Skye's Blog of Doom

I recently discovered that I'm 41U tall.

You know, just in case I need to be rackmounted...

This week I did a little eBay bargain hunting and upgraded my motherboard & CPU from a MSI K7D Master-L with a single Athlon MP 1700+ to a newish Socket 939 based Abit AV8 with an Athlon 64 3000+ processor. The new CPU has the 90nm Venice core and the mainboard would finally use the full AGP 8x of my ATI Radeon 9800 so I was excited to see how it would perform.

Tested with Kill-a-Watt and Aquamark 3:

	MSI K7D	Abit AV8
Power @ Max CPU	305W	280W
GFX Score	4,611	6,207
CPU Score	3,900	8,630
Aquamark Score	28,980	45,650
FPS	28.98	45.65

So now I have a computer that runs almost twice as fast, and uses 20W less than before. Yay for technology! I could get a lot more out of this rig with some judicious overclocking, but I don't know if I'll bother.

If you're going to take the trouble to sending out a phishing email, at least check your English spelling and grammar, people. Here's a classic that recently appeared in my inbox:

Dear customer,

It occures here to us that you or a wrong person is unusually trying to log into his your account because it has being trying to login by unknow person who provides to us your accurate ussername with wrong password, of which by what we are seeing here, the person might log into this account if nothing is done, since he's missing only one letter from what we have here as yourpassword.

Besides, five more wrong login into this account might couse you service suspenssion that will require your coming to the bank for clearification. So the earlier you get this account updated the better for you. So click on this below link to re-proccess your onling banking to update to avoid service suspension.

Does anyone actually fall for that?

For quite a long time I'd been happily using my girlfriend's Mac formatted iPod with iTunes 6 on my Windows PC by using the great and wonderful MacDrive HFS driver. After upgraded to iTunes 7 though, for some reason it stopped working. About a week later the MacDrive 6.1.5 update was released, promising compatibility with iTunes 7 but iTunes still wouldn't recognize the iPod and insisted it needed to be reformatted for Windows.

I decided to try uninstalling and reinstalling MacDrive which pointed to the real problem. Apparently Daemon Tools (which I use to mount ISO images on drive letters, saves having to burn them) uses a "SCSI Passthrough Device" to fake its drive letters and that interferes with MacDrive operation, detailed in this knowledgebase article. I uninstalled Daemon Tools, rebooted, deleted SPTD*.sys from WINDOWS\System32\Drivers, rebooted again, and reinstalled MacDrive.

Success! iTunes 7 now recognizes the Mac formatted iPod again. Apparently more recent versions of Daemon Tools don't use the SPTD driver, but I haven't tried installing a newer version to see if it will coexist better with MacDrive. I'm just glad we both have lots of podcasts to listen to on the long bus ride back from Vancouver next week.

I got sick of not being able to listen to my favourite CBC podcasts so I did some Googling and found this article at Apple:

Fifth Generation iPod resets when playing some mono MP3 songs and podcasts

Basically, you just have to turn off the EQ and lo, no more iPod crash when I try to play "Best of As It Happens" or "C'est la Vie: Word of the Week". I'm surprised Apple hasn't released a new revision of the iPod firmware to fix it.

I've wasted so much time dealing with ISPs that use the SPEWS blacklist to filter out spam - my upstream colo is accused of not kicking off a customer that sent spam at some point, so they block thousands of IPs apparently with the intent of causing enough "collateral damage" to innocent customers that they will put pressure on the upstream provider to enforce their AUP. What a load of bull. This article called Why I Won't Use SPEWS expresses the myriad problems with this approach better than I can. It's pure laziness for sysadmins to be using this heavy-handed method rather than more complex spam identification methods, and in my opinion totally unacceptable to be inconveniencing your own customers in order to make a political point. If you care that much, lobby the government to pass stronger anti-UBE legislation.

I decided to take the plunge and sell our old 32" CRT TV and buy a same sized LCD TV before we move back to Vancouver, to save myself from getting a hernia during the move. I settled on the Vizio L32 HDTV since it got great reviews for it's size and price; not the best you can buy but I certainly don't need anything better and didn't want to pay over $800. What was most important was that it had good support for connecting a computer, because we're planning on ditching cable and putting the money into a Mac Mini (hopefully they will release a new Core 2 Duo "Meron" based Mini soon) and a really fast broadband connection.

