Category: Internet & Technology

I have a vague memory of  a Sesame Street skit with Bert and Ernie, where Ernie put the peanut butter into the cookie jar, and the cookies in the sugar jar, then the suger into the fish bowl, and the fish into the…whatever. You get the idea – swapping things around to make space, but you always end up with something that needs to go someplace else.

Last weekend I spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday working on the PCs in my office. I’ll write up a different post about the Velocity Micro PC (yes, it’s finally working), but it was the piece of the puzzle that was missing (like a cookie jar). I couldn’t do anything with my machines until it was working properly – oh, and that XFX 7600GS video card that I was waiting for as well. Once I started tearing down my PCs to put Vista on them, I also decided to swap parts around to get the best performance where I needed it the most. That meant taking the XFX 7600GS video card (passively cooled, totally silent) and 2 GB of Kingston RAM from my main workstation (a Shuttle SD11G5) and putting them into the Velocity Micro machine, taking the 2 GB of high-performance RAM and high-performance ATI Radeon 1950 from the Velocity Micro and putting them in the Shuttle SD11G5. Why? Well, the Velocity Micro PC is going to be serving as my TV recording/music storage PC, so it didn’t need either the high-performance RAM or video card – it’s hooked up to a Dell 26″ LCD TV that is no good for gaming. Swap one complete.

Then I had a medium-sized tower PC that I was using to test Vista on, recently wiping the hard drive to install the Windows Home Server beta on it. This PC had a 3.2 Ghz Celeron CPU in it (overclocked to 3.4 Ghz if memory serves), 1 GB of RAM, a 120 GB hard drive, and a Radeon 9600 GPU. Fine for testing Vista with (even with Aero Glass), but overkill for Windows Home Server. Then I had a Shuttle SN95G5 machine that I had been using as my Windows Media Center 2005 PC for the past couple of years. Great machine, and with the Velocity Micro now taking over that role, I was going to use it as a dedicated photo/video/audio editing workstation (my 17″ Fujitsu laptop just wasn’t cutting it). One of the three Dell 24″ LCD monitors I purchased was also going to be dedicated to this task. Unfortunately when I started to install Vista on the SN95G5, I was seeing it hang at boot. I poked around in the BIOS, but couldn’t solve the problem, so I dropped Shuttle tech support a line. Turns out the AMD 64 X2 4400+ CPU I had put in there last year wasn’t fully compatible with the motherboard – it would work fine in Windows (it had been working great) but the system would have trouble booting with it in (well that explains a few things). Continue reading You Put The Peanut Butter Into the Cookie Jar…

I want to give a shout-out to the people at ActiveWords, a product that I rely on every single day. I read about their licensing plan today:

“People who adopt ActiveWords want it available all the time, saving them time and making their computing more spontaneous, relevant, and enjoyable. We want to make sure our customers know they are free to take their ActiveWords with them, to use on any computer, anywhere, for the price of a single license. The ActiveWords PLUS Personal Version License gives our customers the unrestricted right to install and use the purchased version on any computer. As a customer you can unlock any ActiveWords PLUS installation for your exclusive use. This means you can use it on any computer, anywhere, anytime. This applies to the version of ActiveWords PLUS you purchase so long as it operates with a compatible Windows operating system.”

This is the way all software should work: it’s delusional how some companies think that every computer should have a unique license for their software, even if it’s the same person using it on each computer. Wouldn’t it be great if all companies were that flexible and friendly with their licensing? I’m far more inclined to purchase software that I know won’t give me a hassle when I install it on any or all of my five main PCs. Companies that treat me like a valued customer, instead of a software pirate, will always get my money first.

Now I just wish it wasn’t so confusing to unlock their software once you have the registration key…

That’s right – technology miracles do happen! And, that’s right, I had a bizarre setup for that boot test. 😉 Acting on the suggestion of my contact at Velocity Micro, I took off that massive Zalman cooler and looked at the CPU – it was partially dislodged and some of the CPU pins were bent. I carefully bent the pins back (it’s microsurgery without the benefit of cameras or view magnification) and put the CPU back in, placing the Zalman cooler loosely on top. Much to my amazement, the damn thing booted up! It gave me a warning about a “degraded RAID configuration”, but thankfully it still booted into Windows Vista.

