Connection Marathon

Managed to connect for 503 hours straight. Need evidence? Look here:

End of Semester, Starting a New Phase

We had our last final Machine Learning examination on Thursday morning, and we had lunch at steamboat after that. Here are the satisfied faces after the very fulfilling meal. (Never judge how much a person can eat by his/her build - another lesson learnt)

I'm not a big fan of steamboat buffets because I can never eat so much. But well, this is the end of the semester after all, what we have been looking forward to for four months. Phew.

When are we going for karaoke? Sorry that I 'duahed' everyone the last time ... I really slept too late. Next time just go there and start without me, I'll catchup. Apologies again. :)

Also bought a cool aluminium hard disk enclosure (at Storage Studio, slightly overpriced) and DVD-RW drive (a $69 bargain at VideoPro's new showroom).
Too bad the 250GB capacity hard disks are out of stock. The perils of shopping close to the weekend, and during X'mas season at that. I'll try again on Saturday, after I sort things out in school.

Started my first day (orientation) of internship at Encentuate on Friday. Feels wierd becoming an intern especially after working for five years already. Man, it has been that long! It is quite cool to experience how another company operates, it opens up a whole new perspective, very enriching experience. Apparently my project is quite highly sought after, not to mention being quite expensive too (cos of the equipment involved). *Pressure*.

Got a pair of Creative 1700 headphones, not too shabby, heh ... has a long 1m extension cable.




Wow, I'm spending a lot of money. :P:P

Went browsing around at Best Denki, looking at DV Camcorders. There was a guy promoting JVC models, but he was enthusiastic enough to discuss esoteric features like Canon's (and Sony's) AV-DV passthrough with me, although, like virtually all salespeople I have talked to, had no idea what I was talking about at first. This one is good though, he was patient enough to listen, and really understood what I was saying.

The new Canon DVD camcorder did not have the passthrough function, apparently, so he kindly let me plug the power into one of the DV tape models to browse through the menu screens. I finally found the setting "AV-DV recording (on/off)" while in VCR mode. Sweet success!

Also saw the spare battery for my wireless headphone at Best Denki, but it costs a whopping $30, so I decided against it for now. Need to amortise the spending.

Plan to go back to school Saturday morning to clean out the waste paper, scan handwritten notes and burn stuff to DVD.

USB2.0 drives finally works on my Linux machine! Had to use a 2.6.12 kernel. USB development has stopped on the 2.4 series of kernels, so even the 'latest' 2.4.30 cannot make it.

Made a Knoppix 4.0.2 LiveCD a few days ago and booted from it. Viola, the USB drive worked with the EHCI-HCD driver! Wonderful! But I've been afraid of migrating to a 2.6 kernel, which is rather unfamiliar territory. Since I am running a RedHat9 system, even though I have already heavily patched to keep it up-to-date, the system and some initialization files (namely /etc/rc.sysinit and /etc/modules.conf) also need some tweaking to get them to support a 2.6 kernel.

Instead of trying to compile a 2.6 kernel myself (which takes a terribly long time, by the way, even on my Pentium4 3GHz with HyperThreading), I just copied the kernel and modules from the Knoppix CD's Live filesystem! Guess what, it actually works! (Well, but not without some adjusting of configuration files of course).

For those who are in the same boat as me, here are some useful links.


http://thomer.com/linux/migrate-to-2.6.html
http://kerneltrap.org/node/3106
http://www.mobydisk.com/techres/linux_2.6.1_kernel.html
http://www.linux-sxs.org/upgrading/migration26.html

The Knoppix 2.6.12 kernel has now replaced 2.4.30 as the default kernel in my Grub configuration.

Found this new NDAS technology while looking for an external drive enclosure http://www.ximeta.com/technology/ndas/index.php, looks rather promising since it includes both USB and NDAS. NDAS skips the overheads of TCP/IP and CPU processing, even allowing RAID configurations and unlimited expansion options. It comes standard with Gigabit Ethernet too (you can't do any fast file transfers with Fast Ethernet anyways)! The case by Sarotech is going for S$179, seems a good buy. A 250GB drive is also going for the same price ... hmmm cheap cheap ... but getting both will set me back by another $400! Not to mention that I need to get a replacement DVD writer.

Hmm ... I'll make this my X'Mas wish list! :P