Today is the eventful day; Service Pack 1 for Vista is finally released. I’ve linked to the stand alone installer page but it’s seeding out through Windows Update now. I’ll be installing later this evening and will update with how it goes in the morning. Wish me luck.
Download details: Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Five Language Standalone (KB936330)
More a note to myself than anything else but Lifehacker linked to YouTorrent today which looks to be a pretty sweet bittorrent search site. Similar in a sense to torrentz.com I suppose. Have to check it out later.
I know this probably won’t be of interest to many of our readers but Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has now had its warranty expanded to three years” Now, having had a few friends receive the wonderful red rings of death I’m not only happy, but quite surprised that Microsoft took this move. They didn’t have to cover their product with a three year warranty and, from everyone I talked to, they’re quite good with warranty repairs. Still, most electronics companies in the U.S. sure as hell don’t warranty their product for three years; you’re lucky when you get one.
Whats most interesting is that the Xbox has generally always been a losing division for Microsoft. They almost never made money on the original Xbox and granted, I haven’t followed the 360 that much either but I dont think; they’ve made money in that division yet either. In the face of that, they’re taking a one billion dollar loss extending this warranty service.
As much as people might decry Microsoft and all their motives and methods sometimes they do actually come out for the customer. Now, whether they’re doing it to save their own asses from a probe from the AG’s, who knows. I can’t help but feel better about it since I’m considering buying a 360 around Christmas time.
Just a little bug I’ve recently run into with Trillian running on Vista. Apparently, it attempts to write all chat logs under your Programs File directory which it doesnt have permissions to do, so it’ll never log anything. If you do want it to log chats, just move the logging directory to your C:\User\Documents. This can be done under the Text Conversations tab in the preferences menu. You have to create the directory first, it doesn’t automatically create one
I’ve had this issue pop up a few times now on machines where, when you attempt to install a program you will get a “blah blah is missing MSVCR80.dll file” and the install will fail out. It was a vexxing problem because these were fresh Windows installations, completely patched and up to date. Nothing was running in the background.
Finally, doing some google search on revealed something interesting. Windows Defender sometimes breaks Net 2.0. Atleast, thats how it appears. If a machine has Defender installed, and you get said error, uninstall Defender. Disabling it doesnt fix the issue, but uninstalling will.
Good job Microsoft. Funny how this problem didn’t exist in the betas.
It won’t really be noticeable but I did some winter cleaning and updated our wordpress setup from 2.0 to 2.0.6 and also updated some plugins. At this point I’m not sure what all sam wants enabled in that respect, so there might be some missing functionality until he re-sets things up. Until then, enjoy
powered by performancing firefox
So, after upgrading my Dapper Drake install to Edgy Eft I started noticing a few problems. First, just random links weren’t right, some applications didn’t upgrade properly, and it appeared that a kernel module I needed wasn’t installed and I felt too lazy to fix it.
Instead, I’d do the Windows user mode: reinstall. Suffice to say, it was by far the easiest install for Linux I’ve ever done. 30mins later, a fresh, brand new Edgy install is done.
All my hard drives were properly detected and mapped onto the desktop, as was the iPod on first boot. Sound worked right off the bat, as did networking. With my nForce2 based motherboard, it can always get dicey that.
However, it did install a generic version of the kernel (2.6.17.10) instead of a properly optimized i686 or k7 version. Not hard to fix, and I think in the next post I’ll describe and list all the things I do to get my system back and functioning properly. From the kernel, to TwinView, to actually getting all five buttons on my Microsoft wireless mouse working.
Most of it will be surpsingly easy.
So Ubuntu’s newest version, Edgy Eft or however you spell it launches officially tomorrow and I decided to get an early jump on it by upgrading. Primarly, I wanted to see if the speed advantages are worth it and also its a complete waste to try within a few days after the release do to the slam from everyone else upgrading. So, I do my usual editing of the sources list to change Dapper to Edgy and apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade to start the thing. It reports it’ll take about 40mins to download all 1200mb of updates. Not a problem, I got work.
Ten hours later I come home, flick the mouse to unblack the sleeping monitor and find out…it hasn’t even started the install!Apparently, for the past nine hours, it sat there at a screen waiting for me to hit “ok” as to whether I wanted it to install the ‘new’ flash plugin. Umm, hello? I already HAD flash installed. Wouldn’t logic follow that I want it installed again, the new, updated version? Where’s the user friendliness in that? Isn’t that what Ubuntu is supposed to be working towards? Humanity?
Another thing, I’m sitting here and I have to sheperad the install along because it keeps asking whether I want to install the package maintainers .conf file or my own. Personally, I couldn’t give a rats ass. I don’t go in and make custom changes to the .conf file, nor do I even make custom changes to the make files. I just wanted the application installed. Its idiotic to ask a user that type of a question. Automatically backup our original file ifs different, and then, when we launch the upgraded application for the first time ask us. That makes far more sense than to stop an install after its already sat for…nine hours.
Basically, what should have been a two hour upgrade has now taken almost 11hrs. Pathetic. Thats if this works that is. The last upgrade (to dapper drake) completely borked three times, whether upgrading from Beta, RC2, or the final release. Thankfully, all my personal data is actually archived and backed up to CD and HD this time. Hell, I feel like Im running Windows again
Color me impressed. AOL is developing a “lite” version of AIM which gets rid of all the fluff. No ads, no annoying themes, Plaxio, VoIP or streaming video. Just your basic, standard messaging. Hell, it even supports tabs.
I really like the direction AOL is attemping to move into as well, or atleast, what they “talk” of moving into.
“this is really the future of AOL: light, fast, free products that compliment our bigger, more feature-rich products.”
If this actually pans out then it’s only taken them something like 10 years to identify a core audience that they were ignoring. Now granted, the “a-listers” or gatekeepers are typically the ones who would avoid AOL products like the plague, for obvious reasons.
I actually just finished installing this on my windows virtual machine and it appears to only be using about 5Mb of RAM at the moment with one of my alternate buddy lists. Not bad at all. Far lighter than the crap that is Triton (AOL’s new AIM). The only thing I dont like about it at the moment is the interface. It doesnt use standard windows widgets like the 5.x branch but more the somewhat obnoxious and hard to use WinAMP type widgets. Ah well, cant have everything.
Here’s a direct link to download it if you want to test it: AIM ET
A quick tip to improve performance on an ext3 based file system. Change from the default Ordered(file contents are written to disk before associated meta-data is marked as committed in the journal. default with ext3) method of journaling to the Writeback method (meta-data is journaled but file-contents are not.) Writeback is much faster but you can get out of order writes after a crash, so dont do it on a production level system. Here’s how: (note: I highly recommend making a back up of your filesystem before you attempt this. Otherwise, I offer no warranty with this 
)
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Now, you should see a similar line to this:
/dev/hdc2 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro,noatime, 0 1
That’s the mount line of your filesystem for the root system. After the last mod entry (noatime,) in this case, type the following:
data=writeback
After entering the line, hold down Ctrl+O to write out the line to /fstab, and finally type Ctrl+X to quit nano. I fully recommend using nano over one of the various GUI editors like kate or gedit, primarly because there’ll come a time when you need to be able to use a text based editor.
Finally, we need to change the actual journaling mode of ext3 to writeback through the following:
sudo tune2fs - o journal_data_writeback /dev/hdc2 (replace hdc2 with ur drive)
Thats it, if you wish to double check its switched just type
sudo tune2fs -I /dev/hdc2