Google Search
Page Hits
Corsair Vengeance 6GB
The Cyberpower System from November 2010, was ordered with 6GB of memory. An additional 6GB of memory is down to $39 with free shipping, so I went for it. Looks like I got the last one. 
They are out of stock and don’t expect any more. But I’m sure that other similar memory packages are available for similar prices.
The memory arrived and installed with no problems, but then the system would not boot. Turns out that the RAID system had a problem on system restart. The RAID controller did not wait for drive spin up, so the BIOs reordered the drives in the boot menu, and after that the system would not boot automatically. I was able to boot it by selecting the RAID array from the BIOS boot menu.
Stopping in the BIOS and reordering the boot menu fixed the problem. The system has an ASUS Sabertooth X58 Motherboard.
Another tip, you might want to consider whether DHL should be your shipper of choice. The memory was left in my mailbox out on the road, rather then at my door. For a couple of dollars, I could have had UPS deliver the memory, and it would have been dropped at my door, which I’ll do in the future.
Enjoy,
ww
VirtualBox
Virtual Machine systems have been popular for servers for a few years now. They save big time $$ when setting up server rooms since most of the server systems in an IT shop aren’t that busy. But recently VM has become popular for desktop users. Many of the reasons we used to use “Dual-Boot” systems are much better served using VM. There are several reasons why you might want to run VM on your system:
- You have a windows system and want to run Ubuntu.
- You have a Mac and want to run Windows occasionally.
- You have Windows, or a Mac, and want to have a system where you can surf safely, for example to do your online banking.
- You are doing development and want to have a “clean” system for testing.
One of the most functional, and easiest to deploy, VM systems is VirtualBox. Now inside Oracle, this system was originally developed at Sun and is Open Source, and free. Microsoft has Windows Virtual PC, and you can run Windows XP or Ubuntu on your Vista or Windows 7 system. But of course, it has no support for Ubuntu or OS/X as a host, so why learn more than one system? I’m going to use Windows and Ubuntu systems as hosts, so I’ve chosen VirtualBox.
New Fan Control / Media Slots
The recent Cyberpower PC had a broken Fan Control / Media card slot device. The Media Card slots didn’t work. I have arranged to return the device to Cyberpower and have purchased another one from Frozen CPU. The Frozen CPU folks have the option of dressing the cables for another $20.
For a complete album of photos of my installation of the new device.
It works great, has 4 rather than 2 fan controls and a bright LCD display. Took about 4 hours to install since prudence called for a careful test it before completing the installation. The only odd thing about the new device is that you insert the SD card upside down in the slot.
- Windy
Update: Update: Program fixed now. The problem was some plug-ins that process images. These DLLs were not supplied since the program finds them with a non-standard way if you have the Qt toolkit installed. The program and the installer is now fixed to install those plug-ins too.
Update: This program fails on Win XP Sp3. I’m investigating why this is, but it appears to be a bug in the QPixmap class of the Qt Library. I’ll fix the program as soon as possible. You can follow the discussion in this post.
Friends of mine have their digital cameras and need to resize their photos to send over email. All the programs I’ve found on the web are either too complicated with way too many options for a novice computer user or strange to use like the program that you rename to change the size of the photo and then drag and drop photos onto it to resize the photos. I have designed a very simple program to resize either one or several photos.
Resize a Photo
The Website Building Problem
As a consultant, I am continually looking for modern tools to help my clients build websites. Recently several web site builders have appeared that combine Hosting and Website construction in a single place and for a single small fee.
In the past few years I have come across more and more clients who have been held hostage to the old way of doing websites. The old way uses off-line tools like FrontPage, DreamWeaver or other tools that run on a desktop computer and then upload the website pages to the hosting service. Clients run into several problems when these tools are used.
- These off-line site building tools are expensive [ several hundred dollars], require special training and must be upgraded over time.
- Often the clients can’t find the person who built their site, or it costs too much or that person has lost vita information about the site because it has been months or years since they made any changes.
- The hosting service may be going out of business or changing it’s terms and so the site expert needs to be contacted to move the site to a new hosting service. The client may not have the credentials or expertise to sign into the site to back it up to migrate to another hosting service.
Modern sites utilize a CMS or Content Management System. There are many out there, but only in the past couple of years have they started to appear that work for the novice user. A CMS separates the “content” of the site from its “Look”. The text and pictures are stored separately from the “Theme” which directs how the page is laid out on the browser page. Also sites using CMS’s are not built on your local computer and then uploaded. Rather they are built on the site itself, using the browser and software running on the site. So there are no expensive and separate tools to buy or learn to use.
