Over the past few weeks, Rukia (Sony Vaio SZ480) has been running quite hot (up to 94 degrees C) when at full load with video intensive applications. That’s pretty insane. This week I finally got around to addressing this issue. I bought a Zalman notebook cooler, which brought the temps down to around 86C at full load, and then configured RMClock to undervolt my 13 FID (max) VID to 1.0375 V (from the default 1.1625 V), as well as the subsequent lower FIDs (I was able to run 11 FID at the minimum 0.9500 VCore allowed by the BIOS), and now Rukia never goes above 78C at full load. (She hovers around 50C on idle.)

I’d recommend anyone with a laptop to at least undervolt their CPU. You’ll prolong battery life, decrease energy costs, increase the lifespan of the hardware, and help save the environment– all at no cost to performance! Here’s a nifty guide to follow. It’s written for Vista, but you can extrapolate it to work for XP without any problems.

For the past several days, the Nocturne (or Notturno) from Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has been in my head– specifically the opening theme played on the horns (youtube). There’s a mixture of sadness, resignation, hope, and resolve in those simple opening phrases. This is one of the few pieces for me where I can actually appreciate the horns for the subtle yet complex colors they’re capable of crafting out of their seemingly cold and metallic shells. Although I suppose context also plays an undeniable role in how I interpret the piece.

I’m only going to say one thing on this topic.

Never before has so much been asked of so many to bail out so big a problem created by so few people.

Now I gotta get back to work.

I don’t know if anyone has been paying attention, but there’s been some interesting background music being played at the Olympic games this year. In the beach volleyball games, in between points, they played Naruto theme music a couple times. And just now, as NBC introduced the men’s basketball gold medal match, they played theme music from The Prince of Egypt.

Congratulations to Michael Phelps on winning his eighth Olympic gold medal and making everyone at NBC wish they could have his baby.

via patrickmoberg

My desktop is like my room.  Usually I keep it pretty clean.  Then at some point a switch goes off, I suddenly don’t care anymore, and junk ends up all over the place– random media files, shortcuts, readme files to programs I don’t remember installing, etc..  I can tolerate this state for a while before I get fed up and go on a cleaning rage.  I’ve just now completed one such cycle, having spent a large part of the day cleaning up my desktop.

It’s funny how software preferences and opinions on sensible computer usage evolve over time.  For example, I used to think blogs were the most retarded idea and that “bloggers” were those who had failed at life.  Now look at me.  Pretty sad, huh?  Then there’s the view of Windows Media Player users as misguided souls who need to be shown the light (e.g. foobar2k–in right screenshot–, mplayerc, VLC, etc.), similar to the perception online bourgeoisie now have of people who still use IE.

But even software choices that used to reveal technical savvy are being corrupted.  My favorite text editor for a long time, UltraEdit, seems to be killing itself by becoming bloated with more and more useless features while failing to fix existing bugs.  Still, I prefer it over the alternatives like TextPad, Notepad++, etc, although not by much anymore.  My new love is AutoHotkey, which allows you to create macros and assign them to global hotkeys.  I can now automatically launch PuTTY, login, start a shell, and cd to my project directory with a single key, and I’ve also configured a macro to perform KDE-style moving and resizing of windows (ALT+leftclick anywhere in window to move it, ALT+rightclick to resize it).  How sweet is that?

I finally got around to installing Firefox 3 on my laptop just now, and have spent the last several minutes trying to figure out why my userchrome wasn’t working like it did in 2.x.  I’m used to having all buttons, menus, and the address bar on a single line at the top of the window, so that I have more vertical space to display content.  However, that means I need to cut out unnecessary menu items like the Help, View, Edit, History, and Bookmarks.  (I use the collapsible All-in-One  Sidebar add-on for all that functionality.)  Anyway, after installing FF3, the Bookmarks menu came back.  I checked my userchrome.css file and it was the same as before.  Then I googled for at least 5 minutes before I found a user comment that mentioned FF3 had changed the css name for the Bookmarks menu from #bookmarks-menu to #bookmarksMenu.  Ugh, why?

So I’m watching the opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympics, and during a break I see a commercial for a car that advertises “MP3 connectivity.” Does that sound wrong to anyone else? MP3 is a file format, not a hardware specification. Say I have MP3s on a hard drive, is that compatible? No. They should say “audio jack connectivity.” The car itself doesn’t have any hardware or software specifically designed to decode MP3 files (unless they were talking about an MP3 CD player, and they weren’t.)

And then there’s another commercial that touts “IPod compatibility.” Okay, that’s a bit more accurate, but still, that’s like saying, “this CD player can play Soulja Boy CDs.” Soulja Boy isn’t the only music artist on CD out there, and the IPod isn’t the only portable music player with an audio jack connector out there.

I’m writing a web application that requires me to use PHP to output Javascript code, and one of my lines is the following:

echo “fund.Data={$ydata};\n”;

This caused a Javascript error, which didn’t make sense to me until I realized that the squiggly brackets weren’t being printed, so the output was actually:

echo “fund.Data=$ydata;\n”;

This was strange, because squiggly brackets aren’t the type of characters you normally escape in a double-quoted string.  However, if placed around a variable name, they apparently mean something special and aren’t printed.  So in the end, I just broke up the string:

echo “fund.Data={” . “$ydata};\n”;

And that worked fine.

… you see smiley faces in your regex expressions.