Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

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My laptop finally kicked it

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Well… that’s not an entirely accurate statement.  First, "finally" isn’t the right word, because the underlying cause had been going on since the thing came out of warranty (funny how that works, isn’t it?).  Also, it didn’t really "kick it."

It started about… oh, say beginning of this year.  I have no idea really, but that sounds about right.  Anyway, I’d have it off, or in hibernation, and it would shut down entirely.  As in I couldn’t turn it on.  At all.  The power button didn’t work, the little lock switch next to it wasn’t next to the little lock, the battery and power cable were both properly connected, and the charging light wasn’t lit when plugged in.  The first time it happened, I just waited.  I used my old laptop (the one who’s screen broke. I just propped it up on something).  Anyway, it eventually started working again, and everything was fine.  For a while.  Then it happened again.  And this time, I waited for a couple days.  And it still didn’t work.  I contacted Gateway, and they sent me back a suggestion to send it in to Gateway to be fixed.  No thanks.  They also gave me an 8 step process for taking out and reinserting the memory, which might fix the problem.  It did.  Temporarily.  Then it happened again.  And I repeated it.  And it kept working.  Then I started getting lazy, and I forgot to detach the battery one time (which was incredibly stupid of me, I could have shocked myself…), and it didn’t work.  So I did it again, taking out the battery, and it worked.  Some time later, I forgot to unplug the power cable from it.  It didn’t work.  With power cord: doesn’t work.  Without power cord: works.  With battery: doesn’t work.  Without battery: does work.  Seem like a pattern?  Finally, one day, I decided to try just taking out the battery and power cord, waiting a couple seconds, and reinserting each.  And, sure enough, it starts working again.

And so I finally figured out that all I had to do was remove the battery and power cord, and then put both back in.  Which was good, because it started happening more and more frequently.  Whenever I leaned on the area of the hard drive a little too hard, the whole thing would crash.  I was annoyed, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

One day, I was a bit pissed at my computer, because it was lagging more than I had ever seen it lag before.  I couldn’t even get to the restart button.  So I did it the fast and easy way.  I whacked the area above the hard drive, and it crashed.  But when I started it up again, it was in pretty bad shape.  Explorer took forever to load, and when it did, almost every program was slower than it ever had been.  So I restarted it (I could at least get to the button this time), and it shut down and powered back on.  I signed in, and was greeted with a blank, blue screen.  Then it restarted.  and the same thing happened.  This time, it failed to boot.  And it failed to boot in safe mode.  So I booted the Vista DVD and selected "Repair."  It couldn’t find the Windows installation.  So I got to the main menu, and it couldn’t find any system restore points.  I clicked "Detect and Repair," in the hopes that it might find something, and it did.  And it repaired it.  I booted the computer, and the same thing happens.  I repeated the boot from DVD, and this time it detects the Vista installation.  "Repairs Unsuccessful."  I try again.  This time it said it worked.  Reboot.  It failed to boot normally, so I tried in safe mode.  And it works.  I sign in, and it works.  Barely.  As soon as I try to open something, Explorer crashes.  And it won’t recover.  I hold the power button (because I couldn’t get there in Explorer), and it boots in safe mode. Repeat.  The third or fourth time, I get a chance to press the "restart" button in Windows.  It shuts down, and the next time it starts, there’s a message: "WARNING: Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent."  Fuck.

So, when backing up my hard drive, I found a number of files that were unreadable (corrupted).  Which leads me to think that when I hit it, either the disk head scratched the surface (which isn’t theoretically possible, seeing as it’s designed not to), or files were open, and Windows hadn’t finished writing to them (which isn’t likely, cause the thing’s done the same thing about a hundred times without this happening once).

