New XBOX Dashboard Experience Is A Legal Nightmare

... and by Legal Nightmare, I mean that I'm going to have nightmares because of the sheer unadulterated length of the EULA you need to accept before you can use the service.

It goes on for PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES ...

... well, you get the rough idea.

Toshiba Laptop Recovery Blank Screen

So I got a new laptop today (my old one is dying; the hard drive has bad blocks, so rather than just buy a new hard drive, I decided to get a swankier model and give away the old laptop as a gift once I've had some time to sit down and repair it).

Unfortunately, the only one that BestBuy could sell me was one which already had been mutilated by the Geek Squad. Given that I have no idea what they did to it, it's off to System Recovery land to explore and find out.

Unfortunately, every time I tried a Recovery and then booted up, it failed. It'd get through the progress bar screen, and then stop working.

Safe mode? It'd stop after loading crcdisk.sys.

Four different attempts (and several hours of messing around later), I finally got it to work.

I took out the flash card that was in the drive.

Motto of the story: If you're doing a recovery and it doesn't work, make sure you've not got any PCMCIA cards, flash cards, USB thumb drives or anything else like that plugged in which aren't part of the original system.

It's either that which fixed it or the Startup Repair option (first one in the list when you do a System Recovery, not a Toshiba Recovery).

*sigh* It really shouldn't be this hard. Still, hopefully this will solve the problem for a bunch of other people out there who were seeing the same thing. Worth a shot before you start deleting driver files at least...

Vista Image Backup

So, my laptop has Vista Home Premium, and I'm starting to get bad sectors... so tomorrow is a Fry's trip day.

However, I'm sorely annoyed at the limitations in the backup as disk image technologies available to me.

Vista's Backup System

Vista has a built-in backup system. I'm running Vista Home Premium. This backup system will only backup my files; it won't create a backup image. Epic Fail.

To get the full-on disk imaging backup, apparently I need to upgrade to Vista Ultimate Edition. $139. That's pathetic. So on to my next option...

Norton Ghost

Ah, Ghost, how I loved thee. Your ability to create a boot disk I could use to backup pretty much any system as an image was legendary.

Unfortunately, the latest version (which works with Vista) no longer offers me that option. It runs while the system is up and running, backing up in the background using the Windows Shadow Volume Service to do its magic.

And it does so - on my work machine at least - while soaking up nearly all my CPU time and hanging.

Ugh.

So now I have to find something else to do the business. Wish me luck.

The Fastest Repair in the West...

Recently, my fiancee accidentally dropped her phone in the toilet, so it was time to get a new one. I picked up an AT&T Tilt. (Note: I'm not an ass; she preferred it to the iPhone - this was a conscious choice).

Roll forward a month, and we're at the Puyallup Fair, and the screen cracked. Well, it didn't actually crack per se, but the transistors certainly did, causing it to leak a puddle of pixels in the middle of the screen.

It looked like this, only more personally annoying

Argh. Not covered under warranty, and I didn't get phone insurance (which I'm seriously thinking of getting now).

I did a little searching, and I came across Matt. He builds eCommerce sites, and in order to prove to his clients that - no, seriously - he's good at it, he built a site for himself, and started a business on the side repairing AT&T Tilt (and other devices) screens.

He lives local, so instead of shipping the phone to him, I went and met him at the Tully's in Wallingford this morning. Shook hands, gave him the phone, went to get my latte.

My latte took about 5 minutes to arrive. While I waited there patiently, and got the hazelnut syrup added which was conspicuously missing, I heard this pinging sound of a phone booting up.

I walked over to him with my now flavored coffee. He was done.

I'm flabbergasted. He officially has the fastest hands in the West. One phone, fixed, good as new, for $85 - which is much cheaper than sending it in for an official repair, and if you live in Seattle, much much faster than shipping it anywhere. And frankly, the experience of seeing someone do that repair job that fast was worth the price of admission. (Ok, so I'm a big fat geek... you were expecting someone else?)

Contact him here: http://www.mobile-device-repair.com

New Browser Round-Up

IE 8 Beta 2 (Microsoft)

Pros:
Love the Accelerators (in theory), and the web slices. All in all, pretty fast.

Cons:
Slow as hell if you select anything on the page, because of the accelerators. This needs a fix, pronto, because it makes selection basically useless.

