Railwolf.com

Tiny Terror

April 26th, 2010

I recently got a new guitar amplifier. I got an Orange Tiny Terror along with a matching 12″ speaker cabinet. It’s my first tube amplifier, and I’ve been impressed so far. I also got a couple more pedals. A BOSS NS-2 Noise Suppressor pedal, because with 19 pedals — especially overdrive and distortion pedals — it can get a bit noisy, and that pedal does a good job cutting it out. Funny that it even cuts the noise made by my computer if I walk close to the case with my guitar.

I also got a BOSS ME-25 multiple effects pedal, which is pretty cool, and can also be used to record with a computer. But that turned out to have a little snag. They don’t include a USB cable with it, so I searched all over my lair for one. I had lots of USB cables with the mini-B connector, but none with a full sized B connector, which is what it uses. Coincidentally, I happened to go to Home Depot with my father to get some things for the yard, and I saw a USB cable there, so I bought it. In the past, I had tried recording with a microphone or connecting the headphone jack to my line-in on the computer, but never got a really good sound from that. The ME-25 records much, much better. Although I couldn’t get the software they include (Cakewalk Sonar LE) to actually record anything yet… I used Audacity instead, which is free.

Posted in Guitar

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New Monitor

April 6th, 2010

My new monitor finally arrived today. After waiting for a month, I decided that I had to contact Dell about it, so I used the form on their website. The next day, I got an email apologizing for the delay, and they arranged to have it shipped by Friday. It took a little longer to arrive because of the Easter holiday, but it’s here now. So I’m happy.

Now about the monitor. It’s an ST2410, the screen is 24″ widescreen, and “true HD”, but the funny thing about it is that it’s no higher than my old 19″ was. But that’s why I got this one. I wanted the same height as before, because a higher screen is better for writing, and with widescreen monitors, it takes a bigger monitor to achieve this. I kept the second monitor I had, an 18″ LCD, for my notebooks, since my desk had enough room to keep it even with the new monitor beside it. That way, I can watch a movie or something and still see what my notebooks are up to with their lids closed.

Posted in Lair, Loot, Technology

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New Pedals

March 27th, 2010

I got some new guitar effects pedals yesterday. I ordered them online. Since I couldn’t get any BOSS pedals online, I bought something different. I got a couple of Behringer pedals, the “Slow Motion” and “Ultra Vibrato”, which are copies of a couple of old BOSS pedals that were discontinued long ago and are very rare and expensive now. These Behringer pedals are cheap plastic pedals, but not bad. They’re certainly better than paying hundreds of dollars for a used pedal. Roland could make a lot of money by making limited edition reissues of their older discontinued BOSS pedals, but they don’t. I like their products, but I really don’t understand what the company management is thinking. Maybe it’s something like: “Oh, we have too much money! Let’s make pedals that are not as good as our old ones, and we’ll make it difficult to buy our pedals, because we sell too many of them.”

But anyway, the real gem from this order is the Visual Sound Comp 66 pedal. It’s a great compressor, I’m so glad I got it. I had thought about getting a BOSS compressor, but their latest one doesn’t seem to be too well reviewed. It seems that their old one was better. I also got the Visual Sound “1 Spot” power supply, which is quite good. They say it can “power all your pedals”, but since mine are not all in the same place, I will keep using my other power supplies for some of the pedals. It does have much better daisy chain cables than what I had before, though. So if I were to go back in time, I would have bought this for all of them, I suppose. Or maybe two.

Posted in Guitar, Loot

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New Fans

March 25th, 2010

I received some new cooling fans for Meteor. All of the original case fans are dead now, same as those in Colossus. I spent some time installing those yesterday. Three fans in total. Not really fun. But I did finally solve the problem with the fan in the bottom of the case next to the drive cage. The Antec P180 case should have come with a fan grill there, but it didn’t. With 4 hard drives in there, the cables are sure to interfere with the fan. Since I had to remove the fan holder to change the dead fan, I installed a grill on it at the same time. I had originally just placed a grill just leaning against the compartment to keep the wires out of the fan blades. It had worked okay, but it was loose in there. Now it’s attached securely to the fan.

