December 2008 – Krunk4Ever!

December 29, 2008December 29, 2008

Seagate FreeAgent Freezes on BIOS screen

So in the past, I’ve always had to tell my parents to start deleting stuff on the fileshare, since free space is quickly depleted mainly due to the fact it was only a 160GB drive. Most of my computers at home are ancient. I mean I can’t even watch 720p HD trailers on my desktop here.

Anyway, I thought it was time to upgrade the drive, however given that this machine is probably over 6 years old, it didn’t have SATA connectors. I figured I could probably pick up an external drive for about the same cost as a SATA PCI card + hard drive. The external drive would also be much easier to move to a different machine if mine died again.

I picked up a Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1.0TB External USB2.0 that was on sale at Staples. The drive’s actually quite neat. The Seagate Manager software that comes with the drive has a bunch of cool options such as telling the drive to automatically go into power-saving mode after a certain amount of inactivity. There’s also some security/encryption setting which I have yet to play with.

Anyway, everything was going fine until I needed to reboot. It just froze on the BIOS/POST screen after detecting all my hard drives. At first I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, but when it rebooted fine after I unplugged the USB drive, I started troubleshooting down that path. It was pretty ridiculous that every time I wanted to reboot, I had to unplug the drive, reboot, and replug in the drive. The boot process wouldn’t even continue if I unplug the drive and keyboard did not have any response, nor was I able to get into the BIOS setup.

After some quick searching, I found this thread: Free Agent freezes computer on restart? Turns out that it’s quite a common problem with certain motherboards that try to boot off USB drives. I don’t know what’s different about this drive since I have another external drive (using a generic external enclosure) and it’s never had problems at boot.

Anyway, I thought maybe it was due to the power-saving mode of inactivity so I disabled that, but that still didn’t help. According to the forums, there were a few things to try:

In BIOS, try to disable booting from USB
Connect drive to USB PCI card instead of motherboard’s USB ports

I search throughout my BIOS and there was no option to disable booting from USB. I even ended up disabling all USB support and my keyboard/mouse stopped working (it did boot without freezing though). This PC Chips M848A motherboard is pretty crappy and options are pretty limited. I ended up resetting the CMOS.

I was already contemplating if I should get a new CPU/motherboard combo at Fry’s or just pick up a cheap USB PCI card. I mean I’ve brought back a good PCI-E graphics card and DDR2 ram in preparation of the worse case scenario when my mom told me the scent of burning came from my computer and it stopped working (turns out the fan on my graphics card broke off and it just burnt out the GPU).

While looking at the internals, I noticed I already had a USB PCI card, which was not being utilized due to the fact a couple of the ports were dead. I guess that’s what you get from a $5 USB PCI card. I hooked up the Seagate external drive and reboot is working just fine now. No more hangs or freezes.

Update: I actually forgot to mention several things. I had tried to see if I could update my BIOS firmware, but it turns out I already had the latest (July ’04).

I didn’t actually see the mention of USB PCI card until later, and before that I was contemplating on ways to delay the start of my external drive or the USB hub that my drive was connected to.

December 25, 2008

Merry Christmas!

I wish everyone a Merry Christmas! And for those non-Christmas believers, I wish you Happy Holidays. ;p

My vacation’s half over and it’s been loads of fun so far. Met up with many old friends.

I also went snowboarding on Tuesday with Chris and Dave. Dave taught me how to carve, something I’ve been having trouble with. I’m still in the learning/practicing phase, but at least this time my first instinct isn’t to fall down immediately.

I’ll be in Las Vegas with my family the next few days, so I probably won’t be online (much?). Wish me luck!

Hope you guys are enjoying your holidays too!

December 14, 2008December 13, 2008

CDBurnerXP – Best Burning Software Ever

So Liam was over and wanted me to burn him some “videos” that I had. Should be easy, or so I thought. It turns out I didn’t actually have any data burning software installed on my computer. What is going on I thought… It’s been at least over a year since I last formatted this computer. Windows shows a creation date of April 10th, 2007 for my user folder. Has it really been that long since I’ve burnt any data. I guess that’s what happens when you have a 2.5TB file server available (currently down to only 600GB+ free).

I tried using Windows Explorer as I believed I should’ve been able to drag and drop files onto my burner and burn it via that method. Unfortunately it didn’t recognize my DVD+R as a blank writable disc.

