Tuesday, January 22, 2013

WarGame 2 Results

Note: this blog has been migrated to Medium, with the articles here available to preserve permalinks Please see this post at https://medium.com/@ianrbuck/wargame-2-results-7e0fb348d29b

We all love running bechmarks on our machines right? I certainly do, especially when they give me useful numbers that tell me exactly how much my rig is than my brothers'. +Ryan Rampersad wrote a nice little java program that uses a simulation of war (the card game, not a combat simulation) to benchmark CPUs. I ran his previous version of WarGame back before he made it threaded and nice. Now it's time for round two!




The important number there is 31.3913 games per microsecond. According to those results, my i5-3570K runs faster than Ryan's i7-3770K (which got 26.4796 g/ms). I guess that overclocking actually made a difference.

Sexy Computers

My friend +Liv Klemek has a Tumblr where she occasionally posts "car porn" as she describes it. Reading through CES news and seeing the Lenovo Erazer X700 made me realize that I could totally make a post of computer porn. So here they are, the sexiest computers I could find on the internet.

Lenovo Erazer X700
Alienware Aurora
Alienware M18x
Falcon Northwest Talon
Zotac Geforce GTX 670 AMP!
Origin Big O
Sasha would get jealous if I didn't put her in this gallery. Of course she is much better looking than this stock photo, with her sexy Blu-Ray drive and cute little card reader.
Rosewill R5
And here is the case +Ian Decker recently got for his rig.
Cooler Master HAF 912
And this list wouldn't be complete without an Apple.
I went there.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Spring 2013 Schedule


This is what a normal, non-hectic week will look like for me this semester.

CSci 3601 is Software Design and Development. Out of all of my classes, that is the one that I have to care about the most because it is a prerequisite for pretty much everything else in the Computer Science major from now on. 5 credits

CSci 4553 is one of the few electives that doesn't have 3601 as a prereq, so I took it. It is a really interesting sounding class on Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Intelligence.4 credits.

Hist 2361 is "Environmental/Geographic History of the US". This is an area of history that I have never studied before, should be interesting. 4 credits.

Arts 1002 fulfills the last general education requirement that I need. I'm usually not very interested in visual arts, but hopefully Digitally Assisted Design will keep my attention.

And of course I have track every day for half a credit.

I'm glad that I have 10 o'clock classes four days out of the week because it's not too early in the morning, but it is early enough to keep me on a reasonable sleep schedule. I bet I'll be doing quite a bit of sleeping in on Fridays.

The highlight of every day is Stargate, starting at 9 or so in the evening. I managed to get a little group of people on my floor into Stargate SG-1 and we have been watching an episode a day. We got through the first five seasons last semester, and if we keep it up we will be able to finish the series by the end of the school year. If we start doing two episodes a day I bet we can even start Atlantis and watch them concurrently, just like we would if we were watching them when they first aired.

It looks like a big chunk of my Saturdays will have to be set aside for homework because Sunday is a little packed with church in the morning and recording Eight Bit.

And yes, that is a map of the Star Wars galaxy in the background of my calendar.