5 Things About Me

Responding to Marc's post.

1. 2006 ended with me being a first time dad!
2. I've lived longer in my current area then anywhere else in my life.
3. My first computer was a Commodore 64 and I had a IBM-AT 6Mhz (not the 8MHz)
4. One of the biggest "wow" computer moments that I always remember is the first time I heard sound through the Soundblaster card.
5. In my freshman year of college, my roommate and I continued the tradition of throwing an end-of-year party in our dorm room because we had the smallest room in the whole dorm.

beagle on fedora

Today I noticed my hard drive spinning a lot and so I did a "top" to see what was running. A process called beagle-build-in was the highest resource consuming task and a "ps auxfw" showed that it was started by a daily cron job called beagle-crawl-system. Beagle is a Mono-based desktop search engine so I guess what this is doing is to index files on the system, but the thing is that I had not enabled Beagle on my service so I'm not sure why Fedora kept this daily cron job...

NVidia 7600 AGP

My new FXF NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB DDR3 (PV-T73A-UDF3) card came last night to replace the burned-out MSI Ti4800 (Ti4600-TD8X) card. Because my motherboard is still AGP, I had to get an AGP card instead of the newer PCI-E and there are fewer and fewer AGP options out there especially if you're looking for dual-DVI connections. There seems to be more ATI cards that sports dual-dvi, but they tend to cost a lot more and I've always liked Nvidia cards.

This is definitely a no frills package that came in a small box with the card, manual, CD, s-video cable, power splitter cable and a DVI-VGA converter. The installation was easy, but don't expect to get help from the manual which just said insert the card into the AGP slot. It didn't even take up half a page. Later on, I found that on the CD there were some PDF documents that offered a little more details but only because it included some diagrams.

After putting in the card, I turned on the machine and saw... nothing. The GPU fan was running but I realize that the power cable from the PSU (the card recommends 350W) wasn't connected properly to the back of the card so it wasn't getting enough juice to turn on. Once I reconnected the cable, everything worked fine. I downloaded the latest drivers from Nvidia and a reboot later I configured everything as I wanted and the monitors looked very nice with both going to DVI.

Overall, the card is nice. The AGP version was more expensive then the PCI-E version but it was still cheaper then upgrading the whole machine. The card is actually smaller then my previous card and I didn't notice it being any louder. The latest version of CPU magazine did an article on AGP card and this one got the best review and performance, but is about $30 more then the average price but given that this will hopefully be my last video card for this machine and I want it to last I figure the investment was good.

MS hotfix for HT and dual-core

This is slightly old (although the latest version is new), but MS has a hotfix designed to improve the performance and compatibility of those running multi-core processors or HT-enabled processors:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=896256

I haven't tried it myself, but figure I note it here so I can find it late.

Dead video card

Last night I suddenly smelled burning plastic. After looking through the house, it turned out that the fan on one of the video cards (MSI Ti4800) stopped working and the heat of the card melted the fan and surrounding plastic. Not being a heavy PC video gamer these days, I don't buy the super fast video card that could melt a glacier, but I guess most cards these days will generate a decent amount of heat as to require at least a heat sink or fan. What was interesting is that the video card still worked although probably not for much longer, but I still took it out of the computer and put it in the garage because it smelled really bad.

Since no video card essentially means no computer, I figured that I should find one fast, but as I'm not a gamer I haven't been following the latest in video card technology. Although I've heard a lot of good things recently about ATI cards, I've been a long time user of Nvidia so I started there. The Ti4800 is no longer made so I'd have to upgrade to a newer GPU and this time I decided I really want one that has dual DVI connectors instead of a 1 DVI and 1 Analog, and since the motherboard is still an AGP mother board, I needed to find an AGP version of the card.

A few generations of GPU has passed me by since I bought the 4800 with the latest-and-greatest being the 8xxx series, but those cards are in the $400+ category and way beyond what I want to spend for an old system. At first I thought that the older 6xxx series such as the XFX GeForce 6600XT would fit my needs exactly as it has dual DVI, AGP and is relatively cheap.

However, the shocker came as I read the various comments that the XT requires a 500W power supply!?! I thought, "is this the norm these days?" Looking around some more, I settled on the XFX Geforce 7600GT which got very good reviews and being that it's no longer the top-of-the-line from Nvidia the price isn't at a premium. However, because I had to get the AGP version, it was about $50 more then the PCI-E version. While the 6600XT seemed to require a powerful PSU and the XFX version seemed to be a fairly large card, the 7600GT is less power hungry and is suppose to be more a regular sized card. I'm now waiting for it to arrive and I'll provide more details of my experience with it.

Hopefully this will be the last upgrade for the computer until the whole system is upgraded.

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IE7 menu location

Maybe I'm just a old fart who likes his menu to be where every other application has their menus, but IE7's menu position (underneath the address bar) drives me nuts. To change this and move it back to the top, set the follow registry key to 1 (add the DWORD value if it doesn't exists):

HKCU\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\INTERNET EXPLORER\TOOLBAR\WEBBROWSER\ITBar7Position

TrueImage backup software

One of the reasons I bought the new HDD was so that I can have a place to set up more regular backups, and not have to manually backup to removable media as often. I want to setup an automated backup schedule with me doing a full backup to DVDs only every so often.

