More Motherboard Woe

My "impressive" Linux compile screenshots were taken with 384MB of memory (one 128MB, and one 256MB).

After a BIOS flash to version P15, my 512MB memory is recognized. However it is completely unstable: Windows will not boot (gets stuck loading the agp440.sys file). Linux is badly damaged that it will not get past uncompressing vmlinuz.

This was working fine last night with 384MB. And now I have added a "real" heat sink and retention mechanism, so no more thermal shutdowns.

Really looks like the motherboard can't take 512MB DIMM's. Which is bad news for me. Oh well.. maybe Neverwinter Nights 2 will still run on 384MB.

Heat Control

I was able to purchase an Intel D845HV motherboard (with three SDRAM sockets) and a P4 2.0 GHz Northwood processor yesterday. Total cost was 2,700 pesos.

It struck me as ironic that, had I spent the 7,000-plus pesos for an Intel E2160, motherboard, and 1GB of RAM, I would have roughly thrice the performance, at thrice the price.

There was no heat sink, so the machine was shutting down spontaneously all the time -- sometimes not even finishing POST. Also, the motherboard had an old BIOS revision and would not recognize my 512MB DIMM's.

I finally got the P4's thermal problems under control. It all boiled down to the craptacular "improvised" Socket 478 cooler that I made: it wasn't pressing down on the Integrated Heat Spreader tightly enough. Plus, I had no thermal paste.



Naked CPU. With misbegotten retaining mechanism.



I used a copper Globalwin Socket 370 cooler, and attached two clips from an old Socket 423 retaining mechanism. The copper is rather soft, so I had to wire the two clips to each other using galvanized-iron clothesline wire.

The clips are wired to the retaining mechanism on the motherboard, using the same clothesline wire (I have 50 meters of it, which I used for stitching my boat). I had to wire it down real tight to get some semblance of stability.

Idling at 31 degrees Celsius (according to lm_sensors)



Voila! it compiles the Linux kernel without a Signal 11 or spontaneous reboot. Stability!



Actually the peak temperature shown above of 38 degrees Celsius was while doing a "make bzImage" although the objects had already been compiled, so it was just a link. A full compile takes the temperature to 52 degrees Celsius, perilously close to the 60-degree cutoff.

I installed The Proprietary OS, service pack, and Radeon drivers last night. I also flashed the BIOS to version 15, and the 1GB of RAM was successfully recognized. However, this morning when I tried booting the machine, it was unstable again. I suspect my clothesline-wire retainers were loosening overnight (they are not that hard).

Anyway I managed to find a Socket 478 cooler with some heat sink paste, for 200 pesos (!) at Save On Surplus in SM Megamall. Much cheaper than the TipidPC sellers. Also, SOS literally had a 1-meter tall pile of Socket 478 coolers in their store. So much for rarity..

I hope that when I get home, this instability issue will be settled.

Bad Computer

I got a copy of Neverwinter Nights 2 yesterday, hoping to see if it will run on my ancient system (AMD Athlon-C 1.4GHz, 1GB SDRAM, Iwill KK266 motherboard, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro graphics).

Well, it doesn't -- like my bad experience with Oblivion, this game requires the presence of SSE instructions, which the Athlon-C (non-XP) doesn't have. Ironically my even more ancient 800MHz Pentium III has SSE, but it would certainly crawl on this game.

I got the Athlon-C (which was the fastest non-XP Athlon way back in 2001) and the motherboard off TipidPC many months ago because I wanted to play Oblivion. Bad idea: the KK266 motherboard, while it was highest-of-the-high-end in 2001, does not support Athlon XP processors (which have the much-desired SSE instruction set).

So in order to play any new game, I need at least an Athlon XP and a matching motherboard, hopefully one which accepts SDR memory, so I could reuse my existing ancient memory.

I tried installing the game on my notebook, which does have SSE (1.86GHz Core Duo) but has dinky Intel GMA 950 integrated video. I know the GMA 950 doesn't have hardware T&L but there is this utility, 3DAnalyze, which supposedly fakes the hardware T&L and Shader Model 2.0 features.

Well.. that didn't work either.

