Archive for General
08.15.05
Posted in General at 5:14 pm by jw
Saturday saw my wife and I head out to the stores again. Passing PC Club in Robinson I managed to convince her to go look for cases for the home theater box I had sitting on the living room floor in an ancient beige brick case which she absolutely detested. Well, she picked one she liked and I randomly chose one of the two colors available to bring home. Lucky I chose randomly as I ended up getting the opposite color I chose, but that’s the beauty of not caring! Being a Micro-ATX case, I also got a new motherboard and a wireless keyboard+mouse combo in “stylish” black and silver to complete the system into one which would be aesthetically appeasing to the boss of the house.
I always enjoy building new PCs so I dived into putting this one together and found to my disappointment that it didn’t boot first try. Pulling the components out one by one it slowly dawned on me that the CPU I was using (an ancient Duron 650) just wasn’t compatible with the motherboard that was trying to feed it a 266MHz FSB. Luckily I still had my old Athlon XP 2800+ sitting in the cupboard which did support a faster FSB and I had the 1G of DIMMs that I’d pulled out of my wife’s PC earlier when I upgraded her to 2G. Once I had all that together, the machine worked first try. Got XP up and running pretty quickly (I’m so practiced at that now it’s just not funny) and now I’ve a home theater PC in a nice little box that sits in the component pile and gives good 5.1 surround sound for any xvid stuff or games I want to play viagra for sale uk.
Sunday, with all the new HDD space on my home machine I needed to find something to do with it, so I set about destroying my Windows Vista (beta) install and dropping on Gentoo. This wasn’t a reflection on Vista itself (I need to look at it for work reasons) but just a practical case of which partition I didn’t need for playing around and I didn’t really want to mess with Partition Magic in creating some new free space.
As usual, I went with a stage 1 install because it’s way more fun that way. I like compiling every last thing that goes onto my desktop – even the compiler itself! Sure it takes a little while longer (gcc and glibc aren’t small) but it’s a good feeling to know that exactly the same compiler settings and compiler versions were used for every component in the system. So, a few hours later I had gentoo up and running. Unlike some of my previous experiences the whole bootloader experience went without a hitch and I even got vesafb working to give me a bazillion lines and columns of text on my console screen.
Building X11+KDE took a fair bit longer and still wasn’t finished after I’d finished watching “Phantom of the Opera” (ehh – prefer the stage version) and “Shrek 2” (love it) so I went to bed and let it run overnight. If my UPS power readings (see links on the right) are anything to go by, the build finished in the wee hours of the morning so sitting up waiting wouldn’t have been a great idea. Guess I finish playing with it tonight, trying to get the ATI drivers for my X850 going and other fun stuff.
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08.12.05
Posted in General at 2:17 am by jw
Well, exceeding 1TB was exciting. I had a small problem though with the install, and it’s one that seems to recur every time I try it – the nVidia IDE drivers are broken. Under load they just crap out and kill the OS, or even worse just write crap to the disk. I don’t know how something like that got through QA but I keep believing that next revisions might be better however every time I install them I get bitten again!
This time I was moving 160G of captured video to the new HDD (don’t you love digital video cams?) using KillCopy and it was just dying after only a half gig or so. Well, killcopy does stress the system (because it’s a damn fast copy utility) so I tried again with plain old xcopy and got the same thing.
Only one thing for it – into device manager and install the standard Microsoft IDE drivers for everything, which work acceptably well on my nForce4 board. Changed them over easily enough and rebooted only to find that XP decided to put my main SATA drive in PIO mode – with hdtach telling me the throughput was something below 10M/s at 100% CPU load which is completely unacceptable.
So… back to google to find something useful and after some quick hunting I found the solution at this helpful web site. To summarize I opened up the registry editor, went to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Control\ Class\ {4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} and fished around for the blahblahDataChecksum values which I promptly deleted. On the next reboot – magically DMA mode 6 and hdtach reporting 65M/s sustained, 140M/s burst at approximately 0% CPU usage. Much, much better!
So, I set the copy going and went to bed. It finished eventually. Even with fast drives, 160G is a lot of data to move around.
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Posted in General at 2:02 am by jw
Onfolio is another cute utility program I’ve found useful enough to go out and buy. It’s a great tool for searching the web and keeping information that you know you’re going to use later – especially those annoying sites that tend to come and go seemingly without rhyme or reason.
My favorite uses for this tool so far have been:
- Storing web info – whether it be an EQ2 walkthrough, a nice article on a political action I find curious or someone else’s posting on a message board I may want to keep for incriminating evidence later, the web capture utility does a great job of managing full pages for later offline viewing.
- One of the best RSS readers around. This tool will aggregate a bunch of different RSS feeds into a newspaper format for quick browsing. You can even flag stuff you want to read later and it dumps it into a special folder for you to pick through when you have time.
I’ve used a few different offline web storage engines before and none have had the polish and ease of use that Onfolio has given. No – I’m not being paid to say this. I just like to give props to a good product when I see it.
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08.10.05
Posted in General at 10:55 pm by jw
Blew past 1TB of storage with another 300G drive turning up today. Amazing how that stuff fills up.
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Posted in General at 1:52 pm by jw
Creating dynamic sigs for phpbb is rather difficult, mainly due to the fun “security” features in phpbb. First of all, for obvious reasons, it doesn’t let you include server side scripting within your sig text. That rules out most efforts to create dynamic text, which leaves you with the use of a dynami image. The problem with that is that phpbb is all nazi when parsing [img] tags and prevents you from using anything for an image other than something ending in .gif, .jpg or .png. Well, there’s an easy solution – create a directory on your web server called “sig.png” and mess with the index.php file for that directory. Phpbb (how do you capitalize that at the start of a sentence?) accepts it because it thinks it is looking at an image (the URL ends in .png) but in reality it’s hitting the index.php script for the directory. Fun times!
In my case, for a first pass I just wanted the latest blog title to show up in the image I created, so the script ended up looking like this:
<?php
// Spit out headers
header(“Content-type: image/png”);
header(“Expires: “.gmdate(“D, d M Y H:i:s”, (time()+900)) . ” GMT”);
// Config Files
include (“../blog/wp-config.php”);
// Blog entry
$posts_list = wp_get_recent_posts(1);
foreach ($posts_list as $entry) {
$choice = $entry[‘post_title’];
}
$choice = “Latest blog post: ” . $choice;
// Load a random quote
$font_name = “arial.ttf”;
$font_size = 9;
// Image Settings
$x_size = 400;
$y_size = 18;
// Calculate starting point of text (horizontal)
$line_width = imagettfbbox($font_size, 0, $font_name, $choice);
$x_start = 5;
$y_start = 13;
$max_width = $line_width[2];
// Create the image resource & assign colours.
$im = imagecreatetruecolor($x_size, $y_size);
$back = imagecolorallocate($im, 220, 220, 255);
imagefilledrectangle($im, 0, 0, $x_size-1, $y_size-1, $back);
$border = imagecolorallocate($im, 128, 128, 128);
imagerectangle($im, 0, 0, $x_size-1, $y_size-1, $border);
// Write the text on to the image.
$textcolor = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);
imagettftext($im, $font_size, 0, $x_start, $y_start, $textcolor, $font_name, $choice);
// Create and then destroy the image
imagepng($im);
@ImagePNG($im,$cache_filename) ;
imagedestroy($im);
?>
Will, it works. I guess I’ll be putting some more stuff in there sometime in the future, but without the ability to create image maps, it’s probably going to be rather entertaining getting anything too useful in the script. I guess my next avenue for playing is to see what web browsers do when the Content-Type header doesn’t match the apparent file extension.
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