Still As Life

Here it is, the all new Still As Life design on Wordpress. Check it out at blog.stillaslife.com or head to the new portal page at www.stillaslife.com!

This old Blogger blog will remain here, accessible at stillaslife.com/blogger.html so that the articles on it are still available for everyone.

The new Still As Life blog also incorporates a gallery system for my fractal art and wallpapers, which are free for anyone to use as their desktop background and so on as long as my little copyright statement remains intact. The gallery is of course, very empty at the moment as I have not yet put many of my completed ones up, and I am re-rendering some of them at higher quality on the new computer. There will of course be new ones as well as time passes.

That's it for this blog. I'll see you at the new one!

Labels: art, code, design

Today, along with plotting to take over the world with Rhi, I rearranged me desk setup, and for that matter, most of that side of the room.

I've chucked one of my bookcases up on the back of one of my desks. I've run out of room on the ground level, so logically, start building up. Tetris style.

It turned out that the bottom shelf of the bookcase is the perfect size to fit my pair of 19" widescreens with about 3mm to spare above them and about 2cm in total to spare horizontally. Sweet.

I've migrated the main work stream applications over to Quadzilla. As a result of this, I've noticed about a 50% performance decrease in the performance of Adobe Photoshop CS3 when working with large files compared to the old XP box that is around a quarter of the power of Quadzilla. That doesn't make any sense to me and I sure hope it's just a temporary problem.

I have left the old box up and running next to the new one. I need it for access to the RAID 0 array in it. At the moment, I have it plugged in to the second input in my secondary monitor, however I am accessing it predominately via the Windows Remote Desktop Connection software as this saves the trouble of switching the inputs and the keyboard and mouse.

Since moving the bookcase, I all of a sudden seem to have so much extra space. I need it since I'm planning on getting a filing cabinet soon, all the same though, it's remarkable the amounf ot space it seems to have made. I'm also thinking about getting a fourth desk from somewhere to get myself some more desk space since I seem to keep running out.

Labels: other, software

I have Folding@Home running on all of my computers, I have run it for quite a while. I have no real reason not to. Now having it setup on the new computer, and watching the usage on the CPU, it is nothing like what I had expected.

On everyt other computer I have used it on, it consistently keeps the CPU usage up at 100% except when it is sending and receiving a new block to work on. On the quad core CPU though, even though it is set to use all of the idle CPU time, it seems to sit between 30% and 50% of the CPU time, it is also getting through pieces quicker than the old computer, despite only using such a small amount of the available CPU time.

No, this does not mean that I have gotten the new computer completely stable. It is close. I am still having a couple of problems. It seems that I cannot reboot. I have to shut it down and then manually power it back on. If I tell it to reboot it will get stuck in an infinite loop of rebooting. The only way around this is to either force it to power down and then switch it back on, or to boot into safe mode and then reboot from safe mode.

This seems to be the only problem remaining. I have a couple of times had the 200gb drive become read only, however, a shut down and then power back on has fixed that.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have put a fan in the front now as well. I accidentally killed my spare 120mm fan (I accidentally put a screwdriver through it. Don't ask.), so it's got my only spare 92mm fan in now instead (which is noisier than any of the 80mm ones that I have lying around). This seems to have fixed the problem of one of the drives constantly spinning up and down for no reason. It will definitely have to be replaced by a 120mm fan though as this single 92mm fan is producing as much noise on it's own as the entire old computer did.

Labels: hardware, software