Fun with Ecto
Kelly makes Ecto work with Mandrake 10 and WordPress...feeding his inner Geek along the way.
What the heck is this?
Blogging…I’m pretty sure that term was invented by the same group of irritating people who more recently came up with “podcasting”.
I’ve had what I call a “vanity” website for about 9 years now. I have been posting stuff about myself, that interests me, or that I wanted to experiment with all that time. But I’ve never really called what I do “blogging”, even though my most recent website incarnation has looked an awful lot like a blog.
Computer upgrade 2005…
Well, its that time of year again...time for me to break my computer in the name of geekdom...
For 2005, my objective was a bit different- stick mostly to upgrades that can be transferred to the next "version" of my computer- things that I don't need to throw away in a year. Because the next upgrade will be large- in 2006, I expect to move to a new motherboard supporting PCI Express slots, which means a new video card, and while I'm at it, an new processor...ouch. So, for this year I'm replacing my monitor, my memory, and my hard drive subsystem. In some respects, I wish I'd stuck to just those things but, since I had to reformat the hard drive as part of the upgrade (see later in this posting), it seemed like a good time to upgrade the OS... The big news in the past few days was that the 64 bit version of Windows XP was released to manufacturing. What this means is that the code is basically "finished". Since I'm an MSDN subscriber, I was able to get the RTM (release to manufacturing) version and install it as part of my 2005 computer upgrade. Yes, don't worry: I'll buy a full "normal" license later. As an aside, I understand Microsoft will be offering free upgrades to Windows XP Professional 64 for people who bought Windows XP Professional: I'm not sure about that, though. Why care about 64 bit Windows? The immediate benefits from 64 bit Windows versus 32 bit Windows boils down to memory addressing, both real and virtual. Big applications, and games are a prime example here, have been butting up against all sorts of memory space limits. This isn't just the 4 GB RAM limit: there are much smaller limits for certain types of paging objects that, with XP 64, are blown wide open. What this means is that applications that use lots of memory should be faster and more capable. Other benefits start to accrue once more and more applications are written natively as 64 bit apps. 64 bit processing, done right, should be faster: on the order of 10-15% faster. However...initially, when running 32 bit applications under a 64 bit OS, there will be some potential performance degredation...from what's been tested thus far, from 0 to 5%. Both AMD (Athlon) and Intel (the new Pentium 4s and the rather unpopular server processor, the Itanium) now have 64 bit processors. Its probably inevitable that most users will be using one sometime in the next 3 to 5 years. But if you don't upgrade your computer often or at all, don't play large/complex games or run memory-hog applications like image or video editing...really, you won't see much need for a 64 bit OS. Oh, and by the way: a 64 bit OS only works on a 64 bit processor- I'm probably stating the obvious, but... My upgrade this year...Note I make several references here to "EQ2" (EverQuest 2) performance. Thats a game I play a lot and, thus far, is the only game I've installed. I'll add some other performance comments later once I've had time to install several more games...yes, I play a lot of computer games :-)
- part #1: a 20" LCD 1600x1200 flat panel monitor (ViewSonic VP201s). I got this a month or so ago. Its working out great: no visible "trailing" and fast refresh, very sharp and bright with "rich" colours, viewable from wide angles
- part #2: memory upgrade from 1 GB to 2 GB (Corsair Platinum series paired high speed 1 GB DDR); installed without a hitch Thursday night and made a noticable but small difference in EQ2 performance
- part #3: a RAID 0 array using 2 x Western Digital "Raptor" 10,000 RPM SATA drives; a little challenging to install because you have to use supplemental drivers during the XP install; the performance increase was immediately noticable. Zoning in EQ2 still takes time, but its probably half as long (guessing) and just seems smoother. Exiting the game no longer results in a minute or so of disk thrashing...
