The Home of Tom & Morven

When was the last time you defragmented your hard drive?  Is your computer a little slower to load lately?

JkDefrag is a fantastic alternative to the Disk Defragmenter tool that comes with Windows (2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008).  It does it better than Windows.  (For a full explanation, read on the website)

But how often should it be done? What if you forget to keep doing it? An easy “set and forget” solution is to install this as a screensaver.  Download JkDefrag from the website, and extract the archive.  Copy the two files:

• JkDefragScreenSaver.exe
• JkDefragScreenSaver.scr

to the c:\Windows\ directory.

Then on your desktop, right click and go to Properties.  Under the Screen Saver tab, select JkDefrag as your screen saver.  Select it to not start unless it hasn’t been done for 24 hours, and select your preferred screen saver to come on after the defrag is complete.  It will now defrag every disk drive connected to your system on a regular basis, and it doubles up as a pretty good screen saver in itself!

I like to use private posts, as not everything that I blog about should be read by the public. Several versions of Wordpress ago, I used the Disclose-Secret plugin.

However, development of this plugin hasn’t really happened since version 2.3 of Wordpress, due to significant changes being required from the plugin in order for it to work with the later versions of Wordpress. Now using version 2.5 of Wordpress, I finally decided that I couldn’t wait for Disclose-Secret to catch up, and have converted over to using Role-Scoper. As far as I can tell, Role-Scoper does absolutely everything that Disclose-Secret did, and with so much more flexibility I can’t begin to comprehend. Anything to do with privacy, restrictions, permissions, groups of users permissions, etc.. you name it, it can do it! There were a few minor bugs with it that affected a few users like myself, and I am very proud to have helped Kevin (the author) debug the plugin to produce version 0.9.16, which I believe now does absolutely everything that Disclose-Secret did. Kevin is an excellent coder/hacker, and I think he will do very well in his web development career.

I’m so proud to have been part of debugging this fantastic plugin, that I have taken screenshots of my name in cyberspace. Maybe one day when Kevin becomes the next world famous coder/hacker I can autograph these screenshots and sell them on eBay?

Download Role Scoper now!

I had a random thought on my way home today about Microsoft Office 2007. It’s great that Microsoft have adapted the XML format for Office 2007, but it’s not particularly useful when sharing with someone using Office 2003 or prior, who can’t open this new file format. I’ve read previously that the Office 2007 Word Document .docx format file can be opened with a ZIP extraction utility, and the XML file can be read within the file. However this still isn’t particularly useful.

It makes sense for me to start using these new file formats since I’m using Office 2007, but what about people I send the files to? What are they going to do?

Blow and behold, Microsoft have actually released a compatibility pack for Office 2000 onwards, which depending on the exact previous version of Office you have, allows you to open and possibly even save to .docx format.

I shall go install it on my fathers computer before he asks me how to open that .docx file I just sent him!

Whilst I’m waiting to board, I might as well take the time to blog to the world how impressed I am with the Spamato Ad-on for Thunderbird. I have not had any much success with the Thunderbird adaptive junk email filter system, nor with the uncustomisable Trend Micro Internet Security Pro 2008 anti-spam solution. So I sought greener pastures and tried Spamato. It doesn’t take much effort to setup, but you do have to manually specify your Java binaries directory. Once setup, you’re laughing! It uses seven types of anti-spam filters which means you can use them all with low thresholds, and set it to require two filters to classify as spam (i.e. default settings) which means chances of false detection are slim to none.

If I didn’t use the gmail web interfaces (for mobile browser as well as normal browser) and still used Thunderbird, I would defintely go the Spamato solution.

I do find Gmail to have an outstanding spam filter built in anyway, which has never falsely detected any spam, and only let less than 0.1% of spam get to my inbox.

Warning: if you’re not a computer g33k don’t bother reading this post, you just won’t understand!

In December, I started playing a little more of the game Colin McRae Rally: Dirt. However, I decided that my beast of a machine (refer here, here, & here) wasn’t performing quite fast enough for maximum off-road rally driving pleasure. Thus, my recent overclocking obsession came to be!