I discovered a few nasty things while browsing the PC hardware web sites for my "dream PC upgrade," which is very entry-level actually:

• DDR memory is twice the price of DDR2 memory
• motherboards which support both AGP video and DDR2 memory are rarer than hens' teeth

My problem is that I don't want to spend for another video card, since the one I have is adequate (it does support DirectX 9.0 and Shader Model 2.0).

But DDR memory is so expensive compared to DDR2 memory that I can't buy a DDR-capable board, there is only one main board for Intel (the ECS P4M800-PRO M3) and one main board for AMD (the MSI K9MM-V) which support the combination of DDR2 RAM and AGP video.

Whether I go Intel dual-core (with an E2140) or AMD dual-core (with an Athlon 64 X2 3600+) I will spend either 6,960 pesos or 7,330 pesos, respectively. That's assuming I can find these motherboards: all modern ones use PCI-Express graphics, which would force me to spend another 2,500-odd pesos for a PCI-e video card.

Since I would like to avoid spending 7,000 pesos if I can, I visited TipidPC to see what I can buy. The funny thing is, I want to recycle the 1GB of single-data rate (SDR) RAM which I currently have, so as to completely avoid spending more than pin money.

I need at least an Athlon XP processor, because that's the one with SSE instructions. And I need a motherboard which has support for SDRAM. This way I would only need to buy a used motherboard, and a used (hopefully cheap) processor.

The equally-dumb thing is, when Athlon XP's were all the rage circa 2003, SDRAM was already on its way out and it was really hard to find motherboards which supported SDRAM. And the ones that did, were generally bad-performing.

TipidPC is full of cheapskates like myself, trolling for stuff. I actually found a seller who wanted to get rid of his ECS K7AMA2 motherboard for the princely sum of 500 pesos. Unfortunately, he was located in Project 8, Quezon City -- a long drive from here. And if I wait a few days, it's almost certain that some other cheapskate will scoop up the motherboard.

Oh well. Maybe he'll still have the board tomorrow. Or maybe I should pony up 7,000 pesos and not be such a cheapskate. The idea of going to Quezon City on a Sunday night to buy a 500-peso part would be funny if it wasn't so surreal.

AstraZeneca Isn't So Evil After All

I feel like a complete moron.



It turns out that Symbicort only costs around $30 locally. Sure that's about 40% more than the Seretide which I purchased. But here's the thing: I just discovered today that I can reimburse my pharmaceutical expenses (up to a point..) from my employer's health care provider, so long as I provide the receipts and prescriptions. So I can't reimburse the Seretide (because I substituted something else..) or the Ventolin which I self-prescribed.

Oh well.

Getting What I Paid For

I was at Market Market yesterday and chanced upon some incredibly cheap screen protectors:



These normally go for 100 pesos ($2.5 or so) but these were less than a dollar. Unable to resist, I bought four of them, even though none of my gadgets fit the screen protectors. "I'll just cut them down to size," I thought gleefully.

"Longer, younger!" proclaimed the caption. Very promising!



It quickly became apparent why these screen protectors were 39 pesos: there was nothing physically wrong with them, but the "Longer, younger!" stickers wouldn't come off! Oops..



Unwilling to concede defeat, I first tried scraping the sticker (and adhesive) off with my fingernail. When that failed, I took to swabbing down the decks with acetone. That kind of worked, it softened the adhesive and redistributed it over the entire plastic surface. Double oops.

The dismal result.



Oh well. Four dollars (and half an hour of my time) wasted.

Globe's Back Again

After a heated argument with Customer Support, and two visits from their contractor, our Globe DSL connection is working again. Ostensibly upgraded to 1.5 Mbit now that we're a paying customer. Seems to be working as advertised.. I'm getting about 125KB/second download from Siemens' web site.

Siemens provides a free 2D CAD package called SolidEdge. The last CAD program I used with any regularity was AutoCAD 2.17 (!!) around 1990. That's positively ancient. But I still remember the AutoCAD command-line. I used this software before called FelixCAD, which has some AutoCAD command-line compatibility, but it wasn't free and expired after 30 days.

I only need the CAD software to work on my homebrew boat design, so I'm not willing to spend anything for it.

