Posts Tagged Technical
Impending Technical Choices
In the coming weeks, I have some technical choices I need to make.
- Personal Finance Software: For years, I have used Microsoft Money. In the last couple of years, though, I knew its days were numbered. The official announcement of its “end of life” is here. With this announcement, my choices are fairly limited in the realm of personal finance software: Quicken, Mint.com, or my Bank. My thoughts on each are below, but I crave input from others.
- Quicken: They clearly want the Money customers, and they are the oldest, biggest, and only player on the block. There is a limitation with how much transaction data they can convert to Quicken from Money. I also abandoned Quicken a long time ago, as I thought it getting long in the tooth–that was over 10 years ago. They are a serious contender for my software choice, and this is primarily because I really want and desire a desktop application.
- Mint.com: The darling of the Web 2.0 personal finance space, Mint offers a lot of the integration that I have with Money and would presumably get with Quicken. I only have two issues with Mint. For one, Mint.com does not yet offer any type of bill payment scheduling like I get with Quicken or Money. The other concern–not a large one–is my fear of the “personal finance cloud.” For someone who has a lot of information in the cloud, I seem to not be too big a fan of having my personal finance information exclusively in the cloud with no local backup. I have to admit that I like having a piece of software that connects to my bank and keeps everything in sync.
- My Bank: I will admit that my Bank’s online presence has greatly improved over what it was even 5 years ago. I do make use of its online billpay feature pretty extensively, and the eBill feature is not bad at all. Still, though, I have to admit that I crave that desktop experience. Also, my problem with both Mint.com and My Bank, is that I have no tactile feedback for bills that are due and such. I like having a desktop application remind me somehow. Call me old-fashioned in that sense.
- Virtualization Software: I have been a huge user of VMWare on my various machines through the years. It works quite nicely, and there is a completely capable free version. I did, however, download Sun’s VirtualBox the other day for use on my Win 7 desktop. In my coming experiment of running Windows 3.11 on Win 7, I am looking for a free virtualization solution. So, for the first time in a while, I am going to give VirtualBox a chance.
Looks like I get to have some fun in my spare time with these tasks in the coming weeks. Especially since my copy of MS Money is “on the clock,” with the online services expiring in October.
Getting SATA and Windows XP Installs to Play Nice Together
Before the end of last year, I undertook an interesting project. One of my coworkers—actually, one of my team members—wanted to downgrade his laptop from Windows Vista to Windows XP. He had complained about the speed, even with SP1 installed. I took a look, and I immediately thought the culprit was the onboard graphics and chipset—an Intel 945GM Chipset. Of course, as the press discovered and class-action suit disclosed, emails sent within Microsoft complained about the performance of this chipset with Vista, but I digress.
I had thought I blogged this topic, but I had only twittered my victory apparently. I was contacted by David Bradley via Twitter asking if I was ever able to get this working. Thus began an email conversation between the two of us concerning this. I also admonished myself and promised to post my solution to this problem as I recollected it.
Given the rebuild task, I did some research before starting to grab the drivers I needed and see if there were any other potential issues to be wary of. I soon discovered a pretty big one. Windows XP SP2 does not have native Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive support. In other words, unless you have a floppy with the drivers or have a USB key handy, the installation disc does not contain the appropriate drivers.
I initially tried to burn an integrated disc, but I was met by a BSOD when the machine rebooted. I burned a new disc with Windows XP SP3 integrated, and that also resulted in the same “blue” results. I opted to do a bit more Googling, and I turned up the following two articles concerning the “downgrade” of HP laptops to Windows XP from Windows Vista.
An Up to Date Guide to Reinstalling WinXP to DV6000T
HP dv8000t Reinstallation Guide
The takeaway from both of these articles and what I learned when I rebuilt this machine—I got it right on the third attempt—is that there is a delicate dance required to get SATA support to work with a new Windows XP installation. At a very high level, here is what is required to get this installation routine to work:
- Make sure to download the appropriate chipset drivers—in this case the Intel 945GM chipset.
(If you have any question as to what to install, download and run the Intel Chipset Identification Utility on the machine in question. Be sure to install the version appropriate to your OS.) - Extract the SATA driver for your chipset. This varies based upon the method you can get the storage driver, but in my case, it involved the use of a virtual floppy tool to trick the driver install into believing my PC had a floppy drive.
- Disable Native SATA support in the BIOS.
- Boot from your installation media and proceed with your operating system installation.
- When the installation is complete and you boot into Windows, open Device Manager.
- From Device Manager, select your IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller and select Primary IDE Channel.
- Choose the “Update Driver” button, and be sure to not search for the driver and instead specify the Intel SATA driver.
- Continue the installation of the drivers, clicking through any security prompts.
- Reboot your machine once complete. As the machine boots, enter the BIOS and re-enable Native SATA Support. Save your BIOS changes and reboot.
- Enjoy Native SATA support for your machine, and continue installing the other drivers on your machine as required.
Now, this procedure will vary depending upon the hardware manufacturer. Nonetheless, the way to get around the initial install problem is to disable native SATA support, install your OS, install the correct SATA driver for your hard drive interface, then reboot.
