Replace "{searchTerms}" in the URL with "%s" (excluding the quotation marks).
  7. Click Ok. You should now be able to search using the search engine in Chrome/Iron, simply by typing in the search keyword, then the search terms to use, separated by a space.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Of Sky Crawlers and Change

I finally watched Sky Crawlers (from a source I will not name), and it left me with mixed feelings. For a long time I haven't thought about so many things after watching an anime series/movie, so I'm penning all this down.

First, a warning to readers: No, I did not have an outline of this written on a sheet of paper, nor did I plan an introduction, body (with points + elaboration) and conclusion, so I'm afraid you'll have to suffer some of my brain diarrhoea. Any academic body would tell you this is bad writing style, so do not emulate this. But for a blog... whatever.

Without revealing too much of the story and plot, Sky Crawlers is a story about people living the same life over and over again, in an unchanging landscape. Like with other Mamoru Oshii works, this one's a thinker. What makes this one different is that it's boring, absolutely boring, but intentionally so.

In case that hasn't registered with you, I will emphasise again: this is a boring movie. If you just want a quick sky-fighting flick with hot action and lots of noise, this is not the flick to pick.

To be honest, the film piqued my interest only after I read Justin's review of it (scathing look at the anime industry? Ooooh...) I don't fully agree with him, though. As one of the posts on the ANN forums says, the theme of this movie is so general that it could apply to almost anything. It could be a scathing look at anime... or at engineering, or business, photography, any number of fields and disciplines that have fallen into the rut of wash-rinse-repeat. From a general perspective, Sky Crawlers is the embodiment of pretty-but-boring; lovely textures and lighting, sharp CG, but flat textures on flat characters, and bland voice-acting. I wonder if this is Oshii's way of making a point that constancy is not something to be aimed for.

As a teenager I sometimes thought to myself, "How nice things would be if they could stay the same so I would never have to grow up". Now the irony of that statement comes back to bite me. It's triflingly amusing because at that moment in time, I was looking forward to an eternity of constancy; the preservation of a state that includes my preference for an unchanging state of constancy. If that state could have been perfectly preserved maybe I would have been in frozen, time-preserved bliss. Wouldn't that be a dandy state of things? The classic fairytale "living happily ever after".

But in retrospect, maybe staticity is desirable only in the context of an inevitably changing background. In a world where things are changing slowly but surely, constancy is the flip side of the coin, the greener side of the field. I say as a teen, "It would be nice if we never had to grow up and graduate" because growing up and graduating is the de-facto state of things. I wonder what I would have said in an alternate reality where graduation never existed.

In the first chapter of The Nature of Physical Reality, (part of) a paragraph reads "Professor William Lyon Phelps, in his charming informal lectures to the undergraduates at Yale, insisted that physics had far less to say about truth and reality than did poetry. and to prove his point he asked them: 'Would you now read a physics text that is 100 years old? Of course not. But you still read Shakespeare!'"

So much for truth and reality then, as convenient and useful constructs of the mind. Maybe they're not constant either, changing as our perceptions and collective ideas do. Perhaps, as the cliché goes, the only thing that doesn't change is change itself. And if change is the only thing we can count on, then it's probably time for me to grow up and stop getting too comfortable in my little academic pigeon-hole.

I leave you readers to your own ideas on change, and hope you leave some fragment of your presence in the comments :)

Sunday, February 15, 2009

NAS Project Status: Suspended/dropped

As I was working on the design, this cropped up in my RSS feeds:


QNAP TS-809 Turbo Pro NAS

Specifications:
Intel Processor Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz
2GB DDRII RAM
8 x 3.5" SATA I/II HDD, hot-swappable, lockable
Mono-LCD display with backlight and buttons for configuration

As much as I love the idea of owning an NAS I built myself, this is just so much more awesome. So I'm dropping the VIA NAS 7800 project, until something better comes up.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

NAS Server: v0.4

Photobucket: NAS Server v0.4
120mm fan swapped with a 200mm fan, an obvious solution to the issue (thanks jisa!). I'm currently eyeing the Antec Big Boy 200 (the fan in that image is not the Antec, but since i couldn't find a ready-made model I just resized the 120mm to the same dimensions). Hopefully it does translate to better airflow distribution. Removing the duct also makes the enclosure shorter, a welcome change.

Ventilation grilles have been added to the front of the base plate; I'll be adding more in future. The motherboard mounting plate is currently secured to the base by screws. I'm still figuring out a way to make it easily removable without requiring tools.

I'll try to find time during the upcoming semester to model the backplane PCB & SATA connectors. I also need to find a way to secure the hard drives (most likely idea would be a stiff plate secured by press-down clips). I'm also thinking of adding a graphic LCD to the front, so designing the side walls is going to take awhile.

