September 3rd, 2008 at 8:12 am
(Computing)
Google Chrome looks very nice in concept. After reading through the comic book explanation of what they’re up I really wanted to give it a whril. So I installed it yesterday on my work machine, but I get nothing but sad tab errors. For everything. Blank pages. www.google.com. Chrome’s Help. Everything.
Whoops.
Since I haven’t seen much of anything in the news as yet about massive failures I’m guessing it is just me, but I haven’t had the chance to install it on another computer to figure out what could possibly be the issue. FF works just fine, and lamentably I have to use IE for some work things, and that’s fine. Hmmm…some obscure policy issue perhaps?
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March 24th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
(Computing)
Those of us who work in the computer industry are in the business of dealing with other people’s mistakes. That’s it, really. I spend my days fixing bugs in other people’s software and hardware. Then I get to go home and deal with more of the same.
Today’s fun? I bought a new monitor for my computer, a Samsung SyncMaster 932BW. Why? Because I have the earlier model of the same for my other computer and it worked fine the first time. What happened now? Well, since I have a newer video card it is unable to communicate the default resolution to the monitor. So where my 6800GT works my 7900GS fails. I finally came up with a solution: switching from DVI to VGA cables.
Quality, eh? But then I expect no less from the computer industry, and Nvidia in particular. After all, they still haven’t figured out how to make a driver install program that won’t fuck up your system unless you completely uninstall the previous one, reboot, and then install the new one. Yeah, that’s also a Windows problem but neither of them can manage to get it to work, and they probably never will. Why? Because that would take effort.
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December 12th, 2007 at 7:14 am
(Computing)
Since I first started playing City of Heroes I thought that the Blasters really needed some love. Why? Well, honestly their base special ability, defiance, sucked all possible ass. As you took more damage you would deal more damage. This sounded like a good idea on paper but it just never worked out. First of all in order to get it to do much of anything you had to be down to about 25% of your health. To have a serious effect you had to be knocking on death’s door. The problem is that blasters don’t have much in the realm of hitpoints so if you got there the next shot killed you. All in all it was something you’d be lucky to ever see do anything.
But all of that has changed! They scrapped the old system and replaced it with something more sensible: a damage bonus for using your attacks in quick succession, which honestly, you do anyway.
What’s more they made it so you can still use a couple of your abilities while you are mezzed, and that takes a bit of care of the other problem. Since blasters have no defense, little to no ability to mitigate damage, and zero mezz protection (that being held, put to sleep, and stunned for those who don’t play it) your biggest problem was standing around during fights holding your head. Now you can at least knock a few shots off.
Oh yeah. Plus the 12.5% overall ranged damage bonus. I think it is about time they realized that scrappers ended up doing a lot more damage overall since range doesn’t really exist in the game as much as you would like. It isn’t like a sniper rifle can shoot half a mile or anything.
So overall they’ve finally fixed something that has been bugging me as long as I’ve played and showed some love for those who have needed it for a LOOOOONG time.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 4:34 pm
(Computing)
So I got this one today: Pedophile gets 110 years in MySpace extortion scheme. The links at the bottom round out the story some more.
I have two things to say about this: HOLY SHIT. I am stunned that someone was out there doing this, but on the other hand I’m happy he got caught. I really hope that if there was indeed an accomplice (or accomplices) involved that he gets busted too. At the end of the day it is nice to see that such extreme cybercrime is being dealt with, and dealt with severely.
I can appreciate his mother’s comments on the matter, but honestly this wasn’t a mistake. It was a lot of mistakes, and big ones at that. I only hope that his victims and their families can get past what was done to them. Oh yeah…and I hope he gets kicked in the nuts at least once a day in jail. But that’s just me. 
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November 27th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
(Computing)
Back in October I installed a set of XP updates from Microsoft: KB933729, KB939653, and KB941202. Since then I’ve been getting all manner of blue screens, about once a week. Checking things out on the net KB933729 has been causing people tons of problems, especially the same I’ve been getting.
So now I’ve reached the point when I can no longer trust updates from MS. Nice, eh? I don’t know which is worse, that or the fact that Vista is little more than a flaming pile of dog poo. I guess the new direction the corporation is taking doesn’t include stability.
Well…I’m going to attempt to uninstall those fuckers. Wish me luck!
2 Comments
May 15th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
(Computing)
You’d expect when you spend hundreds of thousands or even millions including consulting costs for a piece of software that not only would it work, but it would be well written. Our previous experience at work proved quite otherwise. Our current, on the other hand, has panned out much better. Unfortunately I ran in to something that really ticks me off today.
In your typical database you have three logical states: true, false, and null. Null represents the unknown and undefined. Null is used for any data field that has no data in it. In other words a value that you do not know. Database logic is built around the idea that a null isn’t simply not a value, but an unknown. For instance if I ask for all rows where a certain field does not equal ‘X’, null columns aren’t supposed to be counted. Likewise in numerical values selecting less than a number won’t count nulls, they aren’t zeros after all.
Thus when you mean to use True/False (T/F) or Yes/No (Y/N) values you shouldn’t substitute F with null, nor should you substitute N with null because it ceases to work properly if you are using negative logic. Granted, negative logic isn’t processor friendly in the least, but none the less this does not account for allowing an obvious flaw in your data.
Now then, back to the topic. Today I was working in our the impressively expensive software suite we have purchased only to find a table with an indicator column that switched on Y/null instead of Y/N. My SQL and the logic of my programs that make reference to the table won’t be effected by it, but none the less such a glaring flaw in the data modeling makes me ill at ease. For the money you’d hope they would have corrected for such issues to make sure the entire structure of the database is rock solid and beyond any such little issues.
