Friday, June 19, 2009 
Blown Capacitors

I complained a week ago about my display driver going berserk. I blamed Windows Update, since it happened within hours of a pile of updates being installed. I upgraded to the latest beta NVidia drivers on Monday and it helped for a while, but by Wednesday, it was almost as bad again as it had been last Friday. It was infuriating and I was both entertaining and alarming my neighbors with my cursing.

Today was the last day of a very busy sprint for me and at last I had the time to dig into it. I opened up the case and took a look at both video cards—I have two dual-head cards connected to three monitors—and one of them had partially blown capacitors like those in the picture. I removed the bad card and did some graphics-intensive things for an hour, and the other card behaved flawlessly.

Oddly, until someone mentioned that it might be a hardware problem yesterday, it didn't occur to me, even though a video card blew in this machine last year. I came in one morning to find a black monitor, and when I pulled out that card, I found that some of the capacitors had popped right open with stuffing protruding.

On general principles, I had been meaning to repave this machine for a while. I've had it since December 2007 and it was still running the original installation of Vista. I booted from a DVD, reformatted my C: drive, and installed Windows 7 x64 RC1.

I finally have a 64-bit OS as my primary Windows desktop, so I'll actually be using the Win64 build of Vim that I maintain. My first impressions of Windows 7 on this machine are very favorable, but there's plenty more that I need to install before the machine has everything that I need.

posted on Saturday, June 20, 2009 4:40:37 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Friday, June 12, 2009 
Display driver lddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered

This morning, the video adapters on my Vista dev box were resetting 2–3 times per minute.

After a pile of Windows Updates landed on my machine at 3am yesterday, it would occasionally freeze solid for a few seconds. Once in a while, all the monitors would go black briefly, then restore. Each time, I would see a status update pop up from the system tray, "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

This was irritating enough that I downloaded the latest NVidia drivers this morning, 185.85_desktop_winvista_32bit_english_whql.exe. That really screwed me. The video adapters started resetting 2–3 times per minute, rendering the machine almost unusable. I have two video adapters, NVidia GeForce 8600 GT and NVidia GeForce 7600 GT.

The eventlog was full of Event ID 4101 - Display Driver Timeout Detection and Recovery.

I reverted to the 178.24 drivers and that helped. When I'm not touching the machine, the adapters only get reset every few minutes instead of several times a minute. When I am using it, something as simple as clicking a window to bring it to the foreground can trigger a reset.

It's very irritating but I can live with it for a little while, unlike the other. I don't want to repave my box: apart from the time loss, I'm not convinced that it would help if I got the same driver config all over again.

I contacted a friend at Microsoft who tried to hook me up with a driver guy, who is unfortunately out of office. I'm hoping that it can be fixed early next week or my temper is going to fray rapidly.

Update: June 19th: See When Video Cards Go Bad.

posted on Friday, June 12, 2009 7:27:43 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Friday, April 10, 2009 
NTFS-3G

After I started running Linux and then Mac OS X, in addition to Windows, I started on a quest to find the universal filesystem. I had multiboot systems and external drives where I wanted to to be able to read and write disks under multiple operating systems.

The obvious choice is FAT32, the ubiquitous, lowest-common denominator filesystem. FAT32 is supported out-of-the-box by all major operating systems, digital cameras, and PDAs, so that's a huge advantage. FAT32 also has major shortcomings:

  • Maximum file size is 4GB. I have ISOs, MPEGs, and other large files exceeding this limit.
  • Fragmentation happens too easily.
  • Timestamps: accurate only to 2-second resolution. No notion of timezones or UTC.
  • Journaling: none. Preferred for robustness.
  • ACLs or Permissions. Nothing beyond R/W.

I experimented with ext3 (and its non-journaling sibling, ext2) on Windows and later on the Mac. On Windows, ext2fs works well and I used it happily for several months on a machine dualbooting XP and Ubuntu. It did not work well with Vista initially, though that seems to have been fixed since.

My experiences on the Mac were bad: ext2fsx caused some kernel panics, which was enough for me to abandon it.

There was no free solution for reading and writing Mac HFS+ disks under Linux and Windows the last time that I checked.

