The Mothership

Yesterday the memory upgrade for my laptop arrived and I installed it as soon as I got home, taking it from 2GB to 4GB. Fortunately, upgrading the memory on an MBP is fairly easy, only requiring the removal of three standard screws underneath the battery.

It was mainly meant for a (now postponed) trip so I could use VMware Fusion effectively, but the difference was immediately noticeable when I went to fire up WoW as well. Normally, running WoW on my laptop grinds and chugs and stutters a lot, mainly because I always have Firefox open as well, and together the two just use up too much memory. Now though, it’s smooth as silk, with WoW loading only a little bit slower than it does on my desktop machine.

I received a jury summons a few weeks ago, to be held tomorrow, but I called in today as instructed and was informed that it had been canceled and I was no longer needed. It’s actually kind of a shame; I was a bit curious about the whole process. Maybe I’ll just go sit in on some cases instead.

It was also a bit of a surprise that it had taken this long to get a summons (the first in my life), but I guess we just don’t have enough crime…

I recently upgraded my server to Ubuntu 9.10, and it finally fixed one thing that had been bugging me ever since I built this system: the audio drivers. The default drivers that came with Ubuntu wouldn’t properly set the line-in volume, so I had to go and get a newer version from Realtek’s site. But, every time there was a system update that refreshed the driver modules, I’d have to reinstall the newer drivers and reboot again. Fortunately, now the default drivers work perfectly fine as of this release, and I’ll hopefully never need to build them separately again.

It also updated MythTV, which was a bit of a surprise and I needed to go get a newer build of the OS X frontend. That took a while to get working because it would just suddenly stop running immediately after launching it, until I figured out that I had to run the main executable directly with a ‘-r’ option to reset which theme it wanted to use.

All of the upgrades and reinstallation are done, and I now have a zippy essentially-new machine running Windows 7.

The most obvious change in 7 is in the taskbar. It uses large icons instead of a small icon and window title, all open windows of the same type are always consolidated into a single entry on the taskbar (previously it would only consolidate them once it started running out of room), and you can pin a running program to the taskbar in order to launch it again later. It’s basically a lot more like OS X’s Dock now.

The Explorer has also changed a bit. There’s no more ‘Explore’ option off the computer icon’s context menu, which is kind of annoying. And they’ve removed the tree view from the Explorer windows (but you can reenable it in the folder options), instead using the sidebar to emphasize a bunch of standard locations like your home directory, your music directory, network servers, etc. Which is also a lot like how Finder works…

Otherwise, things have gone fairly smoothly, and I haven’t really had any problems that I can attribute directly to Windows 7 itself. I still have to poke around and explore what else might be new, though.

With Windows 7 still downloading at the office, I decided to do the hardware upgrades tonight, even though I didn’t quite hit my goal of finishing King’s Bounty first.

It actually went a bit smoother than expected, with only two major hiccups. The first was when I went to install a new 120mm fan to improve airflow, when I suddenly realized that I didn’t know which direction it was supposed to face… Fortunately it’s the same style as a couple other fans in the system, so I was able to deduce the direction from that, and confirmed it with a sheet of paper. The second was getting the BIOS settings right, since this motherboard doesn’t seem to do a very good job of autodetecting all the right settings. It only took a little bit of fiddling to get it up to the proper 2.83GHz speed, though.

It’s practically an entirely new machine at this point, with a new CPU (Q9550 quad-core, replacing an E6600 dual-core), more memory (from 2 to 6GB), bigger drives (1.25TB total), and a new video card (Radeon 4870). It is actually missing something, though — I yanked out the Audigy 2 sound card I’d been using before. Creative’s support for newer OSes with older cards has been a bit lacking, so I’ll take a chance on the onboard sound for now.

Now I just have to put some OSes back on it…

Woo, the new parts I ordered arrived today, much earlier than expected. But I can’t actually install them yet.

I only want to crack the case open once, so I have to install everything at the same time. But if I install the other hard drives, I’ll lose the OS and have to reinstall it. But Win7 isn’t ready yet for me, so I’d have to either reinstall Vista or restore the old install from the current drive, and there’s not much point in wasting time on that when I’d have to do a new install in a week now anyway.

So, for now the parts all sit on my kitchen table, taunting me, tempting me…

Over 200 pings to the first gateway,
Average round trip time before replacing cable modem: around 1100 ms (max of 5000-8000 ms)
Average round trip time after replacing cable modem: 11.8 ms (max of 295 ms)

After talking with Shaw support, they’ve decided that it’s probably best if they just replace my cable modem with a newer one. They can’t really say if it’s the specific cause of my problems, but it’s a Motorola CyberSurfr, a positively ancient model at this point, and they’ve been trying to get people off of them anyway. I’ve been using this one for over ten years now, and the tech was surprised I’d still had one for that long, since most people experience problems and swap it out long before that point.

So, tomorrow I say goodbye to my old friend as I drop him off downtown. It may be old, but it served me well for an awfully long time.

With Windows 7 being released soon (less than two weeks away now, for us MSDN members), I figured it was time to consider upgrades for my main PC, so that I don’t have to mess with hardware changes post-install. Some upgrades are already essentially here — with the recent order of my backup drives, I’ve got a couple spare drives with plenty of space for games and apps, and I have another 4GB of RAM that I’d snuck into that same order.

I’d thought about upgrading the video card, but it felt a bit early since it wasn’t so long ago that I’d installed this one and my previous card lasted almost four years. But then I realized that, um, April 2007 was over two years ago, dumbass… It doesn’t feel like I’ve had it that long though, for some reason. The CPU is also starting to be a bottleneck in some cases too (I’m looking at you, GTA4), so it could use a bit of a bump as well.

I don’t really feel like going all-out with a completely new system though, especially since a Core i7 CPU would also require a new motherboard and expensive memory, so this is only an interim upgrade and the next one will be the big one. I’m going for good performance/price ratios rather than raw performance, so I finally settled on getting a Q9550 CPU and a Radeon 4870 video card. They should easily tide me over at least a couple more years.

I’m also going to try to add another 120mm fan into the case. The drives run a little bit warm, and these new parts aren’t going to make things any cooler…

As I briefly mentioned before, streaming video has been the main victim of my recent network problems. It’s been an interesting opportunity to examine just how the different services are handling it:

YouTube: Videos load more slowly than usual, and I can’t start watching them right away. Given enough time, though, it does eventually load the whole thing, so I just have to pause it and wait until a decent amount is preloaded. A.

Google Video: Likewise, it’s slow to load but eventually gets there, though a bit slower overall than YouTube, I think. It just suffers its usual usability and quality problems, being the abandoned orphan of Google’s video services. A-.

Viddler: The loading bar sometimes stops and gives up in the middle of a video, causing playback to stop when it gets there. You can get it started again by clicking near that spot on the bar, though, and skipping around like that is fairly robust in general, so there’s at least a workaround. B-.

Dailymotion: Unfortunately, the loading bar stops frequently here, and seeking around its progress bar isn’t nearly as robust. Trying to click outside the already-loaded areas usually just gets me a “There were technical problems, reload this page” error. In order to watch the video, I’d need the entire thing to load in one shot, and I failed to achieve that in what must have been at least a dozen tries on a short, 4 minute video. For not even letting me get to a significant chunk of the video, they get an F.

I just had my first ever compact fluorescent bulb burn out, after being installed for…I don’t even remember how long now, but it’s been years. I was confused at first because there was no flash or pop or anything; it just didn’t come on, and initially I thought there was something wrong with the switch.

It’s the first time I’ve had to change a light bulb at all in years now, after switching over to CF bulbs.

