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My friend got his stuff Friday from NECX. For once something went right. This weekend turned out to be a big computer party. My roommate finally got all the stuff he needed to assemble a working computer, this guy down the hall got a big ass server case (seems like overkill to me) from Supermicro, his roommate got a new computer of some sort, and I got my 3Dfx heatsinks, PS/2 mouse connector, ASUS SC875 Ultra Wide SCSI card, and the 9.1GB UltraStar 2XP. At first I thought I was screwed because Tom Mosher forgot to include the Wide SCSI cable. I was just going to wait it out, especially since I called a place downtown and they quoted me a price of $44.95 for a 3-connector cable! Man, I can wait if it costs that much, you know? But, as it turns out, I was waiting downstairs and I ran into the guy who was picking up his huge ass case. I helped him bring the case up and I asked him about where to buy a SCSI cable. "Oh, just down the street." Only $20! I didn't really want to go there because I had been there before and it seemed like the kind of place where they try to rip you off. But I had to go. My roommate needed a couple of IDE cables too because the one that came with his motherboard (ASUS P2L97, nice!) had a convenient and very clean CUT right after the first connector. We went down there and they had 3 connector cables ranging all the way up to 8 connector cables! I didn't quite want a huge cable cluttering up my case so I went with the 3 connector. Painless enough, too. So I was quite happy...it looked like I was going to be able to install that drive after all! I went home and did a LOT of drive reconfiguring. I took out the old 1GB SCSI drive first (a real piece of crap) after moving all the data off to a friend's computer and my own. Then I put the new drive in. What can I say, it's really fast! It's actually also more quiet than my old Quantum Fireball 1.2GB drive (hot stuff back in the day!). The drive itself looks really cool, it's like a big solid block of steel (anodized black to help radiate heat). Anyhow, I mounted the drive right inside the case with the cover open. Geez, the drive was really hot too, but I had expected that. Anyhow, I proceeded to reinstall NT and make arrangements for removing my other 1GB drive. After reinstalling NT, on one of my reboots I encountered a hard lockup. This was only the beginning of soem big trouble. There were some occasional random crashes of Explorer (which never happens) and other weirdness. At first I thought it might be an active termination problem (typically in an Ultra Wide SCSI chain you want both ends to be actively terminated for high signal integrity). My CDR is not actively terminated. So I tried something drastic...I moved my old SCSI card back in as well, for a total of two cards, and put the CDR on there. Didn't really help...after a while I was having weird problems again like ICQ crashing on startup, the Office 97 installation taking about 10 minutes to get through the very very last part, and a hard lockup at the login screen. After all this, I was getting pretty damn worried. The only thing that I could think of was that either I had bought a faulty cable or the drive was overheating. However, I didn't really think the drive could be overheating...after all, it was in open air and it was only one drive! But then I looked at the operating specs for the DCHS-39100 and found out the max operating temperature was only 50º! Just from messing around with cooling my chips so much, I have a decent sense of temperature by touch now, and I can tell you the drive was well above that. So I pulled the fan cage out of the bottom of my case and rigged it to blow right over the drive. I also mounted the drive upside down so that there would be clearance over both the top and bottom of the drive. It's kind of hanging in the middle of two 5 1/4" drive bays right now. Well, lo and behold, it's been at least 12 hours now and no crashes at all! I knew keeping the drive cool would be a problem, but I didn't realize it would be THAT BIG of a problem.
