Category: Personal

On keeping things

You know, my philosophy about buying things used to be, never buy high-end because you’ll always have to replace it/upgrade it within a few months. But now I’m starting to reject that whole idea entirely.

I mean, I’ve already posted on other sites about how new PDAs don’t impress me because I still use a Palm Vx and it does everything I need in a PDA, and then some. Everything I need. No, it doesn’t play seven or eight MP3s in its Flash memory. No, it doesn’t play video clips I record with the tiny video camera embedded in the back. No, it doesn’t connect to wireless internet access if hotspots are available.

Nope, all it does is keep track of my todo lists, download articles from AvantGo and download maps, directions and listings from Vindigo. I can also set reminders, create shopping lists, and play DopeWars. All in 8MB of RAM. Plus, it’s thin, it’s beautiful, and it’s made in the USA.

Now that computers keep getting faster and faster and most software is not proportionally taking advantage of it, I find it easier to say, “Okay, I’ll have this computer for a few years.” That’s a good thing. In retrospect, these last five years have moved so quickly that it really made us geeks spend a ton of cash. I mean, I’m on a 2.6Ghz machine with a gig of RAM. I never use more than 300MB of RAM unless I’m running VMWare (which I’ll admit, is often nowadays). My CPU never gets cranked unless I’m doing video processing. I mean, things aren’t as speedy as perhaps they should be (I/O being the bottleneck), but I haven’t felt my computer “lagging” in years.

As a side note to that, software needs to get smarter. At 2.6Ghz of raw power, my computer should be doing more for me automatically 🙂

Murphy’s Law: Murphy was an optimist

Well, I have to hand it to you, Murphy. I really wasn’t expecting it this time. But you managed to do it. I thought I was free, but clearly I was not.

It’s 5:44am, the birds are starting to chirp, and here I am, finally with a working computer. I am still not entirely sure why it works now. I believe that the clips on the HT800 CPU cooler push down to hard on the CPU or the socket, and are causing instability problems. It doesn’t surprise me. Right now I have the clips off and it boots every time. I put the clips on and it doesn’t boot. I’m pretty sure it’s not coincidental. It’s also the only thing that has changed.

In any event, this has significantly slowed down my work on the summer project, but I’m going to make it up by working all weekend. angry

The question becomes, how am I gonna clip this CPU cooler to the motherboard without causing the instability? I tried only using 2 clips but that seems not to work either. And I can’t even lift up the HT800 since the thermal paste is acting as an adhesive (maybe I did too good a job?). In fact, I’m starting to think perhaps I put too much thermal paste, and that’s why the CPU is getting crushed. I guess things like that really make a difference when you’re talking millimeters.

Throughout all of this, I thought the reason for POST failure was: (a) thermal paste hotspots again; (b) BIOS issues with the installed video card, causing me to do CMOS resets about 40 times with mixed results; (c) bad memory, becuase sometimes taking a DIMM out helped; (d) bad IDE controller, because sometimes removing the drives helped. In all a-d, I believe I was wrong. This was Murphy playing games with me. He gave me four red herrings. The problem, I’m sure, was the clips all along, but Murphy took me for a ride and provided the coincidences to make it possible. All-expense paid trip into my own personal hell: a malfunctioning computer with all my data on it.

I am still not entirely sure of my theory. If Murphy breaks it here, though, I will be quite upset. What a bastard he can be.

Tomorrow I have to do UAC work all day. It’s imperative. Hopefully it’ll keep booting so I don’t have to use the Mac.

SSL and high school reunion

Been reading the SSL Certificates HOWTO to learn a bit for my summer employment (which will require SSL communications). Nice because here my college education is actually helping, in that things I learned in my Discrete Math class are showing up.

Yesterday in the wee hours of the morning, I was getting bored researching this stuff, and so I googled one of my good friends from high school, David Krauss, an extremely talented computer engineer who knew PPC assembler and was fluent in C (and when I say fluent, I mean it) at the tender age of 15. A die-hard Mac lover with so much knowledge, I always wished and hoped he would get a job at Apple. And, it turns out, he did. That makes me happy. The world is somewhat just, it seems.

If you want something done right…

You know the rest.

Well, I got my video card, and definitely needed new holes drilled in my side panels. Unable to find a usable drill press, I decided to bring it to a local glass shop, as I mentioned before.

The guy acted like he could handle it, and said it was completely “feasible,” but that he’d have to “look it over tomorrow.” So I left the panels with him. I called him twice the next morning to see if he still thought it was possible, and to suggest I reduce the drill pattern to make it easier for him. No responses. He disappeared until 5pm or so. When I called him back he said he was “done.” I couldn’t believe it. Could the side panels be finished already? He said they “looked good,” there was just “a little shelling.” (Ok, so I can’t expect something like this).

