Friggen Huge!

August 15th, 2005 Rev No comments

I must’ve put on like 900 pounds in the last 3 weeks. Being locked in a house and up all hours with a new born and a fridge full of food for 3 weeks is not a healthy thing.

Gotta get fit. GACK!

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Mystery Memory

August 15th, 2005 Rev No comments

I had been trying to migrate my 64bit box over to Ubuntu exclusively but ran into a stability issue. Seemed that bad things would happen (Firefox process starting but never showing the actual app and totaly solid locks) when I was running my full amount of ram 768mb pc2100 – 512 + 256. I found that if I pulled the 256 that it seemed to run pretty flawlessly.

I’d run Memtest86 before with a successfuly pass but Chris had suggested I let it run for a long while. Makes sense.. the errors could take minutes to hours to pop up under normal use.

Well I ran it over night and got 19 passes and 0 errors. *shrug* Dunno what to make of it.

I guess my big fear is that my motherboard is shot and it’s frying video cards and being just all around unstable. I don’t have the bank roll to keep throwing at these computers.

Some days I wish I wasn’t a geek who had to fix everything.. some days I wish I could just buy crap that worked. OH well.

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Video Card blues

August 15th, 2005 Rev No comments

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)

WU830G (Update)

August 15th, 2005 Rev No comments

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?

Baby. Baby. Whose got the baby?

August 15th, 2005 Rev 1 comment

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.

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Ticked off at MSI

July 19th, 2005 Rev No comments

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*

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Sleep

July 18th, 2005 Rev 2 comments

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.

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The case of WU830G, IPv6, and the missing comments

July 13th, 2005 Rev No comments

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*

Ubuntu Cometh!

July 7th, 2005 Rev No comments

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.

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A Public Service Announcement

June 28th, 2005 Rev No comments

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.

  • If you feel incapable of operating your motor vehicle within the guidelines set forth by the DMV, please park your car and get your ass on the nearest bus.
  • If the thought of operating your motor vehicle is frightening, please sell said automobile immediately. (The life you save may be your own.)
  • If you are incapable of telling who should go first when presented with a four-way-stop situation, take a bus to the nearest high school and ask to be immediately enrolled in their Special Ed. classes. (No they have nothing to do with a guy named Ed)
  • If you’re the kind of person who stops to let pedestrians cross when you’re the only car on the road, in either direction, for two blocks *smack* wise up dumbass. If you’d just get your freakin’ hunk of crap down the road rather than stop for a feel good moment no one would be put out.
  • If you’re the kind of person to speed up – actually make a concerted effort – to pull infront of me, and then you slow back down again, I have a battery of hood mounted rocket launchers on order.
  • Just because I have a rainbow sticker on the back of my car doesn’t mean I want you to ride my ass.
  • As hard as it is to believe you’re not that important. Get off the damn phone. In case you ARE that important the time you would be unavailable to your adoring fans due to the accident you cause when you drop the latte in your lap while trying to switch to the other line would certainly be unacceptable.
  • If you’re the kind of person who nudges up as close to the car infront of you as possible when passing on-ramps so that no one can merge infront of you and rob you of that half second of commute time and then pretend to be utterly oblivious to all the poor bastards trying to merge on, I know you see me you bastard. And I’m coming anyway.
  • I think that’s all. For now.

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

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