Like I mentioned before, my friend was having problems getting anything from NECX because his credit card company screwed him by marking his purchase as fraudulent and wouldn't even let him put a ship to address on his card. Finally I decided to buy the important stuff for him just so he could get it up and running. This on an account that I had purchased from before. Well, turns out NECX wasn't about to let my purchase go through either. I tracked my order online and saw something funny was happening. So I had to call to make sure that my order was going to go through and I finally got a call from John, the man in the credit department. He tells me that my ship to address doesn't match and my bill to statement doesn't match and that he can't let the stuff go through. Of course, the fact that I've bought an assload of stuff from them before doesn't mean anything. He's like "I don't really know who you say you are." Goddamnit, I'm thinking, I buy stuff from you guys all the time, what makes you think that now I am some guy who stole some guy's credit card trying to order from the same mail-order house and ship it to the same building! Anyhow, I get my ship to address changed but apparently that won't go through for a couple of days. So I'm sitting on the phone with this guy John trying to figure out what the hell I can do and nothing is really going anywhere when I mention that I'm trying to order the stuff for a friend of mine because NECX's credit department screwed him too, and I don't know why all of a sudden we are having so much trouble ordering stuff. Just after that he talks to his manager and lets the order through. I was thinking, wow cool! So I mention to my buddy that I managed to get the stuff out for overnight delivery (which means it gets here today). I also mention what a bastard the guy I was talking to was. He says, "Yeah, they're so ANAL!" Yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking too. Then I ask him, "Wait a minute, who were you talking to?" "John." Maybe John is the new guy there or something but he must be pissing a lot of people off. I don't know what his problem is, but I'm just glad I got my order out. I think he must have known who I was talking about or I might not have gotten that shipment.
Within the past couple of days but computer has crashed hard. Not blue screened, but a hard lock. I am uncertain what is causing it but I hope to high heaven it's not a hardware problem. I have two theories (besides a hardware problem). Both times, I was on IRC. It's possible somebody has found a new way to nuke Windows machines. The other possibility is that playing Total Annihilation induced some sort of instability in my system. Well, I'm staying off IRC right now and I'm not going to play TA in NT anymore. If it happens again, I've got problems.
11:22 AM Intel's 440BX chipset, which promises to support 100 MHz bus speeds, has a lot of people waiting with bated breath for its release. However, pushing motherboards is a huge headache for motherboard makers and may not be as easy as you might be prone to think. Read up on the details here. Also, learn about the initiave to push lithography past the 0.1 micron barrier here.
Both of these games are currently competing for the title of best RTS (Real Time Strategy) game. I've had a chance to try out both games, and although both games are good, I still don't see the same sense of variety and strategy that Warcraft II had. If I had to pick one so far, it would be Total Annihilation because of innovative use of 3D for units and the overall gameplay. One thing that bothers me about TA is that the movement algorithm leaves a lot to desired. Units are all over the place and frequently running into each other. One problem with both games is that apparently you can just spew units at will, limited only by money. I'm not sure how this will disturb gameplay but rest assured we will spend much time this weekend testing it out (hehe).
If Next Generation is to be believed, the Starcraft beta test is now officially a go within the next few weeks and will only test the multiplayer aspect of the game. Man, I HAVE to get in on that one.
3:13 PM I found a cool article on this cool new product from Nikon. It's basically a digital camera that doubles as a voice recorder, photo annotator, and video camera (but not recorder, just a lens with NTSC output, I think). Not too bad for $700. http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/jit/coolpix/coolpix.htm
2:33 PM I woke up today and noticed that the CPU load on my computer was around 40-50%! I checked out WarFTPD and apparently some guy was trying to connect at about 10-20 times a second. Well that pretty much made WarFTPD very unresponsive to the console, although I think the server was doing OK. I tried mass pinging the guy to see if I could get him to stop but he was on a T3 at least too, I think. I finally e-mailed root at his server and a couple of hours later the problem is gone. In the meantime I banned his IP and that seemed to cut the load on WarFTPD quite a bit. What the hell was this guy thinking?! I wonder if this was a malicious attack or just a really dumb guy. WarFTPD definitely needs some fixing on its side too, though.