I recall someone telling me an alternative to Nero, but I couldn’t recall what it was called. So I went and “located” my copy of Nero. The version of Nero I found was 7. That darn thing was almost 200MB, while versions 8 and 9 reach almost 1GB. I’m thinking why the heck did Nero’s burning software suite get so huge?!?! After installing Nero, for some reason, it did not recognize my DVD burner. It found my Lite-On CD burner, but I needed to burn a DVD+R. Now I’m pissed for wasting my time on Nero.

Anyway, I typed in nero won’t see dvd burner into Live Search and the first result pointed me to alternatives such as CDBurnerXP. Something clicked and I’m pretty sure that was the alternative someone had suggested to me sometime ago. Anyway, it’s freeware and it’s only a 3MB download! That alone made me much happier. All I wanted was an explorer like interface (similar to old Nero) where I can drag and drop files and then click burn.

And that’s what CDBurnerXP turned out to be. Very simple, very small, very fast. I was browsing through its options and it even has the capability of making bootable discs, something I’ve always wanted from a burning software. Now I can truly get rid of my floppy drive, which I only kept around for flashing the bios on my motherboard.

December 13, 2008December 13, 2008

How to Remove Venetian Blinds

For those who’ve been to my house, you may have noticed that I have a window where the Venetian blinds only go half way down:

I thought maybe one of the previous owners decided that they wanted to always have some sunlight coming in, so they only ordered it to be half length. However, today while I was downstairs in my storage room, I noticed that one of Venetian blinds there was extremely long, much longer than the short window it was suppose to cover. I did some quick measurements and the width was exactly the same. Armed with a ladder, screwdriver, and a flash light, I decided I would see if swapping them around would work.

One of my biggest mistakes was not looking online to see how to properly take apart the apparatus. I saw 2 holders holding the blinds in place and screws on each side and thought, that must be how I take it apart. First one was simple, since there was ample room for me to slide the blinds and stick in a screwdriver. However, the 2nd set was more troublesome. I ended up bending it a bit and ultimately using a flat-nose plier and unscrewing it that way.

After I took it apart, I realized in order to put it back, there was no way I could use the plier to screw it back in. I studied the holder and it turns out the front of the holder can be snapped apart and rotated upwards on a hinge. I didn’t even need my screwdriver. Oh well, too late for that now. Something to remember for next time.

And of course by swapping the window blinds, both my windows are fully covered now!

December 12, 2008

Vacation!

In a few hours, my vacation will start. Still have to wrap up some stuff at work before I leave.

Anyway, I’m going to be back in Monterey Park on Saturday (12/13) and I’m coming back to the Seattle area on 12/30. If you want to catch up, just drop me a line. It’s been ages since I’ve seen some of you.

Till then, ciao~

December 11, 2008December 11, 2008

WordPress Automatic upgrade

Apparently there’s a plugin that does what I’ve been waiting for WordPress to incorporate all this time: WordPress Automatic upgrade:

WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

WordPress automatic upgrade upgrades your wordpress installation by doing the following steps.

Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.

Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.

Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.

Puts the site in maintenance mode.

De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.

Upgrades wordpress files.

Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.

Re-activates the plugins.

The plugin can also can be run in a automated mode where in you do not have to click on any links to go to the next step.

Sweet! I thought the automatic plugin update was really neat already. If this works, then it’ll be sweet! Just make sure you haven’t actually modified WordPress code or your upgrade would overwrite it. Previously, I went and modified WordPress core code to get my collapsible sidebar menus, since that wasn’t exposed in the theme layer. However in my recent upgrade, I forwent all that and only made slight changes to the theme so it’d be easier for later upgrades, so upgrading won’t have to be a multi-hour process and tons of breaking changes. I’ll also be able to upgrade more frequently instead of every 6 months to 1 year.

Next thing they need to add is the ability to download and install new plugins on the fly. Currently I have to download the zip file and upload it myself. But given that they can already automatically upgrade plugins to the latest version, I’d think adding a new plugin shouldn’t be too hard.

Update: Speak of the devil. WordPress 2.7 was just released today. Got to test the plugin first hand today and it was a smooth as a baby’s butt. It was basically the steps above, one after another. Personally I think it requested confirmation too many times. Like I don’t think it really needed my confirmation to go and download the latest version of WordPress. I think it should be 2 simple steps: 1. Backup, 2. Upgrade. Any option needed for backup should be on the 1st page. Any option needed for upgrade should be on the 2nd page. However, it definitely made the upgrade process a lot simpler.

Tons of new stuff that I have yet to check out. Definitely a big improvement over 2.6. The editor space is a lot bigger now (fills up the width of your screen instead of set at some fixed width). The common panes (publish, tags, and categories) are move to the right side. Unfortunately they haven’t made it possible to resize the panes individually. I still don’t understand why you can resize the editor window when it’s in Visual mode, but not in HTML mode.

I just watched the video on their blog and they’ve basically rendered this plugin useless. They’ve apparently built the WordPress upgrade directly into 2.7. They’ve also addressed a few of the points I’ve brought up (i.e. automatically downloading and installing plugins).

December 10, 2008December 9, 2008

Lips Update

So I finally remember to ask the Xbox discussion about the issues I was hitting with Lips.

It turns out that all my issues stem from the fact I have a USB microphone connected to my Xbox 360. Somehow microphone registration gets all screwy because of that. In my case, I have my Rock Band microphone plugged into the Xbox 360 at all times. The fix is to unplug the USB microphone when you’re playing Lips. Apparently this will fix both the 2nd microphone lighting issues as well as the static noise, video and audio out of sync issues, as well as the freezing issues.

Other good news is that Harmonix (creator of Rock Band) is going to patch up Rock Band so it can use the wireless microphones! From MTV Games:

We broke the news that the highly regarded microphone bundled with Microsoft’s “Lips” karaoke game would not work with “Guitar Hero” or “Rock Band” at launch.

Harmonix and MTV Games have now addressed gamers’ concern over the lack of compatibility, and there’s good news to be shared.

“Microsoft and MTV Games are working together to ensure that consumers will be able to use the wireless mics from ‘Lips’ with ‘Rock Band 2’ after launch,” said the companies in an e-mailed statement. “More details on timing to come. Harmonix and MTV Games strive for all third-party controllers to work with the ‘Rock Band’ games, fitting with Harmonix’ open-platform philosophy for controllers.”

Sounds like we’ll have a patch in the coming weeks! Will you use the “Lips” mic?

That’s great news! Being able to play Rock Band with a wireless microphone would be neat! Then I can scrap my Rock Band microphone and not hit into these issues anymore!

December 9, 2008December 9, 2008

New Theme

So I’ve finally upgraded to WordPress 2.6.5. Nothing new that I’ve really noticed yet.

I’ve also taken this opportunity to change my theme. The one I’ve decided to go for now is simpleX. I’ve also considered Clean Home and Pixeled, but both had their quirks which I couldn’t think of a easy way to over come.

Given that, I still had to make some changes to simpleX where it did not play nice with the Most Viewed and Recent Comments widgets. I had to add the following to my CSS stylesheet for it to actually render okay:

#recent-comments li { background: url(images/meta.gif) no-repeat 5px 7px !important; padding: 5px 5px !important; padding-left: 20px !important; } .recentcomments a { background: none !important; } .recentcomments a:hover { color: #333 !important; text-decoration: none !important; background: #E8C8C8 !important; border-bottom: 1px solid #c47373 !important; } #most-viewed li { background: url(images/meta.gif) no-repeat 5px 7px !important; padding: 5px 5px !important; padding-left: 20px !important; } #most-viewed a { background: none !important; display:inline !important; padding: 0 !important; } #most-viewed a:hover { color: #333 !important; text-decoration: none !important; background: #E8C8C8 !important; border-bottom: 1px solid #c47373 !important; }

Given this chance, I also went through my blogroll and friends list and purged any link that was no longer working or haven’t updated in some time.

I’m still not 100% sure I’m going to stick with this theme yet. I dig the simplistic view. Maybe all it needs a new header image. 🙂

Update: I’ve also ended up disabling new user registrations and purging users I did not recognize. If you used to have an account and can no longer sign in, do let me know. I had several hundreds of user registrations and most of them were fake. They probably expected to be able to spam better if they had registered an account.

Update #2: Added more padding to the Most Viewed and Recent Comments, along with the little gears icon.

Update #3: Borrowed some icons from famfamfam.com. Didn’t really think gear cogs represented posts and comments that well.

December 6, 2008December 9, 2008

WordPress Visual Editor Changes My HTML Code

I have a love/hate relationship with WordPress’ Visual editor. The editor can be great sometimes. Other times it can be a pain. I already disable “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” as their definition of nested XHTML doesn’t really cover everything XHTML supports.