After finding some instructions on how to properly re-assemble the cooler on Zalman’s Web site, I put the computer back together and gave it a more proper setup. This machine will be used as a media center, so it will eventually end up in the corner of my office attached to my Dell 26″ LCD TV. Now that it’s actually up and running though – wow – it’s a screamer! Vista absolutely flies on this thing. Check out these Windows Experience Index scores:

This is the first Windows Vista computer I’ve seen where the CPU is the lowest part of the score. And when you consider that the CPU in question is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 5000+, running at 2.6 Ghz, the CPU is by no means “slow”. It’s the most powerful CPU I have at my disposal now. I’m not sure if it’s the 65 nanometre or 90 nanometre version – I suspect the 65nm, but I’m waiting on a confirmation of that from Velocity Micro. Continue reading Velocity Micro: Raised From the Dead

That’s a screenshot of the toolbar on a brand new Vista Home Premium laptop that my mother-in-law ordered (an Insprion 6400 to be exact). Look at all that stuff! Many of them are Windows icons, but I resent the fact that Dell pre-loaded the machine with an entire suite of Google software. Vista already has an excellent built-in search function. Why pre-install Google Desktop Search and have two indexing engines running on the laptop at the same time? The Google toolbar was also installed, along with who knows what else. The typical Norton “free trial” was there as well, along with a couple of other icons that I don’t recognize. It took me about 90 minutes last night to wipe the drive, re-install Vista, and get all the drivers off the CD installed. Dell definitely makes this process as easy as they can, though I’d really prefer not to have to do it at all. Why not have a perfectly clean install of Vista then, upon first boot, give the customer the option to install the suggested programs? Leave the power of the decision in the hands of the person who paid for the product. Yeah, I know Dell operates on thin business margins and they make some money from the companies whose software is on the machine, but that’s no excuse.

Can you imagine buying a brand new car and having bumper stickers from Subway, Coke, Cialis, and Jenny Craig on the back of it? “Oh, we put bumper stickers on there to subsidise the cost of the car” says the salesman. “You can just scrape those off”. We’d never accept that from a car dealership, yet it’s exactly what we get from the major OEMs like Dell and HP. I’d happily pay an extra $10 to Dell just to get a machine that had no software installed on it beyond their basic Dell support applications.

That’s the guts of the third PC that Velocity Micro has sent me. I plugged it in (after finding my own power cable, they forgot to send me back the main accessories box), turned it on,  and just like last time, it didn’t boot up. I wish I could say I was surprised, but I wasn’t. Based on the track record so far from Velocity Micro, I was actually expecting it not to work. This time I decided to trouble shoot it a bit more: last night I swapped out the video card (no change) and I ran a 50 foot power extension cable to another socket in my house, on the off chance that it was a power issue (highly unlikely, but I was getting desperate). That didn’t help either. This morning I received an email from my contact at Velocity Micro who suggested that it might be a partially un-seated CPU. I’ll disassemble the huge Zalman cooler and see if that helps…but at this point I’m very close to just cannibalizing this thing for parts and building a new machine from scratch.

I find myself a bit baffled by WordPress 2.1 at the moment. The spell check functionality doesn’t work at all for me. Look at the spelling of the word defaults below – “defults” – and the spell checker says there’s no problem. I don’t think this is an instance of Canadian vs. American spelling either. 😉 I did a bit of searching but can’t find anything about how/why the WordPress spell check feature would not work. Anyone have any ideas?

Here’s another one of those posts that are simply search engine fodder: I’m using Windows Mail, the replacement for Outlook Express, on my small laptop for my personal email. I find it easier to fire up one program, configured just with my personal email, than to start up Outlook and have hundreds of messages flood in from my seven (!!!) different email accounts. What surprised me tonight though was how hard it was to find something seemingly very simple: I was sending an email from Windows Mail, and I wanted to include a BCC (blind carbon copy) recipient. I started looking in the menus for the email I was working on – I looked under View, expecting to see BCC there. It wasn’t. I searched through every menu in the message itself, and even in the Windows Mail options. There wasn’t a single mention of BCC. From my email, I selected Help > View Help and typed in the term “BCC”. Not a single result. What?? I then tried “blind carbon copy”, a term that most people will not understand (average users know it only as BCC) and found 30 results. The first five included help topics on eliminating duplicate files, copy and paste from a remote computer, rip music FAQ, copy a file or folder, and copy information between files. Absolutely nothing on BCC.

I then tried Google and after a bit of searching, found the solution: with an email message open, click on View then All Headers and the BCC field will magically appear. All Headers? That’s completely, totally, and utterly non-intuitive. Who the hell knows that headers relates to BCC other than SMTP geeks more hardcore than I? Not cool at all – Vista, you lose a point in my books for this. The Windows Mail team needs to give their head a shake and change that to “View BCC”.