Well I'm glad to report I'm very happy with the TV, the only complaints being the black isn't exactly "inky", there's no S-Video inputs and there's no menu option for 1:1 or dot-dot mode. The native resolution is 1366x768 so I thought I would use use a DVI to D-Sub (or VGA or RGB or whatever you want to call it) cable and my PowerBook G4 would recognize the resolution and that would be the end of it. I quickly discovered that it would not detect the native resolution but was stuck at 1024x768 which made text look like crap stretched out to the LCD's native resolution. After some web searching I downloaded and configured DisplayConfigX to give me a higher resolution available in my Displays Preferences. It wouldn't let me use the exactly resolution, forcing it to 1360 for some multiple of X reason. The picture looked better, but still not as good as I thought, and the VGA cable wasn't long enough and was very thick and heavy.

I looked up the issue on Apple's site and saw they had a DVI to HDMI cable (for about $120) and figured I could probably find one for much cheaper than Apple's. Naturally I did, buying a 10 foot DVI to HDMI cable on eBay for $10 shipped - how does Apple get away with these accessory prices? Anyway, on arrival I connected the cable to the HDMI port on the LCD TV and.... nothing. Blue screen, no signal. Stumped, I read the manual and did some more searching and discovered some LCDs only like the official 720p resolution of 1280x720 at 60Hz. Since the TV was showing blue screen I couldn't change the Displays Preferences, so I uninstalled the custom DisplayConfigX modes and rebooted.

Voila! Driving the TV at the stock 720p rate brought up a very crisp image. It's still a bit distorted due to the lack of a 1:1 mode on the TV, so the TV is stretching it a little to the native resolution. There's a bit of a problem with overscan on the top and bottom of the screen as well, so you have to be careful not to lose windows' title bar off the top, but it looks really good and plenty crisp enough to read text and use the LCD TV as a casual web browsing or email platform. Playing DVDs and downloaded anime on the PowerBook with the VLC Player looked great. Too bad the TiVo picture quality is lagging so far behind.

Next I connected my PlayStation 2 to the composite input and loaded up Gran Turismo 3. I instantly knew I was going to have to improve the situation; it was blurrly, bleeding and generally awful. I learned the best thing to do was to order a component cable, so back to eBay and bought one for $8 shipped. Connecting the PS2 to the Analog HDTV input using the new cable was like night & day - GT3 looks fantastic now, maybe I'll get around to finishing the Professional league. Too bad more games don't support 16:9 aspect ratio.

I love Firefox but on my Powerbook G4 with only 768MB of memory and lots and lots of tabs open, it's not exactly a speed demon. I'm trying out Camino now, which is also based on the Mozilla codebase and Gecko rendering engine but with a true Cocoa interface instead of the slow cross platform XUL that Firefox uses. It also uses standard Mac keychain access for storing your saved passwords and all the other nice integrated OS X features I've come to love, including Cocoa Gestures and various input managers.

On the minus side, that means all the wonderful Firefox extensions that use XUL aren't available, but a lot of the essentials such as a session saver and Flash blocker are available at PimpMyCamino. The CamiTools are great and CamiScript, which adds Applescript support, seems really powerful. I did have to do the chrome.rdf hack to get CamiFlash to work properly, essential as a lot of Flash sites like Yahoo Finance drive up the CPU usage to 100%.

Another extension I'm trying out is the shareware Inquisitor which adds live predictive searching to Camino and Safari. This replaces the current search bar functionality with a fast live-search style drop down. Start typing your search, and the list appears with possible queries. The registration nag is kind of annoying but it's actually quite handy! What I'm looking for often appears in the drop down, saving me a click on the Google or Yahoo search results page. Since I search about a bajillion times a day, it adds up.

So far I'm loving it and it is a LOT faster and uses a lot less memory. I've been using it for about a week and haven't opened Firefox once, so that's a good sign!