autographedcat

Earlier tonight, the power went out. Our whole block was apparently affected, despite the fact that it wasn't unusually hot and there wasn't a cloud for miles. After about an hour, the power came back up.

My computer didn't.

it would boot up normally as far as starting windows, and then just went to a light blue screen. No text, no errors, no...anything. I tried unplugging everything except the video lead and power, thinking it might be a misbehaving USB device (this has happened in the past), but no luck.

To be fair, my video card has been acting a bit flaky of late, so I was beginning to suspect that it might be in need of replacement soon. In the meantime, I rummaged around in my desk drawer and managed to extract a replacement.

So I'm currently up and running on an nVidia GeForce 7600 GT, a video card that was state of the art when I bought it six years and two computers ago.

Ah well. I get my first paycheque on June 15th, and then I can see about getting something that will at least let me finish Portal 2. (Sometime in the not-too-distant future, I planned on replacing the entire system, but what I want costs a bit more than I'm ready to just drop yet, especially with at least three out of state trips in the next few months.

I agree with the commenter who said "I don't know what I'd do with it, but I want one."

It's so *cute*!

Four-inch computer has more ports than you'll ever need | DVICE

Small computers aren't anything new to write about. Xi3 Corporation's new little computer, however, is unique. It has more ports crammed into as little space as possible that we've seen in recent years.

For such a tiny box, it doesn't skimp out on accessible ports. The Xi3 has six USB 2.0 ports, DVI, two eSATA ports, audio in/out, DisplayPort, ethernet and special 'Xi3 Port." Who else besides professionals need two eSATAs and six USB ports? There are three CPU options are available for the Xi3 — 1Ghz, 1.8Ghz and 2.2Ghz. Sorry Intel, but these dwarfs run on AMD Athlon processors.

All of this is crammed inside a small 4-inch aluminum cube. Take that Mac Mini! The interesting thing about this tiny PC is that it's case also serves as a heatsink. Yeah, pretty cool stuff.

There's nothing quite like spending your day working on a ten-year-old OS to really make you appreciate how far Linux has come.

We have a couple of legacy apps running under Solaris 7. While there's active development of the next generation of these systems, which will be on a more modern platform, I meanwhile have to do my best to keep these systems healthy and happy. To this end, we've acquired a couple of identical servers, on which I am doing various recovery tests and preparing them to be hot-standbys.

Now, Solaris 7 was a fine, fine operating system. In 1998, when it was released. It had lots of cool stuff like support for 64-bit architectures and all that jazz. And back when it came out, there really were only a few "serious" Unix platforms to choose from. If you were an enterprise-level project, you were either going to be on Solaris, HP-UX, or AIX (or, heaven forbid, Windows NT). You could use a BSD variant if you were a purist or working in an academic setting, but the corporate use of it was pretty small. And then there was Linux...

I distinctly remember a guy we hired for tech support back around this time, who fancied himself a bit of a "leet hacker dood". He complained bitterly to me that we *ought* to be using Linux instead of Solaris, and I said, "Linux is a toy. It's interesting to play with, but it's nowhere near ready for commercial use."

Looking back, I stand by that statement. At the time, Linux *was* a toy OS, and it lacked both the tools and the support necessary to make it a viable option for business use. And it's sobering to realise how far we've come in such a short time. Today, $EMPLOYER is primarily a Linux shop, with only a handful of Sun servers remaining, and those are being aggressively phased out. We rely heavily on Open Source software, something that would have been dreamt of just 10 years ago.

Of course, the commercial Internet itself is only 15 years or so old at this time. (You can't really pin a precise date on when the Internet shifted from a mostly-educational network to a mostly-commercial network, but I recall things really starting to explode in late 1994 to early 1995, when commercial ISPs started to really proliferate and national media attention began to run countless stories on it. So 1995 is generally the year I consider the modern Internet to have been born.)

Working on this project this morning does remind me that I wouldn't want to go back to this level of tech on a regular basis. The tools really *have* improved that much, but I admit I'm feeling a little nostalgic for the early days, when everything seemed possible and it was all so new and exciting.

What follows is probably mostly whinging and self-pity. But it's my journal, and I get to use it for stuff like that sometimes.

( I'll stick it back here so you can skip it more easily... )

The computer is NOT my friend.[1]

I got home yesterday at my usual time, a little after 5pm, and, after taking care of the dirty dishes, decided to play a little CoV before making dinner. Went through the entire map, was engaged in combat with the big bad at the end when....everything locked up and CoV crashed. It’s been doing that alot lately, and inf act this was the third attempt to do this mission. So I started to see if I could diagnose the problem. My first thought was that it might be a memory problem, caused by having unmatched DIMMS. I shut everything down, and pulled 256meg of RAM out, leaving the pair of 512s.

And the computer wouldn’t boot. No errors. No beeps. Nothing. The lights came on, the drives spun up, but no video, no sound, nothing.

