Corridor 9

You know the old story; the mechanic who fixes Porsche’s while driving an old Chevy Citation or something. Well, thats about how I feel sometime. In all my computers, only 1 of them has been completely new. All other computers have been pieced together with old equipment.

The pain finally hit after one of the parts on my laptop was stressed beyond it’s design and cracked. One of the hinges on the laptop screen is toast, and the other one doesn’t have enough tension to hold the laptop up sufficiently. This is not a good situation, especially since I’m relying on my laptop to get me through an upcoming HazMat class.I was able to find a piece on Ebay to replace the broken one, but after looking over the whole system I can tell that it’s in dire need of replacement.

As most of you know, I try my best to take care of my equipment. This wasn’t always the case, but in the past number of years, I’ve done everything I can to protect this laptop. I keep it virus clean as well as handling it with kid gloves to make sure that the case or screen doesn’t get damaged. While inspecting the broken hinge, I’ve found a number of cracks in the case at various points.

I can only hope it lasts another year and a half.

For the last 2 years I’ve been using iTunes to manage my database of songs. I know some of you are probably wondering why I’ve chosen to go with a closed source piece of software, especially since I’m such open source proponent. Well… to be honest, iTunes is one of the best applications I’ve used for Windows. Anyway, I’m not here to debate OS vs CS, I’m simply here to state some observations I’ve had concerning the operation of 2 pieces of software.

I’ve had cable modem since it was alpha tested here in Madisonville over 5 years ago. Two years ago, I broke down and installed their Charter Security Suite (CSS) to manage security and virus protection on my laptop. It worked fairly well for a period of time, but always seemed to make my computer lag just a little bit. I was willing to live with this as it didn’t seem to be much of a problem. The actual problem was the fact that I hadn’t noticed how much my system was lagging.

For the past 2-3 months, every time I listened to my music through iTunes, the songs would lag and skip. This happened at the same point in the song every time, about 11 seconds into each song. In addition to the audio lagging, the computer would virtually freeze up for between 5 - 15 seconds during this time. Needless to say, this became quite a big problem for me as I absolutely abhor a slow computer. The clincher was when my email stated getting hosed because the maching was lagging out while I was trying to work. The thing that I really didn’t understand was the fact that it was happening to my fairly new system. Granted, my laptop is 4 years old, but it is still middle of the road for machines today with 2.2G CPU, and 1.25G Memory. Then something caught my eye.

On a hunch I opened Windows Task Manager while listening to iTunes and working in Outlook. I noticed that after every song change a process was being run, fssm32.exe, that would completely consume the CPU cycles and freeze up the machine. Could this be the rogue process that was causing my system to act like a i486?

After looking around, I found that the process actually belonged to F-Secure’s Security Suite which just so happens to be the primary program behind CSS, and it seems to lag more systems than mine.[1]

I decided to dump it and go with a competitor for a trial period since I still had the activation code and could always reinstall the Charter Product. I must say that since I’ve gotten rid of CSS, I’ve not had a single lag with my iTunes, my online gaming experience, or my Outlook.

As there are a lot of users out there who have CSS, I’m hoping that this article helps them out some with their lag issues as well. Now all I’ve got to do is clean out my music library to free up some space for music I actually listen to.

Well… after a weeks worth of problems, I’ve decided that Firefox 2 just isn’t for me. After numerous little differences in program operation causing me problems, I’ve finally had a bug that I just couldn’t shake. It seems that the new firefox has an issue with shutting down properly. Because of this, when I go to hibernate, standby, or shutdown the computer it hangs with an XPCOM error. This is simply unacceptable. Because I’m on a laptop I hibernate or standby quite often. Having these little issues plague me for a week was more than enough.

Well…. it seems that my server upgrades may be on hold afterall. Kristie made me drive the car to work yesterday because she was afraid the transmission was falling out. It turns out, the transmisison will probably have to be rebuilt due to a part that isn’t functioning correctly.

In addition, I may be posting very sporadically in the next few weeks and, unfortunately, months. My laptop just died. I think the video card finally went kaput, but am unable to test this out due to the fact that I don’t have another video card. I called Dell to find out about purchasing another card. Luckily, I can get another card still to replace the one that is broken. However, I’d have to shell out $180 to get it, and right now I just don’t have that kind of money.

