First, I apologize for neglecting all of you. Both my job and my side business are getting pretty thick. I promise to come back again soon.

Second, for those of you who hate the popups from my page (and are running Windows 2000 or XP with IE), go get NoPopIE. Tell it to suppress popups from “members.tripod.com” and you’re golden.

Third, let me reitrerate that the single most useful thing on the Internet right now is the Google Toolbar, hands down. They’ve even gone so far as to implement it on all the lab PC’s here at A&M recently.

Finally, if you got your Google Toolbar a while back check out the options again (this link might work for you lazy types) because, if you didn’t know, the options change every once in a while. And for both new and old Toolbar users, hit up the Experimental Features page – you can now condense all the search options into one pull-down button, maneuver through search results and suppress the popup windows that occur when you leave a site.

Way cool.

The best article on video game violence I’ve read in a while. I just may subscribe to Salon.com – they’re consistently good.

Alrightythen. I started to write a “temporary Blog” in Word at QuakeCon before they let everyone have general Internet access but I kinda fell away from that idea. However since I don’t want to leave a plotline hanging, here’s the one snippet I finished well.

The Upgrade Chronicles, Part 5

In any event, I finally got a good stable system. May none of you ever know the pain of a less than gentle upgrade. I learned there is this thing known as “IRQ Sharing” which, while XP doesn’t seem to think it’s a big deal, many others seem to disagree, especially if the sharing is done with your video card. Sure enough, my DXR3 card, which at least looked like the cause of the problem before, was sharing an IRQ with my GeForce3 card. To make things worse, some of the BSOD errors I continued to get were, according to people on Google Groups, symptoms of faulty RAM.

So I took two drastic steps. First, I pulled out the DXR3 card again. I know I can do things like fiddle with IRQ settings and such but I don’t need a DVD decoder right now, I need a stable system, what with QuakeCon and all. Then I traded in my RAM. The shop I used, Systek, doesn’t keep PC2700 in stock but they were willing to let me try a stick of PC2100 for the night. Didn’t matter much – according to what I’ve read and indeed according to what I’ve experienced, the SiS 745 chipset doesn’t work any faster with PC2700.

I haven’t had any BSOD’s since and for now I’m sufficiently satisfied that the system is stable. It may have been the IRQ’s, it may have been the RAM, it may have been both. In any event I’m happy and since the RAM was cheaper, I pocketed an extra $14. Rock.

Night before last I did walk in and my system was off for some reason (I didn’t turn it off or shut it down) but I think that was my cats being shitheads and running too close near loose plugs.

QuakeCon 2002

QuakeCon was fun. It always is. However, this year it was somewhat akin to Christmas vs. Anticipation of Christmas. Bringing a PC into the BYOC was fun. Playing in the BYOC was fun. Nearly throwing my back out lugging a 21″ monitor around was not fun. When I was playing, I was thinking I should be out and about visiting vendors. When I was doing that, I was wishing I was in the BYOC playing.

We got there Wednesday night – myself, Moe, my cousin Richard and a friend Moe was using to help lug stuff. When we got there they told us the line was shut down for the evening. This meant that we had lugged our PC’s there for no reason. It also meant Moe possibly might not get in to the BYOC (since she got off work at 5) or that I might not be able to save her a spot. I checked in the next morning and placed a nice sign reserving her a space next to me. People avoided that spot but I’m the kind of guy who has anxiety attacks when I save a spot for people at movie theaters. Moe got off early that day and we got her all set up.

The highlights included of course the Carmack speech. This year’s theme – the prediction that by the end of next year PC’s will be used for television computer graphics work (the words “Pixar” and “Renderman” were mentioned about a hundred times) and the notion that at some point graphics engines will be so good that the need to scrap them and rewrite them will be no more (again, Renderman has apparently been added on to for some 10 years now). The only thing that nagged me was the fact that Carmack’s wife, one Anna Kang, runs Fountainhead, and they would tend to profit from this notion. On the one hand Carmack’s speech was just that, a speech. On the other hand if his prophecies are self fulfilling then his wife would win. I dunno…

I saw the DOOM III theater and wow – it’s looking really really good. Of course, so far all we’ve seen have been concept footage, so it was almost disappointing to let the mystique go away and see it really is a game after all. I thought the same of the N64 Zelda game. It’s kinda like Independence Day, it was a more interesting movie before we saw the aliens (Contact avoided this nicely). Still, the demo gave me a headache – they had their 5.1 setup turned up to 11 and I wasn’t smart like Moe – she put her fingers in her ears.

I met up with some guys from TSN, an online radio network, that Moe had arranged to met up with while there. I admit, I didn’t know what to think about TSN at first. Due to the premise (listening to people talk about people play games) and their lack of an outwardly obvious profit motive I had likened them to the equivalent of me broadcasting a radio station out of the back of a van – neat for my own purposes but practically useless. However in talking to them I started to understand a lot more. The existence of $100K tournaments really is bringing multiplayer gaming into the realm of legitimate competitions and these competitions will need coverage. It’s no sillier than ESPN. These guys are starting out small out of humilty and also a desire to gain credibility. As online gaming becomes bigger and the LAN party a more common affair, these guys will probably see themselves in more and more situations.

Another trend I noticed was there were a lot more women this year. In 1999, women were more or less non existant. There were a lot more in 2001 and the best explanation I can think of is The SIMS, that and the law of averages (as gaming becomes more popular, a larger number of women get interested). Of course, since a lot of computer geek guys look like trolls, a lot of computer geek women tend to look this way for the same reason – however, I noticed a lot more “normal” looking women this year, most of whom didn’t look like they were drug to the affair. Don’t get me wrong – this was a convention of self admitted geeks (one girl’s shirt read “Talk Nerdy to Me”) but it’s nice to see people you at least consider normal, and not embarassing.

There is of course some more to talk about (hit up the aforementioned Moe‘s page for a scary pirate incident – and not the one that comes to mind with computers) but that retty much covers it. Lots of playing, lots of schmoozing, and of course I now have a greater drive to program games.

On a related note though my fabulous wife got me a 40X burner and I can run Nero again, so that’s a Good Thing. Also, I got to visit a Fry’s – those things are fucking huge!

And now I don’t feel so bad about not sending in my warranty card.

The Upgrade Chronicles, Part 4

Well I only thought it was over. So my PC threw a STOP error, this time an “infinite loop” error, something to do with the GeForce3 card. I’ve heard of these but never ran into it before. Not a huge deal, since as luck would have it NVIDIA released new drivers today. Rebooted, reinstalled, rebooted, got back to work. Then while in Neverwinter Nights the system locked up. Rebooted, then when I got back in I got another STOP related to IRQ’s or somesuch. So if I wasn’t convinced I needed to reformat/reinstall XP I was at this point. Of course, once I rebooted again, my BIOS gave me a SMART error. SMART is (apparently) a dealie on hard drives where they can signal when they think they’re going to fail. I Google’d this and the consesnus is: this isn’t a drill. This hard drive really is going to die very soon. Given that it’s a 4+ year old 6GB drive, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

In any event, my wife has a second 40GB hard drive that we bought so we could mirror her hard drive but we never got around to it. Given that I do all the ViaTexas work on my system it makes it a better candidate for this idea anyway so tomorrow I’m steaing my wife’s hard drive.

And yet for some reason, despite the fact that it’s going to work out fine and I was going to reformat anyway, this whole thing has pissed me off. Not sure why, maybe because of the series of events leading up to this don’t exactly inspire confidence.

The Upgrade Chronicles, Part 3.

Granted, there’s not much more to tell at this point. I got home, rested, ate, watched West Wing, and then reassembled my PC. Not sure if I got all those sound card connections right but no biggie. Also, I noticed back when I upgraded to XP the hard drive light was on all the time, regardless of if the hard drive was being used. It does that now, too, so either I have it screwed up or it’s business as usual. I carefully removed the Pentium III sticker from my case and replaced it with the Athlon XP sticker. I placed the Pentium III sticker on the little sticker dealie the Athlon XP one came on and placed it in the box I stored my PIII/mobo/old RAM in. I plan on making a second server system with them at some point. Or not. Not sure. This will require a second case and hard drive and I’ll want the sticker for that. Of course it stands to reason that the new case will be cooler than the one I have my Athlon XP in now so either I’ll have the slow system with the good case and vice versa or else I’ll switch them out and have another sticker crisis. Yes I’m a dork. The Pentium III sticker was metallic and sustained some damage when I took it off. It was on crooked and that’s bugged me for three years now. Yes, I am this crazy. The Athlon XP sticker is a simple sticker so I’m not sure it could survive a transplant. I wonder if it’s possible to get these stickers outside of a CPU purchase, since the companies probably want to prevent people from slapping an old Pentium into a case and placing a Pentium IV sticker on it. I also placed the metallic “Powered by ASUS” sticker on my system for some reason. It’s fine, but it looks like it was designed in the 1950’s.

