User:Alexander

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A professionally lit photo of me, taken in October 2023.

My name is Alexander. I am an American informatician, game designer and programmer.

Early life

My name is Alexander Nicholi. I was born Marshall Alexander Rose on March 6th, 1998 on Fort Sill, Oklahoma to parents native to Princeton, West Virginia. My mother was an active duty Army machinist when she had me, and is now a factory worker. My father is a musician and private tutor of guitar and piano. They and I came from a 2,300-years-long unbroken line of poor Anglo-Britonnic yeomen who never intermixed with anyone else after the Anglo-Saxon assimilation. Originally serfs in the greater London area, they emigrated to the New World variously as indentured servants working Virginian plantations for their time. Upon their service completion, they fled into the Appalachian wilderness and eked out a modest existence undisturbed by the world for 300 years. My parents were the first to leave in the 1990s, making me the first to grow up outside our hinterland, although I have siblings who grew up within.

As a child I was enamored with computers. I had countless old machines from thrift shops running various versions of Windows, and as I grew older I learned to use Linux over secure shell. I taught myself a great deal of programming technique, and by age 17 I was doing baremetal programming in C and assembly for the Game Boy Advance. This set the stage for my later research work concerning sustainable computing and the creation of C*.

On December 7th, 1941, a day which will live on in infamy, 2017, I wed my husband from Indonesia, a son of a Jakartan advertising magnate and former San Franciscan international student. He later attended college together with me and has had a presence in many of my business endeavours from the start, including ARQADIUM, which I started with him shortly before we met.

Career

In the past, I have worked white collar at Vurbox and Unai. These days I do consulting work relating to my informatics expertise. I can do what most low-level programmers cannot do: dictate and explain it in high-level design strokes, up to and including productisation. Contact me if you want to know my rate. (Serious inquiries only please)

Theoretical informatics

Applied informatics

Game design

Digital art

TBW

Pedestrian software work

Computers

If you have ever visited my office, you know that I have a lot of computers. Or, well, I did when I lived in the suburbs – these days, only my laptops, Henen-nesw and Hetepsenusret are in use at my new flat downtown. Anyway, here are their specs and stories.

Jericho

Jericho
jericho
CPU Intel® Atom™ N455

Lithography 45nm
Core count 1
Features Intel 64™, 2-way HyperThreading™
RAM 2GiB DDR2 SODIMM
Boot disk 64GiB Transcend® SSD420K MLC SSD
GPU Intel® GMA 3150

Completed August 7, 2023
Cost $73.03
OS Windows XP™ Professional x64 Edition

Jericho was originally the first computer I ever had to myself after I got out of high school so many years ago. The exact model is a 10″ Toshiba NB255 netbook, and this one is a replica I purchased that was identical to the original I owned before. I named it Jericho because it is very old and simple. It runs a Syslinux BIOS-based dual booting installation of Alabaster Linux on Debian 12 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. This computer is too low-power to run any application that is a Chromium shell, so it is a very good baseline upon which to judge software quality. It is my main machine for Microsoft Office usage, as it has a complete installation of Office 2003 including FrontPage, Project, OneNote and Visio. It also has a complete installation of Visual Studio 2005, which runs swimmingly believe it or not.

Senusret

Senusret IV
SENUSRET4
CPU Intel® Core™ i7-8565U

Lithography 14nm
Core count 4
Features Intel 64™, 2-way HyperThreading™, AVX2, VT-x, VT-d, VT-x with EPT, AES, SpeedStep™
RAM 16GiB DDR3 soldered
Boot disk 512GiB TLC SSD
GPU Intel® UHD Graphics

Completed January 12, 2025
Cost ~$661.91
OS Windows 11™ Pro

Senusret is the name given to my current lead ThinkPad laptop. It is usually a 13” to 14” thin-and-light, sometimes a 'Yoga' or 2-in-1, and offers maximal mobility and battery life with a modern installation of Microsoft Windows.

