Archive for the ‘ Uncategorized ’ Category

Newcastle to Berwick

The day started pretty icy. Leaving at 7:30, way before the sun rose, I managed to get quite a way out of Newcastle. It is good to start in the city in the morning as you have street lights to help you. I was hoping the ice would clear up as it took a lot of concentration to not die and stuff. The wind was horribly northerly and icy. Was getting very cold around by 10am, and then the sleet started. I was aiming to get to sea houses by 12 and infact I got there early as, even though I really wanted a tea, I couldn’t really stand in the rain drinking one.

Went to a great friendly pub called the old ship. Then back on the road. I decided to go on the A1 for a sectin as I was keen to get there before more downpours. Had slight drzzle on the way but then just before I got into Berwick there was a trumendous shower of hail and rain. I was just 20 minutes from my destination, but I found a little pub on to shelter in before it stopped and I could finish the trip. By this point, I was completely soaked. Wearing two pairs of socks did not do much good for the cold as I just has more water on my feet then. I could’t even leave the hostel easily as my shoes were soaked. Luckily Berwick hostel was pretty much empty, served nice food and had washing machines.

Instructions per clock

I sat down and figured out the Instructions Per Clock of a set of x86 architectures. You can use it to compare the raw single threaded performance of any architectures.

e.g. a 2.5GHz Core 2 ia about the same as a 3GHz Athlon 64 x2

Pentium 1	1.1
Pentium MMX	1.2
Pentium 3	1.9
Pentium 4 (Wil)	1.5
Pentium 4 (Nor)	1.6
Pentium 4 (Pre)	1.8
Pentium 4 (Gal)	1.9
Pentium D	2
Pentium M	2.5
Core 2		3
K6 II		1.1
K6 III		1.3
Athlon B	1.9
Athlon C	1.9
Athlon XP	2
Athlon 64	2.3
Athlon 64 X2	2.5
Via C3		0.85
Via C7		0.9

DVD Fridges

These fridgesTDVD-8180C 45-250.jpg look sort of fun (although ultimately useless). They accept flash cards and play more formats than most DVD players. I think it would be nice to use the 96KHz dolby digital sound to recreate the sound of a real fridge.

The other thing I found from this manufacturor (who are going to be making the PS3s very soon) are these monitor glassesGLT-M9201-250-1.jpg. The models have 640×480 or the reather strange 800×225 resolutions. The other question is how quickly do your eyes strain from looking at something so close.

AIM again kills bots it doesn’t own

For a while now I have been running a bot to serve out RSS feeds. The bot runs on four networks (AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Google talk) and is subscription only. A few weeks ago I noticed that it was having problems connecting to AIM. It was reporting the username and password were incorrect. I was puzzled as I hadn’t changed these since I created the account. I tried mailing AOL to attain why they killed the account with no reply. So I created another account to serve the bot and again it was killed, and again no warning or response from AOL. This is somewhat insulting as AOL added its bots to the friend list of all their users yet they kill other peoples bots without any explanation.