Kevin's Musings

Well, I hate to jinx it, but, it has now been two days since my last network failure on my desktop machine. The difference? I flashed my WRT54G wireless router with the DD-WRT firmware, an alternate, open source, software choice for the WRT54G. DD-WRT has a TON more configuration settings and it seems to play much nicer. The real question is WHY did my WRT54G start flaking out. I guess I will never know. Another alternate firmware is made by Sveasoft, which I used to run, but, I think I like DD-WRT better.

My hard drive, which I mentioned before was failing, started failing again. I switched back to another drive and all seems good. Unfortunately, I have found two dead or dying hard drives within the last week, both of which are now out of warranty. It seems hard drive warranties are now almost non-existent. Oh well. Back up often (or just don’t care when your hard drive dies).

About two weeks ago I managed to loose my Rio Carbon MP3 player. I have been very sad since then. I am still hopeful it will turn up, but, for now, it is gone. So, I finally broke down and got a Creative Zen Sleek from Best Buy (with the extended warranty, of course… I really recommend the extended warranty on MP3 players). I will keep you updated, but, I am really happy with it so far (with my VERY limited time with it). I did a lot of looking and mostly ruled out Creative MP3 players, but, this one suits almost all of my needs, I think.

We went to the Taste of Rahway tonight. Lots of food from local restaurants (15 or 20 restaurants represented). Lots of wine and liquor (and liqueurs) from local shops (about the same number). Lots of fun, good food, way too much to eat and drink. It was a flat $30 for admission, which wasn’t too terrible. Shot my “good eating” for the day, but, life goes on. Lots of holiday fun.

Well, until next time.

Sorry, my blog has been altogether too serious with my network and video problems. Here is a VERY COOL picture I found up on Flickr. Click on it to get larger sizes. The largest size makes an excellent wallpaper for your computer, in my opinion.

We had a mostly lazy weekend. Started West Wing Season 3, watched about half of it. We had lunch at Chevy’s yesterday, which was pretty darn good. We haven’t hardly eaten out in the last few months, so, it really felt like a treat.

This week we will probably just try to stay caught up on TV, I plan to go to a Java users group one evening, and we’ll probably watch more of West Wing Season 3.

I really hope to figure out my networking problem this week, but, I doubt I will. I will probably just have to move my data to my slower “other” machine that currently isn’t running. I don’t know what to do next. Oh well.

I was thinking just a few minutes ago (not the first time this thought has occurred to me) that every time I have the DNS problem on my desktop machine, which never seems to go away, it seems to happen when I am using Firefox (or so I think, I cannot think of a time it happened while I was doing something else). There are two reasons I can think of for this. The most likely is that it is because I am using Firefox a LOT and it is the primary software I could be using to notice the failure. Firefox probably does 99.99% of the DNS on my system. The thing that occurred to me was that maybe it is some odd bug between my system and Firefox. Going down that path of thinking I have removed Firefox 1.0.7 and all of its files and installed Firefox 1.5RC2. I will use that for a few days and see if it makes a difference. I am 99.99% sure it will not make any difference. If this doesn’t solve it I will again test my thinking by just using Opera or IE for a few days, I guess. Argh this is now been frustrating me for over a week. Oh well. Will keep you updated (should you care).

Check my next blog entry (in a couple minutes) for a cool picture I found on Flickr.

During all my mucking with installing, reinstalling, etc. my video card has been acting up (nVidia 6600 GT is the video card in question). The symptoms were that normal video worked fine, accelerated 3D (games) ran fine, but, playing AVI and other movie files would cause the system to hang for a few seconds and then reboot. By setting acceleration settings to about midpoint (disabling much of the video cards acceleration) video would play (but games would not as acceleration is required for modern games). After much frustration and mucking I finally decided to use an older driver. I went back a few revisions and things seemed to get somewhat better, but, the problem was not resolved. After dropping back to an April driver (specifically version 71.89) everything seems to be working correctly. Doh. Who’d a thunk it.

I have a fairly locked down wireless network so I can use my laptop without dragging a network cable around. I have a custom SSID, by SSID doesn’t broadcast, and I run 128bit WEP. The WEP is probably the weakest link, but… Today I noticed somebody else on my network (because my laptop was complaining about a conflict with IP addresses). This seemed kind of odd to me, I was surprised somebody else could be on my network. I don’t know for sure somebody else defiantly got access and if they did, I don’t know what they were looking for or found, but, I pretty quickly turned on MAC address filtering (I’ve been meaning to do that for a while) and locked down my shares considerably tighter. I have been meaning to lock down my shares for a while, but, WinXP now has the sharing option defaulted to “simple” file sharing. I hadn’t before taken the time to figure out WHY WinXP wasn’t allowing me to set the exact permissions on my file shares. So I found this link about it which I found to be helpful. I am now more securely configured. Now I just need to enable something better than WEP.