In the hopes that I can get back online relatively quickly: See ya soon!
In the reality that it will probably be a while before I upgrade this: I will miss you all!

I’m finally back up and running on my laptop after a little “mishap” caused me to loose my windows partition.

I had tried installing an update to the wireless card inside my computer when all of the sudden things started going haywire. In all I’ve gotten pretty good at reinstalling winblows on my system, and have it down to a 9 hour ordeal. I did lose a bit of financial information, but nothing that can’t be replaced in the next week or so when the statements clear the bank. It was about time anyway… I had reinstalled about a month ago, but had put a bunch of junk on there to test out.

I finally got fed up with waiting on my laptop last night to the point I was ready to throw it across the room. It had been quite a while since I completely formatted the hard drive and reinstalled the operating system so I decided that today would probably be a good day. It usually takes a few days for me to get everything ironed out as I’d like, but I think I’ve finally narrowed the time frame down to just under 18 hours.

So far everything is running nicely, with no problems whatsoever. I’m just hoping that I can keep it clean for a bit longer than I did last time. If I remember right, I did this whole process less than 6 months ago.

WOOHOO!!!!

As I’ve noted in the previous blogs, I’ve become a member of quite a few newsgroups. Last week I finally got tired of checking the Yahoo! groups page a dozen times a day and decided it was time to setup Outlook and start filtering my groups and emails through one place.

Innitial setup was easy as outlook was already installed. I quickly setup my default Charter account. Even though I rarely use that account, I figured it would be good to have access to all mailboxes from one application. Getting Gmail.com setup was a bit harder. The directions on Gmail’s site were right on, but when you ran a test, it would always fail. I tried just enabling the account and things ran perfect after that.

Yahoo was a bit more of a pain though. Because Yahoo thinks they are big stuff, they have made getting your email via pop3 a paid feature. I myself am not going to pay, so I had to find a work around. I started looking around online and found Ypops! This is a gateway that allows downloading of your Yahoo mail through Outlook, or any other email client. It works like a charm too.

Now I just have to sit back and let my emails come to me instead of having to check 5 different accounts at various times during the day.

Since I’m using Outlook for all my email activities, I figured it would be good to use it to sync my phone with. I had to download a new version of the Palm software, but setup was a breeze! now I can do all my phone and email activities through Outlook.

Some questions have been posed on the naming conventions I use for my computers. Back when computers were first being networked, it was much easier to give the specific computers a “name” rather than a numerical identifier. Some of the first names came from popular “geek” tv culture and include Lary, Moe, & Curly; Tom, Dick & Harry; and pupular names from such movies as Star Wars and Star Trek. I’ve chosen to use characters from my favorite Movie quadrilogy. I used to have Mother, Father, Bishop, Ripley, and Newt. Unfortunately, due to some of the computers dying, and others being parted out or sold off completely, I am down to Mother and Father now.

Now you know…

After barely dodging the bullet yesterday by not having to participate in the parade, I was fortunate again this morning in that I didn’t have to work my call-back today. This will almost certainly mean I will work Wednesday, and unfortunately on B-shift, however I was able to get a bunch of stuff done around the house today. The mountain of clothing is slowly starting to be eroded away, and the house is finally starting to look like a home.

I’ve finally had it with Internet Explorer! I made the switch to Firefox and think I’m going to like it much better. I had tried it out before, and really like how similar it is to the full blown Mozilla client. It also allows me to spell check my blog posts prior to posting. WOOHOO.

I spent the better part of the day tweaking Gentoo linux on my laptop. I have wanted to include some enhancements for quite some time now, but just haven’t gotten around to it. I was worried about the fan states (the speeds that both the CPU and Video fans run depending on thermal load), and never really liked the fact that the CPU fan wouldn’t run at max speed unless the CPU temp was between 75° - 80° C. Its my understanding that the die temperature (the temp at which the processor starts overheating) is 100° C, but I would like to keep the temp well below that. I believe that the processors internal thermal control circuit (TCC) will kick in as the CPU temperature approaches maximum die temperature (135° C). However, because I have altered the CPU and Video fan speeds using a software application, I am not sure that the system hardware will override the application if the CPU temp approached 100° C. Under normal operating parameters, this wouldn’t be a concern as the system itself regulates fan speeds in correlation to temperature . However, if the software application happens to crash for some reason, I’m pretty sure the fans will not operate correctly. This would be very bad!

