Thoughts and Ramblings | Thoughts and Ramblings

Cell phone's battery

Well, it seems that the V3m’s battery life sucks. I am going to have to chalk this one up to Sprint’s stupidity. The same phone, with other carriers, is capable of lasting longer on the battery than Sprint’s. I even got their own employees to admit to this, but they insist that the fault does not lie with them (the company). They claim that the firmware for the phone is loaded by the manufacturer, Motorola, in a sort of sly way to pass the blame on to them. The problem is that I know the firmware is modified by the carrier and the manufacturer loads different firmware for different carriers. So that means they are really at fault. In the mean time, I have found a few ways to increase the battery life. The longest I have gotten it to last is 22 hours on a charge, but ATM, it has been 12 hours, and the battery indicator is showing 3 out of 3 bars, so maybe it will last longer this time. Anyway, the tips for a longer battery with Sprint:

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, March 29, 2007

Messina Hof

Well, today I went on the tour of Messina Hof, a local winery. My mom insists that it is famous, but I am going to have to take her word for it. After the tour, they had a wine tasting. The had four wines for us:

Chardonnay
Gewurztraminer
Merlot
Port

I had never heard of the Gewurztraminer before, but I have to say that I liked it. Their port was also good, but I knew from the previous wine tasting that I liked port in general. Anyway, the place was pretty and definitely worth going.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, March 24, 2007

New Cell Phone

Well, I finally did it. I changed my cell phone provider. I switched to Sprint. There were a few reasons for this. One of the more notable is that they seem to cover my parents’ place the best, and thus they changed as well. After my previous experience with Verizon, there was no way I would go back to them. In addition, there is the fact that they like to cripple their phones so you have to use (and pay) for their services instead of being able to use the capabilities they phone is supposed to have in order to sync with the computer.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, March 22, 2007

Spring Break

Well, I just got back from spring break, and so now it is picture time. When I connected the camera to the computer, I realized I had pictures on there from January which I had not taken off. These pictures were just of the kitties, but still, I thought they were cute enough to include here:

No, Hallie is not hissing or growling there, she is yawning, believe it or not.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Branchless Code

Apologies if this is technical, but since I learned something in this experiment, I thought I would write it up:

I remember going to a seminar a few weeks ago delivered by a faculty candidate which discussed the idea of how to get around the branch mis-prediction problem present in microprocessors. Anyway, her idea was to use predicated statements to make the instructions conditional on a comparison which may not have been completed yet. Essentially, when faced with a decision between two routes, the processor starts computation on both before it is even sure which it should take. Then, when the decision is known, it can proceed to throw out the results from the task it should not have started and only keep the results from the other. Her research mentioned using the processor’s internal register renaming system to prevent the results from the two colliding. There is a problem of both processor support as well as compiler support, as well as the fact that the active power in the processor is now increased. From the first two issues, I doubt we will ever see this come to light, especially when such things are already possible: