October 2004 Archives

Wrinkles.

For many years I've been dual-booting my PC, using Windows most of the time, but sometimes switching to some flavour of Linux for development or experimentation. With each release of Mandrake (and presumably other distributions) it becomes easier, such that today I can set up quite a complicated arrangement in only a few minutes. Here's how to install Mandrake 10.1 and add it to your Windows boot menu.

1. When you initially set up your hard disk leave one or two small partitions free at the end of the disk for Linux
2. Install Windows
3. Burn CD 1 of Mandrake to a CD-RW (you won't need it after installation - just download packages from the internet)
4. Boot from Mandrake CD and install
5. Install the bootloader to your Linux partition (not your Windows partition) - it'll probably end in 5 or 6, eg /sda6
6. Boot with Mandrake CD in rescue mode
7. From rescue menu - mount disks
8. From rescue menu - go to console
9. Copy boot sector to from Linux partition to Windows partition, eg. dd if=/dev/sda6 of=/mnt/win_c/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1
10. Edit boot.ini in Windows partition to show Linux, eg. add c:\bootsect.lnx = "Linux (Mandrake)"

Obviously there's a lot more detail about these steps in the relevant Linux HOW-TOs, but I think it shows how straightforward things have become.

A rule of thumb from my early days on the Internet (circa 1994) that I have believed to this day is that there is a small but noticable difference in the time taken to download via FTP versus HTTP, due to the extra overheads associated with the hypertext protocol. Being unable to find anything definitive on the Googlenet, I decided to do the experiment.

I placed a 10,122,564 byte file on my ISP's web server, and proceeded to download it using NetTransport via first HTTP then FTP. My connection is 256/256 kb/s DSL.

HTTP: 7m 12s
FTP: 7m 15s

(If you naively calculate how long it should take to send that file on that speed link you'll come up with a touch over 5 minutes, if you ignore the overhead associated with encoding data over DSL.)

I'd say that's close enough to be called a dead heat. From now on I'll be using whatever protocol's most convenient.

Addendum (29 Mar 2005): Technically, there shouldn't be much difference. FTP has a slightly more involved initialisation process, but after that they are both just transferring identical bytes.

Some notes regarding speed changes
This is as convenient a place as any to note any changes in my broadband speed.

15 Nov 2004: My ISP changed their ADSL configuration to turn interleaving on, and increased the data rate (to counteract the ATM overheads) to 320,000/320,000 bits per second. The time for this test has been reduced to 6m 25s (HTTP).

2 Feb 2005: My ISP increased my speed (for free) to 5,408,000/928,000 (ie. 5.5Mb/s down,1Mb/s up). The time for this test has been reduced to 0m 19s (HTTP). I guess I'll need to use a larger file if I want to compare FTP and HTTP again.

15 May 2005: After my ISP modified their DSLAM settings my speed was changed to 5,984,000/928,000 (ie. 6Mb/s down,1Mb/s up). The download time is now 0m 16s (HTTP).

I have finally found the time and motivation to complete the wonderful real-time strategy game from The Bitmap Brothers, 'Z: Steel Soldiers', the sequel to their hard-to-google DOS game 'Z'. Although I purchased it a few months after its release (according to the receipt at 4.09pm from salesperson Mustapha on 14^th October, 2001), I had only made a few aborted attempts to play it through to the end. I was mainly dissuaded from playing by the annoying necessity of inserting the game CD prior to starting, which became even more of a problem as my CD drive was progressively dying at the time. After all, what's the point of installing the game to hard disk when the CD is required anyway.

Fast forward to a month or two ago. This time the CD requirement annoyed me enough to do a google search for workarounds, and I struck lucky. What you're after is a 'game fix' or 'nocd' patch, and they're readily available. Once that's installed you'll find yourself playing a lot more often, and the time-wasting search for the CD EVERY TIME YOU WANT TO PLAY A QUICK GAME will be just a horrible memory.

