The Mothership

But It Still Doesn’t Remember Where I Left My Keys

heide — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:41:08 +0000

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.

Aw, I Don’t Get To Go To Court

heide — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:14:56 +0000

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…

About Time

heide — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:49:55 +0000

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.

You Got Your Mac In My Windows!

heide — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 15:51:22 +0000

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.

Impatience

heide — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:42:31 +0000

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…

The Anticipation Is Killing Me

heide — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:35:01 +0000

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…

Numbers That Speak For Themselves

heide — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:33:20 +0000

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)

The End Of An Era

heide — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:32:09 +0000

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.

Where Did 2008 Go?

heide — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:48:31 +0000

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…

Latency Killed The Video Star

heide — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:07:50 +0000

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.