Software – Page 3 – Steve Dougherty's Blog

Nvidia 182.50 Drivers Broken!

Newer drivers have less bugs and better performance, right? Not in this case, at least if you’re running an AGP GeForce 6800XT like me. The device fails to properly start, the device manager complains, and falls back on very ugly software rendering. Installing previous drivers – in my case 178.24 – fixed the problem. I learned that EVE will not launch with software acceleration.

On my eMachine where I am currently using my onboard card, (sigh) the fitting screen in EVE took what felt like several seconds to finish the intro animation, but on my machine at mom’s, it takes a fraction of a second or so. I find it amazing just how bad onboard graphics card performance is.

Chrome and WP-Cache

I’m using Google Chrome now. I’ll probably set up Privoxy to get rid of ads, as I kinda miss Adblock Plus already. On a more philisophical note, I’m somewhat confused as to why more sites don’t offer subscriptions or donations instead of ads. When the house was quiet and I pulled up Chrome, I noticed it was almost constantly accessing my disk. Through Google I learned that the solution is to disable pishing and malware detection, which is somewhat concerning, but I don’t want the thing abusing my hard drive. I uninstalled WP-Super Cache and now I’m just using WP-Cache. With lighttpd I think I only used the WP-Cache part of WP-Super Cache anyway.

Also, I found a screenshot of 4chan on Reddit, where someone had posted this sentence:

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

The strange part is when I first read that I didn’t immediately realize that it was nonsensical. Chrome is also reminding me just how horrible my favicon is by putting it in a more noticable place. I should change it to something more bearable.

Cleanup

Just as Vertex mentioned, it is much, much easier to do a fresh Windows install and move over documents than it is to clean up an existing one. Apparently Dell puts (or put, this is an old machine, but I wouldn’t expect this to have changed) RAM that is slower than what the motherboard can take as a cost-saving measure. This things really flies now, and it POSTs so fast that I have trouble getting to BIOS or the boot device menu in time.

That being said, I am once again appalled by the out-of-the-box driver support in a fresh Windows install, even that provided by an SP3 CD. The device manager was no help for finding out the names of the sound, video, and ethernet drivers I needed, so I booted up into Damn Small Linux and did an lspci, which told me what I needed to know. Searching for drivers based on chipset versioning is not too fun, but it worked. The graphics were greatly improved from the 4-bit color, very low resolution they started out in, which was nice. The ethernet driver was a bit harder, because when I downloaded it, it wasn’t an installer, just a series of folders with three files. I went to the add hardware wizard, but it turned out I needed to let it fail, get past the check Windows Update pane, and then it would let me tell it where to look. The operating system seemed too proud of itself when it completed.

I had trouble finding an audio driver, and so did Windows even with a Windows update connection. I was very pleased to find that Dell had the audio drivers, which they made easy to find and download. Adobe annoyed me when I installed Acrobat Reader, as my client requested, because it decided to place another shortcut on the desktop that I didn’t ask for, and I feel it tricked me into installing Adobe AIR. The shortcut then wouldn’t go away – I couldn’t delete it – so I ended up booting into System Rescue CD to get rid of it because it annoyed me so much. I couldn’t delete it even running as administrator.

The whole thing ended up taking somewhere around 7 hours, but closer to 4 or so of those were actual work, lots of it was waiting for a virus scan. I wonder what I can do in the future while waiting for progress bars. I did start installing XP while I waited. I’ve also moved to a different method of charging for my labor. When I was working on friends’ gaming rigs, I just charged 10% of the hardware costs, which seemed reasonable. Dad suggested I charge hourly. I have a cap, though, as to not let labor prices get too high. I feel uncomfortable charging large amounts of money.

Logic Tables!

I was instructed to make code that toggled a Boolean if an input was currently true and had been false during the last loop. I did not realize that this was my task until I had taken a vague understanding from my given assignment and made a table of the possibilities, which Mike called a logic table when I showed it to him. I also learned that two false fed to and does not produce true. And only produces true if both inputs are true. In my defense, my thinking was getting fuzzier as I was getting confused, I was just trying various combinations to see if they worked, and I haven’t done logic loops like this before. I’m glad I know this now, it should prove to be useful.