12:12 AM After the initial rush of around 140 users (I set the limit to 160 which seems to have satisfied nearly all the traffic), tonight the number of users is around 95 or so. I had some more fun today with the server. First of all, I switched the IDE driver in NT to Tyan's busmastering drivers. Several hours later, the computer locked up. Hard. However, one of the good things about having a rock-stable system is that you know exactly what goes wrong when it goes wrong. I can't emphasize how important this is. It lets you do what you want to do and if something weird happens you can just switch back and forget it, instead of worrying whether your system is going to crash every 5 minutes. So I basically switched back. I'm curious, does anybody test these third-party drivers at all? The SB16 drivers are unstable, and so are these busmastering drivers, although it takes a couple or hours or days before something goes wrong. The busmastering drivers also knock my CD=ROM out of commission. Actually, it can still read data, which is the important part, but it can't play audio tracks on a CD. Intel's busmastering drivers screw it up completely...I think this is because it forces the CD-ROM to Mode 4 or maybe DMA 2 and the CD-ROM just can't do that. Anyhow, while the busmastering drivers were installed, I did notice a pretty decent decrease in the amount of CPU utilization. In NT, you can tell the task manager (which I always have start minimized on bootup, you just have to have that thing up all the time because it's so useful) to display kernal times. This basically not only tells you how much CPU time is being used but also what portion of that CPU time is being spent in the kernel or OS satisfying application requests and what not. That part is shown in red. Point being, in any case, that the red was significantly less with the busmastering drivers and the system was a little bit more responsive. Well, until it locked up, anyways. Oh yeah, Penn apparently had some downtime this afternoon for a couple of hours. That was when I switched to the busmastering drivers. I looked at my FTP daemon and saw only 9 users on (soon to be none)! I knew that wasn't right! Anyhow, I figured that as long as nobody could get to my system I might as well fiddle with it a little. Hence the switch to busmastering. I also encoded an MPEG-1 video stream for my friend's web page while I was waiting. After my computer locked up, I decided I would move the files over to my SCSI drive, which is a pretty slow piece of crap and nothing like the new drive which I'm going to be getting. I also switched back to NT's ATAPI drivers, of course. Back to my point, though...the drive IS still SCSI, and it shows. CPU usage is holding steady at around 10-20% (IDE was around 20-50%) and the system feels about 2-3 times more responsive. What can I say, it's nice! Really I only notice a little lag when my computer needs to swap because my swap file is on the same drive. SCSI makes a pretty big difference in these situations. I can't wait to see what my new drive is going to be like!
I have to hand it to SDS Mark II...their prices are not always the lowest, but close, and they do carry a lot of stuff that you probably won't find anywhere else easily. However, Tom Mosher, the owner, is undoubtedly the nicest and most customer-oriented guy you'll ever do business with. The guy sent me packing material for my case at the beginning of the summer (which I needed since I need to bring my computer to school and back) and I had never even bought anything from him! Anyhow, I ordered the ASUS SC-875 card from him, as well as 4 case fans, a Tyan PS/2 mouse connector and a set of 3Dfx heatsinks. He gave me a discount on the card to 120 from 125 without my even asking (I've seen it for $111 from Cantek but I wouldn't order from them at the moment - more on that later) and he told me the SC-875 doesn't come with a 68-pin cable. When I asked how much that would be, he said he would get one and throw it in free! Pretty cool, huh? My drive went out Tuesday; I should be getting it tomorrow, and the card on Friday.
I finally got the guts to advertise my site on the UO Vault as a site to download the beta from. There are now 139 people connected to my computer right now out of 150 max. I can probably up it even further. I'm a little curious as to what point adding users will slow down everybody instead of just letting extra people get on with no problems. I've encoutered a couple of problems with WarFTPD 1.66x3 so far. Once the server lost the ability to list files and I had to shut it down and restart it. The other time, I clicked SPY on a user and he logged off while I was watching. At that point I lost all interactivity with the server, although the daemon itself was working just fine. BTW, do you want to see something interesting? Look at CDROM.COM's computer. Here is the configuration and here is a picture of the computer. It's actually only a 200/512K PPro with some badass SCSI drives and a 100Mb Ethernet connection to the Internet. Get this, CDROM.COM has a user limit of 2000! I logged on and there were about 1500 people on there. And I was worried about 25 people?
Windows 98 was officially delayed until the 2nd quarter of 98 because customers expressed the need for a product that would upgrade Windows 3.1 as well as Windows 95 installations. The plan was originally to have the Win95 upgrade out first and the Win 3.1 upgrade out later but apparently Microsoft decided that would cause too much confusion.
