The Old Dog Barks

I usually make do with my complaining over at Never So Few. That was in the old days. With another site to keep busy I figure to do more of my grousing over here. Unlike grouse — grousing is never out of season. Like many of my rants this one is about computers, but in a rare change of pace does not involve “The Linux.” This time it was my windows machine, the one I do the vast majority of my work on, that started giving me trouble. And then worse, it neared to die!”

A little over a week ago I started getting errors when exiting programs. The error message said that the program, and more than one of them, could not access the memory at a particular location. That was the extent of it and the comp kept right on working as soon as I closed the error window. No big deal as I had installed a very large graphics program recently and thought that it might be the problem. But I was wrong.

Last Monday I went to start working and the machine wouldn’t even boot. It said I was missing a simple PCI bus driver. I try again and it does boot. I try to connect to the internet and the system freezes and I need to hold in the power switch to shut down. This does not look good but I try booting one more time. This time the comp says it recognizes new hardware and asks me if I want to install a driver for it. Sure, why not. I hadn’t added any new hardware so the driver if it was actually required should be on the system. It wasn’t, or at least the operating system couldn’t find it.

Ok, I boot in safe mode and check out what is going on. I go to the device manager and sure enough no PCI bus driver. It knew about the driver but said it was uninstalled. The driver in question came with the system, of that I was certain. I was not sure about what it did other than work with my modem but without it I could not go on the internet. I pulled out the backup system disks and tried to install a driver from the CD. The message said no such driver on the system backup either, Now I am getting worried.

I power up the Linux machine and go to the HP site to find the driver. They don’t have it either. I notice that there are about 90 megs worth of Linux backup files I can install to get the linux system current, after all I had only done that two months earlier, and decide to download all of that before continuing. I did it over night because for me on dialup that takes about 12 hours.

I’m thinking the driver I need might be at the modem manufacture’s site and find out how to read the hardware code so I can tell who that was. I go back to the HP windows machine and now I am having all kinds of trouble booting up. Sometimes I get there but the moment I try to do anything the machine locks. Other times it runs for a minute or two before failing. Booting in safe mode works but I can not use the modem from there.

I tried several different system date restores to no avail and thought about a complete system reinstall. I am backed up pretty well but if I do that I know I have a week of killing the bloatware that comes with a new install and setting all the system parameters to what I am used to. So I hold off go back to the Linux and do some more research.

It seems that the simple PCI bus driver was called on one — and only one — of the sites I visited the simple PCI “Gigabyte” bus driver. And I was getting these unable to read memory errors. Could it be I had a bank of bad ram? I let loose the cover and start pulling ram. After some swapping I can boot up reliably again but I am still getting the hardware found message and am unable to turn on the modem. I can use the system tools though and I get the information I need to go to the modem site.

Back to the Linux and I find what I is the site of the chip maker and that the hardware people are responsible for drivers. That was HP and I already knew they claimed not to have one. But Connextant, hope I spelled that correctly, was kind enough to offer a couple of different generic drivers. I downloaded those onto a flash drive and went back to the win box again. I tried to load the most likely driver and still no luck, then the other and no luck again. I am about to do the dreaded system install when I think to do a manual uninstall of the old PCI driver. After that is complete I boot again and can load the drivers off of my flash drive. Each will load but neither lets me fire up the modem.

In the midst of this with a stable system at least I do a virus scan. A couple more hours, 600,000 files or items and it tells me all is well. I am now really close to that system reinstall but. . . In my searching through the hard drive I find another driver possibility, same name as one of the ones the chipset manufacture provided but with an extra letter – a large X. This was in a folder labeled HP and might be what I was looking for. And it was!!!

I loaded the driver and my modem fired up. I no longer had the simple PCI driver installed but since I am now down to half a gig of memory I guess I do not need it. It seems the mere fact of its presence made it impossible to load the correct driver for a system with less memory. Now I need to go out and buy some more ram but at least the system is working and stable, though noticeable slower than it used to be it is still very usable.

My working theory is that the bad ram was deteriorating and would sometimes work for a while, perhaps only one bit was bad and causing page faults. But now as I say I am on line again. And this was the short version of my rant, I just ran out of steam.

I would like to say that the first chapter of the Fifth Cardoman Novel just went up at the FutureVerse. Talk a look and you might find you enjoy it!

The maintenance scheduled for Saturday 16 2010 has been rescheduled to Sunday 17 2010 due to illness in the house.  At that time every site hosted at Fort Old Dog will go down for a few hours around 3:00 PM MST.