Of course anyone who enjoys video games knows that quality is far from being job #1 for much of anyone these days.
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May 8th, 2007 at 10:21 am
(Computing)
Last night I finally decided to bite the bullet and get to upgrading my one computer at home. The issue with it was that the old motherboard, an Abit AI7, was that something died in the CMOS or whatnot that prevented it from starting normally. It would start POSTing, but after a moment it would give an error code on the board and start up again. Thus the fans would just start spinning, then it would die, then they would start spinning, but then they’d die again. I replaced the CMOS battery, I replaced the motherboard with another AI7, but with the same results. To fix it I would just never fully power down the system. It was fine rebooting, but starting it was a chore. I’d have to clear the CMOS via the jumper, swear at it a few times, and it would eventually start up.
I’m sure there was an actual good solution to the problem, but it worked.
To finally take care of the issue I decided to do an upgrade, and by upgrade I mean everything outside of the case and DVD drives. The little woman and I gave the case a good cleaning, put the new parts in (correct the first try no less!), plugged everything in and started it up. The XP install was going along well enough until the audio drivers for the motherboard wouldn’t load. I didn’t think much of it since the network drivers came in fine allowing me to continue my initial install path: AVG, firefox, video drivers, windows patches. The problem was that the video drivers told me that there was no space available on the C: drive.
“By golly that can’t be right,” I said, more or less, to myself, “that’s a gosh darned 500 gig drive in there. Of course there’s some fine space left on that good drive. I wonder what the renowned programmers have done this time?” I hit Window-E and saw something that made me throw up into my mouth a little: the C: drive had somehow ceased being the partition I had just created during the install that told me it would be the C partition and was now the card reader on my printer. Of course D: was the DVD burner, and E: was the hard drive. Of course the audio drivers were assuming they would be on the C drive where the other ones were using the system root logical. So when I told the Nvidia drivers to go on to the C: drive it balked since there are no cards in the reader.
Just to repeat. Windows assigned drive E: to my primary system hard drive and C: to my freaking printer’s card reader that I have never EVER used.
Brilliant!
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April 18th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
(Computing)
Having recently gotten a new computer at work I installed Office 2007, and man am I ever regretting that decision. Outlook 2007 isn’t all that bad in my book. Granted some folks (*cough*Trax*cough*) had some serious issues with the system fonts getting all fucked up, but I didn’t encounter that. Instead I’m having problems with Excel.
Now what kind of problems you might ask? Well, managing a lot of users and permissions in our main academic system requires me to keep track of things closely. After all, we don’t want to accidentally grant the wrong access to someone. There are tons of laws we must abide by in terms of who gets access to what. Let’s face it…I’m FERPA and HIPPA’s bitch. But that’s ok…it’s my job after all.
To make my life a little easier I keep an external record of who has what so I can compare it against what is in the system from time to time and have a more sane version of what’s in there. I call it our Security Matrix, and it is basically an Excel workbook. One sheet holds what classes have what permissions, another which users have which classes, and a last one for special permissions granted to individual users. Very easy, very simple. Lately I’ve been reconciling some changes into the matrix from another spreadsheet I used to communicate account creations and changes with a couple of my colleagues who help me out with creating and changing accounts.
When trying to work on both at the same time Excel 2007 started getting all sorts of flaky. For instance when I’d make a change the grid would disappear for a few seconds, or a set of cells would get blurry. Sometimes all but the cell I was looking at would disappear for a moment. I thought this odd since this hadn’t been a problem in Excel 2003. Shit, it’s a fucking spreadsheet, and my new computer is far more powerful than the last (being much newer), so why the fuck would it start screwing up?
This is, of course, going beyond my main complaint about how you can no longer have more than one instance of Excel running. Thus Alt-Tab is all sorts of fucky now, since you have one item for excel, and one for each workbook under it. Things were much better when each workbook opened a new version of excel. Tabbing between tasks made sense then. Along these lines, though, today when tabbing between the two the one disappeared. The item was on the task bar, but I couldn’t get to it. I couldn’t click on it, I couldn’t do shit. Navigating through the morass of menus we have these days finally got me to it, but it was not maximized like it was before and I couldn’t do much of anything but save and hope it worked.
I restarted Excel, but it happened again about 20 minutes later. Restart again. Finally Excel just crashed. It managed to restart back where I was based on its autosaves or whatnot, but still. Excel fucking crashed working on what are some pretty fucking small documents. I’m not talking thousands of rows. Maybe a couple hundred in each. Mind you, there are no calculations in any of these cells either…just fucking text.
So what the fuck did Microsoft do to Office 2007? I think Ballmer has done everything within his power to make sure that none of Microsoft’s products are worth the CDs they’re sent out on. I haven’t heard a single good thing about Vista from anyone I know who has braved installing it. Shit, NamantH blew out his bass speaker because of Vista’s retarded power management setup. Office 2007 is all but completely worthless and quickly on the way to being uninstalled on my machine. I may go back to 2003…I may just start using Open Office for my work stuff just like I do for home.
Why? Because there is one all important thing to me in computers. One thing that trumps any level of ease of use, extra functionality, ability to customize, or whatnot. What is it? Stability. Plain and simple. If it doesn’t keep running correctly, it may as not run at all, and given how Office 2007 is working at the moment I might as well keep all of my user data on index cards. At least I know I’m not going to lose any of it during a crash.
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