Thursday, May 29, 2008

More temperature work.

Motherboard monitor 5 was a bit of a bust, it didn't seem to pick up the motherboard sensors.

Speedfan seems to work well, and I am currently running it and charting the HDD temp, the Cpu Temp, and "Remote Temp 1" whatever that is.

Temp 1 has been pretty much rock solid at 42 degrees C, which leads me to believe that it might be a false reading.

The HDD temp has been all over the map from a low of 25 degrees to a high of 33.

The Cpu temp has wavered only slightly up to 38-39 when under load. At idle, it sits at 37 degrees.

Ironically, that is the temperature of the human body.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Feelin' Hot Hot Hot!

Welp, my tablet pc (Gateway E155C), started hard-locking, where it would suddenly and without warning stop responding to any input. We traced it down to a system board failure. The situation happened after an extended time of the computer being in my backpack, when I thought it was off, in 70-80 degree weather. I suspect that the situation was heat related, but I cannot prove it. We had several of these issues in the school, which means it is a common problem.

I'm trying to find a decent program that will log temperature spikes.

I'm currently running Motherboard Monitor 5 and I set it up it email me when it reaches a specific voltage.

We can set all the tablets up to email the technology people when any of them spike in temperature, so that we can determine if that was the cause.

Lets see how that goes.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

May Day 2

Graduation is coming up, and I'm not sure exactly what our needs are going to be.

Last year, Schaumburg had choir and band, which I am guessing they will have again.

We are going to try to do two different cameras this year, with a video switcher to fade between the two.

We will also try to take the stage microphones and pump them into the monitors on the choir/band/etc. They were concerned about how difficult it was to hear on the stage and among the graduates. Last year, SC ran the two mics on stage, but I don't think they have the capability to run monitor feeds.

May Day

The gifted expo stuff seems to have calmed down, and here's hoping, because the expo is just around the corner.

All in all, I believe the form was a big success. I discovered some flaws, which I can address for next year, but I'm going to list them here so I have a reference for next year.

Bugs:
For whatever reason, the Title of the project field was limited to a certain length. When people put in a title that was longer than that, it would totally reject their record. I figured it out, because I was putting in the student records which the database ignored and I kept thinking "Wow, this is a long title" "Wow, another long title"

Possible reasons that the database limited the length:
1) I'm a schmo and I made it that way unintentionally.
2) Frontpage is a schmo and did it randomly
3) Since I used the variable name "Title" it has some preconceived notions that it should be a certain length.
4) Something else entirely.

Functionality changes:
I should make the database capitalize first and last names, and THEN combine them, so that I can use them as LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME, and FIRSTNAME LASTNAME.

I should also tell people that the capitalization doesn't matter anywhere but in the abstract, because numerous times students would enter their abstract twice because they forgot to capitalize everything.

Added features:

I'm going to have to add an easy way to select and enter multiple mentors.

I would also like to have a way to review and edit all of the abstracts by the students, so not as much needs to happen on our end.