tempest in a teacup

I bought 4GB (2x2GB) of RAM during Amazon’s pre-Black Friday sales last week. I got it on Monday and installed it, and things ran smoothly…until I popped into Left 4 Dead today and my computer turned itself off. Twice.

One quick run of memtest86 later, and the result was clear – one of the sticks was bad. In fact, ONE BIT on that stick was bad. It would have passed the complete test suite had it not been for the random number test where that bit failed to get flipped correctly.

The aggravating part is that this happened to me one year ago with the RAM I originally bought to build this machine. The same exact problem – one bad stick of RAM.

On top of that, my five-year old Creative speakers finally gave up the ghost this week, so it looks like I’ll be needing a new set. I’m not into 5.1 or 7.1 setups that much (I used to have a 4.1 setup way back in 1999 but I kept tripping over the rear satellites), so I’ll probably pick up a cheap 2.1 set. There’s a Logitech set on Amazon going for $30 that’s gotten some good reviews.

Fortunately we have a pretty good returns service, so I’ve already asked for a replacement, and will be shipping this dud RAM back to Amazon for a refund. I hope they don’t mind that I snipped off the bar code to submit for my mail-in-rebate, though…

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One of the big headlines in the news right now is the launch of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. The facility is meant to accelerate and collide subatomic particles in order to recreate conditions that were present at the start of the universe so that the interactions of these particles can be studied.

One of the (somewhat ridiculous) concerns coming out of this experiment is that the collision could cause the end of the world (by creating a black hole, or god knows what else). While this concern has been thoroughly refuted several times by people more qualified than me, the folks at Reddit and Fark have taken a different approach to addressing them.

Click here to see what I mean.

Sound advice, all things considered.

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Just saw this piece on the BBC website:
Eat less meat to combat the effects of human activities on the global climate, says the UN’s top climate scientist.

Disclaimer: I’m a vegetarian.

The scientist’s position focuses mainly on greenhouse gas emissions without pontificating about the superiority of a vegetarian diet, which is good, I think. If anything I know that ideas tend to be more favourably received when argued logically, not when preached by someone on a high horse. I’m actually quite interested in seeing the text of the speech Dr Pachauri will give on Monday, if only to see how he tries to sell this idea.

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In other news, I’ve been taking advantage of the 50% discount offer on all id software games on Steam to try out some old FPSes that I missed out on – Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Doom 3. RTCW is pretty good so far, but I played partway through the Doom 3 demo before going ‘fuck this shit’ and deleting it. The people complaining about the light levels in this game aren’t kidding in the slightest. I couldn’t see what the hell I was shooting at half the time, and the fact that I needed to drop my existing weapon to use the flashlight only aggravated this. Yes, you play a marine a century in the future when we’ve colonized Mars and created teleportation technology, but you don’t have access to a flashlight that doesn’t tie up one of your hands.

Long story short, I probably won’t be buying that one.

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It happens to be the 25th anniversary of GNU this month, and Stephen Fry, of all people, has put out a video explaining the promise of free software to commemorate the occasion. Mr Fry, contrary to what most might believe, is quite a techie, and an avid proponent of the concept of free and open-source software (as anyone who reads his blog would know).

In any case, if you’re curious about what this free software business is all about, Mr Fry puts it in rather simple terms that anyone can understand.

Click here to watch the video.

(The server handling the streaming seems to be hammered right now, so you may want to just download the video and watch it on your computer. You’ll need the Ogg Theora codec – a free codec – for it to work)

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I’ve been hearing rumours that the 80GB Metal Gear Solid 4 PlayStation 3 bundle was soon to go the way of the dodo, and with it all backwards compatibility from the product line. I was pondering whether or not to take the plunge and shell out the cash for one of these bundles, but an e-mail that popped into my inbox at work swiftly resolved those thoughts.

A guy at work was selling his 60GB PS3 along with a few games, for the bargain price (relatively speaking) of $450. I wasn’t particularly interested in some of the games he was offering (Tiger Woods and Madden…right), but I realised that that sort of price for the long-discontinued 60GB model was a pretty damn good deal, so I jumped at it. Hence the shiny black monster now perched next to my 32″ HDTV.

The machine is remarkably quiet, even with a disc inside it – noise elimination was clearly one of their priorities in developing the hardware. Heat is another story, though – I tried to reposition the console slightly to make space for something else and the underside was almost too hot to touch.