I’ll have to look into this some more tonight before committing to the changes I’ve made.

Linus released a new version of Linux this today. I’m hoping that gentoo will release packages soon since this seems to fix quite a few bugs in the x86 architecture. You can read more about it here.

Apparently my spelling skills aren’t so good as pointed out by a few people that read my blog. I downloaded a live spell checker plugin to help me with my spelling abilities. I hope it helps.

Sorry I didn’t get a post in yesterday. About 1:30 am saturday morning I issued the wrong command and ended up wiping my entire installation out. I had to work on rebuilding it again yesterday and today. I figure it will help me when it comes to writing the installation documentation though, as I troubleshooted a few problems I just couldn’t seem to figure out. God Bless all!

Ok all, time for a little user interaction on the site here now!

I’m in need of some proofreaders for my Gentoo Installation Guide. Those of you who are already registered can read over the guide, and post a comment in the link directly below this message. Those of you who aren’t registered, you will need to register to the left in order to post comments. Sorry about this guys, but I’d like to keep my blog as spam free as possible.

Don’t be afraid to post an error even if you aren’t sure the word is spelled incorrectly. I understand that there is a lot of technical jargon contained within the guide, and that many of you may not understand what I am trying to convey to the reader. I am merely looking for spelling errors at this point. If you are familiar with linux, understand the point I am trying to get across, yet believe that there is a better way to phrase my sentence, please let me know about that also.

What I will do is post the last date I edited the file at the top of the web page. When you read over the guide, please post all errors, including the previous and following lines, and the date you read the guide. This will let everyone else know that unless the guide is updated, they do not need to waste time proofreading it. I would appreciate at least 3 proofreads from people to catch as many errors as possible. If, however, you are not able to proofread the entire document, please post the last line you were able to proofread so that others know where you left off at. Click the comments line below for an example of what I mean.

Thank you very much all. I am fairly good at writing things out, but not good when it comes to making sure they are grammatically correct.

Well, Father is much better now. I finally have my desktop environment back, my music player, Mozilla is working well, and everything is compiling nicely. I started yesterday morning when I got home from work by saving all critical information and formatting the partition. I decided to use ReiserFS this time to see what kind of differences I could notice. It ran so much more smoothly than last time simply because I had documentation to follow. I’ve only got a few minor tweaks left to accomplish. I’m sure I’ll find little things along the way, but those will be so much easier to deal with now that the major problems are out of the way.

Still working on father, keep your fingers crossed!

Yesterday was not a very good day for Father.

As most of you know, I do not like using M$ products, and feel that Windoze is the worst. I much prefer using Linux. I’ve been using it for since 1995, and although I am not a guru yet I have a good deal of skills with it. I recently started using a distribution of linux called Gentoo linux. It allows me to upgrade my systems with very little effort, is easy to configure, and is probably the most stable distro I’ve used. I’ve been using it for the past 3 years, and my last install was November of 2004.

Usually, I like to completely wipe and reinstall a system every year just to free space, get programs off I don’t use anymore or forgot about, change passwords, and completely clean the hard drive. Its hard for me to do this on my laptop though cause its so hard to configure at times, and usually takes me a month to get things back the way I want them. Unfortunately I’ll be doing this tomorrow though. I changed some settings on my computer yesterday, tried to recompile software, and tried to upgrade but it crashed out for some reason. Took me 3-4 hours just to get the software installation going again. I had to hack around configuration files, and didn’t even get everything I wanted done.

I figure its about time for me to do a reinstall anyway as two versions have come out since I’ve done my last reinstall. Luckily I was smart enough last time to document the entire install process so all I’ll have to do is follow the guide again. This will be a good chance for me to create the install documentation I was working on last time. Now that I have a web page up and running, it will be a good addition to my blog and documents.