Kenplaysviola

For the past couple of months, my Team Fortress 2 was having severe graphics issues. I would mainly see checkerboard patterns on the floors and walls during gameplay. Sometimes the checkerboard patterns were purple/black, and sometimes they were brown/black. I could not find a solution, and even upgrading my video card drivers did not not resolve the issue.

My solution? Uninstall and delete all Team Fortress 2 files through Steam. I then had to re-download Team Fortress 2 again. Once I did that, the checkerboard patterns disappeared and all is well again.

I was starting to get the white screen of death when playing Battlefield 2 Bad Company through Steam. I have researched and googled and tried the various changes such as underclocking the video card to renaming the executable used to launch the game to just “bf2.exe”. I even forced my graphics to be in DirectX9 mode by editing the settings.ini file. Nothing worked. The problem seemed to be that my video card was breaking.

I later discovered that my video card, an EVGA 9800GT, was starting to have more severe problems. I started getting artifacts and random lock ups during boot up of my computer and throughout the day when I wasn’t doing anything. I figured that this was all just coincidence in my video card nearing the end of its life. Strange, because a couple of months ago Nvidia reverted their video drivers because it caused people’s video cards to overheat. There were reports that some people had their video card broken because of those Nvidia drivers. I wonder if Nvidia has taken on a new approach of getting performance gains by severely overclocking your video card through their drivers. Perhaps it is all coincidental for me. Nonetheless, this is the 2nd video card I have gone through in 2-years. My previous one was an EVGA 8600GT that also died and started to produce artifacts and lock up my computer.

After going through 2 EVGA brand video cards, I decided to try the GIGABYTE brand. I ordered a GIGABYTE GTS250. Hopefully it will last me more than a year! I am disappointed with EVGA. They do have a lifetime warranty, but it will take weeks before I get my video card back. I plan on sending my EVGA 9800GT card back, getting it replaced, and then selling it to recoup some of the expense on my new GIGABYTE 250GTS once my new video card comes in.

I took this picture of a BBQ Hot Wings place called Wing Stop right next to a health shop called Health Unlimited in San Leandro, CA.

I have an old film reel of some documentary by IBM titled, “Making Electrons Count”. It was left by a former co-worker who retired. He had received it from a friend. Not sure what I can do with this, but it would be really cool to get this onto digital format.

I recently upgraded my Dell Precision 690 at work from 2GB of memory to 8GB of memory. After installing the memory, my Red Hat 5 would not boot up the X server and present me with the typical login screen. I noticed that my mouse cursor was moving against a solid black background, and it was moving very slow and choppy. I was able to SSH into the machine from another machine and noticed that the xorg was running about 90% CPU! Doing an strace on the processor ID, I found that there was a SIGALRM loop! It turns out it is exactly this
Red Hat Bug.

There isn’t an official fix for this problem, but what worked for me was to download the most recent ATI drivers and install it. With the new ATI video drivers, all was well again. I figure that the same solution would be true for Nvidia users. I’m not sure why upgrading my system memory from 2GB to 8GB would affect the video performance, but somehow it did.

Drupal provides a nice framework to building a website. People always mention that “there’s a module for that!” when you need to implement some kind of feature for your website. For example, a photo gallery or forum. This is nice and dandy, but the problem becomes that a lot of these modules lack customization and options. They are designed by the module designer in mind and NOT for you, specifically. I constantly end up finding myself saying, “That’s almost what I want, but I would like to add this and this in this module.” Good luck! Hacking the custom module and figuring out how everything is put together takes more time than to simply just write my own PHP code to get the functionality that I want. Drupal also isn’t very smart about creating its own custom VIEWS (SQL queries). It’s a give and take situation, but so far Drupal has been a crappy experience. I find myself banging my head and thinking, “I should have just written this in PHP myself and ditch Drupal!”

Out of the box, Mozilla blew it with Thunderbird 3. Here are the new changes which really suck and how to sort of fix them:

1) “Better” search. Do you really want to sit and wait for Mozilla to index all of your emails? The search is damn slow and opens up a new tab and is hard to sort. No thank you. To get the same quick search results as in Mozilla Thunderbird 2, I changed the search bar options in the upper right hand corner to do SUBJECT, TO, OR CC FILTER.

2) Indexing. The indexing just slow! Even when you go to Tools->Options->Advanced and uncheck the Global Search and Indexer, it’s still doing something in the background. I see that Thunderbird still wants to download my 200,000+ emails in the “All Mail” box. WHY!??!?

