Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Tropicana has redesigned their orange juice containers, and the result is very web 2.0:

Note the high-contrast design, clean solid bands of color, and a splendid use of white space. The container packaging is now stronger looking and relaxed.

Kottke just posted the infamous rope-burning interview problem, which is actually quite easy:

You are given two ropes and a lighter. This is the only equipment you can use. You are told that each of the two ropes has the following property: if you light one end of the rope, it will take exactly one hour to burn all the way to the other end. But it doesn’t have to burn at a uniform rate. In other words, half the rope may burn in the first five minutes, and then the other half would take 55 minutes. The rate at which the two ropes burn is not necessarily the same, so the second rope will also take an hour to burn from one end to the other, but may do it at some varying rate, which is not necessarily the same as the one for the first rope. Now you are asked to measure a period of 45 minutes. How will you do it?

The solution is the following:

• Light rope #1 at one end
• Light rope #2 at both ends
• When rope #2’s ends meet, light rope #1 at the other end. 30 minutes have been measured so far, leaving 30 minutes left on rope #1.
• When rope #1’s ends meet, fifteen minutes have been measured, for a total of 45 minutes.

According to this MSNBC article, a blogger can’t be sued for defamatory comments left on his blog. That’s good news!

Netcraft has a great story about Amazon downtime. For what looks like roughly a day, their Alexa portal experienced extremely high latencies. Perhaps we should give them a new logo to represent their downsides:

I’ve always been against third-party web services solutions. What happens when they go down? It’s not a matter of if they go down, but rather when. No matter how many different locations you have, how many servers in your cluster, you will eventually experience a natural disaster, and lose connectivity. Until there’s some better way to maintain uptime, not prone to natural disaster, failure, or human error, you’re better off running your own systems.

Introduction

If you’ve ever wanted a quiet, affordable cooling solution for your PC, watercooling is for you. Even a case designed for quiet fans can be too noisy and run too hot on today’s power-hungry hardware. Personally, I was finding with three case fans, a CPU cooler, two power supply fans, and the build in fan on my graphics card, that the system got too hot. And, it was noisy as hell!

My desktop is made up of the following components:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz 4M sharing L2 Cache LGA 775
• 4 GB PC2 5300 RAM
• Intel Desktop Motherboard D975XBX
• Seagate Barracuda ST3320620AS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
• ASUS EAX1900 CrossFire 512M PCI Express x16
• Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Case

Before installing the water cooling solution, my graphics card idled at 60° C:

Afterwards, it hovers around 40° C a little warmer than room temp:

The Solution

For only $89.99 you can buy the KINGWIN Aquastar AS-3000 cooling system. I also added a little Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound to my order, although the Kingwin system comes with its own thermal paste you can use. You’ll also need distilled water.

What you get from this is a device which sits in two 5 1/2″ bays and pumps water to a CPU block and a GPU block. It comes with adapters to fit virtually all (read the product description for a list) processors and video cards, hoses, screws, antifreeze, and more. Everything you might need is included.

Unboxing

Let’s take a look at what Kingwin gives you for $90:

Installation

Here is what my system looks like before any work is done:

The Antec Sonata 2 case has a weird air-duct which needs to be removed:

Outside of the case, you’ll need to assemble the GPU and CPU pads and connect them with the hosing to the pump unit for an out-of-case test. You don’t want leaks inside your case, so we run it outside first. Connect the hoses, unscrew the cap, add the antifreeze, top up with distilled water, plug into the case power, and run for a while. Technically distilled water doesn’t conduct electricity, but I don’t want to find out.

Our first problem is that the screw mounts don’t fit our drive bays–we need to remove the top mounts, which is no biggie:

Success! Time to connect the heat-blocks:

Installing the GPU block

The ATI 1950 is funny, because it includes its own huge fan and cooling block. You need to completely remove it, and attach your the heating block, using the Geforce 6800 clip they provide. Don’t forget the thermal grease!

Installing the CPU block

Interestingly, the thermal paste on the CPU was pretty bad, so I improved it. This step is is hard as taking off the previous CPU block and adding the watercooled one:

The Final Product

Note that the water cooling system doesn’t work sideways, so you have to test it right-side up. But that aside, here’s what it looks like installed and running!