Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

Programming in D

A few days ago, on Twitter, I said that “Attempting to install D is like trying to speak a secret language, only everyone who knows it is speaking a different dialect than you.” That may have been misleading: what I actually meant was, that attempting to install the whole stack of D + DSSS + Derelict + Arclib is like trying to speak a secret language.

Here’s the secret part no one is going to tell you, and that you will not find written down anywhere: do not install version 2.x of the D compiler. This will save you no end of trouble. Stick to 1.0. Here’s the procedure I followed:

What your business is, well, that’s up to you. Me, well, I just want to be Kenta Cho. (Fun fact: Tumiki Fighters and Torus Trooper both are playable with the Xbox 360 Gamepad on Windows. Much more fun than just using a keyboard.)

April 17th, 2008 · Tags Computers, Development, Video Games | Comments Off

PC question

An idle thought: anyone ever heard of problems caused by a hard drive that was on the same IDE chain as the primary hard drive, but not connected to a power supply?

I replaced my PC’s old clicky 30 GB Maxtor hard drive (from my IBM desktop circa 2001) with a new Western Digital 160 GB 7200 rpm hard drive on Sunday, and also added an extra 1 GB (2 x 512 MB) of RAM. After that, I would periodically have complete freezes of the OS. Today they’ve been especially pernicious, sometimes not letting Windows make it past the boot screen.

I tried running a RAM diagnostic on the memory but after 6 passes it found no errors, so I figured that wasn’t the culprit. Just to be sure, I completely took out the new RAM (still froze up) and then put back in the new and removed the old (still froze up). So I figured, well, heck, it’s probably been about a year and a half since I installed Windows on this thing. Time for a refresh.

Rebooted, started the XP reinstall process, deleted my old partition, added a new one, formatted it, aaaaand… froze up copying Windows files to the hard drive. So that got me thinking. My IDE chain setup was as follows:

It’s currently three or four steps into the install process, so there’s no saying it won’t freeze up again, but I was wondering: has anyone ever heard of a PC having problems due to an unpowered hard drive on the IDE chain?

October 23rd, 2007 · Tags Annoyances, Computers, Lazyweb, WTF?, Windows | Comments Off

SBC seeks RAM for good times, light gameplay

(That’s single beige computer, natch.)

Anyone got any PC2700 333MHz DDR RAM they’d like to part with for a reasonable price? Bonus points if (1) I can pick it up from you and (2) it’s inexpensive. Preferably in 1 GB sticks.

October 1st, 2007 · Tags Computers | Comments Off

A short guide to blaspheming: running Boot Camp after replacing a MacBook’s hard drive

First, the background: a month or two ago, my MacBook’s hard drive had a minor liquid trauma and had to be replaced. I sent it to Apple to see if they’d replace it, but - as expected - it was accidental damage, not their fault, and so I had to pay $700 to replace the bottom casing, SATA cable, and hard drive (not an option right then, or now), or else have it sent back to me. I opted for the latter, and my MacBook returned to me… working?! Turns out someone in the know (as in, who can take it apart without completely FUBARing the laptop) needed to let it air out, apparently. I ran my MacBook for the next week straight… no difficulties. It seemed perfectly fine.

However, I was still a little leery… and had been itching to give myself more free hard drive space anyhow. I bought my laptop directly from a retail Apple Store, so I had no opportunity to go above and beyond the stock 80 GB hard drive that comes on the MacBook (well, the non-black ones, anyway). So, some research and a few purchases later, I followed these instructions (which have one small caveat, which I will mention after the jump) and replaced my hard drive with little to no difficulty (other than having to go out to Home Depot to buy a Torx T9 screwdriver), ending up with 150 GB internal hard drive and an 80 GB hard drive that could theoretically be used for backup.

The difficulty, however, arose when I tried to use Boot Camp to install a Windows partition. Read the rest of this entry »

July 30th, 2007 · Tags Apple, Computers, Mac, Windows | Comments Off

Idiocy abounds

Okay, that’s it, the U.S. patent system is fucked up. Someone patented the linked list:

A computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences. One or more auxiliary pointers enable a fast, sequential traversal of the list with a minimum of computational time. Such lists may be used in any application where lists may be reordered for various purposes.

