Courtney Malone

4 cores and 6 gb
of 64 bit goodness
I was regularly using more than 2gb of ram on my main desktop, and swapping was killing me. So I decided to decided to add more, however there was a problem; the 32 bit version of Windows XP i was using does not support more than 4gb. Even worse, due to the way memory ranges are allocated for device drivers, I would not be able to use more than 2.5gb on my machine (a lot of IO cards using mem ranges, and 2 256mb video cards). Windows XP used to support more than 4gb of address space by using a mode called Page Address Extension, however Mircrosoft removed this support in SP2! Apparently driver writers were not thorough in their assumptions about mappable ranges and this was causing a lot of issues with supporting larger ram configs. Keep in mind that 32 bit versions of 2000 and 2003 all support more than 4gb of ram.

This meant it was time to consider a 64 bit version of Windows. A quick look at Windows XP Pro 64 indicates that it breaks everything and drivers are hard to come by. So I opted for Vista Ultimate 64bit. I heartily recommend buying the OEM version from Newegg since its half the cost of retail. A quick check revealed that all of my hardware would have drivers.

The goodsOf course, one of my problems is “If it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet” so rather than just doubling the ram to 4gb, I opted to make it 6…oh and replace those aging Opteron 244s while I’m at it with 2 dual core 275s.

Before the upgrade
The machine was a bit dirty before the upgrade, and I opted not to remove the bar in the photo since I have a ton of cables on the underside of it (scsi, power, fan speed, etc).

Socket 1 after install
All the slots filled by cpu 1, clearner, but not quite clean enough.

Good newsAfter flashing all the various bits of firmware, and installing everything it was time to cross my fingers and boot it up. Success, yes I know those RAM latencies wouldn’t be acceptable to an overclocker, but socket 940 requires registered/buffered ECC, so there isn’t any point in blowing money on OMG BLING RAM

Installer
The install of Vista was insanely easy; boot from the dvd, partition the disk, enter the key and let it go. It was pretty quick too, took less than an hour.

The old Opteron 244s (1.8 Ghz)

Drives A vanity shot of the drives

Polar ChallengeUpdate:Bonus! I got a 20-30 degree celsius drop in cpu temps, an 8 percent drop in power load at the UPS and most importantly, I can play the 1080p h.264 version of Top Gear’s Polar Challenge.

That has to be some kind of record

snow on the George Bush turnpike
So Wednesday it was 78, today it was 25. I went from using the air conditioner to using the heater in about 6 hours. On to the pics!

near DFW airport
car dealership
a covered jeep

Perhaps I should use this instead of the furnace

a real heater and its little brother

Wednesday some friends and I went to see a screening of Borat. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Borat is the name of a character played by Sacha Cohen (of Da Ali G Show fame). Borat is a reporter from Kazakhstan who gets into John Cleese-like situations due to his hilariously poor understanding of English. While he is normally relegated to a recurring skit on Cohen’s Da Ali G Show, Borat is a feature length mockumentary of his trip to America.
Seriously? The Dallas screening was held at the Studio Movie Grill in Plano, which has excellent, albeit expensive food.

Though I was initially concerned that the movie would be a 2 hour skit that should have been 5 minutes (like every episode of SNL for the past 3 years), it ended up being pretty damned funny. Think Team America: World Police funny, not West Wing funny. The neat thing about the movie is that a many of Borat’s interactions are with unwitting members of the general public. All of this, however, is secondary to my primary point; namely what was required to get in to the screening.

So you’re Rupert Murdoch, you own the largest news conglomerate in the world, a few movie companies, some broadcast networks, and you’re just aching to do something with that social networking site you’ve just spent $700 million on. What to do what to do?

the mark of the beast Well, I can tell you what they did. Fox decided to hold free screenings of the movie in 25 cities worldwide, but to get in, they required you to bring in a printout of your myspace profile with Borat and Black Carpet Screenings in your top 8. This posed a problem for me, because, well I’m an internet elitist nerd(tm), and to me, myspace is the equivalent of the wrong side of the tracks. Quite a dilmna, after all, the internet is serious business! Well, sucker that I am, I created the profile, added the requisite profiles to the top 8 and showed up with hardcopy in hand. Yes, I know this makes me a hypocritical asshole, but I’m comfortable with that I suppose. Well, at least the movie was good, I would have hated to go through all that for something like Intolerable Cruelty.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan will be released on November 3rd.

