Friday, November 16, 2007

Vista and Java continued

So, after I took the time to debug my issues, it just started working. I don't know what caused it to happen but it works now. I have no idea.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Vista and Java

I got a new laptop at work and it has Vista on it. I decided to give it a go for work. After a month, I'm starting to get really irritated. I'm not going to digress too much here. What I really want to bring up is the networking in Vista. If you run "ipconfig /all" in Vista you get a list of 15 items, but in XP SP2, you only get what makes sense. You get the physical adapters and thats it. But my problem is more directly related to the what multicast packets get handled. I'm working a piece of test code that I'll probably post later. It basically creates a thread to list to a socket set to listen for multicast packets on a specific group and port. Then a second thread is created to send 8 packets out to that group and port. In Vista, the packets are never recieved but in XP they are. I discovered this because it also doesn't work in JmDNS. The Java implementation of multicast DNS uses that exact technique and it fails to work on Vista, but works on XP. I don't want to have to install XP just do work, but if I can't figure this out, then I'll have to go "backwards." I'll post the code later.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Upgrades - more

I think I've decided that first I need to do something with the case that I have now. There are some problems with it anyway. First, the CPU is really hot. Like 72 degrees C hot! Second, its pretty old and was made before there were Pentium 2 processors so it doesn't have the cooling capacity anyway for a hotter processor. Three, it doesn't have proper ports on the back. The last mainboard I had didn't have ports that lined up so I tossed the back panel piece. I did make some upgrades to this case that make me happy. I cut an Autobot symbol in to the side of the case, and then I glued a thin piece of plexiglas in to it as a window. The glass is painted with a red glitter paint that is mostly translucent. I'll post a picture later. I also painted the entire case a nice color of glossy royal blue. I think it looks kind of cool myself, but it is bigger than I need for the mATX board. Maybe I should think about a new case before bother with the SGI mods.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Upgrades?

I've started researching a little to move my current PC into a "new" case. I have an SGI Indy case with a dead Indy in it. I'd like to move my PC into it because I like the look of the case. I know that sounds like sacrilege but the SGI is dead so what else could I do with it anyway. I haven't decided for sure that I want to that yet, but I'm seriously considering it. I have to figure out how to cool the CPU. Right now, its really under-cooled in the case I'm using now. Partly that is because I'm impatient and cheap. The case is easily 10 years old and never really had enough cooling before anyway. There's only one case fan in it and then the retail AMD Athlon 64 CPU cooling fan attached. I need something better if the case is going to be much shorter. It looks as though the cooler needs to be less than 55mm from the mainboard to the top of the cooler to fit in the case. The power supply can be a 1U unit I think. That should be plenty small enough to replace the supply in the case now. I'll need a PCIexpress16 90 degree riser card to fit the video in it. That doesn't have to happen right away. There is a built-in card on the board, but the nVidia 7600 GT is nicer. Then I just need to accommodate the TV tuner some way. I think I'll also cut out the entire back panel and replace it with a thin sheet of copper to make cutting the holes for the ports on the back much easier. I'm sure that none of the current holes will be in the right place anyway. This is just a brainstorming thing right now. I need to gut the old SGI out first. I might save the guts only because I don't remember what about the system made it dead. I think it may have been a combination of things but I'm pretty sure that the power supply was the last problem and the most expensive to fix.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Love Canal?

I became curious when I was watching the History Channel this morning. They did a little shpiel about the Love Canal. Of course at the first commercial break I decided to go read the Wikipedia article about it. The first few lines talk about how the Board of Education basically forced Hooker Chemical to sell the land to them. I thought to myself, why would that be? That sounds ridiculous. Luckily there is a footnote that takes you to the referring article.

After reading half of the article, I thought how could this be? That can't be right. How can a totally innocent company be so vilified? Then I finished the article and I started to realize that, although there are a lot of facts in the article, the overt bias against the rest of the world really gets to me by the end. A company produced a bunch of chemical waste and then just buries it in the ground. Then decades later, the chemicals are killing and maiming people. The primary point that the countpoint article seems to miss is that although the company managed to get wording into the deed that absolves them of responsibility, it was still the primary creator of the toxic chemicals in that dumpsite. It should have cleaned up the mess first before selling the land. I want to agree with the author, but the condescending atitude that paints the attacks on the rest of the world really push me back to the popular conclusion that Hooker is responsible and should have to clean up the mess. The Google local view is pretty interesting.