On other topics.. both Lalai and I now have the flu. Seems I infected her. I'm actually feeling a bit better flu-wise, but I still have my steroid treatment ongoing so overall we're about equally miserable. That's three weekends now, wasted by my broken respiratory system!

Hibernate JPA Works!

After some trial-and-error, and some queries to the Pinoyjug mailing list, I got my test code working with Hibernate.

The good news? it's almost three times faster than TopLink Essentials, which lacks batch-writing or JDBC2 batch capabilities. The bad news? JAR hell, a veritable alphabet soup of JAR's needing to be in the classpath. Specifically:

• ant-antlr
• antlr
• asm
• asm-attrs
• c3p0
• cglib
• commons-collections
• commons-logging
• concurrent
• dom4j
• ehcache
• ejb3-persistence
• hibernate3
• hibernate-annotations
• hibernate-commons-annotations
• hibernate-identitymanager
• hibernate-validator
• javassist
• jboss-archive-browsing
• jta
• log4j

I never thought it would take more work to get an established, open-source tool working, than a previously-proprietary product from an infamous purveyor of obscure, hard-to-use tools like Oracle.

Playing Around With ORM

Out of sheer boredom, I decided to explore this whole "Object Relational Mapping" (ORM) thing I've been hearing so much about. Most of it bad, e.g. "ORM is for the lazy," "Java-heads don't know SQL.."

Decided to start out with Oracle TopLink Essentials, which after all is the Java 5 Persistence Architecture (JPA) reference implementation (and open-source to boot). Getting it to work couldn't be simpler. I was quite delighted.

We only need a couple of JAR's:

• toplink-essentials.jar (from the GlassFish installer)
  
• toplink-essentials-agent.jar (also from the GlassFish installer)
  
• classes15.jar (TimesTen JDBC driver, if using TimesTen)
  
• ojdbc14.jar (Oracle JDBC type-4 driver, if using Oracle)
  

First, define our class (analogous to a table in the database) with appropriate annotations. Eclipse makes this very easy, indeed. In my case, it's a simple table with MSISDN and Cell-Id's (used by the Nokia Traffica location-based system).

One major thing I noticed above is that.. we can forget about messy TO_DATE() and TO_CHAR() conversions. In our object, we store the Timestamp column as a java.util.Date object, and the ORM framework will take care of the messy SQL conversions. We just need to annotate the Timestamp column as a Temporal object, in this case of type TemporalType.TIMESTAMP.

Second step, define a persistence.xml file. We must place this in the WEB-INF subdirectory of the src folder (on Eclipse) so that it's visible at runtime.

Some problems.. TopLink Essentials doesn't support batch-writing or JDBC2 batching. So it's kind of slow (with plain JDBC and TimesTen, I can get 10,000 inserts per second, with TopLink I get maybe 100 inserts per second).

I tried dropping Hibernate in, after all it also has a JPA implementation. Several dozen JAR's later.. it doesn't work. TopLink Essentials really is far easier to use.

Blogger is mangling the code I'm trying to insert.. will try to update this entry later.

Comet Holmes and Asthma Drugs

Today was a sunny day, the sky was blue when I got up around 11:30 a.m. However, due to my asthma and because Lalai was still asleep, I knew I wouldn't be able to make it to ALP's Caliraya observing session.

After Lalai and I got home from doing our groceries, I noticed that the sky was relatively clear, so I fired up Starry Night Backyard to determine Comet 17/P Holmes' current position. Then I went to the roof with my 50mm home-made finder scope (I can't find my 10x50 Cebu-manufactured binoculars, for some reason..)

Since Holmes was almost directly above Polaris, at an altitude of about 50 degrees, it took me only a minute or two to find it with the finder scope. It looks very much like a lopsided globular cluster from the light-polluted skies of Taguig.

I also noticed that, after I'd found it with my finder scope, I could see it with my naked eyes as a fuzzy, distinctly un-starlike object. Naked eye comet!!

On the other topic.. while Lalai was looking at Christmas decor in the mall earlier, I decided to go to Watsons to look for beclomethasone. They didn't have any, but coincidentally they had Seretide, a GlaxoSmithKline product. It had the generic name handy: fluticasone propionate and salmeterol.