That said, I don’t have much else to complain about. I’ll probably put Ubuntu on it so that I can use it as a media center (without being restricted to the formats that the PS3 supports natively). And now that I have something that can actually use the hi-def capabilities of my TV, I might start buying more DVDs (and downloading content from the PlayStation Store – I hear Xam’d is particularly good).

Games? Err, I got Guitar Hero III along with it, but until I clear my existing PC and PS2 backlog I’m probably not going to buy anything else for it. I’m still halfway through Devil May Cry 4 and I suspect I’ve barely scratched the surface of Mass Effect.

On a somewhat related note, I beat Metal Gear Solid at last (after disovering the first-person aiming option in the escape level which was never revealed to me, and in any case was rather difficult to use). Of course, the game rewarded me by freezing up right after the credits, preventing me from saving my complete file. Joy.

Overall thoughts? Rather rough around the edges, but it did have enjoyable moments.

I put a few minutes into Metal Gear Solid 2 – the two main things I brought away from it were

1. Yay aiming doesn’t suck as much!
2. Boo the cutscenes are still way too long.

I’ll probably only continue once I get the PS2 memory card adapter I ordered from Amazon tomorrow, so I can move all my save data onto the PS3. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the PS2 yet, but I’ll probably take it back to Singapore the next time I go.

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NASA officially declares that it has found water on Mars.

Now all we need is some gondolas, blue-eyed Martian cats and a few hundred years of terraforming and I think I’ll be ready to move there! :D

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Surely I’m not the only one who thought “is there a version you can wear on your right hand?” after reading about this?

Fear the day when otaku start designing operating system kernels. :P

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Finally beat Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition today. Great game overall, with a few things that could be improved (like the repeated boss fight issue I mentioned a while back). It’s off the backlog for now, but I’m definitely going to re-play it with Vergil and on harder difficulties when I get the chance. I stuck mainly to Swordmaster and Gunslinger, too, so I’d like to try out some of the other styles (and weapons) as well.

And at some point I’ll get off my ass and beat the original game as well. For some reason that final Nightmare fight kept kicking my ass.

And of course, I beat the game just in time for my copy of the PC version of Devil May Cry 4 to arrive tomorrow. Woo.

On an unrelated note, I was having some connectivity issues with my desktop last night when I got home from work. I could ping websites just fine, but all other outgoing requests were being blocked. I knew it wasn’t my modem or my router because my laptop (which runs Kubuntu) was able to connect without any problems.

I eventually found out that ZoneAlarm Firewall was blocking all outgoing packets. I shrugged, chalked it up to lousy developers and uninstalled it, restoring connectivity. Nod32 comes with a firewall too, after all.

And then today I read about this, and the fact that I had installed some Microsoft security updates right before leaving for work came to mind.

This line in particular made me laugh:

Mr Rogers said installing it and re-booting his machines fixed all the problems.

He said he could understand Microsoft being reticent with details about the patch given its sensitivity.

“But,” he added “it would seem reasonable for [Microsoft] to test their patch against what is probably the most popular software firewall.”

Of course it’s reasonable. Which is why they probably didn’t do it. :P

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So I read this story on Slashdot this morning and reacted the same way any sane techie would: “My god, AVG is a pile of crap. I need to get it off my computer now!” So I did.

Only to have it, with its dying breath, somehow fuck up my Windows registry, preventing Windows from starting at all, except in Safe Mode.

I booted into Safe Mode and used System Restore to bring my computer back to the last point where I could guarantee that it was working. Unfortunately, System Restore also apparently rolls back installed programs. Meaning the copy of Diablo II and its expansion set that I had downloaded and installed from Blizzard’s online store are now gone.

Guess I won’t be playing any TF2 tonight while I download both games all over again :|

For some reason my game directory (with my save data apparently intact, otherwise I really would have lost it) still exists, backed up under another name, but the .exe files and Start Menu entries are nowhere to be found.

I guess AVG wanted to leave me something to remember it by. -_-

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This article from Tom’s Hardware on the myths of solid-state drive power consumption is pretty illuminating, and rather hilarious given how companies like Apple and ASUS have been pushing SSDs in subnotebooks the MacBook Air and Eee PC respectively.

In retrospect it makes a lot of sense – magnetic hard drives have undergone many years of evolution, and already have numerous features designed to improve their average power consumption. SSDs, however, are relatively new, and no-one seems to have figured out how to make them power-efficient yet. The main draw is their read performance (although from what I hear the write performance still stinks outside of very high end drives that cost thousands of dollars).

I guess we’ve got quite a way to go before SSDs become ubiquitous in personal computers.

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