Category: Activities

Any interest in my old computer?

My old computer has been sitting here for a little while, and I haven’t needed it for anything, so it’s probably time to sell it. It’s a pretty nice box for its age. Tyan motherboard, 2 AthlonMP1800+ processors, 1Gb of Registered RAM (either PC100 or PC133, can’t remember) (3 sticks, 1x512Mb and 2x256Mb). Nice full tower case, doesn’t require tools to open and the drives are on sleds and trays for easy access. There are two short white slots and 4 longer ones (all PCI, I think). There is also an AGP slot which probably isn’t one of the faster ones. The NIC is in one of the short slots, and the video card is some cheap-ass ATI AGP thing. The power supply is an Enermax 535W.

Back in 2003 I did a major upgrade of the cooling capacity, adding case fans, a hard drive fan, and these two beautiful copper heat sinks that weigh about a pound each. That’s also when I replaced the hard drive with a 160Gb one.

In the last couple of years I’ve added a PCI card with 4 USB 2.0 ports on the back, and then I added a PCI card with two more ATA-133 IDE ports (you can add 4 drives, master and slaves). In recent months the computer has gotten progressively more flakey. I suspect that either the power supply was getting old and losing “oomph”, or the extra load of the having three hard drives and two CDs and the IDE card were just too much for it. But also, several of the cooling fans have gotten full of dust and some of seized up. So it’s possible that was putting too much load on the power supply. I’d advise anybody buying this to give the thing a serious cleaning and be ready to replace some of the case fans and possibly the power supply. I’ll include the 160Gb hard drive and one of the CD-ROMs (I used the burner in another computer).

Anyway, anybody want this? Make an offer. The thing is big and heavy, so I’d prefer local, but will ship if the buyer pays.

A Rant About Splash Screens

(This might look familiar to some people)

Can somebody please shoot all the asshole software designers who make a splash screen that remains on top even if you switch to another application while it’s loading? I don’t want to fucking see the fucking credits for your software every time it loads, fuckers. I especially don’t want to see it blocking my view of what I’m working on in the interminable time it takes you to load your software. Adobe, I’m looking right at you.

Oh Google, you are so devoid of any semblance of clue

As I wrote about in Rants and Revelations » Hey, Google, Google still hasn’t reimbursed me for my hotel, cab and food while I was in New York City. Today, I discovered why. Evidently when one of their recruiters leaves them, instead of arranging some sort of orderly transfer of her unfinished work to somebody else, they just throw all her email into the garbage and mark any mail that she hasn’t dealt with “Return to Sender” and send it back. I got my reciepts back, over a month and a half after I sent them, which means that undoubtedly they fished them out of her inbox rather than just refusing them at the front door. So I wrote to the only other recruiter there I have been in contact with, and he gave me the name of a third recruiter that I need to send all my stuff to, including the claim form that I’d emailed to the first recruiter on July 21st.

You know, if their tech departments were run as well as their recruiting organization, Microsoft could stop worrying about them.

Note to self: Xen config

Once again, my blog becomes my own personal scratch pad for things I want to remember. In this case, what to do with Xen domUs that install udev:

– login to the VM using “xm console ID”
– edit /etc/udev/persistent-net-generator.rules
– insert the following at the top, just below the first comment block:

# No persistent interface names for Xen VMs.
KERNEL==”eth*”, GOTO=”persistent_net_generator_end”

– remove the existing persistence “database”:

rm /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

You’re not expected to understand or care.

Is it really too much to ask?

Is it really too much to ask that when somebody uses the contact email address on a web site to expect that they’ve actually read at least the first page of that web site? I just got an email to the address that is published on the Rochester Flying Club web site that asked a bunch of questions that prove categorically that the sender had not read the first page of the site, specifically the part that says “It is not a flying school, although we welcome student pilots”.

His second question was “Is Rochester Flying Club just a Pilot School, or it is a college too?”. Which part of “It is not a flying school” are you having trouble understanding there, sport? His other questions are just as oriented towards a full time flying school.

One thing that’s unusual, though. Normally I get these sorts of clueless emails from people in India or Pakistan – and indeed I found our club web site linked from an Indian site that claimed to be a list of flying schools in the US, but this time the guy claims to live in Rochester, although from his wording I’m not so sure. “I live in Rochester, NY which is 14 miles away from 1313 Scottsville Rd, Rochester, NY.” Doesn’t that sound like somebody who plugged two addresses into Google in order to provide some fake verisimilitude? Although I have trouble thinking of a part of Rochester that’s 14 miles away from the airport.