I recently had a chance to work on a Cuban Music website – http://www.cuband.com – and hope that it ends up working out.  It has a pretty big catalog of Cuban Music in MP3 format and targets a small market – people that are interested in the classics from Cuba and the newest sound from a whole bunch of genres.

There don’t appear to be too many other sites like this, and certainly none that are as easy to use.  If Cuban Music is your thing, then check out cuband.com today!

(Yeah, this is a shameless plug!)

I’m not sure about you, but I don’t know what these are:

TI-83 (Plus):

n=82EF4009ED7CAC2A5EE12B5F8E8AD9A0
AB9CC9F4F3E44B7E8BF2D57A2F2BEACE
83424E1CFF0D2A5A7E2E53CB926D61F3
47DFAA4B35B205B5881CEB40B328E58F
p=B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD
q=B7207BD184E0B5A0B89832AA68849B29EDFB03FBA2E8917B176504F08A96246CB
d=4D0534BA8BB2BFA0740BFB6562E843C7
EC7A58AE351CE11D43438CA239DD9927
6CD125FEBAEE5D2696579FA3A3958FF4FC54C685EAA91723BC8888F292947BA1
e=11

TI-84 (Plus):

prp77 factor: 67070508990537181066342707695603050521324524613874331879259881495826493920589
prp78 factor: 186923771200711284770368041572205320486346816476524340240220962467860568859381

n=EF5FEF0B0AB6E22731C17539658B2E91E53A59BF8E00FCC81D05758F26C1791CD35AF6101B1E35
43AC3E78FD8BB8F37FC8FE85601C502EABC9132CEAD4711CB1
p=94489014C63CC9E1E1ADB192DBBDD1F78F90A630DA9C86EFC4CBCA44E5B4D54D
q=19D431AF2794229620B884E3750D622D1C74F2E4569DC15486FC8D5A3BCDFE2F5
d=2A3E1B2010F318D9BD7C7E19300980B055A0E2A9554B77E7142E23CDF7C7CA13C233A3D462FDFC
968B1F9CEAF2AC2CF305147992AD9E834192ACEBB517DB9941
e=11

TI-89:

prp76 factor: 2231124525637629443181963045297394875470510167130210300957267082210173784611
prp79 factor: 3226885534240147415018248397410101286362761128614350056368675111071170873486957

(these are factors of 71995834568684773636720438651160472297127884480206535156843307841378050889714332
73011970552138960583799368215373582308591928985045059261105298431035818727)

Hopefully someone out there would find this useful. Oh, and they might have something to do with this: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Suppressed_Texas_Instruments_cryptographic_signing_keys,_28_Aug_2009

This kind of thing pisses me off.  A corporation threatens to sue a guy and make him “publicly apologize” because he expressed an opinion about an Energy Drink that they didn’t like.  They also had his Facebook account banned, and the group he started on Facebook removed.  Then, after he posted this “public apology”, they again coerced Facebook to remove his personal account, despite his public apology (which is now gone as well).

I had never heard of this drink before (and I doubt it is available where I live), but now I’ll make sure I tell people when I’m in the USA to avoid it.  Litigious bastards like this don’t deserve your business.

So, for posterity, here is his full post:

Don’t Drink Hate. BOYCOTT ROCKSTAR* my apology

A comparison between the treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust and the treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza:

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=2510.

Wow.

SETI finally released a CUDA client that will allow you to use your NVidia card (it has to be fairly new) to process satellite data up to 10x faster than before.  Wow!

My system seems to be doing one work unit in about 25-30 minutes now [EDIT:  Ok, that's normal I suppose.  Looks like the Linux version doesn't do any CUDA workunits yet, even though it recognizes the GPU properly.]

Some hours ago, the Phoenix lander touched down on Mars, and just in the last few hours sent back some pictures. One of them has an interesting feature in it:

Click the image below this to see the entire picture and the strange white ‘blip’ in context. Whats interesting about the object is that it appears to have a shadow as well, which might mean it’s a real thing (and not a processing or data error). Neat. I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes out in the next couple of months from this project! To see more images from Phoenix, click this gallery link.

Oh, the gods were angry at me last week. Very angry. They not only put me through the hell of completely destroying my computer (or so I thought), they also influenced me to exhibit my geek stubbornness and not replace anything, but instead break out the soldering iron and spend some frustrating hours soldering wire traces together that should never be attempted by mortal man.

In the end, I guess it was worth it. I mean that I stubbornly decided to fix things instead of junking my fantastic (and now old) computer. And I have the Zalman Reserator completely to blame for the whole thing.