A quick, simple, and not completely factually correct primer for anyone with no CS background: a linked list is basically where you have a series of objects that contain references to the next object in the list (and sometimes to the previous object; this is a doubly-linked list). An example would be if you walked up to me (I’m an object) and asked me where my coworker sits. I know where they are (the reference), and following my reference pointer (pun fully intended, C++ nerds may laugh now) you would find the next ‘object’ in the ‘list’ - my coworker.

Here’s the retarded part:

The date on the patent? Filed September 26, 2002; granted April 11, 2006.
The linked list? Developed in 1955-56.

I cannot stress how absolutely dumbfounded I am that this patent has been granted. Linked lists are a fundamental structure in computer science for doing any sort of list processing. It’s one of the primary data structures in Lisp. It is in textbooks everywhere; I did at least six implementations in my first two years of college.

I’m not a lawyer, so maybe someone can clue me in: is the USPTO not required to do any research for ‘prior art’ (or whatever the hell you’d call it in this case) and just rely on the idea that the first one to patent something is the first person to come up with it?

March 19th, 2007 · Tags Annoyances, Computers, WTF? | Comments Off

Links galore

  • Mr. Gosling, why did you make URL equals suck?! A useful warning to Java developers - using URL.equals may be considered harmful, because apparently it does a blocking lookup to the IP address of the machine.
  • No Shredder in TMNT? Peter Laird, series creator of our favorite heroes on a halfshell, suggested the change. The villain is now a more generic ‘monsters and space aliens.’ Maybe it’s this guy, even though he didn’t really come from outer space, per se?
  • The world’s most indispensable Firefox tab: Ctrl-Shift-T (or Cmd-Shift-T on the Mac) will re-open the most recently closed tab. Hallelujah!
  • Slain trees haunt loggers. My coworker’s response: “heh, ent ghosts.”
  • Find out your Windows Vista Experience number. Sort of like a compatibility rating between your computer and Vista - is it love at first byte, or is Vista simply too high-maintenance for a down-to-earth machine like yours? (Pardon the pun - I had to.)
  • O’Reilly Media launched Hackszine.com, an online companion to the Hacks series of books gracing bookshelves for quite a while now. This is already in my RSS reader.
  • MAKE Blog: Do it yourself grassroots media sites using NewsCloud. Twenty bucks a month gets you a Debian install and NewsCloud; I think they handle hosting. Or you can just do it yourself, it’s open-source.
  • Dear God, it’s the Woot-Off that won’t die. The offer as I type this: a 37″ Sova widescreen HD-ready LCD monitor for $649.99 plus $5 shipping. I wish I could afford this monster.

That about covers it. I’m sort of like a bargain basement Weekend Update. (Obvious pop-culture references linked for my friend Sandra’s sake, who recently revealed she has no idea what movie features the songs “Danger Zone,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” and more. Or, for that matter, has never seen SNL.)

February 1st, 2007 · Tags Computers, Development, Gadgets, Internet, Microsoft, News, Science, Shopping, Software, TV, Technology, WTF?, Windows, lol | Comments Off

For sale: one laptop

I wanted to give you folks a crack at it before I put it on eBay; you’ve got until noon Friday to express interest and/or make an offer.

I’m selling one (1) Toshiba A55-S1063 laptop. The specs on this laptop are:

  • CPU: Intel Celeron M, 1.5GHz
  • RAM: 256 MB DDR 333 RAM, upgradeable to (I think) 1 GB (2×512)
  • Hard drive: 40 GB, upgradeable to whatever laptop hard drive you want to shove into it
  • Optical drive: CD-RW/DVD-ROM; this laptop has NO floppy drive, if that matters to you.
  • Ports: 3 USB, 1 external monitor, 1 (I believe) printer, 1 headphone port, 1 AC adapter port, 1 Type II PC Card slot
  • Screen size: 15″ viewable glossy XVGA
  • Communications: One WinModem, one Intel PRO 10/100 Ethernet connector, one Atheros 802.11 b/g Wifi card

Additionally, I’ve seen elsewhere that this laptop supports PCMCIA. Not sure about that for sure.

This laptop comes with

  1. The laptop
  2. The laptop’s AC adapter
  3. The laptop’s restore disc
  4. 1 battery, still very good (I get approx. 3-5 hours usage out of it)
  5. Your choice of any OS I have a legal license for: that basically comes down to Windows XP Home or some variant of Linux. Ubuntu Linux runs well on this and recognizes nearly everything - hotkeys, peripherals, wireless, everything except the modem. I can verify it will run Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, Windows XP Professional, and a bunch of other OSes no one would want to use. :)

This laptop’s still in great condition; however, it no longer suits my needs, so I’m offering it to you, my readers, before hawking it on eBay. Ideally I’d like to get around $400-$500 for it, but make me an offer.