I mounted the drive on the Linux box and set up access to it through SAMBA since I want to back up files that are on the Windows machines also. I started looking around for a backup solution for Windows. There is always the basic backup tool that comes with the OS, and I also have Acronis TrueImage that I got a while back to create a bootable image of one of my test windows box so I don't have to reinstall Windows everytime.

Acronis is pretty full featured and allows setting up backups based only on files that have changed which is what I wanted. Before I installed it though, I looked at what kind of things it puts on the computer and saw that it added 4 processes to the startup list (1 service, 3 running in the registry's run section):

TrueImageMonitor.exe : "provides the interface between running Acronis True Image tasks and the user. It allows to observe the tasks progress and cancel the running tasks. It is started when a user logs into the system and terminates when the user logs off." -- Acronis Support

Timountermonitor.exe : "observes the tasks concerning an image mounting (exploring).
These programs are not required by Acronis True Image to perform its tasks, and can be terminated if you think it occupies too much memory, but you will loose the ability to control running Acronis True Image tasks." -- Acronis Support
Schedhlp.exe - "Acronis scheduling service helper. This program monitors the logons and logoffs in the running system and notifies Acronis scheduling service about them. It is started when a user logs into the system and terminates when the user logs off. Acronis True Image uses this program to schedule tasks on user logon/logoff and to run non-scheduled "Image creation" operation." -- Acronis Support
Schedul2.exe -- "Acronis scheduling service. This service is started on the computer startup and remains active until the computer is turned off. It is used by Acronis software to start scheduled tasks. Note that Acronis True Image always schedule image creation tasks, even if you start the "Image creation" operation. Thus if you stop Acronis scheduling service, then you loose the ability to create images in Windows." -- Acronis Support

Digging around the support forums, it sounded like schedul2.exe is the only one that is critical, but the descriptions aren't exactly clear. It sounds like when a process gets kicked off, the TrueImageMonitor is what allows an users to abort it. The Timountermonitor has something to do when you mount an archive as if it was another directory on your drive. Schedhlp is the most confusing as I'm not sure what it would want to do when a user logs in-and-out. One post said he couldn't get TrueImage to run backups when the computer shutdown unless this was on which makes sense if he created an event to occur when he logs (i.e. shutdown).

I'm gonna play around with it, but if anyone has a better understanding or recommendation about backups let me know.

Seagate External USB/Firewire HDD

This weekend I got myself the 750 GB Seagate Dual Interface (USB2.0/Firewire) External HDD [ST3750640CB-RK]. I looked around at the various external enclosures and internal HDD combination, but since Best Buy was selling the drive with an instant $100 rebate and I had a discount coupon the price came out better.



The drive's spec is pretty good:

• 7200 RPM


• 16MB Cache


• 2 lb. 9.5 oz.


• USB 2.0 port


• Firewire (IEEE1394a) port

The drive is pretty compact and feels solid in my hands. It comes with a stand so you can have it sit upright or flat if you wanted to stack them. The problem is that there are no rubber feet if you do lay it out flat so it'll slide around on a smooth surface.

The drive is formatted as FAT32 and comes with a one-push button that will start a back-up program if you use it with Windows. I didn't try it with Windows but instead connected to my Linux server.

Setting it up was very simple and involved plugging it into the electrical outlet and connecting the USB cable from the drive to the computer. My Linux box didn't automount the drive, but I was able to check that linux can see it using "fdisk -l". This will return the device name that can be use to manually mount the drive:

mount -t vfat [device name]

Once I knew it was working, I decided that since I will primarily use it with Linux that I'll format it to use ext3 instead of FAT32 so it can understand UNIX file permissions. Unmount the drive and format using:

/sbin/mke2fs -j [device name]

This will erase everything on the drive and make use ext3 (ext2 + journaling). The process was very quick although it uses up a bit more space then FAT32. Once I was done formatting, the drive showed 688 Gb total and 198 Mb used. I think the default FAT32 had 699 Gb total.

Once it looks like everything is working, I added an entry into my /etc/fstab so that the drive will get mounted.

I'm debating whether I should use the fstab or whether to use automount, but this is a minor thing. Otherwise, the drive seems to operate seemlessly with Linux. I now need to get my other machines to back up files to the new drive.

Chicago Bears

Man, where's the love?  Why the constant "overrated" flag that many sports writers keep pinning on the NFC North leader?  Before the season, I doubt any of them pick the Bears to be Superbowl contenders, so the fact that they're leading the NFC should really mean that they're beating expectations.  Instead, it's a constant "they are who we thought they are."  (To this day, I'm still trying to understand Dennis Green's quote.  Is he saying that the he thought the Bears was a good but not perfect team who will beat his Cardinals?  If that's the case, yes, the Bears showed flaws and did beat them even without an offensive touchdown...).