Thanks to my extensive Wikipedia forays, I immediately knew that this was one of those other glucocorticoid concoctions. But I had ruled it out in favor of beclomethasone, because the US price is around $80, very close to the price of the Symbicort (budesonide) I'd been prescribed.

Of course the fact it was on the shelf next to the salbutamol (Ventolin) made things a little too obvious.

Anyway, the 100-microgram Seretide cost about $22 for 60 puffs. So I bought it right away. Once I got home, I immediately did some more checking (with our Smart connection, because the Globe DSL connection has gone to heck again).

There are a bunch of studies on the net which show that FP (fluticasone propionate) is more potent than BUN (budesonide), and cheaper, resulting in a factor-of-two price/performance ratio.

Of course AstraZeneca has their own army of researchers who've managed to prove that FP has a higher plasma concentration than BUN. Which, to my unschooled, un-medical mind, means that prolonged use of FP would have a greater chance of getting Cushing's syndrome or other steroid-overdose side effects, than if the patient was using BUN.

As an aside, I've gotten to be a "know-it-all layman" regarding steroid side-effects, including Cushing's, because I watch too much House. And I also bought some steroidal cream some time ago and use it for everything including scratches that get inflamed, and painful red pimples (works like a charm!)

Oh well. I will just feel really stupid if it turns out that the local price of Symbicort is in the $20 range. Apparently the drug companies do scale their prices to what the local market will bear.

Drug Equivalency and Self-Prescribing

I had some trouble sleeping last night, so after staying off the Ventolin for a week, I decided to have a puff. After which I experienced a somewhat unnerving episode of palpitations (when my heartbeat seemed unnaturally loud) for several minutes. It's one of the common side-effects of salbutamol, which I had conveniently overlooked when I was reading up on it.

Anyway, I decided to (finally) visit a pulmonologist like my cousin advised me to. Kinda worrying that my cough hadn't gone away for almost a month now.

So I went off to FortMed (because I'm a creature of habit, they do the annual physicals at Oracle Philippines). The pulmonologist on duty, coincidentally, was my high-school batchmate from Philippine Science High School. Didn't talk much with him in Pisay though, different cliques (not that the "D&D Nerd Gang" was much of a clique).

After a quick run-down of my self-medication efforts, a "before and after the Ventolin" session on the spirometer to rule out COPD, and yet another X-ray (three so far for me this year!) it's been officially proclaimed that I suffer from cough variant asthma.

The treatment of which is at least a month of glucocorticoids. The pulmonologist prescribed what's currently accepted as the "first tier" drug for this condition: a dry powder mixture of budesonide (a glucocorticoid) and formoterol (a long-acting Beta-antagonist, a bronchodilator).

Formoterol is basically Ventolin on steroids. Now that's funny, on more than one level.

Problem: this drug cocktail, called Symbicort by its manufacturer AstraZeneca, is under patent protection. So only the Swedes can produce it. And it costs a lot: two weeks' worth is about $100. I don't know the local price yet but I'm expecting it's bound to be appreciably higher.

AstraZeneca is making a huge killing from Symbicort, earning over $1 Billion Dollars (enough to render Dr. Evil speechless) annually from the misery of asthma wheezers. Imagine, with one product they have 25% of the profit of Oracle.

Seeing as I'm not dying of asthma, the idea of forking over at least $200 for this annoying cough does not fill me with joy. What can I say, I do try to save money here and there.

So I did a bit of Googling (discovering in the process many white papers published by AstraZeneca where they tout the benefits and lower cost of Symbicort compared to their stand-alone budesonide and formoterol products). I found that another glucocorticoid, beclomethasone, is just about as effective as budesonide, and costs only one fifth as much as the Swedish product.

Kinda like comparing a Mazda3 and a Volvo C30. The Japanese product is basically the same thing as the Swedish one, albeit at half the price.

I also found a New Zealand study (vigorously challenged by AstraZeneca's allies, naturally) which concludes that beclomethasone was more potent than budesonide. All of these glucocorticoids get converted into cortisol in the body anyway, so their actions (and side-effects) are pretty much the same.