January 9th, 2007 · Tags Computers, Hardware, Shopping, Yard Sale | Comments Off

Windows Home Server: reinventing a few wheels

Ars Technica reports today on Windows Home Server, built on Windows Server 2003. While most people will just use it as a glorified fileserver (indeed, if anyone gets one at all; they’re not offering an OEM version, and do-it-yourselfers automatically seem like the biggest audience for this kind of thing, but apparently not in MS world), I think my favorite part was where they touted one of their “brand new” technologies:

In terms of storage for files, music, etc., users of the WHS won’t see a “C:\” drive, but instead just a single storage pool which can be almost endlessly expanded thanks to WHS Drive Extender. This is accomplished with a new twist on dynamic disk control. Adding more space will be as simple as adding more hard drives (internal or external, ATA/SATA or USB/Firewire) and using a tool to add that drive’s capacity to the central store. The use of dynamic disks will also allow for a degree of data redundancy. This isn’t RAID, but something more akin to data mirroring.

Now, where have I heard this before… oh right, Sun already did it.

Unlike a traditional file system, which resides on a single device and thus requires a volume manager to use more than one device, ZFS is built on top of virtual storage pools called zpools. A pool is constructed from virtual devices (vdevs), each of which is either a raw device, a mirror (RAID 1) of one or more devices, or a RAID-Z group of two or more devices. The storage capacity of all vdevs are then available to all of the file systems in the zpool.

…

Dynamic striping across all devices to maximize throughput means that as additional devices are added to the zpool, the stripe width automatically expands to include them, thus all disks in a pool are used, which balances the write load across them.

There’s no wheel so awesome as the one you reinvent.

January 9th, 2007 · Tags Computers, Microsoft, Sun | Comments Off

You can almost smell Macworld in the air

If you’ve got as many Mac-oriented sites on your RSS reader (or your daily reading habits) as I do, you can tell it’s almost time for the Macworld Expo. The signs? Maybe it’s all the wishlists, announcements, predictions, predictions and counterpredictions, podcast segments, iPod guides, oh and who could forget: the rumors.

I think Mac people love rumors more than Gawker sometimes, I really do.

I wish I could get out there but, you know, job. C’est la vie. I can hope for a smaller MacBook Pro in the same form factor as the MacBooks (tiny but powerful!) and, well, when it boils down to it that’s about all that’s on my wishlist for Macworld. I’m hoping we’ll see some interesting and new stuff out of Leopard, and something tells me that there won’t be a damn phone (I’m not sure why people are so hyped over the phone anyway: I couldn’t care less).

We’ll see, now won’t we?

Update: Maybe I’ll have to stock up; Merlin’s posted a Macworld ‘07 drinking game. I’m hoping for the Danika Cleary one, myself.

January 8th, 2007 · Tags Computers, Mac, Wishlist | Comments Off

A moment of unfettered materialism

Last year there were a number of things I wanted to purchase; several of those goals were achieved, most notably the Nintendo Wii. Cellphone-wise I owned (and still own) a Blackberry 7100g. I also wanted to get a laptop; I ended up settling for the Toshiba Satellite A55-S1063, and was bitten - hard - by the results of trading performance for low price. (I’m looking to get rid of the damn thing, actually.) This year, however, there are a whopping two things I want to own, and my goal is to have both of them by the end of the year. What are they?

Read the rest of this entry »

January 6th, 2007 · Tags Computers, Gadgets, Mac, Shopping, Technology, Wishlist | Comments Off

Goddamnit Parallels

So TUAW mentioned that there’s a new version of Parallels out, and now - on top of the Coherence feature from the last beta - they’ve added Transporter beta3. What’s Transporter do? I thought you’d never ask.

It allows you to migrate an existing Windows install on a PC to a Parallels install over a network. It will also convert VMWare and Virtual PC disk images to Parallel Disk images.

Anyone want to buy my Mac mini and Toshiba Satellite for $1100? ;)

I’m suddenly itchin’ to replace ‘em both with a MacBook or MacBook Pro.

(Incidentally: there’s more about the Coherence feature here and here.)

December 29th, 2006 · Tags Computers, Mac, Software | Comments Off