Holy shit. A little shelling? He ruined my side panels!…

Work begins today, computer fixed

It’s June 1, so work begins today. I’ve started out by looking for a JSP/Java Servlet host for my web development project for the summer. Found out an old friend of mine from high school (Andy) is running a business where he resells server space, and he found me a real cheap price and a lot of features, which is nice. I’ll be the only client of his using Tomcat.

My computer problems seem fixed. I don’t want to jinx it, but the tests are running smooth, and I spent all last night developing without a crash. I really think it was a hot spot on my CPU from uneven spread of thermal paste. I switched to the stock Intel cooler with the “black dust” thermal paste, and it is running better. The only problem now is that the old cooling system makes a bit of noise, but I’ll replace it soon.

I planned on doing some case mods to my ECube along the lines of this and this, but know I won’t be able to do them alone (not without a good drill press). I am going to have the holes drilled by a local glass shop I think (Lion’s Pride in Manhasset?). I don’t receive the Nvidia video card until Wednesday, but I hope it fits and I can have these modifications done at the end of the week.

Hardware instability

Well, I’m annoyed now. My hardware’s been unstable since the start of the summer. In WinXP I experience random BSOD on mysterious STOP codes like 0x0000008E and 0x0000007E (which are like page faults and unhandled system thread exceptions). I’m suspecting bad RAM. I pulled out one of my memory cards and left 3DMark03 running in loop, and indeed the computer still crashed. I have the other RAM DIMM out and will do the same kinda test to see what happens. If this crashes as well, the only thing I have left to suspect is this damn AIW 8500DV, which’ll be out of here soon anyway.

I hate stuff like this.

Leadtek Winfast A360 (GeForce FX5700)

So, I decided I’m going to move away from my ATI hardware (an 8500DV AIW) and on to a cheap GeForce card by Leadtek. According to reviews, my 3D performance should increase significantly (from 1000 3DMarks with my current card to ~3500), and this way I should be able to use the Nvidia Linux drivers which are all the rave lately. Frankly I’m tired of ATI’s piss-poor graphics support for Linux.

The other thing is that now I will move my TV capture to a separate card in the PCI slot. A Hauppauge WinTV PVR Media Center Edition (MCE) 250 is my current choice. What’s nice is that then I’ll also get the capture functionality in Linux, which I’ve been missing with my ATI card.

The only thing I fear is that the Leadtek’s fan won’t fit in my Ecube because the AGP slot is near the side panel. But if that happens I’ll RMA to NewEgg.

Links

Daily Reads

Other Blogs

Projects I’d Like to Work On

  • Glade-3 UI Designer: This is the only real tool out there for designing GTK+ interfaces without resorting to pure-source design. Development has stagnated a bit, but there are some good ideas for the rewrite which is in CVS right now (Glade-3). I am sure if I spent some time hacking it, I could make serious usability improvements and make it a more viable tool; I’ve played with the CVS checkout and although it’s a complete rewrite in terms of internals, the UI design approach is about the same. I think we can do better, and I think this is probably the best project for me to hack if I want to really learn GTK/Glib/GObject. I’ve heard that Dan Wither is working on a GUI designer for C#/GTK# called Stetic, but he hasn’t released anything. I think I’d want a good GTK+ designer first, and then we could make it work with C#, too. Since Glade-3 is a rewrite, this seems like a viable suggestion.

  • Galeon: a tabbed. mozilla-based web browser that is fully integrated into GNOME, is lean, and has a shitload of awesome features I can hardly live without. I have a few ideas for new, useful features I could add.

  • Gnome-Vim: this makes vim a bonobo component so it could be used in other Gnome apps, like anjuta, evolution or even nautilus.

  • Nautilus: the GNOME file browser and graphical shell. I’d like to work on Nautilus’ plug-in architecture, and maybe even write a plug-in or two.

  • GTK+: a toolkit for writing GUI apps in C, I’d like to delve into its internals and focus on hacking toward fixing speed issues (particularly, responsiveness and redrawing, the two things that take the most complaints from “usability experts” coming from other desktop environments).

Fun Stuff

New design

So, I spent a little bit of time to get a new design going on this site. Basically put back together CuteNews 1.31 and coded some nice-looking stylesheets to go with the site. I also had to learn a little PHP for modifying CuteNews and also for simplifying the layout of the site (the header and footer are componentized, and the header has a little php code behind it so that it figures out what page you are on and chooses which images to write to HTML based on that information).

The reason I came back to this site is that I plan on working on a lot of projects this summer, and hopefully I’ll be disciplined enough to document my efforts here. We’ll see how that goes.