Category: Internet & Technology

I’ve been waiting to build a “super computer” for months, and now that I finally had enough parts to get started, when I put it all together into the ultra-sweet chassis of the Shuttle SD39P2 XPC…the damn thing wouldn’t boot! I had a kick-ass Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 running at 2.96 Ghz (courtesy of Intel Canada), 4 GB of 800mhz RAM (courtesy of Kingston), 1150 GB of storage (courtesy of Western Digital) – what I didn’t have was an optical drive since Plextor said they’d send me a Blu-Ray burner but never did, and I never did end up sending that email to ATI asking for a card…

At any rate, I cannibalized a few parts from another PC and put it all in the SD39P2. I felt a rush of excitement booting up such a powerful machine, pressed the power button, and nothing happened. @&*$%&^@#!! I spent the next couple of hours trouble shooting it, swapping out the RAM and video card, all with no positive results. @&*$%&^@#!! Then I got in my car and spent 90 minutes driving to and from Memory Express, having bought a ghetto 2.8 Ghz Celeron CPU ($60!) just for testing purposes (I didn’t have a spare Socket 775 CPU sitting around). It was a grim scenario: either the $1300 CPU from Intel was bad, or the Shuttle motherboard was bad…both scenarios sucked for me. Turns out the new CPU didn’t change anything, so it looks like the Shuttle XPC is bad. Damn. Damn. Damn. They’re sending me a new one and I’ll send this one back. That’s going to take at least a week though, meaning this project is on hold.

I guess on the bright side though by the time the new Shuttle arrives I’ll have the new video card I ordered and the new optical drive as well. I just hope that XFX video card fits in the XPC (gulp).

Every time I build a computer and it doesn’t go quite right, I think to myself “Jason, just go buy a Dell…” – but once I fight my way through the problems and I end up with a sweet-ass rig, I know it was worth the effort. I really hope this is one of those scenarios…

I picked up Gears of War a couple of months ago, but have only recently started to start playing it more seriously. Some friends were over a few weeks ago and we played in co-op mode for a bit, and got to a certain checkpoint. Then this last Saturday I fired it up again to play with a buddy of mine who’s in Ontario. I wanted to start over a new game from scratch with him, but I also wanted to keep my previously saved game. The game wouldn’t let me do that – it said that if wanted to start a new campaign I would lose my previous campaign and checkpoints. That can’t be right – am I missing something? How do you play a solo game and also do online campaigning with your friends? Or what if you have more than one group of friends you want to play with?

I took a several videos today at CTIA, all of Windows Mobile applications being demoed. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight I really didn’t have the right hardware or software to get the job done properly. I thought that YouTube was limited to videos 10 minutes long, but they also have a 100 MB file size limit. My Canon SD800 doesn’t have any sort of video compression beyond basic MJPEG, so the file sizes are huge. An 8 minute 44 second video clip at 320 x 240 resolution weighs in at 325 MB. That means I’m having to compress them to get the file size under 100 MB before I can upload the videos to have YouTube compress them all over again. It’s not like you can see the double-compression though with the crappy bitrates YouTube uses.

Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but my Fujitsu P7010D doesn’t have the graphics power to run Windows Movie Maker (which is incredibly stupid that it requires hardware acceleration and won’t run at all), and I didn’t install Premiere Elements before leaving, so I was left without any ability to edit video files. I tried Movavi, but it turned out to be highly problematic – it locked up on me several times, complained about missing codecs even when Windows Media Player could play back the file without trouble, and generally wouldn’t do a damn thing properly. I really wanted to like Movavi – it seems to have a great set of features, but I’ve tried it on two PCs now (one Vista, one XP Pro) and it was unstable and dysfunctional at editing video, splitting video, and ripping a DVD. Next I installed Nero 7 because I happened to already have the 175 MB “upgrade” downloaded – it’s ridiculous how Nero releases a trial version of the entire suite as an upgrade for customers, but in this case it happened to be helpful to me. A quick phone call to Ashley got me the serial number I needed. I installed it and rebooted, but bizarrely enough Nero Vision (the video editing application) won’t work with the Canon AVI files properly – when I add one to the timeline it only recognizes the first ten seconds. No errors, it just won’t work properly.

I started to get a bit desperate at this point, so I did a search for a freeware video editing application and tried AviTricks. I didn’t work and puked on codec errors. At this point I was loudly cursing Canon for making their video format so difficult to deal with. As a last-ditch effort, I tried the crusty old Windows Media Encoder 9, and it actually worked! The problem is this 1.2 Ghz Pentium M CPU is exactly made for fast video encoding – it’s taking me forever to encode each clip, especially when I encode a file only to discover it ends up being more than 100 MB in size.

I actually spent some time researching what laptops a local Best Buy here had because I was convinced I’d need a new laptop in order to get all this video transcoding finished before I left Orlando – selecting a new laptop is a topic for another post though, because it’s proving to be a frustrating trying to find the right one. At any rate, the closest Best Buy was out of stock on all six of the HP laptops I was looking at. What are the odds? 🙁 The nearest Circuit City only had one HP laptop, not the one I wanted, and no one at the store would pick up the phone. I gave up and decided to rough it with my little Fujitsu, and while it’s slow, I’m getting the videos transcoded and uploaded. Back to the grind…

The other day I complained about the scam situation that is brokerage fees from courier companies, but I didn’t explain what exactly I had shipped. Well, here it is: a custom-made skin from DecalGirl for my Fujitsu P7010D laptop. The skin is a durable vinyl that’s sticky, but not so sticky that it was difficult to work with or pull off and re-apply.