There have been four incarnations of Senusret, my faithful ThinkPad. This is the current one, which I purchased for $899 SGD (~$661.91 USD at the time of purchase) while on holiday in mid-January of 2025. It was a display model on a pretty generous discount and is a stacked specs model (high-end processor option, 16GiB RAM, WWAN, et cetera). Senusret I was a ThinkPad S1 Yoga with 8GiB of RAM and a Core i5-4200U processor running Windows 8.1, which was retired. Senusret II was a ThinkPad X1 Yoga (Gen 2) with a Core i5-7300U and 16GiB of RAM running Windows 10 which died due to multiple motherboard shorts from a faulty refurbishment. Senusret III was a ThinkPad X240 with a Core i5-4300U and 8GiB of RAM running Windows 10 which was retired in favour of the Ptolemies.

Amenemhet

Amenemhet III
AMENEMHET3
CPU Intel® Core™ i7-3520M

Lithography 22nm
Core count 2
Features Intel 64™, 2-way HyperThreading™, AVX, VT-x, VT-d, VT-x with EPT, AES, SpeedStep™
RAM 2× 8GiB DDR3 SODIMM
Boot disk 64GiB Transcend® SSD420K MLC SSD
GPU Intel® HD Graphics 4000
OS Windows XP™ Professional x64 Edition

Amenhemhet is my other actively used ThinkPad that kind of plays second fiddle to Senusret. There have been times when I have not had an Amenemhet, but when I do, it is usually an older model ThinkPad that provides conveniences unavailable on up-to-date Windows installations. Currently, Amenemhet is on its third incarnation, and it is a mobile creative workstation running the Adobe CS3 Master Collection on Windows XP. In this sense it has more synergy with Jericho as a fellow x64-capable XP laptop, where Jericho is an ideal target for software engineering and Amenemhet is a more usable development host from which to target it.

There have been three incarnations of Amenemhet so far. The current one was built from a collection of as-is ThinkPad X230 Tablet models obtained on Tokopedia and eBay, being the last centre-swiveling ThinkPad 2-in-1 tablet. Amenemhet I was a ThinkPad S1 Yoga to supplicate the old experience of using Senusret I after Senusret II was acquired. Amenemhet II was a ThinkPad X201 Tablet, which was retired in favour of the X230 Tablet due to its provision of 22nm Ivy Bridge mobile processors over the X201's 45nm Nehalem models, its doubling of RAM capacity, and its support for USB 3.0.

Menat Khufu

Menat Khufu
menatkhufu
CPU 2× Intel® Xeon™ E5649

Lithography 32nm
Core count 6 (12 total)
Features Intel 64™, 2-way HyperThreading™, VT-x, VT-d, VT-x with EPT, AES, SpeedStep™
RAM 100GiB DDR3 RDIMMs (7× 8GiB + 11× 4GiB)
Boot disk 250GB WD IDE HDD
GPU Nvidia® Quadro™ M6000 with 24GiB VRAM

Storage 6× 1TB Seagate Constellation ES SATA HDDs
OS Windows XP™ Professional x64 Edition

Menat Khufu is a dedicated Windows XP build with x86-64 in mind. As a nod to Weird Al's infamous song All About the Pentiums, Menat Khufu is equipped with "100 gigabytes" of RAM (more precisely, 100 gibibytes, but blame JEDEC for this erratum), enabling me to say that "I've got myself a hundred gigabytes of RAM" as he does in the song. Besides that novelty, the build will be my main rig for using the Adobe Creative Suite as it was on Windows XP, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and perhaps even Premiere Pro. It will also run Visual Studio 2005.

Menat Khufu will be installed as the computer of first resort in my laboratory. It will be set up with a tenkeyless Filco® Majestouch™ keyboard and a Microsoft® IntelliMouse™ both over PS/2 as well as an ASUS® ProArt™ 1920×1200 display. It is essentially a top-specced desktop version of Amenemhet that is more than capable of doing video editing, unlike Amenemhet.

