Category: Geek

Stripping Down

Although my earlier attempt at quietening my gaming system failed miserably, it’s finally now one tenth as noisy as it was before. It’s still not exactly complete silence, but it’s like an empty library in comparison to what it used to be.

How did I do it? It was rather simple, actually — I just ripped two of the three hard drives out. One of them had been acting up lately, going through bursts where it would suddenly power down and back up again. No data had been lost, but I don’t really trust it anymore. The other one was an ancient 12G drive, and the only reason it was even still in there was because it was the boot drive and removing it would have required reinstalling all of the OSes, which is moot now.

Plus, removing the drives removed the need for a couple power splitters and one IDE cable, so the cabling isn’t quite so chaotic inside. I also discovered that I was using a 40-pin cable on the remaining drive, so switching in an 80-pin cable should get it up to full speed. The video card doesn’t have to split its power with a drive anymore, which will hopefully help with some strange video driver crashes. And without the other drives, there will be less heat generated. Ripping out all this stuff has made the system the quietest, coolest, and most stable it’s been in years. Damn, I should have done this a long time ago…

Of course, now I have to reinstall everything and I’m about 40G shorter on space (with 100 left), but I can live with that. I just won’t reinstall Linux on it, which hadn’t been getting much use anyway. I also won’t both reinstalling Win98SE, since pretty much everything I have works under XP now, and the few that didn’t (Pod, Daggerfall) aren’t too important anymore.

The New Sound

Out of all of my systems, one of the components that I’ve upgraded the *least* over the last 11 years is the sound card. I first got an SB16 way back in the mid-’90s and continued to use it alone until a couple years ago, when the lack of ISA slots in a new motherboard forced an upgrade to an SBLive. Even then, the SB16 continued to live on in my server box. The sound card is just one of those parts that I never really felt an urgent need to upgrade. It produces sound…what more do I need? Whereas the clarity of a new video card’s higher resolutions or the speed of a new processor are easy to appreciate, the subtleties of a different sound are harder to quantify to a tone-deaf musical ignoramus like me.

Nonetheless, upgrade time has come again and a shiny new Audigy 2 ZS has kicked the SBLive out and down the hand-me-down chain into the server box. The reasons are somewhat more practical than audible, though: the old SB16 in the server box was simply annoying the hell out of me.
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Not You Again

InstallShield rears its ugly head once again. There’s a new version of one of our products, so of course I have to go back and update all the version numbers, filenames, etc…

That’s easy enough, except that when I went to save all the changes and export them back to text files for source control, I got the dreaded “87: Error in exporting tables” message. I had run into this error on Server 2003, but everything had been fine when I did changes under XP. Except that apparently XP SP2 broke InstallShield 8. Sigh…

Fortunately there’s a workaround using a tool called ORCA from Microsoft. All I had to do was load the InstallShield project in ORCA, delete a table that’s causing the problem, and resave the project. Except that when I tried to select the table, ORCA crashed…

AAAAAAUGGGHHH.

Numbers Are Fun

Out of curiosity, I tried to break down all of the hits this site has ever received (except a couple months where I lost the client and referrer data) and see what kinds of categories they fell in to. Out of 132,046 hits:

People I Know Personally: 10.5%
Myself: 10.6%
Web Spiders: 28.9%
Directed Here By Search Engines: 30.2%
RSS Aggregators: 4.5%
Bandwidth Thieves: 0.3%
IIS Backdoor Attempts: 5.7%
Proxy/Mail Relay Exploit Attempts: 0.2%

There Is No Escape

Ugh, I’m starting to get spam in my e-mail at the office now. I’m not sure how this account was discovered since it’s only used within a fairly small circle of people: coworkers, and a very small handful of vendors and customers. Spyware or viruses grabbing address books off of infected systems, perhaps…

Unfortunately since it’s Lotus Notes I can’t install a filter myself, and we turned over control of the e-mail system to the head office, so hopefully they’ll do something about it…

Missing A Foot

My recent trip to Edmonton was the heaviest use my iBook has seen as an actual laptop. Although it performed admirably enough, after getting back home and putting it back in its usual spot I noticed something was slightly off. One of the little rubber feet went missing somewhere along the way and now it rocks slightly when typing and slides a bit when opening the latch.

Although there are apparently replacement kits available, they’re awfully overpriced for silly little pieces of rubber. Ah well, at least it’s properly broken-in now…

The iBook also finally has an AirPort Extreme card now, and more memory. Lacking wireless on the trip wasn’t too big a deal since there was plenty of wired connectivity where needed, but it’s still nice to have the option. The memory upgrade (from 256 to 640 megs total now) is a far bigger improvement. Previously, running multiple apps (and there’s generally always at least Firefox in the background) would introduce long delays as it swapped its brains out, but everything is much more responsive now.

