It Never Rains but It Pours
Athlon 64, Crazy cab drivers, honest/dumb look, rich people, How to block the new generation of popups, all this and more!
First post in a while. Had a sudden burst of inspiration last nite. Just when I felt like posting, blogger went down. Can you imagine the odds of that happening?
Yesterday I was tasked to build a number-crunching system. So I went down to sim lim to scout and gather intelligence, as I haven't been keeping up with all that stuff. I was looking around the shady shops trying to decide which not-too-shady shopkeeper to approach. Really miss superpet, the staff there were very knowledgeable and didn't try to con me.
In the end I asked this shop on the 6th floor (where sp used to be). The guy said he built systems but no AMD. He was about to direct me to HWP across the floor when this other guy spoke up. Turns out he didn't really work for any of those guys but he just built alot of Athlon 64 systems for CPIB or something like that.
So he brought me to a couple of shops to assemble the components for the number cruncher. Except that neither of them were the same shop that his namecard says he was from.
In the end I settled on this system:
Athlon 64 Socket 939 3500+ @ $683 w/ mobo
Gigabyte nForce3 Ultra Mobo w/ dual RAID + SATA
Corsair CAS 2.5 512 mb (x2) for 1 gig dual channel @ $196
El cheapo ATI Radeon 9250 gfx card @ $80 (so I won't be too tempted to run half-life 2 or warcraft in the office)
Maxtor 80 GB SATA (x2) for RAID 0 @ $216
LG 8x DVD Burner for burning office videos @ $128
HEC power supply (pretty good experience with their case) + casing + lots of fans @ $235
and last but not cheap,
Windoze XP Pro SP2 @ $235
defintely earns the title of the most worthless buy. Wouldn't be getting it if the number crunching programs weren't running on windows. This microsoft tax is almost as bad as COE. Except it's more brilliant cos it reaches out to the entire world whereas COE only affects a tiny island whose citizens don't really speak up much anyway. At least the open source advocates are putting a dent in the windoze/msoffice tax with firefox, openoffice, thunderbird, linux etc.
On the ride home, the taxi driver was putting the darndest ideas into my head. Mostly the usual complaints except for this one theory that stood out most. You know how cars are impossibly expensive, and some minister encouraged people to bike a while ago or something like that? Well he's saying they want more people to ride bikes so that more will get killed on the roads. I get the idea that this is some kind of crazy social engineering program - poor people ride bikes and get run over by crazy drunk drivers, more organ parts for transplants for people who can afford it. Also I thought when one dies one's organs are not up for transplants unless one has signed and agreed to that before? But apparently that's not the case for road victims. And the driver said he's been monitoring the number of cyclist deaths and there's been more than 10 in a period of 7-8 months. Scary. Ndru1 is right, these cab drivers usually have very interesting things to say, there's so many times I had interesting or just crazy conversations with them back when I was giving tuition.
Funny how he said he was telling me all this good stuff cos I looked like the honest sort and would be conned and eaten alive and spat out by others outside. And that guy who was helping me pick pc parts also said the same thing - he couldn't bear to see me cheated by other people. Yep, instead of letting others cheat me, y not do it himself. I can totally understand since my momma used to say she'd rather cane me herself than have the teacher punish me.
Actually I think he did give me some pretty good pointers. Like making sure that the sticks of RAM had the same batch number so I'd have no problem doing dual channel. And checking for (the absence of) screw marks on the motherboards and cards to make sure they are new. One motherboard did have a very obvious screw mark. Lucky me, my mobo wasn't screwed with. i hope. why did you close down superpet? hmm i shld ask that sim lim regular about what happened to them. sp was so popular, so recommended, i wonder what could have gone wrong.
Anyway, you rich people who live in marine parade and orchard road and boat quay, you guys just paid more for less. Gosh there r (were?) so many rich kids reading my blog. (I ought to rename it the Singapore Tatters or Monkey Tat Monkey Too.) Anyway that geologist from nus quoted in Today said that seismic waves get dampened by solid rocks in the west, but not the sedimentary foundation in the eastern and central areas. Westerners and northerners, rejoice!
The following instructions were mostly lifted from http://www.petebevin.com/archives/2005/03/10/firefox_popups.html (get linkification!)
If you're like me you probably love Firefox for many reasons, including popup blocking. So I must say I was more than mildly surprised when recently I saw some popups actually get through.
It turns out that some clever people figured out that you could launch popups from flash (evil, evil flash) and other plugins, penetrating firefox's armor.
Fortunately, you can get around it by:
1. Type about:config into the Firefox location bar.
2. Right-click on the page and select New and then Integer.
3. Name it privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
4. Set the value to 2.
The possible values are:
* 0: Allow all popups from plugins.
* 1: Allow popups, but limit them to dom.popup_maximum.
* 2: Block popups from plugins.
* 3: Block popups from plugins, even on whitelisted sites.
I have mine set to 3 so not even a fly can get through. But keep yours to 2 if you actually click on those flash thingies or play some silly games. And wow I'm amazed if you actually got all the way here. Lucky you, the most useful thing in this post was right at the end. Give yourself a pat on the back!
