A lot of junk emails I receive everyday. I use mostly my Yahoo account for personal emails because their Spamfilter is pretty cool. But recently, I received some weird emails which originated from my blogger!
Google's blogger has a feature to forward any posting on our blogger webpage, kinda notification message. But now this good feature has been abused by spammers to send their trashes! They click "comment" on some of my postings and put trash messages, hence I get notifications in my email.
I think I will just disable this notification, leaving alone the trash on the blogger's comments.
Monday, September 19, 2005
Broadband Penetration
Last week I borrowed a book from my professor titled Broadband Services: Business Models and Technologies for Community Networks. My professor is one of the editor.
After flipping some pages, I starred on one page that has a diagram showing the top 15 countries with broadband penetration. Do you know what? The United States is only in the 11th place.
The number of most broadband-penetrated country is South Korea, followed with Hong Kong, Canada, Taiwan, Denmark, Belgium, Iceland, Sweden, Netherlands, Japan, USA, Austria, Switzerland, Singapore and the last one is Finlad.
After flipping some pages, I starred on one page that has a diagram showing the top 15 countries with broadband penetration. Do you know what? The United States is only in the 11th place.
The number of most broadband-penetrated country is South Korea, followed with Hong Kong, Canada, Taiwan, Denmark, Belgium, Iceland, Sweden, Netherlands, Japan, USA, Austria, Switzerland, Singapore and the last one is Finlad.
Tweaking Linksys Router (Part 3)
Last night I tried to reprogram my new Linksys WRTG54GS with different firmware (I think it is Alchemy version (?)). It uploaded with no problem, but when I tried to reboot it, it just hung!
Gosh, I just wasted my $90 something for the now-turned-to-useless-brick router (well, not really, because I am going to return it to BestBuy and claim that it does not work at all. May be I'll just exchange with WRT54G as this model has a lot more different firmwares.
I'll post again once I get the exchange and success on upgrading the firmware.
Gosh, I just wasted my $90 something for the now-turned-to-useless-brick router (well, not really, because I am going to return it to BestBuy and claim that it does not work at all. May be I'll just exchange with WRT54G as this model has a lot more different firmwares.
I'll post again once I get the exchange and success on upgrading the firmware.
Use Your Unused PC Power to save Life
Many PCs around the world, especially in office buildings, are left idle when their users or employees are not using them. Many of them quite powerful PCs (such as Pentium 4, AMD or even the 64-bit version and/or with dual core or multiprocessors). Why don't we use them for something useful?
There is a project at Stanford University under project Folding@Home that's trying to simulate proteins (interactions, quantum physics computing etc.). All of this computation requires very huge computation power. The group of Biochemistry, biophysics, chemistry, biology, physics and computer science experts led by Prof. Pande (called 'Pande Group') at Stanford has come up with a novel technology and idea: distributed computing (computational grid using clusters).
Instead of using single supercomputer to compute, the software distributes chunks of work to many computers connected to the server over the Internet. This chunk of work is called Work Unit. Every user who wants to contribute his/her computation power can subscribe and download the software (people can also affiliate to any groups or even make their own group). The software that's running on every user will then download workunits from Stanford University's server and does the computation. After the workunit has been done, the computer then send the result back to the server.
The software can use up to 100% utilization of the PC, but we can adjust how much it is allowed to consume (or even when the computer is idle only). There are different versions of software: console-only and screen-saver; available on Windows, Linux and PowerPC (MacOS). Unfortunately, Solaris has not been supported.
Actually, there is another project that came before Folding@Home (not sure which one came first). I used to run this program under project SETI@Home from UC Berkeley (?). But after sometime, I was thinking, why should I run such a useless program to find extra terrestrial (ET)? (Off the record, I don't believe there is another creatures in outerspace. Even if they exist, not with intelligence as human being have).
So, instead of leaving your PCs idle for many hours (do the math: you leave at 6:00 PM from work and come back next day at 8:00 AM. The PC is idle for 14 hours!), you participate to a project that can find cures for some diseases.
Please check it out at: http://folding.stanford.edu
There is a project at Stanford University under project Folding@Home that's trying to simulate proteins (interactions, quantum physics computing etc.). All of this computation requires very huge computation power. The group of Biochemistry, biophysics, chemistry, biology, physics and computer science experts led by Prof. Pande (called 'Pande Group') at Stanford has come up with a novel technology and idea: distributed computing (computational grid using clusters).
Instead of using single supercomputer to compute, the software distributes chunks of work to many computers connected to the server over the Internet. This chunk of work is called Work Unit. Every user who wants to contribute his/her computation power can subscribe and download the software (people can also affiliate to any groups or even make their own group). The software that's running on every user will then download workunits from Stanford University's server and does the computation. After the workunit has been done, the computer then send the result back to the server.
The software can use up to 100% utilization of the PC, but we can adjust how much it is allowed to consume (or even when the computer is idle only). There are different versions of software: console-only and screen-saver; available on Windows, Linux and PowerPC (MacOS). Unfortunately, Solaris has not been supported.