So, in conclusion…  My hard drive is partially corrupted, and my laptop is the biggest reason.  Which makes it easier to convince my parents to get me a new one (plus the fact that it’s been spiraling downhill for the year it’s been out of warranty…).  And, at least most of my data isn’t corrupted, so I’ll just be able to transfer it over when I do get a new computer.  Of course, the laptop isn’t completely unusable, and I do have my old hard drive…  And as long as I’m not using it regularly…  What I’m planning to do with it is set up Web Server 2008 on it, and tuck it away somewhere where it won’t get hurt.  I can then run my SharePoint site off of that, instead of a 10 year old machine with a 20 GB hard drive and 256 MB of ram.  That’ll make everything a whole lot easier…

god that was long…

Posted in Computers, Windows | 1 Comment »

Hearts of Iron

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

Some of the people who read this (by the way, who exactly is that?) might have heard me talk about Hearts of Iron.  If you have, you know that it’s more of an obsession than a game.

On the surface it looks, feels, and plays a lot like Risk.  But comparing Hearts of Iron to Risk is like comparing Halo 3 to the original Pong.

In this and all future screenshots, click on the picture to view a larger version.

menu bar

That’s just the top bar.  Yea.  I’m not explaining the game in any more detail than that, cause it’d just take way too long…

Ok, so lets walk through a game!  In this, I’m playing as the USNA (blue) in the scenario “The Abyss,” and I’ve declared war on The Confederates (black).

1

The Confederate’s Capital is Mexico City (it’s the one in the middle, surrounded by blue).  I’ve landed troops in the surrounding provinces, and  thus cut off all supply lines (they all stem from the capital).  Now every one of their divisions is out of supply, making it easy to defeat them.

2

I’ve taken most of the southwest, and I’m starting to advance into the southeast.

3

I’ve taken the entire south except for one province.  That gets taken soon.

4

I take Mexico City (allowing supply chains to resume. whoops), and push south into northern South America.

5

And there you have it.  I’ve conquered the entire continent of North America, and some northern South America, and annexed The Confederates. Notice the date: It took just a little over 2 years.

Again, that’s barely scratching the surface.  In this case, I didn’t have any allies to compete with (yes, I compete with my allies), so I was able to take the entire country.  In other cases, such as the one below, you’ll see that that’s usually not the case.

6

Now, that doesn’t come with a before picture, but just pretend there is.  APR (orange) originally extended from Cape Town (South Africa) to the Ottoman Empire (light green) border (there are still some APR controlled provinces there), and north to Roma (green) (again, still one province there), then west to the Atlantic, where it bordered Bourbon (gray) to the north.  So, basically, everything there that is now brown (Republic of China), blue (USNA), off-white (Australasia), and light blue (I think that’s Sweden), and some parts of the gray (Bourbon), was once orange (APR).  By the way, the big message window?  A peace offer made by APR, offering some large amount of territory in exchange for me backing off.  Well, sorry, I already had most of the country…

7

And another desperate offer, when all they actually still controlled was their capital (so they wouldn’t be in supply).  Which is about to be taken.  “Decline.”

So yea.  After that, I declared war on Prussia and let my allies in Europe (mostly the Cossacks and Sweden, and a couple provinces for Bourbon) fall in on it.  The Cossacks took most of the country.  As the leader of the Axis (a required alliance even if the timeline’s been screwed with), they didn’t want to let the alliance die, so they allied with the Empire of Russia near the end of the war.  The Russians started chipping away at the Cossacks, so they rushed back to defend the eastern border.  Meanwhile, I went north, around Sweden, and landed in northern Russia.  I surrounded Moscow, the capital, and next went south, then east to capture most of western Russia (the Chinese got eastern Russia).  After that, I declared war on the Empire of Persia, and took almost the entire country (the Cossacks got a couple territories.  Now, I’m preparing to invade the European Soviets (Stalinist Britain), Roma (Stalinist Italy), and PRRS (Stalinist Japan) (their all allied).  And the people in South America (also Stalinist, I forget their name) might join them.  So, a war on four different fronts.  This should be interesting :).

Posted in Computers, Games, Life | 1 Comment »

thetoothpick.com Design Update

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

Did I seriously neglect to post about my design overhaul? Oh well…

 I changed the layout of http://thetoothpick.com/ from the kind of blocky, straight thing it was to… well, kind of like a capsule.  It’s easier to show:

I’m going to experiment a bit with the header (I’ve given up trying to include the desert picture I had before).  I’ve found an image editor for Linux that will let you create/modify images (including adding text), from the command line, and someone’s created a PHP extension for it.  Now, all I’ve got to do is figure out how to install it on my server (I don’t own/control it).  I guess I could just ask IX, but I’m not sure they’d do it. In all honesty, I’d prefer to host the website on my own computer, but that’s more or less out of the question (my SharePoint site is already unbelievably slow. I didn’t post about that either, did I? I’ll get to that later).