I’m not really a “bling bling” type person, but I thought a DecalGirl skin would look great on my laptop, and I was right! I’ve long wanted to make my laptop more customized. Voodoo PC “tattoos” their laptops, but the process is expensive and they only do it on Voodoo-branded machines – which of course I don’t have. The DecalGirl skin was an inexpensive way of giving my laptop a customized look – I think it ran me $24 USD for the unique size that I required. There are a huge variety of skins to choose from – and they make skins for not only laptops, but iPods, Zunes, and other devices. The install was quick and easy (just peel and stick), and the air bubbles were very easy to push over to the edge and out.

About the only problem I had with the install of the decal was that it was just a smidgen too large – resulting in the edges looking like this:

That was easy to fix by cutting the corner piece in half, then laying the two edges on top of each other. I’m thrilled with how this looks and I’d highly recommend DecalGirl products to anyone – just remember to factor in the nasty shipping and brokerage fees if you live outside the USA.

A big shout-out to the awesome folks at Akismet. They make a tool that works with WordPress to filter out all the spam comments that get submitted to this site. I was under the radar for a while there, not getting much in the way of spam, but I must have been noticed by the spammers because now I’m getting a lot of spam. Akismet caught 80 (!!) spam comments posted to this blog in the past 24 hours, and all were legitimate spam. That’s a 100% success rate – very nice. I don’t make money off this blog, but I’m tempted to pay their $5 a month commercial license key fee just to help them out and make sure they stay in business.

You know what would be really neat for Outlook? To have it scan your address book, picking up the names and email addresses of people in it, then automatically adding it to the custom dictionary so that when you send an email with spell check turned on (and you DO spell check your email, don’t you?) it wouldn’t trip up over every email address and name it finds. The same theory would work for Windows Mail, Word, and any other application that uses a user-customized dictionary. Someone go make this happen – thanks. 😉

My spelling tends to be pretty good, although I do make mistakes and a friend of mine always points them out to me (thanks Janak!). I’m not one of those types of people that resents being corrected because a correction is an opportunity to learn and grow. “Humility is the beginning of wisdom” or something like that. At any rate, between the spell checker not working in WordPress 2.1 (and 2.1.1 for that matter) and the Firefox spell checker not working in the WordPress posting interface, I was beginning to think that someone was trying to expose my sometimes poor spelling to the world. While I still can’t get the WordPress spell check working (and their support forums are strangely silent on the issue), I did manage to find a guy who created a plug-in for WordPress called FFspell that will magically enable the Firefox spell checker and allow it to work. I don’t know how something this obvious made it past the WordPress developers, but at least there’s a way to fix it. Three cheers for indy developers who create things to work around problems other developers create!

I was checking my email today and was alerted to a new service called Clipmarks. I’ve seen things like this before, but this implementation seemed pretty cool. And since I’m on the big blogging kick lately, I figured I’d check it out. I was amazed at what I saw on the install page:

A Firefox add-on released before the Internet Explorer version? This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this before – Firefox sure has made headway over the years! Regarding Clipmarks, I haven’t checked it out yet because like all Firefox add-ons, you have to restart the browser before it will work, and I have many tabs open and am in full work mode. It would be nice to not have to re-start Firefox whenever there was a new add-on installed.

That’s the bottom-end Dell PC that just arrived today. It’s a bit big, but I like the hardware design. I haven’t fired it up yet or anything, but I assume things will work ok. That’s a lot of hardware for a mere $379! Gotta’ love Dell and their promotions. I just wished I could have ordered it without any operating system and saved even more money. That seems to be a popular idea over at Dell’s Ideastorm, even if it’s mostly Linux geeks voting. 😉

In other Dell news I spent 63 (!!!) minutes on the phone with a helpful customer service gentleman named Lorne. I told him my sordid tale of woe and he said that my case was exceptional enough to warrant a replacement of the monitor even though it only had one stuck pixel. I won’t know for sure until tomorrow, because he had to escalate it, but he seemed quite confident that they’d send me out a new monitor. Sweet. We’ll see what happens…

For you Vista users out there, if you’re seeing strange issues with Adobe Flash (boy it feels strange to call it that) where the plugin is installed but not recognized on certain sites, I have a solution for you. On my wife’s laptop (Toshiba M50) I’m using IE7 and have installed Flash. The “installation successful” page tells me that I have Flash installed. I can see the Flash banners just fine. Yet when I go to look at one of my videos on Revver, it tells me that I need to have the latest Flash player installed. The same thing happens on YouTube. I’ve confirmed that “Shockwave Flash Object” is installed (Tools > Manage Add-Ons), and Flash9b.ocx is the file name. If you’re having the same problem, keep reading.

Even though Adobe’s online tool said I was running the latest version of Flash (9.0.28), it still wasn’t working properly. I ran across a forum post that suggested trying several things, so I found the install folder for Flash:

C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash

Inside that folder, there are two files: Flash9b.ocx, the ActiveX control that IE7 uses, and FlashUtil9b.exe. I shut down IE7 then ran FlashUtil9b.exe and it said that there was an update for my version of Flash – it downloaded a new version, I rebooted the PC as it suggested, and now I can view all Flash content on YouTube and Revver as I should. What’s interesting is that the version number of Flash didn’t change. I suspect the issue is more one of registering Flash with the system properly, and Adobe has a bug in the installer. This worked for me, so I hope it will work for you!

UPDATE: If you have Vista 64-bit, which is much more common now then when I wrote this post, you’ll want to look in this folder: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\flash\ (thanks to Charles Culver for pointing that out)