Chrome Beta (Google)

Pros:
Nice, minimalist UI (although not too different to IE).

Cons:
When you first start it up, if there's nothing in the cache, it's ludicrously slow to load pages. I saw GIFs slowly fill in, pages take 6 or 7 seconds to render, etc. For some reason though, once it was up and running, it rendered really nice and fast.

I'm not going to recommend either one (try them both!) as they're both in beta. The sooner the IE 8 beta gets the kinks out of the selection handling though, the better.

Why you should support HD-DVD and not Blu-Ray

http://consumerist.com/344116/buyers-beware-current-blu+ray-dvd-players-wont-correctly-play-future-discs

Yep, that's right.

Old Blu-Ray players won't correctly play new Blu-Ray discs come October.

Nice work! Now... why are all the studios going with Blu-Ray instead of HD-DVD again? HD-DVD may have some problems with some disks being marginal, but it's at least a stable standard that will play everything you throw at without becoming obsolete a year after you bought a $700 player.

Bittorrent Bugginess... or how to use up 35% of your CPU doing nothing...

Looks like someone might need to add a little throttling to BitTorrent.

Build 4747 of version 6.0 of the client has a nasty little bug in it - one that should be really easy to fix, but a bug nonetheless.

On my laptop (a single core, old Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC), when I'm downloading stuff it will happily sit there, soaking up 35% of my CPU.

What's it doing when it's doing this and how did I figure it out?

Well, I looked at my TaskManager and found that Explorer was taking up 35% of the CPU. I opened up Process Explorer (it's incredibly useful - so download it here; you can find other useful tools at the www.sysinternals.com site) to figure out what was going on in more detail, selected Explorer, and looked in the properties. What I got was this:

The Explorer.exe thread properties in Process Explorer

Hmmm... a single thread is soaking up a lot of CPU. I wonder why that is? Let's pop it open by looking at the Stack for that thread by selecting it and hitting the Stack button.

The Explorer.exe thread stack in Process Explorer

Hmmm... well, nothing really useful at the top of the stack, and every time I break in, the thread looks the same. Which means it's mostly likely another app rapidly updating the tray icons and spamming it so much that it's just getting hammered and soaking up a lot of CPU.

But how do we find out which app?

I wussed out on this, dear reader. I just started going through the tray and closed apps one by one until I found the one that was doing it. In this case, it looks like it's BitTorrent. I close it down, and the problem goes away. Open it back up, and lo and behold, 35% CPU.

Kinda sucks. Should be an easy fix though - just update the icon on a timer instead of every time something changes in BitTorrent. Hopefully they'll fix it soon.

Windows Desktop Search - Half Baked, Half Assed

I love the ability to search fast through OneNote and Outlook that Windows Desktop Search gives me... but...

And here's the problem. But. It's a huge but. It's an enormous but. If it had an extra t, it'd need to buy an extra seat whenever it flew.

It makes my machine run like porridge.

I don't know what it is. I disabled it scanning XML files because the XML parser runs like molasses on a cold day in January. But It Still Regularly Slows My Machine To A Crawl.

Here's a clue, Windows Desktop Search team:

I don't know what kind of uber monster machines you're running, but most people's systems these days slow down considerably whenever they hit the disk. I don't know if it's the chipsets being used, or the drivers, but nearly every machine I've seen slows to a crawl when it hits high disk utilization these days - including Quad Core, 4Gb monster machines like my system at work.

Laptops are worse. Most laptops I've seen can't handle sustained high throughput on any IO channel - USB or hard drive. It just kills them. They slow to a crawl and become unresponsive.

LIMIT YOUR DISK ACCESS. I don't care if you're in an idle thread, you can't hammer the disk the way you do.

Fix it, or bye-bye WDS. I have no idea if Google Search is any better; I uninstalled that puppy when it was still buggy enough to cause problems and crash on a regular basis. Either way, it won't provide the search functions I need in Outlook and OneNote.

Microsoft Money for the Smartphone... Does Not Exist

I have a smartphone (it's a Cingular 3125). I love it. It's great for making sure I show up on time to all my meetings, and it helps keep my life in some kind of order.

There used to be - for the Pocket PC - a version of Money. This was great. I could sync up my PC with the Pocket PC and keep track of all my cash.