Henen-nesw

Henen-nesw
henen-nesw
CPU Intel® Core™ i7-5775C

Lithography 14nm
Core count 4
Features Intel 64™, 2-way HyperThreading™, AVX2, VT-x, VT-d, AES, SpeedStep™
RAM 8GiB DDR3 UDIMM
Boot disk 128GB SSD
GPU Intel® Xeon Phi™ 3120A coprocessor

Storage 2× 512GB Intel® DC2500 SSD in Linux software RAID 1
Completed October 7, 2022
Cost ~$2,000
OS Alabaster Linux on Debian 10

Henen-nesw is my personal rig for daily usage at home. It is always online and therefore where I host many of my open-source torrent seedings, as I have high-speed Google Fiber home internet. It has a 43″ 4K main monitor, flanked on its left by a 27″ 1440p monitor in portrait orientation with about the same DPI. I chose the flagship Broadwell Core™ i7 as it has an unusually beefy Intel Iris Pro™ iGPU with 128MiB of L4 cache. This, coupled with Intel’s first-class open source Linux graphics drivers, was a dream combination to me back in 2015 when I first got into PC building. It's socketed into a Z97 mITX motherboard with blacked-out Noctua cooling, inside a golden-orange Thermaltake® The Tower™ 100 chassis.

Currently, the motherboard is kind of defective, as it refuses to accept having both of its RAM slots populated, limiting it to a pithy 8GiB of system memory. Aging motherboards are hard to come by, so it may be a while before I remedy this.

Eventually I would like to slightly downsize and qualitatively upgrade the display setup to some panels with far better colour quality:

This new setup will offer a higher DPI while retaining the close consistency between monitors which I have with the current setup. I like my old trusty 43″ 4K display, but it is heavy, obscures the view of my living room a little bit too much, and my husband is patiently awaiting inheriting it from me as an upgrade for his own setup.

Hetepsenusret

Hetepsenusret
HETEPSENUSRET
CPU AMD® Ryzen™ Threadripper™ 1900X

Lithography 14nm
Core count 8
Features AMD64™, 2-way SMT, AVX2, AMD-V, AMD-Vi, PowerNow!™
RAM 64GiB DDR4 UDIMMs (4× 16GiB)
Boot disk 512GB Plextor® M8Pe NVMe SSD
GPU XFX RX 590
XFX RX 580
XFX RX 560
XFX RX 460 Passive

Storage 2× 6TB Seagate® IronWolf™ SATA HDDs
Completed c. 2019
Cost ~$3,200
OS Windows 10 Enterprise

Hetepsenusret is a very large build housed in a white Thermaltake® The Tower™ 900 chassis that my husband funded to build early in our marriage. It uses a special Russian multi-seat software solution called ASTER to allow several "terminals" of displays, keyboards, mice and other I/O to be shared on the same running instance of Windows. The computer is floated prominently in a central location in the common areas of our house, and much cabling is run behind to our desks and the living room allowing us to log on and use the computer simultaneously. It also features our only Blu-Ray writer drive, which we use to save movies.

Hetepsenusret is one of two desktop computers I have in my domicile, the other being Henen-nesw. As my house is quite modest, I simply do not have room for any more computers beyond these and my laptops.

The PC was built to have a wide upgrade path, and the following are planned once funding is permitting:

  • max out the processor to the platform's flagship Ryzen™ Threadripper™ 2990WX, quadrupling the core count
  • add an additional 4× 32GiB of RAM, bringing up total memory to 192GiB
    • this will allow for creation of a 128GiB RAM drive for scratch disk usage
  • upgrade the boot SSDs to much faster PCIe 4.0 drives and soft RAID them in BIOS
  • upgrade the mass storage setup to 4× 20TB drives using Windows ReFS in a RAID 5 like configuration
  • retire the four Polaris GPUs in favour of two Radeon RX 9000 series cards, as we only have two possible ASTER seats in the new flat

Ideally, this upgrade will coincide with a new (and identical) case purchase as I dropped one of the tempered glass panels and shattered it back in 2023. A fresh installation of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB will also be quite welcome.