First post in a while. Had a sudden burst of inspiration last nite. Just when I felt like posting, blogger went down. Can you imagine the odds of that happening?
Yesterday I was tasked to build a number-crunching system. So I went down to sim lim to scout and gather intelligence, as I haven't been keeping up with all that stuff. I was looking around the shady shops trying to decide which not-too-shady shopkeeper to approach. Really miss superpet, the staff there were very knowledgeable and didn't try to con me.
In the end I asked this shop on the 6th floor (where sp used to be). The guy said he built systems but no AMD. He was about to direct me to HWP across the floor when this other guy spoke up. Turns out he didn't really work for any of those guys but he just built alot of Athlon 64 systems for CPIB or something like that.
So he brought me to a couple of shops to assemble the components for the number cruncher. Except that neither of them were the same shop that his namecard says he was from.
In the end I settled on this system:
Athlon 64 Socket 939 3500+ @ $683 w/ mobo
Gigabyte nForce3 Ultra Mobo w/ dual RAID + SATA
Corsair CAS 2.5 512 mb (x2) for 1 gig dual channel @ $196
El cheapo ATI Radeon 9250 gfx card @ $80 (so I won't be too tempted to run half-life 2 or warcraft in the office)
Maxtor 80 GB SATA (x2) for RAID 0 @ $216
LG 8x DVD Burner for burning office videos @ $128
HEC power supply (pretty good experience with their case) + casing + lots of fans @ $235
and last but not cheap,
Windoze XP Pro SP2 @ $235
defintely earns the title of the most worthless buy. Wouldn't be getting it if the number crunching programs weren't running on windows. This microsoft tax is almost as bad as COE. Except it's more brilliant cos it reaches out to the entire world whereas COE only affects a tiny island whose citizens don't really speak up much anyway. At least the open source advocates are putting a dent in the windoze/msoffice tax with firefox, openoffice, thunderbird, linux etc.
On the ride home, the taxi driver was putting the darndest ideas into my head. Mostly the usual complaints except for this one theory that stood out most. You know how cars are impossibly expensive, and some minister encouraged people to bike a while ago or something like that? Well he's saying they want more people to ride bikes so that more will get killed on the roads. I get the idea that this is some kind of crazy social engineering program - poor people ride bikes and get run over by crazy drunk drivers, more organ parts for transplants for people who can afford it. Also I thought when one dies one's organs are not up for transplants unless one has signed and agreed to that before? But apparently that's not the case for road victims. And the driver said he's been monitoring the number of cyclist deaths and there's been more than 10 in a period of 7-8 months. Scary. Ndru1 is right, these cab drivers usually have very interesting things to say, there's so many times I had interesting or just crazy conversations with them back when I was giving tuition.
Funny how he said he was telling me all this good stuff cos I looked like the honest sort and would be conned and eaten alive and spat out by others outside. And that guy who was helping me pick pc parts also said the same thing - he couldn't bear to see me cheated by other people. Yep, instead of letting others cheat me, y not do it himself. I can totally understand since my momma used to say she'd rather cane me herself than have the teacher punish me.
Actually I think he did give me some pretty good pointers. Like making sure that the sticks of RAM had the same batch number so I'd have no problem doing dual channel. And checking for (the absence of) screw marks on the motherboards and cards to make sure they are new. One motherboard did have a very obvious screw mark. Lucky me, my mobo wasn't screwed with. i hope. why did you close down superpet? hmm i shld ask that sim lim regular about what happened to them. sp was so popular, so recommended, i wonder what could have gone wrong.
Anyway, you rich people who live in marine parade and orchard road and boat quay, you guys just paid more for less. Gosh there r (were?) so many rich kids reading my blog. (I ought to rename it the Singapore Tatters or Monkey Tat Monkey Too.) Anyway that geologist from nus quoted in Today said that seismic waves get dampened by solid rocks in the west, but not the sedimentary foundation in the eastern and central areas. Westerners and northerners, rejoice!
The following instructions were mostly lifted from http://www.petebevin.com/archives/2005/03/10/firefox_popups.html (get linkification!)
If you're like me you probably love Firefox for many reasons, including popup blocking. So I must say I was more than mildly surprised when recently I saw some popups actually get through.
It turns out that some clever people figured out that you could launch popups from flash (evil, evil flash) and other plugins, penetrating firefox's armor.
Fortunately, you can get around it by:
1. Type about:config into the Firefox location bar.
2. Right-click on the page and select New and then Integer.
3. Name it privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
4. Set the value to 2.
The possible values are:
* 0: Allow all popups from plugins.
* 1: Allow popups, but limit them to dom.popup_maximum.
* 2: Block popups from plugins.
* 3: Block popups from plugins, even on whitelisted sites.
I have mine set to 3 so not even a fly can get through. But keep yours to 2 if you actually click on those flash thingies or play some silly games. And wow I'm amazed if you actually got all the way here. Lucky you, the most useful thing in this post was right at the end. Give yourself a pat on the back!
posted by bean at 11:39 PM
1 comments
