Entertaining Midterms and Hot Prescotts

Today I gave the midterm of Distributed System, probably one of the best taught courses at LUMS. Its being taught by Dr. Umar Saif, who has a really different teaching style than the rest of the CS faculty at LUMS ... he actually makes studying sprawling and complex distributed systems fun. The midterm was a nice change from the mundane papers that I've become acustomed to giving for other courses, it actually made you think about the problem, and have a laugh or two about it as well. For instance, we had to come up with a naming scheme for robots in the Borg collective (Star Trek anyone?) ... too bad most of the people in the class didn't know what the Borg were. :( Anyway, and then there was a question about the Yoogle search engine (Yahoo! and Google?!). We should have more guys from MIT teaching at LUMS...


On a completely different note, being the owner of an Intel P4 Prescott, you kinda get basic fire-fighting training, or rather, it should be a pre-requisite before you buy the damn thing. I've owned one for about 2 years now (I religiously count the number of Summers the P4 has passed without buring up in my face). The year (actually the month ... no wait, the week) I bought mine, it blew up twice in a week. I spent most of those days in Hafeez Center watching 'technicians' trying to figure out why my system was heating up so much. They finally changed the MSI motherboard to an Intel one, and the temperatures kinda went down. Then I had to buy a Rs. 4000 cooling fan for my processor (which comes with its own nifty regulator ... woohoo!!) to keep the temperatures of the cpu at around 50C. Every summer, one or more of the power cables inside the cpu burns up and I have to get it replaced. This year was no different, but instead of waiting for it to happen, I caught the burn symtoms early, and cut the wires and taped together fresh portions of 'em so that they should (hopefully) last through this summer.

So the moral of the story is, stay away from Intel Prescotts! They are HOT (in the very very bad sense)!