- part #4: re-install OS...this is where I decided at the last moment to go with Windows XP 64. If I made a "mistake" in this upgrade, this was it
- Before: Maxtor 7,200 RPM SATA drive (single drive): Drive index of 40 mbps
- After: Western Digital 10,000 RPM SATA drives in RAID 0 pair: Drive index of 105 mbps
Halflife2 Memory error/Direct X error ”fix”
I've been playing Halflife2 recently. Its a great game, fully deserving of all the praise its been receiving. Unfortunately, it was crashing a lot for me. And I was seeing different symptoms, making it hard to try to debug Sometimes a level would "corrupt" itself, which showed up as not being able to move on to the next level. If this happened, I'd also suffer from the fact that the save/load game interface would be "garbled": basically, the menu would sort of collapse in on itself into an unreadable/unuseable mess. Sometimes the game would "crash" to the desktop, with a "memory read" error dialog box. And occasionally, I'd end up back at the desktop with a dialog box saying something like "Internal driver error in IDirect3DDevice9::present()". It was all very frustrating I did some digging around on various forums, and found a fair number of people who seemed to be experiencing similar problems. The general recommendation: upgrade video drivers, test memory, make sure you have the latest DirectX9 (dx9c). None of it seemed to help me. I should note a bit about my configuration. I'm running an AMD 64 3400+ processor on an Asus K8V Deluxe motherboard. I have 1 GB of Corsair paired DDR memory. And I have an ATI X800 Pro video card. I'm running Windows XP SP2, fully patched and up to date. My ATI drivers are version 5.3, and Direct X is the latest version: 9.0c. My Via chipset and Creative soundblaster Audigy drivers are also fully up to date. I finally "fixed" the problem. I put quotations around that, since I can't claim that this is an absolute fix since it seems like so many other users of Halflife2 are finding different solutions. In my case, I went into BIOS and changed the video aperture from 128 MB to 256 MB. I came across the suggestion to try this at the World Overclocker's website. Before making this change, I was crashing once or twice on each "level" (between each load...there are usually several "loads" per level, so this was ugly). After changing my video aperture from 128 MB to 256 MB, I didn't have a single crash through a dozen or more "loads" worth of play. In fact, I managed to finish the game- so it was definitely worthwhile for me!
”Star” releases Staggering amount of energy…
The natural universe is an amazing place. Our sun, which warms us at a distance of 96 million miles for billions of years. Black holes, with gravity fields so intense that light itself can not escape. And neutron stars… (more…)
Psychic random numbers..
I read a story today about some interesting observations being made using simple random number generators.
In a nutshell: some scientists developed a simple little box that is supposed to be a pure random number generator. This box design was used a couple of decades ago as a control system to see if people could somehow influence randomness with their minds. It was shown that ordinary people could apparently do so. A number of other scientists began coming up with more elaborate experiments to get to the bottom of this effect. (more…)
New planets discovered…
I was reading a news blurb in Astronomy magazine the other day about some new planets discovered around distant stars. Some of these planets are pretty weird. An important couple of points need to be made first before I talk about the planets. I've got to mention that IANAAOAA (I am not an astrophysicist or an astronomer), so everything here is just a lay-persons perspective. From what I understand, scientists are not discovering these weird planets because they are the only type of planets around distant stars. They are finding them because the techniques they currently have will *only* find weird planets. Basically, the only methods they have at the moment to detect the existence of a planet boil down to detecting variations ("wobbles") in the rotation of the star they are looking at. To make a star wobble enough to detect currently requires an extremely large planet (Jupiter sized or bigger) or a largish planet that is very close to the star. Future detection methods will hopefully allow detection of more typical planets That said, some of the weird planets they are finding are really weird... The latest batch are very close their stars...like about 0.028 astronomical units...or about 2.5 million miles. And they are quite large- something like 15 times the size of earth. And they complete a "year" (a full orbit around their sun) in a matter of hours: two to three days. For comparison, Mercury (the closest planet to our Sun) orbits at a distance of 0.38 AU (53 million miles), is a third the size of Earth, and completes one orbit in something like 90 days. So, here we have a planet 15 times the size of earth that is orbiting its star ten times closer than Mercury does to our Sun. Its travelling around its orbital path at something in the neighborhood of 250,000 miles per hour. If you were on an "earth" in this distant solar system, you'd be seeing the equivalent to the transit of Venus across the sun every few months (I'm guessing on this- the math is a bit beyond me). Except this "venus" in this case would be huge...I can't quite imagine what it would look like seeing a planet that large that close to its sun as it passes between you and that sun, but I imagine it would be spectactular. This planet is a freak... But here's the really weird part. So far, scientists have found three planets pretty much just like this. What this says to me is that there is a huge range of weird and wonderful planetary systems out there, and we have a ton more to learn.
Microsoft goes nuts with IP…
Apparently, Microsoft is now offering the opportunity for companies to license from them most of the underlying protocols behind the Internet. Little things like TCP/IP and DNS, for example. (more…)
Moon Landing Conspiracy!
The Apollo moon landings were all fake. If you believe that, I imagine you also believe that Santa lives at the North Pole, and all Politicians are always scrupulously honest.
Not to be dissuaded by facts or logic, there are still a surprising number of people, most of whom have not had lobotomies and aren’t permanent residents of mental institutions, who believe that the moon landings are fake. But, I suppose they are welcome to have their stupid, pathetically innane, and completely wrong theories. (more…)
What makes a great hacker?
The last couple of years I’ve been blessed to have an opportunity to rediscover my “roots” at work. More specifically, I’ve been able to return to programming after spending many years in infrastructure support and design. (more…)