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CPU Cooling FYI

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: December 28, 2007 at 1:17 pm

If you are planning on building a new computer in the near future, I would like to recommend you stay away from CPU coolers that have the plastic push/snap pins such as those in the image.

cpu cooler mounts

The past couple of days I noticed that while compiling code, my CPU temperatures went up above 70°C. After further inspection, I noticed that one of the corner posts on the CPU cooler came loose from the motherboard, therefor not coming in full contact with the CPU itself. So if you have a choice of CPU cooling, remember to shy away from the coolers with the plastic posts that snap into the motherboard. These are flat out garbage. After cleaning up the CPU and cooler, I remounted it, and now my temps when compiling are a toasty 60°C. I will be purchasing a new cooler in the near future to replace my current one, as even 60°C is a little to high for my liking. My server is watercooled with a custom setup I built many years ago, and when I have a couple of builds going on, it never gets above 35°C.

Boost library rocks!

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: December 26, 2007 at 2:28 pm

I have been messing with a project through the university and we decided that we would go with the Boost library for the project, so to read up on Boost and how to use it, I decided I would attack Project Euler using Boost. One area that Boost really showed its strength was determining how many Sundays fell on the first day of the month between January 1, 1901 and December 31, 2000. In just a few lines, the answer was apparent. Here is the lines of code that answers this problem, and answers it immediately. I had used other calendar solutions in C++ in the past, but the gregorian.hpp library is fast.

#include <iostream>
#include "boost/date_time/gregorian/gregorian.hpp"
 
int main(void)
{
    using namespace boost::gregorian;
    int count = 0;
    date_period dp(date(1901, Jan, 1), date(2000, Dec, 31));
    day_iterator iter(dp.begin());
 
    while (iter != dp.end())
    {
        if (iter->day() == 1 && iter->day_of_week().as_enum == 0)
            count++;
        ++iter;
    }
 
    std::cout << count << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

The answer takes milliseconds, it is just that fast. Right now I would like to replace my gmpxx libraries for big numbers with a boost library and I think all of my Euler answers will be “boosted.”

Posted in Development | 11 Comments

New Year Resolutions

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: December 22, 2007 at 3:02 pm

It is about that time of the year, where people start bringing up their New Year Resolutions. For those of you who do make resolutions, what are some of them?

A few of mine would be:

Get through another semester with perfect grades
Move back out east to be closer to my x-wife and daughter
Get back into weight lifting - got a little pudgy over the past 6 months
Get more involved in software development (hopefully get a nice job in it too)
Seek out more business ventures
Loosen up around the edges a bit, take a breath and step back at times, look at the bigger picture and not worry about the torn corner I may currently be in

Pretty boring, but who knows, I might add something interesting, like sharing a meal with a polar bear or something