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Wonderful Computers…

March 9th, 2010

I’ve determined that my problems with Colossus are actually the fault of the monitor. I don’t know why it started happening only when I installed the SSD drive, but it seems that it is just a coincidence. Apparently, something is wrong with the monitor’s power supply, and it fails to power on when it’s supposed to. If I leave it on all the time, it works. But if I turn it off for a long period of time, like when I sleep, it won’t power on after that. For now, I’ve found  a temporary solution. I can unplug the power for a few minutes and then it usually works for the rest of the day. I decided to get a new monitor, I ordered it last week,  and it’s supposed to arrive by next week.

Now about ICQ7 again. It seems that they’ve started displaying real advertising in ICQ now, they just started today. I had wondered when that would happen. Now those spaces for ads are actually used for what they’re intended. :lol:

Also, I did some digging into the SQLite database that ICQ7 uses for the message history and so on. While its layout looks similar to the older Access database used by ICQ6, I ran into an unusual result for the date field. Apparently, it’s a sort of Julian date format, but it starts after the year 1900, possibly to save space by having a shorter date. It’s an interesting choice, but it doesn’t really matter. It still works fine.

Anyway, here are the various formats used for message history that ICQ has used over the years:

  • ICQ2003b: FoxPro database
  • ICQ5: XML files?
  • ICQ 6 / ICQ 6.5: Microsoft Access database
  • ICQ7: SQLite 3 database

I personally feel that databases work much better for this purpose, as long as they can be compacted and repaired when necessary. XML files aren’t good at all for saving the message history in my opinion. I know that Windows Live Messenger uses XML files, and it can be frustrating because they don’t save the messages before the conversation is over. If the program crashes, you lose the entire history of that conversation. With a database, the messages can be stored immediately when they arrive, or are sent, and that saves them even if the program crashes during the conversation. They have also limited the size of the message history XML files, so it has to create a new one when it’s too big! That’s a real inconvenience. Microsoft made Access, so why not use it for their Messenger message history?

So while I don’t always agree with what the ICQ programmers choose to do, I think they made the right decision in choosing the databases for both ICQ6 and ICQ7.

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More CDs

February 19th, 2010

I received a couple more CDs from Amazon.ca today. I had also ordered a couple of Saxon albums that have been recently re-released, but they seem to have been delayed for some reason.

Here’s what I got:

  • Piece of Mind – Iron Maiden
  • Seventh Son of a Seventh Son – Iron Maiden

Other than that, everything has been pretty much the same as usual. I did have a bit more trouble with Colossus, but it seems to work fine if I turn off the monitor while it boots up for some reason.

I got a couple of Scythe Bay Rafters to mount the SSD drive. They hold two SSD drives and one 3.5″ hard  drive in a 5″ bay. I won’t be using them for anything other than SSDs, though. Now I’ll have the capacity to add one more SSD to Colossus, and 2 more in another later.

Posted in Loot, Music, Railwolf.com, Technology

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Nightmare

February 13th, 2010

I received the OCZ Agility 30GB SSD yesterday. The Purolator man came by in the afternoon while my parents were away, so I had to sign for it. I don’t know why they use those electronic devices, it’s impossible to sign properly on those, and it seemed that half the screen was affected by the cold and may have been frozen. It made a crazy line that shot up when I attempted to write my last name… :lol:

So my bad luck started then. I decided to wait until the evening to install the drive. What should have been simple and should have taken 15-30 minutes or so ended in disaster. There was nothing wrong with the drive, though. It’s the machine that was the problem. As soon as it booted up, the monitor would not stay powered on, it alternated between a blank screen and power off. I tried both monitors, and although the second one managed to stay on until part of Windows loading was completed, it also powered off the same way.

After trying the obvious, like removing the drive, I thought it was the video card that was causing this. But it was about 1:30AM by the time I figured out that I wasn’t going to solve it for a while, so I went to bed.

I tested the video card in Terminator, and to my surprise, it worked just fine. I reinstalled it in Colossus, but same as before, no power on the monitor.  I was puzzled. I decided to remove one memory module, and it  seemed to solve the problem. The monitor stayed on! I thought that the module was bad because of this, but after trying the other one in its slot, it didn’t work… as before. So I moved both modules to the other two slots that the manual says not to use when only 2 modules are installed. I have no idea why they say so. But it works fine now. Those DDR RAM slots are really hard to install modules into, though. I hate them, they shouldn’t require the force of Colossus to push them in. I hope I won’t have to touch them anymore.

