Today I had the bad luck to have to deal with a damn Macbook Pro on which I need to install a retarded software (IBM Rational Software Architect). Despite RSA becoming one of the worst piece of crapware I’ve ever seen this time it wasn’t the problem. The Macbook was one of the latest model, a 13″ one equipped with a Core i5 Sandy Bridge CPU and an awesome a certain amount of GB 5400 RPM hard disk drive…everything sold at the fair price of 1200 or so €. As long as you use it just for what close to every Apple user use it – going on Facebook, synchronizing music tracks on an IPod and iCloud – everything is fine (tho, you can do these things with every PC/MAC/whatever-you-want not older than 6 or 7 years). Anyway, if you happen to be one of those bunch of unlucky people on earth who pretend to use it for something different you will quickly face with the complete inability of this, I repeat, 1200 € worth machine, to provide, at least decent performances. Starting from the point that many programs (like RSA) don’t exist for OSX you have to virtualize a Windows or Linux OS, and here comes the problem. The 5400 RPM HDD is so crappy that when you fire up the virtual machine everything slow down to a level similar to a 10 years old PC with a P4 Willamette and a 20 GB PATA HDD. I really don’t get why people keep buying those completely overpriced piece of garbage apple is selling; this Macbook Pro hardware wise is very similar to my Thinkpad but it costs much more (something like +80/90% over the price of the Thinkpad), is way slower, have an higher weight and miss some important features (like external battery, UMTS module, matte display, trackpad, etc etc). Keep up the good work apple…

Past Friday’s afternoon, around 3 pm, I was at university, specifically I was in one of the libraries and I was reading a book titled Concurrency; it’s about engineering concurrent systems using the modelling software LTSA and then write the actual program in Java. While reading I was also talking with two friends of mine about a problem another friend found on a book; to make a long story short, the problem was about balancing a predefined non-balanced random function. One of these two friends showed us how he solved the problem, the algorithm he wrote was written in Python. When some hours later I was back home I did thought it was finally the time to install a Python interpreter and start playing with it. So I did it. I got myself the latest release of Python interpreter and the Pydev plugin for Eclipse IDE, installation and configuration on Windows is incredibly straight forward, just a matter of pressing install and next 2 or 3 times. I don’t have any Python book then as first programming guide I used the well known (at least here in Italy) html.it site, if you are not Italian just google Python and you will find a huge amount of interesting PDFs and guides of any kind. After had digged trough the html.it Python guide in a bunch of hours (guess not more than 2 or 3) I felt myself just like the guy in this comics: …

Yesterday’s afternoon and today I had a LN2 trip with two AMD setup. I was aiming to break the 7 GHz wall with the trusty Phenom II 955 B.E. and improve my precedent results on socket 939 with the Opteron 148. I failed in reaching 7 GHz with the 955, tho I managed to improve just a little bit my Super-pi 1M score…still not satisfied with it but it is better than nothing. Also got the time to play with UCbench in which I got quite easily the first place on the bot in the 955 B.E. category. …

What is the best way to kill time when you have close to nothing to do ? Easy, run Super-pi 32M using an CPU which takes more than 20 minutes to complete each run…so I did it and killed with easy 8+ hours trying to pull, tho without success, a sub 21 min 32M run with my trusty Opteron 148. Anyway, the result is still kinda worth to be posted here. …

Yesterday Crucial released a new firmware for its M4 SSD series, the new version (codename 000F) is supposed to address some issues which used to appear when using the SSD connected to certain SATA/SAS controllers and generally improve stability and reliability. Changes between version 0309 and 000F include the following changes:

Ten days ago I had an LN2 session together with this Opteron 148; finally today I’ve the time to write a post here and talk about that. .:. SETUP: CPU: Opteron 148 cabrio @1.5*123% volt – CABYE 0536GPMW cooling: Guglio’s CPU pot 2.0 (CPU) and 1.0 (RAM) MB: DFI nForce 4 Ultra-D – bios 623-2 RAM: Corsair PC3500C2 2×256 MB :: Winbond BH-5 – yellow slots VGA: nvidia 6200 LE 256 MB PCI-E HDD: Kingston SSDnow 60 GB sata2 PSU: PCP&C 1200 OS: 2k3 server TW …

This is the moment we are all waiting for (ok, maybe not really everyone 😀 ). Anyway, after approximately 10 hours of tweaking I came up with a quite interesting result. .:. SETUP: CPU: Opteron 148 cabrio @ 325×10.5 1.5*123 volt – CABYE 0536GPMW cooling: Single Stage phase change MB: DFI nForce 4 Ultra-D – bios 623-2 RAM: Corsair PC3500C2 2×256 MB @ 260 MHz 1.5-2-2-3 1t 3.7 volt:: Winbond BH-5 – yellow slots VGA: nvidia 6200 LE 256 MB PCI-E HDD: Kingston SSDnow 60 GB sata2 PSU: PCP&C 1200 OS: 2k3 server TW …

Two weeks ago or so I bought a DFI nForce 4 Ultra-D, when it was here I had some fun playing with an old Athlon 64 3000+ core Winchester and some crappy DDR modules. I had also a bunch of Winbond BH-5 kits, too bad they are all dead or semi-dead, so I had to stick with a kit of Micron value PC2700 cas 2.5. Luckily a friend of mine was so glad to send me a kit of Corsair PC3500 cas 2 BH-5, so in the next few days I will have a decent kit of RAM to play with super-pi. Other than this, 1 week ago I bought an Opteron 148 for 8.49 € plus 1.50 € of shipping cost, yesterday it arrived. At a first try it was good for 3200+ MHz aircooled, so definetly deserves a try at lower temperature. …

As you can see, it’s quite a long time since my last overclocking related post here. Even the one I’m writing now is not about overclocking, nothing of the latest hardware is interesting at all, so I don’t really bother go out and buy something. When nothing interesting is on the market the things I do is: upgrade the daily use rig. I’m not one of those interested in uber dupah performance, I’m alot more focused on reliability, so I never use the latest stuff for my DU rig…better to have 20 % less of performance but well tested and widely used components. Because of what I wrote before, 1 week ago I bought a new monitor, a Dell U2412M. …

Think I never mentioned it but I have a small home server, it was built with a c2d E6600, an Intel G965 mobo and some HDDs. Since 2 weeks ago I was using Ubuntu then I decided it was time to try something better and more challenging than Ubuntu, my choice was CentOS. Why use CentOS ? Because it’s one of the best enterprise class distro with 7 years support and have a good ammount of interesting features like services GUI manager and iptables GUI. I don’t consider myself a Unix pro nor a noob but I’ve to say that the first touch with this distro wasn’t the best. In fact I had lots of trouble trying to install CentOS from USB drive, after had lost 1 hour or so I took a DVD drive, burned the ISO on a DVD and installed from it. When finally I was able to get into the OS the first thing I did was installing XRDP to remote control the machine from one of my other PCs. I also installed Transmission torrent client, added some iptables rules and did some other things. Everything was quite easy except the installation and configuration of Samba server, to be honest I didn’t remember well what I did to make it works on Ubuntu but here on CentOS it gave me some troubles. Google this time wasn’t that helpful, there aren’t much info or guides about Samba on CentOS, so I think I should write here how I made it works. First of all, we have to install Samba, open the terminal, get admin privileges and type: <pre name=“code” class"ruby"> yum install samba …