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Last week I was pretty sick amd I ended up awake at 4 AM. That's a pretty dull hour to do anything interesting and for some reason my half functioning brain wondered what happened to Fractint, that old program I used to use at the university back in the 90's to compute Mandelbrot fractals.
Turns out Fractint development kind of stopped at Fracting version 20.0, one that is said to "even work under Win95". Outch :-)
However the DOS version still rocks. It runs very nicely under XP in DOS mode without any tweaks and finds lots of interesting VESA modes to use, so I ended up using 1280x1024 mostly.
In a matter of minutes I got myself re-acquainted with the interface and generated these images:
Click on the images to view the full album and larger versions.
Fractint is unique in that it can compute in a variety of precisions, ranging from integer to floating point but also the one called "arbitrary precision". Think zooms in the range of 10^100 or, as you will see below, 10^240. 20 years ago the speed was simply ridiculous.
This is called "deepzooming", and you can view many deep zoom examples here.
Deepzooming at the top of the Mandelbrot set has already been done, for example in this page from Bengt Månsson. To put things in perspective, the most inner zoom I computed took me 3h30 at 1280x1024 whereas the page above reports 800 hours at 640x480 on a 90 MHz Pentium.
All of this starts when zooming at the tip of Mandelbrot, near -2,0.
There are a bunch of converging "nodes". One would think the intersection of two nodes is empty. Nothing exciting to see here?
Yet by zooming at the intersection between 2 nodes, it eventually splits in 4, then 8, 16, etc...
And there's yet-another Mandelbrot in there:
Earlier I was complaining about my motherboard not booting from time to time. It's an ASUS M2N-E motherboard.
A few days ago this happened again. In the past, the problem would happen for a while and suddenly the mobo might start booting, so annoyed I unplugged my cell phone to go read my mails somewhere else and... oh wait it just booted!
Huh? Backup! OK the cell phone is one of these smart cell phone and I had plugged to the USB to charge it (incidentally the USB has power even when the PC is stopped.)
I tried a couple of times and this is definitive: having the phone plugged into USB simply locks up the BIOS. At boot it will stop after printing the CPU and before starting to detect the drives.
A flagrant test is to boot the PC without the phone plugged, enter the BIOS setup and plug the phone: it locks up instantly. Remove the phone and the setup works again.
Anyhow, I found an Abit AN8 forum page that describes exactly this behavior. Granted the page is for the Abit AN8-SLI motherboard, not the ASUS M2N-E but the description is right on and I take it's not just a coincidence.
It's like the tide... up, down... up...
Right now I'm more feeling in the "down" part of the tide.
Too much clutter. On my desk, in my mind. Need to clean it. Annoying but nothing new.
I'll reuse plan A. Worked the last N-1 times: Make a list. Bullet points. Draw a line. Everything below the line is trashed. Act on the rest. Get some exercise, some sleep and reboot. Restart cycle every two years.
There's a plan B too. For serious and drastic times. I used it in '95 and it was painful. Let's not do it again.
I finally got around to update the Project List and added 2 years worth of random and insignificants projects.
The only non-trivial projects that got completed in that time frame are rig3 and asqare.
Here's an extract from the Webalizer log for my Izumi site in March 2008:
The numbers may vary and the ranking might chance slightly but overall that's a pretty constant search pattern on my site except for one unusual entry.
Amusing, isn't it?
This morning when going to work, I was on the highway in a nice & fluid traffic. I was probably doing in the 60 mph, nothing too fast. Suddenly I saw the minivan in front of me run over something on the ground and that projected it in the air.
That looked like a foot-long piece of solid, maybe wood or similar.
And it landed. On the hood.
And bounced back. On the windshield.
And finally bounced back somewhere else.
The whole thing lasted 2 seconds and now I need a new windshield and 5 days of body shop on the hood.
I guess it could have been worse. But, damn, that windshield was barely 4 month old!
Thinking about it later, my reaction had been to do absolutely nothing and in fact it was the right one -- there was traffic all around me, there was no escape pattern to avoid it.
When I rebuilt my desktop box six months ago, I picked an ASUS M2N-E motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64x2 5600+ and 2 GB of G.Skill DDR2.
That config has been running mostly smooth for quite a while. Once last year, I remember trying to boot the computer, the BIOS starts showing up and then nothing happens. It would look like this and just sit there:
That was once and it stopped the next day. And now it's doing this again.