Basically, I overclocked my Q6600 B3 revision Intel Quad Core CPU from the stock 2.4GHz speed to 2.6GHz. However, after countless hours upon hours of running CPU stress testing (specifically, Prime95 v25.6 build #2), and comparing to temperatures measured by other people with almost exactly the same hardware configurations, I came to the conclusion that I am unlucky to be one that has received a CPU chip that just runs at a hotter temperature than the average manufactured chip. Upon exhaustive research through overclocking forums on the net, I discovered that lapping (making something flat via sanding) the Q6600 Core 2 Quad CPU is generally a very beneficial thing to do for increasing the thermal transfer of the CPU cover to the heatsink. I suspect the manufacturing process that Intel use to fix the CPU cover to the cores causes the cover to bend slightly. Consequently, the outside edges of the CPU cover (and a section in the middle) are slightly raised from the rest of the cover, leading to big air gaps that require filling with thermal paste in order to transfer heat half reasonably. Since it is the outside edge that is most raised, I can see why my CPU heatsink created a big air-gap when it was installed. This definitely contributes to a hotter CPU, which means less overclocking is possible before you risk overheating it.

I used the razorblade with torch behind it technique to determine how flat both surfaces really were, but I found that the razorblade wasn’t rigid enough to provide consistency for a good idea of how much curvature existed. The heatsink seemed relatively flat already, but the CPU definitely had big gaps of light coming through. Regardless, I decided to lap the heatsink so I could practise my lapping technique before doing the CPU.

I conducted the lapping process using a large piece of tempered glass (compliments of Scoobth) which I used to tape the wet-and-dry sandpaper on for a flat surface. I used a spray bottle of water to keep the sandpaper moist at all times. The sandpaper grit sizes I used were 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000, and 1200.

The most time consuming stage was using the very coarse 200 grit size, just to get the surfaces flat before I could progressively smooth them down. I only had 1 piece of each grit size for the CPU, and 1 piece of each grit size for the heatsink, and all of the sandpaper became too worn for them to be worthwhile using anymore. If I were to do it again I would have a lot more sandpaper handy because once it wears down, the efficiency of the sanding action decreases dramatically and you really just waste time.

I couldn’t work out how to remove the thermal plate surface from the heat-pipes of the Scythe Ninja heatsink, which made for a very high centre of gravity as the complete unit slid over the sandpaper. Consequently I found it difficult to stop the heatsink from shuddering.

The CPU was much easier to sand because as a flat plate it has a very low centre of gravity. I held it with the black piece of protective plastic that it came with, so that way I didn’t touch any of the sensitive side of the unit. You can see after starting to sand, the edges of the unit were scratching away (nice shiny silver instead of a matte finish). It took a large amount of sanding to actually notice this. After a while, you could notice a circle in the middle also start to sand away

I kept using the 200 grit sized sandpaper up until about this stage where I switched to the 400 grit sized because the 200 grit had completely worn out! Probably a good idea anyway, because there wasn’t much sanding now at this stage to get it completely flat.

By the time I got to about here, the 400 grit paper was also fairly worn out, but I kept going until all the plate was uniformly shiny and all of the matte surface had gone. I read on a few forums that the silver surface is a nickel plating. The only reason I can think of why nickel plating would be used on a CPU cover would be for corrosion resistance, because I would imagine corrosion of (what appears to be) copper underneath the nickel plating would have a very low thermal conductivity.

Somewhere at about this stage, I noticed a red liquid appearing on the sandpaper. It was blood from my finger, which I didn’t feel was being sanded to the flesh as my hand was numb from holding the CPU! Lesson to be learned: keep lots of fresh sandpaper handy so you don’t have to waste time sanding with worn out sandpaper!

Eventually, after going through all the grades of sandpaper, the end result!

I then cleaned the surfaces using a few drops of the Arctic Silver ArctiClean product (compliments of Scoobth) and applied a line of Arctic Silver ArcticSilver5.
I applied the line of AS5 as the instructions suggested, although I think the instructions would be written with the non-flat surface of the Core 2 Quad Q6600 in mind, and I should probably have used a much thinner line.

Next time I ever do it I would definitely still use it in a line for the purpose of ensuring all cores have good contact in the immediate vicinity, but just used a lot less. It would perhaps have been easier to apply if I heated the AS5 liquid up somehow. Not in the microwave as it contains metal particles, but perhaps out in the hot Australian sun or in the oven on a maximum of 30 degrees celcius. The AS5 compound probably doesn’t reduce in viscosity when it heats up, but it would be worth a try.