After re-qualifying in America’s Army, I played Neverwinter Nights for a very long time simply because I lost track of time (and because the game plays so well now) and so did Wendy (as she often does when reading a book).

My cat Liza was sitting in my chair the whole time. Funny thing was, when I was down on the floor with a flashlight behind the system making all those connections she came down there to watch. And now she’s taken to laying down on my desk when I’m programming. I’ve actually found it makes me more focused to occasionally pet her when she does this. Of course, I also have to because if she lays there and I ignore it long enough she’ll sit right in front of the screen and stare at it and me back and forth. This will be right before she decides to see if she can get the mouse cursor. Early on she figured out that the cursor is behind glass and she can’t get to it so now when it’s close to an edge of the screen she’ll slap under or on the side of the monitor, like she’s trying to reach around. On the one hand she’s smart since she knows slapping at the screen won’t work, but on the other hand she never figures out that the other method won’t work either.

But I guess I’m lucky not only to have a cat that like me but has the same interests as well. Now if she would just stop with the sadistic biting…

The Upgrade Chronicles, Part 2.

Got the stuff in today. Got the stuff into my system tonight. Posting this from my new system right now.

The Internet (mainly Google) is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means that you are more informed as to what you could be looking at, in terms of things like upgrades and products. The downside is that ignorance is bliss. Though I read tons of good “this motherboard is great!” posts, I also read tons of “this motherboard sucks!” posts. It only takes one of those to make you nervous.

Many posts I had read stated that after upgrading to the A7S333, they were unable to get anything to run. Or boot. Or any OS’s to install, especially XP Pro. The common statement was the BSOD in the installation. Now, as I chronicled earlier, BSOD is a generic enough term that I didn’t know if it was a “real” BSOD or if it was a generic error message with a blue screen. As I left the computer shop, some guy walked in with the same problem I was dreading – new mobo, new RAM, new processor, no dice on XP. He was exchanging the RAM to see if that could be it. I started dreading this upgrade more and more, especially since it dawned on me I’ve never done anything this drastic alone.

Anywho, it took me 2 hours to get the new stuff in – partly because I was cautious, and partly because while Tiawan makes good motherboards, they don’t make a friendly upgrade experience. It took several tries to get the thing to turn on because as it turns out the part where the power switch hooks into the motherboard isn’t documented well either.

Then I booted it up and it went into BIOS mode. This was good. It detected the one hard drive I hooked up (I figured I’d hook one at a time up). Then I rebooted. It couldn’t detect the hard drive, despite doing so in the BIOS. It also couldn’t detect the floppy disk. I turned the floppy cable around and fixed that one but the hard drive was still a no go. So I hooked the other one up and that seems to have done it. It’s got something to do with the new hard drive cables/IDE paradigm but damned if I know exactly what or how, nor do I care at this hour.

Then XP started booting. And stopped. Or rather STOPped. It gave me a blue screen with an error message. At this point I’m not sure if its a “your shit is broke” or a “your shit is different” message. It says to reboot, so I do. It happens again. After some research and some random card/hair pulling, I get it down to this – the IDE controller has changed (obviously, the entire system has changed) and XP can’t handle it. I can either revert back to original motherboard, hack the registry, or reinstall XP. I pick the last option. Just to cheat, I reinstall XP over itself. An hour later, I’m back up and running.

So I fire up IE. Kinda faster. I fire up Excel. Kinda faster. I fire up Outlook. Kinda faster. At this point I start to wonder if this was worth it.

Then I fire up Neverwinter Nights. Whoa baby. For starters it comes up a lot faster. That’s good. It shows a cutscene. This is when it occurs to me that I couldn’t watch these before – too choppy. Now they’re like silk. That’s good. Then I get into the game. Damn. I never realized how choppy/slow it was before. Now it’s like a big stuck of buttah. Me likey the new processor. I could even bump up the resolution.

Then I fire up Civilization III, which I thought would be an even better test, seeing as how the game doesn’t rely on 3D hardware. Whoa. I never realized how many frames I was missing in this little sprite based game. And the load times are almost nil.

Then for fun I fire up Jedi Knight II, since the hectic battles were often a source of slowdown. I can run it in 1280×1024 mode. I’ve never been able to do that before.

So I’m happy. And relieved.

