Category: Geek

The Perils Of Being Proprietary

I’m not much of a shutterbug, but I had some older pics that I figured I should upload to Flickr, just for kicks. It was a tad tougher than expected.

The pics in question were taken over seven years ago, and I asked for digital copies on CD as well. I hadn’t dealt with PhotoCDs before, so I didn’t really know what to expect or ask for, and I wound up getting a disc with the photos in Kodak’s FlashPix format. Flickr, of course, doesn’t exactly want them in that format…
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Stay Of Execution

I was just about to give up completely on Firefox on my iBook. Flash applets would either perform poorly or do horrible things to the mouse focus, it would often chew up all available CPU time after a while, and I was still stuck with version 1.0.7 since the 1.5 series would reliably freeze on me within an hour or two.

Fortunately, I gave Firefox 2 RC2 a spin for a few days, and things are much improved. The tab freeze doesn’t happen, Flash performs better (about the same as in Safari now), and…it still chews some CPU, but not as much as it used to.

Catchup

I often run across URLs that I can’t check right away, or want to come back to later. Since I’m not necessarily at the same machine I want to check it from later on, I throw them into a file called ‘urls’ on my file server.

I just realized that that file is now over 1200 lines long.

I’ll be surprised if half of them are even still there…

Spammers Must Die

It had been so long since I had received any spam over ICQ that I had forgotten how much of a problem it once was, but it appears to be back in full force. At least once a day or so I receive an authorization request from an unknown account and I have to look it up in the ICQ whitepages to see if it’s legitimate first. Usually there’s random junk in its profile, so I block it.

Except that’s not the end of it. They’ll continue sending authorization requests every few seconds, and although the client no longer prompts me once it’s blocked, it still fills up the activity log window. There’s often spam text in the authorization request message itself. They switch account numbers often, so you get reprompted and have to block the new accounts. And they keep sending the requests even when you’re offline. When I got up this morning, so many requests had been queued that Fire couldn’t handle it and I couldn’t even stay logged in; I had to log in at the office with a different client to clear them out, one at a time.

It’s almost enough to make me block *all* requests from non-buddies and make people contact me by other means first to be added. IMing is supposed to make communication *more* convenient though, not less…

The Fastest I’ve Ever Voided A Warranty

I finally figured it was about time to upgrade to an 802.11g router now that I’m using the wireless on the iBook more and more, but it was with some hesitation. I wanted a nice, stable wireless router, but the impression I had been getting from some of the forums I visit is that none of the various consumer-level brands and models were really all that reliable. Some people had no problems at all, but many others had stories of lockups and other strange behaviours under load.

There was a recommendation that often came up when people had these complaints, though: try a third-party firmware. I managed to find a compatible Linksys model today (not all revisions will work) and immediately loaded DD-WRT onto it fairly painlessly, and now I just have to use it and see how well it works.

Besides the (hopeful) stability, it adds a few other features I’ll use:

– Static DHCP assignment, so I can use fixed IP addresses (which makes port forwarding a lot easier) without having to configure each system.
– Local DNS resolution for those DHCP assignments, so I can refer to each system by its name without having to set up the local ‘hosts’ table on each system.
– QoS features, so time-sensitive game data doesn’t get buried by other traffic.

Save Me, Superman!

I bought a scanner a while back to help with my mess of papers and documents, and then it collected dust in a corner for a while. One of the other reasons I got it though, was so that I could scan some of my comic collection, for convenience and long-term archival. Unfortunately it’s probably one of those ideas that was better in theory than in practice.

It takes about two or three minutes per page to do the basic scanning, after accounting for proper positioning attempts, previews, the full scan, the slowness of the software and disk processing, and trying to handle things carefully. That just gets me a bunch of extremely large raw images that still need to be postprocessed, though. Stuff like the colour curves and black level adjustment could be skipped if I’m not feeling too picky, but at the very least it has to be cropped, rescaled to a manageable size, compressed, and checked for gross errors or aliasing patterns.

For now I’ll probably only bother doing this on my very favourite and rarer, hard-to-replace issues. For others, I may as well let someone else do all the work and just find some pirate scans online… :-P

Partially Surprised

I didn’t even know about today’s announcements from Apple until I saw a “hey, it’s starting” forum post somewhere. The cases and Hi-Fi are kind of underwhelming and are really just more expensive and underperforming accessories.

The new Mini is a bit more interesting to me though. I’ve been thinking of putting together a home theatre PC for a while now, and this Mini slides into that role fairly nicely. The only sticking point is that it still doesn’t have video capture built-in, so it wouldn’t entirely replace my MythTV server, but it could act as a front end to it. It’s also not clear if it’ll be quite powerful enough to decode HD video, but that’s more of a future concern and there are still a bunch of other unsolved problems surrounding HD anyway.