Heh

Heh
heh
CPU 2× Intel® Xeon™ E5-2699v4

Lithography 14nm
Core count 22 (44 total)
Features Intel 64™, 2-way HyperThreading™, AVX2, VT-x, VT-d, VT-x with EPT, SpeedStep™
RAM 64GiB DDR4 UDIMMs (8× 8GiB)
Boot disk 64GB Transcend® SSD420K MLC SSD
GPU AMD® FirePro™ W4300

Storage 2× 20TB Seagate® SATA HDDs in RAID 1
2× 20TB Seagate® SATA HDDs
OS Alabaster Linux on Arch Linux

Heh is a build dedicated to LTO-9 data archiving. It is decked out with maxed out dual Broadwell Xeons to get good power efficiency and good aftermarket value for the Lzip-based compression to be done on archival data during ingestion. It is also equipped with at least 64GiB of RAM in order to have sufficient headroom for both the LZMA compression algorithm's multithreaded memory consumption as well as mbuffer usage to ensure smooth operation of the tape drive heads. The RAID 1 array holds a "tape disk in progress", that is, order data compressed and encrypted that does not yet fill up an entire 18TB tape disk and must be grouped with other orders until it does. The two non-array drives are temporary staging areas for ingesting data from the variety of input media for backing up, providing coherency and performance in its transit from customer media to the partial drive and to final tape disk storage.

Heh is a planned build and will be installed in my laboratory alongside Menat Khufu and Mirgissa.

Mirgissa

Mirgissa
mirgissa
CPU AMD® EPYC™ 4564P

Lithography 5nm
Core count 16
Features AMD64™, 2-way SMT, AVX-512, AMD-V, AMD-Vi, PowerNow!™
RAM 1× 48GiB DDR5 ECC RDIMM
Boot disk 2× 256GB PCIe TLC M.2 SSD
GPU ASRock Rack® ASPEED™ AS2600

Storage 2× 20TB Seagate® SATA HDDs in software RAID 1
OS Alpine Linux

Mirgissa is a planned always-on server build for my laboratory. It will be the last stop for all of my web services, which will be proxied through VPSes I lease for cheap. It will be housed in a Thermaltake® The Tower™ 300 µATX chassis and use an ASRock Rack® EPYC4000D4U µATX motherboard with ATX power. Booting will happen from BIOS soft RAID 1 NVMe drives, and mass storage is provided by two 20TB hard disks using ZFS in a RAID 1 type configuration with the built-in SATA/SAS controller.

Ptolemy I and II

Ptolemy is my late 2019 13″ MacBook Pro, which I purchased for $1,700 in August of 2019 for use in school. Ptolemy II (ptolemy2) is my 2021 16″ MacBook Pro M1 Max, which was given to me by my former employer for work. If you have noticed the Egyptian theme of most of my other computer builds, this Hellenised deviation should make much sense.

Mail Jeep

This is a collection of items to purchase and configure for use in my 1975 AM General DJ5-D "Mail Jeep" Dispatcher 100.

Mechanical items

Cabin electronics

Hybrid utilities

Electricity

  • 48V monocrystalline solar panel installation

Current broad idea is to build out a solar array that is rated to support the house, with an AGM battery pack installation. I want to explore the feasibility of supporting heat pumps in the winter on solar alone.

Emergency heat and power will be run on a Cummins Commercial Mobile Generator, 10kW 60Hz model. The idea is to maximise flexibility on both ends: recapture all waste heat and use the generator to power auxiliary heating implements if necessary. The generator is diesel, so it can run on #2 or alternatively kerosene.

2021 Fall of Kabul

Was marked safu on Facebook. Nothing else to report as of yet.

Legal issues

None yet.

Later years and death

My biographer will enjoy filling this out a lot more than I.

References

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