I ordered the Ultra-Wide ASUS PCI-SC875 card and some assorted junk (fans, connectors) today. So hopefully I'll have everything up and running by the end of the week. My friend got his case and motherboard in today also. Man, that case is a solid piece of work...it's the Elan Vital T10AB ATX case. I'll try to take some screenshots of all the goodies soon. The video card is a ASUS 3D Explorer 3000...yes, that means the hot new nVidia 128 chipset with AGP support! The big problem is that my friend bought a lot of stuff from NECX and his bank is giving him hell. It took them a week to get rid of a fraud flag on the charge (even though he called the 1st day to clear things) and they are just generally screwing him. PNC Bank, by the way. I don't what he's going to do about that...we'll have to see. Oh yeah, we both signed up for the FireTeam beta today. If you haven't heard of it, it looks to be a real cool multiplayer X-Com style game with a heavy emphasis on voice communication and team cooperation.
"Elicit" and "Illicit"
I got my bid on the Fast-Wide SCSI-II 9.1GB IBM UltraStar 2XP! The monster hard drive is mine! HAHAHAHA!!!! Only $659! HAHAHAHA! Actually, that's a decent amount of money, but considering the drive is retailing for around $1299, it's a damn crazy awesome deal. I'm not sorry I did it at all. At Onsale, the online auction house, by the way. And remember the key...bid on stuff the masses have never heard of. That's the only way you'll get a deal.
I have been offering the Ultime Online beta for download for about a day and a half now and with 60-70 users my computer is barely feeling anything. I suspect what IS there is caused by the IDE drive. Anyways, I told my friend that I was still using IDE and he had the equivalent of a techie shit-fit. Well, once I get the drive and the controller we'll see how things go. I'm trying to figure out how far I can bump up the user limit but now I'm afraid I might attract attention from the networking guys here if I start chewing up bandwidth.
Ha! Well, I did one of these for my friends over the summer and since I had a friend whose playstation was chipped but later broke down (the joysticks stopped working) I decided to use his mod chip. This was quite an adventure...we headed down to the EE lab of STWing, our living-learning program, where the guy who was supposed to meet us to give us the key to the lab completely dicked us. Well, we ate our dinner there and walked around, and we were about to head back when we ran into the sysadmin of Force, who we discovered after chatting with him has a key to the EE lab too! OK, so thank god we actually got in. Then we look around...there is no desk space, the entire place looks like a storage room. There is some solder and a couple of soldering irons. The soldering irons were not even opened...they were still in the original packaging! The EE lab has been around for two and a half years at least! I don't think the place has even been touched! Anyways, we got a soldering iron, and at least there was a stand for the iron and the little sponge where you wipe the solder. The solder was a little thick gauge for this kind of work, but we managed by melting a little bit of it onto the iron tip and touching it to the point. I don't think that's standard technique, but it was fast and it worked. We cleared out some of the computers and then we sat down and studied the printouts we had found on the internet. Well, as it turns out, it was pretty confusing. The printouts were not very high-res and to make matters worse there are different models of mod chips and different models of Playstations! We had one printout that looked very similar but it was kind of screwed up. We went up to some guy's room and searched for some more pics and printed those out. We got a great diagram of my Playstation (THE original Japanese model) but the chip on the diagram was not the one we had (6-wire 18-pin model). Basically, we did a lot of comparing and examining and we finally settled on what to solder to what after about 45-60 min. I gloss over this but it was a lot hairier than it seems here. Anyway, we soldered the stuff but we forgot to bring a disc to test it. I had seen this guy playing this Playstation up on the 2nd floor before so we went there (with the STWing sysadmin, as a symbol of our trustworthiness) and asked if we could borrow a CD. The guy was with some friends and he sat there thinking about it and finally said "Let's give him the Final Fantasy VII demo disc." Then that sat there looking around for it for a while. Great, glad to know you trust us. Actually, we had gone to get the disk first before we went to solder the stuff. After we soldered the chip in, we ran around trying to find a TV for an hour. An HOUR! That guy with the Playstation had apparently gone to sleep, and I don't know if I would've wanted to bother him anyways. Everybody we met had a cheap piece o' S#%* TV with only coax inputs! Why!?!? We didn't want to leave without testing the Playstation, but in fact, that's exactly what we ended up doing. We borrowed the soldering iron just in case we screwed up. So finally, we get back to my dorm at around 2AM. We sit down, pull the Playstation out of the backpack, plug it in, and dump in an American disk. These were my friend's exact words "Oh my god, it FUCKING works!" Haha! Well, if anything, that should tell you just how uncertain we were of the whole thing.
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