This does not exist for the Smartphone. I'm not sure if a version ever existed; if it did, it's certainly not one that works today.

Microsoft doesn't publish an API (or any advice) for how to sync MS Money with a Smartphone over Activesync. The only choice you have is to use the exchange files that they create for communicating online with banks that are behind the times, and/or exporting/importing data to and from Quicken.

Microsoft - please, guys, come on. Either open up an API for people to use to write a third party app, or take your Pocket PC version and port it to the Smartphone. I'm sure it would be easy for y'all to do, and a lot of people would be very grateful - myself especially.

Come on guys... you know you can do it...

Update: Hey, whaddya know? A third party (Ultrasoft) stepped into the void and (somehow, given that I have no idea where they got the docs to be able to do it) have produced a Smartphone compatible app that will sync with Microsoft Money. Hurrah. It only came out last month, so I guess that's why I didn't know about it.

CSS Sucks (for layout)

I'm often amazed by people who defend CSS as an amazing technology for layout. I get where they're coming from - I mean it is a pretty reasonable way to handle styles (font stuff, mainly), and it has a laudable goal - namely to separate content from the layout. But as a technology for marking up layout? It's about the lousiest thing I can think of. It's painful. it's a chore.

CSS3.0 is starting to address some of these issues (border layout handling, for example, is something that we should have had since the start - and by start, I mean since Netscape 1.0), but it still needs to be backwards compatible with the older CSS functionality, which sucks.

But don't take my word for it. John Nagle doesn't like them either. (And yes, that's right, that's John Nagle. As in Nagle Algorithm). Here's a post I found from him on this blog:

You’re absolutely right.With Dreamweaver 3 and tables, it wasn’t necessary to look at HTML to lay out a page. With Dreamweaver 8 and CSS, the page designer must understand CSS, HTML, and probably Javascript. That’s was a big step backwards.

The CSS system is just too programmer-oriented. And I’m a programmer. (Programmer as in MSCS from Stanford, the Nagle algorithm in TCP, inventor of ragdoll technology, real-time robot vehicle control, not programmer as in “writes some Perl”. And my first web site went up in 1995.) It’s not that CSS is hard; it’s that CSS is bad.

CSS is, simply, a badly designed layout system. Even the rather simple system in Tk which lays out dialog boxes and windows is better. Tk is a nested-box system, but both “pack” (like CSS “float”) and “grid” (like tables) layouts are available in the same system. This is enough to handle most cases. Which “float” and “clear” are not. Page layout is forced to fall back on absolute positioning far too often.

The clever way to do layout would have been with a constraint system. Each box has four edges and four corners, and it would be possible to bind corners and edges to create any desired relationship between boxes. This is something one could express easily in a click and drag graphical tool. Want three columns the same height? Tie their adjacent bottom corners together.

Want to fill the page? Tie the outside corners to a page edge. Ten minutes to explain to an artist. Advanced use would involve priorities on constraints, so if something had to give in “fluid design” as the page size or type size changed, you could pick what gave first. (This could be extended to allow curved boundaries, even splines, but that might be overdoing it.)

The browser would have to have a constraint engine to resolve all the constraints, but there are known solutions to that problem.

Too many people drank the Kool-Aid on CSS. It’s just not that good a technology.

...

The worst problem with DIV-based layout is that the layout system is too weak. There’s no form of “grid” layout. There’s no way to relate a DIV to anything but its predecessor, its parent, or an absolute position. The system is just too dumb. That’s why people have to stand on their head just to get three columns to work.Tables actually are a better designed layout system. Table layouts allow table cells which span multiple rows and columns. If all tables could do were simple grids of cells, the CSS approach might make sense, but tables are more general than that. And they’re well supported in Dreamweaver.

The fundamental limitations of DIV-based layour are obscured by an excessive number of attributes and the occasional use of Javascript when the attributes aren’t enough. But underneath, the fundamental approach is just too weak.

If CSS had a grid capability, it wouldn’t be so bad. But it doesn’t.

So there you have it. CSS sucks.

I'm thinking about an alternative solution for some of the problems... If I get time I'll post it up.

OSS and the Many Eyes theory

Just got a flurry of mail today regarding some bugs I posted against a cross-platform open-source GUI toolkit that's pretty widely used.

I posted the bug in March of 2003.

Today, it's January, 2007.

