I’ve officially declared my Asus 9600XT dead. No matter how much I fiddle with it or underclock it or cry and beg it consistenly throws artifacts when trying to do anything 3d. And once they start the corruption carries over to the desktop.

(Update: Not just little lines sort of artifacts.. but this)

I’ve tried a LOT to get this solved. New power supply, fan and heat sinks. Endless time twiddling bios settings. In the end I think it’s just toasted.

Currently I’m running a backup Nvidia GeForce 2 mx 32mb card. Almost totally worthless for WoW use. It’s also sad to have to run my 2005FPW with the analog connection rather than the DVI.

I returned the 500w power supply I got over the weekend and intended to swap it for an MSI 9600XT that was on sale for 85 bucks. But the sale had ended the day before. ACK!

I’ve got my eyes on this XFX 6600GT. The price for the chipset is more than 50 bucks cheaper at new egg than I can find anywhere else and the super reviews just keep rolling in on it. The XFX flavor apparently is the only AGP version of the card to actually run it’s memory at 1Ghz as well… all other coming in at 900mhz - PCI-Express runs a 1Ghz. The card is also supposedly very overclock friendly - though I’ve never really felt the need to do that with any hardware in the past.

So yeah.. I’d get that if I could.

I have this nice little fan with LEDs on that I want to find a use for now. Maybe I can find a way to rig it onto my north bridge.

With all the hardware I go through and have laying around perhaps I should take up the hobby of making pieces of art out of everything. Nah.. that’d be a dead on indication that I’m getting old. I noticed the other day that I’m wearing sneakers and colared shirts now rather than my boots and leather jacket. (Not to mention having two kids)

Well, I’ve gotten a comment from somone stating that the ndiswrapper guys had given up on this nic since it’s drivers were just too dependent on windows. And I still haven’t found anything encouraging on google. So I’ll have to just write it off then.

Just so I know… what wireless cards are you guys using succesfully under linux?

We do. It’s hard to beleive I’ve been pretty much away from the world for almost a month now. Our newest little son was born July 25th at 10:15pm(ish) weighing in at 6 lbs. 11 oz. he is just as incredible as his brother. Little Emmet Truman Justin W. is a welcome addition to the family.

I dunno what it is.. if it’s me or MSI V3 but it’s got me a little pissed. You can install a product either Per-machine (admin privilages) so that all users on a system can use it or Per-user so that the installing user can use it, obviously.

When you’re trying to use FindRelatedProducts to find packages already installed on a system so you can remove them FindRelatedProducts (for some reason) won’t remove packages installed in a different state (PerMachiene/PerUser) than the current install is running in. So.. if I’m installing PerMachine and the package I want to remove is PerUser, it just skips it and says sorry.

Used to be I could just set ALLUSERS to either 1 or 2 to jump between the two states. It was coming up as Per-Machine on my test install. So I created an ALLUSERS property and set it’s value to 2. And I still didn’t get the results I wanted. I looked in the log and I find where it’s seeing the property set to 2 and changing it back to 1 because it’s detected it’s going to do an Admin installation. Uhh okay.

So I create a simple action to SET the property to 2 after this phantom action is run. So now.. the property says 2 I confirm it changes the property to 2. It shows the correct value in the install log property dump but… yes… it still tells me that this is a per-machine install and the targeted package to detect/remove is a per-user and it’s skipping it. WTF?

Now, I understand there’s a registry setting where you can set defaults for a system. But.. I mean I can’t tell users to go dig in their registry and change something. Maybe it’s because I’m late. I dunno. But this is really ticking me off. This last week of bug fixing - the week before my son arrives and I’m gone for 3 weeks while we ship - has been nothing but stupid little annoying time consuming issues that should take 2 minutes.

So I guess I have them document that the users should add/remove programs the previous version of the app. *sighs*

So strange. Last night I went to bed at 11 and found that I was wide awake and looking at the clock at 6:50 waiting for it to go off. Is this what getting sleep is like? I’m used to getting to sleep at 3 or 4 and getting up at 8. Oh well. I’m putting the brakes on WoW for a while as it’s become a little all consuming. I should be able to normalize my sleep patterns now.

Hey there. I was just looking through gmail while I was waiting for vmware to install. I noticed I had actual spam in my spam folder so I went to clear it. To my surprise it was all comments to my blog. I quickly let gmail know that these notices weren’t spam and set to work approving the comments. Two were really blog spam and the other three - which I approved - I will answer here. You can find the comments in my post about WU830G and IPv6. Sorry it took so long to get that cleared up.