When a game offers the choice of easy, normal or hard, I normally select easy, kidding myself that after I finish I'll play again on a harder difficulty level. With Z:SS I assume I chose easy, but I couldn't find any way of finding this out a month after the fact. Anyway, the levels were pretty well set up in terms of difficulty for the first half (ie. the first 15 of 30 levels), but then something wacky happened and it all got really easy. What I want is for me to have to restart a level 5 or more times, trying slightly different strategies to try to get the advantage. This is how it worked out initially, but after about level 15 I would easily get through on my first attempt, apart from perhaps 2 of the remaining levels. Although it was nice to win, it lessened the sense of achievement.

Once you're worked your way through the single player missions you might be tempted to try some skirmishes against the CPU, but for some reason it is incredibly easy to win, and thus exceedingly boring.

Lastly, you'll be enticed by the multiplayer option. This was truly the greatest part of the original 'Z', which I played for many hours against my brother in LAN games. Whilst Z:SS advertises multiplayer, this is an unfortunate situation where real life intervenes. The game was originally released with a horde of bugs, most of which were eliminated in patches. However, while the single player game is bug free, the latest patch (from 17th August 2001) admits that:

MULTIPLAYER - Fixes - GAMESPY

- Reduction of critical errors although there is still one problem we are currently trying to track down hence the 'BETA' nature of this patch.

So, while some of us live in hope that one day the Bitmap Brothers will pick up the source code and spend a few hours fixing the multiplayer code, or release it to the open source community for fixing, the current situation is that this is a truly great single-player game that can now be purchased for not much more than the price of a blank CD.

An aside to a flu vaccine story in the Washington Post says:

The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, released an ad Friday calling Kerry "the most liberal man in the Senate" and "the most liberal person ever to run for president."

• Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
• Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.

(Obsolete) Morally unrestrained; licentious.

In this country, liberal is such a positive term that parties from both sides of politics are associated with it. The conservative party was founded on the bold idea of naming itself the Liberal Party. At no time were their policies liberal, so it seems to be a sly way of forcing people to think liberal when talking of that party. More straightforwardly, the parties to the left, Labor and the Greens are both seen as being liberal in policy.

If you're not satisfied with the return of the Howard government, or you've ever been unhappy with results in the past, then you might be interested in a fairer method of calculating the winner. Named after its French creator, the Marquis de Condorcet, the Condorcet method is described (and evangelised) at ElectionMethods.org, and you can even try out some examples of its implementation regarding the 2000 and 2004 US Presidential elections.

It is more complicated than current systems, but some might consider that fairness is more important than understandability.

Was Crikey the only major news organisation in Australia to voice the opinion that Labor should win?

The booming economy is a false dawn with a policy-induced housing bubble and a debt-funded consumer binge leaving no great legacy for future generations.

The Howard years have coincided with the age of the Internet, yet we have not produced an IT company of any note or taken advantage of new technology to create greater diversity of ownership and choice in media. Our business sector has become an amalgam of gouging cartels, a service sector oligopoly which has delivered for shareholders but not for the nation. Look no further than the way bank profits have more than doubled since 1996.

For the first time in history, we have fallen below one per cent of world exports and those exports remain dominated by primary products and minerals.

Just as Bob Hawke benefited from the drought breaking in 1983, the Howard Government has taken credit for things over which it has no control, primarily low global interest rates and the our best terms of trades in many years thanks to the boom in China.

Tomorrow's the day when your television viewing will be rudely interrupted by a bunch of politicians talking about themselves. I hope that there's some input from The Chaser Decides to liven things up. If you have digital tv and you live in Sydney then the live ABC election results service on channel 41 might be of interest.

If you were just planning at lobbing up at the polling booth and letting your party of choice choose your preferences too, then you might want to read The grubbiest preference deals at Crikey.com.au to get some background information. You can find out who your candidates are at the Australian Electoral Commission candidates pages.

After experiencing some problems with the K8V SE motherboard in the system I built recently, I decided to try out a different motherboard for a second project.

