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Microsoft: Dump Switch Support for Windows

Published December 18, 2008

Schematic from Microsoft's article Dump Switch Support for Windows.

Known mostly as a software company, it surprised me a bit when I came across the article Dump Switch Support for Windows at Microsoft’s site a few years ago. This site has a schematic (which appears to have been done in Paint, detailing a PCI device for generating an NMI to force a machine to bugcheck and dump.

Many servers have NMI switches built in, but it’s quite nice to be able to add one to a PCI slot bearing device of your choice. I think it’d be nice to know how to do this on PCI Express, but it’d take me a little time to figure out how. It’s probably not as easy as this implementation.

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Honda DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communications)

Published December 18, 2008

Honda DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communications) R&D vehicle seen in Southfield, MI with small antennas on it for short area network research.

While parking yesterday I saw a couple of these Honda R&D vehicles for DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communications) parked next to each other. They initially caught my eye because each has one or more small, round antennas stuck on the top. A quick look around online shows that each manufacturer seems to be doing some manner of DSRC work for things ranging from freight management to toll booths, collision avoidance / proximity notification, traffic detection, etc. This sounds like it could be interesting to play with.

(Yes, this photo was taken in a very public parking garage.)

Here, have a few more moblog photos:

· My coworker Nick happy about his machine crashing again. At least we now know the cause.
· Crappy traffic on the way to work today.
· I accidently opened the door marked 18 on my chocolate-filled advent calender today.
· Vernors branded department store quality mountain bike.

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Space Giraffe PC is Out

Published December 15, 2008

Space Giraffe PC screenshot running under Vista.

In case you haven’t already heard, Llamasoft has released Space Giraffe for PC. It’s US$20 for a license of the game, or you can download the demo here and give it a go. It’s pretty nifty, and the new NUXX version (no relation to nuxx.net) is a easier to see, for those who thought that the original version was too cluttered / busy. Don’t worry, though, the original graphics are still there as Acid-Mix should you wish to use them instead.

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Locking Pliers, Furnace Issues

Published December 11, 2008

A pair of Craftsman pliers with locking jaws found in the road around my condo complex as I was leaving for work this morning.

This morning I found this pair of Craftsman locking pliers in the road as I was leaving my condo. I’ve been wanting some of these but haven’t purchased them, so this is a nice find.

Before that, I found that my house was 58°F (14.4°C) when I woke up this morning. The thermostat was calling for heat, but the furnace wasn’t igniting. This has happened in the past, requiring a quick reset of either the thermostat (Heat -> Off -> Heat) or the furnace (power cycle) to make it work again, but in the past couple of weeks it’s been happening with alarming frequency. I’m afraid that an electrical component of my furnace is starting to go wonky. I may end up just calling Mike’s Heating & Cooling who did a nice job installing a new air conditioner in 2006. While I normally wouldn’t mind fixing such electronics myself, reproducing the issue is difficult I can’t exactly wait for parts when it’s regularly below freezing outside.

Oh, and welcome to my first post from WordPress 2.7. Hopefully it’ll continue working nicely. As long as it goes well I’ll probably be upgrading the rest of the blogs I host sometime this evening.

UPDATE: Some things are a bit weird, and plugins like StatPress Reloaded and AdSense Manager need their management / control portions tweaked so that they show up under the right part of the Dashboard, but they still seem to work.

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Palazzo di Bocce

Published December 10, 2008

Playing bocce with some coworkers. Brad is on the left and Doug just rolled a ball.

Today some coworkers of mine and I went to Palazzo di Bocce to play some bocce as a group Christmas-ish outing. It was much nicer than the last times I went with work, because we had smaller teams which allowed everyone plenty of time to play. The last time we went there was a tournament-style game, fewer points needed to win, and four players per team which meant that I was only able to bowl six or eight times the whole day.

After work I ran to Trader Joe’s, then Danielle and I met up for some nice dinner here at home of sweet potato fries, mayo and Clancy’s Fancy dip, organic chicken sausages, wheat buns, and tapioca pudding. At TJs I was able to get some of the 2008 Vintage Ale, which being brewed by Unibroue will hopefully be good. I acquired quite a bit of it last year’s 2007 vintage and if this year’s batch is just as good I’ll probably get a bunch more.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to build up the hardware portion of a replacement PC for my grandparents, a meeting about some volunteer computer-ish work, normal work, and… whatever else comes up. This is right in line with how busy my days have been lately. I guess this is a good thing… I think?

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I Got To Say It Was A Good Day

Published December 9, 2008

Today I didn’t even have to use my AK.

As opposed to yesterday when all sorts of things seemed to be going wrong, today was all right. I got a bunch of stuff done at work, got to hang out with after work, ate good curry, and had things go reasonably well with my server and moving some data around (more news on this later).

Thanks very much to everyone for the kind words last night when I was feeling more than a little bit poopy. The problems are looking up, and I think I know how I can sort through them. I should be (and am) really glad that they are as basic of problems as they are, too. No one was hurt, relationships are good, and all the problems are really not that big of a deal when looked at in a proper light.

Now it’s time for bed. Goodnight, everyone.

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NGROUPS_MAX to 64 under FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE on banstyle.nuxx.net

Published December 8, 2008

Just so everyone knows, I’m changing NGROUPS_MAX on banstyle.nuxx.net to 64 shortly, which will require rebooting the box. Everything should come back up okay after this.

This change is being made so that a user can be a member of more than 15 groups, which will allow me to add far more local web hosting users under the lighttpd / PHP privilege separation model which I prefer. Due to some incoming sites this is needed in order to best host them. As far as I can currently tell this will only break NFS, which I don’t use.

I’ll update this post once the reboot is complete.

UPDATE: Well, that seemed to have gone as expected. Per usual, please let me know about any problems you are having with the server.

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Bad Mood

Published December 7, 2008

After failing to get my grandparents iMac G5 working again and with an overwhelming feeling like I haven’t been accomplishing anything, I started to get in a bad mood this afternoon. Fast forward to this evening and I’m feeling downright awful. I think I’m just acting cold, not very talkative, and extremely pessimistic all while feeling like little matters and I can’t fix the problems I’ve created. I wish I knew how I could make myself be in a better mood, but absolutely nothing sounds like it’ll help.

Maybe I just need some better food and a good night sleep. The bowl of potato chips in front of me do not qualify as good food, so I’ll have to eat something else soon.

On a related note, I think the only realistic solution to my screwing up my Grandparents’ computer is to build them a PC out of spare parts, locate a (working) monitor, and get that to them. It’s not as elegant as an iMac and likely won’t be as easy to use, but at least it should work. I’ll then part out the iMac and sell the pieces on eBay. I know the display, RAM and various small cables work properly.

This means more work for me. Hopefully I won’t screw this up somehow too.

(No, I didn’t get it working, even after attempting to reflow some of the connections, checking for any solder droplets or wire pieces on the board, ensuring all cables are right, etc.)

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