Ummm WU830G:

I haven’t really touched much on this since I posted. Tried getting the newest ndiswrapper from their site thinking that the Ubuntu package might be stale. But that didn’t work either. I looked high and low for information on this nic but I haven’t found very much. Seattle Wireless lists the nic and it’s chipset - a chipset that brings up two unrelated sites when I google it.

My next approach with this is going to be to try and set it up on my sons machine which I installed DSL on. I noticed the ndiswrapper software is already installed there with a nice little wizard. Maybe I’m just a spazz as far as setting up ndiswrapper goes. But it seems pretty straight forward.

IPv6:

I’m not sure what isn’t working with your setup, Tom. I’ll take a closer look after I get a little work done today. =) I have to say though, that I haven’t found myself using any of the enhancements available with IPv6. I hardly know it’s there accept that I feel the presence of a gaping hole in my router - IPv6 isn’t NAT’d. But I’ve got firewalls up and such.

Which reminds me, I saw a post somewhere where in it was suggested that you don’t need firewalls at all if you compartmentalize the functions of our system across virtual machines via Xen. I don’t know about the no firewall thing… but I am constantly intrigued by Xen and the thought of using your system in new and interesting ways. But I’m afraid I’ll have to get some new memory before I get to doing any heavy linux work.

Well, I think that has it covered. Sorry didn’t notice the posts sooner. And I still find it freaky that I come up at the top of so many google searches *shudders*

Finally after what seemed years - Okay maybe just months - my Ubuntu cds have arrived. I couldn’t believe the box when I saw it in the mail room. It looks like it’s been through hell and back. But the CDs seem intact. Time to start pimping them around the office. I’ve already handed out 6. Now to get our companies project on Mono 100% and then release our machines as live cds. Oh heck yeah.

When you’re flying, you often read the card in the pocket infront of you that lets you know you’re sitting in the emergency exit isle. The card asks that “If you feel that you would have any problems discharging your duties please notify a crewmember.”

I’d like to personally extended this advice to my fellow drivers.

I think that’s all. For now.

And as the street sign near my house says (it really does):
“Drive like you care”

Okay, managed to work around the targeting issue with this fix from the transgameing board. Works great.

I’d gotten the new ATI drivers but then WoW wouldn’t start in GL mode (or at all?) - No direct rendering. So I reinstalled Ubuntu’s default fglrx and it was back to working. Tweaked with the settings files a little and managed to get full screen 1680×1050. Turns out I had to turn off windowing in the Cedega (of course). Then you have to remove the resolution setting from the WoW config file and start it up. It starts at some ungodly level but it’ll also offer your full range of acceptable resolutions. So that worked.

But, it only worked a number of times. I went back to play again and it’s taken to locking up as it’s loading me into the world. *shrug*

I dunno. I waste a lot of time trying to make these things work. If Windows isn’t going to puke on my 256meg memory then I’m thinking I might just throw it back in and run windows on my 64bit box and bring my 800mhz linux box in from the garage rack to run Ubuntu on. Do the KVM thing. I start to have doubts about how well my board or processor… or any number of things on the system are working.

*sigh* Nothing is ever easy.

In my attempts to make Linux the only OS I boot to on my 64bit box I’ve done a number of things.

To stableize Linux (Ubuntu or Suse 9.2) I had to remove my 256MB stick from the system. Now I’m just at 512 pc2100 =/ But, the system runs much better. WinXP runs better in a VMWare machine than it does just booting straight.

So as I mentioned above, I setup XP in a VMachine so that I could access windows apps that I have to have for work or cross platform testing. Works great.

Now I’m on to games via Cedega. The big game that we’re playing at now is WoW. I’ve managed to setup Cedega 4.3-1 and get WoW installed. I wresteled with the video settings for a while and managed to get it to come up. Not full screen though, only 1280×1024. The other problem that makes it unplayable… You can’t target anything or activate it. Basically no right clicking. The cursor never changes.

When I get some time I’m going to try and down and compile Cedega 4.3.2 and see if that helps.

My system spec’s:

AMD64 2800+
512 pc2100
MSI K8N NEO Plat
ASUS ATI Radeon 9600XT 128mb
Dell 2005FPW
Ubuntu Haory

I’d be interested to hear peoples Cedega/Wine experiences.