Netherlands Trip 2013, a set on Flickr.
I've uploaded photos of my Netherlands trip to Flickr. Check it out!
Monday, July 15, 2013
Sunday, June 30, 2013
My first European trip...to Amsterdam!
This Thursday, I'll be visiting Europe for the first time in my life. I am attending a conference at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam called GECCO 2013, or the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. I will be presenting the academic paper that I have been working on for the past year. The paper is titled Fast and Effective Multi-Objective Optimisation of Wind Turbine Placement.
As you can imagine, my paper has to do with research into the real world applications of Evolutionary Computation. In this instance, genetic algorithms are used to arrange the layout of wind turbines inside a wind farm. My research involves fiddling with the mutation and crossover operators in order to get better results in multi-objective settings.
It was by chance that I was able to visit Amsterdam to attend the conference. The University of Adelaide offered the opportunity to me after my paper was accepted. So, thanks very much to my supervisors, team members and faculty for making this all happen. I won't forget the generosity of the School of Computer Science. Looking onwards, I hope I can enrich my knowledge in the field at the conference. Not only is it my first time to Europe, but it is also the first time I am attending a conference.
Look out for newly uploaded photos on my Flickr account. I am expecting to take as many photos as I can on my busy schedule! I might even update my Google+ if I have the chance.
As you can imagine, my paper has to do with research into the real world applications of Evolutionary Computation. In this instance, genetic algorithms are used to arrange the layout of wind turbines inside a wind farm. My research involves fiddling with the mutation and crossover operators in order to get better results in multi-objective settings.
It was by chance that I was able to visit Amsterdam to attend the conference. The University of Adelaide offered the opportunity to me after my paper was accepted. So, thanks very much to my supervisors, team members and faculty for making this all happen. I won't forget the generosity of the School of Computer Science. Looking onwards, I hope I can enrich my knowledge in the field at the conference. Not only is it my first time to Europe, but it is also the first time I am attending a conference.
Look out for newly uploaded photos on my Flickr account. I am expecting to take as many photos as I can on my busy schedule! I might even update my Google+ if I have the chance.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
HP 9000 Model 735/125
Hi folks,
Today I got a nice Unix box from a fellow who was looking to offload all his junk. It's a HP 9000 Model 735/125. It's a shame that there was no keyboard and mouse, but it came loaded OpenBSD 4.2.
I promptly upgraded the machine to OpenBSD 5.2 and it runs sweetly, if only through the serial console. I'll be on the lookout for HP-HIL adapters so that I can use the framebuffer.
For those that don't know, these machines were expensive high-end Unix workstations in the early 90s. This particular beast sports a 125 MHz PA-7150 CPU and 176MB of RAM. To put this in perspective, the average high end home machine at the time (1994) would have had 16MB of RAM. In terms of performance, these chips were second only to the most torridly clocked Alpha AXP 21064 CPUs. The PA-RISC chips of this era easily smashed the IBM POWER, SGI MIPS and Intel x86. Way to go HP!
Not sure what I'll do with it, but for now I'll just fiddle around with OpenBSD/hppa. Feels great to use a machine that cost $30,000+ at one point. They're simply built to a completely different standard...
Today I got a nice Unix box from a fellow who was looking to offload all his junk. It's a HP 9000 Model 735/125. It's a shame that there was no keyboard and mouse, but it came loaded OpenBSD 4.2.
I promptly upgraded the machine to OpenBSD 5.2 and it runs sweetly, if only through the serial console. I'll be on the lookout for HP-HIL adapters so that I can use the framebuffer.
For those that don't know, these machines were expensive high-end Unix workstations in the early 90s. This particular beast sports a 125 MHz PA-7150 CPU and 176MB of RAM. To put this in perspective, the average high end home machine at the time (1994) would have had 16MB of RAM. In terms of performance, these chips were second only to the most torridly clocked Alpha AXP 21064 CPUs. The PA-RISC chips of this era easily smashed the IBM POWER, SGI MIPS and Intel x86. Way to go HP!
Not sure what I'll do with it, but for now I'll just fiddle around with OpenBSD/hppa. Feels great to use a machine that cost $30,000+ at one point. They're simply built to a completely different standard...
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Blast to the past: Brøderbund's Living Books
As some of you may know, I always post retro things to my YouTube channel. A few years ago, I posted a few videos with demos of me playing some old interactive books from a defunct company known as Brøderbund. They had a whole product line called the Living Books series. These were amazing interactive, animated children's books.