Both Linux and Macs natively support mounting NTFS disks read-only. The NTFS-3G project allows Linux to write to NTFS disks, and Mac NTFS-3G does likewise for Macs. I've never had a problem with NTFS-3G and it's worked flawlessly under Linux and Mac for me.

posted on Saturday, April 11, 2009 6:43:56 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009 
Safari 4 coverflow

Apple launched the public Safari 4 beta today.

It runs beautifully on Vista and it's the fastest browser that I've seen, noticeably faster than Chrome. Everything that I tried worked fairly well; I saw only a few minor glitches.

I installed it on my MacBook at home this evening. It crashes at startup every time that I attempt to run it. Fortunately, it comes with an uninstaller so that I could revert to Safari 3.21.

Back to Opera for now.

posted on Wednesday, February 25, 2009 7:18:48 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) 
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Sunday, February 03, 2008 

http://www.georgevreilly.com/blog/content/binary/Stochastic-Peregrinations.png

Use O'Reilly Maker to generate book covers. I've always wanted to write a book for cousin Tim, and now I have!

Via Pavel: Adolf Hitler - Vista Problems (YouTube).

The Photographer's Right: a handy one-page guide.

The general rule in the United States is that anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place or places where they have permission to take photographs. Absent a specific legal prohibition such as a statute or ordinance, you are legally entitled to take photographs. Examples of places that are traditionally considered public are streets, sidewalks, and public parks.

The tiny <code> font in Firefox has been bugging me for a long time. I finally figured out the obvious: Override the Monospace setting. Tools > Options > Content > Fonts & Colors > Advanced > Monospace: change Courier New at size 13 to 16. While you're at it, change the font to Consolas or Lucida Console or Monaco. Courier New is ugly.

My man, John Edwards, is out of the presidential race. Some analysis from Corrente and Meteor Blades of Edwards' candidacy.

I have never been enthusiastic about Hillary Rodham Clinton as a presidential candidate. She's accumulated 16 years of negatives from being relentlessly demonized by Limbaugh and his ilk; she's too damn centrist and corporate for my liking; and I remain troubled about her vote for the Iraq War and her refusal to apologize for it.

I am now an Obama voter. I have expressed some doubts in the past about his efficacy, but there's no doubt that his messages of transformation and inspiration are striking a chord with primary voters.

The Washington state primary on February 19th is a complete farce, at least if you're a Democrat. The Democratic presidential candidates are entirely chosen by the Washington state caucuses on Saturday, February 9th. Washington state law requires that a presidential primary be held, but the parties are not actually obliged to select any delegates as a result of the vote. The Republicans delegates will be allocated 49% from the caucus results, and 51% from the primary results.

I'm the Democratic Precinct Committee Officer for SEA-1945, and I'll be participating in our neighborhood caucus at Asa Mercer School. I need to phone participants of the previous caucus today, both in my own precinct and some adjoining, PCO-less precincts, to remind them of the caucus.

I've uploaded Vim syntax highlighting for PBwiki, a free, hosted wiki that I've used for a few different projects.

posted on Sunday, February 03, 2008 8:43:06 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) 
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Tuesday, August 14, 2007 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/89/Resttriangle.svg/273px-Resttriangle.svg.png

My first project at Cozi is to build a simple REST-style Web Service. Nobody here has done that before.

The first thing that I'm trying to get going is a simple URL rewriter, using an ASP.NET HttpModule.

I'm running Vista as my development desktop for the first time. So far, not bad, but there are lots of new quirks to get used to. I've been a good boy so far and I've left the User Access Control stuff enabled, so that I'm not running with administrative privileges by default.

It's my first exposure to IIS 7. I must say that the IIS UI is much improved (a low bar to surmount).

My first problem was that Skype was squatting on port 80, preventing browser requests going to localhost. This happens to me about once a year on a new dev machine, and I always forget.

To get the HttpModule going, I had to follow Mark Rasmussen's detailed instructions on making URL rewriting on IIS 7 work like IIS 6. The code will be deployed on Windows Server 2003, so IIS 6 compatibility is more important to me than IIS 7 purity.

I was trying to get some debug output appearing in DebugView, but my Trace.WriteLines were not showing up. Some Googling eventually showed me that I had to enable Capture Global Win32, which I never had to do before. Presumably because ASP.NET is executing in a different desktop session.

posted on Wednesday, August 15, 2007 2:58:21 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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