Another entry just for any poor souls trapped in Google Hell.

While placing an order on TigerDirect.com for a VGA splitter cable (wtf, no B&M places within an hour's drive sell them...), I decided to go for 4GB of RAM for my laptop. 1GB is hardly enough these days with games/etc., and a possible Vista upgrade to go in the next 2 years (which I see as the possible main lifetime of my laptop).

After a long week of waiting (memory got stuck in UPS limbo over spring break), I got my RAM and installed it. Laptop doesn't boot. Uh oh. Figuring one or both of the sticks was bad, I try booting in both slots with just one. Both sticks check out fine in both slots. That's not good.

I tried one of the 512 sticks I had before in combination with one of the 2GB sticks I had ordered. No good. A lot of investigation later, and the best I can come up with is that the folks at Mitac decided on an Intel chipset that supports up to 4GB of RAM, but went with a memory controller than only supports 2GB (the Intel chipset identifier program was not particularly helpful in figuring this out; here's a clue, guys, an identification program probably should avoid giving the end user 16 possible configurations for their chipsets. At that point, I may as well just start guessing by picking random chipsets off your list)

Bottom line, if you've got a Mitac 8258 (and you're either Chinese or have managed to identify your laptop chassis/mainboard as such, which is no easy task), chances are you can only install a maximum of 2GB of RAM in your system. Luckily for me, my EeePC is happy to take the extra stick, so I didn't waste my money. But still..

When I took my current job, I inherited a complete mess. Every computer was set up in a completely ad-hoc manner, and the software is nowhere close to standardized. This creates awesome little brain-teasers for me, like the incompatibility of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express (although, really, I'm more upset at MS about this one; email clients shouldn't have to be standardized at all, because email is supposed to be) Anyway, part of my clean-up initiative is mandating what software gets put on new systems. I decided paying upwards of $200 for a copy of Microsoft Office, chock-full of its own incompatibilities and awful errors, was downright foolish. I'm also a fan of FOSS software, so I decided to give OpenOffice.org a shot in the business environment. The results were pretty good; most of my users couldn't even tell the difference! The only problem they reported was that OO was saving files in OpenDocument format by default, which is obviously a problem for the Microsoft-centric business world. You can change this in the program itself in the options, but doing this on all the computers I install it on is too tall an order. After a little research and poking around, I found the file that contains this setting, and wrapped up a juiced version of it with my OpenOffice installer, so that all instances will save in Word/Excel/PowerPoint by default. The file (Setup.xcu) lives deep in the hierarchy of folders, in OpenOffice.org 3\share\registry\data\org\openoffice. It's just an XML file that contains some settings that can be applied for the user. Mine looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<oor:component-data xmlns:oor="http://openoffice.org/2001/registry"
xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" oor:name="Setup"
oor:package="org.openoffice">
 <node oor:name="Office">
  <node oor:name="Factories">
   <node oor:name="com.sun.star.sheet.SpreadsheetDocument">
    <prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" oor:type="xs:string">
     <value>92,146,952,520;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
    </prop>
    <prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter" oor:type="xs:string">
     <value>MS Excel 97</value>
    </prop>
   </node>
   <node oor:name="com.sun.star.presentation.PresentationDocument">
    <prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter" oor:type="xs:string">
     <value>MS PowerPoint 97</value>
    </prop>
   </node>
   <node oor:name="com.sun.star.text.TextDocument">
    <prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter" oor:type="xs:string">
     <value>MS Word 97</value>
    </prop>
   </node>
  </node>
 </node>
</oor:component-data>

I got Left 4 Dead for Christmas, and it's awesome. Unfortunately, you pretty much absolutely need a mic to play. Typing or even using the in-game voice commands is way too slow/generic. I don't really like the mic on my laptop, so I decided to try hooking up my bluetooth headset to my computer (via a bluetooth dongle I have). So got that all squared away, and discovered I was required to set the handset as the default device before starting the game in order to get sound to come out (I still haven't found a graceful way to replicate output to the bluetooth AND the realtek audio). This is annoying, so I did a little research and set up a batchfile to automatically handle switching the device for me before starting the game.

