My 200GB Seagate Sata has suddenly started making a lot of noise. I hope it is ok and won’t crash in the middle of something. Though I have taken backup of all important stuff, still its painful to restore everything in case of a crash.
Hardware
My New Computer
I have been equally passionate about computer hardware and open source ever since I joined IIIT. Friends usually tease me by saying “Hey dude, you didn’t by any IT product this month :D”. I always keep dreaming of a better machine and a lot of machines in my room. And the worst part is that I spend whatever I earn in buying new hardware ( I hardly spend on other things like buying flashy clothes, shoes etc.. looks crap to me.. a wastage of money to be precise :P).
I bought my first personal computer in May, 2006. I used it as much as possible. Then there was a puase for a very long time because I didn’t have cash to buy new hardware. In November 2006, I got RAship in BIRC and hence I got cash 😀 I bought another 160GB hard disk in June 2007 because that was the craze at that time. And because I had to support more upload space on Bordeaux’s FTP 😀 Few months later in August 2007, I bought a new 19″ ViewSonic LCD monitor by spending all the cash I earned till then from RAship and other contract works 😀 Again it was like no cash, no new hardware.
So, by that time I had two monitors and a single cabinet which was not capable of supporting dual display 🙁 As I was out of cash, I had to work harder to get more cash. I did so. And earlier this month I bought new Altec Lancing 2.1 Speakers.
And following them, I bought this monstrous brand new computer. Here is the configuration for the new desktop.
Processor
As I am an AMD fan, so there is no question of going for Intel. I was thinking of buying Quad core initially but then gave up the idea because the cost was increasing beyond my budget. So I decided to go for AMD Athlon64 X2 5600+ (2.8GHz dual core, 2MB L2 cache). This was the first one with 2MB L2 cache with the lowest price 😀
Motherboard
Selecting the motherboard was a really tedious task. Because AMD released its latest 780G chipset recently. A few bugs were reported in forums and I was a bit paranoid while selecting this mobo. But ignoring everything, I decided to go for Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H AMD 780G chipset because this motherboard is currently carrying the best onboard graphics card in the world. ATI Radeon HD 3200 is the onboard graphics card for the mobo. The other reason for going with this mobo was the damn HDMI port 😀 May be it will come handy when I’ll have my LCD TV 😀
RAM
The easiest part to select. I went with Transcend DDR-II 800MHz 2GB x 2 ( total 4GB). I think thats enough for the coming year.
My room has become messy and its really really becoming hot due the heat emissions from the two damn processors.
BTW, the new cabinet has this awesome small LCD display for displaying temperature and other system activities.
My room now looks like this …
So, I have my own small LAN here where I do all the testing stuff with different servers and firewall configuration. I have got a new platform for exploring the world of computer networks. Its fun to work on two machines 🙂 Ok. Here is the last image with Antitrust on one machine and I Robot on the other 😀
Adios,
Kulbir Saini aka General Bordeaux 🙂
My new Altec Lancing 2.1 Speakers
I was living without speakers since one and a half years. Actually, the speakers are not allowed in labs @ IIIT 😛 I moved to BIRC lab to work as a research associate in December 2006. After that I never enjoyed music on speaker except on my neighbors speakers. I am a hardcore fan of punjabi songs and listen to them whenever I am up and sometime I keep them on while sleeping 😛
As the speakers that I had previously (Intex 2.1) was not of any use to me, I took them home so that they can be put into use. I moved back to my room in mid February. I was missing the speakers like hell. I have small speakers in my monitor but they are not good enough. I finally bought these Altec Lancing 2.1 speakers and now my neighbors will soon run away or die of the 24×7 full volume songs in a language that they can’t even understand 😛
PS : Going to buy a monster soon 🙂 Keep checking 😛
My new ViewSonic VG1930WM 19″ WideScreen LCD monitor
Finally after stumbling for almost 2 months, I have got my brand new ViewSonic VG1930WM 19″ WideScreen LCD monitor. I gathered the money almost 2 – 3 months ago, but was not able to decide which monitor should be purchased. For last two months, I stumbled on Samsung SyncMaster 940NW which was a bit costlier for the features, AOC 199S which was also costlier, ViewSonic VG1930WM which provided the same features, but the price was a bit attractive. I browsed through enormous monitor reviews, huge price lists on the internet and what not. Then in the beginning of this month when I was about to go to buy the monitor, I was told that the Paradise market remains closed on Sundays. Then, we have hectic schedule throughout the week, so could not go. Then these hyderabad serial blasts went off, again a hurdle.
Finally, today ignoring everything else, we, me and ajay somani went to paradise computer market. I got my ViewSonic and ajay bought a Seagate Sata II 500GB external hard disk with Seagate casing. I bought the monitor for Rs. 10200/- and ajay bought the HDD for Rs. 8700/- .
The monitor is really wide and its looks are just awesome. I can’t express my happiness and monitor’s beauty in words. The monitor support a 1440×900 resolution and has a fantastic response time of 5ms. It also has the inbuilt speakers. The complete technical specs of the monitor is here.
Here are the pics …
Here is a video as well.
PS0 : I am very happy today … of course I have reasons 😀
PS1 : We will have a data center with ajay’s 500GB HDD 😉
PS2 : I am planning to get either a XFX nVidia GeForce 8600GT or I’ll go for mobo and processor upgrade so that I can use my old Samsung SyncMaster 793S 17″ CRT monitor with this LCD monitor in dual display mode. Now, that would be the coolest(?) thing 😀
PS3 : I am a bit showing off 😉
Yahooooooo !!!! Bandwidth Increased !!!
Long time, no post. Actually nothing significant happened in last one and a half month that might have been worth noticing. But something significant happened suddenly that I couldn’t stop myself from writing this post.
When I came to IIIT-H in year 2005, it has a 4Mbps backbone and a lot of users, may be around 600 or more. The browsing experience at that time was excellent. The average load time of any site was around 4-6 seconds. We used to get around 20-30kbps download speed from internet. Life was pretty easy and one need not to go to coffee shop until a site opens. But as the time passed, the no. of people @ IIIT-H started increasing and with no increment in the bandwidth. So, life became harder and harder. Then, suddenly some day the switch(i think the one of the two available, which used to route the traffic between hostels(wireless) and main building(wired)) was burnt due to some short-circuit or whatever. So, some traffic between the hostels and main building was banned(which includes DC++ traffic) because one switch can’t handle the huge traffic which IIIT-H produces in peak hours and if they allow all the traffic the other will also be burnt due to heating. So, we had a hard time. Due to increased no. of users, internet bandwidth share per user decreased and intranet traffic was also limited due to availability of just one switch.
There were time when you might have really thought of visiting coffee shop until the techtree.com(an Indian site somewhat similar to e-bay) page shows up. This was the situation for almost a year. People were hopeless. There was no other alternative except increasing the bandwidth. And thats what happened. Today we received a mail from the help desk that the bandwidth has been increased to 8Mbps. Twice!!!!! Wow!!!!! The browsing is now much more fun than it was in 2005. Average load time of any site is 2-3 seconds and that too because my PC is slow 🙁 . I have 1GB RAM and my browser still hangs when I load a no. of pages at a time, due to the fact that it can handle a specific amount of data at a time and proxy is swamping the browser with data instantly on request. I think, I have to advance with time and should get additional RAM.
There are some other significant improvements also, which are going to come into effect pretty soon. One that the burnt switch will be replaced soon. I hope that the blocked protocols between hostels and main building will be unblocked soon after that.
The other is that hostel wireless is going to localized with the help of level three switches. So, that if I want to download data from one room to my room in the same hostel, then it need not travel all the way from the other room to the main building and then back from the main building to my room. So, we hope for a better bandwidth utilization.
PS : I wrote what I could understand from the terms used in the mail by Dr. Kamal. They may have been misunderstood.
Best Summer Ever
One of my friends recently flamed me on yahoo saying what the hell are you up to “Bye Bye Windows, Hi Hi Linux ???”. Because I was having my status messages like “Bye Bye Windows”, “Fedora 7” etc. etc. So, I have chosen the title for this post “Best Summer Ever” instead of “Bye Bye Summer’07”.
