I have returned
Back from the Networked Robotics workshop, and it was pretty good. (See here for more info: http://control.mines.edu/netrob09/) Got my paper presented, it'll be officially published soon, and I made some really good contacts for the job hunt. For any of you who weren't already aware, I wrote a paper over the spring/summer and sent it in to this conference where it was reviewed and accepted. So I went to Denver, Colorado (the conference was actually in Golden, but it's pretty close) for a week to present it and listen to the other presentations. There was a group there from Denmark which is developing a similar system to the MASnet system on which I ran my experiments. They're interested in how we built it and what problems we ran into and the solutions we had. So I'll be collaborating with them on helping them to try to figure out their issues.
I'll put up a link to the paper when it goes up on the IFAC website in the off chance that any of you want to read it. ;)
In other news, my server finally entered its death throes last weekend. Looks like a power supply failure of some sort. It started making a really loud vibrating noise coming from the power supply, which means it's one of 3 things: 1) the fan is chewing on something, 2) something has vibrated loose and is making the noise, 3) the capacitors are going bad. I bought it from a BYU surplus sale around 3.5 years ago for $40-- it's a P3 1.0 GHz with like 512 MB of RAM, and the hard drive is only 20 GB. So, needless to say it's not really worth trying to save. I took a look at it and I couldn't see any evidence of 1), and 2) is unlikely, which means it is probably 3) or a similar component failure. I could probably even take it apart and repair it, but power supplies are sensitive things, and I'm not really interested in putting in a bunch of time to fix it only to have it freak out and fry my data in a few more weeks.
Besides, I found an awesome new server from Dell for $400 including tax and shipping. This one has something like 16x the hard drive space and 6x the processing power-- not to mention like 8x the RAM and it'll have gigabit ethernet. Nice. :D
I'll put up a link to the paper when it goes up on the IFAC website in the off chance that any of you want to read it. ;)
In other news, my server finally entered its death throes last weekend. Looks like a power supply failure of some sort. It started making a really loud vibrating noise coming from the power supply, which means it's one of 3 things: 1) the fan is chewing on something, 2) something has vibrated loose and is making the noise, 3) the capacitors are going bad. I bought it from a BYU surplus sale around 3.5 years ago for $40-- it's a P3 1.0 GHz with like 512 MB of RAM, and the hard drive is only 20 GB. So, needless to say it's not really worth trying to save. I took a look at it and I couldn't see any evidence of 1), and 2) is unlikely, which means it is probably 3) or a similar component failure. I could probably even take it apart and repair it, but power supplies are sensitive things, and I'm not really interested in putting in a bunch of time to fix it only to have it freak out and fry my data in a few more weeks.
Besides, I found an awesome new server from Dell for $400 including tax and shipping. This one has something like 16x the hard drive space and 6x the processing power-- not to mention like 8x the RAM and it'll have gigabit ethernet. Nice. :D