Welcome to the Windy Weather Website.

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These are musings from my vantage point on the Oregon South Coast.

A long-time software engineer and general geek, I continue my exploration with Photography, 3D Graphics, Linux and other nonsense. Come along for the ride.

My Photo Gallery is here. And of special interest are the albums of the beautiful models that I’ve worked with. If you are of age, and enjoy artistic photos, you should register on the photo gallery to see all of the beautiful pictures. If you are a model or need photos for any other reason, my rates are very affordable. And for special clients, I will consider TFCD. Contact me and we can discuss your needs.

Look on the left for links to topics of interest as well as my photographer sites on modeling portals.

I fix computers, and software and build websites. For more information, check this page. I’ve built Wordpress based sites with custom themes, and photo galleries based on Coppermine for several clients.

Enjoy, and don’t hesitate to drop me a note at djduffy at windyweather dot net if you have a question or comment that you don’t want to just leave here on the site.

For years I’ve had fans in the back of the audio cabinet to keep my stereo stuff cool. Even modern equipment generates a lot of heat, esp the Receiver or any Amps you have.

When I got this audio cabinet about 8 years ago I put 3 fans in it. I got the best fans that I could find to reduce the hum that fans all make - Vantec Stealth 5″, and a Vantec Stealth 3″ for the center bay. There is a small transformer hooked up to the Aux power of the receiver so that the fans turn on whenever the receiver is on.

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I’m getting a new pair of hi-fi audio speakers.

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Some research on SysInterals.com has turned up XPerf, a performance tool written by Microsoft.

This tool records a number of kernel mode activities and then allows analysis in detail, esp of interrupts and Deferred Procedure Calls.

Using XPerf on the ailing laptop has shown that the culprit is acpi.sys.

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I just got a new Alienware m15x. Great machine. Very nice design. But I’m running into a couple of problems.

Update: 8 June 2008 9pm- I spoke too soon. The problem is back in spades. See section later in this post regarding use of SysInternals Process Explorer with more data on the problem.

Update: 8 June 2008 - The CPU Busy problem is not occurring for about the past 2 hours. The system was idle - but with the CPU busy for several hours today. There appears to be no reason for this change. It bears watching.

Update: 7 June 2008 - New information added on CPU Busy.
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The WindyWeather site is now up on Lunar Pages. After being with Godaddy for several years, the performance began to get slower and slower. It was taking literally minutes to post an article on Wordpress. After an hour with Godaddy support and no satisfaction for why performance was so bad, I looked for other hosting services. More »

The PS3 is probably the best, and reasonably priced, Blu-Ray player on the market. Now that the HD format wars are over, it was time to get a Blu-Ray player

All the Windows hype about the “Media Editions” of Windows was never very clear. Apparently the Media Edition contains the features necessary to serve various files to the other entertainment systems in the home. Music and video players can play files from your desktop harddrive via these servers. Now with a new PS3, Media Services is becoming more useful. It will be interesting to play photos and videos from a server. The PS3 only has a 40GB harddrive and the file management features of the PS3 are very primitive.
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Ubuntu and Windows can work together on a network of course, using winbind and samba. But Ubuntu doesn’t come that way and the configuration of Samba needs some work to make it happen.

I’ve got my systems all file sharing now, but it took some doing since I’m not a Samba expert.
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There has been much bad-mouthing of Vista in the press… A continuous low hum in the blogs and podcasts that Vista is terrible. With no data and no references. Well here is some data. A list of products that work just fine on Vista.
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Here is a list of products that do not support Vista x64. This is shameful for several reasons:

1. Vista is the currently shipping OS and x64 is the “Ultimate” expression of that OS.
2. Vista x64 is the second generation of x64 OSs, so it is hardly brand-new and the requirements for supporting the system are well known
3. Most medium to high end systems are x64 capable.
4. Most high end system support as much as 4GB of memory.
5. One can only make use of 4GB of memory with an x64 edition OS. With an x86 edition one only can address 2.7 or 3.5GB of memory depending on the hardware available. See this Alienware Support post.

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When settings files are transferred as part of a program update, it may be interesting to assure that the files are not corrupted, or changed in such a way that the program is compromised. One can do this with XML Signatures.
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I recently purchased a 15″ PhotoFrame for what seemed like a great price of $250US. Of course now they have a WiFi version for $270. But I have a 17″ LCD monitor that wasn’t pulling it’s weight anymore, so I wondered how much trouble it would be to make a PhotoFrame from that.
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I chose Puppy Linux 3.01 and burned a CDROM. I’ve got Nero 8, so that part was a snap.

When I booted the CDROM, I got a much better result than for Ubuntu:

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