I also got a new D-Link gigabit switch; a DGS-105D. That’s a 5 port version of the switches I have now (DGS-1008D). I got it for Terminator, since it was hooked up to an older 100 megabit switch. Funny that Dell shipped it to me in less than 24 hours, but they can’t get me a monitor, which they make.

The transition to Terminator has gone pretty well. I had to edit a few scripts to make them connect to the MySQL database on Electrocuter2, and create some new PHP script images that actually pull an image from Electrocuter2 and then recreate it so that it’s available to the outside world. The Now Playing section, for example, had to be modified this way. It’s not as fast, but it works pretty well.

Once I was done with all of this, I brought the boxes to the basement… it’s starting too look like a warehouse. So I decided to clean it up and get rid of some of those boxes. That will take some time, but I need to do it.

Posted in Lair, Railwolf.com, Technology

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Downtime

March 18th, 2010

There was some server downtime since last night when I shut down Colossus. I’m really thinking about scrapping that machine now, I’m fed up with all the problems it’s been having. It’s not only the monitor problems, but Nvidia chipset drivers that cause blue screens, etc.. I tried many different versions, but they all cause some sort of trouble on occasion. Not to mention the shorted out network chip on that motherboard, and unstable USB… it’s time to retire it. I can keep it as a spare machine for just surfing the web or whatever, but that’s about it. Never again will I buy a motherboard with an Nvidia chipset, nor a video card. Too many problems…

So now I moved the web server job for Railwolf.com to Terminator… yes… and my internal lab stuff has all been moved back to Electrocuter2, which works fine now that I have removed those failed drives. I’ll be moving some of the drives from Colossus to Meteor soon, too.

The idea is to cut down on the heat produced in my room, especially since it seems that this summer will be hot. It’s only March and it’s already getting pretty warm. Nice weather, though, like spring. It was 16°C / 60°F yesterday.

I still haven’t gotten my monitor. I don’t know why, but it’s taking much longer than reasonable for a monitor. I ordered it from Dell.ca on the 2nd of March. So it’s been more than two weeks already, and they don’t even know when it will ship now. It’s just a monitor, do they have to make it especially for me or what? I can probably get something shipped from Taiwan myself faster than that.

Posted in Railwolf.com, Technology

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BOSS in Canada

March 11th, 2010

Last night, I decided to see if I could buy some BOSS guitar effects pedals online.
It should have been easy, but it isn’t the case for those of us in Canada. The few online retailers that actually have them are not allowed to show the prices!
Apparently, Roland Canada has a policy that prevents retailers from listing the prices online. So you can’t even buy them online. Call for the price? No thanks. The prices are not some trade secret. Are they trying to discourage people from buying their pedals or what?
This is the year 2010, I want to put the pedals into a shopping cart and proceed to the checkout. Meanwhile, in every other country — the USA for example, the prices are listed on every site. So I thought, “well I can maybe order from the USA and eat some yummy shipping and duty fees…”
But again, another policy; they don’t allow the US shops to ship these to Canada either!
So I will have to buy my pedals in an actual shop somewhere downtown as I have been doing in the past. That would be fine, but the problem is that they almost never have the pedals I want in stock. I have to go to different shops to get them all. I have collected quite a few pedals over the years, but I would probably have more if it were easier to get the ones I want. Now the pedals are hard enough to find, but their accessories, like pedal boards, are nearly impossible to find in shops. I don’t understand why they can’t sell those online.
So a suggestion for Roland Canada; if you don’t cut out the archaic internet policies, make a new policy so that the shops have to stock the entire line of BOSS pedals at all times.

Posted in Guitar

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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.

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.

Posted in Technology

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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…

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.

Posted in Technology

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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

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