Archive for February, 2008

Puzzled

Monday, February 18th, 2008

I have always had an issue with the greater Amman Minicipality, Where do we park our cars, No cars, what’s the alternative.

But this is irrelevant to the Public Servant that works there.

Astonishing, Seen nothing like this before, Everyone knows his/her Job so well, A smile on every face, A very polite gesture before and after every signature, and most importantly, in 10 minutes SHARP i got my “License to practice” renewed, 10 minutes exactly.

Absolutely everyone was very “friendly”, something you don’t expect from someone drowning in paperwork 24/7, the boss, even though busy with someone resolving a problem took the time out of whatever he was doing and signed my paper, With a smile.

You have to see ti to beleve it, but every smile there was sincere, the yellow smile you see at your local GSM carrier branch is not what i mean by a smile, the guys were smiling like they are enjoying there job.

Before leaving home, i was so troubled, its gonna take two days at least, boy was i wrong.

Jordan, you are really becoming the place to be, i got back to my car and turned on the radio, and some Jordanian Music talent (Hannah Gargour) was on the radio, technically perfect music (Not so original but the technical aspects of the music are done to perfection), this is the second guy to astonish me, right before him was someone just as good, Humam Ammary was his name i think, and the song was called lullaby, and it makes me think, ma… are we there yet.

Microsoft – What a looser

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

So, the long awaited Windows Vista SP1 arrives, the Service pack fails to address piracy and basically, the old cracks still work with the SP1 installed (Check it out here)

Gigabit Switch

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

Over the years, i have had pleanty of trouble with 8 port switches, With plenty of traffic going through such switches while analyzing database data on multiple computers, i have always had problems with them overheating and then the process halts, and it is easier to do it all over again than to rewrite the software and teach it how to resume, the answers have always been simple, Get an aluminum (Or if you are lucky to find a brass (zinc and copper)) heat sink, you would simply get some thermal epoxy, unmount the existing heat sink and fix your larger heatsink on the heating processor (the switche’s processor) and voila, problem gone.

Yesterday i got a D-Link DGS-1008D 8 port, Thinking that D-Link would actually put a decent heatsink on a switch, i plugged it in… then not very surprised, the thing overheated (And it is not even summer yet).

No problem, found a nice piece of aluminum from a hard disk enclosure, Cut it to an appropriate size, bent it a couple of times, and unscrewed the switch casing, Surprise, no heat sink at all (Surely this should mean they did not expect the processor to heat up so much), so i got my beloved thermal epoxy and fixed my new heat sink on the relativly large processor (As big as the die from an intel dual core processor), reassembled the casing, and put it back on the network.

A few hours later i went to see what it was doing, there was no network load, NONE, and to my surprise, the casing was very warm VERY, i unscrewed the case and the new heat sink is so hot it is annoying to keep your thumb on it (Thumb feels least).

So whats the story D-Link, am i missing something ? I got my handly little battery operated drill, and punched some holes above the heatsink, but the damn thing back on the network, i will go and check on it now (5 Hours later)…

The thing is very hot, i took off my heatsink and went to get a proper one, i though this was an overkill for something D-Link did not bother cooling !

Anyway, i will come back and finish this post, along with pictures of everything as soon as i find the time to install a new heatsink.