The core temperatures of the CPU instantly ran about 10 degrees celcius lower, and after a few thermal cycles and a few days about 12 degrees celcius lower. I tested this temperature drop using ambient temperature that was plus or minus 2 degrees celcius, and taking measurements using SpeedFan & CoreTemp after about 1 hour of Prime95 v25.6 build #2 using the small FFT torture test.

I was then able to overclock my CPU to 2.7GHz, but the cores were starting to run in the red zone (above the maximum rated temperature of 71 degrees Celcius) so I also used another overclocking hardware modification called the pencil Vdroop mod. This mod involves using a graphite pencil to shade over a (I think the component was a) resistor to effectively lower the resistance by adding another resistor (the conductive graphite) in parallel. Now although I’m a qualified Mechatronic engineer, I have absolutely no idea what any of the circuitry on the mainboard does, so I was taking a giant leap of faith from fellow overclockers on the internet! The idea is you keep lowering the resistance until the voltage across the CPU core(s) is exactly the same voltage regardless of whether or not the CPU is experiencing a full load or not. That is, there is not voltage drop (aka droop) when the CPU is under computational load. The bad side of this is temperatures immediately sky-rocket when you start to next apply computational load because the voltage doesn’t decrease at the same time. So, the idea is to lower the overall voltage to compensate. The end effect is increased voltage stability of the CPU due to it not fluctuating, which means the CPU is less likely to produce errors, and there is less heat generated at idle capacity. It definitely helped to decrease the temperature of my cores under load, which is particularly important for this computer as it’s used to do 24/7/ number crunching for Team_Bammann.

So I now have a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad running at 2.7GHz, at a lower temperature than it was before! I’ve also upgraded all of the case fans to medium speed Scythe S-Flex fans, and the fan for the CPU heatsink to the high speed Scythe S-Flex fan. So there is also more airflow but with less noise, and this also further cools the CPU cores by another couple degrees.

This definitely helped the performance of the Colin McRae: Dirt game, but what REALLY helped the performance of the game was adding an extra 2Gb of RAM to a total of 4Gb. Unfortunately I can only use 3.0Gb due to the Vista 32bit limitation with my mainboard and graphics card, so an effective total of 3Gb. This SERIOUSLY increased the gaming performance, completely eliminating the stuttering that was occuring at times when lots of cars were on the track. What I realise now is that Windows Vista Ultimate uses so much RAM that 2Gb is just not enough for computer games. I expect that if you want to get serious about a beast of a gaming machine with a Vista installation, you need to go for 64bit and get a minimum of 4Gb.

I then also added (as I mentioned in a previous post) the Logitech Momo steering wheel so that I can really enjoy the new gaming beast I have.

I didn’t stop blogging, I’ve just had higher priorities in the last few months. Since I last posted anything substantial, I’ve been doing a lot, and I will attempt to catch up with what I’ve been up to in this post. SWK will be proud!

In my last post I mentioned I was going to do the Foxy1000 cross country mountain bike endurance race with Nick. We did the 100km race (50km each) but it was much harder than I anticipated. The fact that I had to ride 50km was okay, and the difficulty of the terrain wasn’t too bad although the track did include the Fox Creek downhill trail which I found doing very scary, but was proud that I only dismounted I think at two spots on this downhill track. The reason I had to dismount twice is because at one spot there was a drop-off which you had to negotiate whilst doing a corner on a slope (hard to explain) and another spot where there was just a massive drop-in. When I say drop-in, imagine a slope that’s about 60 degrees below horizontal for several metres! I would possibly attempt these obstacles if I hadn’t already ridden flat-out for about an hour, and didn’t have arms that were worn out and/or had time to stop and adjust my seat-post such that my centre of gravity was more reasonable. But at the end of the day, the idea of a race is to get from A to B as fast as you can, and if it’s on average quicker to get off the bike than to attempt something you’re not confident doing and risk injuring yourself or your bike, then you might as well! (However this hasn’t stopped me on at least one occasion recently which I’ll get to later!) Nick and I took turns at doing 2 x 25km laps each (100km total) and each lap involved 1000m of vertical ascent. Half way through my second lap, I had major cramp in my legs from dehydration. I don’t know how I got dehydrated because I was drinking by the bucket loads after my first lap, and was well hydrated before the first lap even started. I guess it was a hot day. The last 10km was very painful and difficult because of the cramp, but eventually I finished and we came 3rd in the category of Men’s Duo so it was very much worth it! We have been riding together on most weekends usually doing at least 30km rides, and recently becoming closer to 50km rides on some occasions. We hope to do quite well in the 2008 Foxy1000 race. Who knows, maybe in 2009 we might even both race solo! But I much prefer the team idea - besides, Nick is faster than me… at the moment I say “at the moment”, because I’ve been riding my road bike a little bit lately on my trainer to try and build up my leg muscle which is my major weakness from several years of endurance running which stripped me away from leg muscle.