This setting is stored in the Windows Registry, in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Multimedia\Sound Mapper, under the Playback value. You can use the reg.exe command to change this from a batch file, as below:

@ECHO OFF
echo Switching to bluetooth handset...
reg ADD "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Multimedia\Sound Mapper" /v Playback /t REG_SZ /d "Bluetooth Hands-free Audio" /f

echo Starting l4d...
start steam.exe -applaunch 500

echo Hit enter to reset the default audio device...
pause
reg ADD "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Multimedia\Sound Mapper" /v Playback /t REG_SZ /d "Realtek HD Audio output" /f

(Mostly for my own records, and any poor sap who ends up in the same Google hell I was in for a few hours)

My most recent slice of computer repair work started out simple enough: an HP Pavilion a420n with a 0x0A STOP error caused by some driver or another failing during Windows boot. Safe mode worked, nothing else did. I quickly concluded (after listening to the hard drive clanking and creaking) that the HD was going bad (it WAS a Maxtor, after all) and in the process of doing so had nixed some crucial driver (probably LAN), and after confirming with my client, ordered a new harddrive out of pocket with the intent of being reimbursed at invoice time. The old Maxtor was PATA, so I originally started looking for a PATA replacement, but then noticed a pair of SATA ports on the mobo. With more of a selection in SATA, I decided to go for it and upgrade the guy. 2 days later, the drive (a Seagate 7200.10 80gb) shows up. I pop it in, get my clonezilla disk ready to start hand-picking his old files to recover, and I'm met with "NO HARD DRIVE FOUND."


Obviously I was pissed, having put my own money up for a drive I had no use for, being a dedicated notebook user for the time being.


2 hours, one useless chat with HP support, and innumerable google searches later, I figured out that the VIA 8237 Southbridge (used in the A7V8X-LA motherboard, the bastard cousin of the Asus A7V8X-MX) does not support SATA2 (3.0Gbit/s). Jumpering the drive (thanks for not including a jumper, TigerDirect/Seagate!) solved the problem just nicely, and I'll be raking in my profit soon enough.

It did piss me off that this was not documented on HP's site OR in their technical division's files (although the tech DID mention something about the chipset not supporting RAID, which got me researching it to begin with). Just another reason never to buy a whole desktop, I guess.

While cruising the interwebernet to take a short break from a project, I stumbled across an article written by Simon Tatham (author of the infamous PuTTY) on how to [properly] report a bug as a user.


It's a nice essay, and it provides some insight into why programmers and general technicians are all so particularly annoying about the little details.

A quick moment of zen here. When you buy a laptop with an ATI video card, it's usually suffixed by "mobility," showing that the model has been somehow altered for use in the laptop world. OK, sounds good to me, there can't be much hardware difference if it's the same model, right? Well I'm not entirely sure about that, but here's what I do know:

ATI does not distribute drivers for mobility cards. For some crazy reason, they rely exclusively on the companies that produce the laptops to re-package the original Catalyst drivers into a format that works for their platform. I guess that kinda makes sense, but it leaves users like me in the cold. I bought my laptop from CyberPowerPC.com, and it's wonderful, but as a smaller-scale dealer, they don't produce these drivers.

And ah, the solution; Driver Heaven's Mobility Modder.net. It's a simple piece of software that alters the 'normal' Radeon drivers to properly install for a Radeon Mobility card of the same model. It's as simple as downloading the tool (and some specific Microsoft requirements like MSXML and the .Net Framework, or temporarily disabling UAC in Vista), downloading the driver you want, extracting the files, and then running the modder tool. Then, you just go ahead and install the driver just like you would for a PC.

Being able to get my Mobility x1600 updated to keep up performance? That's zen-inducing.

