Two weeks ago, my Dell notebook once again decided it had had enough. The CPU had fried itself, so Dell decided to replace both the motherboard and CPU.
It only took two weeks for problems to rear their ugly heads again - on Monday night I was up late fixing some code for our Final Year Project, which we needed due the next day, and once again the CPU started throttling back. I eventually gave up, not realising until the next morning what the problem was - the fan wasn't moving at all. Completely dead.

I eventually got it to start working again, but Dell are going to now replace both the heatsink and fan - I could only wish they had a copper HSF kit for this notebook, because the stock HSF in it clearly doesn't do the job.

One of the subjects I'm taking for university at the moment is called 'Advanced .NET'. The name is very misleading, because the subject is all about multithreaded programming, it just coincidentally happens to use .NET for the coding side of things so that we have a common platform and set of languages to deal with.

The current assignment I'm working on requires us to write a heap of utilities from scratch. They have to be thread-safe, and well, they have to basically work. This means things like Semaphores, Latches, Barriers, Channels, and Exchangers.

Though I could see the problem straight away, the funniest bug I had to fix thisafternoon was with my exchanger. For those who don't know what an exchanger it, it allows you to have two or more threads, and exchange a peice of data between the two. So thread 1 mihgt give A, thread 2 gives B, and the result is that Thread 1 gets B and Thread 2 gets A.

Anyway, what my code did was this, as n example.
Player 1 comes in, it gives a pen. It waits for another thread to give something.
Player 2 then comes along, and offers a shovel. It now has two peices of data, so it gives the shovel to player 1, and gives the shovel to player 2.

Anyone else see a problem?

So suddenly I had a bug where you would end up with multiple copies of one object, and another would just disappear from my game altogether. Oops.

Don't do things like that, it's not handy at all.

Fortunately most of the other utilities work fine, but there's a few I'm still not quite 100% happy with and am pretty sure they need fixing. Of course, these needs to be absolultely perfect to be able to be used in the next application I have to develop before the end of the semester, so back to it, I guess :)

Last time, I predicted worse to come for the remainder of the week. Looks like I guess right. On the 'technology headaches' front, the guy from Dell didn't turn up until 3pm, meaning I had no use of my notebook until almost the end of the day. That pretty much wiped out any chance of me having time to get to uni in the afternoon, though in the end it wouldn't be the deciding factor.

I don't know what happened between midday and the afternoon, but at lunchtime I was fine. By the time I left work I was feeling awful. Basically I went to bed early, yet got virtually no sleep. It's probably just a cold, but whatever I've ended up catching is really nasty, so I was in bed pretty much all of yesterday. As a result I'm now a couple more days behind on work.

Anyhow, recovering now, hopefully I'll be able to catch up on everything.

Apparently it's been decided it's just going to be one of those weeks for me. On Monday night, I got home, and none of the networking stuff wanted to play nice. That wasn't a hard solve, but the problem was compounded by the fact that while I was trying to solve the issue, my boss rang me to say "it's not working!". As luck would have it all our servers were inaccessible because our ISP had changed our primary static IP on us - the one which all our other servers were routed via. Of course this meant everything was offline. Sigh, so I was to get that working.

Yesterday I finished up at work, and headed off to uni. Got there on time, tried to turn on my notebook. The danm thing decided that flashing a capslock light at me was highly productive, and I'd get more work done with the laptop off. I disagreed, and rang Dell, who informed me they would replace the motherboard for the second time in this notebook's life. Basically that meant my notebook was out of action until they could bring out the spare parts truck to us thismorning - more on that later.

Thismorning started off wonderful, in fact almost immediately I just knew it was going to end up being one of 'those' days. I got not one step from my door - and by "my door" I mean bedroom door, not house door, and it had been decided my head and body would go one way, with my legs heading off in the opposite direction. Net result: Thud. I don't know how I managed it but it was the most spectacular fall I've taken in a long time, and I've been nursing a sore wrist and ankle all day as a result.

So then to top it off, the Dell service guy arrived, late, and quickly proceeded to pull my notebook to peices. Not 20 minutes later he had it back together with a new motherboard installed, and whaddyaknow? The same flashing light greeted him, myself, and the replacement motherboard. Turns out the CPU was a slightly darker than normal shade of brown - possibly something to do with all that dust that had caked up inside the chassis and CPU fan. I now have to wait yet another day to have a replacement CPU bought out (second replacement CPU too, hiphip-hooray).

And to top it off there's still two days of the week to go! I wonder what else I should be looking forward to or expecting this week.

Woot! Take that Adelaide fans :P

Seriously, worst fans ever. Seriously, who boos like that. Such bad sportsmanship/form.

I swear I need a little waving flag animation here:


:D

Ah, what a helpful error:

We're having a lot of fun at work this week, with geek gadgets all around. The video below should pretty much illustrate the kind of things we're getting up to. I'm not sure what was actually expected (anything less?) when one of my bosses decided to go and buy a USB missile launcher.

Because of all the performance testing I'm doing as part of my job, writing code for multiprocessor systems, HP agreed to loan us a beast of a system - their new, top of the line, HP-DL380. This thing is nuts (or at least, the one we have sitting on a desk is). Two Dual-Core 3.0GHz Xeons (so four cores total), and this one came standard with six(!) 72GB hot-swappable Serial Attached SCSI drives.

The DL380 has redundant modular power supplies, so that's pretty cool, but I can't really begin to describe the noise this thing makes.

Let me put it this way: Two months ago we took up Sun on a try-and-buy offer for the UltraSPARC T1000. Problem was, I couldn't run it most of the time because it was so loud. We had to lock it in a soundproof office, and even then we could still hear the faint noise of the server.
Well, this thing… it's louder. But louder in a cool way. Maybe I should record an audio clip, because the sound of the fans is so incredibly cool it has to be heard to be believed. That said, I'm not 100% sure that they're actually fans in the DL380-G5 - The new HP BladeSystem (C-series) uses jet turbines for cooling the blades and chassis. I didn't make that up either - HP and Boeing actually jointly took out 30 patents to make these things.

But wait, it gets cooler.

We have the DL380 so we can do performance testing. So what might we be testing it against, you'll probably want to know?

AHA!

That's right. That would be four Mac minis, the first in our intended super-cluster. $12,000 worth of HP hardware, and $5,000 worth of Apple hardware - which I'm predicting to be a close battle, in terms of performance.

The minis are, obviously the cheaper solution. Long term, we intend on having a set of racks consisting of a total of 100 Apple Mac Minis.