eight months can make. Yes, I’m aware that I havent updated the blog in nearly that long, but on the brightside, several interesting things have happened since then. Lets see…

I’ve moved from Shreveport to Dallas, into a third story walkup no less.(Photos to come) Dave got hitched, and I had the honor of being best man at his wedding. (Photos to come) Mike graduated (congrats!), though his blog is down at the moment. The existence of dark matter has been proven conclusively, (hopefully) putting an end to this MOND bullshit. Oh yeah, there was that minor Israel invading Lebanon thing…again.

I know most people start blogs and then abandon them, and lets face it, thats what happened here. It occurs to me that for someone with as many gadgets as I have, its odd not to have a digital camera, and that will soon be rectified. I will try to update more often, I promise.

The Colonel!Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the colonel. So my latest book order comes in, and what do I see? Upon further inspection, its not The Colonel, rather its Norbert Wiener, everyone’s favorite mathematician/philosopher.

Separated at birth?What the hell is going on here, did every guy of that era look the same? A quick Google search revealed that, yes…yes they do:

Hitchcock and ChurchillWell, if 2 random matches from google aren’t enough to convince you of the statistical certainty of my statement, I don’t know what will. On a related note, its safe to say Colonel Sanders wouldn’t be a big PETA supporter.

No, not that Postal Service, namely the United States post office. For the past 3 weeks now, we have not been regularly receiving our mail. Around the 5th of December, I got a notice in the mailbox saying that our box was full. Ok I think, “I will just go down and pick this up”. Upon my arrival at our local branch station, I am handed a tub full of mail. No wonder our mail volume was so low the past week. “Well, thats that” you might think, but that was only the beginning of our problems…

Last week, it happened again. Chris calls the local station to confirm that they have the mail there. But when I go down to get it, the postal tech hands me an 2 envelopes and a magazine. I’m home before I realize “wait a minute, there should be a lot more than this”. At this point, its too late to go back so I make a mental note to stop by again the next day. Thursday, I return to the station to talk with a tech, who looks for a bit before getting the postal supervisor. The supervisor disappears for a while and says that he looked personally and there is no mail being held for us, but he will talk with our carrier in the morning and give me a call. Come Friday, no call, so I head to the local station again the next day… only to find that no one is there on Saturday.

Monday rolls around and at this point, I’m more than inconvenienced, I’m annoyed. I call the station again and the station supervisor assures me that he will talk to our carrier and call back. That day, we got 6 different letters for 3 different addresses on 2 different streets. By now, I was becoming more furious than annoyed. I ask Dave a few background questions on postal procedures because his dad is a postal carrier. He advises me to talk to the postmaster at the main station in town. So Tuesday I call the 800-ask-usps number, and after navigating the usual maze of IVR prompts, get to someone who takes down all my info, gives me a case number and promises that my local Consumer Affairs office will contact me in the next 24 hours. She was courteous, helpful and outright reassuring. “Finally,” I think “action”.

Well, that was Tuesday, Wednesday rolls around and no call, today I couldn’t get ahold of anyone in Consumer Affairs despite trying for hours. I did all my shopping online and early this year, so I wouldn’t be running around in the mall and dealing with last minute shipping issues. Now I will likely not receive 2 amazon, 1 overstock.com and 2 bestbuy.com items in time for christmas. On a related note, EVERYTHING that was shipped UPS arrived ontime and undamaged, their guys are out doing deliveries until 10pm for the holidays. And that, my interweb colleagues, is what the free market will do for you. Suffice to say, I passed furious a while pack.

So, its finally happened, I’ve given in to the web-2.0-blogosphere-podcasting-the-drm-revolution types. Don’t expect much from this space but occasional rants and the display of general geekhood. I resisted the demands for a web presence from Chris and others for years, but now that all the hard work has been done, I guess I’m relenting.