Since the Foxy1000, apart from weekend rides with Nick (mostly from the city, up to and around Eagle Park) we’ve also been doing the Summer Series races. I find the night races much to fast-paced for my liking, because for my category (Sports Men, which is “C” grade) I generally do 3 laps of about 5km. It sounds like a lot, but it’s all over within 45 to 60 minutes. Since my strength is endurance (i.e. 50km+) I struggle with the sprinting, and my heart rate averages 180bpm (minimum 170bpm, maximum 187bpm). When riding up a hill at 185bpm+ I feel like my heart is going to explode! For this reason I don’t look forward to doing the race, I look forward to completing the race! And it is a good feeling to achieve finishing. The first night race of this summer season was at Flinders Uni. My tactic was to go easy at the start to avoid any 185bpm+ activity in the first two laps. Unfortunately this meant I was stuck behind a couple slow(ish) riders who didn’t let me past. After the first 5 minutes there was an opportunity for me to overtake on a downhill section on a fire-track (i.e. a track designed for a 4WD vehicle to access) which was covered in blue gypsonite crushed rock. Because I built up a lot of speed in an effort to pass the guy before the bottom of the track which turned back into a single track, I wasn’t able to take the corner at the bottom. I think a combination of me going way too fast, my tyre pressure too high, and the rebound dampening of my suspension all worked against me, and although I sort of made the corner after turning right on to the bridge, I was sliding sideways off of the bridge, and in fact slid off into the rocks which formed the bridge. (I call it a bridge, but it’s really just a pile of boulders with finer gravel on top to allow the water to pass through. I snapped the buckle off of my shoe so wasn’t able to continue the race, and I seriously gashed my hip and elbow which I was paying the price for over the next month.

The second night race of the season was at Eagle Park, and I did okay physically but had a flat tyre towards the end, so overall got a poor time. The third race was again at Eagle Park last night, and I think the training I had been doing has only just started to pay off. Unfortunately, I had a small crash due to my front wheel sliding off the track in a sandy patch on a corner. I was okay and didn’t lose too much time, but I bent my rear derallieur which meant that my chain kept slipping into my wheel between the spokes and rear cassette.

This happened about 6 times during the remainder of the race, and meant each time I had to get off and pull it back on again, costing about 20 seconds each time. Also I kept losing the gear I was in on most climbs, which made me lose traction on many occasions which cost me a few more minutes overall. Overall I came 6th in my Sports Men category, which was fairly satisfying, even if there weren’t many more than 6! I will take my bike back to the store on Monday and get a yearly overhaul done, even if I can fix it myself. It’s probably about time I had the suspension serviced anyway. After the race last night I went to the Lotus Lounge for going away drinks for a mutual friend of Morven and myself, Monica. It was great to see lots of our friends all together in one place having a good time, but it’s weird going out without Morv! (I’ll explain later in this post where she is at the moment). After the Lotus Lounge, I headed over to The Worlds End bar with a couple uni mates (including Nick who I raced with). Good times were had, but I went home before everyone else because my elbow was oozing yucky stuff from when I slid on the dirt in the race. It is mildly amusing that the scrapes I have from last night are in exactly the same spot as the first summer series race where I stacked it, but nowhere near as bad as the first stack!

