Jason Sidabras

So for quite some time I’ve been dreaming of a perfect backup system. Luckily my current RAIDbox at work was no longer cutting the mustard so I decided to upgrade… big time.

As the system goes:

• Intel Core2 Duo 2.56GHz
• 1 GB DDR2-4200 RAM
• Giga-byte GA-945GCM-S2 Mobo
• Areca ARC-1220 SATA raid controller 8-port
• Seagate ES 250GB
• 5x Seagate ES 1TB

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So for the past two days I’ve been writing a patch for GNU Chess. First, GNUchess hasn’t been updated since August of 2003, so what could I possibly add to such an awesome chess program.

Let me introduce you to Chess960. Chess960 or Fischer Random Chess is a chess variant designed by Bobby Fischer to enhance creativity and talent for chess playing which is lost in memorizing awesome starting moves, middle and finishing moves.  Since there are 960 possible positions for the chess pieces memorization if futile. Pawns are where you expect them. Obviously there is one of the 960 setups which is the original chess board.

This version needs some testing in that the castling queen and kings side ends up the same but doesn’t start the same. I will be posting it on gnu.chess in google groups.

UPDATE: There seem to be a few random bugs. In one game, a chess piece changed on me from turn-to-turn. I haven’t tested castling yet.

gnuchess-507_508.diff

So I got a bit ballsy today and I decided that the only program I need on my laptop is Mathematica, otherwise everything is just unix command line. So I decided to upgrade my PowerBook G4.

So I started with debian 4.0; Successful install, no wireless card drivers mouse moves a few pixels per inch. Useless.

OpenBSD: doesn’t boot the install disk

NetBSD: install disk freaks out

FreeBSD: doesn’t find the cdrom or drives when trying to install, boots great

Ubuntu 6.04: installing like a charm but old as hell

Ubuntu 8.04. I thought it didn’t exist for ppc but I was wrong. The impossible isos for PPC PowerBook G4 can be found here.

So far this has not been a good idea.

With this post, I become one step away from being getting the Holy Grail of my Master’s Thesis. With the help of Pozar and Pan’s papers on mutual coupling of slot antenna arrays, it looks like finishing this master’s thesis will all of the things I wanted to do isn’t that far fetched.

So what am I so happy about?

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First off lets start with a comic that caught my attention:

Ah hits right at home.

Ok so whats up with that awesome percent error calculation? Read the rest of this entry »