3) global-messages-db.sqlite. This file can get INFINITELY big as it is used for the indexing and searching, I believe. It is located in your Thunderbird profile folder. For Windows Vista/7 users, it should be under the folder C:\users\YourUserName\AppData\Thunderbird\Profiles\SomeUniqueRandomCharacters. As an individual user, you might not care about this file growing insanely large, but in an enterprise level these files will consume so much disk space. Mine was reaching over 200MB+ and growing. I just have to shut Thunderbird down and delete it. Disabling the Global Search and Indexer will stop this file from growing big after you shut down Thunderbird 3 and restart it, however, this is a PER USER option. Any other users logging in the same machine will have to do this themselves. What a pain!

4) So you’ve turned off the indexing and search, but your IMAP accounts are still going berzerk and downloading mail. What’s going on? Go to TOOLS -> ACCOUNT SETTINGS. Expand your mail account(s) and go to SYNCHRONIZATION AND STORAGE. You need to tell Thunderbird 3 to download messages from your IMAP server from the past X days. By default, it’s set to download all your IMAP emails locally to your computer. HORRIBLE IDEA! I changed mine to just 1 day(s). I don’t need my emails from 2001 locally on my computer. If I did, I would have chosen POP instead of IMAP!

In conclusion, once I realized the problems with Thunderbird 3, Thunderbird 3 became bearable to use. It’s just very annoying!!! I wish there were more mail clients around. I also don’t like Outlook, so what mail clients are left to use?

I had been a slicehost.com customer for over 1-year. I was paying the $40 plan for 20GB of disk space, 200GB transfer, and 512MB of RAM. I recently switched to linode.com after investigating other Virtual Private Servers. For the same amount ($40), I am getting 32GB of disk space, 400GB transfer, and 720MB of RAM. Also, I get to choose an x86 or x64 of my OS choice!

Slicehost uses an AMD Opteron (4 processors) on their servers. Linode uses Intel Xeon 5520′s @ 2.27GHz (4 processors). I don’t have any objective benchmarks, but I am finding that my performance is much better on the Linode server. I host a Left4Dead game server on it and it runs well with up to 8-players. Perhaps it’s because I get more memory, or that the CPU is better, or that I am running a 32-bit OS instead of 64-bit. Maybe it’s all three! Whatever the primary reasons, I am getting more bang for my buck!

Slicehost’s data center is out in Missouri. Linode has 4 data centers up across the US (California, Texas, Georgia and New Jersey). Since I’m in California, my latency and response time has been very low! When I play on my Left4Dead server, I get around 13ms latency. When I was with Slicehost, I was getting about ~100ms.

Slicehost had really good uptime. It’s too early to tell with Linode, but so far the past month has had no problems.

Slicehost did have nice tutorials and a good community forum, however, if you are a competent Linux systems administrator then you should have no problems setting up your virtual private server. Linode does have a help section and a community forum area, but I did not explore it thoroughly as I was able to get myself up and running without the helps and FAQ’s.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have chosen Linode. I hope that Slicehost will be able to competitively compete with Linode in the near future.

Just to be absolutely clear, I am in no way represented by Slicehost or Linode. This is all from my own personal experience and opinions.

Great Thai food! Two people for lunch with two lemongrass iced tea drinks = ~$24. Definitely will eat here again.

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Pineapple and duck curry - $10.50

Pineapple and prawns fried rice - $8.50

A couple of weeks ago, I got presented with the message that NTLDR IS MISSING when booting up the operating system on one of our Windows Server 2003 machine. First, I suggest you check out http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm. Did all those methods fail? Then read on …

For me, none of the “obvious” solutions for NTLDR IS MISSING worked, despite all the Googling I did. It turns out that I had inadvertently marked the wrong drive letter as the active partition, which Windows will now make as the bootable drive letter. When I popped in my Windows recovery CD, the drive letters were reversed. C: => D:, and D: => C:. That’s why my OS wouldn’t boot. The only way to flip the drive letters back while preserving data was to do a parallel install of Windows WITHOUT formatting or overwriting the old Windows. After you boot into your 2nd Windows OS, just go to the disk manager and right-click the REAL C: drive with the c:\windows on it, and mark that as the ACTIVE partition. Go ahead and reboot and all should be back to normal. C: => C:, and D: => D:.