Busy and out of it!

Quite hell of a week! I got very bad work-related news, but as always took it responsibly. I can manage, I can handle it. I still am very amazed how good I deal with predicaments, as well as controlling myself when receiving great news. Everything happens for a good reason, I should find a good side to it. For sure, it was a wake up call.
I have been very busy. Usually I take enough sleep no matter what. But in the last few days, I have not got enough sleep. I've got to finish this work by Monday or Tuesday the latest. Today I was so out of it; in the afternoon my brain stopped working. In the morning though, I had quite an impressive progress. I have taken some time off since then, and probably go to bed early. Tomorrow is a killer day.

Why do we take photos?

I spent an hour this afternoon to sort and organize my photos. Equipped with a digital camera, it is so easy to accumulate a lot of pictures, without proper naming and time stamp. And since it is free, we usually take the advantage to take many alike photos, so that later we choose the best. However, since harddisk space is so darn cheap too, we usually end up keeping them all. So it is necessary to take time once in a while to discard out-of-focus or redundant photos and to organize the remaining.
While doing so, it came to my mind that what the advantages are really to have photos of as much moments in our life as are possible? What did they missing, let say a century ago, when people did not have any photos of their past?
I was looking at some of the photos I have taken or was given to. From special moments, happy moments, celebrations, farewells, friendly gatherings, first-time moments, with somebody I love, of somebody I love, .... and of course sad moments.
Some seemed so like yesterday's that I did double check their time stamps, I could not believe they were, for example, 2 years old.
If nothing, they remind us of the good times, that our past hasn't been a waste; in addition to giving a warning that time is passing by so fast. Always be aware that "What is important in life is the journey itself, not just what you expect at the end of the road".

Some recent cookings

These are the photos of some of the dishes I made this weekend:



1) Rice + Lentil + shrimp sauce: Cook rice separately, for an elaborate recipe see here, but you can use a rice cooker for convenience . Boil Lentil separately with some cumin, salt and pepper until cooked. Mix the two in a big pot and let them stay over very low temperature while making the sauce. Fry some onions in a frying pan in extra virgin olive oil and then add the shrimps. Season with salt, Italian herbs, nutmeg and pepper. At the end, add some chopped fresh spinach and parsley. Serve the sauce on the side or the top of your dish of rice and lentil.


2) Home-made yogurt: Well-explained and illustrated Yogurt recipes can be found in recipe 1 or recipe 2.








3) Fried spinach + yogurt: Just fry some chopped spinach and some onions in extra virgin olive oil. Add salt and pepper. Let it cool and then add it to some yogurt. Put it in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours before serving.





4) Condensed Whey from Yogurt (soft "Ghaaraa")

Lovely Elisha Cuthbert

Wallpaper 0, Wallpaper 1, Wallpaper 2, Wallpaper 3, Wallpaper 4, Wallpaper 5 (with my favorite car), Wallpaper 6, Wallpaper 7, Wallpaper 8, Wallpaper 9.

More here.

RAID Technology

I had this impression that RAID is only a mechanism for combating disk failure. It turns out that the first RAID organization (Level 0) does not provide any redundancy but is to improve system performance and throughput. So it is a technology to achieve higher data transfer as well as to provide fault tolerance. A quick search on available motherboards and raid controllers showed that RAID 0, 1 and 10 (and sometimes 5) are the mainstream organizations. Here is an easy to read article on Basic RAID Organizations.
So I think for my next desktop I would go with a RAID 10 with 4 SATA hard disks.

Intel Processors in the order of innovation

It is getting a bit confusing as Intel is using different brand names, but maybe later it gets much more straightforward as the processor names for desktops and laptops are being chosen similarly.
I was browsing Intel's website for the new offerings. Here is the list of current and upcoming desktop processors as of July 2006:

• Intel® Core™2 Extreme processor
• Intel® Core™2 Duo processor
• Intel® Core™ Duo processor
• Intel® Pentium® processor Extreme Edition
• Intel® Pentium® D processor
• Intel® Pentium® 4 processor Extreme Edition supporting Hyper-Threading Technology
• Intel® Pentium® 4 processor supporting Hyper-threading Technology
• Intel® Pentium® 4 processor
• Intel® Celeron® D processor
• Intel® Celeron® processor

And here is my favorite, Intel Dual-Core Processors for Dual-Prosessor Servers: Dual -core Xeon and Itanium

Electronics: Notes on Op-amps - 1

Single versus dual supply: An Opamp can be powered by a single supply or a dual supply. Dual supply is the natural selection. However, when designing portable devices usually we have to use a single supply (a battery) which gives for example a 10V (Vcc). The important problem is that the output should be bias to swing around half the supply rails, which here is Vcc/2. That is if we have a 10V supply, the input should be biased so that the ouput swings with a DC of 5V and the maximum swing would be [10-Vx, 0+Vx] where Vx (called headroom) is usually 1.5 to 3V.

A work-around for creating negative voltage in the circuit with a single supply is to create "phantom ground" (reference)

Great Readings:
Single-Supply AC Inverting Opamp
Stability of single supply opamp:

Instrumentation op-amp applications: In sensors like medical applications, the input is sort of different. In normal application one of the - or + are actually the ground (or the phantom ground). While in the sensing applications, we are amplifying the sensed voltage which is differential and non or the - or + are actually the ground. In these ones, to find the actual output (in regards to the ground) we have to know what is a value of Vin + or Vin-. For example see the formula at figure 2 of this analog devices document. Or a better circuit is the two-amplifier approach of figure 3 of the same reference (read on for even better and more complex circuits).

Beautiful Jessica Alba

Wallpaper 1,
Wallpaper 2,
Wallpaper 3,
Wallpaper 4.

Askmen.com's rank 1 woman.