Chaos Terminal

Rumors have been running rampant about a new camera to replace the Canon 20D. Canon finally announced the 30D and it's basically the 20.5D. The sensor and image processing abilities are the same but just about everything else has been refined.


Canon definitely listens to users since a large number of little issues have been addressed (feel free to read all about it here). When the announcement came and was effectively quite disappointing, I was a bit shocked. The more I look into the list of changes, the more I realize this was a fairly comprehensive list of changes and there is much more to a camera than megapixels and image quality. When I upgrade from my 300D, I might give this one a look.

Posted by Mike at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments

Note to self: Re-rip your copy of Bad Religion 80-85. Not only is the copy on your computer missing a couple of tracks, this is now out of print, replaced by a remastered copy of How Could Hell Be Any Worse?


I do have a copy (no, not an original) of Into the Unknown that I break out from time to time for shits and giggles. Nothing like a little synth-rock from my favorite punkers to get the day started.

Posted by Mike at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments

Ok, most of my Media Center issues are now resolved. Based on all the sites complaining about "Media Center Receiver Service" issues from Media Center Rollup 2, I figured I had the same issue. I wasn't getting anywhere with uninstalling and reinstalling the updates and .NET frameworks, so I knew the issue had to be something else. I decided to look in the Event Viewer and I saw the error was always reported at "fault address 0x00000254". Looking this up separately brought in a few more suggestions. One was simply "check your codecs". I had installed an all-in-one codec pack as soon as I built the machine since this was going to be media-centric. Uninstal l that a BOOM, everything works.


For some reason, the .ax files registered by the codec pack conflict with the receiver service. Now my only issue is that my new router doesn't seem to like 802.11a traffic. I get barely 802.11b speeds. The router also supports 802.11g, but my laptop is 802.11b, which throttles the whole connection. For now, I can either use my laptop or the 360 as an extender, but not both at the same time.

Posted by Mike at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments

My TV card came in and I'm all excited about descending into DVR hell, but I'm getting hit with the "media center receiver service" issue. I've spent roughly 2.5 hours on this issue so far and none of the workarounds I've found are helping. It seems related to .NET 1.1, which isn't terribly surprising since I had a bitch of a time getting .NET 1.1 set up properly for MCE.

Posted by Mike at 6:59 PM | Permalink | Comments

Things are starting to look up, a bit:

• The 360 and Media Center are now talking to each other. I figured out that just because I've added new media to the MCE doesn't mean that I've added new media to the extender (360). I didn't think they would use different access lists, but oh well.
  
• I have at least recovered the directory structure for my photo gallery. The thumbnails are all there, the heirarchy is all there.... just the actual photos are not. Slight problem, eh? I think I can muck around with the DB enough to fix it, if only I can remember more mysql commands than "show", "explain", "select" and "update".
  

Posted by Mike at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments

Keeping the shitstream going:

• Arrived at my doctor's appointment 20 minutes early, didn't get to see the doc until 50 minutes later AND he gave me less than two minutes of face-to-face time.
  
• Since the appointment ran so late, I get to work at that purgatory period: after the bulk of employees have arrived but before lunch. The parking lots at work are double and triple parked by 10 AM so arriving at 11 AM is a lesson in frustration, futility and lots of gear changes. I can't find a spot at the local lot so I got to park a couple of blocks away. No big deal, unless it rains. This is Seattle. This conclusion left up to the reader.
  
• My favorite internet station, WOXY, the station I listen to every minute I'm at work, is moving to a pay model. $5/month, I'd think about it, $10/month, I'm not so sure.
  

Posted by Mike at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments

God damnit again! The Seahawks lose and I'm having nothing but trouble with Gallery. There is no feature for "bulk upload". Come on, everyone stores their pictures in some sort of directory hierarchy and there is NO support for uploading from a directory. The best I can find is some hacky perl script that will allow me to upload a directory-full of images. It doesn't even create and name the album for you! I think the old albums from my gallery will be down until such a script is written.

Posted by Mike at 7:51 PM | Permalink | Comments

God damnit, I can't seem to restore my gallery. I guess I get to fully reconfigure it for a third time! I hate the lack of a reliable backup/restore for this software.

Posted by Mike at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments

I have decided to upgrade my home computer to Media Center Edition, basically since I have the 360 to act as an extender. My current PC only needed a few things (new video card, TV tuner card) and I decided to tack on an extra 300 GB drive. The downside is that I haven't reinstalled Windows in forever and my current build is well used. I believe I have backed everything up, but I'm still going to have to reinstall and reconfigure:

• Apache 2
  
• PHP 5
  
• MySQL 4
  
• Gallery 2
  

That is going to be difficult, let alone all the userland applications. I may be able to get away with installing WAMP, but I might have to install everything manually like last time. All of that, just for a photo gallery? I think the gallery2 setup is just too complex for it's own good. The database points to the picture files on the hard drive, but maybe it's easier to control all of the other data using a full-fledged database.


Anyway, the point of this post is to warn you that my gallery will be unavailable, and probably for some time.

Posted by Mike at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments

Bwahaha, I "upgraded" my computer from a GeForce3 Ti 200 to a GeForce 6600 and decided to run 3DMark 2006 just for fun. A whopping 446 isn't all that fun and is by FAR the lowest score for anyone running the GF 6600. I think most people have upgraded from a 1.3 GHz processor by now.

Posted by Mike at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments