Perry’s weblog

This article at eWeek quotes a security manager from Microsoft who essentially says that saving a Windows install from a bad malware infection is becoming near impossible. He mentions malware that self repairs — you remove it then refresh the directory and it is back again. He recommended using Spybot to help keep systems clean and has urged businesses to come up with quick, efficient ways of backing up data and reinstalling a system.

That’s great.. businesses can afford a dedicated staff to keep their computers running, but what about home users? They’re pretty well screwed when they get an infection.. The standard advice of running Spybot and Ad-Aware may no longer be enough.. “Hope you kept backups, because you need to reformat,” may become the advice of the day.

Sure am glad I use Gentoo, but maybe mom will be getting a Mac next..

The webhost FINALLY got around to upgrading the webserver from a single P3-1GHZ to a dual Opteron 246. Bout damn time. Only a month and a half from when I initially complained (and I had been having problems before that) to when they finally upgrade the server. Hopefully things will run smoothly now, and I can actually use my site that I’ve been paying for.

Computers Chase the Checkered Flag, an article in the NY Times, talks about all the computing power in an average F1 car. Data is transmitted from the car to the team computers as the car whizzes by the pits at 200mph. Teams are able to monitor potential problems in real time and predict failures.

Estimates say that teams will spend in excess of $2.8 billion this year to run all the races, with top teams spending around $400 million each.

AMD is excepted to announce that it will build a computer roughly as fast as the 10th most powerful machine in the world for Sauber which will be used for aerodynamic testing.

Seems like F1 racing is becoming more of a battle between engineers than a battle between drivers.

HowStuffWorks has an article about the technology behind CART cars. Budgets and technology in CART isn’t quite as large as F1, but still an interesting read.

Hmmm.. One reason I never minded the Google ads was because they were all text based. Now that they can do images, I’m not so sure I like em. One thing I like about the regular text ads is that it seems some webmasters are able to customize the display of the ads so that they fit in with the page design. With random images popping up, that just isn’t possible. The image ads will stand out and be pretty damn obvious, while the text ads fit right in with the design.

Oh well. Google’s going public. I guess they gotta find ways of keeping shareholders happy.

Preliminary system requirements for Microsoft’s next OS, Longhorn, have apparently been leaked. The “average” computer should have something along the lines of a dual-core 4GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, up to a terabyte of storage, and a graphics card that runs 3x as fast as the ones on the market today. Wow. And that’s just average. I guess that MS expecting that Longhorn will take a while to come out, or that technology is going to keep advancing at a rapid pace.

Last weekend I bought Battlefield Vietnam. I hadn’t played Battlefield 1942 too much, so it was kinda a gamble as to whether I would like it or not. I’m glad I bought it, because I love it! I generally suck at video games, but I love hopping on a big server and running around shooting people. Adding to the fun is the fact that I can drive tanks, APCs, jeeps, helicopters, planes, and even a scooter!

The one thing I dislike about the game is the M60 on the US side. It’s like a BFG from “other” games. It’s insanely accurate, has a high rate of fire, and very deadly. The gunner also either gets a grenade launcher or a LAW. The LAW and M60 combo is deadly against the enemy, almost unfair. Hopefully EA will fix the problem in a patch.

One of my favorite things to do is play as a sniper and set myself up a little ways from the enemy base.. Guys will spawn then stand around waiting for a helicopter to appear, making it incredibly easy to get headshots on them and drop em like flies. Gotta be kinda demoralizing to just be standing around and suddenly drop dead.. even moreso when I manage to get a guy twice in a row.

I’ll have to put up some of my screenshots sometime soon…

I’ve been using my ATI Radeon 9800 PRO for a little over a week now. I’m loving it. Not a big benchmark fan, so I haven’t bothered overclocking it. I’m mainly playing America’s Army and I can play with all the details cranked up and still get a decent FPS of ~50-70. Lovely.

But ATI’s drivers in Linux absolutely SUCK. I get some terrible distortion while playing AA after about a minute in a map. Game is absolutely beautiful in Windows, so I find myself booting over just to play that game. I’ve found a couple other people with the same problem, so I guess it really is a driver issue. I’ve tried two different versions of the driver (3.2.8 and 3.7.0) and get the same problem.

And GameVE continues to cause problems for me. They issued a refund, but it was only a partial refund. I’ve tried calling them a couple times but can’t get ahold of the manager. I emailed them and asked about it, but no reply yet. In the meantime, I’ve filed complaints with the BBB, California Attorney General, and the Federal Trade Commission. They sold me a used, old, defective product and advertised it as brand new. Now they’re hassling me about giving me my money back. So screw em.