So if you noticed, I’ve began to recently embed flash videos into my blog posts, something I’ve avoided doing for some time since it doesn’t really fit well with my theme, which I’m in the market of changing. Still searching for one that I’d like. I recently switched to the Green Light theme for my HD-Trailers.net Blog, but I’m not sure if I want to have that here at Krunk4Ever!

I love the fact that when you try to add an image, it’ll automatically fill in the height/width and allows me to set alignments and etc. However, for everything else, I usually use the HTML editor which allows me to put in code directly.

Anyway, today’s blog post is how frustrating the Visual Editor can be some times. The main problem started because I started embedding flash videos into my blog post. I like my webpages to be XHTML valid, and for those who have this gene, you’ll know that most flash code websites provide are XHTML invalid. I found out how to modify it. Basically the <embed>...</embed> is invalid and I have to add a few attributes to the <object> tag.

For example for this video on YouTube (Lime in the Coconut), the embed code they provide is:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/BUG8A8e8KC0&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/BUG8A8e8KC0&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

To make it XHTML compliant, you covert it to:

Resulting in:

<object width="425" height="344" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/BUG8A8e8KC0&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/BUG8A8e8KC0&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param></object>

Just for kicks, here’s the video:

If you watch House, M.D., you’d recognize this song, which was hilarious!

However, if you switch to the Visual editor and back to the HTML editor, WordPress decides that your flash code should look like this:

It removed my type and data attributes, stuck in the classid and codebase attributes, and then re-added the embed block back in. WordPress strives to create XHTML compliant code (hence the check to correct any invalid nested XHTML), but why re-add the embed block which is XHTML non-compliant?!?!? I found it annoying and basically the flash video would have to be the last thing I add or else the code gets “corrupted”.

I tested the newest version of WordPress (2.6.5) and this issue still exists. I found the following threads where people have been complaining about this issue:

It appears the WordPress folks have no plans on fixing this issue as they’re suggesting to use one or the other completely and don’t switch between editors. I’m generally okay with that approach, but on my HD-Trailers.net site, I have multiple people editing posts and can’t really enforce one editor for everyone. I have a SQL script I run every few days to fix some stuff that “disappears” after a post gets edited.

Others have suggested using a different visual editor, but it doesn’t seem that any is that great…

I have a hunch that the embed code is needed for flash to work on IE6, but if you’re surfing the web and still using IE6, you don’t deserve to see the flash content on my site. ;p

Update: Another common thing I do is insert <div align="center">...</div>, so stuff are aligned in the center, but switching between between the Visual and HTML editor removes the divs. It’s actually quite annoying.

December 1, 2008December 4, 2008

Mirror’s Edge

I don’t actually own the game yet, but I’ve played the demo and I found it to be a lot of fun. You may then be wondering why I have a whole blog post dedicated to Mirror’s Edge. The main reason is because it ties in with a couple things I wanted to blog about but doesn’t deserve their own post at the moment.

I got the demo a few weeks back and it was extremely fun. As one of CAD’s sillies state: “I have never felt this much like an acrobatic asian chick in my entire life.”

On the same lines, Penny Arcade also made a comic strip about Mirror’s Edge, but I didn’t really have much problems with the headaches, given that I’m pretty sure I’m quite susceptible to 3D motion sickness. For example, I was playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on Saturday and after just 2 missions (~30 mins or so), I felt a slight headache and had to stop playing. It could be that the demo was short and it didn’t have to time to get to me yet, but even with COD4, I was pretty sure I’d get a headache within minutes of playing the game, which I didn’t really get with Mirror’s Edge.

I was planning on getting it for the Xbox 360, but it looks like it’s going to come out on the PC in January, so I might pick it up then. PC games are usually cheaper to get and I’m not sure I’m willing to drop $50 on it quite yet, given that I heard it’s a rather short game.

Speaking of which, have you seen the trailer? Check out these trailers just to see how fun they look!

You can find more trailers here: Gametrailers.com – Mirror’s Edge: Reviews, Trailers, and Interviews

The music you’re hearing in all of the trailers are remixes of a song called Still Alive by Lisa Miskovsky. No, this has nothing to do with the Portal song by Jonathan Coulton.

You can also watch/download the HD version on Gametrailers.com. Someone also posted the mp3 for you listen: Still Alive.mp3 (Still Alive by Lisa Miskovsky – 4MB). I personally think the song’s amazing, especially with the piano keys, which for some reason makes me think it has some Asian background. I wonder if that has to do with the fact the main character you play as is Asian.