The one slightly sour note is the fan on my GeForce 3. A while back it was making noise, and I was going to have to replace it. Then it stopped, and I was happy. But when I took it out I noticed the fan was not turning easily, which made me think perhaps it hasn’t been spinning this whole time. When I put it back in I heard odd “chirping” noises – it was the fan trying (and failing) to spin. Not sure if it’s been making these noises all along (only heard them with the cover off the system) or if its just now stopped working since I fucked with it but in any event I need to replace it soon. Good thing it has a heatsink. Not sure why a CPU without a heatsink can make the chip fry and a video card chip will mostly just cause lockups and not fry, but oh well.

I may still do a full reinstall of XP, or I may not. Depends on how this installation reacts. Also I still don’t have all the little sound card connections going yet, nor do I have all the right stuff for the lights on the case and such, but good enough for now.

The Upgrade Chronicles, Part 1.

OK, so my system has been chugging along with a Pentium III 500 for some time now. This isn’t a bad thing really – it was starting to get slow back when I was still running Windows 98 and such but as soon as I bumped up the RAM and upgraded to XP, it started running really well again. Sure, games like Neverwinter Nights take a while to load, but once they do load they run pretty damn good all things considered, mainly because they rely on the video card for the graphic bits and I’m running a GeForce 3.

So what I need is a processor upgrade. Problem is, that also requires a motherboard upgrade as well. And, since its been so long since I upgraded my motherboard, there’s also new RAM out there. It’s funny – there are a wealth of computer topics that you have to get up to speed with in a short amount of time every time you want to upgrade. I wouldn’t know what a chipset was if it kicked me in the face, but I had to learn all about them to do this. Funny thing is, every time you so any sort of “massive” upgrade (and I think this kinda qualifies) there’s always at least one factor you never considered last time and is somehow vitally important this time around.

Right, so I made the command decision to go with the Athlon XP line this time around. See, I used to have these “principles” about what I would get and where and from whom. For example, “buy your comic books from a Comic Book Store, the kind that sells D&D and cardboard cutouts of the X-Men, don’t get them from Wal-Mart.” and “buy your games at a dedicated store like Babbage’s, not from Best Buy”, and “Only buy the kinds of processors that everyone else has, not a different brand”. However, these “principles” began to give way when I started doing this thing called “working for a living” and stopped “living under my parents”. Now, I’m up for the lowest bidder, within reason. I don’t drive a junker car to save money, but I’m not going to pay 200% more just so that it’s brand new on the lot, either. I figure I’ll revert back to these principles when I become “rich” but we’ll see how that turns out later…

So in any event I decided to go with Athlon XP because AMD has held itself pretty well in the market, hell they took on Intel and didn’t die, and I was looking for the most bang for the buck this time around. I started hearing of a lot of people using them and so forth, espeically people like me – avid but cost conscious gamers. The final straw was my Microsoft/Intel whore friend who told me he went to Athlon – if he’s convinced that’s saying something.

However my original plan was to replace the motherboard and carry everything over, including RAM. Turns out about a year or so ago the paridigm changed from “SDRAM” to “DDR SDRAM”, which is (a little) more expensve and, more importantly, not what I had. I think when a RAM standard is well used then no one worries about what kind of RAM there is, everyone just uses the one – when the standard changes thats when people start worrying about semantics. To upgrade to this latest type of motherboard I would also have to buy RAM. If I went for the 512MB I have now things would get expensive. There is a board out there that can use the old style of RAM as well as the new style (not at the same time) but its an old board and apparently the concept either didn’t work well or proved unpopular. However, from what I’m told, the 256MB of DDR SDRAM works considerably faster/better than the 512 I have, and since I mostly bought the 512 to speed up the system, I figure I’ll get the 256 now and maybe upgrade later. It’s not like I’m playing EverQuest or anything.

And then there’s chipsets. Apparently the “big 2” are VIA and SiS. On the advice of a friend who’s had no problems with the motherboard maker ASUS, I’m getting an ASUS A7S333, which is based on the SiS 745 chipset. It’s a little bit slower than their VIA-based A7V333 and doesn’t have some things, like USB 2.0 or FireWire but from what I understand the difference doesn’t merit the $50 price difference. After the motherboard, RAM, CPU and the new power supply I’m getting, this $50 difference started to become important. Not to mention the fact that since this is such a big upgrade and is coming out of pocket in cash (as opposed to a credit card my parents are covering) that I decided to go local and not get the stuff online. It costs a little more but the idea of being able to take it back and not send it into space (plus a better warranty on the Athlon since its now a retail product instead of OEM) are worth it to me.

So they’re supposed to come in Tuesday or so. I’ll be stressing out until then.