It has been a while since my last post on this subject, unfortunately this is related to my own lack of activity in this area. I've been too busy with other courses and non-study related stuff in the past weeks.

Since the deadline for the peer reviews of my paper is next Friday, I have put my Bachelor Referaat at the top of my priority list, very lonely. With good results. So far I've made a structure with some general content (Introduction, something about LocSim, etc). I've been finishing up on the obstacle thing in LocSim. Most algorithms should now work with obstacles. I've implemented my improvement and got actual, measurable, results!

See more ...

Recently, I've added an extra memory module to xanthe, my notebook. Originally, she shipped with 512 MB DDR400 (== 200Mhz) memory. I added 1024 MB DDR400. For some weird reason, this caused my memory to be clocked at 133Mhz instead of 200Mhz, even when both memory modules support 200Mhz. Removing either memory module makes the other module at 200Mhz again.

Tonight I was googling around for a fix for this problem, when I found that a new BIOS version was released (v6.70, while I was running v6.50). Since MSI does not seem to like changelogs, my only option was to just try. Easier said then done, since the supplied flash program needs dos to run. The recommended way for this is, as usual, "Make a dos bootable floppy and run the program". Not having a floppy drive severely limited my options here. So, I googled around and found the "ultimate boot cd", wich should be able to boot into DOS.

Trying the UBC (supplied as a 200M iso download) proved very handy. It provides a FreeDos and OpenDos installation (IIRC, the flash tool worked under OpenDOS, but not FreeDOS). Furthermore, a lot of testing utilities and hard drive tools are included on the CD. Nice to have lying around.

Anyway, updating the bios was succesful (though my laptop did a full powerdown when it was finished, I suspect this was a feature of the flash tool). I was unable to see directly if it also solved my problem, since the new BIOS does not show the memory speed anymore (which would be a very stupid way to 'fix' the problem). But, using Memtest86+ (also on the UBC), I found out my memory was correctly clocked at 200Mhz.

Dehibernating my linux worked, which I did not really expect and I experienced a significant speedup when dehibernating and especially deswapping Firefox. Yay!

Lastly, when I first bought my notebook, I promised to post pictures of her insides and a tutorial on dissassembling the S270. Just now, I've found a S270 disassembling guide by MSI themselves, so I won't bother anymore. I might publish the pictures anyway if I finally get my gallery plugin to properly work.

The standard Nokia SMS tune (beep-beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep-beep) is actually "SMS" spelled in Morse?

Watching a commercial for some kind of skin cream called "SOS skin repair" or something, made me realize this yesterday (in between watching Beauty & the Nerd.

I've finished both of my exams for this quarter: Signals & Transformations and Circuit Analysis. The first is a master's course on mathematical models of (electrical) signals and performing (theoretical) transformations on them, involving a lot of complex numbers. The second is performing analysis on simple electrical networks with resistors, capacitors and inductors. Not too hard to grasp, but juggling around with hands full of different resistor values tends to get messy after a while. Also, the last part of the course involves, you might guess, complex numbers! Both these exams went pretty well, probably 7+ (out of 10 marks).

During the circuit analysis I've learned that electrical engineers have nasty habits. They have the tendency to not conform to the standard mathematical conventions that the rest of the world does (this view might be a little biased, though ;-p). The best example of this is the way they write complex numbers. Some time back, a bunch of mathematicians agreed that there was need to calculate with the square root of -1 (). While everybody agrees that this number is called i, they insist to call it j, since i conflicts with their symbol for electrical current. Anyway, I think I managed to do both exams without switching them, but I've been mixing them up all the time so far...

Besides these minor inconveniences my electrical engineering minor is starting out OK. Since I've already done Circuit Analysis, which I expected to be next quarter, this leaves only 15 ECTS in my minor. Since that is enough to fill two quarters (which was the original plan), I'll probably try to squeeze in instrumentation for embedded systems, a mandatory masters course, which should not cost too much time. Only problem is that it's given at the same time as another lab course, but I should be able to get away with that...