Monthly Archives: September 2005

Silicon Hell

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Bought a new PSU.

Ripped out the old PSU.

Fitted the new PSU.

New PSU has rather less power cables than old PSU.

New PSU has exactly enough power cables to power my two hard drives, two optical drives and one floppy drive.

Old PSU had all this, plus an extra floppy drive power connector to power the Firewire controller card. New PSU does not.

Firewire controller card can’t drive the iPod without aforementioned power connector.

Ripped all cabling out, sacrificed floppy drive, tried to stretch floppy power connector to Firewire card. Couldn’t.

Moved Firewire card to spare PCI slot nearer drives. Cable now (just about) reaches.

Fire up PC, Windows says of Firewire card “This device cannot start. (Code 10)”.

Scream.

Reboot, reset ESCD data in BIOS. No joy.

Reboot, manually assign IRQs in BIOS. No joy.

Reboot, auto assign IRQs in BIOS, resetting ESCD data again for good measure. No joy.

Cry.

Rip out power cabling, sacrifice optical drives, move Firewire card to original slot, stretch power cable to card. Reboot.

Windows magically recognises Firewire card. It just completely refuses to recognise the iPod when I plug it into the dock. The cabling’s fine, because the iPod is happily recharging its battery. I am at a loss.

I am definitely buying a Mac.

[And as if by magic, it’s started working again. No reinstall, not even a reboot. How weird… Still getting a Mac though.]

B0rkage

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As if suffering the ignominy of managing to somehow break an original IBM Model M wasn’t enough, things appear to have got rather worse.

My aging PC has now taken to spontaneously rebooting at the drop of a hat. Much as I’d love to blame Microsoft, I suspect the hardware is at fault. Both case fans are spinning nicely, as is the CPU fan. But the PSU fan appears to have died, which could explain an awful lot.

So do I spend £30-£40 on a replacement PSU and see if it fixes the problem? Or do I just grit my teeth and wait until next month, when I’ve already decided I’m almost certainly going to buy a Mac?

A Sad Day

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My keyboard died. Not the feeble instrument on which I’m typing this entry, but my main keyboard. My 1991 IBM Model M. King of keyboards. Previously thought indestructible…

Ironically, I was trying to type ‘M’ when I noticed. Nothing happened. ‘Z’, ‘#’ and the return key had all apparently suffered the same fate. The wiring appears sound, and prying under the keycaps of clickiness yielded no answers.

I’ll investigate further, naturally, but I suspect I’m going to have to accept my loss.

25th March 1991 – 8th September 2005. RIP…

Alfie

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Finished work early yesterday after a weekend of too much PostgreSQL and too little sleep.

Then off to Derby – arriving already overheated and flustered, thanks to a train with sealed windows and broken air conditioning. Into The Victoria Inn to catch up with old friends, happily noting that the photograph of me and Dan in traditional dress is still on display in the collage in the corner.

Then into the back room for a cracking set by Alfie (Flash site, yes I know).

I hadn’t seen them live before, but their first two albums are both favourites. Unfortunately I guess I should have bought their later two albums before the gig, as these are where most of the tracks played came from. Still, the few tracks I knew sounded great, and some of the new stuff was at least as good, if not better…

Today, a day off to relax, hook up with friends and catch up on sleep…

Minted

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Okay, now I’ve seen everything.

Designer Shaun Inman has created a webstats package called Mint, which sells (yes, I know) for $30.

What does it do? Well according to the “demo movie”, it shows the same information you can get for free from awstats, webalizer or several others, but in Mint the pages are green and prettier. And require DHTML support. And don’t work in Internet Explorer.

Oh, and from what I can tell, it doesn’t track the server logs like most stats packages – instead, it appears that you need to add tracking code to every page on your site instead. Using JavaScript, of course. So visitors without JavaScript support (eg. lynx, JAWS, curl) won’t appear in your stats. Nor will visitors who’ve chosen to disable JavaScript (as many do).

This isn’t a personal attack, and apologies to Shaun if he reads this, but I’m struggling to understand several of these decisions. I think I’ll stick with awstats.