Migration

As I perform user migrations, it occurs to me just how nice it would be to have a seperate /home partition. This is possible, and it’s even an explicit option in the Debian installer. That would help not only with migrations from box to box but also changing servers on networks with a home directory on NFS.

My sister now has the old server as her desktop machine, and her old machine is now a BOINC zombie.

lighttpd!

This server is now running lighttpd. I’d capitalize it but its creators don’t. Most of my problems were caused by WordPress and its insistance on Apache’s .htaccess, (for fancy permalinks) as well as WP Super Cache. The workarounds that are out there ended up redirecting nonexistant things to the main page, something I found unacceptable. I don’t use the directory structure style permalinks, so I didn’t end up using any of the workarounds. WP Cache works fine, although my understanding is it loads PHP to serve cached files and thus is more intensive. WP Super Cache uses rewrites to avoid PHP and directly serve its files. It was really difficult to get this all working, but it is much more snappy. There was around 6MB free RAM on the Apache 2 machine even though it had 603 MB. The new server has 503 MB (an unfortunate thing I realized just now as I looked it up) and has 115 MB free. I hope it stays that way, and that there aren’t stability problems.

pfSense and lighttpd

I upgraded to version 1.2.2 of pfSense after I noticed syslogd was eating as much processor time as it could get. I hope that doesn’t happen again. Earlier when I tried BandwidthD, it didn’t seem to collect any data, even when I gave it the time it asked for, but I reinstalled it after the upgrade and it works fine now. It’s collecting data on the LAN interface, so I guess it’ll count in-network transfers too, or maybe within LAN stuff will just go straight through the switches? I don’t know, but I suppose it will be easy enough to find out with those handy graphs. The next step will be figuring out if I can have it monitor both the LAN and WAN sides. The upgrade process was really nice. There’s a page in the interface where you can upload the firmware upgrade from your local machine. If you enable SSH and log in, it can even pull down and verify the firmware on its own or upgrade from a file on the router itself.

The lighttpd test server is progressing nicely, after the people in #wordpress helped me with the redirect problems I was barely aware I had. A feature of WordPress is to redirect traffic that isn’t going to a defined blog URL to that URL. This meant that going to the test server on port 81 would redirect me to my main server, which got even more crazy when my pfSense DNS listings pointed me to the test machine, except on port 80 where there was no server listening. Someone in the #lighttpd channel helped separate PHP launching from lighttpd, which I’m not sure is something I want to stick with. If I do, I think I’ll have to add an init.d script for it.

Comcast

They’re at it again. This time, there’s a way to slip under the net, though. Comcast reduces your packet priority if you exceed 70% of your up or down pipe for more than 15 minutes. I think my up pipe is about 52 KB/s, but just to be safe I set my BitTorrent upload limit to 33 KB/s, less than 70% of that, and 0.6 KB/s less than 70% of the slowest upload pipe listed on their website. I’m glad that they now have concrete policies, and I’m happy that they’re no longer messing with BitTorrent directly, but I’m disappointed because I don’t see a meter anywhere so I can know how close I am to the dreaded 250 GB/month quota. I have no clue how much bandwidth I use.

I found this awesome rant on Microsoft’s almost criminal business practices and the buggy, bloated thing they call an operating system. There are some pretty ugly coding practices in there.

Networking Wierdness

I moved a machine from Dad’s to Mom’s, and updated the static IP configuration. First I realized I spelled gateway wrong. Then I realized I put the wrong IP under network. I still couldn’t contact hostnames. I went DHCP, and it started working, and continued working when I switched back to static. It wasn’t fun to be doing this over SSH and absently running network stops instead of restarts. I guess I’m used to messing with networking locally.

Dr. Horrible and VirtualBox

I downloaded the Dr. Horrible soundtrack on Amazon. I had to use the Amazon MP3 downloader to buy an album as a single unit, and the Ubuntu version was for 7.10. (Old!) They had one for Debian Etch, so, being stubborn and not using XP, I brought up a VirtualBox Etch instance and downloaded the album from there. To get the shared folders to work I had to do the Install Additions thing. The install additions button mounts a disk image of the installers. The Linux version was a bash script and required the GNU compiler(s? I just installed both and it was fine) and kernel headers. It installed a kernel module, necessitating a reboot, and then I could successfully mount my shared folder as described in the manual. (Link is pdf.) Hooray stubbornness!