Hi everyone,

I know what I said. No more reading extend paragraphs of text which appears to be mildly interesting or boring depending on your emotional attachment to knowledge. Instead there was supposed to a bright flash based audio player that streams my voice (not that it is really anything all that stupendous, but it is mine and parapharsing Jewel “This voice is small I know, but it’s not your’s it is my own, but it’s not your’s it is my own, I am never broken. “) to whoever wants to click the play button.

Unfortunately that isn’t the case. So you will probably have to keep on reading or fall asleep. Your choice , not mine, and entirely upto to you. If you are going to fall asleep while reading my scribbles (Well they are typed so they aren’t really scribbles or etchings, but if I had to write them up in hard copy they would be with lots of little weird metaphorical and random pictures.) , you may as well make yourself comfortable by getting a decent sized chair unlike the one I am currently sitting on, a pillow and either a sheet or doona.

Alternately if you happen to have a giant beanbag of comfyness, that would work just fine as well. You comfy yet ? When your comfy either read on or sleep your choice ;).

Life is a busy thing. My laptop is now being repaired under warranty, however they are charging me $130 for it (it should take 3 to 4 days), this means I paid $170 total ($40) for the new ac adaptor (which works but doesn’t solve the problem).

A warranty is an obligation that an article or service sold is as factually stated or legally implied by the seller, and that often provides for a specific remedy such as repair or replacement in the event the article or service fails to meet the warranty. (From Wikipedia)

Because the manufacturer of my laptop has definitely provided a remedy to repair the product if it doesn’t meet the warranty, which is exactly is what they are obligated to do. However the contents of warranty (apparently didn’t cover the pressure spots on my lcd laptop screen, which became dead pixels eventually, but by then it they said it was too late to repair under it warranty, and they could replace it for $900) don’t mention whether the remedy of any problem which doesn’t live upto the standards of the warranty is paid for by the consumer or the company providing the warranty.

I read my warranty booklet (5 pages approximately 10 cm square) and it doesn’t mention who pays, nor did it mention any detailed expectations that the laptop is supposed live upto.

Previously when I tried to get my LCD screen fixed, I was told that if I had brought in my laptop to the service centre (which wasn’t the address I was originally given) as dead on arrival (even though it wasn’t, as it was in an operational state it just had very small (around a pixel, pressure spots move and aren’t static like dead pixels) , hardly noticable pressure spots which grew bigger later leading to dead pixels) during the first week, they would have replaced the lcd screen under warranty (not charging me).

I recently was able to get a bag replaced with a new one as part of the bag’s 5 year warranty. When this happened I took it in after two years (which is the same time as my laptop) and they were happy to replace with the similarest model to it they had (as that model was no longer in stock) after seeing my warranty card and receipt and other paperwork. They didn’t charge me, in fact as the new bag was cheaper than the original they gave me $20 credit.

What I am wondering now is , is a warranty like insurance, is it money you pay upfront or in installments so that if something happens to cause the product not to live up to the obligations in the warranty, that money covers the scenario of replacement / repair of the product, or are we as consumers expected to pay extra money for a warranty which only gurantees a solution to the problem provided we pay for it ?

But enough about my warranty queries, moving on …, Advanced Calculus is awesome. Partial Derivatives are Sexy, to quote our lecturer (He is awesome! :D). Thanks to his awesomeness , clarity and passion I finally clearly understand what a differential is, let alone the fact that I don’t have to do calculus slowly like I was taught in highschool but can speed it up (This is like being shown howto speedread when you were forced to only read aloud.).

Even though one of the lectures starts at 8am, I can think of little else to cheers me up, than some advanced mathematics (calculus or otherwise) early in the morning. On the subject of Mathematics, “Happy Pi Day !”

I have to finish coding up a prime number generator for ITB749, the tutorial exercise was just to teach for and while loops in C (which I know), but having done ITB712 and being a maths student I thought using Sieve of Eratosthenes was a bad choice given it is the opposite from an algorithim design perspective and thought the Agrawal-Kayal-Saxena primality test would be faster computationally.

However after finding in implementation in C , I ran into some hiccups, it uses both the GMP (gnu maths precision library) and Maple hooks to do the required mathematics. This got me thinking and if I can find time, I may write an entire implementation in C, or alternately just use the Sieve of Atkin instead (*sigh*), although primegen (http://cr.yp.to/primegen.html) already has one for that.

I was trying to write a double sieve algorithim in my head ,but it got confusing, and while I don’t have anything yet to show for the tutorial (unlike Cheater’s quick and dirty Sieve of Eratosthenes implementation ) , I think the tutorial has taught me more than I could have ever expected it to.

Cheater needs to focus on writing the oscilloscope kernel driver for poscope anyways :P, and needs to stop playing BF1942 and Defcon. On the subject of drivers and games, I finally did the usb sniffing for my digital voice recorder (jnc ssf-22) and will eventually start writing a libusb based driver for it, and we played Inquistor at Uni on Thursday, it was epic, despite the rush to create my character, my terrible luck with the dice and my morale at the end of it. (I apologise for being so demoralised by the end, it was only because I had pumped myself up way too much at the start. Silly excitement.)

Anyhow, I also installed lots of portable apps on my usb stick so I can survive till I get my laptop back and use IRC and IM wherever I end up. I also caught up with Redhatter today and helped setup a demon laptop to smoothly run Xubuntu for Maddie, as well as honing my Python skills helping first years.

I have a busy weekend ahead of me, with some voting, some coding and lots of caculus study.

Best of luck to you all and have fun,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234 🙂

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