The original bug? Well, under Windows, modal dialogs get assigned an owner window. This makes it so that clicking on the owner window brings the modal dialog to the foreground, disables message handling in the underlying window, etc etc. This framework wasn't doing it right, and so the window would end up attached to the wrong thing.

Pretty easy to fix, to be honest. MSDN covers it right here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/winui/winui/windowsuserinterface/windowing/windows/windowfeatures.asp?frame=true#owned_windows

Oh well. 4 years. I guess it was low on their priority list, not being a Linux bug and all.

Windows Live Writer

This is a test post really... I'm just trying out the new Windows Live Writer application (now in Beta and available for download) which apparently makes blogging oh-so-that-much-easier.

So far it's not too bad. One really ultra cool feature is the Web Preview function which lets you view your post as it will appear when posted to your blog - without posting it to your blog! That's pretty rad. Also, fortunately, it lets you edit in "normal" mode, which removes all of the wacky style-sheet goodness. I'm all for WYSIWYG, but you can take it a bit too far (IMHO). You can also edit the raw HTML if you so desire.

A huge plus (and why I'm using it), is that it'll post to Blogger sites, which is the front-end I use to drive my blog (even though it's actually hosted elsewhere). So far I'm pretty impressed. It may even completely divert me from using OneNote 2007 to blog, which was my original plan.

Download it, give it a try.

Of course, I just tried posting this to my blog, and, erm, it didn't actually post. Looks like it may need more work. You may get better mileage if you post to a real blog with it, instead of doing the personal hosting thing.

Hmm... looks like I just needed to wait for the post to propogate - looks like it went through fine :)

Separated at birth (by about 24 years)

Nintendo DS:



Nintendo Donkey Kong Game & Watch from 1982:

New Phone = New Problems

So a couple of days ago I went out and got myself a new phone - the Cingular 8125. It's a rebadged HTC Wizard running Windows Mobile 5.

Unfortunately, it's slow, and it's buggy. I opened the contacts - and nothing appeared in the list. Reset, and they're back. Occasionally it slows down to a crawl. (Turning off Receive all incoming beams in the Beam/IR settings helps with that, but still).

It also doesn't work that great as a phone - I mean, it works and everything, but there's something about the convenience of a real numeric keypad.

And then there's the mandatory $39.99/month EDGE data service charge. Which frankly is a little much, when it appears to work slower than GPRS for most of the things I use the phone for (namely MSN Messenger).

All in all, I'm a little nonplussed. Why put together such a powerful hardware package if you're not going to give it a CPU that has the oomph to drive it?

I'm going to give it a couple more days to woo me, then take it back and swap it for a refurbished MPx220 again. At least I can live with the issues with that phone.

Hyperlinks in Paper Media

Well well well... things have changed quite a bit since I was last in England. Here's a surprising one though.

The Granuiad¹ (sic) is now putting hyperlinks in its articles. No, I don't mean that they're spelling them out with an http://whatever and everything... no, they're actually putting the whole text-in-blue-with-an-underline thingy in print media.

It's actually surprisingly effective. Instead of clicking on said link (which frankly, will only start doing something once someone actually manages to put together working E-Paper for the masses), you just look across the page until you see the call-out box which has all of the "anchors" for the links. It's a very very cute way of handling glossaries in printed articles. I wholeheartedly approve.

¹That would be The Guardian newspaper, which for a while now has been warmly referred to as the Granuiad, because for the longest time it had the worst proof reading in the business.

Supercool dating site...

OKCupid is something that a few friends passed on to me recently. It's really incredibly cool - for a start, it's totally free, which is pretty rare for online dating sites.

What's really intriguing about it though is that it's all based around questions and answers. The more questions you answer about yourself - and the kind of person you're looking for - the better it can give you matches. They've got some Math PhDs running the numbers on this site, and as a result they're really confident about their matching algorithm. The more info you put in, the more likely you are to find someone you're compatible with - and so on.

It's also really addictive, because they have plenty of silly tests for you to run. Give it a shot - it's a lot of fun.

MSN Messenger Soaks up nearly 100% CPU...

Looks like if you don't have a valid network connection when MSN Messenger starts up, it'll quite happily soak up nearly 100% cpu.

No idea why. Looks like a pretty annoying bug - especially as it makes it difficult to bring up Task Manager to kill the damn thing.