Then it’s just a question of whether a home theatre computer is worth the cost…

Backups, Finally

A new hard drive is on the way, to resolve my current disk woes. Apparently it’s been generating these bad block errors since at least October, so it’s not exactly dying rapidly, but better safe than sorry.

I was tempted to just go ahead and upgrade the whole system while I was at it since it’s now on the lower end of gaming performance. Especially with the new monitor and its much larger number of pixels to fill, which often requires me to turn down or disable higher-quality video options. After putting together a list of parts though, a bit of sticker shock convinced me that I can probably make do with what I have for a bit longer yet…

There is one thing I can do now that I should have done long ago, though: put a proper backup solution in place.
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Beware of Piles

The mouse I was using at the office had a rather difficult-to-press mouse wheel, which became a big problem when I switched back over to doing more Unix development, since it’s used so often for pasting. Fortunately, like any good IT department, we have a big pile of spares to choose from.

Unfortunately I didn’t notice that the first one I took back to my desk had a *completely* broken scroll wheel — it couldn’t be pressed in at all.

I double-checked to make sure that the second one had a good feel to the click before taking it back to my office. It wasn’t until about 15 minutes later that I noticed that whenever I switched to one application, one of its subwindows would always scroll to the bottom of its list of items. I tried to scroll back up in it, but it immediately went right back down again. Turns out that its scroll wheel was reporting as if it was constantly scrolling downwards, no matter what I did.

So, back to the pile for another replacement. Fortunately this one worked well; the wheel clicked nicely, and scrolled properly. Except that over the course of a few hours, it became apparent that the wheel’s click might be a little *too* sensitive. Wheel movements meant merely to scroll would sometimes inadvertently register as a click, pasting whatever junk I happened to have in the clipboard right into the middle of some source code.

I’m still not sure there’s a single good mouse in that pile…

Things Fall Apart

The reliability of hardware can unfortunately be an unpredictable phenomenon, and it seems I am bitten once again. About a month ago, my Slackware box would suddenly start ‘going nuts’ every few days, for lack of a better term; network services would no longer launch, common commands could not be found, and directory listings would produce garbage.

(Warning: boring techno-geekery and personal woe to follow.)
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Misrouted

I’m starting to get a little sick of this Linksys router (a BEFWS11). Functionally, it has pretty much all of the features I need; the problem is that it’s horribly unstable in certain cases.

The main source of trouble seems to be the wireless support. If I enable the wireless interface, it’s only a matter of time (anywhere from a few hours to a week or so) before the router just freezes up and has to be power cycled. It’s annoying to have to manually enable it whenever I want to take the iBook away from the desk and have to remember to disable it again afterwards.

It also seems to fall apart under heavy data streaming. I went to a site to watch some streaming music videos, and as soon as each one ended, the router would go dead and have to be rebooted.

The latest firmware updates seem to have reduced the frequency of the problems, but it still happens more often than I like. I can live with it for now, but the next time I buy one I suspect it won’t be the same brand…

I’ve Seen Better

So Longhorn finally has an official name, and…I’m finding it difficult to care. What’s supposed to be so great about it?

– A new OS interface. Whoop-dee-do. I spend most of the time within some game’s own interface anyways.

– The WinFS filesystem and its better organizational structure. Oh wait, they pulled that one out…

– The WinFX APIs. This really only affects us at the office, but since we want maximum compatibility and Win32 isn’t going away, we won’t be switching over to these anytime soon.

– More DRM ‘features.’ Oh yeah, I always wanted more restrictions placed on how I can use my computer…

XP was decent because it was the first NT-based Windows that was officially supported as a gaming platform, and it’s actually been fairly stable. Vista seems like a fairly minor bump and just doesn’t offer me anything interesting enough to make it worth upgrading.

I Got The Power

Woohoo, I finally got around to getting a replacement power supply for my XP box, and things are finally back to normal — I no longer have to underclock the CPU by 25% and I can take the GeForce 2 out and put the Radeon 9700 Pro back in.

Those two factors alone had been making quite a difference. After the power supply started deteriorating, I had to cut the resolution of a lot of games down to 800×600 and had to go from having every advanced graphics option in World of Warcraft turned on, to turning almost all of them off just to make it playable. I installed GTR while it was crippled and was getting 15-25 FPS, but after restoring it, it shot up to 90-100+ FPS, enabling me to turn on higher levels of detail.

I keep getting tempted to put together a nice, new Athlon 64 / PCI-Express system, but now that I’ve got this one fixed up again, I think it’ll last me at least another year or two.