DAC

Finally bite the bullet and got myself a DAC. Well, an USB DAC to be exact. (Anyway, my main concern is on the DAC part. The USB sound card in it is just a bonus :P)

It is the Mini USB DAC by HiFIidiy.net. Granted, it is not the best DAC out there. But given its price (< HKD900), it is tough to beat in its own class.

This DAC is based on the Texas Instrument PCM1793. And rumor said that the headphone amplifier part is a clone of the Solo.

But to my ears, my DIY PIMETA sounds much better that the built-in headamp.

On the left is my DIY PIMETA headphone amplifier, with Analog Devices AD843 op-amps installed. (If you love pop/vocal and is not a bass-head, I strongly recommend the AD843 op-amp. It might not has the details of the OPA627 / OPA637, but the tone produced by AD843 beats them all (even the OPA2111 that I have can't beat the AD843).

My current setup is: Pioneer DV-636D -> (S/PDIF) -> DAC -> PIMETA. The S/PDIF cable is a Canare cable. There were debates on the net that whether a RCA cable can really make a real 75 ohm coxial cable. But nevertheless, this Canare cable with the designed plugs seems to be doing fine... at least to my ears (These Canare plugs require a special crimp to assemble the cable... so I bought this interconnect directly from a studio shop).

The analog RCA interconnects are DIY ones made from Swiss Gotham GAC-1 cable with Canare plugs.

Let's Start from Here - Joanna Wang 王若琳

By：Luke McMaster / Vincent Degiorgio / Damhnait Doyle

giving up   why should I   have come too far to forget
beautiful   just got lost   somewhere along the way
so much was missing when you went away
let's start from here   lose the past   change our minds
we don′t need a finish line
let's take this chance   don’t think too deep
all those promises we couldn't seem to keep
I don't care where we go   let's start from here

standing here   face to face   a finger on your lips
don't say a word   don't make a sound   silence surrounds us now
even when you were gone I felt you everywhere

let's start from here

I've never been the one to open up
but you've always been the voice within
the only one for my cold heart

let's start from here   lose the past   change our minds
we don't need a finish line
let's take this chance   don’t think too deep
and all those promises we couldn't seem to keep
I don't care where we go   let's start from here

Two years

While doing a routine health check, I realized that one of my servers (that is running a hobby project from my friend and I) has been working non-stop for almost two years.

The server was assembled by me. A 3U rack mount chassis bought directory from factory (a real bargain!). Two redundant PSUs. An Intel dual sockets motherboard. Two 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs with hyper-threading. 2GB of RAM (yes... RAM was quite expensive at that time so that was what my friend and I could afford :P). Two sets of RAID: 2 x 80GB RAID 1 for OS and database, plus 8 x 200GB RAID 5 for application data.

I spent nearly a month on assembling the hardware and fine tuning the OS kernel (Linux) and RAID/DB/cache settings etc. Still can't forget the noise produced by the 2 PSU and 10 hard disks, especially when I had to do it in my bedroom and had the machine running 7x24 for stress tests!

Actually the server was up and running more than two years ago. But about six months after the server was deployed to the data center, one day it suddenly crashed. After a few hours of diagnostic, it was concluded that one of the SATA ports failed! And it took me another five to six hours to rebuilt the RAID, performed some tests and restarted the application.

The service was resume about two years ago around midnight. Luckily it has been running smoothly since then. This also means that I haven't been to the data center for two years! :P

男人的末日

各位男仕的末日到了！女人終於有辦法唔洗有男人都可以生育喇！

Death of the father: British scientists discover how to turn women's bone marrow into sperm

The only catch is... 只可以生女，因為女性本身冇 Y-chromosome …

…同生出來的 bb 有好大機會有 defects… -_-"