odd_parity

Overclocking, or how to squeeze a juice out of dry wood - is a compromise between getting better performances for your money and expected life of the components.
I used to be really interested in overclocking, back at the time when the difference between 333 and 466MHz really saved couple of minutes of your task, be it 3D rendering or compiling a kernel. You could, with some effort, get 40% increase in performance, and that was really worth it. Even if that meant having to draw conduction lines between pins with soft graphite pen to unlock the multiplier on your AMD Athlon (and THAT was the funniest thing I have ever done to overclock the CPU!).

Now, that was back in the old days. Today, it is still fun, and can get really extreme if you happen to have some liquid hydrogen nearby, but I gave up on any extreme overclocking. Not because of the fear that I am going to shorten my CPU lifetime (from 20 years down to, say, 10?) or burn my hands with liquid nitrogen, but because I lost the interest for extreme overclocking, and it has become more extensive, with much more variables to take into account, while not providing so great advantage over unmodified components.

Then I bought myself this Intel Q9450 and Asus P5E motherboard. I tought I might want to overclock it, so just in case I bought Kingston DDR2-800 RAM designed for overclocking. Hey, it's cheap, so I bought whole 8GB of it.

Then I had a crash with my Linux disk. Happily recovering from that, I just couldn't resist the temptation. Q9450 is four-core CPU running at 2.66GHz, with 12MB L2 cache. A little beast, I tell you. But, I tought, wouldn't it be nice to round that frequency to something higher, like 3GHz?

Now, before I tell you what I did, you have to keep in mind two things:

1. overclocking is not a child's play, and you can damage your hardware. It is not a joke, you shouldn't do that if you are unsure of what you're doing;

2. to succesfully overclock, you have to have hardware that support it; most modern MBO-s and CPU-s do, but you will want to get some that are known to be overclocking-friendly/-easy.

Third thing: you should keep in mind is that you are doing it at your own risk, and what I have done might not work for you, it might even damage your computer and void your waranty, so please, don't do this - and if you do, and something bad happen, don't tell it's my fault. You have been warned.

Now, let's see how to make some slight overclocking; I'll refer to my CPU and my MBO (Intel Q9450 and Asus P5E (green)).

Probably the easiest way to overclock your computer is to fiddle with Front Side Bus (FSB) frequency. This thingie could be considered as sort of central clock for the entire computer (don't take this literally), and increasing FSB will increase the speed of pretty much everything else except your disk drives.
My Q9450 run on FSB of 333MHz. It has a multiplier of 8, thus giving the CPU speed of FSB x multiplier = 2664 MHz (2.6GHz).
In the old times of Pentiums, almost every CPU model had "unlocked" multiplier, meaning that you could change that eight into nine, or ten - and get faster CPU while not increasing the overall speed of your other components. Today this is not a case, and my CPU can't change multiplier. Some CPUs can, though, such as Extreme edition of Intel CPUs, but they have a premium price that just isn't worth it. However, for the middle range, you're stuck with fixed multiplier.

So, what did I do? I have increased FSB to 425MHz (as I have read on the Intertubes that safe limit is about 427MHz), and - whoa! - after the reboot, my Q9450 got a kick of 3.4GHz!! Not bad, is it?

However, my other goal was to keep my system cool, and overclocking should heat the processor up to 50 degrees Celsius. The components can get hotter than that without much problem, but I like it cool.

The other problem was that my helpful Asus P5N motherboard has really nice overclocking options, where you can increase FSB manually, and let the motherboard take care of the rest. This is just great if you aren't an extreme overclocker, but I found out that my nice MBO raised Vcore voltage too much, to 1.4V, a value I am not comfortable with.
You see, Vcore voltage is the power supply voltage supplied to the CPU, and there's just so much of it. If you overclock your CPU, you might have to increase that value because overclocked CPU has bigger demand on power. Starting voltage for Q9450 is 1.2V, and the tolerance should be about 10%, which means that the safe limit would be 1.3V, and 1.4V is still good, as it gives enough power, but increasing voltage makes your CPU hotter, which then makes CPU life expectancy shorter. Theoretically, you can go up to 1.7V, if you wish your computer to burst in flames... (that won't happen, but it sounds scary).
Having a good cooler is paramount, so get yourself a decent cooler. I like them with big fans, as bigger fans are quieter.
To cut a long story short, I have manually set my Vcore to 1.25V, and left everything else on auto. That was too little for FSB clock of 425MHz - the system crashed under load.
I lovered FSB a little bit - to 420MHz - to get still impressive 3.37GHz out of my CPU. And at the beginning all I was asking for was round 3000MHz...
The system proved stable with FSB 420MHz and 1.25V Vcore. The bonus effect is that my RAM chips, certified for DDR2-800, became DDR2-1009 :-)
If you remember, increasing FSB is going to speed up pretty much everything else in your computer...

