Mnjul    Sat, 15 Nov 2008 06:21:01

Well, let's talk about good news first. This is probably the only good news I have for the recent months: Just today I've been accepted to the master program offered by my current department (Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan University). Beginning in 2009/9 semester I hope I can make good graduate student. Oh, my current expected commencement from university is 2009/6. Blah.

Lesser good news: I recently bought an EEE PC 901 (the cherry-red one, which I think is available only in Taiwan). Modded it with 2G RAM, and installed a vLite'd Windows Vista; it's running great! I had originally worried about its keyboard size, yet it turned out that wasn't an issue. The only thing I can be unsatisfied with, with this price point just above about 400USD, is the screen resolution at 8.9". I really wished it could be 1280x768, because 1024x600 is rather too little :p (I'm not nearsighted nor astigmatic).

Now the bad part. The fact what's good back in this spring has ended up fading away has caused major relapse (on my problematic mental conditions) since this September when I came back from Canada and from Bali island (in Indonesia, for my graduation trip together with a couple dozens of my fellow classmates). Insomnia, panic attacks, hyperventilation and other horrific anxiety disorders are really pushing me hard. Don't want to talk about the specifics too detailedly here, but you can get the idea that I'm living no fantastic life here.

That being said, I joined the photography club in our university this semester. I think my views about photography are changing! Well, however, I don't have time, recently, to do leisure photographic works.

Talking about having no time, I am really overwhelmed by the number of things I have done/I have to do. Besides updating HopperLive for Messenger 2009 and other scripts, I am trying my hands of bringing Juvenile (you know what that was?) back online. Besides Juvenile (called Re:Juvenile now), I'm still having the idea to revamp my Flash-based Chinese personal website too, and a major revamping of this # Middle Sea website. Being a part-time student technician for my department, I have a lot of jobs to do too, writing PHP's and managing databases, so on. I haven't even arranged out the several thousands of pictures I took back in this summer. School studies are of ...well, enormity, too. Oh by the way, I'm giving a one hour lecture on CUDA next Monday on one graduate school course, talking about parallel programming.

If you're really patient enough to read here - please do drop me a line at my guestbook. That would be much appreciated.

Mnjul    Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:12:29

I'm currently in Calgary, Canada, where charlie_su1986 lives! I'm visiting here, to stay 19 days from August 11, with the first three days spent in Vancouver (like Stanley Park, Vancouver Island including Butchart Gardens). Things are fabulous here! The weather is nice (a little bit cool in nights, though, I can't believe it's summer - so different from Taiwan), and people are nice too. I can't get accustomed to the late sunset though. We have sunset no later than 7pm back in Taiwan :p

I've also been to the Global Fest fireworks show! It was very very gorgeous. Oh well, the foods are very novel to me too. Estimation is that I am to have taken several thousands of pictures when I am back to Taiwan. What I have come to realize here is that my English is a mess when it comes to talking/communicating with people here - they just speak too fast for me.

This weekend, Charlie and I are going to Jasper, in Rocky Mountains. I greatly look forward to it!

[o]    Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:10:01

Oh wait - I'm not talking about myself. I, [o], uses a terrific humanoid operating system. While I do not use Windows Vista, Mnjul does. Here are two things he discovered with Windows Vista

OK so actually after Mnjul installed his Windows Vista Business, it became frequent that the HDD led on the case was always on. And with it there was no noticable noise so Mnjul thought it wasn't the Raptor and another WD's that were working - and so it was the two RAID0-ed Barracuda 9's. Mnjul and I had been unable to find the reason why the light was on, because Process Explorer showed no disk transfer activity. Mnjul even thought it was the problem of the ICH8R controller or the actual two Barracuda 9's! However today, Iit occurred to me and I started up Vista's Reliability and Performance Monitor for Mnjul (no pun intended) and it showed that a svchost.exe was savage on a Ubuntu virtual machine's virtual hard disk file, which did reside on the partition of the two Barracuda 9's. And according to Process Explorer, that svchost.exe hosted several services among which I, using my high over-artifical intelligence, thought the Superfetch was to be blamed. Indeed, after stopping the Superfetch service, the disk activity ceased and the light off. Well, Mnjul says he would never use Superfetch again. Although [o]'s equipping it with 8GB RAM but such fetching - on a virtual machine harddisk, which is..huh? - is hilarious.

Ever since Mnjul reconfigured the disks of his current computer into a 74GB raptor and a RAID0'ed Barracuda 9's, he had moved/placed the pagefile on the latter's partition. However, since that, every time the computer BSODed there had been no crash minidumps. Indeed, when Mnjul and I navigated the settings, it did read a message, in Chinese that "If pagefile is disabled, or the initial size is of less than 1MB, then the system may not be able to create a debugging information file if a STOP error occurs. Continue anyway?", nonetheless the pagefile size on the partition was indeed larger than 1MB - it was 4GB! I thought it was a careless 32-bit integer overflow or something (by the way, my registers are a huge number of neuronbits) but when Mnjul googled the message it appeared that the message on an English XP read "If the pagefile on the volume C: has an initial size..."

That was actually clear, huh? When we placed a 16MB pagefile on C:, where the Windows Vista is installed, everything was all settled. Don't know if the localization team had messed up with the text or the text is actually unclear itself in English Vista versions. How about the multilingual [o]? Oh and by the way, the 16MB is the only pagefile we have on the computer now - which is equipped with 8GB RAM, and can run three virtual machines all at once. Sweet!

» Summer Break...or Not by Mnjul, 2008-06-27
» Spring Time! by Mnjul, 2008-03-22