User:Alexander

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 6^th, 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 7^th, 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

• Functionalism
• Mechanicalism
• Literate programming
• Maintenance-free programming
• Modular memory
• Law and order
• Welch's bridge
• Superwiki

Applied informatics

• Sirius DOS
• A*
• MILOTIX
• Byblos
• Oración
• Feeble C compiler
• Sirius C*
• Backus–Naur–Nicholi normal form
• Octet, not byte
• Pel, not pixel
• Effective RGB

Game design

• Pokémon Citrite
  • Citrite overworld maps
  • Citrite title screen

Digital art

TBW

Pedestrian software work

• Senusret syntax highlighting theme
• Citrite source patching system
• Custom static site generator

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

• AGM battery, group 48 size $254.99
• Powermaster Street Alternators 37293, 150A $198.99
• CSF 2578 radiator for 4.2L 258 powered Jeeps $519.00
• Conversion kit to support TH350 transmission $506.00
• 2WD TH350 transmission $1,728.99 + $178.99 shipping
• GM Turbo 350 Transmission Floor Shifter $167.96

Cabin electronics

• Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Lite wireless AP $99.00
  • Install OpenWrt 23.05.0 and follow the Dumb AP configuration guide
  • Use 12V PoE injector to power the AP
• TP-Link TL-SG105 unmanaged 5-port gigabit Ethernet switch
  • 5V power provided by direct 12V DC converter
• Nanopi R5C router $69.99
  • USB-C powered from the primary power socket's USB-A port
  • provisions WireGuard VPN, NATted behind 5G smartphone modem
• Motorola One 5G Ace $316.79
  • Install LineageOS kiev, variant 2 to liberate the hotspot
  • USB-C to Ethernet should work directly
  • Mount to function as a DIY dash cam
• Eton® E1XM satellite-enabled HD radio $550.00
  • 9V power provided by direct 12V DC converter
• Cabin road fan $30.19
• Dual 12V secondary power socket $7.99
  • One is socketed with the road fan
  • One is socketed with a USB power adapter
• Anker USB accessory power adapter $39.99
  • One USB-C port can provide Turbo Power to a smartphone
  • Another USB-C port can provide Turbo Power to another appliance (phone, headphone, …)
  • The USB-A port can power dumb USB charging devices

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.