Well, summer’07 will be remembered forever for the extreme entertainment we had. We did all that we could. Bye the way we implies Me, Mahaveer, Sambhav, Deepak, Kiran Dandesh, Sachin, Ajay Somani, Alok, Ojasvi, Abhinav. We played cricket @ basketball court, then dumbC, cards throughout the night, volley ball, counter strike, age of empires, cricket @ ground facing library, outing-shouting and much more …
Karan has written a nice blog entry for cricket @ bbcourt. dumbC was more than enjoyable in group with movie freaks like sachin and dandu. Dandu has some special advantage for movie names. He knows all the movie names, plus their tag lines, plus their imdb ratings and much more. If he gives you a movie to act for, forget that you’ll be able to act. He is really good at remembering the movie names.
After we got bored of this dumbC, then comes the time for cards … we played cards throughout the night for a lot of days or I should say a lot of nights. Cards were just the medium, bc was the only purpose for playing cards. Ajay was the only target during discussions. He is humiliated too much, we (at least me) are really sorry for that. But, that was not serious, it was just for fun.
Then comes the volley ball. Can you imagine that people will go crazy and they will not sleep through the night, just to play volley ball in the early morning. We did this for a lot of days. We spent the nights playing cards and then at 5:30 am we start playing volley ball. Its seriously awesome weather at that time of day. We all enjoyed it a lot.
Then comes counter strike. People who can hardly play Pac-Man, suddenly started playing counter strike. From 11:00pm – 6:00am, we played counter strike for a lot of days. Sambhav, Alok, Deepak played the amazing game for the first time.
In the final days, we are playing cricket @ the ground facing the library in the morning time. You can see the most lazy person (Somani), fielding at 6:00am in the playground, who will prefer dieing on bed instead of fetching a glass of water for himself.
ohh god !!! I forgot the most happening thing this summer… its the blog entry written by mahaveer. check it out here . read the comments carefully.
Beside all that we went to Golconda Fort recently. Had a lot of fun out there. The shop keeper over there was selling cold drinks for 13/- which was priced for 12/-. Somani applied his intelligence and argued. I can’t forget the conversation between somani and shop-keeper. Shop-keeper just ****** him too much that he can’t even utter a word after that. I can’t give you the description, because somani can kill me for doing that.
All in all, this summer was most enjoyable ever. Having a lot of friends around you is just more than fun.
PS1 : I got a brand new Seagate Barracuda 160GB (IDE) hard disk.
PS2 : Leaving for home today. Will return on 6th June.
PS3 : Found this really humorous. A GEEK’S IMAGINATION.
Its HOT !!!
Woke up in the morning at 7:30am (hey i am not joking) with no prior engagements. The first task, just rush to OBH mess for parathas (its a part of routine now … me, Mahaveer, Deepak, Alok, Nitin, Ajay and sometimes some more friends are having breakfast with 99% regularity). The quality of the parathas has fallen considerably in last 2-3 days, as we are eating parathas like we were starving for centuries … some of us even eat 10 of them … is 10 bucks for 10 parathas are justified in anyway ? keeping in mind out attendance and starvation, the caterer has finally decided to compromise and quality, so its not a enjoyable anymore the have breakfast. [The first disappointment of the day].
Returned from OBH mess. Sachin has planned to take his laptop to the hp clinic. Now, my hardware obsession played a significant role and I just decided to go with him without any considerations about the hot weather.
While we were passing the main building, we told the security we are taking the laptop for repair, and asked whether the main gate security will allow us to take it out of the college …
the security guard asked in telugu accent : “whhhichhhhh hastel”
sachin : “nbh”
gaurd : “take pass from nbhech guard”
when he said this i uttered the f word three time in mind with increasing intensity of sound[though i was silent].
well, we didn’t give a damn to whatever they said and headed for the main gate .. while on the way we decided that if the main gate security stop us, then we will say that we are doing internship at pramati and sachin –> manish arora and me –> nitin gupta. unfortunately the main gate security didn’t stop us and i couldn’t utter the f word [ a disappointment].