Ah well.

GTK Popup Window Bug Fixed

Back in March 2003, I filed a bug against GTK on Windows. You see, it wasn't handling popup menus correctly, so when the window with the popup lost focus, the menu would stay up on the screen.

This bug has finally been fixed - only two years and five months after it was reported. I guess I should be happy, but frankly, I'm not really.

You see, this was a pretty major bug in GTK on Windows - it broke some pretty basic Windows functionality. That it took so long for it to get fixed is, frankly, amazing to me.

The whole idea behind Open Source is that there are many eyes looking at it, which leads to fewer bugs, and faster bug fixes.

To that, I say, in best Steve Carrell tradition, "Where's your god now, Moses?!"

(This is the only Open Source / Linux post that will ever be made to this blog. Treasure it, for it is an only child).

Beat Seattle Traffic with your phone...

Seattle has some cool traffic monitoring technology (LA has it too - as do many other cities). Sensors under the road let you see in pretty much realtime (ok - to within 5 minutes or so) how much traffic is going through a given area. It's great for avoiding traffic jams. They have an app on your PC that you can use (called Webflow), or you can just check their website before you head home. Neat, huh?

But I'm looking for a more ... mobile solution. After all, I have a Smartphone, so I can install apps on it.

You can buy a cute little LCD gizmo with a pager built in from http://www.trafficgauge.com/ - and ok, that's not bad. Except it's $50 for the device, and then there's a $5/month fee.

Pharos has an app for the Smartphone (at http://www.pharosgps.com/smartphone/) , but it's $44 for a year's subscription, or $5 a month, and I hate the idea of paying yet another bill - especially given that the actual data that the Washington State Department of Transport puts out there is available for free.

OK, so there are other (read: less expensive) ways to do it. One is this site - http://www.manoli.net/seattletraffic/ - but frankly, I just don't want a text-only interface. I like the ease of just seeing the visual layout of where things are congested, and where they're not so I can route accordingly. There are some J2ME solutions too, but I was up for a challenge at this point.

So I started writing my own app. I've nearly finished the display code; all that's left is the network code and the plumbing to turn that into stuff you can see on the display. Oh, and given that the WSDOT maps are copyrighted, come up with my own.

Here's a screenshot of where I am right now:

Now, admittedly, this is a bit hard to read, but it's the overall coverage map of Seattle. Hey, think of it this way - at least I know that the bilinear minify routine I wrote works.

(As soon as I have a finalized routine, I'll post an article to CodeProject with the bilinear interpolated stretchblt I've been working on - heck, other people may find it useful).

Living Close to the Bleeding Edge...

A short while ago, I decided that it was time to update my desktop system. I'd been using it less and less, having bought myself a Toshiba M205 Tablet PC in January... but then, we finished shooting The Good Samaritan, and it was time to edit it.

At which point, I discovered to my absolute horror that my 1.4GHz Athlon system just wouldn't cut it - because it didn't support the SSE2 instructions necessary to run the newest versions of Adobe Premiere - which also were the only versions which supported the 24P DV footage we were capturing using Miah Hundley's Panasonic camera.

(Miah, by the way, is really cool. I sincerely think that he's going to go very very far in his movie making career - certainly, if I were a betting man and the choices were me or him making it in Hollywood, I'd bet on him first)

Of course, because I still want to edit this film, I decided that... well... screw it. It's time to use those high credit card limits for what they're intended and upgrade the systems. At the same time, I went ahead and bought the full version of Adobe Premiere Video Collection Pro. Very cool - comes with Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Encore DVD, Audition and After Effects Pro. Basically, everything I'll ever need until I start shooting on actual real celluloid film and end up needing to Avid systems to do the editing.

To have a system to run it on, it was time to update my hardware. I already had 2x80Gb drives, a 40Gb drive, DVD+R burner, DVD reader, 2x512mb sticks of PC2100 RAM, and a firewire editor card. At the very least, I'd need a Pentium 4, so I went out to Fry's and went on a spending spree.

I walked out with a Pentium 4 3.2GHz CPU, a P4C800 Asus motherboard, 2x512Mb ultra low latency DDR Ram sticks, and two 250Gb 7200RPM Western Digital hard drives. (They ended up in a spanning RAID array for high speed access, so now I have over 1/2 a terabyte of space on my machine. This figure is mindblowing.... and I'd never have dreamed of having so much just a couple of years ago).

