What is this place?
If you're interested in stuff other than programming and technical mumbo, then
take a look at my personal page. However, if you are interested in technical stuff, you're in the right place. You might
also like to check out my programming page.
- 5/2/80 Software is Crap, and so I've
started a "real"
(Wordpress) blog about it.
- 30/8/05 Don't try this at home, kids?
My Pentium-4 CPU started overheating recently and throttling back speed (which
is apparently a built-in safety feature of intel CPUs). The only reason I knew
it was happening was because linux was printing syslog messages to the console. The CPU
would overheat, throttle down, cool down, throttle up, over and over while running
a heavy load (a screensaver...).
Anyway, I tried rebooting but that didn't help. So I opened the case, took off
the CPU fan and heatsink, and noticed the thermal gunk which normally sits between the CPU
and heatsink was a bit patchy. This gunk has the same consistency, colour and
smell as blu-tack, but rather than make inductions about the suitability of
blu-tack as a thermal conductor I just spread the existing stuff around with
my finger. As it was bit dry and crumbly I mixed a few drops of water in.
I'm not sure what really possessed me to do this as I'm not normally the type
to put water anywhere near the surface of my motherboard but I did it, and it
seemed to help, and my CPU is no longer overheating. Just makes you think,
though - were it not for the syslog messages I never even would have realised
there was a problem...
- 26/8/05 I got pissed of with an aspect of C++ and wrote about it.
- 3/7/05 A look at the humble chdir system call and why it's so problematic
for cross-platform programming.
- 29/6/05 This is cool - a tiny flight simulator (for X-Windows)
- 16/6/05 Has anyone come across this potential problem with the GPL?
- 3/4/05 A big rant on CSS, HTML, XML, and scripting languages.
- 24/3/05 The BlueJ wiki - I'm responsible
for a reasonable amount of content on this wiki.
- 28/6/04 I decided to rant on about java and
in particular, the "Tiger" release.
- 24/5/04 Freedom can be Slavery.
I don't agree with everything in this but it's an interesting read in
its own right (and it ain't soft on Redhat).
- 16/5/04 My C++ quick reference.
- 21/3/04 What's happening to linux?, a bit
of a rant of mine about the state of things GNU and linux at the moment. Read
about the glibc maintainers' apparent (and unannounced) decision to make no
further releases.
Update 31/1/05: It looks like glibc version 2.3.3 is now officially
available for download, at long last. Welcome news!
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