Well, it’s been forever and a day since I last made a blog entry. Life has been a little wild latly!

The spring quarter has started at OSU. I signed up for the CS&E 201(Computer Science and Engineering). It’s a programming class. We are going to be learning Java 6. It’s starting out like any basic computer programming class so I am driving my head into the wall. My professor, a Romanian (I think) woman, is kind of hard to understand. She enunciates every letter she says. One top of that, she emphasizes every syllable. It’s kind of hard to understand her, on top of a new programming language. After a few days, I’m sure her voice will be second nature to me! I’m very excited about this class. It’s going to be giving me a break from my other classes! I love programming so much. I think it’s because I am always on the computer. Programming gives me the flexibility to customize my computer to do specific tasks at a certain time. For instance, I have a piece of Perl code that calls for a few RSS feeds and cuts out the new information and puts it is a nice and easy HTML file that I can access from the internet and read. It’s like an online newspaper of things I like to read. CNN, Dreamhost news thread (my web-host provider), and CH2 RSS feed just to name a few. It’s very convenient to have everything done for you so you don’t need to waste your time on the little petty things in life.

I’m in another math class… whoopty do! My professor is from Germany. It’s really interesting talking to him. He sounds just like the Einstein impersonators do. He even has the half bald with messed up hair look. It’s awesome!

I really like my geography professor. He has a lot of energy and he has a sense of humor! We are covering most of the basics in geography. I never liked geography in high school. We didn’t have the best teacher. She actually let you use your notes on the test. That gave me no incentive to study. I could go in and get an A because all the answers were there. I forgot most of the information because of this. With this class, I have to read the book and take notes. The professor adds a lot of information that is useful. I have a new inspiration for geography from this class!

Well, because of my lack of posts, I will post two more through this weekend.

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I will be using these units:
Watts (W)
Volts (V)
Amps (A)

With these equations:
W = V * A
A = W/V

Well, to understand how a rail works, you need to understand how power works. 1 PSU with a 36A rail will be able to yield 432W (W = +12.0V * 36A). A single 20A rails will be able to produce 240W (W = +12.0V * 20A). Two of these together would produce 480W. If you want to over clock, then yes, you will want to increase your +12V rails. Your CPU draws from the +12V rail so having a solid +12V rail is very much needed! Lastly, all these Watt figures are the measurements of the total or peak power of your power supply.

Here’s a list of what rails your devices generally run off.
CPU: +12V
Motherboard: +3.3V, +5V, +12V
Hard Drives: +5V, +12V
CD/DVD Drive: +5V, +12V
Video Card: +3.3V +5V, +12V
Memory: +5V

As you can see, every device uses different power, but most of these tend to run off the +12V rails. A common system will use about 250W – 300W. This would be from a midgrade video card, a single hard drive, 2 CD drives, and a midgrade CPU.

Now that you understand how the power system works, it’s easy to understand how the dual, and even quad rail power system work. The idea of increasing the rail number is to balance the load of the PSU. To do this, most power companies run the CPU and motherboard under one rail with the other rails running the peripherals. At first glance, this looks HORRIBLE! But hold on one second! Most of the devices don’t draw from only the +12V rail. Take a look at my graphics unit, the XFX GeForce 7800 GT. It runs at 200 W under full load. ~50% of this power is drawn from the +5 V rail though. I am using about 8.3A (A = 100W / +12V) from the +12V rail and about 20A (A = 100W / +5V) from the +5V rail. Now, this number is not 100% accurate. I am probably using closer to 120W. I’m basing the numbers off the common trend for video cards because I can’t find the draw anywhere. So with only an 8A draw from the +12V rail, you will probably be ok with a solid dual rail system with a two 18A rails. Since the CPU takes up about 100W (all from the +12V rail), it needs at least 9A to be stable. If you have a dual core CPU (like me), your CPU will probably take up to 200W under full load. That needs a beefy 18A rail with some play room for over clocking.

One more thing about dual rails before you should make your decision. When you have two rails working less to produce the same amount of power, you will see less heat generated. Think of it this way. Say you have three people. Person A can run a mile in five minutes while person B and C can run a half mile in 5 minutes. The total distance ran by person B and C combined was one mile, but they worked half as hard so they are half as tired. At the same rate, you are now dependent on both rails to run at full. On rail cannot supply its power to the other rail. So if person B was to fall behind, person C couldn’t just run faster to pick up the slack.

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I have been busy working on my new little project. I was tired of having a default FTP look for my folders where I store my downloads so I decided to write a script that will return the contents of a directory. It basically does the same thing, but I will be able to control certain aspects of the files. One, I will be able to search sub directories with the same script. Two, I can exclude certain files or directories from the listing. This will help with the overall layout of the script. Third, I can integrate this into my blog so the blog acts as the center for my whole website. I will be adding a main homepage later that will act as a welcome panel. It will show my latest blog entry, my latest flash entry (when I get the flash module done), and some other useful information. Then it will link to my blog. The blog will have individual pages to my modules, like downloads, media, flash, whatever. This integration might take a month or so, but I am very excited about it.

Anyway, the directory listing is in version 1.0 stage. It is a basic script that only returns the listing from the root directory. I will be expanding this to include sub directories, file/folder exclusions, and much more. Here is the current release note.

Directory Listing Version 1.0
What’s new
————
Since version 0.2
-Changed the file structure.
-Added new images
-Fixed the formatting errors in IE7

since version 0.1
-Fixed the error where the directories would be listed as files.
-Added new logo, folder, and file images.
-Added support for changing the image directory.
-Added support for file extension images. See function “get_file_extension”

What’s coming in the next versions
————
-Subfolder browsing
-Easier CSS modifications
-File exclusions
-Folder exclusions

For a working demo of it, visit http://downloads.rob-meier.com/

Click here to download this script.

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