My Internet performance at home has had these occasional bizarre hiccups lately. In the above example, not a single packet in a string of 100 pings between me and the cable modem head end was lost, but just look at the latencies. There’s no physical-level problem with the data getting through, but the gateway’s holding on to packets for up to five seconds?! Good luck playing WoW under conditions like that…

After having bought a pair of 1TB drives for my new Linux box, I now have a set of three 1.5TB drives on the way to me. Damn, that’s a lot of storage.

I was actually waiting for 2TB drives to come down in price, but two 1.5TB drives together are still cheaper than a single 2TB drive. These ones will be used to complete the rest of my backup plan — right now I only have a 500GB external drive for my Linux box’s backups, and it’s 95% full. And that’s doing a straight mirror, without any room for daily differentials and rotating sets. Two drives will be used for that so I can keep one offsite, and the third drive will be for the Windows box’s backups.

Then, I can take the current backup drives and swap them into the gaming PC at the same time I upgrade to Windows 7, which should take me from 480GB to 1.2TB on there. Then I’ll never have to uninstall anything ever again…for a couple years, at least…

It’s a good thing I gave my mother my old router, because the new one hasn’t been working out as well as hoped. It works fine for a while, but then eventually it suddenly loses all of its settings, reverting to defaults and making me restore them from a backup. If it ever happens while I’m away, it’ll leave my wireless network completely open until I can get back and fix it.

It’s hard to tell whether it’s a problem with DD-WRT or with the router hardware, though. I’m leaning towards the latter, as apparently one possible cause of symptoms like this is if the flash memory goes bad, but it’s still hard to prove what the problem really is. And it’s not like Linksys will support a third-party firmware under their warranty, and I really don’t want to shell out another $130 just to test on another router that might well have the same problem.

For now I think I’ll revert back to the official firmware and see if it has trouble as well. Tomato was extremely reliable on my old router, but it doesn’t support this model.

Dell had its regular end-of-quarter sale recently, and I couldn’t resist picking up their 2408WFP monitor. It’s normally fairly expensive, but at around 40% off with the sale, it was a better deal than a lot of plain old mid-level monitors. It also fulfills a few needs of mine, as not only is it bigger (24″ versus 20″), but it has HDCP support and an HDMI input, and also two DVI inputs and a set of component inputs. Too many of my consoles were languishing on sub-optimal inputs already.

I just got it and set it up today, and so far it’s just as good as I’d hoped. It’s about as big as I’d want for the distance I sit away from it since it already pretty much fills my view, the PS3 looks amazing on the HDMI input, I can put both PCs on separate DVI inputs, the 360 can get the VGA input to itself and not go through the KVM, and the Wii can finally use component instead of crummy old S-video.

The only caveat so far is that for the Wii, I have to set the monitor’s scaling mode to ‘Fill’ in order to get a proper widescreen display. But I don’t want it set to that for the PS3, or it scales the 1920×1080 mode up to 1920×1200, stretching things vertically a bit, so the PS3 has to be set to 1:1 or ‘Aspect’ mode. Making sure it’s on the right mode is a minor annoyance, but I can leave it on Aspect 99% of the time since I haven’t been using the Wii much lately anyway.

Edit: Hmmm, I can see some backlight bleed in the corners on the right-hand side when the screen is dark. I don’t think I’ll do anything about it, though; I’ve heard of people returning their screens six or seven times in a row before they got one that didn’t bleed at all, and it’s only really noticeable when the screen is completely dark, so it’s not really that big a deal.

Ubuntu 9.04 was just released, so I upgraded over the weekend and it went fairly smoothly except for two old friends: the sound drivers had to be rebuilt from the ones from Realtek’s site like I had to do before, and Amarok.

Oh, Amarok… This Ubuntu release includes the 2.0 version for the first time, but as far as I can tell, it’s actually a huge step back. There’s an all-new, pretter interface, but a lot of functionality seems to be missing, or is so well-hidden that I couldn’t figure out how to use it. In particular, all of my carefully-crafted smart playlists were gone, with no apparent way to recreate them. It also didn’t help that it kept crashing on me, especially while trying to import my old collection.