In the midst of all my network and reinstall problems I went out this week and bought Norton Ghost 10.0 by Symantec. I have been using various versions of ghost since long before Symantec bought the company (from, I think, Ghost Soft, Inc.). The latest version (which I got for like $20 after rebates from CompUSA, and got a free wireless optical travel mouse to boot) comes with Ghost 10.0 and Ghost 2003. I think the reason they give you both Ghost 2003 and Ghost 10.0 is because Ghost 2003 is probably the classic hard drive imaging system and Ghost 10.0 is a re-release of Powerquest Drive Image Pro, which was a great piece of software. With Drive Image Pro (and now Ghost 10.0) you could make an image of a RUNNING system (make an image of your C: drive and store it in a file on your D: drive). From this image you can then restore files or the entire drive at a later time. In some cases you will have to boot from their “Emergency CD” to restore the entire drive, but, it is pretty nice software. My only real complaint is that the emergency CD is REALLY slow to boot — it seems like they could install something on my C: drive to boot faster if the C: drive is still intact, but, I do like the software. At $20 it is a no-brainer (it is normally $70, though… probably still a no brainer).

We are about to start The West Wing Season 3 and have some dinner, so, I am outa here! Sorry, spell checker still not installed 🙂

Well, my desktop system is back up and running. I had reinstalled the OS on my machine and it would boot up but right after the login it would spontaneously reboot… I couldn’t do ANYTHING. So, I vacuumed out the fans, reseated the memory and the cards, etc. and tried again… and… it booted right up. Something must have been mis-seated or overheating. Things seem to be better. I have been slowing installing and then Ghost’ing periodically with hopes of keeping a stable system (or reverting back to a stable system). We’ll see.

I forgot to mention that last weekend I attended a Mazda Zoom-Zoom event where I got to drive the RX-8 and the Miata on some “courses”. It was fun, but, the lines were way too long, so, I didn’t get to drive as much as I would have liked. They really could have organized better. We recently bought a Hyundai Santa Fe (almost a year ago, I guess) and I stick to that I am glad that is what I got. Having the space to move stuff is very nice, good visibility, etc. When we moved here the Santa Fe was invaluable. The RX-8 and Miata are both neat vehicles, but, you are hard pressed to carry a full set of golf clubs much less enough luggage for a weekend trip.

The Epson 1670 scanner arrived today. I got it hooked up (was a snap) and it seems to work great. It is fast and image quality seems really nice. Probably more impressions on it in the infuture. Not bad for a $50 scanner (with free shipping and no tax).

We are talking about going into the city this weekend, maybe to the Met museum, maybe some other stuff. We’ll see!

I haven’t reinstalled the spell checker so… if there are spelling mistakes in this one they will have to wait. Grammer, word choice, and intelligence checker seems to be completely missing for now — cannot find the installers 🙂

If you have been reading this for a while (or you know me) you know I enjoy video games — I wouldn’t call myself a “hard core gamer”, but, I enjoy playing when I have some time to spare. I have been watching the information about the pending release of the Xbox 360 and it appears that Microsoft may have decided to limit the shipped number of units (I have heard 400,000 mentioned?) to artificially increase demand. It has also been mentioned that people who pre-ordered (from places like Gamestop and EBGames) may not get the system as soon as they thought, maybe having to wait months. To make this even more humorous, supposedly some of the games for the 360, from what I have read, are actually being released this week. People might be buying games today or tomorrow that they cannot play for weeks (definitely) or months (maybe?). In my opinion this is a dumb move by Microsoft. With the PS3 possibly still a year away, Microsoft should be getting as much market share as possible now. I had thought about pre-ordering but I am now glad I didn’t. Best Buy has a pre-order right now where I can get a 360 Premium, Madden 2006 (which I don’t care about), and maybe a second controller for $509. This has got to be at least $30 over retail. I have decided to stick to my guns. I may go into a store at 10am on Nov. 22nd to see if I can get a 360, but, I will not pre-order and I will not do a midnight madness event. I will not stand in long lines. I will not play their reindeer games for a system with (as of now) no reviewed games – I don’t even know what game I would want for it and I am not buying a system just to have a system.

More pressing than the 360 (at least to me) is that the networking on my desktop computer at home has been uber-flakey as of late. The symptoms are this: when I first boot up everything works fine. After a relatively short amount of time (5-30 minutes? usually about 10-15) I can no longer get to any web sites on the Internet (i.e., requiring DNS). I can ping anything I have an IP address for. VNC, file sharing, etc. from other machines into the desktop machine works fine. Using my desktop machine I can connect to my router (by IP address). It appears that no name services will works. I have tried all the ipconfig DNS flushing, repairing, renewing, etc. I have tried removing the devices and re-adding it, changing between DHCP and static. I have tried installing a new network adapter. I even went as far as reinstalling the operating system. After I reinstalled the OS it appears to work correctly for a while, but, in the process of reloading software and Microsoft updates it started behaving badly again. I have disabled services that have to do with DNS caching and other networking. I have modified my DNS settings using TCPOptimizer. I am SO frustrated with this and don’t know where to go next. Now, this morning, my primary hard drive appears to be failing. So, I have backed up stuff (agaig, this time to another drive) and am in the process of getting ready to reinstall for the second time in half a week. I will be taking the current disc out completely. I will install the OS and some core software and then making an image of the disc (while the image is still a reasonable size) so I can experiment some more. Dang. Very frustrating.

Finally, I need to get everything back to working correctly because I am going to undertake a relatively large project shortly after Thanksgiving. I will be getting the box of my mom’s recipes and scanning them all in. Ultimately, I hope to have them all scanned well before Christmas and even plan to push them up to Flickr. I have ordered an Epson Perfection 1670 Photo scanner. This scanner seems to get really good reviews, is supposed to have good image quality and be quite fast (USB 2.0). I got a really good deal on it. I may sell it after I finish the project as I generally have very little need for a scanner. Maybe I will teach Deb how to use it and scan in some of our old photos as well.

Enough for now.

Last night I did a mini-marathon. I saw (no pun intended) two movies… The first one was “Saw II”. I really enjoyed “Saw” and I almost let myself be suckered by the “Saw II” reviews — that it only got a RottenTomatoes.com 38%. Saw II was a very credible sequel, much more credible than most horror sequels. My belief that the majority of reviewers cannot review horror movies is again exhonorated. If you like horror films and you liked Saw (and man, who didn’t? Saw was a really stellar horror film) you WILL like Saw II – go out and see it tonight. Yes… Saw was more creative, there were more creative killings, etc. I liked Saw better than Saw II, BUT, I did like Saw II. In the immortal words of, umm, Bill and Ted?, “it is worthy”.

The second movie I saw was “Stay”. This movie has an incredibly forgettable title. I saw the previews for it and was somewhat interested. The RottenTomatoes.com score of 24% probably swayed me against it in the initial release. Damn it. Damn RottenTomatoes. Damn them to hell. I will say it again — Damn them and damn the reviewers. I read something by somebody comparing it to Jacob’s Ladder (an incredibly awesome film) and decided I needed to see it. On Thursday of last week Stay was at many NYC theaters. On Friday it was almost completely out of the NYC area (and completely out of the NJ area). Dang, how bad must it suck to be pulled so quickly from the northeast (released on October 21st)? How wrong must I be to want to see this movie?

I got my ticket, the movie started. By about the second scene I had decided it was in the top five trippiest movies I have seen (and I have seen some really trippy movies). By the end of the film it firmly held something like top 3. The movie was really well written and acted. The cut scenes amazing. Everything. This is a COOL movie. Why didn’t people like it? Because most people are sadly week minded and can’t handle trippy movies that go beyond the boundaries of the normal (is my guess). If you liked “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Mulholland Drive” you will like this movie. It was nothing short of an amazing cinematic experience. This story really can’t be done except for cinematically. Don’t rent the DVD – find it in the theater. If you hated the previously mentioned films, you will hate this one too (too bad for you).

I’m making great progress in the game F.E.A.R. – still lots of fun. For fans of FPS games, especially those with horror elements like Half-Life I would strongly recommend this game. It is lots of fun with lots of scary parts. I have read the single player game is about 10 hours, so, I must be getting near the end. Will keep you posted if I remember.