Well, the system was a little unstable. I've gotten about 3/4 of the editing done so far, but kept running into crashes, glitches, hangs and bluescreens. So I decided to start playing with this system to find out what was going wrong.

Ends up that it's a memory stick. What's amusing is that memory sticks have heatsinks on them now, they're being run so fast and hard. Only one of them is having a problem - the other is fine.

I remember when memory was really really stable. Chips which didn't function correctly used to be pretty rare. And these days, features are getting so small on memory chips that you're pretty damn lucky not to get memory corruption just from normal everyday background radiation which flies around all the time - and there's nothing you can do about it.

I think the next memory I buy will be error-correcting. We're riding very close to the edge, it seems. Expect things to be... flaky for a while. Unless we can figure out a new way of handling memory, that is. Maybe integrate it with the CPUs on a massively multi-layer 3D cpu die. Might even be lower power too.

Windows MediaCenter vs. TiVo

Guess who wins?

Why, TiVo of course.

I went over to a friend's place recently, and discovered that he has one of these Windows MediaCenter devices. They're very cool - and have enough horsepower under the hood to have a rather slick 3D fade in/fade out transition on their menu system and all sorts of other cool stuff.

Pity that it repeatedly glitched. Sometimes the tuner locked up. Sometimes the video codec died. Sometimes it just hung.

Now, in my experience, typically if a computer system is doing that, either it's a hardware problem or the OEM install of the OS has completely horked it. (This is why I always install a fresh unadulterated copy of Windows XP on systems that I don't build myself... the only system I've not been able to do it on so far has been my Toshiba Tablet PC. Which is a shame - after all, it should have a clean restore CD that just installs XP Table Edition on the machine - but then again, Toshiba seem to have proven themselves able to modify an XP install without completely borking it.)

So in this case, the blame goes to either Microsoft, HP or ... well... I dunno. One of those two. Either way, it's a buggy piece of crap. I'm much happier with my DirecTV HD TiVo... even though occasionally the display will glitch in the menus. But to fix that, all I have to do is hit the TiVo button on the remote - I don't at any time need to grab a keyboard and start killing processes in TaskMgr the way my friend does.

Round one: TiVo. By much much more than a nose.

Upgrade Time Again

Well, I guess it had to happen. My computer gave up the ghost.

Well, okay, it didn't really. I just found a single app that it couldn't handle. Namely, Adobe Premiere Pro. I didn't know this at the time, but apparently it requires SSE instructions to work - and apparently, the AMD 1400+ that I bought a couple of years ago doesn't support this.

So now my wallet is considerably lighter... I went out and got a 3.2GHz P4 (1mb cache), with DDR TWINX1024-3200XL extra low latency Corsair Platinum RAM, and an Asus P4C800 motherboard.

Well, at least the software runs now.

One thing I'm going to miss, however, is the ability to use Wake On Lan to kick my machine when I'm at work. (This way, my apartment doesn't turn into a heat bath thanks to the output of the computer in the summer... although it's almost welcome in the winter).

I wrote my own little app to create the right magic packets, broadcast them over the LAN from outside of it and everything. Worked great. But apparently this mobo doesn't support it.

Damnit. To fry or not to fry, that is the question.

Blogger Updated

Blogger

Wow. Looks like Blogger now lets you use comments. Woohoo :)

Slashdot | How To Get Googled, By Hook Or By Crook

Slashdot | How To Get Googled, By Hook Or By Crook

Looks like people are having a "hack google" competition. The only problem? Looks like it's a bunch of people who'd rather have google become their own personal advertizing playground.

The competition? Make a search for the phrase "nigritude ultramarine" bring up your site listed first on google. Sounds great, huh? Sure. Except for the fact that it's an advertizing company sponsoring the challenge, and this kind of thing will make google less useful as a search engine.

So please, follow my lead. If you're blogging, link to google itself with the phrase. That way Google will come up top on the list of sites - and they'll be stymied. Nyuk nyuk nyuk. In fact, to make it easier for you, just cut and paste this code:

<a href="http://www.google.com">"nigritude ultramarine"</a>

That way, none of this "nigritude ultramarine" stuff should matter in the long run. And we'll all have a happy useful search engine. Ahhhhh... bliss...