Thursday's Erratica: Data Manipulation, AMD 64, Waterfall ideas, Scientific American and Writing.

Another day of dancing-with-servers - enough database manipulation to keep a client's client pleased and to drive me to the point of structuring a wxPython application to handle the nitty gritty for the kind of manipulations I'm doing - I have a feeling I'll see it again and again and again and again and again. That ate daylight more than I cared for, though I did get a few pictures of doves deseeding the ground while I was debugging PHP/MySQL.

I do miss my C++ compiler, but I've moved on. I do like this laptop, but it just can't handle the stress.

Building the semi-perfect beast

Tomorrow evening, I should have the server parts for the new beast - the AMD64 bit beastie. A AMD Athlon 64bit 3000 512K Cache FSB800 - probably the ADA3000AEP4AR. I'd have preferred to get a ADA4000DEP5AS, but...you can't always get what you want, so you deal with what you need. Manipulating 100 meg databases requires some muscle and memory, as does generating a good rendition of a fractal.

Yeah, I know, you don't think I need to generate fractals. That's OK. I think I need to generate fractals to as visual aids for some of the stuff I'm thinking of. The trick will be creating animated images, like this (which I didn't create):

Says a lot more than a picture of a mountain, doesn't it?

Vlade and I will build the machine - 1 gigabyte of RAM, a 128 meg video card (until work pays for more), standard DVD/CDRW, and so on... I already have the 19" monitor, the keyboard, the mouse, the speakers - in fact, the same speakers I've had since 1999 - and while originally the system will be running Windows (a waste of 64 bit computing), the next check gets the secondary hard drive for the Ubuntu install. Why Windows? Well... let's say that all clients are not created equal.

I hope that the machine pays for itself over the next 3 months, but one never knows. I might just become a fractal specialist.

And Where To Put It?

There's plenty of space around to stick the machine, but if I'm going to spend a lot of time working on it (which I expect), I'll need a spot to stick it. I've decided the laptop area I'm using will work... the laptop can move, and I have the wireless router staring at me, so... no excuses. For straight writing, the laptop - for tearing the kicking and screaming truth out of data, the beast.

I need this silicon derivative. I hope they get that motherboard in tomorrow, or I shall be quite... perturbed. My weekend plan revolves around baking the silicon in. While I'm writing on this, the beast can be doing some math for me- some things slightly more involved than your regular tax form.

The Waterfall

Yes, multitasking right into thoughts on the waterfall project. Oddly enough, while I was poking around between bugs (and waiting for the server on the other end to finish it's job), I ended up considering the waterfall and a pump for it. I saw an AC pump down the street for about $100 U.S. - but then I saw the Swiftech MCP350™ 12 VDC Pump for liquid cooling of computer systems.

Hmm. 12V. Solar energy. I already have a solar system. It sucks 8.3W, the panels I have provide 200+ Watts. It's not exactly what the pump is designed for, but... isn't it odd that liquid cooling for processors would provide a pump that pushes about 92.4 gallons an hour, runs off of 12 volt DC, and... well, the applications are interesting. It could even be handy to have in a car for moving water from a container or into a container. And the [t:spot cooling] applications are interesting as well.

Scientific American Subscription hits the email box

Yeah, I subscribed to the digital Scientific American - pretty nice how they handled this, I'm somewhat impressed. I was expecting a Digital rights management encrypted piece of code with a magazine embedded - but was pleasantly surprised with a 6.7 megabyte PDF file which is very well done. I still can't read it in the toilet, but at least I am guaranteed to get it wherever I am. Tradeoffs. So I'll kick back, read that for a bit, and knock off and sleep.

Some more things to feed incomplete ideas.

Writing, Writing, Writing

I fell behind on my writing because the data manipulation took longer than I expected today... Most of it was because I had to break data into chunks that my system and even the remote server could process. Flogging 20+ megabyte scripts around that manipulate data (I wrote the scripts that wrote the 20 megabyte scripts, so I was a demented grandparent most of the day) took much too much time. I could have been doing other productive things instead of waiting on computers.

I have some writing I promised Katrin Verclas over at MobileActive, related to the Alert Retrieval Cache, and some parts to add for the online book/presentation related to SMEs and ICT... I hope to knock a chunk out of both in the morning.

Time for the evening hot cocoa, and wondering why the admin pages that you folks never see (but I do) always have advertisements for drugs that will cure Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Umm.... Better living through reckless experimentation.