To check the improvement, I fired up simple glxgears application. This does not do much, drawing some spinning gears in the window, but I like it as a quick and not too reliable benchmark. The result is satisfactory: before overclocking, my computer did about 20.000fps, and after it went ten percent up, to 22.000fps. The temperature did increase some degrees and now the CPU is over 40 degrees Celsius while not doing much, up to 50 while under heavy stress. I think this is acceptable.

I don't recommend anyone to overclock the machine, as there's always a chance that something could go wrong. If you, however, think that taking moderate risk is worth 22% increase in CPU speed (and about 10% in overall performance of your computer), you might find simple FSB increase a relatively safe and easy option. Overclocking-friendly motherboards are of great help in the process. But, keep in mind - if you fry something, don't blame me!

I had the honor to write an editorial for Privredni Vjesnik, a business magazine with quite high circulation (100.000) for such a small country as Croatia (4.5 mil. people). I was asked to write a short article about interoperability.

Given the typical audience (upper management), I did not delve into peculiarities of IT interoperability, but instead used an analogy with the automotive industry to present the possibilities and impossibility of full interoperability. I went as far as to ask readers whether it would be nice to have a car made by one manufacturer that can have its parts replaced with better/cheaper parts from another model from another car manufacturer, and still maintain the integrity of the car as a vehicle, to conclude that yes, that would be terrific for the consumer, but the automotive industry is never going to do that; then, I've moved that analogy to IT industry, where there are many systems that should, and could, and it wouldn't be too hard or too expensive to make - talk to each other and exchange information, regardless of who made what software or hardware... just to conclude that IT industry is very much like the automotive industry, and where should be interoperability, it is being avoided by manufacturers for exactly the same reason (money, vendor lock-in...) - and that, at the end, the victim is the end user.

Few days later, I vent on to help my school mate from primary school migrate his e-mail messages from PC to Macintosh. If I had done that before I wrote the editorial, it would be really, really different - I would omit analogies to talk directly of one example where interoperability is being screwed up by the same software company that makes both products!

Could you guess what company's that? The one that makes e-mail reader for PC that can not exchange mail messages with another reader made by the same company for Mac OS X?

Would you be surprised if I tell you that the company is - Microsoft?!?!

I was surprised, honestly. The PC software is Outlook, part of MS Office for PC, and the companion is Entourage, outlookish mail reader and part of - can you guess it? - MS Office for Mac!

I mean, Ok - those two are different programs, at least as long as their names matter. The fact is that users see Entourage as Outlook for Macintosh (and it does serve that very purpose on Mac version of MS Office). I would never, ever, think that there might be a problem moving mail messages from Outlook to Entourage. But it is impossible without the third party application! How cool is that? Interoperability, you ugly word, you shall not exist! Curse you! And, curse everyone who dare to move from PC to Macintosh! No e-mail for them, naughty people who dare to move from Windows to OS X! No cookies for them!

There it is - If I knew it, I would happily write about that experience as a prime example that interoperability is something that is not that hard to achieve in software world, but is often thwarted by greedy interests.

I can't stress enough how big this annoyance could be for a business user.

If you happen to run into this issue as well, there's quite simple and massively ironic fix: you'll have to use some FLOSS software!

The solution is acutally quite simple: Install Mozilla Thunderbird on your PC, and let it import MS Outlook mail. Once that is done, export mail from Thunderbird in MBOX format - just transfer your mail files from your profile to some folder on your Macintosh. As Entourage can import MBOX messages, you'll end up importing that, and probably do some manual filtering of imported messages. Or, use the script provided here: www.entourage.mvps.org/accounts/thunderbird.htm.

While you're waiting for a piece of FLOSS software to import your mail from Outlook, it would be great time to think about using MS Outlook and MS Entourage, and probably ditching them both for a solution that trully is interoperable - Thunderbird. Unless you simply must use Outlook or Entourage, Thunderbird would be great replacement - and if you ever have to move your mail around different architectures, as long as there's Thunderbird for it (Windows, Linux, Mac OS, BSD are supported, and since it is FLOSS it can theoretically be ported to any platform imaginable - notice the word "theoretically", please :-), your data will happily follow you.

My bitter conclusion would be this: how on Earth could a company that failed big time to provide interoperability between two almost siblings of their flagship product that run on Windows and OS X platform... how could they persuade ISO to fast-track their proposal as a standard that should ensure interoperability between not-so-mall number of different applications made by different manufacturers?!?!