The journey from IIIT to Panjagutta was fine but the struggle was about to start … we stepped down the bus and now we have to walk by foot to the hp clinic(its hp service center … i don’t know why i am calling it hp clinic…). I didn’t know where is this hp clinic, so followed sachin … damn it … it was about a kilometer from Panjagutta and walking by foot in the sun …. uf … it sux … [second disappointment]
we reached the hp clinic somehow … its good … at least it has AC … amazed to see that even HP service center has the same class stuff … i didn’t see any receptionist 🙁 (the receptionist @ fiitjee, delhi was gorgeous ..) I heard and read on some news sites that hp is world leading laptop seller … [third disappoint]
now its time for the laptop repair .. it has got a strange problem .. its not booting up … the hp guy tried removing the batteries .. changing the charger … and finally declared that motherboard is ****ed … added that it’ll cost around 25000 bucks to replace it because laptop was not in warranty period … this is major reason i hate these branded companies … 25000 for a motherboard … hell … [fourth disappoint]
but thanks to the other hp guy who gave us the address of a hp dealer somewhere near anand theater … sachin managed to bargain with some autowalah (its really an art … i think these autowalahs are good random number generators … ask them the price … they’ll same something which is not anywhere near the actual price ..) and we traveled to the anand theater …
the dealer over there treated us like he had a customer after centuries … he was a genuine hp dealer so he agreed upon bringing the laptop in warranty period at a cost of 6760 for a period of two years … now it rocks in india .. the laptop was out of warranty since dec, 2006 … the guy logged in and filled some form and see we have our laptop in warranty again (a spoiled piece in warranty .. getting insurance of a dead person 🙂 )
we came out of the shop and now its like a mania … i have urge to inquire for some hardware prices .. asked sachin to get to paradise(for those who don’t know, its a place in hyderabad) .. so he again bargained with some autowalahs … but this time it was strange … when autowalah asked him for the price … sachin said … 10 12 15 20 .. what the hell .. has he gone mad … i was feeling very embaraced .. how can you bargain at such levels …
we got to paradise … i inquired about some hardware(processor, gfx card, hdd etc) … was this a good reason to travel to paradise in this hot summer 😕
we headed back to IIIT, but i suddenly feel urge for eating biryani (the only south indian food, i like sometimes) … had a nice lunch in paradise … and headed back ..
while we were waiting on the bus stop at paradise … a bus numbered 49 came … though i knew that 49M is that actual bus we have to catch … sachin inquired from a person in the bus whether the bus will go to mehndipatannam and the damn person replied “YES” … we get in .. and on the way asked for the ticket .. the conductor said that the bus will not go to mehndipattnam and we have step down on the way … he dropped us somewhere near some under construction fly over at 2:00pm… ufff that was the hottest part of the day …. we stood there in the sun for 20 minutes(no sheds or shadows at all) … FcUk .. 🙁 .. [fifth disappointment]
we get a bus after that and came back to IIIT ….
while passing the TV room … just took a look at news … bomb blast in some masjid … hell .. its a shame …[sixth disappointment] …
a day full of disappointments .. it was my first day when i went out of IIIT in this summer vacations and it was reaaaalllllyyyyyyy HOT and disappointing ….
PS0: my longest post ever … dunno how it happened 🙂
PS1:came across 3-4 server room tragedies this week .. but will not report them …
PS2: thanks to saini for downloading the “paani aali paani pyade” a haryanvi song … i heard it for around 60 times in a row … great song ..
PS3:pati has written a really great post here …
PS4:amd has announced something really ambitious ….
PS5:cricket at basket-ball court is really enjoyable .. i am the bowler of the day 😉 …
PS6:learnt from the last post that a large part of IIIT janta love sleeping in the lab 😉 …
My Computer
I bought a desktop last week on Tuesday the 16th May, 2006. Though we are supposed to buy the laptops, i preffered the desktop as it can be a good partner for developing things and of course its cheeaper than a low end laptop. I bought AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 939 pin, the Gigabyte nVidia nForce2 motherboard, Samsung SyncMaster 739S 17″ , Seagate 200GB SATA-II with other necessary accessories. Well, it cost me only 30700/- and that is quite cheap. One bad thing that i didnt buy any graphics card b’cos in case we are forced to buy the laptops, i’ll have to buy a laptop within 25000/- so that total cost can come under 55000/-. Even that is quite lower than the cost of a high end laptop. As i didnt take any project i m just watching movies and playing games and i shud admit that AMD rocks for gaming. Its enough alone to check the graphics details of the popular games like UT, NFS Most Wanted , Doom 3, Prince of Persia etc … But i m sad that still i m not able to configure my wlan card in linux. its WNC-0301 level one lan card. If you have any suggestions please let me know, i m just killing my time using windows and this norton really sucks. it reports windows registry file as trogen, i dunno why ?????????