I finally got round to starting on the CUDA rig. Build pictures:
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.
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.
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 :)
As I was working on the design, this cropped up in my RSS feeds:
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.
Inside view, after some cable management
Parts boxes