Needless to say, I'm going to substitute beclomethasone (which is available from three or four drug manufacturers) because I can't resist a $160 per month savings. Heck even if beclomethasone was half as effective as Symbicort, I'd still take it.

Doctors ought to keep in mind that patients are far more likely to complete a course of treatment if the treatment is more affordable. That $160 will buy a Wharfedale Diamond 9.2 Pro speaker system. Or an Intel Core 2 Duo E2140 and a motherboard. And it's not like I'm gambling with my health, beclomethasone is at worst slightly less effective than budesonide, and at best, even more effective. Can't lose.

Pfizer recently lost a court battle with local pharmaceutical company Unilab over the latter's attempts to market a generic Viagra for the rest of us.

Now they're at it again. Pfizer is trying to convince HMO's and doctors in the US that their anti-cholesterol drug Lipitor (atorvastatin) is much superior to simvastatin, a similar drug manufactured by Merck whose patent has expired.

As a result, generic simvastatin has cropped up right and left, and it costs about one-tenth the price of Lipitor.

Does this scenario sound familiar? Pfizer has commissioned studies which show that Lipitor is 14% to 30% more effective than simvastatin. But at ten times the price!!

Most patients have financial limits. If I were a doctor, I'd rather have a patient continuously on simvastatin, than one who only took Lipitor once a week because they can't afford it.

I can't fault the pulmonologist, but I wish doctors would prescribe the best drug, considering all factors, including cost. I see so many buyers at the drugstore who buy only one-third of the quantity on their prescription because the medicine is so damn expensive. When people buy just enough antibiotics for three days instead of a full week, it just increases the already mind-boggling number of drug-resistant bacterial strains out there.

Who is served by that?

Globe Leaves Town Again

Lalai and I just got home from work. And guess what, the DSL light on our Siemens Speedstream modem is out again.

I'm typing this on our (still-connected, although completely unused for the past week) Smart wireless connection, which currently clocks at a piss-poor 79 kilobits per second to OregonTel.

I'd forgotten how crappy the Smart wireless connection was. But it has the benefit of being quite reliable. Anyway Globe customer support said they'd reset the port (again). Another hour's wait.

If the Globe connection goes down every week.. it might be worthwhile to throw out the Globe connection, since I spend on the average 10 minutes calling Customer Service, on a (Smart postpaid) cellular phone, no less.

MonsterMob Statement to London Stock Exchange

I just recently heard from former colleagues that, post-acquisition by La Netro Zed, there have been a flurry of lawsuits between my former employer Information Gateway and the parent company, MonsterMob.

One of the immediate results is that a lot of the code I worked on, which had been deployed to the regional Mob companies in ASEAN, was removed from deployment. Something of a blow to my efforts as a developer manager..

A rather sad state of affairs. It's of interest though that MonsterMob's statement includes the fact that Information Gateway's EBITDA for 2006 was UKP 3.2 million out of total turnover of UKP 8.6 million. That's pretty good money! we should recall that the UKP 8.6 million turnover due from IG, is already net of the telco share.

Some other links:

search for a locksmith

locked out of office



Full text is reproduced below.

RNS Number:8002Z
MonsterMob Group PLC
06 July 2007


Monstermob Group plc ('Monstermob' or the 'Company')


Statement re Information Gateway Inc


Monstermob announced on 21 March 2005 that it had entered into a share purchase
agreement (the 'SPA') with Dragon Impact Assets Limited ('DIAL') pursuant to
which it acquired the entire issued share capital of Upper Mobile Limited
('Upper Mobile') and its 100% owned subsidiary Information Gateway Inc
('Information Gateway') for an initial consideration of £19.11m and an earn-out
which was to be determined with reference to profit before tax for the 24 months
ended 31 March 2007.


Under the SPA, the accountants of both the Company and Information Gateway were
to produce a joint report stating the profit before tax for the earn-out period
by no later than 30 June 2007. Monstermob has for this purpose appointed a 'Big
Four' accountancy firm and DIAL has appointed a local firm of accountants. These
two firms have produced an independent report each, which draw significantly
different conclusions.  The joint report required under the SPA has not yet been
prepared, however, and an agreement on the earn-out figure therefore not yet
been reached.


