Ok, so its that time of year again. Christmas is coming up, and they say it’s better to give than receive. If you feel so inclined, you can get your favorite WordPress plug-in author (and second favorite Weblogs.us administrator) anything from the following list:
- 2x2GiB (4GiB total) kit of DDR2 667 memory for laptops, something like this 4 GiB G.SKILL would be fine (the CAS 4 latency kit would be better, come January I’ll be running Linux with KDE 4.2 so it can handle 4GiB just fine).
- A nice backpack that is meant for caring a laptop or nice laptop carrying case for up to 15″ laptops (I don’t plan on getting anything much bigger than the 14″ laptop I have right now). I’d like to be able to tote around my laptop with the secondary power brick, my Logitech Bluetooth notebook mouse, and my creative labs X-Fi laptop audio card.
- CoD4 and/or CoD: World at War for PC, never bothered to get CoD4 last year. (Yes, my computer should be able to run both of these, it runs Crysis so they should not be a problem.)
Everything else that could be on the list would get into the $100+ range, so I left them off the list. They are computer parts for a Core i7 system which I will be building this spring (I plan on getting a mid range graphics card (or just scrape by with my brother’s old Radeon x800) and then upgrade next winter when Intel enters the high-end, discrete graphics fray).
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Vista’s little time clock/calender is much better than the one in XP. Not only does it make checking dates easier, it also warns of impending doom (err. Daylight Savings Time starting/ending).
So it’s that time of year when signing up for spring semester classes begin. Once in upper division once every two semesters a one year plan must be filled out and a meeting with an adviser must occur prior to singing up for classes. Today, I was assigned my advisement date and time, and I went to check what day of the week it would be–they only gave a date and something about it seemed wrong (turns out they sent the wrong time and date). Upon clicking on the taskbar clock, I was greeted by a message warning that Daylight Savings Time ends on Sunday, November 2nd. This was a surprise as XP did not even warn when it would work its DST magic–Windows 98 would warn after it automatically changed the clock.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
The installation went fast, the updates, on the other hand did not. Rewind a bit, back to a few weeks ago. Some troll over at Digg was spamming links to shock sites. One of them causes thousands of popups of shock images to display. It also happens to take advantage of some security flaws in many web browsers. That was last week, but going back a bit further the real odd behavior began.
It began with Adobe Flash security warnings. They were triggered by advertisements (flash based advertisements should be illegal for more than one reason) that are part of the Microsoft Mojave campaign. The warning stated that code in the flash object attempted to redirect about:blank to some other address. One would think a large corporation such as Microsoft would keep its advertisements out of the realm of malice, but then again they are still spamming stats with fake arrivals from their live search service.
Even though the Flash warning was odd, it was not the thing that was really bad. Out of nowhere no execute bit errors start killing Firefox. Most of the time on a website with an Adobe Flash based advertisement. Did I mention I believe Flash based advertisements should be outlawed–and all websites that have them should be added to the malware harboring website lists?
Well, after having enough of the stupid NX bit errors, Firefox and Flash player were reinstalled. No luck, the problems still occurred. Time for drastic measures, reinstall Vista time. After backing up the few files not on my home server (running Gentoo Linux), the Vista DVD made its way into the DVD drive. After rebooting and clicking through some options, the installer did its thing. Fifteen minutes later–surprisingly fast–the familiar welcome screen appeared. First order of action was installing the WiFi driver. Rather than before I let the additional intel tools to be installed. Surprisingly, I’m connecting at 802.11N speeds all the time now (verses when ever Windows felt like it before). Next up was the graphics driver. Previously, the dell driver did not allow the one distributed by intel to be installed so I was running a year old driver.
Then Windows Update in its infinite wisdom decided to try grabbing over 30 updates. Naturally, there was no dependency handling causing numerous blue screens of death at boot. To compound the issue I had at one time tried to install about ten of my commonly used programs. After the first blue screen of death, and doing a system restore, they were all missing (System Restore shadows many more things than it used to). Instead of trying to reinstall the programs again, I focused on the Windows updates.
That is when things became fun. Not only does Windows Update not properly handle dependencies, it seems to always have problems installing more than twenty or so updates at a time. Even worse, it seems to generate error codes that are random when encountering this situation. Another fun fact is Windows Update seems to not check the hash sum of the updates it downloads until it attempts to install them. If the hashes at that time do not match it returns an error code instead of redownloading and trying again as it should. Installing only four or five updates at a time, along with the oldest first seems to help. However this is taking forever. If I wanted to spend two full evenings working on this I would have installed Gentoo, which I would be done installing by now as well.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
So this past weekend the NHRA drag racing circuit was up at Brainerd International Raceway. So we made a day trip up there on Saturday to watch the qualifying rounds. We spent most of the day up there. It was a very nice and sunny day. I forgot the sunscreen at home. Thanks to being half Norwegian, I typically burn rather than tan. And, burn I did. Anyways, here are some pictures from the day.
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- US Army Team dragster burnout.
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- Funnycars preparing for their run.
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- Two top fuel dragsters preping for their burnouts.
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- Snapon Franchise team top fuel burn out.
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- US Army Team top fuel burnout.
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- Funnycar burnout.
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- Quicklane Team funnycar burnout.
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- Team Force funnycar burnout.
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- Team Force funnycar burnout.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Going into work this morning was less than desirable. After a week in Colorado, the humidity of Minnesotan summers seem unbearable. The trip was nice, even though it rained on us just about every day, and no I’m not talking about the typical 5:00pm rains.
We made it up to the ~14,000ft summit of Mt. Sneffels. There was a nice 100ft patch of melting snow near the summit that we climbed through while ascending. While my old ASICS GT-2100 running shoes were fine for most of the climb, they lacked proper tread for snow. Thus, it was necessary to use both hands and feet to keep climbing without sliding down. Luckily, a few other groups knew a much better route, which completely avoided the snow. In its place was a nice two-foot-wide shelf above a 50ft or so cliff. It was not snow, thus was not a problem.
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- 1000 feet to go
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- Blue flowers growing in the saddle
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- Notice the snow
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- An overlook of Yankee Boy Basin from the summit
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- Looking at the saddle from the summit
There are many more pictures from the trip. I’ll eventually get a pictures page up with the pictures from this trip and from Moab, Utah last year.
I found the manual mode for the SD850, which really helped with the grainy image problems I was having before. Tweaking some other settings further reduced the graininess to the point that point-n-shoot auto mode produced pretty good pictures. All-in-all, the camera is pretty good, it is just different from the previous PowerShots we have/had.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]