Copy Nonprotection

A while back I ripped a bunch of the games I own to ISO images so that I could play them without having to swap actual physical CDs around, but there were a couple (Beyond Divinity, Thief 3) that didn’t want to work that way. It turns out that the copy protection on some newer games specifically checks for the presence of certain CD emulation drivers and, if it finds them, refuses to let you run the game.

The purpose of this copy protection is of course to make life difficult for pirates, but the great irony is that it actually has the opposite effect. This form of copy protection has absolutely no effect on the pirates because they circulate hacked versions or patches that remove the copy protection entirely. Who then, actually runs into these conflicts between the protection and other programs? Someone who still has the copy protection on the disc: the person who bought it legitimately.

So, copy protection doesn’t stop the pirates. It frustrates the legitimate users who actually dare to use their systems in unconventional ways (and many who simply have hardware conflicts with the unusual tricks copy protection schemes use). And the game developers, being technically-minded people, certainly know that this is the case. Why does it even continue to exist, then?

It’s actually rather simple: it’s a management issue.

Imagine that you’re a middle manager at a game publishing house. You know that piracy is eating away at your sales, and by jove, somebody ought to Do Something About It. Along come other companies who have developed their own advanced copy protection techniques and they say hey, we *can* Do Something About It, you just have to buy our XYZProtect scheme. Now, the next time one of the development houses you control finishes a game, you can tell them that they have to put this XYZProtect scheme on the disc and now you can sit back and feel accomplished, having Done Something About It.

After all, who’s going to oppose you? The development house? Though they know the futility of it, they’re not going to oppose you since they’re counting on you to promote and distribute the game. Your bosses? Solving problems like this is the only reason they even let you have this job. The game players? They’re certainly mad enough, but you’re not even in direct contact with them. Even if you were talking to them, they’d come across as lunatics. They could argue until they’re blue in the face about technical problems and uselessness and inconvenience and all that, but to your ears all it sounds like is that they want you to Not Even Try To Do Something About It. Sheer madness! Your entire job is to Do Something About Stuff, after all.

Unfortunately, that entrenchment means that we’re just going to have to live with it for the forseeable future…

Powerless

And once again, fate has conspired to take away my servers while I was away on vacation… This time it was a power outage, as evidenced by the blinking clock in my bedroom.

All of my systems are set up to automatically boot into the appropriate OS, start the right services, etc., but there’s still one problem: when the power goes off, it stays off. Even if it’s only a five-second outage, the systems simply don’t come back on after the power is restored, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to control it. (One of my systems at work actually has the opposite problem: it can’t be powered off. A ‘shut down’ simply makes it reboot, so you have to use the main switch on the back.)

I’m tempted to finally get a UPS. Not to keep them on during an outage — they’re not exactly mission-critical servers — but just so that they *stay on* after it…

Need More Goat’s Blood

My iBook is being weird again. Well, some combination of the iBook and the rest of the network, anyway.

If I fetch a file from the Internet, I can get 300+ KB/s down to the Linux server. I can get 300+ KB/s down to the iBook. But if I transfer a file between the iBook and the Linux server, on the same switch, I get 4 KB/s.

It *used* to work just fine, so I’m not quite sure where the problem lies. While the transfer is in progress, the ‘frame error’ count on the network interface on the Linux side increases, which generally indicates a hardware problem, but swapping around cables and ports doesn’t change anything. A second Linux box can talk to the first one just fine at full speed but is also slow with the iBook, which would seem to put the blame on the iBook side of things, but the iBook is fine when talking to the Internet at large. It happens under both OS X and Gentoo on the iBook, so it’s not something in the OS. It affects Samba shares too, so it’s not FTP-specific either. Duplex settings are consistent.

I’m running out of ideas here… About the only other thing I’ve changed recently is the firmware on the router (a Linksys BEFW11S4), but this is supposed to be a stable version and the trouble didn’t start back then.

Too Much Quality

I’ve been trying to rip just the audio stream from each chapter of a DVD I have, but none of the tools I’ve tried so far (transcode, mplayer) seem to work, and just produce noise instead. The disc uses 48khz 24-bit PCM audio, but it keeps getting detected as 16-bit, and the programs don’t even seem to support 24-bit audio at all.

Maybe if I can at least get the raw PCM stream I can manually massage it into a usable form, but it looks like other useful conversion tools like ‘sox’ don’t support 24-bit audio either. Maybe I should just write a trivial app to just knock every third byte off…

Update: Worked around it by playing it in the DVD Player on the iBook and capturing the audio with WireTap (found via Matt). I’m still lacking an automated batch method, but this is good enough for the one chapter I really wanted for now.

Paranoia

I usually keep an ssh session open to my server at home, so I can check in on e-mail and such during the day, and every once in a while the connection breaks and I can’t get back in. My mind instantly starts conjuring up scenarios in which my server is being stolen, or the apartment is burning to the ground, or hackers have locked me out of my own systems, but after quickly popping back home over lunch to check on it, it’s inevitably just a cable connection problem, hardware crash, or power outage (today’s culprit).

But what if my systems really had been stolen?
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