On 2 July 2007 the Company received a notice of breach from DIAL, alleging that
the Company was in breach of the terms of the SPA, an allegation the Company
refutes, and demanding recision of the SPA.


At a hearing at a Regional Trial Court in Manila, Philippines, on 5 July 2007
DIAL sought, and was granted, a temporary injunction preventing Monstermob from
removing any key employees of DIAL as directors, officers or authorised bank
signatories of Information Gateway, and from performing any other acts to wrest
control of the business and assets of Information Gateway.


Further court hearings, when this injunction will either be extended or
cancelled, have been scheduled for 10 July, 11 July and 17 July 2007.
Monstermob will be doing its utmost to get the injunction lifted at these
hearings.


The Company is furthermore exploring other legal avenues for resolving this
situation and restarting the negotiation deadlock it currently finds itself
faced with.


Monstermob employees are in the meantime also being prevented from entering
Information Gateway's premises and have, accordingly, no access to further
financial and operational information.


Monstermob will be providing further updates on this matter in due course.


For the year ended 31 December 2006, Information Gateway contributed £3.2
million of EBITDA on a turnover of £8.6 million, out of the Company's
consolidated pre-exceptional EBITDA and turnover of £12.3 million and £106.9
million respectively.


The operations of Zed Philippines Inc., the acquisition of which was announced
on 31 May 2007 and which is expect to complete at the forthcoming AGM, remain
unaffected by the above situation and continue to trade profitably.


Enquiries:


Monstermob Group plc

Javier Perez Dolset, Interim Chief Executive         Tel: 01524 841 155

Teather & Greenwood Limited

Jeff Keating
Sindre Ottesen                                       Tel: 020 7426 9000


                    This information is provided by RNS
          The company news service from the London Stock Exchange
END

Amazon & Music

I didn't realize how much I depended on the opinions of friends and the radio for listening to music until now.

Back in college, I was always chasing after the latest albums of my favorite artists, and I'd be the first one in the group to get the CD once I'd heard the lead single on the radio or on MTV.

But guess what -- thanks to not watching MTV or Channel V anymore, and since we took the standard "bee sting" antenna off our car so it wouldn't be stolen -- I'm completely out of touch music-wise.

This is why I was quite delighted to visit Amazon.com today (that's what very long weekends recovering from illness does to me) and noticed a few very interesting new features.

There is a section "Listen to samples and purchase MP3's" so the consumer (that's me!) can listen to sections from all the songs in the album before deciding to buy. Neat!

Another section is "Customers who bought this item also bought..." which lets me have a look at artists similar to the ones I already listen to. For example I can search for "Sarah Maclachlan" or "Tara Maclean" or "Chantal Kreviazuk" and find out what like-minded people are thinking.

Unfortunately it's somewhat of a closed loop. If you search for Sarah Maclachlan, you'll get links to Tara Maclean, Chantal Kreviazuk, Dido, etc. And I already have a ton of CD's by these singers. It's self-referential. I actually got interested in Tara and Chantal because of their songs on Lilith Fair, a Sarah Maclachlan-produced album. Oh well.

However I did discover this little gem, Coco by Colbie Calliat. And, with the relatively-cheap MP3 download feature of Amazon ($7.99 for an album), we're off!

Very much worth listening to. Very vocal and with a rich midrange.

Lalai and I wired up her Ipod Shuffle to one of the two Altec-Lansing ACS-45 "lots of boom at low quality" computer speakers we have lying around the house. Thing is -- when played at volume over any period of time (not for games), the sound is very fatiguing. Metallic and crashy. Not unexpected for a (at that time) $80 set of speakers including the amplifier!

Ironic that in 1999, I really saved up to buy the ACS-45, it was a great piece of speaker kit to me back then at 2,500 pesos. But they sound pretty bad for music unless you keep the volume low.


I'm really looking forward to using my GainClone with some half-decent speakers. Like these Wharfedale Diamond 9.2 speakers. The Wharfedales are supposed to be really good for vocals. Guess I'll have to build pedestals first, because putting them on the floor would ruin their performance.

Something to do.. some 3" or 4" PVC pipe would come in handy.