I’ll keep changing this from time to time, but it’s gonna look a lot like that for a while.  My change log’s looking unused (yea, I’m keeping one.  And I’ve managed to almost lost it twice…).  If anyone’s got any suggestions, let me know.

Posted in Computers, Website | No Comments »

August 31st, 2007

Friday, August 31st, 2007

This post has no specific topic.

 

School started.  A while ago.  My schedule:

  1. Biology with Willats
  2. Spanish II with Leskowski
  3. Computer Programing TA for Mattix / Modern World History with Cowherd
  4. Algebra II with Hayden
  5. English 3-4 with Hill
  6. Modern World History with Cowherd / Social Psych with Blanpied
  7. LC with McCarthy

 I’m not going to talk about them.  If you want to know, ask me.  I won’t finish this blog if I start talking about everything…

 

Cross country is… alright, I guess.  Things hurt from time to time, but I’ll live…  Fuck, the freshmen are annoying.  There’s this one dumbass punk wannabe that’s just so annoying…  He won’t stop talking to us, even though there are plenty of freshmen on the team, and he seems incapable of saying anything intelligent.  I was asking Stephen what he thought the middle school XC team was doing (they were like… hopping 5-10 yards down the football field, not staying in any sort of recognizable formation [aka they're line kept braking apart]. he said he had no idea), and the freshman kid is just like “Well, you know, when you run, it hurts.  So maybe they’re just trying to get used to pain, so they can go faster!”  (It looked like they weren’t close to breaking a sweat).  The he continued.  “So, like if you stab your hand with a knife, you’ll be able to run faster!”  Stephen and I just kinda looked at him.  I was like “you know, that’s really not a good idea…”, and Stephen says “Actually, it’s a great idea! Go try it!”  Anyway.  He’s a pain in the ass.  I’m sure he’s just trying to fit in or something, but… cmon… go fit in with other freshmen or something.

 

Florida was fun.  Pictures!

 Mine:

Troop 4 - Florida Sea Base Trip

BTW, I did a lot of cool things with that.  You can view a map of the pictures, and you can view them in Google Earth.

 Amos’s:

http://picasaweb.google.com/grace.namaste/SeabaseTripAugust2007 (I can’t imbed it…)

God damit Amos…  I put up 83 pictures, so he puts up 92.  Granted, he did take like 600 to my 285… whatever.

http://picasaweb.google.com/grace.namaste/SeabaseTripAugust2007/photo#5104294802603934914

xD I look weird in that…

I might do some sort of post with stories and stuff.  Maybe.

 

Waterworld on Sunday!  Elaine and Justine want to strap sandwiches to me and have me wear a baggy shirt, so it just looks like I’m fat or something.  It’s mainly Justine though.  Thomas doesn’t care xP.  Donno if that’s going to happen xD.

 

Owell, I’ll write more at some other point in time, I guess.

Posted in Boy Scouts, Computers, Life, Running, School, Traveling | No Comments »

Windows Genuine Advantage

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

On July 24th, the FBI and the Chinese Public Security Bureau seized almost five hundred million dollars of counterfeit Microsoft software, making it the largest single counterfeiting bust in history.  Microsoft estimates that the total software produced by this group over the past several years values at over 2 billion dollars.  Microsoft’s dedicated anti-counterfeiting team, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), helped track down more than 1000 people across 12 countries who had purchased the counterfeit software.  These people turned the software over to Microsoft, who gave it to forensic specialists, who traced it to the group based in Guangdong province, China.  Without WGA’s help, this group would still be at large, making millions off other people’s work.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with WGA, their the ones who are behind all the security precautions in the Windows packaging (the holographic disks, the product keys, etc). 

Here’s a picture of the fake and the real Windows Vista Business disks, side by side.  See if you can tell which one’s which.

Posted in Computers, Microsoft, Windows | 1 Comment »

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