I was disappointed enough in it that I tried out some other programs as well, like RhythmBox, but they didn’t even recognize my iPod, since support apparently hasn’t been added for 4th gen Nanos in the library it uses yet.

In the end I removed Amarok 2 entirely and actually went back and completely rebuilt Amarok 1.4.10 from source. It’s literally been years now since I compiled a major program like this manually (just minor utilities), and it took a while just to figure out what it required and get the packages needed to satisfy all of the dependencies, but I finally seem to have Amarok working again.

I’ll be trying to set up Internet access for my mother soon, so I went out today to buy a wireless router for her. But as I was researching, I wondered hey, why should she get a better router than me, since most of them are Wireless N and gigabit nowadays and mine wasn’t. So I ended up buying a new one for myself instead and she can have my old one. Hey, she won’t know the difference…

I wound up picking up the Linksys WRT310N, since it’s the easiest one to get hold of around here that’s still hackable. I would have preferred something like the WRT610N, with its dual radios and USB support, but it’s still a work-in-progress for custom firmwares. The 310N’s not supported in Tomato though, so I’m back to using DD-WRT instead. It doesn’t really matter now that DD-WRT has bandwidth monitoring as well, since that was why I switched to Tomato way back when.

The performance is definitely improved over the old one. Wireless, I can get around 40-50 Mbps, versus maybe 25-30 before. And wired I can do 160-200 Mbps, which isn’t coming close to maxing out the Ethernet speed like I could before, but is still a decent improvement over the old 100 Mbps. I might actually be bottlenecked by the SSH encryption speed there. It’ll take a while to see how the reliability is, though. It’s not on the 5 GHz band since I need compatibility with 11g, so I’m still subject to all the same old possible interference. It’ll be nice if I can reliably stream MythTV…

I think I finally figured out the problem I was having with syncing my iPod via Amarok. The key seems to be that some other KDE services need to be running in order for the iPod to be fully identified properly. Without those services, it shows up but gets treated like a generic, unidentified iPod and there’s no history for it to sync against.

The thing that made it inconsistent was that I wasn’t always running the full KDE environment. Sometimes I’d export it via X11 to my laptop, and after the recent reinstall I was running Gnome instead of KDE for a while. I should be okay as long as I keep using KDE as my desktop and always run it at the console, which shouldn’t be too big a deal as it’s about the only thing I use the console for nowadays anyway.

Subject: Be satisfied for life!

You know, most DMs fulfill that kind of Wish request by doing something like killing you instantly…

Subject: Enter the New Year without ED dysfunction

ATM machine. PIN number. ED dysfunction.

Subject: Your dream is reality You have 70% cut off in our software shop

Er, which 70% of me do you intend to cut off?

Subject: Amaze your gf with your new dimension

Hey, I have enough trouble navigating through three dimensions already.

Subject: Embarassed over what you have in your pants?

I swear, officer, I have no idea how that squirrel got in there.

After all the trouble I had with various hard drive enclosures earlier, I’ve finally found one that works well: the Antec MX-100. No problems at all with reliability, speed, or physical construction quality with it so far.

I ordered two, so that I can finally put my offsite backup plan into effect. They’ll each have the same size hard drive in them, formatted as an encrypted filesystem and set up to be the same mount point, but only one of them will be hooked up at a time. The daily backup script will sync everything to the drive, and then once a month or so I’ll disconnect the drive, swap in the other one, and take the old drive to the office and stick it in a desk drawer. That way I’ll be covered even if fire, theft, or some other catastrophic event takes out my system and the currently-attached backup drive at the same time.

Unfortunately they only support SATA drives, and I still have a couple of 500GB and 750GB PATA drives that are still perfectly good, so maybe I’ll throw them into the gaming box. Or put one in one of the sucky old enclosures and hook it up to the PS3. Or play Frisbee…