In October I went to an 80’s night a HQ Nightclub with Morven and her friends. It was to celebrate the birthday of FreshFM radio station. It was a good night, but we were the only people that actually dressed up in 80’s gear! Okay well there were probably about a dozen others that made an effort to dress up, and I can’t really say that I dressed up myself but Morven and her friends did so I felt ripped off and we sort of looked silly. Every now and then you would see someone from the crowd of people dressed in classic 80’s gear. I misunderstood what a barman said at one stage and ended up accidentally ordering 5 different cocktails instead of one! I didn’t mind, we drank them all!

Really the main reason I haven’t been blogging in the last 5 months is because my server hasn’t really been working anyway! Apache (the main part of the webserver) just kept crashing, and not loading after the computer rebooted like it always did before I upgraded to this new computer. Over the last week I’ve updated Wordpress, Gallery, all of my Wordpress plugins, and the webserver software XAMPP. I found it difficult to upgrade my XAMPP installation, and I will write about this upgrade process in a seperate post at least for my own future reference! I took me a VERY long time to work out why Apache wasn’t booting on startup, and I’ve found that the Apache service under Windows Vista doesn’t load under the LocalSystem or Administrator account, I had to create a seperate user account to run it under. This is a problem attributed to the UAC (User Account Control) system of Windows Vista. I will also write about this in a seperate post.

I had a really nice break from work between Christmas and New Years. Christmas was mostly spent with Morven’s family and family friends. For Christmas Morven gave me a bike chain bracelet. I was so happy to unwrap that gift, as I used to have one as a kid (that I had found on the ground with a broken link and repaired it myself) but lost it somewhere along the line and was really upset. Our family was fortunate to receive a CD from my younger cousin in Melbourne, who is manager and website guru for a band called Men Without Pants. We were given their debut album GhosTrain. I don’t know how to describe it but I’ll give it a shot: very cool jazz! Really not very descriptive, but I like the sound effects they use, coupled with the cool, semi-philosophical chilled-out lyrics/vocals. You can listen to my favourite track by clicking on the play button.

For the very low price they are asking for the CD (AUD$10) I can’t recommend any more just buying a copy or three or more (for gifts). You can listen to their music on the website too, so go check it out! (Please note I have special permission to play this song on my blog, it is copyright. Please go to their website if you want to hear more.) The band is two of my cousin Carl’s high-school classmates in Melbourne. Two very talented musicians whom I’m sure will go a very long way with their music careers. My cousin Carl is pretty talented too with maths and website technologies, although I have to question his sense of humour given he just sent me this URL to a comic as I’m writing this paragraph which is quite bizarre. Having said that I did laugh profusely after reading it. It’s disturbing how similar Carl and I are!

Over Christmas, I decided that my computer wasn’t performing well enough for my liking (even after upgrading it) with playing Colin McRae Rally Dirt, so I did my research, learned how to overclock my computer (which I will also write about in a separate post). Doing this, and adding a soundcard (instead of using the onboard sound) and adding more RAM has significantly increased my gaming experience, as has purchasing a Logitech Momo steering wheel and pedal set! There is so much enjoyment that can be had driving rally cars in such a realistic rally car simulator game, with amazing visual and effects, using a reasonably realistic steering wheel and pedal set! I’m looking forward to getting Morven “behind the wheel” as she has been known to enjoy a bit of the rally car driving game. She doesn’t like driving using the keyboard, but I haven’t had any alternative up until now. Maybe she’ll perform better using the wheel set and stop using the hand brake so much - who knows! She hasn’t actually seen it yet because I only got it recently after she left.

Morven is doing part of her work placement in a hospital at Stoke on Trent, England. She left nearly two weeks ago (such a long time to be without my lady!) and I will be going and meeting her in London on her last day of work. We will spend two nights in London in an expensive hotel right slap bang in the centre of London, then four nights in Paris again in the slap bang centre of Paris in a very expensive hotel! The last night of Paris will be Valentine’s day, so it should be a very romantic holiday You can check out a map of where we’re going and staying.