I have made it to about 30th position (ranking) in SSX On Tour and I am probably pretty much done — I am to the point where I can no longer really compete (i.e., come in first place) in the races or the trick events. This is unfortunate, but, (as I think I said before) I remember had the same problem with SSX3 (although with lots of persistence I did win all of SSX Tricky of I remember right). Maye if I had a better board or spent a lot more hours (which I may do) I could improve, but, sadly I may have hit a wall. At least in the racing, I think the problem is the computer knows some shortcuts I haven’t found yet, so, playing some more may show me the shortcuts I am missing.

I have started playing Tony Hawk American Wasteland (THAW) and am enjoying it (about 2 hours in, maybe?). I played THPS 1 – 4 (?) but didn’t play the Underground games because I didn’t really like the direction they were going — I think THAW is a better direction and am finding it to be a lot of fun (especially re-teaching my fingers how to play Tony Hawk games again, and learning the new movies I never master before such as the “manual”). It is also fun to play the “Classic” maps again with the new graphics and controls. If you are an older school Tony Hawk fan this game is definitely worth picking up. I am interested in seeing how it improves even more on the Xbox 360.

Speaking of the Xbox 360, I have been looking for one of the Xbox 360 demo consoles. I looked in NYC at Gamestop and EB Games near Penn Station, but, they didn’t have one running. Today I looked at the Circuit City near my apartment in NJ and found one. I played a bit of Kameo and Call of Duty 2. Both games look very nice and the controller seems very solid. I was sad to see there were only two playable demos, but, in about 3 weeks it should be amply available 😉 I still haven’t decided if I will buy a system at release, wait for Christmas, or something longer. Sadly, my new job doesn’t give me the week between Christmas and New Years off like my old job did (which was always great for gaming), but… Anyway, I am sure I will have a decision made by Nov 22.

We’re rewatching Alien and Aliens for Halloween, always fun. We didn’t see any new movies this weekend. We’re really getting behind and hope to catch up soon, but, will probably start West Wing Season 3 soon, so, that may mess up our movie watching as well. Oh well, it’s all good.

My pursuit of a healthier attitude toward food continues to go well. I have now lost darn near 30 pounds since since about mid-summer and am eating foods I would never have imagined (mom would be so impressed). I really need to start exercising more, but, one thing at a time (I suppose). I hope to loose about another 15 pounds by new years.

Until next time…

I have been giving some though to the supposed Xbox 360 “backward compatibility” to play some specific Xbox games. The Xbox 360 architecture (processor, video card, etc.) on the Xbox 360 is vastly different from the Xbox, and emulation of a 733MHz processor, even on a 3GHz processor would be no trivial task, especially if the plan is to improve the original game (as has been speculated). The think the goal has nothing to do with actual backward compatibility, i.e., playing the original code from the original games.

Windows, and I believe the Xbox as well (and Macintosh, …, is based on a set of APIs. As long as the games in question don’t make heavy use of assembly language, but, instead are written in a high level language (such as C++) and do all of their work interacting with the Xbox hardware using the APIs, and if the Xbox 360 either has the same APIs or a “compatibility” API, there is no reason that one couldn’t take the source of a program and recompile it for the Xbox 360. It shouldn’t be necessary to do anything special with the “data” the program uses, such as the game maps, graphics, textures, sounds, music, etc. Really just the main program would have to be recompiled. So, they pick the games that are the best written (i.e. most portable) and put the recompiled version of the game engine online. When you insert the Halo or Halo 2 disc, it checks to see if the recompiled version is available, downloads it from the Internet, and runs the new executable but uses the data from the original game’s DVD. If they did this with a handful of the most popular games, they could declare some degree of backward compatibility success. The actual portion that would need recompilation is likely not all that big, so, they could theoretically put a few games on the hard drive that ships with the Xbox 360 Premium.

What I have said here is probably already been speculated (or downright stated?) by others, but…

Still playing and enjoying FEAR and SSX On Tour. Lots of fun. I am reminded with SSX On Tour of my feelings about SSX3… I really enjoy the racing events but I find the trick events more difficult, so, once I have progressed pretty far into the game I tend to stick to the racing events. I enjoy performing the cool tricks during races to get more “Boost”, but, I prefer to race. I am ranked like 34th in the game, but, I wonder how much higher I will get without honing my trick-ability.

We saw A History of Violence this last weekend. It was really good, but, it does have some violence and some gore…. if you are particularly squeamish it might not be for you. We have almost finished season two of The West Wing, continues to be very good.

Until next time…