My living room has literally become a Data Center (4 servers, 2 multifunction printers, 2 monitors, 2 keyboards, 4 switches, charging stations for I don’t know how many portable devices and a Partridge in a Pear Tree) the cabling having happened not planned, looks like a freaking Rats Nest. Not to mention the dead server (the old olddog.name) just taking up space.

I need to turn everything off, unplug everything, move the crap and route the cabling in a professional manner. Fer Gods sake I teach this crap. I am like the Auto Mechanic whose wife drives the crappiest junker in town because I am to busy working on other peoples stuff.

Today I am going to take some time to work on mine!

What happened here was my Paycheck Continuation Program, PCP or job to the clueless!

Last Thursday right after sticking Wes with the start of The Devil in the Mirror, my Boss calls me in. It seems we are now bidding on a Government Contract whose info will reside on my Linux Servers at work (Yes plural, as in 5) and they must meet the current Government requirements for Secure Environment Linux hereafter called SE Linux.

I explain that our servers are running on Fedora 8 and that to meet current Gov requirements we would need to go up to Fedora 12. Not a major problem, when do you need it?

Answer, TUESDAY! Now we have a fracking PROBLEM!

Thus since last Thursday almost every waking moment has been involved in doing a four generation upgrade on five servers. This believe it or not is where this site saved my behind as I had fought the same problems here already.

It is 8:30 AM Tuesday the 12th of January and we are Gov compliant! Now having been up most of the weekend I am dying!

We have a minor competitor who works in the same building we do and when I left work there four IT pukes from that outfit were in the parking lot smoking and griping about there BIND problems as they were trying to do the same thing I had just finished.

Now there are about three people in this town I would not piss on if they were on fire, two of them were in that group!

If you think I told them shit, you don’t read our books.

Cross Posted at www.neversofew.com

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy Orin Kerr Posts : Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks YouTube Broadcast of Same-Sex Marriage Trial

From the Associated Press:

The Supreme Court is blocking a broadcast of the trial on California’s same-sex marriage ban, at least for the first few days. . . . The high court on Monday said it will not allow video of the trial to be posted on YouTube.com, even with a delay, until the justices have more time to consider the issue. It said that Monday’s order will be in place at least until Wednesday

This seems to me exactly the kind of news/speech that should be protected by the first amendment. Whatever your view on the outcome we all should be able to see the arguments made that determine, or at least influence, how the court rules. Some will say: “You can read about it later.” I say: “Why not now?”

Update: I see again at Volokh there is live blogging of the sesession. That is good but still not the same as an audio or visual real time feed.

Things that Chap My Ass.

The constant reference in the Press and amongst bloggers who should know better about Muzzies getting killed by “DRONE STRIKES”. I have even seen this meme on sites written by ex-fighter jocks.

Let me say this once and with feeling, The United States of America does not fly a drone with weapons on-board!!!!!

Drones come in two types towed and dumb computer controlled. The first are generally referred to as “Target Drones”. The second type was actually developed originally developed to replace the first so a tow plane was not at risk as weapon systems got more complicated.

Later it was conceived that the pure drone was great for Reconnaissance and Intelligence flights over high risk areas. These did a dumb task without risking a pilot on board and were great at the limited task they were aimed at. Put a weapon on one of those and it is simply now a missile, no different in intent than a Trident from a sub!

Now let us focus on those two highly efficient and cost effective government Issued killing machines the Predator and it’s big brother the Reaper. They are NOT DRONES! They are a new class of Airborne Assassin known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles flown by Pilots safely on the ground.

The decision to fire or not fire is made by the Human Pilot in command of the aircraft. More Predator and Reaper flights come back with all weapons on board than kill Muzzies! This called Human-In-Loop Command and is not a FUCKING DONE!

Repeat after me, if it carries a Camera or Radar it might be a Drone! If it carries a weapon it is a UAV!

Americans do not trust precision death and destruction to computers, humans control that.

The only American Drone that carries a weapon is called an ICBM, cause Canned Sunshine ain’t precision killing!

Words have meaning, use them properly!

H/t here to Misha.

It seems that the PUMA’s from HillBuzz are none to happy about go here a read it from the source.

Thanks for the blurb below Oldiewan. I am not so shy that I wouldn’t have written one for myself but since the final part of the book ‘A Point of Honor’ was going to be posted today I thought I would just wait and get two birds at the same time. So the Epilogue to A Point of Honor is here, and to read it all from the start go here.

Next I need to get an advertisement up at Never So Few. This self promotion is a bitch!

My buddy and the guy who does the look and feel around here has the last chapter of his latest up.

Check it out at – A Point of Honor. Yeah, if you read the whole book I had a bit to do with it.