The Zalman is a water cooling device that has no fans. Before, my computer had a total of 6 fans keeping it cool (CPU, Case, Graphics Card, and 3 in the power supply). Turning it on was similar to the noise of jet aircraft taking off from an aircraft carrier. Now it has just one, and it’s barely audible. The Zalman itself is inaudible and works flawlessly, so I feel somewhat bad for placing the blame on it. But how did this great travesty begin?

Due to the small yet real influence the angry gods had on me that fateful Thursday, my hand slipped as I installed the new heatsink of the Zalman onto the CPU, and suddenly a few copper traces were now exposed to the world in a way that god had not intended. They had, in fact, been severed by the edge of my needle nose pliers, and – as much as I tried to ignore the cut traces – the computer simply wouldn’t boot despite all of my anguished bleating. Yes, it was a sad time.

After a restless night of tossing and turning, dreams of soldering teeny tiny wires and conductive pens made for gnomes that could fix my sub-millimeter problems, I awoke the next day with newfound energy for fixing things, and putting my world back in order. I mean, how hard can it be to fix some silly wire traces coming from a CPU on a PCB? It’s got to be POSSIBLE, yes?

Now if I actually had some sort of measuring device to tell you how small these traces were, then I’d tell you. But I didn’t. My best guess is that they were 0.000001 mm wide. Well, they seemed that small anyway. Take a look at them – see the shiny colored copper areas? I had at this point scraped some of the coating off to inspect the damage and prepare for soldering.

Notice how there are two traces next to each other? Yes, that makes for a lot of fun – they are so close together that it’s not easy to get solder on just one trace without hitting the second one. To get an idea of the size of these traces, look at the socket on the left – the holes are for the CPU pins. The traces are less than half the width of the holes that the CPU pins fit into.Now if I actually had a soldering iron worth a damn, or some kind of PCB repair kit or a conductive pen with a tip the size of a mosquito’s schwanz, then I’d have been optimistic. But all I have at home is a Harry-Homeowner-I-Solder-Once-A-Year iron to work with. On the positive note, I can now tell you that it can be done. Even with crappy tools.

So here is what I had to do. First of all, I had to make a suitable tool to solder with – which meant taking that ugly soldering iron tip and sharpening it to a point. Any self respecting geek will have a dremel tool (or a cheap knockoff like me) with the appropriate grinder tip to do this with.

While certainly not the best tool, if you’re desperate like I was, then this will do. This is pretty easy to do.

The next thing to do was to rip apart a copper stranded cable and get a thin coating of solder onto several strands. This part is pretty easy as well – it just meant grabbing any old electric cord, chopping out a section, and then getting a coating of solder onto each of the strands.

At this point, things were going pretty well. But after this point, things got a lot hairier.

I don’t know if anyone in the world does this kind of PCB repair for a living, but one thing is certain – they probably have the correct tools to do it with. And they must also have a lot of patience.

I spent a few hours fiddling with these small wire strands and attempting to solder them to the broken traces. And yes, I was extremely pleased when I finally got the traces repaired. This involved touching the wires quickly with the iron while they were on top of the metal traces (to get them to initially stick) and then afterwards applying a small bead of solder to make sure that they stayed stuck in place. This was a lot harder than it sounds. But in the end, the wires were stuck. I mean, how geeky is that? Here is what my terrible soldering job looked like (there is a metal stud where the hole was in the previous picture).

Ugly, but functional (or so I thought). After getting finally getting a post, I quickly assembling things in my ignorant optimism – with it only to refuse post at all after the assembly was complete.

After another deconstruction, lots of coffee, re-heating the solder contacts, conductivity tests- it looked like things were actually going to work.

And here I am writing this blog entry on the one and the same, with those very horrifying looking solders (but with the naked eye you can’t really see how bad they look). And yes, I didn’t have any microscope or special magnifying tool to help with this.

So what’s the point? Perhaps I can at least encourage someone out there that has jammed a screwdriver into their motherboard to try to fix it, even if you only have primitive tools – there is at least one other person out there that has successfully done it

Of course, now that I’m concerned that the solder joints might “go bad” in the future, I guess it’s time to start looking for an upgrade. Now that I have a good reason, that is, I’m looking forward to it!

BTW, the Reserator works great, but one missing point in the instructions led to me sticking a tool in the computer in the first place, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. There is a mounting plate on the bottom of the motherboard directly below the CPU which has to be swapped when installing on a socket 939 board (in my case, with an ASUS board, it was glued on, so it took some careful prying to remove it). However, if you follow the picture instructions that come with the Reserator, you’ll install it upside down like I did, and then the nuts will pull through when you attempt to tighten the metal pegs that hold the heatsink bracket. And if you’re as unlucky as me, you might even cut some traces along the way.