I spent the next hour or so checking and reseating all the connections, trying replacing the various ram chips in different combinations, unplugging different parts. Absolutely nothing worked, and as near as I could tell, it was a dead system.

To say I did not react well to this was....an understatement. I take computers failing on me rather personally at times. It’s not just a hardware fault. It’s a betrayal. And this betrayal drove me to do something I have not done since the mid-1980s [2].

I went to CompUSA and bought a retail PC.

I know I just lost a ton of geek-cred, but honestly, I don’t think I could have built a system for as cheap as they’re selling in the stores anymore.[3] For $550 (after rebate), I got myself a lovely Compaq Presario SR1950NX, with Athlon 64 3800 processor, 1GB of ram, dual-layer DVD-RW and a 250GB SATA hard drive.[4]

I got it home, and immediately put the RAM from my old PC in, bringing me to 2GB, and tried to put my hard drives in place. I figured out pretty quickly that they weren’t going to install nicely in the actual drive bays, so I finally settled for standing them on edge in the bottom of the case and hooking them up. I’ll evetually get myself some external enclosures for them.

The only thing I need now is a good video card[5] and I’ll be ready to rumble.

[1] If this be treason, then let us make the most of it!

[2] The last retail computer I bought new was a Laser 128 Apple ][e clone. I bought two Amigas second hand after that, and have since then owned 4 different PCs, all of them hand-built.

[3] And if you think you could, don’t tell me. I need what few illusions I have left, Besides, whatever small amount I MIGHT have gotten cheaper is offset by the instant gratification factor.

[4] And yes, Windows XP. This is the gaming system, which makes Linux and MacOS be less than ideal.

[5] The video card in my old system was an AGP card, and the new system is PCI-E. I’ve got a couple of people who might be interested in buying my old card though, so I’m hoping to offset some of the cost of the new one.

What a fun weekend. A little dabbling in technology, a little trip to the past...

( Computer upgrades that *don't* suck... )

( Sunday at the Faire... )

( After the Faire... )

Thanks to everyone for the hugs and words of encouragement. After lunch things did calm down a bit and my headache finally went away (lending credence to the theory that it was a blood sugar problem).

Also in good news, I picked up a new 500w power supply at Micro Centre while I was out at lunch, and installed it when I got home. It definitely turned out to be the problem, as my system sprang to life immediately after this swap was made.

Tomorrow will be a long day, but I dare hope it will be a better one. :)

All too often, when someone writes about an interaction with a tech support organization, it's to vent. So it's only fair to write about good experiences as well.

( Adventures in Tech Support... )

Once upon a time, I took a lot of photographs. Whenever I go somewhere with a descent camera, I tend to snap off a lot of pictures, because I enjoy it. And when I get home, I put them on my webpage.

What I've always been really bad about is actually going through and captioning them, and providing thumbnails, and all the other things that really make a photo archive usable by, say, people who aren't me. It was always one of those "things to get around to" that I never got around to.

Well, some time ago, themouseshouse told me about an open source project called Gallery. The entire thing is written in PHP, and makes the entire effort of maintaining a photo archive on the web painless, or so it promised, so I thought I'd try it out.

Wow.

No, let me make this clear...

WOW!

The software was everything I wanted and more. It took a couple of hours to get working, mostly having to do with upgrading PHP and Apache on my server and installing several graphics manipulation packages for the program to do its magic. But once it was working, it was amazing. It automatically generates thumbnail pages, in a grid sized to your choosing. You can manipulate images on the fly, rotating them, resizing them, reordering them, however you like. If you want to remove a shot, just click on the "delete photo" button, confirm your choice, and its gone, and the thumbnails are regenerated to get rid of the gap. I was impressed.

The first batch of photos I set up were the shots I took at the Quinze Filk Festival last October. Those had seen these before will know that there were a large number of completely useless shots mixed in with some that were rather good. Once they'd been imported into Gallery, kitanzi went through all 900 shots and threw away nearly half of them. There's still some that are fuzzy or blurred, but the overall set is quite watchable. (And now needs to be captioned.).

The program managed uploading pictures as well, so it can be used to completely take over the management of this entire set of my webpage. You can even enable it to allow visitors to leave comments on pictures, so they can help with captioning, or just giving feedback on your photography.

I'm very happy. If you want to see the whole archive, go here. Note that large sections of these photos STILL aren't captioned. Its the ongoing project. But the photos are all there.

Now, I just need a new camera. I was lusting after the new 8 megapixel cameras while browsing at Circuit City last night, though the reviews I read on the Sony DSC-F828 lead me to believe it's not quite mature enough to spend that kind of money. I am thinking strongly about the Canon G5, which fits much more easily into my budget. Then I can take a few thousand MORE photos for my website.

bounce Happy ACat!

An interview with Don Woods, one of the original authors of the Adventure text game!

Thanks to hitchhiker for the link!