Need a media center/entertainment PC?

I was checking ASUSTeK website when i was surprised by this little fella: Rampage II Gene It's tiny.... but packs everything needed to make a quite powerful machine.... problem: costs more than 200€ so ... a PC build with it will cost quite something ... (specially if you pair it with 2 BFG Nvidia GTX 295 H2O, 6Gb DDR3 2000Mhz and a i7 Extreme CPU) ... and to keep things silent and cool, the V1... and this monster... or this puppy - hmmm ... 250+1200+500+1000+500+50 = 3500€ given or taken... pair it with a G9x and a G19, hmmm ... some G51 and the G25 (well... you buy 2 of G's series, you could as well buy the whole set) and a Samsung Led-TV ... That would power up a room :p but is around 5000€ ... ah well ...

Cleaning fail...

So... today, after have some work done i solve to clean up and desktop since my sister is using it, she cares little over the dust that accumulates on filters... My computer case is very nice, a Thermaltake Tsunami, so i got the moment to clean up the cables as well, a year ago or so, i buyed a lcd panel for temperature monitoring and a card reader, sata plugs and usb extra plugs were freebies (even with the case usb plugs my motherboard still has room for more) by the time i connected everything and just rearrange the cables just enough to allow a good air flow. So today, i rearrange the cables not only for the air flow, but to give it a cleaner look, since the 5,25" panel has around 40 cables that was no easy task, but i'm happy with the result, even the graphic board agrees, since now it won't fire the fan into hi-speed (hi-noise) that easily. So... where is the fail? well... after all the work to clean and correct stuff, i ended up with this: Link (i wonder if this link works properlly) Well, not exacly that one, but you get the idea. A screw from the floppy drive went missing... just to be found right after close the case and connect all cables... oh well... i won't mess with the case any time soon again >_> *resumes work*

Hmm...

Well ... i'm dead tired, have a pile of work above me and it each time i try to reduce the pile, it increases size.... Hmm ... right... i won't sleep till i finnish this piece of code, so ... don't expect for me to be very cooperative into helping in something... In 5 days or so, we shall see if i'm alive after being up and wake working non stop for more that 4 days... not that i never did it before, but by the looks of it i gain a couple of years (or lose, depends on view point) each time i do it... So... 'till then folks *resumes work*

Swine Flu...

So.... first was the avine flu ... well ... now is swine flu... evolution ...

Quando o frio aperta....

Quando o frio aperta: link Bem... de volta ao trabalho...

Line of code of the day

Hmmm ... you know... sometimes you create pieces of code that look like crap but do wonderful things and very fast... so i'll paste a line of a VHDL architecture module... now imagine that 90% of the rest of the module is similar... yes... a nightmare to debug... div_buffer <= (NUM_VARS-LOG2_NUM_VARS-1 downto 1 => '0')&((offset-(stack(top)(NUM_VARS+LOG2_NUM_VARS-2 downto NUM_VARS)&'0'))&'0'); But work! I might clean up the code later ... anyway, this calculates a divider for a bit vector calculation ... in software takes around 2*N clock cycles to calculate the bit vector, in hardware takes N*log(N) clock cycles... i would say my implementation is efficient .. XD In other news, my pen tablet and gimp (or should i say GTK+?) are always punching eachother... i found a way of solving the issues ... reboot! ... This only happens in windows Vista... so... yeah ... Vista is not only sluggish, slow and bad... is even worse ... specially since my pen tablet says "Certified for windows Vista" ... go figure!

LCDs...

Hmm... you want to buy a new screen for your computer, or even for your living room, but have no idea of what to choose and how to see if it's really good that cheap one at the store in the next corner? Well, then i have something to you! Was not made by me, but you may want to see if, even if you are already happy with your current screen. LINK You don't need to be an expert to know that my laptop screen does suck, you just need to glance it, but how bad it is? The answer is 1:50 contrast ratio! ... Yes ... i have a freaking laptop with a crappy contrast ratio, sadly, i usually use it to image edition, getting somewhat shabby results because of my pour color choices... go figure! ... Well, i'm happy with my laptop, it's freaking fast beating my desktop in every point, except for the screen... well, at least i can conect it to a proper screen :p EDIT: After a few more tests, i found out i wasn't holding the camera perfectly perpendicular to the screen, since my screen viewing angles are .... bad, i was getting such values, it's not like it's much better, but the after all the testing the results i've obtained were 386:1 contrast ratio and 180cd/m² on maximum luminance... my pda screen has 580:1 and 295cd/m² ... one can easily see the diference just by looking at their image, oh well... Hmmm ... in other news, gimp and my new tablet went in disagreement, since only gimp gives me trouble i would guess that it's gimp's problem, but since it does detect my tablet correctly, but looses track of pressure information channel, i would say that is a less ordinal aproach in drivers implementation with some gimp implementation choices that cause trouble, oh well, at least openCanvas 1.1 beta 72 revision 1, never fails me, but it does lack some features xD. Oh, it works everytime in Adobe applications too, well, my 30days trial over photoshop are over, so i can't exacly see if it works there now... well... stuff done with my pen tablet can be found here, some stuff (like the comic with BOOM letters - lineart came from snafu-comics.com) is not entirelly done by me, but you can have fun watching stuff appear there in a random fashion...