My Dream Energy Generator

I have been dreaming if there is a way to generate power from water. This dream power generator will just convert water to electrical power with Oxigen as its residue.

This technology shall be cheap to make and compact enough to fit into a car. I imagine till will reverse global warming effect. Why? because, first, it takes water from sea to generate energy. Secondly, it does not generate much pollutant to the ozone layer. Third, it generates oxigen essensial to human.

That's just (all will stay) as my imaginary dream, eventhough with fusion we could similarly do create energy from oxigen, but the technology is still far from practical use.

45 nm Chips

Last week Intel announced that they had overcome difficulties in making transistors smaller and smaller. A separate announcement was also made by IBM.

I don't know if both companies have the same solution for the nano technology. We'll see.

Sys-op for Packet-Radio Network

Just found this information:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:_I-BvCh6yTMJ:onno.vlsm.org/v11/onno-eng-1/network/the-indonesia-computer-network-status-report-04-1995.rtf+lutfi+itb&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=28&client=firefox-a

I did not remember my number is in the list as the sys-op many years ago! :-)

Review on Sandisk's Sansa e280 MP3 Player

I got my player a few weeks ago after going through rigorous reviews posted by other users on the Internet. My decision to buy this one instead of iPod was mainly because Sansa is more open system than Apple's iPod. Also, I recalled that MaximumPC sometime ago had reviewed and made comparison between some audio formats and Real's Rhapsody audio format (*.rax) is superior than others, including Apple's AAC (*.m4p or *.m4a).

Another reason is that Rhapsody has monthly rental service plan, which allows you to listen to their files (yes, all of them which is millions of music files) on the go (on Sansa players) or through its Rhapsody software running on PC. They even allow us to indirectly transcode the files to non-DRM MP3 or WMA format. How, you may ask? It is by burning your purchased music files and then re-rip them to unprotected MP3 or WMA. The quality of this *.rax files are really good and the size is not bigger than average high quality MP3 encoded in VBR.

One thing I don't like from Sansa is the buttons on the front. The four buttons surrounding the rotating wheel are placed sunken (shallow) than the wheel hence make them harder to reach/to push.

Quality of the sound is average. Sometimes I hear some distortion, but not sure whether this is caused by the device itself or because the music was undersampled/bad encoder.

Will continue in more detail if time permits.

Comparing some Headsets

I was looking for a good and affordable headsets for to-be-mine Sandisk Sansa e280 (darn, 2 more days have to wait till it is delivered) MP3 player (will put a review on it later).

Upon searching on google, I landed on a site http://www.headphone.com that compares the 'really' technical comparisons (not just a sounds-like-a-geek-but-a-stupid reviews). The web gives a frequency response graphs, harmonic distortion graphs, isolation and impendances for the tested headsets (unfortunately, they did not test on Bose headsets).

Here I try to compare between Sennheiser's PX100, Sony CD3000, Apple's Ipod earbuds and KOSS KSC55:

Frequency Response


Harmonic Distortion Products



Isolation



Impedance



So How to pickup the best headset? The rules of thumb are:

1. Pick the headset with the flattest and widest frequency response
2. With the lowest and flatest spikes in harmonic distortions
3. Isolation; This is a measure of a headphone’s ability to isolate the listener from outside noise. The deepest notch for the noise frequency usually good ones.

Recompiling my Linux

Somehow, my Xserver just hung everytime I browse some sites, especially the ones with script. That was one of the reasons I almost rebuilt all my Linux components from scratch. From kernel, XWindow, QT, KDE, DBUS, Apache and many others.

Compiling those libraries and applications are not always staright forward. Many of them are dependent each other (causing circular/loop dependencies). Others are out-of-date or too old hence would not compile with the latest GCC/kernel. I had to hand-fix them manually. You know it was not easy at all to fix these broken codes, but luckily I enjoyed it and learned a lot by doing it. Google is still my best tool to search missing components or how-tos.

Now, my machine had been running (almost) the latest libraries available at the time I wrote this blog. I also always enabled optimization with -mtune=pentium3 -msse. Also, if possible and available, I turned on POSIX threads as well. The kernel recognized my dual-processor chips as well, so I ran folding@home application and it showed (by 'top' tool) that the application uses one of the processor to do its very extensive biological chemistry computation.

I am still having problem making PHP run from Apache. Somehow it could not recognize/interpret PHP commands and just showed error. I will try again later if I have time. Oh, by the way, I could make the perl cgi work. It was just a configuration issue (fault from my side!).

I think I will take easy and relax now to concentrate more on my work, study and research (and perhaps pursuing my professional certifications). See you again in year 2007! (hopefully I still work on the same job).