Caught in a rat trap

Now, lately I have been working on a project that involves image processing. For the last couple of hours my program has been causing my PC speaker to beep when I tried to dump an image to a file "con.bmp". Furthermore symbols started to appear on my command line for no reason it seems. Extremely frustrated at the lack of progress I finally decided to post it as a question on a developer forum.

The reply I got from a kind expert was kind shocking. There was nothing wrong with my program. I was totally smacked by M$'s WinXP. Turns out that WinXP does not allow files to be called "con" with any extension for that matter (e.g. "con.bmp"). These files are reserved device files. Unlike Linux where the device files are kept in a special place, in WinXP, they can be accessed everywhere (that is why they have to be reserved)! What is worse is that "con" and its extensions are not the only reserved file names.

"Do not use the following reserved device names for the name of a file: CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9. Also avoid these names followed by an extension, for example, NUL.tx7.

Windows NT: CLOCK$ is also a reserved device name." -- msdn

$100 human powered laptop

Well not quite $100 (yet), more like 100 pounds. An interesting scheme to get laptops to children in developing countries -- these things can even be powered by foot-pump. Some very big names are involved in it, including Intel, AMD, Google, etc. Although Intel is involved, the laptop will run on AMD processors for now. Since RedHat is involved and since you cannot find a supported version of Windows for under $100, my bet is it will run on the Linux operating system.

Some updates: there is a full run down of the laptop's specifications and capabilities here and some Nigerian children have already found something that inspires them to "foot pump" their laptop more (pointed out by a friend of mine).

Travis: Closer

One of Travis' new songs, Closer, is currently one of favorite songs. Even though the lyrics only contain the same few words. I found the MTV on youtube and guess who is in it?

It's more than meets the eye!

Last night I decided to catch this movie to take advantage of the cheaper weekday movie rates and I was totally blown away. Never mind that it is Transformers, it was also one of the best action movies I have seen in a long time. There was never a long pause in between the sequences and it just gets better and better. If I were to plot the action over time it will look something like the graph on the right.

Furthermore, there were the cameos! Hilarious. I shall not spoil the movie and reveal who are the cameos here. If you have not watched it yet, go see it! If you dislike the way Bumblebee and Star Scream speaks in the cartoon, go see it! They both say almost nothing in the movie.

Another M2TW movie

Another M2TW movie that is done reasonably well. The green army in all the movies so far are the Turks in the game.

And it blows

My desktop PC is a noisy one. With a CPU fan speed of 3300+rpm, it was a pain to listen to. A few days ago I decided to try to reduce the sound as well as the CPU temperature. Thats when I realized that my front chassis fan (left picture, red arrow) was dead and the CPU was averaging 61-63C when idle. Hence I made a trip down to the store to get a new one.
Having obtained my new fan, firstly I had to adjust the CPU fan to lower speed if the target temperature is reached. This was done through the BIOS. Most new motherboards have this option (ASUS calls this Q-fan). Setting to 60% the full fan speed when the CPU target temperature is reached, and installing the new fan, I started the computer to get a new set of readings: fan speed of 2300+rpm and temperature of 56-58C.	"x" marks CPU fan blowing inwards
This was much quieter and cooler. However something seemed strange. Then I realized -- all fans were blowing into the chassis! After reading a some article somewhere on wikipedia, I adjusted my rear fans to direct exhaust air from the system. This should create air flow similar to the channels shown on the right.
Rebooting proved that having air flow from the bottom front to the top rear of the chassis is the best. When idle, the CPU temperature is 51-53C and the fan speed is ~1500rpm. A reduction of 10C and 1500+rpm respectively! Finally I can snooze comfortably with the PC on.

Medieval 2 Total War

I bought this game a couple of months ago, still been playing it for a short while every night. This is a strategy game with tactical battles. Rampaging across Europe during medieval times is really addictive. You can be invaded by the Mongolians and Timur the lame or even sail to America to conquer the Aztecs. It comes complete with the Pope in those days and represents the major religions of that era/region, notably Islam. This leads to many interesting options if you are a Christian Kingdom you will want to curry favor with the Pope, the Muslims will be more than happy to kill him and the Eastern Orthodox will basically be fighting everyone else. You can also go on crusades and jihad that will look somewhat like the movie, "Kingdom of Heaven". The tactical battle graphics are amazing especially with a good graphics card. Here are some home made videos by one of the talented players using the in-game battle engine.