Mostly Harmless

Mostly about my amusement

Archives (page 69 of 97)

February 22, 2008

Vista and 4 GB of RAM

I’m running Vista 64 on my XPS 700 720 and I just upgraded from 2 GB RAM to 4 GB of 800 MHz dual channel DDR2 ram.  My system was running slowly (it’s a Microsoft Operating System).

The RAM even came with heat sinks.   After the upgrade my system does perform nicely and I have much less disk thrashing.  But Vista is a pig.  Even running idle and having only Firefox or Internet Explorer, the system is using more than 1 GB of RAM.  That’s just nuts.

This is one reason why people should stick with XP.  With every iteration of Windows you get an even more hungry monster for very little benefit.  I’m glad I moved to Vista but that’s because I have a character defect.  I like working with broken and difficult systems.

I went with the 64 bit version because I was sure I’d run application that could use the RAM.  With a 32 bit Microsoft OS you get a actual limit of somewhere between 2 and 3 GB’s.  It’s an addressing issue and the fix is to go 64 bit.

February 18, 2008

WinTV PVR-350 and MCE

When installing a WinTV PVR-350 on a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 PC, don’t forget to install the Sonic CinePlayer DVD software that came with the PC.  MCE won’t display a TV image until you do.

February 18, 2008

Ubuntu 7.10 on Virtual PC 2007

Installing Ubuntu on more time

Today it’s President’s Day, it’s raining, and the kids are off this week.  So naturally I am goofing around with my PC. I’ll head to the basement soon to play with the kids but first I want to setup something on my workstation.

My main workstation is a Dell 700 720 with a Core 2 Duo and a pair of nvidia GeForce 7900’s.

It’s a great machine and I am currently playing Call of Duty 4, Crysis, and a couple of others.  But I really enjoy working in Ubuntu. I just don’t want to give up the games.

I installed Virtual PC 2007 on my workstation and enabled hardware-assisted Virtualization.  I captured an Ubuntu 7.10 iso on my disk and began running the installation. I created a disk for the virtual PC and began the installation.

I knew that once the live CD booted up I would have problems with the X11 driver.  So I ctrl-alt-F1 and ran “sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf”. I replaced the “Depth 24” with “Depth 16”, saved the file, did alt-F7 to switch back to the X11 screen and then alt-backspace to restart the X11 server.

The mouse still did not work.  Google is my friend and I learned that when I boot the CD press F6 and append the following to the kernel boot parameters ” i8042.noloop”.  The article suggested running the Virtual PC in safe graphics mode but that went very low resolution on me.

Wash, rinse, repeat the “Depth 16” portion.  I’m now installing on my Virtual PC 2007 Ubuntu with a color depth of 16 and a working mouse.  My system has only 2 GB of RAM but since I upgraded to the XPS 720 motherboard I can go nuts with the 800 Mhz stuff.

Vista 64 with 8 GBs of RAM, that sounds like a good upgrade.

After the install I modified the /boot/grub/menu.lst to add to the kopt line i8042.noloop as well as to the end of the kernel line.  That’s probably not the place to put it but it works for now and I’m going to continue working on it. I’ve just got the networking going and I’m putting on 187 updates since the iso image was created.

February 16, 2008

Movable Type to WordPress

Over at my brother Stefan’s blog, he’s been running Movable Type for years. It bugged be because his server was slow, the theme was dated, it lacked a good archive page, etc.

Mostly I did not like the look or the speed. Stefan takes really good pictures and I thought he should have a web site that can show off some of his work. What I ended up showing him was good enough that he told me to go ahead and do it.

Read on for what I had to do to make it all work. Read more

February 12, 2008

Crazy people on the Supreme Court

Normally, a nut as a judge is just odd. If he makes enough bad calls he gets pulled off the bench.  Some really odd people have been on the bench for years.

The “debate” about water boarding is ridiculous. It’s torture, no arguement about it. The U.S. government tried and convicted other people for doing it. Until the Jack Bauer crowd came into power, it was reprehensible. Now these fear mongers have gotten the U.S. to use phrases like “water boarding, which some consider to be torture”. This is just unbelievable. Whatever happened to people just speaking plainly?

Antonin Scalia is a nut. His idea that “smacking someone in the face” could be justified is beneath that of a Supreme Court Justice. Forget the constitutionality of torturing people, or that it’s a crime under the law. In his Jack Bauer world anything can be justified and the hell with the law or the constitution.

I wish this nut job would just get his cameo on the new season of 24. Just get this stupidity out of his system and then maybe he can actually concentrate on his job instead of being Vice President Cheney’s towel boy.

February 12, 2008

The oddest people have common sense

Glenn Beck, who I generally feel is a I-wanna-be-Bill-O’Reilly entertainer, wrote an article I agree with.  Giving people debit cards for the “stimulus” package is a good idea, assuming the package will actually work.

February 10, 2008

Gundam 00 Episode 18

Gundam Exia attacking the Throne Gundams

Well that did not take long. Episode 18 reveals more of the fact the the Throne Gundams are not Celestial Being. They use imitation Solar Generators and one of the observers is definetly a traitor.

The three pilots are further revealed to be psychotic murderers. The girl Throne pilot massacred a wedding party that Louise was attending for no reason at all.

The scene was a little thick. I mean the viewer gets it that the Throne pilots are bad but that was way over the top. Graham Aker manages to damage one of the Thrones too, so they are not on par with Setsuna.

The episode wraps up with Setsuna attacking the three Throne Gundams. I’m sure that that will not go well since Setsuna is acting on his own.

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Jan Dembowski

Jan Dembowski

I am a software enthusiast who is easily amused and definitely mostly harmless.

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