1. a random, steady, unvarying, electronically produced sound
2. nerdy notes from suburbia
Siemens acquires software producer UGS for US$3.5 billion. With its acquisition of U.S. software producer UGS Corp., of Plano, Texas, the Siemens Automation and Drives (A&D;) Group will expand its product spectrum in automation technology to include industrial software for planning, design and simulation in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).
My company has been sold again. I start learning German next week.
Filed under General News
High performance wireless is important in my house. For one, my desktop is located in a room at the opposite corner of the house from the cable modem and running an ethernet cable between the two is just not going to happen. This is the machine I’m likely to do all my gaming and large downloads on. This machine also runs my streaming media server having to pull media from a NAS and shoot it wirelessly to a media playback component hooked to my living room stereo. Even though the house is small and the locations probably not more than 60 feet apart, the neighborhood is dense with wireless traffic and my wireless performance never been great.
Over the past couple years I’ve gone through a series of upgrades. First, I switched our cordless phones to 5.8 GHz instead of the interference prone 2.4. Then not so long ago I upgraded my wireless router to a new Belkin N1 unit. Although reviews on the unit measure it to have mediocre range, the throughput is pretty respectable, and that’s what I need more than range. Still on the other end (my computer) I’ve been using a cheap D-link USB wireless G adapter. The switch to the new router definitely helped, but music dropouts and high game pings still occured more often than I’d like.
With this configuration I tried various internet speed tests and found about a 25% drop in download speed from being wired to the router to my wireless setup. For example, hitting a server in Chicago (which tends to be about the fastest regionally) I was getting 4.8Mbps down wired (which is about the Roadrunner cap), but only 3.7 wireless. Upload wasn’t affected since it’s capped at about .4 Mbps.
Monday I finally decided to replace the cheap G adapter and spring for an N1 PCI card which is the natural match to the router. I figured this would be as good as it could get for a while so I might as well try it; and if there wasn’t much difference I’d return the card.
After struggling a bit to install the drivers, I finally got it running, and the flood gates opened. Instead of detecting about 5 wireless networks I starting picking up about 22! Great, just more interefence I started thinking. I used Netstumbler to optimize the antenna placement, then went back to try the same online speed tests. This time I got exactly the same results as being wired to the router with a down throughput of 4.7 – 4.8 Mbps! I have yet to try streaming music or video, but things aready seem much improved!
I guess the moral is that unless all your components are on the same playing field you’re missing out on some of the goodness that you’ve paid for. It’s like buying a pretty HD-DVD player, but displaying it on a standard def TV.
Filed under Comp hardware / mods
This past weekend was Lanwar 33 – about 28 straight hours of gaming goodness. It was a great time! Joe, Rob, Cassie and I make it to this one. We haven’t been to Lan since MML5 last summer so we were definitely due. There were probably about 250 gamers at this one, so even though it’s a mini it’s still a big setup.
This was Cassie’s first Lan and her proud Pop got to introduce her to all things uber-geek.
She of course got her traditional initiation.
Team Boom Tape was back (sans JBoom) to field a Duct Tape Wars team to defend our MML5 title. The challenge this time was to construct a boat (limited to the size of a box they had (about 11″x7″x7″) which would be placed in a tub of water and gradually loaded with poker chips. Once your boat sinks to the bottom you’re out. The boat with the highest chip count before submerging wins. Team Boom Tape did not disappoint. Our “box” handled 368 poker chips before giving into the 9.3 pound load. The next closet competitor sank to the bottom with 342 – making for a pretty close match. For our win we were given a case of Bawls. Watch out for the next Lan where Team Boom Tape will be going for the 3-peat.
Gaming was good. Lots of UT2k4 (DM and ONS) this time 🙂 BF2142 had action, but not BF2. We had some good fun with Trackmania and some silly rounds of Armagetron. Leaching was pretty good (besides some flaky servers); I got about 75GB of goodies. Add to that a constant stream of hot food and snacks at a reasonable price and none of the eating and sleeping rules of MML and overall it was a great event.
Filed under Lanwar
During the flooring stint we also put up the backsplash tile behind the wet bar. After New Year’s I finished it up with caulk and the necessary touch up paint. The glass mosiac tile, motar, and grout were left over from the kitchen so this was a virtual freebie. So what’ll it be, shaken or stirred?
Filed under Basement
I had a bunch of vacation to use up before the end of year, so I decided to spend it getting the flooring installed in the basement. My Pop came down for about 4 days and we hammered though it.
First, we put about 90 sq feet of tile in the laundry room. As can be expected we had to cut a lot of tile (along all but one wall). My Dad was a sport manning the wet saw all day while I did all the knee work setting the tiles. Very happy with the finished product – probably a little too nice for a lower level laundry room, but why not.
Then it was on to the wood flooring covering the majority of the basement. I had picked out a type of flooring that has the ease of installation of laminate, but all the perks of real hardwood. The choice was Vanguard by Tarkett. Their tongue and groove planks consist of hardwood plies (like plywood) with a quality, prefinished ply on top. The planks tap (actually pound) together without the mess of glue and float on top a layer of foam underlayment. Meanwhile the crossed plies reduce expansion effects. Just like a traditional hardwoord strip floor, the planks can be sanded and refinished if ever needed in the future (not that I ever will!).
I choose a light shade (natural maple) to keep things modern and bring a bright, airy feel into the basement. It’s actually a real poor choice of flooring for a theater room, but I let design drive this decision. The challenges are that the smooth, hard floor accentuates reverberation and the light color causes more ambient reflection on the screen. I felt these weren’t super big problems since the sound can be improved with other furnishings and the picture quality can be optimized with the screen surface and projector settings.
Here’s a look with the underlayment down:
And here’s the finished result:
It took about 2 full days to lay the roughly 370 sq ft of wood, but man, are we happy with the results!
Filed under Basement