I've decided to open up a new folder just for my geeky posts, just because I'm making so damn many of them. You can access that as blog/geek.

My geek moment of zen for now is a little program called imagecfg.exe. It's released as part of one of the Windows Server Resource Kits, apparently, but I was unable to really actually find it anywhere on Microsoft's site. You can find it here, however.

It's a simple enough utility, it just sets processor affinities for any third-party binary. This is a lot more useful than you'd think, especially if you're a fan of vintage gaming. I just started playing the original Deus Ex again, and it doesn't play so nice with multiprocessor systems. Using imagecfg to lock it into a single CPU makes the game run smooth as pie, even from an external drive.

Look forward to more geeky tools and tricks and what-have-you.

I've been goofing around with my Gentoo Linux install from time to time, trying to prep myself for a potential[ly inevitable] move from Windows. But that's neither here nor there.


In GDM, I discovered how much I love seeing my own face when I go to log in, so I enabled face browsers on my login screen. However, in the spirit of customization, I eventually pimped my GDM out with some theme I downloaded. The only problem is that this does not enable a face browser at all.

To enable a face browser, you have to edit the theme's XML definition a little bit, but to get a face browser to appear on my theme (BlueSwirl), all I had to do was add this small snippet to the theme's definition:

<item type="list" id="userlist">

<pos anchor="w" x="-215" y="150" height="100" width="400" />

</item>

The ~jg5/blog/etc structure used for this site is accomplished using the mod_rewrite engine in Apache.

I wrote my own CGI-based editor to make updates and posts to the site, but I could not figure out why javascript would not work on the redirected path, but worked fine on the direct file path (eg. it works fine for cgi-bin/post.cgi, but does not work for blog/makeapost).

Here's the kicker: Whenever you use a rewrite rule for Apache, the directory you accessed in the browser is the relative path used for the site. So, if you include any files, it's better off to just use the absolute path to them, even if they're in the same directory. Technically, I guess I should have been doing this all along anyway.

Oh well, I'll never learn.

So, I've been toying around with the idea of buying Call of Duty 4 for PC from Steam for a while now, but I'm holding off until I'm really sure I'd like to, and don't just want to blow some money on anything (I'm a very impulsive buyer).


While looking at the specs, I noticed the game needs a whopping 8 gigs of free space to play. My free space at the time: a miserable 3 gigs. I recently re-partitioned my drive, because I've been toying around with Gentoo Linux again, so I sacrificed about 8gb to that.

The thing is, I have a wonderful 250gb Seagate external USB harddrive right on my desk, but I can't use it for a lot of things, because apps don't like installing/moving/etc. around on there. They like a very rigid registry structure and things like that. The bottom line is that Windows does not adapt well to some certain changes like that. Under linux, moving the files would require a very simple little fix to make everything work smoothly again: a symbolic 'soft' link between the new folder and the old location. Common symlinks, as they are known, are /usr/src/linux, which points to the current version of your kernel sources, and /etc/localtime, which points to the zoneinfo for your timezone (ie. changing from GMT to EST would be as simple as issuing ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST /etc/localtime).

I was under the impression that Windows just straight-up doesn't support this type of linking for a very long time. Then, I read about how it really DOES support it, but the tools are not very readily available to the user, without purchasing X software or Y package.

Today, I stumbled across an explorer shell extension that makes creating hard/soft links as simple as right-clicking. It also displays a little chain icon on a folder when you create a symbolic link, and a blue arrow when you create a hardlink. Very very useful.

I'm using it to split my Steam games up into local and external games. I don't play some of my games often, like Deus Ex, Deus Ex 2, and Shadowgrounds. Some of them, on the other hand, I play much more often, like Counterstrike:Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. The games I don't play take up a lot of space on my hard drive, so what I've done is moved the files for those games to my external harddrive, and replace the actual folders with symbolic links pointing to the external games. This way, I can play my games when I like, without having multiple copies of steam installed: