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Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Posted @ 9:02 PM EST
I'm still alive. I might add that I'm preoccupied with many things. Just can't manage to squeeze much time in for website updates at all. It's school, homework, and some little fun. Process repeats daily. My little fun consists about a couple hours of playing with my friend on our Xboxes, enjoying Halo online through XB Connect . Half of the time, we get beaten like we can't do anything, the other half, we win battles. All in all, it's fun.

For school, it's starting out slowly. Adding inclement weather (read: snow), a few classes of mine got cancelled. Slept in whenever I can. I've been busy reading my massive collection of magazines, trying to clear out my shelf of them. Everyday, I try to go through at least 1 magazine. Usually doesn't happen, but at least I try to read in my spare time.

In the mean time, I'm trying to figure out what's the best order to benchmark my 802.11g gears. Only time would tell whenever I decide on a specific method. Still trying to find the best way. Of course, it's still taking its time.

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Posted @ 11:47 PM EST
School kicked in and I had to throw everything to a halt. What a sad winter break. I mostly had more fun than getting things done. Getting a review written was impeded by difficulties with the hardware and interference. So, right now, I'm going to just take down values and leave it as is. I'll try to eliminate as much as I can, but from the past experiences trying to complete the review resulted in results being very irregular. I'm about ahead of schedule with homeworks right now. Got one done, one more to go. Shouldn't be that hard to get it done over the weekend. Just got to find those formulas and put them to work.

Sunday, January 18, 2004

Posted @ 2:35 PM EST
School is almost around the corner. This upcoming Tuesday, I will be starting my spring 2004 semester. I hope it'll be better than my last semester and never to be that way ever again. Anyhow, lack of updates is caused by life's massive chores and complications. I can never get a break from these things at all.

As for my D-Link reviews, I can only do one, as I just eliminated my 802.11b network. It'll be up for testings later on, but I have to find a location where I can test the performance without any interferences. Same thing with my 802.11g network that replaced it. I find that the latest drivers for my 802.11g network adapters causes my signal to become unstable and weaker. I do not know why, but when I have time, I'll test through all of the available drivers. I have downloaded them all. Just have to find a huge chunk of time to test all the drivers, as its time consuming to go through it.

Experience with initial 802.11b driver testing told me that interference is hard to avoid, and complications proliferate by any means. That's how I could never get my 802.11b reviews done, due to inconsistent results. I may end up looking into doing other reviews that I wanted to do by later tonight and get something up tomorrow.

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Posted @ 11:47 PM EST
There's a lack of update just because I lack to have something for my website. But not for long. Something just became interesting. I am going to get myself a set of D-Link DI-624 router, DWL-G650, and DWL-G520. In English, it means I'm getting the 108Mbp wireless router, two wireless network cards, one for my laptop and one for my desktop computer. I would love to see the performance on my new toys. I don't know when it's going to come, but it should come this week.

In the mean time, over the past few days, I just did nothing more than sit around and read my magazines and take care of whatever problems that arises. Not that much fun, but I'm getting some of my other stuff accomplished, but not quick enough. The day is not long enough for me. Once this weekend is over, it's back to college I go. Winter break is so short.

Well, I shall report back with my 108Mb wireless toys when I get them. Time to clean out some more magazines and get a goodnight sleep.

Friday, January 9, 2004

Posted @ 4:00 PM EST
Nothing goes the way I plan it to go. Instead of working on the benchmark, I indulged myself with Xbox Halo - online multiplayer thanks to XB Connect for a few days. It was fun playing online, when playing in groups of people. I had the most fun when it was 2 vs 4 and 2 vs 5 games. Very challenging. The 2 vs 4, it was my friend and I who had to take on 4 players, playing capture the flag. We won that one. It was a close one. Score was 5 to 4. The 2 vs 5 game was challenging at first - but then it fell apart. This time, it was my brother and I, with a group of 3 other newbie players playing against these two elite players who kicked the living crap out of us in team slayer rounds until they decided to do capture the flag. They held their base pretty darn good, but it start to fell apart when we start to attack in groups. At first, we couldn't coordinate worth anything, but in the end, score was 3 to 0.

I'll most likely get Halo for PC sometime later on when the price drops on it, but for now, it's not worth the $49.99 price tag when I can play it on the Xbox for a while. I like the PC version, since mouse and keyboard combo is a heck lot better for me than the Xbox controller. I can't aim faster than what I can do on the PC.

I don't know if I'm going to indulge myself into other games soon enough, because right now, it seems that I just want to play around a little bit more before getting back to writing reviews. It'll be apparent enough when there's no reviews up my website in the next couple of days. You'll know what I'll be doing.

Tuesday, January 6, 2004

Posted @ 10:55 PM EST
I haven't finished the benchmarks yet. I've already gone through one set though. A test this morning involving how to reduce interference yielded excellent discovery about my DI-614+ unit. Today wasn't fruitless. Just cumbersome. I'm hoping I can get it all finished tomorrow. Interference is kicking in again, most likely from other active AP's around my neighborhood. The results are sure weird for one part, but who knows, I probably didn't know about it or have a misunderstanding of it. Soon enough, I'll know it.

Thanks to everyday errands and whatever or whomever likes to keep me busy, I couldn't get it done when there was less chance of more AP's in my neighborhood turned on and any other interference running around. Well, I'll just have to wait for morning to come once again to continue on with my review.

Posted @ 12:46 AM EST
Ran into some trouble while benchmarking my DI-614+ and DWL-650+. I knew this was coming, as the difficulty was due to noise. What gave me problem was that at any point in time, one range of time may be good, another may be bad. Hence interference. This puts my data up and down. At one point, all the data collected for one part of the test makes the next test look better, when the data was suppose to be worser. Meaning I tested with no WEP, and then 64-bit WEP on. Well, guess what? 64-bit WEP had better transfer rate than no WEP, which is highly not possible. Running tests again to make sure that no WEP was accurate provided different data, now it's better than before. Puzzling at first, but can be attributed due to noise/interference. And my laptop is right next to the router too! The data would be off by 10's of KB, or 1 second faster transfer. Sure made quite a difference. I even tried to take three transfers to do an average, minimum and maximum. Almost success, but no go.

So I'm going to have to isolate this interference and get it to be a constant somehow. If I can't, then the review is off and I move onto the next review that I can do. Well, what a waste of my time today. I got a lot of things to do later today, so time for sleep. Goodnight people. A guide written by me is bound to be up... Some day.

Monday, January 5, 2004

Posted @ 2:30 PM EST
I'm in the process of getting one of my editorials done right now. I am working on the DI-614+ and DWL-650+ performance benchmarks and should have it up by tomorrow morning. I just have to load up a FTP program on my server system and start loading up on all the drivers available for the DWL-650+. I am testing drivers ranging from 2.20 through 3.07. I expect the testings to be done within hours, but details and write up will go through the afternoon and the night.

Sunday, January 4, 2004

Posted @ 5:03 PM EST
Last night, I was watching a movie on my desktop computer and started to see some artifacts, but didn't care about it. Thought it was the CD-RW drive. Not until I finished the movie about more than an hour later, I decided to reboot my computer. Lo and behold, the POST screen started to have major artifacts. Thinking it was my video card, as the screen's pictures were all messed up, even in Windows, I shut down my machine. I popped open my computer's chassis side to see what was going on with my video card. But what I was looking for wasn't the problem. It was something else. It was my North Bridge chip's fan/heatsink that fell out of place. One of the loop bracket broke off, and the fan/heatsink was just hanging there, fan still spinning, but wasn't properly sitting on the North Bridge chip. Never knew that the North Bridge chip can introduce artifacts into the video output to the screen. Fixing it was not fun, because this was during over night around 1 AM right after I finished watching the movie. It turns out that Elmer's glue (you know, that white glue used in elementary school) didn't really hold down the bracket, as the metal clip on the fan/heatsink made it pop back out when I let the glue settle in overnight. So, I had to turn to super glue, and that did the trick. I hope it'll hold and not pop out again. Went half day without anything wrong, so I won't worry, unlike how Elmer's glue held for only a few seconds and that was it. Good thing I didn't sustain long term damage to my North Bridge chip.

In other news, I have updated another section on my website, this time My Computers section to reflect updates to my desktop computers.

One day, I'll try to overclock my desktop computer even more, to surpass the 3.12 GHz barrier that I keep running into. But for now, I'm running my desktop at max 3.12 GHz, or at its default 2.4 GHz. Running at 2.4 GHz isn't all that bad. It's fast for a lot of things. But we'll see when I start playing more games on this machine. The only game I played so far was Max Payne II. Even when I got back on it and ran it with 2.4 GHz, it was running fine.

Well, I got to get back to doing more work around my room. At least I read some magazines yesterday and able to get some off the shelf. Now for some more reading.

Saturday, January 3, 2004

Posted @ 12:00 PM EST
I have gave my website some updates in my About section (minor updates), Rebate Tracker section (minor updates), Kodak DX3600 Zoom Digital Camera & Kodak Camera Dock review (corrections).

Posted @ 12:05 AM EST
I hope everybody had a great New Year's Day. So far, my productivity rate isn't all that great. That's because I keep getting stuck taking care of a problem that just wouldn't let me finish it within a few seconds, but a few hours one by one. These tasks just pop up out of no where and needs priority, which sucks. At least I knocked off almost all movies. I have 1 more left to see. A few magazines got read, but still see a stack load to go through. At this rate, I'll need an entire summer to do this. But I hope I can get more things done within the next few days. Family emergency is starting to brew up again, so things are a little hectic and I have to cover a few areas to get things done around the house.

Well, that's the update so far. I got a few minor things done on my list, but fell short of what I actually want to get done. But I'll manage some how. At this point in time, I don't think my programming project will get done due to insufficient time that I have on my hands. So now I'm looking at an ETA of summer 2004 at worst to get this programming project done that should've been finished in fall 2003. That is, nothing else interrupts the flow of my schedule.

Well, that's enough from me. I need to get some rest and prepare for another day of trying to get things done and actually get it done. Goodnight folks.

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