Actually, there is another project that came before Folding@Home (not sure which one came first). I used to run this program under project SETI@Home from UC Berkeley (?). But after sometime, I was thinking, why should I run such a useless program to find extra terrestrial (ET)? (Off the record, I don't believe there is another creatures in outerspace. Even if they exist, not with intelligence as human being have).
So, instead of leaving your PCs idle for many hours (do the math: you leave at 6:00 PM from work and come back next day at 8:00 AM. The PC is idle for 14 hours!), you participate to a project that can find cures for some diseases.
Please check it out at: http://folding.stanford.edu
Sunday, September 18, 2005
AMD Clock and Voltage (part 2)
It's been awhile after I posted the first blog on the subject (AMD-64 on Compact Presario R3000). I just want to update the status on this issue: I one day checked AMD website and found out an information about "Windows XP incorrectly reports CPU clock". Overthere, they suggest users to upgrade the laptop BIOS. I followed their instructions and reboot my laptop.
Do you know what happened after my Windows XP rebooted? the CPU went to full clock speed and never scale back. The fan started to spin after a few seconds later and kept running. I checked CPU temperature (via 3rd party software I downloaded for free from the Net), it showed temp. close to 90 degrees Celsius! After a few minutes the computer turned off by itself (not a gracefuly shutdown!). I was like that no matter what I changed on the powersaving settings on Windows. Damn! (well, there was workaround. I used another software to manually control the CPU frequency back to 800 MHz to prevent it to overheat and shutdown). I checked on Microsoft site, the rebooting problem was caused by overheating.
I almost gave up (and did not use Windows during the time, but reboot to Linux partition. Linux successfuly control the acpi with no problem, besides it never reboots my computer). Finally, I give a try to download the latest AMD driver and reinstalled on my Windows. Somehow it now worked! (I am pretty sure I did exactly the same a few time before with no luck. So I believe there must be a fix in the newer driver).
Now PC is working OK. The frequency could scale up to its maximum (2.2 GHz). There is only 3 stages of frequencies: 800 MHz (base clock), 1.8 GHz and 2.2 GHz. The fan would turn on after a few seconds of CPU running at maximum clock and the temperature stabilizes around 80 degress Celsius, hence the Windows never reboots.
Phew!
Do you know what happened after my Windows XP rebooted? the CPU went to full clock speed and never scale back. The fan started to spin after a few seconds later and kept running. I checked CPU temperature (via 3rd party software I downloaded for free from the Net), it showed temp. close to 90 degrees Celsius! After a few minutes the computer turned off by itself (not a gracefuly shutdown!). I was like that no matter what I changed on the powersaving settings on Windows. Damn! (well, there was workaround. I used another software to manually control the CPU frequency back to 800 MHz to prevent it to overheat and shutdown). I checked on Microsoft site, the rebooting problem was caused by overheating.
I almost gave up (and did not use Windows during the time, but reboot to Linux partition. Linux successfuly control the acpi with no problem, besides it never reboots my computer). Finally, I give a try to download the latest AMD driver and reinstalled on my Windows. Somehow it now worked! (I am pretty sure I did exactly the same a few time before with no luck. So I believe there must be a fix in the newer driver).
Now PC is working OK. The frequency could scale up to its maximum (2.2 GHz). There is only 3 stages of frequencies: 800 MHz (base clock), 1.8 GHz and 2.2 GHz. The fan would turn on after a few seconds of CPU running at maximum clock and the temperature stabilizes around 80 degress Celsius, hence the Windows never reboots.
Phew!
Tweaking Linksys Router (Part 2)
OK, now I have upgraded my router's firmware to this fancy firmware: v4.70.6_Hyperwrt-2.1b1-(Thibor). Unfortunately, after looking around on the menus, I still could not found the wireless bridge feature. But, there is a cool feature there: telnet!
I then enabled telnet daemon and telnet into it. Do you know what's inside? Linux!! Wow, Linksys uses Linux for its router products!!. I then checked some stuff there. Pretty cool! Allright, maybe my next hacking project is how to hack the source code (it's available on linksys.com page, under GPL download). The source code is really huge, it is more than 100 MB even after zipped! Perhaps there are some binary firmwares inside it. I'll check it out later and report it on this blog once I am done checking out this amazing product.
(PS: I now highly recommend people to buy Linksys routers. I used to suggest people not to buy Linksys routers as their products relatively more expensive. But now, it is really worth it to invest a little bit for the really big thing you will get!)
I then enabled telnet daemon and telnet into it. Do you know what's inside? Linux!! Wow, Linksys uses Linux for its router products!!. I then checked some stuff there. Pretty cool! Allright, maybe my next hacking project is how to hack the source code (it's available on linksys.com page, under GPL download). The source code is really huge, it is more than 100 MB even after zipped! Perhaps there are some binary firmwares inside it. I'll check it out later and report it on this blog once I am done checking out this amazing product.
(PS: I now highly recommend people to buy Linksys routers. I used to suggest people not to buy Linksys routers as their products relatively more expensive. But now, it is really worth it to invest a little bit for the really big thing you will get!)
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