Another week has gone by, and it looks like I’m still going to be without the gear I need to get up and running. Velocity Micro was supposed to ship out a replacement PC (this would be the third) on Monday AM to arrive in time for Wednesday. On Tuesday I emailed them and they said they’d have it going out the door on Wednesday for arrival on Thursday or Friday. Then when I emailed them on Wednesday to ask if it was shipped, they said they were having trouble with the machine and they would try to fix the problem and get it out to me for delivery by Friday. Today I emailed them and the machine is now finished and has been passed off to their shipping department, but that means it will only get picked up today in the best-case scenario – so I’m looking at Monday or Tuesday at best. It’s sad that on the 22nd of December I was supposed to setting up this computer.

XFX, the video card company that I’m waiting on a card from, said on the 24th of January that my replacement card would be going out “soon”. Then a few days later they admitted to me that they don’t even have the 7600GS in stock – the video card with passive cooling that I ordered specifically because it was silent. They said they’d ship me a 7800GT, a card with a noisy-ass fan. No good I said, I need a passively cooled, silent card. They said ok, we’ll ship you a 7800GT with a fan. Yes, they suggested that same card that I already refused. I then asked for a 7950 GT, the next passively cooled card they offer. It’s a more expensive card, but since they can’t replace the card I sent them, it seems fair they should give me whatever card matches the last card the closest. They’re checking with their inventory department to see if they have one of those cards in stock – so at least they didn’t say no right off the bat.

Another weekend without being able to set up my office properly. All is not wasted though, I have finish setting up our TV room in anticipation of the UFC 67 fight on Saturday night. We assembled the Toshiba TV stand the other night (more or less the right way ;-)), so now it’s a matter of pumping it all through the sound system so we can watch the first UFC fight to be broadcast in high-definition. It’s gonna’ be sweet on that big 72″ Toshiba TV!

I’ve been checking the Dell business Web site every morning for the past week or so, because they’ve been running their “Days of Deals” promotion. They’ve had some great deals – I picked up a 250 GB Iomega external hard drive for $89 with free shipping – but this morning’s deal took the cake: a colour laser printer, the 3010cn, for $19? It was about 5:50am when I looked at this, bleary-eyed, so I had to blink a few times. When I saw that Dell was charging $192 for a hub/memory card reader, normally priced at $249, I figured it out: some bumbling HTML intern had the prices reversed. I figured I’d try to buy one anyway (I already have a colour laser, but for $19…), yet upon clicking on the Customize link for the printer I was shown a price of $299. Drat – this wasn’t one of those scenarios where you could actually order the product. And they must have realized their error quickly, because now when you look at the page the printer is $299 – which is an excellent price for a network-ready colour laser printer (I paid $379 for my HP 2600n, current price is $449).

As much as I try to keep my office clean and organized, I’ve tented to ignore the networking equipment that is my lifeblood, which is something I remedied yesterday. When we had this house built, we ran CAT5 cables from all around the house (there’s one drop in almost every room) down into the basement to emerge near the electrical panel. I’m not talented enough to create a patch panel or anything that elegant, so instead I just had a bunch of cables going into a bunch of devices, all perched precariously on top of various boxes. Here’s what that looked like:

As you can see, it’s quite the mess (dig the Spider Man mat though!). This isn’t a REAL “before” picture though, because I had already put up the shelf. We had some left over wood from building our garage “hold lots of empty cardboard boxes” shelves, so I had my father in law cut me a shelf from the wood (I have no capability to cut wood – I don’t even own a saw). After spending a good 30 minutes un-tangling cables and setting everything back up again, I now have a much more tidy solution.

From left to right on the top shelf, that’s my Motorola Cable modem (connected to Shaw’s Extreme server running at 10 Mbps downstream), a basic Linksys 802.11g router (waiting for a D-Link Draft N router to show up), a 400 GB Maxtor NAS drive, a 160 GB drive connected to the NAS drive, then a Netgear Gigabit router on top of a 250 GB drive also connected into the NAS. Below that I have two different UPS units, each sharing a bit of the load. If I lose power I figured I’d have ‘Net access for a few hours at least. This new setup will make things easier for me to swap out gear, which will definitely be happening this year – by the end of the year I expect to have a final 802.11n router in there, and some form of Windows Home Server (likely the HP product). This isn’t a real “after” photo either: after I took this photo I ended up putting the UPS units up on the black table, positioned below this shelf, to get them off the ground in case of a water leak. Clearly I lack the concept of “before” and “after” photos. But at least I have some clean cabling!