Commonly, Gigabyte is regarded as a slightly lower quality manufacturer to the top tier of Asus and a few others. However, not long ago I punted on a really cheap Gigabyte graphics card, and found that it performed well. So, I thought it'd be worth the risk to go with a Gigabyte motherboard, and I was happy to find a suitable one, the K8VT800 Pro at a price 20% lower than the Asus K8V SE Deluxe. One thing I did notice, as with when I was choosing my video card, was the huge variety of Gigabyte products, all with just tiny variations in some technical aspect. This makes choosing just that much more fun.

The problem with the K8V SE was that the hard disk light does not work for disks plugged into the VIA SATA port, and this is a general bug with all K8V SE motherboards. If not for this, I'd have been happy to buy it again. On the other hand, I have found Asus technical support to be efficient and responsive, which goes a long way to assuaging any fears of problems.

For this new motherboard I got an AMD Sempron 3100+, as opposed to the Athlon 64 3000+ last time. It's a bit slower, but a lot cheaper, and my favourite feature this month, Cool'n'Quiet, is included in both. The Sempron won't run 64bit software, but for its intended recipient that won't be a problem.

You can read the products web pages to compare their techical details, but for my needs they were identical. The Gigabyte board was noticably smaller, such that it screwed into the case backplate using 3x2 screws instead of 3x3. Plus the Gigabyte's hard disk LED worked perfectly.

The BIOS setup for the Asus was far better laid out than the Gigabyte. In fact, the Asus BIOS setup was by far the most logical that I've ever used, whereas the Gigabyte's was a little odd, though still usable.

Cool'n'Quiet, the underclocking of the CPU when it's not heavily loaded, requires more steps to turn on in the Asus, but paradoxically is easier because it's actually documented in an easy to find place on their web site (though not in the manual). For the Gigabyte I had to email support (a few days for a response, which is pretty fast) to be directed to a page on their web site that described the process.

So my conclusion is that you do get a slightly more polished, better featured product from Asus for a slightly higher price, and that Gigabyte provides a perfectly functional product. In addition, you will find many more people have purchased the K8V SE than the K8VT800, which might assist if you need user-to-user support. However, the overriding result from this head to head showdown is that the Asus board has a hideous bug and that if it's going to affect you then the Gigabyte board is a perfectly suitable substitute.

When I recently installed Windows XP on a freshly-built computer I found that the rather necessary Windows Update feature was not working. After much fiddling, uninstalling and installing I found a solution documented on Computing.Net, involving re-registering the Windows Update client:

1. Quit all programs that are running.

2. Click Start, and then click Run.

3. Type "regsvr32 jscript.dll" (without the quotation marks), and then click OK.

4. When you receive the "DllRegisterServer in urlmon.dll succeeded" message, click OK.

If this does not resolve the problem, repeat inputting the following commands and click OK after each command.

regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wuauserv.dll (May have the error " DllRegisterServer entry point was not found". It is normal.)
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll
regsvr32 iuengine.dll (May have the error " DllRegisterServer entry point was not found". It is normal.)

I've just put out an unexpected new version of WimpWall, my freeware wallpaper changer. It's unexpected because I had thought that my last release was feature complete, but after a number of requests from users I decided to add one little option.

It is now possible to turn off the countdown dialog preceding wallpaper changes. I won't use this option myself, because I prefer the ability to cancel a change if I particularly like the current wallpaper, but I appreciate that some people prefer the silent approach.

Although adding this to WimpWall was pleasantly straightforward, it did necessiate rewriting the settings parsing code. This is because I had assumed that, as mentioned before, v0.2 was feature complete, and the settings would never change. In v0.3 I had to add the countdown setting. Related to this, to cater for people upgrading from v0.2, I had to change from a hard-coded to a modular method of parsing. Fortunately, this means that any future unexpected changes will be easy to accommodate.

With this new release I also added polish to a couple of items, which you'd never notice, but make me feel better.