Today, after from updating my blog I’m taking it rather easy. I’ve done some odd jobs including fixing a shower-head mount, a shower curtain rail, our letter box lid that had broken off, and a rail for a window blind that had popped out of the wall. I’ve been keeping our lawn (Santa Anna Couch) in admirable condition despite the drought. It’s surprising me how little water we can get away with for watering our lawn and keeping it amazingly lush green despite the fact we’re going through a drought. Despite the current water restrictions of a maximum of 3 hours watering per week, we only water the lawn for 1 hour per week. I think the trick to keeping it lush green is to let the lawn grow longer when a heat wave is happening, and cut it back to normal length again after the heat wave. The other trick is to use fertiliser as recommended to keep the roots of the lawn strong, but use organic fertiliser because it won’t burn the lawn if you don’t water it in very well. This way you can apply the organic fertiliser just before rain (if you’re lucky enough to get any). A week or two after fertilising, check for weeds in the lawn. The other reason for using an organic based fertiliser over chemical fertiliser is it is better for the environment, and requires less water to manufacture it. So if you are using chemical fertiliser to keep your roots strong to save water overall, think again! Chemical fertilisers require ridiculous amounts of water to manufacture. Also any weeds will suck out water from the topsoil, so use a cover-spray appropriate to whatever weeds you have. I’ve also been regularly coring the lawn, and using a “Wetta-soil” powder which holds water in the soil after the rain, increasing the time it takes for the water to evaporate back into the heat of the harsh Australian sun. I’ve noticed that the Windsor Green couch has died off in the drought, whilst the Santa Anna Couch has stayed strong! Paul Munn personally recommended to me at his store to use Windsor Green Couch because it tolerates drought conditions better than Santa Anna, but I suspect this was just a sales pitch (unless we have an uncommon soil type/mixture). I would highly recommend to anyone in Adelaide to use Santa Anna couch over Windsor Green (update: discussion continued in a later post.

I should also write about my latest batch of black boys. After a few months now, my latest batch of black boy seedlings (xanthorrea’s) are about 3cm to 10cm tall. Unlike last time where they all died after leaving them in the sun, I’ve been keeping them mostly in the shade, and always constantly moist. I don’t have much experience with growing seedlings of anything but I expect this is a requirement for most seedlings. I am surprised though that black boys in particular are so sensitive to direct sunlight.

You may or may not have noticed that this blog has been dead for a couple weeks. This is firstly because due to a recent price drop in Intel Quad Core CPU’s (specifically, the Q6600) I decided it was a good time to upgrade (even though I just got my first Core 2 Duo CPU this year). I also upgraded the graphics card to a Gainward 8800GTS Golden Sample.

An hour after getting the beast home, and pushing electrons through the thing, it started to die a horrible death of blue screens and random reboots. A logical conclusion (I thought at the time) was that the new CPU that got put in, was a dud. It turns out that the new brand of RAM I had been using (GeIL DDRII 667MHz Dual Channel 2×1GB CAS 3-4-4-8 passively cooled RAM) was not a very good product, and there has been a relatively high percentage of this RAM not working in particular configurations of machines! The store swapped me over to Corsair CAS 4 RAM, and now all is sweet again. It’s possibly slightly slower, but at least it works!

I also just happened by chance to discover a major security loophole with my webserver that delayed me putting it back online. I haven’t got around to fixing it for a couple weeks until now, and it only took about 10 minutes to fix, I just didn’t get around to it.

Recently a friend Nick asked me to join him as a duo in the foxy1000 mountain bike race at Fox Creek, which is a total of a 100km race, 25km per lap, and each lap involves 1000m of vertical ascending. The idea is we would do 50km each, i.e. 2000m ascending each in total. Since I’ve done stuff all riding this year, I went out to Fox Creek on Sunday to get in some training with Nick. As I was putting my bike back together (I have a small boot to fit it in) I put the front wheel on the wrong way around. I then squeezed the front brake and realised instantly the error of my way. With hydraulic disc brakes, if you squeeze the lever with no disc in, the pads get stuck closed together. I tried prying the two pads apart, to no avail. I then tried calling half a dozen bike stores for help, but being a Sunday, none seemed to be open. I also tried phoning a friend to see if they could quickly look up on the internet what to do. Getting really frustrated, and flat phone battery, I gave a screwdriver one last good hard push through the brake pads and voila!! Fixed like new. I think the problem was I wasn’t prying them open from both sides, which would have wedged the two pistons back on an angle and created too much friction due to the angle of force.