The OCZ SSD is fast, so I’m glad I got it. It’s just unfortunate that I had to go through all this when I installed it. Maybe moving the case loosened the RAM, or something happened to the slot one module was in somehow. It was a nightmare, but it’s over now.

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Raptor Extinct

February 7th, 2010

Last night, I found Meteor dead with a blue screen. I tried to reboot it, but about half-way through, the same thing happened. So I powered it down again, and I heard some pretty strange noises that I’ve never heard before coming from the drive cage.

I never thought that a Western Digital Raptor would fail me, at least not that one. The Raptor in Colossus is the original model, it’s older, it has been running for much longer, and I thought that one would be the first to go if any. But no, the Raptor in Meteor failed instead. So the Raptor WD740ADFD has gone to extinction just like all other dinosaurs :lol:

I ran the WD diagnostic program, and not surprisingly, it failed all tests.  Here are the details:

Extended test failed
Error / Status code: 0226
226      Sector Relocation Error      Failure to relocate a sector during drive repair. The drive has to be replaced.

It was one bad sector that cannot be recovered caused all this. Luckily, I was able to use the WD Edition of Acronis True Image to clone the drive to a spare 250GB drive that I had recently installed in the machine because the Intel Matrix RAID kept dropping the drives “failed” from the mirror (that’s another story).

True Image is a nice program, and very useful. Even though it obviously could not copy the bad sector in question, it got everything else from the drive. After that, I just had to use the Windows XP CD to repair the replacement drive’s XP installation. I didn’t even have to do the entire reinstall process, it repaired some drive errors at the beginning, and then it was fine.

Now I’m not happy about the failure, but as has been my experience with Western Digital hard drives, I almost always am able to recover even when a boot drive fails by cloning it to a replacement drive. So I will stay with them, although I’m now going to experiment with solid state drives. Western Digital makes those too, but they don’t sell them to consumers yet. I guess that’s not surprising, SSDs might cut their traditional hard drive sales.

I ordered a 30GB OCZ Agility SSD just to try those out. They’re starting to become affordable now, and despite their size, they make good boot drives. Should be interesting…

Posted in Railwolf.com, Technology

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ICQ7

January 20th, 2010

ICQ7 has been released.  ICQ7 seems to have been designed to copy some of the design features of Windows Live Messenger, and they might have rushed it out to be the first to have the social networking features integrated in the program, many of which Windows Live Messenger has been rumored to include in the next version. ICQ is going to lose its unique qualities if it becomes no more than a Windows Live Messenger imitation, however. This makes me wonder if they’re planning to allow communicating with users of Windows Live Messenger in the future. Dropping the statuses to be the same could be a clue to this possibility.

One thing that surprised me was that they changed the database engine yet again. This time it went from Microsoft Access to SQLite. Now SQLite is probably fine, it’s just that another change is annoying, since it’s incompatible with the previous database, and you have to import the message history (at least they allow this). And it just makes more work for me…

So here is my list of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good:

  • Spell-check is still there.
  • The smileys are the same as in ICQ6.
  • Most of the options from ICQ6 have remained.
  • The color scheme can easily be changed. Just like in Windows Live.
  • Xtras removed. While it was a good concept in theory, the Xtras were a failure, and it’s good that this feature is gone.

The bad:

  • Sometimes a bit slow and momentarily unresponsive.
  • No send button from the message window. There is plenty of room for it. Really, does everything have to be like Windows Live Messenger?
  • Statuses have been reduced to only these 4:  “available”,”away”,”busy”,”invisible”.
  • Status messages, again more like those in Windows Live Messenger, dropping the unique status icons that made this feature stand out in previous versions.

The ugly:

  • All avatars / display pictures don’t scale properly in most parts of the program, the exception being in the message window.
  • The message window copies Windows Live Messenger’s message window style for the most part, except it’s uglier. Instead of giving the program a look that follows Windows 7, for example, it looks more like it belongs in Linux.  They moved the avatars / display pictures to the left side too,  just like in Windows Live Messenger.
  • The buttons for the smileys, spell-check, etc. are blended into the chat window and look dull.
  • Profiles have been reduced to very basic information plus social news feeds. You have to go to the website to view the rest.
  • Ads: Why have advertising all over the place when it’s only to advertise ICQ on ICQ? What’s the point of that?

