Category: Geekery

Hey, maybe this time it’s not the hard drive?

Or maybe it’s the hard drive and everything else at the same time.

My Windows box hasn’t been really happy since the move. And a few weeks ago, when I tried to start it up to test my new USB KVM switch, it started behaving badly. It was the first time I’d had it on in a while, and I was surprised that it suddenly rebooted, and while it was running chkdisk, it rebooted again. And again. And again. So I turned it off and forgot about it for a while.

Today I decided to try it again. I booted it with a Knoppix CD, and it managed to boot, and it could mount the hard disk. And I could navigate around. So I took my USB drive, and tried to copy files from the Windows drive to the USB drive. But it didn’t work – it got into the “My Desktop” part of the file system and Knoppix started talking about IDE errors and lost timer ticks.

So I grabbed another hard drive I had kicking around, and slapped it into the machine. There was a lot of dust in the machine, and I took it outside and blew it all off with my last can of “Blow Off Duster”. I booted it up and installed XP. It didn’t seem to want to get a DHCP address, but I gave it a static IP and started installing Windows Updates. But after downloading 17 updates and installing 3 of them, it rebooted with no warning. And when it came up, it said that Windows detected instability in the ATI Radeon graphic card driver. I pushed the resolution down to 1024×768 from 1280×1024, and blew off a bunch of dust in the graphics card heat sink. And it got a little further this time before it suddenly rebooted, and this time I saw a bunch of purple splotches on the display first.

So maybe it wasn’t the hard disk, and maybe it was the graphic card. Or maybe it was something else entirely. I’ve downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD and now I’m testing the drive and the memory and everything else. These tests run in text mode, so maybe they aren’t as demanding on the video card.

We’ll see.

In today’s email

Received at one of my role addresses:

The following message sent by this account has violated system policy:

Connection From: 82.8.79.93
From: [role account]@xcski.com
To: noreply@centerparcs.com
Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2005 17:59:26 +0100
Subject: test

The following violations were detected:

— Scan information follows —

Virus Name: W32.Lovgate.R@mm
File Attachment: xsmru.zip
Attachment Status: deleted

— File name Block information follows —

File Attachment: xsmru.zip
Matching file name: Message is considered to be a mass-mailer.

My response:

Your ignorance of the difference between an easily and almost assuredly forged “From” line and the real sender violates my policy of not accepting email from fuckwits or from systems run by fuckwits. Have a good day.

Various updates

  1. Got the UPS software working again, after I converted from using the mge-utalk driver to the mge-shut driver. No idea why the other driver, which has supported this UPS just fine for years suddenly started having trouble. Oh well. Such is the world of open source software.
  2. Our company photo contest results were announced today. I didn’t win anything. I guess at least part of the problem was that I ignored all the advice I got from my friends and submitted the pictures I liked best. But because of my wrist problems I didn’t have as much time to work on them as I would have liked. Oh well. Not to sound like sour grapes or anything, but the guy who cleaned up in several of the novice categories takes pictures of bicycle races and sells them at the race, which make him more than a novice in my book. Most of his pictures, though, were really good and would have won in the advanced categories as well, and my favourite one of his didn’t win anything. Actually, all the competition was really good. Of course it doesn’t help that there were three other people submitting pictures from Alaska cruises, and one person who went to Antartica.
  3. My SafeType keyboard was acting a bit weird. Every now and then I’ll be typing away and suddenly all 4 LEDs in the middle (caps lock, num lock , scroll lock and one other labelled “W”) all come on for a second or so, and a whole bunch of typing gets missed. I’ve seen this about two or three times a day at work, but when I brought the keyboard home for the weekend, I was seeing it about once a minute. Mildly annoying. I moved it from my powered USB hub to plugged in directly to the Powerbook, though, and I haven’t seen the problem since. Must be some sort of timing thing.
  4. I worked hard this week to provide a new architecture for dealing with encryption keys for our digital cinema product. Today the guy who has to use these keys comes over and starts talking about unresolved issues and use cases. My thought was why didn’t he think through these issues and use cases before he asked me for this new architecture? The upshot is that I have to totally redesign the architecture again, back to something a little more complicated than the original, but much less complicated than the one I did this week. And since development has to be finished by the end of next week, I guess I’m going to be billing some hours this weekend. Normally I’d be really annoyed at the wasted effort, but I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of that code I wrote this week.