Eventually if I let it sit there for 15 minutes or more, the BIOS might concede to start but the whole thing seems pretty flaky. It might not start or Windows might crash during the boot or something like the sound chip might not be working at all.
A quick search online seem to indicate that the ASUS M2N-E has frequent boot issues and the culprit might be the support of the memory. And I'm not even overclocking mine, so it's clearly a sign of a flaky series of motherboard. What is strange is that for me most of the time it had worked just fine (until now at least) and that eventually the board boots. Maybe because I run the conservative BIOS settings.
Reports from forums indicate that some BIOS updates might fix this so I'll see what the latest BIOS update does.
I'm just back from Thunderhill where I participated in the Hooked on Driving - Driver Development Program (select DDP here).
As always, getting to Thunderhill is the hardest part (not to mention the 6 AM wake up call) but at least the weather was very nice -- relatively clear, sunny with a refreshing wind -- and the people from Hooked on Driving were really nice.
The group was pretty small, we had 4 people in the beginners groups and 6 in the advanced one. The 4 of us in my group had 3 instructors whom were giving plenty of feedback, which was much appreciated.
The program consisted of a series of exercises: running over dots to understand the car limits, simulate getting in the dirt and back on the track, and of course the mandatory find-the-apex-yourself, the cone zigzag and the braking exercises. All the kind of stuff you have to do when you want to learn your car, which is exactly why I went there in the first place.
We also had some more practical exercises to learn the track, especially a good amount of time practicing turn 9. For those unfamiliar with the track, it's a nice "blind" spot: the track goes up the hill, and right at the top there's a turn to negotiate and since you can't see the road on the other side of the hill it's really hard to know where to go when you're doing that at 50 MPH :-)
Later we did the same with turn 5, which is even more tricky, but this time we stopped and literally walked the turn. Once used to it this way, I found these turns to be almost the easiest ones. We walked turn 11 too but I still found it pretty tricky to get right after.
We also had a nice number of real track laps, basically I was following a lead car driven by an instructor. This started nice and slow and depending on how the student behind was following the instructor would give some nice feedback or pickup speed. I built up a descent speed although a couple of times I almost wanted to pass the lead car ;-) but it was really nice to have a reference point in case I had forgotten how to negotiate a turn and most important to see in advance which zones would be tricky and where to brake. Having the instructor in front made most turns look almost obvious; remove him and it's a whole different story...
In total I drove 85 miles, with most of it on the track so it was pretty good for a training program. And I used about 8 gallons of gas, so that gives me a respectable 10 mpg, not bad :-)
Most important I see now what my little car can do, it's really nice to see it in action and to have a safe place to experiment with it. It's only a Civic Si so it's clearly not as spiffy as the other cars one expects to find there -- for example the others "beginners" cars included a Subaru STI, a Corvette Z51 and an F430!
I can really see a clear difference with the old 240SX. The most important is the understeer instead of oversteer of course, but the way the power builds up is interesting too -- the VTEC really kicks in at 6k RPM and the red line is at 8, so after a couple of laps I found where to downshift to get more RPM faster thus a better momentum.
So overall a great experience which was totally worth it.
I finally received my OLPC XO laptop, which I ordered via the G1G1 program.
It's cute and nice. Here are a couple of pictures:
Continue reading on the Olpc Xo Tips page. There rest of the pictures are here.
The original goal was that it would be a laptop for the kids to play with. That's still the goal, but I'm going to play with it first ;-) I need to see what activities would be good for them and maybe program some things I have in mind or alter existing stuff for my needs and then have them play with it under supervision.
It seems impossible to get a descent home printer now-a-day. I mean one you don't have to replace every other 2 or 3 years.
Last time I was ranting about how our last Brother HL-1440 sucked and we replaced it by an HP LaserJet 1012.
Turns out the HP LaserJet 1012 sucks too.
I always knew it was an "host-based" printer, meaning the Windows box is the one that prepares the image and sends it to the printer. What I didn't know is that it is actually a more powerful printer which is caped down due to some firmware bugs. These bugs are known by HP but they choose to ignore them, as one can read one this forum page: HP LaserJet 1012 Unsupported Personality PCL.
In my case, 3 years down the road, the printers works fine, very fine. When it decides to work that is, which doesn't happen very often. Continue reading the HP LaserJet 1012 rant for the full details.
So is another HP LaserJet going to suck too? What other printer would you recommend?
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