Got my new video card today. Finally. It works A-OK! Sapphire (ATI) Radeon 9800 PRO. I’m pretty happy with it.

Getting it going in Gentoo was pretty easy.

emerge -C nvidia-kernel
emerge -C nvidia-glx
opengl-update xfree
emerge ati-drivers
opengl-update ati
fglrxconfig

That will create an XF86Config-4 file for the card. I said “no” to using the internal AGP, opting to use the kernel’s instead. agpgart and the nvidia_agp interface were built as modules. In /etc/modules/autoload.d I load nvidia_agp and fglrx at boot time.

America’s Army is raising hell in Linux though. I’ll play SF_Hospital for about a minute and then the screen will become corrupt. Pretty nasty. But I can play it just fine in Windows.. I guess ATI’s Linux drivers really do suck.
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Windows 2000 & Windows NT 4 Source Code Leaked according to Neowin.net. That site is down at the moment, so I linked to the Slashdot discussion of it. Should be interesting…

So after I returned that card to Newegg, I ordered another one from gameve.com. What a nightmare. That place sucks. They sent me a used, old, defective card that they had advertised as new, and then I had to argue with the manager there to get him to refund my money. He kept wanting me to try another card from him, after the garbage that he sent me in the first place. It was a BGF GeForce FX 5900, and he blamed the problem on BFG. Said that they sent him the cards just like that. Sure, I believe that.

How many manufs keep new merchandis right next to defective, returned merchandise? How many would sent those defective cards out?

Now, if a store got a rush of orders for a certain card and took more orders than they had cards, what do you think they would do? Hmm… ship out some returned cards and pray that they work? Hmm…

I think gameve.com sucks. I’ll never do business with them again.

With this new computer, I’ve started playing America’s Army again. I had played it a little bit with the old computer, but it always kinda sucked. So I tried it out again.

I ran in to a strange issue where my cable modem would reset whenever I started the game, in both Windows and Linux. Did a little snooping around, and found out that it’s an issue that effects my cable modem - Com21 DoxPort 1100 I think it is. Seems to also effect the Motorola SB4200 and a certain Linksys router.

Since Com21 is out of business I couldn’t just download a new firmware like people with the Motorola unit can do. I dreaded having to visit the Comcast office. I had tons of troubles with Comcast when I first got service about 2.5 years ago, I figured it would be a nightmare visiting them again.

But I went anyways. And it was really quite painless. In and out in about 5 minutes. Came home, plugged it in, and I was good ta go!

Now to try America’s Army again…

Got my new computer all put together. Ended up with:

• Antec Sonata w/ 380W power supply
• MSI K2N2 Delta L NFORCE2 Ultra 400 motherboard
• AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton 333MHz FSB
• Kingston HyperX PC3200 512MB (2×256) CAS 2-2-2 RAM
• Western Digital 80GB 8MB Cache 7200RPM hard drive
• Leadtek A350 GeForce FX 5900 128MB RAM video card
• Speeze Falconrock CPU heatsink / fan

It’s perty fast! Really happy with it. Carried over the optical drives (DVD and CD-RW) from the old computer. Figure I’ll pick up a DVD burner in a few months when the dual format drives get a little cheaper.

Unfortunately, the video card hard to be returned because it had some problems playing full screen stuff — like games. I tried a game that was included with the card, 3D Mark 01SE and 03, and the dxdiag Direct3D tests under Windows. Under Linux, I tired to play RTCW: Enemy Territory and the glxgears test. All of them yielded the same results. I’m using my GeForce 2 MX from the old computer for right now. Heh, only got like 2900 on 3DMark 01SE.

Got everything up and running in Gentoo pretty quickly. It compiles stuff MUCH, MUCH faster than the old computer. Pretty rediculous. I used a binary version of KDE to get up and going quicker, and because KDE 3.2 is due to be released soon. I’ll just wait until then.

The Falconrock cooler does a pretty good job. Keeping my system at 34C idle, and around 44C loaded. Quiet too. Right now, I have the FSB up to 180, so just a mild overclock. I looked at the markings on my chip before I put the heatsink on, but didn’t bother to write them down so I’m not sure if I got an unlocked chip or not. I’ll have to play around with it.

The Antec Sonata case is really high quality. Nice rounded edges. Big 120MM fan in the back for exhaust. The hard drive cage is roatated 90 degrees compared to a normal one. Makes mounting the drives a little interesting, but not too bad. Seems pretty quiet too. I was kinda disappointed with the noise level when I first built the system. Then I swapped the video card and things got really quiet. Real nice for a change. When I get a new card, I may have to look in to quieter cooling methods.