Martin Geisler Online

I’m back at [Skejbygård][] again after visiting my mom, dad, and Kristoffer in the weekend. As you can tell from my schedule I don’t have any classes on Fridays, so I could get on a train for Aalborg Thursday evening — it had been a long time since my last visit to Aalborg and then of course it was my dads birthday.

I left my computer on while I was away with FreeNet running. I checked on it regulary over a SSH connection (I really love SSH, it’s so cool to be able to login securely when you’re away from your machine!) to see how the load was and to read some mail.

My node saw an incredible amount of requests, the average number of requests per hour was around 30,000 most of the time, but I also saw it rise to 60,000(!) once. This made my node reject all incoming requests most of the time because all threads were in use. I can raise the number of available threads and open connections, but it wont be before I get a new computer, for I simply don’t have enough RAM and CPU power to do it.

I am connected to the Internet through Bolignet-Aarhus and there was a constant load of about 90 KiB/s on the connection. This was split between 25 KiB/s downstream and 65 KiB/s upstream. And it wasn’t me who asked my node to download this stuff — my datastore had grown to over 7.5 GiB when I got home, when I left it was about 6 GiB.

So, FreeNet it definitely working. Whether or not the contents on it is interesting is another thing, but the techonoligy works and that kind of cool.

I’m beginning to play with the idea of buying a new computer — my old system feels old, especially after I’ve begun using FreeNet.

The focus on my new machine will be low noise — I aim for no noise at all, but that’s probably a bit hard to achive. As it can be seen here, it is actually possible to build a desktop PC without any moving parts(!) but the performance suffer.

So a little noise is probably innevitable… but there’s no reason to put in more fans that I have to, so I wont buy a motherboard or graphcscard with a fan on it. How come every little chip needs acitve cooling these days?

I’ve been browsing the ‘net a little, and have come up with a list of components, but I’m still very open to suggestions, if any of you have experience with building low-noise systems.

Intel Pentium 4 at 2.8 GHz: This should be a nice step up from the AMD Athlon 900MHz I have now…

Zalman CNPS7000-Cu: The tests I’ve read indicate that this is a good low-noise cooler.

Asus P4PE: This board has onboard LAN, audio and serial ATA. Does anybody know if the onboard audio works in GnuLinux? I’ve read that some boards support “Dual DDR RAM” which should increase the memory bandwidth further — is this something that works?

512 or perhaps even 1024 MiB DDR-SDRAM PC3500: I hope this fits together with the CPU and motherboard? From what I’ve figured out about these numbers, PC3500 RAM is the same as DDR433? But I haven’t seen a motherboard that supports this speed, infact I’ve only seen motherboards supporting up to PC2700. Any comments?

silentmaxx proSilence: This is a power supply without a fan! The idea of having a power supply without a fan sound absolutely wonderful to me, for it’s my current power supply that produces most of the noise from my current system. But I wonder how this will affect the air-flow in the case?

There’s a very recent English review here. It actually looks like this unit is very new, it’s in back-order everywhere I’ve looked, including http://www.silentmaxx.de/ which appears to be the main reseller.

Seagate Baracuda V SATA: From what I’ve read around the ‘net, this should be the most silent harddrive available. Or rather, the Baracuda IV should be the most silent drive available, but I would rather have this newer model.

If you have any comments or suggestions for my new super low-noise system, then please either mail them to me at mgeisler@mgeisler.net, or place them directly in the page. Just write some stuff, I’ll always be able to edit it after I’ve read it.

Sounds like a pretty cool system. For my next pc I’ll definitely also go for an Intel P4 CPU. -Kristian Kristensen

Yes, now I just have to find out when this funky power supply will be available in Denmark, and how much it will cost. I’m afraid that it will be rather expensive though…

I’ve now succesfully inserted GimpsterDotCom in FreeNet using the fcptools package. Go to GimpsterDotCom/1// and give my site a try! Like every other site on FreeNet, GimpsterDotCom has it’s own ActiveLink — it’s the little image on the right. So if you stumble over this image while browsing FreeNet, then click on it :-)

The site will be edition based, so that I can insert a new edition whenever I feel like. I’ll try and make a new edition a couple of times a week as the WikiWikiWeb at GimpsterDotCom is updated. Because the FreeNet edition is a mirror of the live www.gimpster.com then it’s easy to put comments on the pages by editing them on the real Internet. I know that this is isn’t anonymous, but on the other hand: there’s nothing at GimpsterDotCom that should require you to be anonymous. But I could insert a NIM (Near Instant Messaging) board if it seams worth is.

Ups, wrong key!

Some of you might have noticed, that the link above has changed from edition 6 to edition 1. This is because I’ve generated a new set of keys. I suddenly realised, that I had managed to use the public key with fcpputsite where it expected the private key. So my site ended up under a third key with a nice mixture of private and public keys in the links in the HTML code :-) I hope I’ve got things under control now.

I’ve now been using the Tagged Message Delivery Agent for a year and the result has been fantastic — no more SPAM! During the last year, TMDA has stopped 4039 mails, that’s 11 mails each day on average. I’ve periodically released normal mails from the list, so the 4000+ remaining mails are all SPAM.

My whitelist now contain 223 addresses that go right through to my mailbox. An address is added automatically to the list when the sender replies to the challenge send out by TMDA. I’ve yet to put someone on my blacklist….

So, if you’re also troubled by SPAM, you should try TMDA. Now I only see SPAM once a month or so.

The book that my dad ordered for my birthday has finally arrived. First my dad ordered the book from some English online bookstore in the beginning of January. But after having waited 14 days he asked them what they were doing? The webpage had said that it would be shipped right away. They answered that the book were in backorder with their suppliers… Strange, as this is an extremely popular book on C++.

So my dad cancelled the order and ordered the book at Amazon instead. While we were at it, we also ordered some extra books. I ordered a book about the Standard Template Library in C++ and my dad ordered a book about database development in Kylix — which is the legendary Delphi ported to [GNU][]/Linux. Using these tools, it’s possible to develop a program under MsWindows and them recompile it under GNU/Linux, or the other way around. Both Kylix and Delphi uses ObjectPascal which is another nice language.

Amazon promptly shipped all the books, but then the Danish postal service screwed things up! Or at least that’s our theory. The books in my dads package was switched with some books for a guy who lives in Copenhagen. My dad called this guy, but he didn’t reply before my dad had shipped the books back to Amazon. They were very sorry for the trouble and shipped a new set of books right away.

And now, I’ve finally gotten ”The C++ Programming Langauge” by Bjarne Stroustrup; ISBN:0201700735 and Effective STL by Scott Meyers; ISBN:0201749629. The Stroustrup book is as expected: heavy, complete and throughout. I bought it because I wanted a reference for C++ and I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ve gotten.

The other books is much smaller and consists of 50 specific points that one should keep in the back of ones head when using the Standard Template Library (STL). This books is written in a much more entertaining style, but I’m sure the advice given here will be useful.

Now I just have to start programming some C++!