These products were amazing in that they offered so much multimedia (animated graphics, sound effects and music) for the time. This was software that could really put your (early 90s) multimedia PC's or Mac's capabilities to good use. I used to have hours on end of good fun from these games since the in-game world was so responsive to your actions.
The fascinating thing I found about the videos I uploaded was how popular they were. My YouTube channel has over a million views, the bulk of which is supplied by views of the Living Books videos that I posted. Many people post comments to ask me to post more gameplay videos. I would, if I owned more Living Books, but even now I only posess Just Grandma and Me, Arthur's Teacher Trouble, The Tortoise and the Hare and Ruff's Bone. All of them are great titles that offer hours of enjoyment.
You might be thinking that these wonderful products are now lost in the mists of time. You would have been right about that until recently. A company named Wanderful, Inc. has revived many of the Living Books titles on mobile Apple devices. Pretty apt, since a lot of parents these days buy iPads for their kids. Check them out here.
These products were amazing in that they offered so much multimedia (animated graphics, sound effects and music) for the time. This was software that could really put your (early 90s) multimedia PC's or Mac's capabilities to good use. I used to have hours on end of good fun from these games since the in-game world was so responsive to your actions.
The fascinating thing I found about the videos I uploaded was how popular they were. My YouTube channel has over a million views, the bulk of which is supplied by views of the Living Books videos that I posted. Many people post comments to ask me to post more gameplay videos. I would, if I owned more Living Books, but even now I only posess Just Grandma and Me, Arthur's Teacher Trouble, The Tortoise and the Hare and Ruff's Bone. All of them are great titles that offer hours of enjoyment.
You might be thinking that these wonderful products are now lost in the mists of time. You would have been right about that until recently. A company named Wanderful, Inc. has revived many of the Living Books titles on mobile Apple devices. Pretty apt, since a lot of parents these days buy iPads for their kids. Check them out here.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
MR2 Swaybars
It was a Good Friday and I had two Whiteline swaybars and MR2 reinforcement plates sitting on my bedroom floor. I tried my best to resist up until then, but moments later I was outside jacking my car up and preparing it for a swaybar swap.
Installation was about as smooth as I imagined. The rear swaybar was a bitch to install as I needed to drop the cross member a bit to access the bolt holding down the swaybar mount. I also found along the way that the exhaust mount on the cross member wasn't bolted in! So all up it took a few hours to install the rear swaybar. The front swaybar was considerably easier as I didn't have to stick my hands into any odd places to remove the mounts.
Installation was about as smooth as I imagined. The rear swaybar was a bitch to install as I needed to drop the cross member a bit to access the bolt holding down the swaybar mount. I also found along the way that the exhaust mount on the cross member wasn't bolted in! So all up it took a few hours to install the rear swaybar. The front swaybar was considerably easier as I didn't have to stick my hands into any odd places to remove the mounts.
First driving impressions
I have a conservative understeer setup at the moment, with the front set up to Medium and rear on Soft. First impressions - turn-in is much snappier but I think there is a loss of feel at mid corner. I might go soft at the front to see if that is fixed. I'm definitely quicker in the corners as I found that I didn't need to slow down to any less than 50km/h at ANY corner on Lobethal Road. So in summary, Whiteline = good :)
Putting my trust in Google
After years of hosting a blog on my home server, today I migrated all my Typo posts over to Blogger. My intention is to stop running public-facing web servers at home since I don't have the time to keep them all patched up. Rising power costs are another factor, as it is actually quite expensive to run a machine 24/7 with 16 hard disk drives connected to it. All relevant Typo pages and posts have been recreated in my Blogger account.
My current scheme is to go with the devil I know - and that is Google. Until recently I avoided most of the hosted stuff like online storage, but slowly I have been opening up to these technologies. I figured that since I always used Google services, Blogger would be a good choice since Google already has all my personal information. Is my trust misplaced? Only time will tell.
I was recently concerned about how Google canned Reader, since that is a product that I have been using for many years. Still, I am willing to trust Google to maintain all the other services I use. Am I crazy or what?!
My current scheme is to go with the devil I know - and that is Google. Until recently I avoided most of the hosted stuff like online storage, but slowly I have been opening up to these technologies. I figured that since I always used Google services, Blogger would be a good choice since Google already has all my personal information. Is my trust misplaced? Only time will tell.
I was recently concerned about how Google canned Reader, since that is a product that I have been using for many years. Still, I am willing to trust Google to maintain all the other services I use. Am I crazy or what?!
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