Bugged by a Bugcheck
I have had a minor problem from time to time on my home desktop. Specifically, my desktop will sporadically reboot. Now that I have had some time to dig into the problem, I am pretty certain I know what the culprit is. Inspection of the event log shows the following entry.
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Event Type: Information
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Event Source: Save Dump
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Event Category: None
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Event ID: 1000
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Date: 10/7/2008
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Time: 7:46:56 PM
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User: N/A
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Computer: JJTHOME
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Description:
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The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x000000ea (0x85a33020, 0x863f9e88, 0xf7a49cbc, 0x00000001). A full dump was not saved.
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For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
My immediate thought was that the problem must be with a device driver, as that tends to be the case. A quick search on MSDN turned up a list of bug codes contained in the Windows Driver Kit. One specifically calls out the hex code in the System Log entry above--0x000000ea. To quote the article:
This indicates that a thread in a device driver is endlessly spinning.
This usually indicates problem with the hardware itself, or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly. Frequently, this is the result of a bad video card or a bad display driver.
I have cranked up the debugging options on my machine to try and capture a full dump of this event. For some strange reason, my machine is not capturing the actual dump being generated by the "Blue Screen of Death" I know is occurring. It just reboots. In my quest for more knowledge, I may just start hooking debuggers into my system and seeing what I can find out.
In the meantime, though, I have two plans that will bear themselves out in the near- and long-term, respectively.
- Visit NVIDIA and download the latest drivers available for my card, a GeForce 8600 GT. DONE
- Revisit moving to Windows Vista on my desktop, especially now that SP1 is available and resolves a lot of early problems.
Drive-By Downloads, Apple Style!
So, like many of the unwashed masses on the Internet, I decided to update iTunes on my PC to iTunes 8. I left my PC running the update when I left for the office, and I rebooted when I arrived home from work this evening.
Of course, yet again, Apple finds no problem in offering me the optional software of Safari for Windows--an optional piece of software whose selection checkbox is checked by default. If I wanted to run a crappy web browser, I would willingly find a way to install Internet Explorer 4. I was sure to uncheck that piece of optional software.
In reading some of the coverage of the post-install reports--those folks having blue screen errors and other nasty results, I came across Ed Bott's piece on ZDNet. His article goes into detail concerning some of the kernel mode drivers that iTunes installs--drivers known to be the root cause of BSODs on Windows. Even better, though, was the installation of a piece of software that I was not informed of--MobileMe. While I was not informed this was one of the packages installed by the iTunes upgrade, there is was in the list of programs available to me in Add/Remove Programs in Windows.
Wow, Apple. It's bad enough to attempt to foist upon me an incredibly craptacular browser experience, but now you want to install the Windows client to your "cloud service" known to not work? For all of the haughtiness of your users and your condescending ads, you are no better than Microsoft.
Twitter’s Failure and FriendFeed’s Shortcomings
Various bloggerati are up in arms about the ongoing instability of Twitter. Information is slightly better than it has been before as the technical folks are communicating the status and their ongoing work to resolve the problems. Various Twitter clients fail to work, and in some cases the site is completely unreachable. The FailWhale image has become all too common.
Honestly, I have grown to enjoy Twitter. Is it something you need to be on? Not really, but it is incredibly simple to use. Nonetheless, the downtime of this free product has been annoying--keeping in mind you get what you pay for. Given this, the most recent exhortation to flock to FriendFeed really started to grind my gears.
I'm spending 80% of my time on FriendFeed instead of here. Move over there, slow adopters.
Sure, I have a FriendFeed account, and it does some interesting things I like. Still, FriendFeed to me is just an aggregator. It relies on folks posting items--links from Google Reader, links from del.icio.us, blog posts, flickr photos, LinkedIn, and other things--to build their FriendFeed content. You still need things like GoogleTalk, Twitter, Pownce, and your blog. People: use common sense. FriendFeed is an aggregator of your various points of presence on the Interwebs. It is nothing more.
My other complaint is how everyone is crowing about "the discussion is happening over on FriendFeed." Better yet, I am moving from Twitter to FriendFeed since I can have a discussion." If I wanted to have a discussion with people, I would send them an instant message, send them an email, or, for chrissake, pick up the phone and call them.
We have comments in blogs, and that is, quite frankly, where most normal folks who actually have things to do will engage in their "conversations." Most normal folks do not have hours on end to comment on someone's blog post on yet another aggregator. Call me myopic, but I do not see how FriendFeed is the technical equivalent of the second coming of Christ.
Great, people can comment on my blog, my flickr photos, and my various tweets. . Are they commenting on my blog? On a photo on Flickr? On Twitter? No. They are commenting on someting in FriendFeed. You know what I call that: FAIL.
At the end of the day, FriendFeed allows me to catch up on things when Twitter's infrastructure is a smoking mess of plastic and silicon. Nonetheless, it is just that. To borrow from William Shatner in a classic SNL sketch:
GET A LIFE, will you people!
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