So, in the end, I will stick with ICQ6.5. I have to say that while I don’t like ICQ7 that much right now, they still did a pretty good job on it. At least the features are there, and they all work pretty well. I remember when the first version of ICQ6 was released — how bad that was — it was shocking, and this is better than that for sure. But I still feel that they could have done better in some areas.

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The Case of the Bleeding Stomach

January 12th, 2010

This all started yesterday. I suppose it was caused by yet another virus. I was very tired, and I slept almost all day and all night. Once I got up at around midnight, I ate what would have been my dinner the night before.  A couple of hours later, I was still hungry, so I ate a can of soup. At about 5AM, I started to become very nauseous. So much so that I decided to take some medication. It didn’t help. So, I ended up vomiting. The scary part was that there was some blood in there.

So, I woke up my parents, and then we decided to wait and see what would happen. At about 7:30AM, it happened again. There was some blood again, but a bit less this time. It was time to go have it checked. By the time I was ready to go, the clinic had opened, so my father took me there instead of the hospital.

Things went pretty well at the clinic. It took only about an hour to get examined by a doctor. It turns out that I probably ruptured a blood vessel in my stomach while vomiting. Who knew that such a thing could happen? :o

I should be okay now, but that was quite a scare. I’m not supposed to eat until tomorrow, and then I’m supposed to start eating soft foods, like soup, rice, etc.

Not a good way to start the year… :(

Posted in Health, Life

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More Stuff

January 7th, 2010

Yesterday, I received a box of stuff from Amazon.ca. I got up pretty late, so I didn’t post about it. My energy has been terrible for the past few days. And to make that even worse, I had insomnia, too!

Anyway, I got some more Iron Maiden CDs and a few movies. Here’s what I got:

CDs:

  • Iron Maiden – Iron Maiden
  • Powerslave – Iron Maiden
  • Somewhere in Time – Iron Maiden
  • The Number of the Beast- Iron Maiden

DVDs:

  • Backdraft
  • Bulletproof
  • Cop Land
  • In the Line of Fire
  • Shooter
  • True Crime
Posted in Loot, Movies, Music

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MostWeirdo.com

January 6th, 2010

I finished up the theme, and now MostWeirdo.com is up. I deleted the most recent junk mail from here, and moved it over there. I used the classic WordPress theme as the base for my theme, and it looks okay. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on that, since it’s not really important for it to look pretty.

Funny that WordPress only suggested the upgrade to version 2.9.1 (yes, already) on one of the sites, but not the other. I updated both, though.

Posted in Railwolf.com

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Happy New Year

January 4th, 2010

I wish you all a Happy New Near, including those who have seemingly disappeared. ;-)

I realize that I’m a bit late in posting this. I usually would have posted it on January 1st, but this year, I was pretty tired and depressed. Despite the fact that 2009 was not a bad year, some things didn’t go so well. As always, I was alone when the clock struck 12, and that wasn’t so great for my mood.

I need to work on my writing more, but I often have almost no energy, along with lots of brain fog.  I do still write some lyrics and poems now and then. I can focus on a verse, but the pages of a story are not so easy to focus on. It’s a challenge, but I still enjoy writing, even if I’m like a tortoise with a typewriter. :lol:

My bass playing has improved a lot. It’s only been two and a half years since I started, and it’s getting closer and closer to my guitar playing, but I still have some more work to do.

I’ll be moving the junk mail posts over to another site which suits that better, and that will keep this site more clearly focused. I will have that ready pretty soon. I just need to make the theme for it. That site has been around for a long time, but I never really did anything with it, so I might as well do this.

Posted in Life, Railwolf.com

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WordPress 2.9

December 19th, 2009

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.9, and everything went smoothly, as usual.

Not much else happened this past week other than a bit more snow and some quite cold temperatures for a few days. I had some problems with my lower back, some pretty bad pain at times, and I was really tired, too. That can be a bad combination, because I get back pain if I sleep too much, but I’m too tired if I don’t sleep enough. It becomes a sort of vicious circle. It’s better now, though.

Posted in Health, Life, Railwolf.com