(more…)
I recently wrote a program to test my new computer. I wanted to test the wattage range and cooling of the new processor so needed a program that would keep all the cores of the processor busy. The Core i7-950 is a 4 core processor with Hyper-Threading which means that there are a max of 8 threads. Since AMD provides server processors with up to 12 threads so the program has a maximum number threads of 32. I use the HWMonitor program to monitor temperatures and wattage if your processor supports it.
I’ve been looking for a source control solution for some time. I used to use QVCS, but it costs money and you have to get the Enterprise version to get client/ server. At this point I have three, or four, development systems and they include both Windows and Linux.
I considered Bazaar, but after a couple of days I came up with more questions than I had answers. My reasons for not using Bazaar are here.
While there were a few glitches I was able to get going with Surround SCM in a single day. Surround SCM is easy to use, and supports client / server across Windows, Mac and Linux.
I need a personal source control system for my development.
As a big believer in Open Source solutions I took a careful look at Bazaar. But alas, I could not get started with Bazaar.
21
Update: MSE is available now for everyone. On 3 October 2009, I have moved all my computers from AVG Free to MSE.
Microsoft has entered the business of AntiVirus software by simplifying and repackaging their Corporate Security suite for home users. The new program is called Microsoft Security Essentials. When this is released, it will be free for use by non-commercial users and will run on Windows XP, Vista and Version 7.
Currently the Beta is closed, but the program will be available later this year. Based on all the reviews I’ve seen – Security Now for example – this is a light weight, but very robust anti-virus.
When this comes out I will be installing it with an eye toward eliminating my use of Free AVG.
More news when it appears,
- windy
Update: Fixed in a new release of the Exporter. A working version of the scene is here.
Fails in Firefox 3.0.12 and 3.5.2. Website reported as a failed site.
Using Max 2009 on Vista x86, SP1, I created and exported a simple scene with a knot, 3 lights and a camera.
Here is the scene on this website.
The model does not play in Firefox 3.0.13, either from the file system or from this website.
It does play in MS IE 8 both from the file system or from the website.
The samples on the hypercosm website play in both MSIE 8 and Firefox 3.
I’ve been using a Media Server for sometime to view photos and play music and podcasts on my PS3, but recently I’ve upgraded my Media Server and found a new server that provides Video On Demand from Netflix and other video sources.
Here’s a test of a Google Spreadsheet posted here to this page.
Starting with an Open Office 3.0 spreadsheet Import failed. Then after converting the sheet to XLS it failed. Finally converting to CSV worked.
Notice that the Frozen Row 1 of the above sheet is not frozen.
I’ll try this again for publishing complex data to my websites. Since I can add formulae, it should be interesting.
- windy
I just descovered Audacity, an open source audio editor for Windows, Mac and Linux. I’ve been using Goldwave for a long time, and Adobe Audition V1 a little, but Audacity looks like it has features and a UI paradigm that I like better.
Wakoopa is a free software service that keeps track of what software you have been using. I heard about it on the Windows Weekly podcast from back in January. I’m just now catching up on missed episodes.
To use Wakoopa, just sign up for a free account and install the little program on your system[s]. The little applet [ 3MB ] uploads the info to the website so you can review and share the statistics. (more…)
As you may know from reading other posts here or from checking out my photo site, I use a Nikon D300 and a Nikon S550 camera. I have about 16GB of CF cards for my D300 and an 8GB SD card for my S550, but these are not enough for a week long vacation where I’m going to be taking quite a few pictures. For past trips, like the trip I took to Boise, ID for a week, I have taken my older laptop with me. And while on that trip I bought a 160GB USB hard drive as a second backup device. As you can imagine, a laptop is not a convenient device to carry on a trip.
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.
OpenOffice Base 2.4 running on Vista Ultimate [x86 or x64].
Dynamic reports fail with the data not matching the column headers. Static reports work.
Update: This is a known problem. The problem is that the name TITLE doesn’t work as a report column. This means that no column of a database table can be named TITLE if dynamic tables are used.
When building a database of my DVD collection which includes BLOB images of png images of the covers, the database can be backed up, but it cannot be restored. This of course makes the backups useless. The images are 475×475 pixel PNG images.
UPDATE: Problem solved. Parameter max_allowed_packet is the packet size for requests. This defaults to 1M and needs to be larger to allow this restore to work. Setting the max_allowed_packet parameter to 10M allowed the restore to complete successfully.
(more…)
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.
(more…)
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…)