chrisbekas.com

Notes 1.1 - this you have to see!

This is what the Earth & Moon would look like from Mars through a small telescope - if you were an amateur astronomer (living somewhere close to Olympus Mons and a member of the Martian Astronomical Society), the Earth would be a common feature in the night sky…

There are so many blogs these days - hey, even in business (see Ed Brill’s official Lotus Blog). It’s also interesting to see the number of Domino based weblogs on the increase; sure, I’d like to run this site from Domino too, however hosting makes it a little difficult here in Oz.

I visited Steve Castledine’s DominoBlog site the other day and I noticed it started to look a little like the site for MoveableType. Well, Movable Type is a fully-featured weblog management system so it’s only natural that Domino Bloggers are looking for some inspiration from something that works well. So Domino blogs everywhere… even the girls are into it!

It upsets me that respectable song contents like the Eurovision Song Contest has become such a political event - you would think that music could not be confined into political boundaries but hey, the results speak for themselves; Turkey wins, the Brits get no points whatsoever, the Austrians (with that completely silly song) get more than 100 points, the Russians too (tatu), and we the Greeks left with 23 or so points (most from Cyprus surprise, surprise…)

I guess everyone is to blame; as someone said to me, “…”It’s all about who your friends are, not the best song…” - I rest my case.

I’m I looking forward to Half-Life 2? Late nights, loss of sleep, loss of productivity, loss of partner (?), change of lifestyle as a whole… YOU BET! The original Half-life was responsible for some (all?!) of the above, as I took the role of Gordon Freeman inside the mysterious Black Mesa labs…

The sequel promises to be even more captivating when it’s released in September, but it makes you wonder; are we going to need an Athlon 3200+ and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to run it properly?

Here’s the scenario; you need a new car. You buy the new car, but you don’t know what the new car looks like… something really odd is happening inside room6… go and see for yourself…

I finally got my hands on the Thermaltake Volcano 11 HSF on Friday. Following the procedures and using Arctic Silver 3, I mounted the copper monster - I used the supplied PCI bracket to manually control the fan speed (that can range from 1600 rpm all the way to 5500 rpm) then, it was on for some readings… Well, let me tell you that the fan at max (5500 rpm) the noise level if absolutely unbearable… The most acceptable level I found was around 3400 rpm so I used this level for my readings in comparison to my old trusty Globalwin WBK38 running at 4300 rpm.

Idle temperatures
WBK38 @ 39C, Volcano 11 @ 40C

Max Load temperatures
WBK38 @ 43C, Volcano 11 @ 42C

hmmm, that’s kinda weird; the idle temp is 1 degree higher in the Volcano 11 than the Globalwin WBK38; at max load (using CPU Burn-in) the temps are 1 degree lower… spinning the fan at maximum (5500 rpm, although the specs state that 4800 rpm is the max) the story changes but not as much I would have thought; 39C idle, and 41C at max load - the noise at this level is something like a harrier jet taking off from within your room!

The results are interesting to say the least, I’ll be looking into it in more detail and I might even repeat the installation process just in case…

*UPDATE: Dan’s data reviews the Volcano 11

Mercury is an odd planet - the length of it’s day is greater that it’s year and temperatures can reach from 430 C during the day to -180 C during the night. On Wednesday, 7th of May Mercury will appear to cross in front of the disk of Sun seen as a tiny black dot from the Earth. This event is called a Transit of Mercury and it is a rare event, occuring on avegage only 13 times each century.

Only Transits of Mercury and Venus can occur (as they are the only 2 planets orbiting closer to the Sun than the Earth). Transit events have been used historicly to accurately measure distances to the Sun (like the transit of Venus in 1761 and 1769). Unfortunately, transits of Mercury cannot be observed with the naked eye (transits of Venus are much larger and can be seen), however a number of transit-cams will be available to see this event. Here’s some usefull links:

SOHO 2003 Mercury Transit
SpaceWeather.com
Sky and Telescope article