NAS Server: v0.3

Photobucket: NAS Server v0.3
Actually this is v4, but since I didn't make any 2D images or backups of v3 I'll pretend it never existed :P (sloppy, sloppy...)

Anyway, you can see that quite a few things are changed by now. I figured it would be easier to make a wall for the base plate and punch holes in it for the backports, so I did that.

It might be interesting to note that the PSU isn't secured by any screws at all (although the metal bracket supporting it at the back is secured by screws). I don't think it has any screw-threads on the bottom surface and I don't feel safe tapping new screw threads on my own, so that will have to do for now.

The 2X80mm system fans have now been replaced by a 1X120mm fan, which should be quieter. Since the HDD cooling section profile is larger than 120X120mm, I ducted the fan to allow airflow to spread. This is a dumb idea of course, I just put it in because I didn't have any better ideas, until a friend pointed out an obvious fix (I still can't believe I didn't think of it earlier; see next update). The fan plate is supported by protrusions on the base plate (a little hard to see in the image, look near the top edge of the base plate).

Along other changes, the HDD cage was redesigned yet again; It now has bottom support in addition to side support. Both old and new designs are simple folding designs that can be made from a single sheet of metal, with no assembly required. I'm still thinking of ways to reduce drive noise and vibration, this will probably be handled with the use of anti-vibration damping strips but I'm open to other suggestions.

The side walls and top mesh cover have not been modeled yet, I'll get to it eventually.

NAS Server: v0.2

Photobucket: NAS Server v0.2
Some tweaks, as you can see; the backplane feature has been added, HDDs are flipped with the connector on top. you'd notice that one column of drives has been rotated in order to cluster the connectors in the middle. I hope the rotational symmetry helps simplify the CFD later on (or maybe not, since the heat source isn't centred).

The white bracket you see at the back was a temporary measure for drive-mounting, since I haven't figured out a way to keep the HDD cage suspended above the motherboard and PSU. you might also notice that the HDD cage design has changed; the design I got from 3D Warehouse just wasn't good enough. Currently system cooling is managed by 2X80mm fans, an arrangement I'm not really pleased with since the outer HDDs get less air.

In any case, I did a major redesign (not noticeable, but I basically deleted most of it and started over) shortly after this point.

Friday, January 2, 2009

NAS Server: v0.1

Photobucket: NAS Server v0.1
This is a simplistic initial design, made using standard (slightly modified) parts from Google 3D Warehouse (apart from the outer case, which is self-modeled).

Motherboard: VIA NAS 7800
Power Supply (PSU): Seasonic SS-200SU
Hard Disk Drives (HDDs): Western Digital Caviar Green

You can tell this is definitely an early model; no holes for the motherboard backports and PSU power socket, and lots of features not included yet. But the important design features are in place; small footprint (the initial design has a horizontal cross-section dimension of 250X250mm) and low power consumption. The HDD arrangement was selected for optimal cooling and more even heat spread*.

Drive SATA connectors were initially positioned at the bottom for close proximity to the motherboard, but I later decided to design it for easier access with minimal disassembly by the user. This will be achieved with top-loading drives, via backplane PCB-mounted integrated SATA connectors (see the later posts for more details).



*Some case history: I am currently using a Synology CS-407 4-bay NAS (see photo from earlier post), which has the drives horizontally oriented, vertically stacked. While that is a convenient and compact arrangement, it causes the top drive to be cooled less efficiently. During typical operation the CS-407 reports HDD temperatures (in degrees Celsius, from top to bottom) of 42, 42, 40, 38. For this design I decided to go with only 1 layer of hard drives, with sufficient spacing between them; Despite the small footprint, I believe it's still possible to design an optimal HDD layout that isn't confusing or inconvenient.

NAS Server: Introduction

This project is a downscaled version of the previously-mentioned Uberserf (which I still haven't gotten round to giving a proper name to), meant as a specialised file server, perhaps with a web management UI.

The main design focus and requirements are small footprint (takes up minimal space), low power consumption (so an ATX/microATX mid-tower, though cheaper, wouldn't do) and high storage density (at least 8 drive bays). Other secondary factors include low cost, low operating temperature and ease of manufacture.

The designs are done in Google Sketchup, due to its simplicity (I don't want a design so complicated it can't even be done in Google Sketchup) and also ease of viewing (via Google's 3D Warehouse). There are also some ready-made parts (fans, hard drive cages, etc) available in Google 3D Warehouse, which simplifies the design process.

Anyway, this post and the next few posts are actually backlogged; I should have started project logging earlier, I know >_>

This post, and the posts that follow, will be tagged "nas", and serve as a project log of sorts. Feel free to add your own comments, or recommend any sources/manufacturing workshops if you know any. I fully intend to create a CAD model of it, carry out some CFD simulations for airflow, and eventually make a prototype of it, and use it for personal storage. Plans for commercialisation and mass production are not in the pipeline yet, though I wouldn't rule it out.