Alden Bates' Weblog

I have occasional problems with my computer just up and resetting in the middle of doing something. This is, naturally, hugely annoying and I worry that one of these days a reset is going to kill something.

I'm pretty sure it's not the AGP/PCI cards I've got installed, so I guess that leaves the memory, motherboard, CPU, power supply, and two of the four storage devices installed.

Theory #1 is that the CPU is overheating, which is why I usually operate the PC with the side cover off. However doing so hasn't stopped the problem.

The resets most often happen specifically during the process of loading a level in Unreal Tournament 2004. Last night I had one occur while playing a Shockwave Flash file. I've also had one while sending an email in Pegasus with a particularly large attachment. This could suggest some arcane problem with the single hard drive in the machine.

Theory #2 is something wrong with either the CPU (an AMD Athlon XP 2000+) or the motherboard. Perhaps some instruction UT2004 executes during the level loading triggers a bug in the Athlon chip which causes the reset. It's hard to say, because sometimes a particular level will work fine, sometimes it will crash the computer when it's loading.

A while ago I kept finding a DLL in my temporary directory, an odd place to store a DLL, and mentioned it in my LiveJournal in a post titled I have a strange thing. So far that's proven to be the most popular post there in terms of comments, simply because there isn't a lot of information about the DLL on the web.

The library appears to be installed with a number of games. I got it most recently from Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. It may be created by other games, and may well be something to do with copy protection which requires you to keep the CDROM in the drive while you play. One person thought it might be preventing the copying of games altogether. CmdLineExt03.dll is likely to be a variant of 02, though so far no one has reported a CmdLineExt01.dll. The file is recreated on bootup if it's deleted.

Other games which may install it include Unreal Tournament 2003 (possibly only before the patch which removes the need to keep the CD in while playing), Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Nascar Racing 2003, Diablo 2, and quite probably some non-game software.

The latest anonymous comment suggests creating a directory with the same name as the file in order to prevent it coming back. Cunning!

So after a bit of messing about with configurations, we now have a wireless network set up here, and the computers can see each other and surf the net via broadband. It's not perfect though. There's a lot of noise along with the signal and a lot of dropped packets. I suspect much of the noise is from the appliances in the kitchen. Is there any reliable way of determining the source of radio noise?

At least now we can transfer files around and possibly even play games...

For various reasons, one of these being Windows 98 was becoming increasingly unstable (e.g. halting the system when I attempted to create directories (or Folders, if you were introduced to computers after about 1995 (but I digress))) I went about installing Windows XP on Saturday. This went OK, and before long I had most of my software reloaded.

Unfortunately, after that, it all went a bit pear shaped.

Continue reading "Adventures with XP"

Good luck to Björk, who's nominated for two awards this year for Medulla and Oceania. She was nominated for best packaging on Family Tree last year, but didn't win.

I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. It may prompt more people to buy Medulla, which is good, but on the other hand Medulla is not exactly the most accessible of albums. Even Björk's fans are deeply divided on it. On the other (third??) hand, the first Björk album I heard was Homogenic, which isn't exactly accessible either, and it's still my favourite of her albums.

On a related but tangental topic: Lord of the Rings, and the "Best Song Written For A Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media" award.

2002. Enya, May It Be - nominated but didn't win.
2003. ????
2004. Annie Lennox, Into The West - nominated

I guess Emiliana Torrini isn't well known enough to get nominated. Though I note that one of the nominations this year is Kylie Minogue's single Slow, which she co-wrote.

I've finally upgraded my Movable Type installation to 3.131 and also installed MT-Blacklist to see if it stops the increasing amounts of comment spam coming my way recently. The installation instructions for the plugin weren't too clear, and the configuration pages all have a "concatenation" error of some sort at the bottom of them. I may need to update another file somewhere...

At any rate, perhaps now I'll get more legitimate comments than spam. :)

Bruce Simpson writes on making electronics less attractive, having been burgled on the weekend and most of his stuff taken. Bruce was previously bankrupted by the NZ government after he designed and built a do-it-yourself cruise missile.

As he points out, even passwords on PCs can be circumvented. I suspect any such measure on electronics such as DVD players is going to have similar problems... Besides which, you'd end up with hundreds of people locked out after a power cut because they can't remember the pass code for their microwave, all calling technical support. :)

As I was driving home, I noticed the car in front of me had the number plate "SUPOOH". I can't work out what it's supposed to mean. Could mean Winnie the Pooh is now a sysadmin (Super User Pooh) or possibly it's some sort of slang (S'up Ooh. Who's Ooh?)...

Why get a personalised plate and put something that cryptic on it??

TSV issue 28 is now online. It includes some cool stuff like interviews with Paul Cornell and David Halliwell, the last part of Jeff Stone's Murder at Midnight, an analysis of The War Machines, and some pretty cool artwork and cartoons. :)

There are one or two pieces still to come for that issue as well...

Weekly World News: Monkeys Type Shakespeare Play

Ripshaw assembled 5,000 monkeys and an equal number of typewriters. The monkeys were rewarded with bananas every time they filled up a page with letters.

"Ninety-nine percent of it was nonsense," Ripshaw says. "But one of the monkeys put up a blog on the Internet, and it has a big following."

Snicker