Very excitedly, I span the wheel. For some reason, I stuck my finger dangerously close to the rotor. I didn’t realise at the time just quite how sharp all the machined holes are in these disc rotors. My finger nail brushed up against the rotor, and the rotor cut into the middle of my finger nail, grabbing the tip of my finger and wedging it into the brake pad. This cut a third of the way across my finger nail, all the way through. At the time I just grabbed my finger and compressed it to numb the pain, and it didn’t seem to hurt that much. After walking around in circles a little bit trying to distract myself from the pain, I opened up my hand to find it covered in tomato sauce. For some reason I absolutely panicked, possibly because I haven’t actually seen any blood for a few years. Worried what was going to happen to my finger, I drove straight home, and then to a GP clinic where I waited almost 2 hours to get a tetanus shot. By the time I got home, I had wasted 6 hours of my Sunday - most unhappy!!

Dear anyone that cares, please don’t abuse me if something on my website doesn’t work right now, as I’ve just upgraded Apache, PHP, and MySQL. If you find any security exploits or anything that doesn’t work, please bring them to my attention, as right now I haven’t had time to test.

I haven’t updated my blog (as promised) about the new computer I’m using these days. I’ve finally got 2 x 120mm Scythe S-Flex Fluid Dynamic Bearing fans, and a Scythe Ninja CPU heat-sink in the system. It is kind of disturbing that just those parts cost $160, and they don’t do anything except make the computer more silent than it already was. I kind of justified it though by the fact that it would also cool the computer better (in particular the CPU) which is a high priority considering I’m running the Core 2 Duo CPU at 100% on each core with Prime95, and that system stability is almost just as important to me these days as cardiac stability of my body (so true, so true…).

Anyway, here are a few pics of my system (aka FlammobammoMk3) in action!

I’ve learned the majority of the ins and outs of Windows Vista now, and discovered that all the software problems I was experiencing have been due to DEP (Data Execution Prevention) which Vista by default enables this for Vista programs and services, although I had also enabled it for all other programs. Sure enough, turning it back to the default DEP setting did wonders. I’m slightly disappointed with Vista as a whole as it appears that Microsoft have realised all the weaknesses of Windows XP (compared to Linux distributions, and Mac OS X Leopard) and fixed or implemented features to produce Vista, but I would have thought that for such a long time between OS releases, and given the budget that Microsoft have, it could be much better.

One major annoyance I have is not been able to run custom services without using 3rd party software such as FireDaemon Trinity (which by the way, is absolutely awesome software for anyone wanting to run Vista as some form of server, and I highly recommend it).

Another example is for an OS that is meant to be so security focussed, I’m amazed at how unintuitive the interface for assigning permissions to specific users is. I’m also disappointed that (apart from Windows Server 2003) there is no version of Windows Vista that will allow total denial of access to a particular folder, whilst allowing access to an adjacent folder (i.e. in the same parent folder). All it does is deny access to open the folder – that is, you can actually see the folder you’re being denied access to. I can understand the algorithm of permission assignment requires significantly more processing if it is to filter out displaying of unauthorised access, but considering the resource hog that Vista already is I wouldn’t have thought a little bit more resource hogging would be a problem. The ability to do this is called ABE (Access Based Enumeration), and Microsoft have implemented this in Windows Server 2003.

Another annoyance is that when I resized my system partition, Windows Complete PC Backup no longer works, because it doesn’t recognise the fact that the partitions have changed. As far as I can tell, the only way to fix error 80780010 is to reinstall the system on exactly the same hard drive. This is completely stupid, as if I have to restore my entire computer due to a hard drive failure, of course I’m going to replace it with a new bigger, faster drive. Therefore, my verdict of Windows Complete PC Backup is: “INTO THE BIN!!!!”

I’ve now considered going back to using SyncBack which I was previously using before Vista, but now that hard drives are so cheap and my system is running so beautifully, and I know how long it takes to get everything back up and running again, I’m fully endorsing drive imaging as the optimum backup solution. I’ve tried using Paragon Drive Backup, but I’m not 100% satisfied with it due to its lack of ability to do incremental backups of the entire drive, and the fact that you can’t specify what priority of system resources it should use (such as hard drive and CPU throttling so you can use the system productively in the background). I’m going to try using Acronis instead, and will report back with my experience.