11 September 2004 in Business | Comments (0)

Quote:

Intel is almost seven times as large [as AMD], with expected revenues of $34 billion this year. Its projected 2004 profits of $7.35 billion mean that Intel earns in 11 days what AMD will make all year.

All about how AMD is slowly getting more and more of the processor market and Intel is getting given a run for it’s money.

Full article here

– JD

11 September 2004 in General & Windows | Comments (0)

…and I did, when I was installing the “Longhorn transformation pack 7″ I was trying to decide if I should complete the install as I’m damn sure swapping components in from an alpha operating system into a stable one was a bad idea.

But then I thought “It’s just screensavers and themes”. How wrong I was.

Everything was fine except that windows seemed to have gotten damn slow. Often the system would appear to hang – the mouse would move just fine, but nothing else was responding for several seconds. Then it would come right, so I monitored task manager to see what was up – nothing seemed to play the resource-grabbing game in the freeze ups, everything seemed “normal”.

After a day or two I had gotten a bit sick of this and decided to uninstall the transformation pack. This is where the trouble really began.

Let me paint you a mental picture – it was around 10pm on a Friday night, my friend had just left from watching a movie and I decided that I wanted to do some coding. Rowena had gifted me some GuyLian chocolates before leaving yesterday so I thought I would enjoy a couple of those while having a Red Bull that Bev from work had given to me earlier. Everything was good, all I needed to do was crank up some music and get to coding.

Of course I’m missing out that I still needed to get rid of the transformation pack. Well the instructions just said “run the install again, and select uninstall”. Good thing I have a computer science degree.

First off the uninstall tells me there is already an install in progress. Odd since there wasn’t. So I reboot and try again, this time it seems to like me a bit more and gets part way through the uninstall and terminates for no apparent reason. Upon re-running it complains that an incomplete uninstall is pending and I should restart.

Note: Computers can lie

I restart and bam – try to login and I get a lovely message about my account being damaged. There is only one option – use the default. So I click to use the default, windows loads and all I get is a desktop image and a cursor. Hitting ALT+CTRL+DEL does nothing, windows key does nothing, everything does nothing.

Maybe if I restart it will work? Nope.

I’m somewhat security concious about my system and have any accounts that aren’t needed disabled. This proved to my downfall since I couldn’t do things like login in as Rowena (she’s in the Administrators group). I guess my lesson learned was that I shouldn’t use the default Administrator account as my own (I know, it’s a pretty simple rule even though not fully pushed on the Windows platform).

So, to re-cap to where we are now, I can’t get into windows, nothing seems to work.

I also tried:

• Safe Mode – same problem, just with a shitty screen size
• Last known – same problem, nicer screen size

So now I’ve got out my Win2k3 CD and chuck it in, I spend some time in the repair console but I don’t have access to most folders even though I’m an admin – my guess is that it was because the problem seemed to be my profiles were rooted. Nothing in their offered much help, I couldn’t even backup my files because I couldn’t access the folders they were in.

So I try running a repair install to re-install key system files. 30 minutes later I’m ready to reboot into Windows.

Guess what? I get as far as the loading screen which appears for a whole 3 peco-seconds before the system reboots.

So I try:

• Safe mode – same problem
• Debug mode – I don’t even know what this does but it didn’t seem to generate any logs or anything but I still have the problem
• Enable boot logging – No boot log was generated, same problem
• Last known – worth a shot, but since there never was a last know good boot it also fails

Hmm… so I decide it could just be a oncer – I run the repair install again – still screwed.

By now it’s about 12:30am

I bite the bullet and do a complete overwrite of windows – it’s complaining loudly that it might destroy my files and kill my future children – I press on in my epic battle.

This seemed to work, however it took until about 1:30am for me to be back in windows. I didn’t format because I wanted to see if I could save any of my files, thankfully I could however the system was a bit icky – I went in and manually deleted almost all the application folders from program files etc so the system was semi-clean (saving the files from them that I still needed).

Things seemed to be going alright now and I’m still reinstalling all the applications that I need.

Note to Microsoft: Please allow me to save my email account settings. Setting up the 7 or so accounts I have in outlook is painful. Surely it can’t be that hard to do!

Anyway, that explains why there wasn’t much posted on here yesterday. Now I need to reinstall Visual Studio 2003 and finally get to some coding (My joke challange to to build a complete content management system over the weekend. I know I won’t make it but I bet I can still get something basic working).

Hopefully all you out there are having a more enjoyable time with your computers.

- JD

8 September 2004 in General | Comments (0)

Finally I’m feeling almost 100% after having a bad cold last week which meant 2 and a half days off work.

I’ve got one more day of anti-biotics left but I’m still coughing with a dry cough, hopefully I can still remain on the mend.

Today was also the day of the fire drill at work – I wasn’t looking forward to it since I was filling in as the building warden while JB was away and had no idea what to do. All went well though.

Locomotion comes out on the 21st and will only cost 69.95!! I’m so excited – I might have to take a days annual leave just to enjoy it for a day

Anyway, not much happening at the moment, work is going ok.

– JD

7 September 2004 in General | Comments (0)

Well, last night, after pretty much fobbing off Rowena (sorry Ro!) to spend some time with my other lover – locomotion – I am impressed

The game has lost none of it’s game-play fun. In fact it’s actually become more fun because of the new track positions, raised tracks, tunnels, more controllable land etc.

The one downside was that the graphics are quite possible worse than the orginal Transport Tycoon! I can’t believe it. They’re not so bad that you can’t enjoy the game however, it still floats my boat

One thing about the demo that I didn’t realise, is that it appears to let you play a level for about 10 minutes then jumps back to the intro screen – it doesn’t tell you this will happen and doesn’t really warn you when it does. This is a bad thing because I wandered out of the room for about 30 seconds and came back to find it at the intro screen – I thought something had gone wrong.

Absolutely cannot wait for this to come out. I’m not quite serious when I say that I’ll need to take some holiday time to play this game!

– JD

6 September 2004 in General | Comments (0)

Woot!

The demo of locomotion is out! Locomotion is the sequal to my all time favourite computer game – Transport Tycoon!

There are two demos available, one with music, the other without. The one with music appears to have about 100MB of music being a big 120Mb+ download.

Download Here:
3D Gamers

I’m off to play!

– JD

6 September 2004 in Business & Intergen | Comments (0)

This just showed up on stuff.co.nz this morning, giving a bit of history about where I currently work.

About Intergen

- JD

5 September 2004 in Business | Comments (0)

Just found an interesting article about how TradeMe started and the guy behind it. I was quite amazed to see that they have 30 employees now.

About TradeMe

Worth a read

- JD

5 September 2004 in General | Comments (1)

I’ve just integrated my first “hack” allowing users to select different styles for my blog on the side bar. At the moment there is only two choices and I’ll add more if people request.

Note: I didn’t create the hack myself. If you want to use it as well visit
http://www.alexking.org. It is a great resource for hacks and tweaks for this web log software that I’m using.

If there are any other changes you guys think would be useful, leave a comment

– JD