Now, just a few words about DORS/CLUC 2008: for the majority of you who don't know, this is the biggest and probably the geekiest FLOSS conference in Croatia. It's been arounud for 15 years now (!) and over time has attracted many great speakers and number of participants, covering areas of Open Systems, these days mainly Linux and BSD. This years event was, IMHO, one of the most successful regarding speakiers and quality of the event.

There were some really interesting people: Alan Cox, Matchtelt Garrels, Andrew Shitow and Marino Marcich (just to name some of foreign speakers), and number of local gurus as well. What is really new is that this year Microsoft has participated as well. Nobody was sure whether they are going to talk or not, as it seems there were some small (political) issues on both sides, but at the end they did participate, and I find this really Ok. They were talking about their licensing models that are "certified" as free software licenses, or close to that. Nothing really new here, but it was quite good ice-breaker and a ground for more serious participation on CLUC 2009. The auditorium was at the beginning a little bit sceptical, but as the ice melted the fun kicked in, and there were a number of questions from the audience. Ratko Mutavdžić (MS speaker) held the ground quite Ok, despite sometimes not so easy questions, and he definitely survived the very direct and not at all diplomatic questions from Toni Prug (who previously held also a good speech about FLOSS in the world of Capitalism), who at one point concluded that "Microsoft is a cancer on the body of Capitalism, and that cancer should be cut off" - quite a strong opinion, but it seems that as soon as somebody pulls Immanuel Kant into conversation, "diskurs" moves to heavyweight category...

Just as I said, this year's it really was fun. :) I hope to see more of that next year. :-D

The reason I haven't posted the story about DORS/CLUC 2008 already is the fact that I dared to install new motherboard (Asus P5e) and new CPU (Q9450). Oh, and a new graphics card - an Asus 8800GTS TOP.

I was a little bit sceptical about how my Windows partition would survive such a drastic change, but none the less, the reinstallation was long overdue.

So I did it. At first, everything seemed well. Then, it happened. I couldn't find my Linux partitions. Everything has turned into a really, really big FAT12 partition on that drive! Luckily, there's an angel named Michail Brzitwa, who wrote a thing named gpart - a small utility that will take a guess at what your damaged partition table used to look like. In my case, the guess was right - and as soon as I have recreated my partitions using fdisk and data provided for me by gpart, the icons on desktop popped up! I've checked the consistency, and everything is well.

That left me with a discovery that my drive is not in good shape - a clicking sound emanating from it is generally not a good omen. So I rushed to the store (and THIS is one of the reasons that at least some stores should be open at Sunday), bought a nice 400GB drive for my new Linux partitions, removed the old drive, installed the new one, and in a bold move I took pre-release of Ubuntu 8.04. It's Ok. It does work. I have had some issues with new nVidia card with Ubuntu 7.10 (namely, a big drop in performance over my old 7900), but now it runs faster than my old card - as it should be.

Windows XP did not survive the change, however, and reinstall failed as well. It seems my computer is too new for XP without an SP. I'm not going to buy Vista, though - not for those few games I play on Windows (as that is main reason I keep Microsoft on my computer).

After the initial setup was done, I used KamaConnect USB to SATA/PATA adapter to connect my old drive with my conputer, and with a help from trusty Midnight Commander, transferred my old home to my new home, did some chmod and chown, and voila - my old home partition on shiny new (and somewhat faster) disk drive!

So, to cut the long story short:

1. Do backup! And don't forget about it!

2. If you hear clicking sounds from your computer, brace yourself for possible data damage (and get a new disk ASAP).

3. If you get into trouble, there are some nice people out there, who wrote nice programs that can help you a lot.

4. Windows XP doesn't like new hardware. But it is getting obsolete. For some people it's XP, for some people it's Microsoft altogether.

Today, after a four hour meeting, Croatian CSI accepted ODF as a national standard.

I have rather few and incomplete information from the meeting (formal press release will be made by CSI in a few days, I hope), but as it seems, there were mostly political and not much technical objections regarding ODF (that were risen by Microsoft earlier on), but at the end of the day ODF was accepted. It is worth noting that Microsoft requested that their statement pro ODF be officialy noted. That is a fair move from Microsoft, as they declared previously that they are for standards in general, even if we remember that it was their objections that caused the delay.

It is important to say here that having ODF as national standard does not force anyone to use it, not even government bodies. However, a victory here is that this really did open a door for users who do not have MS Office to exchange documents with government bodies, as they will be using national standard from now on, and should not be denied if they send their document in ODF format. In many previous cases, offices would accept only .doc files, as it was "de facto" standard, and there was no national standard at all. Well, now we have one!

Being able to exchange documents using ODF is quite important for me - I have a freedom of choice (and the rest of Croatia, for that matter). That is always a good thing. :-)

P.S. And I do like the fact that my country is going to get some positive press coverage for doing the right thing.

P.P.S. No, this is NOT April joke! :-)