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February 06, 2009

   Today, Tazz and I took a tour of the UW Madison campus.  I was hoping for more information about admission, campus setup and such.  Instead, it was mostly a sales pitch about how great a university Madison was and why I should go there.  Well I knew that... why else would I be at the campus?!  Well the day wasn't an entire waste (although most of it was) as I did get some information I needed.
   Pictured is Tazz in one of the Biology buildings.  The building was fantatic and I think Tazz was pleased with the idea he will be attending classes at this location sometime in the future.

February 02, 2009

Jai and Que

Jai and Que

    Sad truth about my nice speakers--they are power pigs.  Just to have them powered on takes 22 watts, which is more then my entire web server.  And if they are in standby, they still draw 10 watts.  That just seems a bit excessive.

February 01, 2009

Xiphos

Xiphos

   Today the Micro Dragon takes over as the web server.  This was a little ahead of schedule.  The Red Dragon stopped displaying anything on the monitor it is connected to.  I thought this might be the video card and a good indication that it was had to do with the video card fan being completely ceased.  When I went to change it out--unplugging the monitor cable--I was electrocuted--a solid 120 volt bite.  Clearly, there is a ground issue somewhere.
   I started to trace the grounding on my bench using a multimeter and decided to change out a power strip I though suspect.  When I turned it off, just about everything turned off--including the web server.   Apparently while I was away in Iowa, someone decided to move the server off the UPS and plug it into one of the many plugs around my bench.  Why?  Who knows... someone had also unplugged the router and complained to me they were only getting one IP address--the static address provided by the cable modem.
   This seemed like a good time to test the new server anyway.  I already knew it worked as a server, now we'll get see if all the services are running like they are suppose to (namely, the cron jobs).

January 31, 2009

Happy Birthday Liz

Liz

Liz

   With my little Kill-a-watt power monitor, I decided to see what kind of power draw my flagship--the Blue Dragon--draws.  I decided to include monitors and sound system for completeness.  The results: The base draw of the Blue-Dragon at idle with both monitors on is 475 watts--300 of this is just for the tower.  That's fairly significant but may very well be lower then the base for the Red-Dragon when it had both CPUs.  But I wanted to know how bad things could get.  The CPU gets hotter when it's doing more work, and heat requires energy.  So I decided to fully load the CPU by doing a little Einstein@Home.  My sound system is rated for 505 watts continious.  Most of that power goes to driving the sub-woofer.  So I needed something with a lot of base.  I tried verious songs before it dawned on me that I have Audacity, which can generate tones.  A note of about 30 hertz with the base and volume cranked was enough for my roommate to hear the sidding on the house shake when outside.  With all of this going on, I held an energy draw of 700 watts, peaking around 750.  About the only way I think it could be worse is by loading the video card too--but for now, that's a big number.  The base can easilly add 200 watts of draw, but I never saw it do pull 500.  Anyway, fun experement.