COMPUTERS

I read a story a few days ago on Digg showing how AACS accidentally slipped up and published some kind of "AACS HD DVD DRM process key". Once the story hit the front page, everyone was in a uproar over this. "OMG BLU-RAY IS NOW CRACKABLE WAI2GO AACS!!!" seemed to be the order of the day, and now not more than 10 minutes ago I check out Digg and see this (all links found on www.digg.com):

http://digg.com/tech_news/IP_Version_6_with_128bit_IPs
http://digg.com/apple/Sixteen_Hexadecimal_Digits_Screensaver_for_Mac_OS_X
- (http://www.newcleardream.org/screensaver)
http://digg.com/programming/The_best_mathematical_riddle_you_will_see_today_Period
- (http://farm1.static.flickr.com/191/480556169_6d731d2416_o.jpg)
http://digg.com/tech_news/d1af2e56517a7202a1cc087a69c4e296_md5_of_some_random_hex_values
- (http://www.quasarrising.com/md5.txt)

Stuff found on Facebook
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9HaNbsIfp0 (Song featuring the process key)
http://ucr.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2338184677 (Facebook Group supporting the key)

What does this all mean? Are all HD-DVD's from here on crackable? Can the process key not be reset? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

I officially completed my first C# program yesterday, and it does more than print "Hello World" in the console window! I created a program that automatically switches my laptop's network adapter between DHCP and a hardcoded static IP.

I primarily use my laptop for my work and have demoted my PC tower to file-storage duty. My tower and laptop connect via a crossover cable, but in order to connect the two I need to manually set the IP of each machine to the same three IP groups (ex. 192.168.0.x). Normally, I'd have to go into my laptop's Network Adapter and manually set the IP, but after yesterday, all that is a thing of the past!

Now, I can just run my fancy C# program and POOF! The program reads my current IP and adjusts my adapter to either DHCP if the IP is set to static or to the static IP if DHCP is enabled. I kept to a console application because I didn't feel that this required a fancy UI, but I learned a great deal about the minor differences in how C# handles string manipulation and foreach statements.

I'm learning slowly but surely, and I'd learn a lot more if I had something to work towards creating, but for now I'll be happy with what I've accomplished!

P.S. My apologies for the poor grammar, its been a rather long day

Every once in a while, I'll see some article on Digg about programming font alternatives and I'll find myself thinking, "is that really necessary?" I've been around programming for the last four or five years, and in all that time I've never once moved away from the default Windows IDE font.

For those of you who've never touched programming in a computer language, most programming integrated development environments (IDE) are set to use the monospaced Courier New font. Created in 1955 for typewriters, this font eventually found its way into Windows operating systems as far back as Windows 95. The strength in this font and many of the other monospaced fonts is that the characters all line up vertically. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

I've compared Courier New to Times New Roman because TNR is widely known as a popular font for word processors. As you can see from the guide lines in the image, all the characters typed in Courier New (the monospaced font) line up, while the characters typed in Times New Roman do not. A benefit to monospacing characters in code is that its possible to easily compare the content of various lines of code. If I want to compare a MySQL database connection string from one file to a similar string in another file, I can just copy-paste the two strings and compare their string length to check for any inconsistencies or differences between the two. With a font like Courier New you'll notices character differences between strings almost immediately.

Since I started coding, I've tried to switch fonts once or twice. I stayed away from TrueType fonts because I liked the look of monospaced characters, but finding a monospaced font I like was difficult. Every time I tried a different font, I thought the text was too small or the characters were too blocky. SOME monospaced fonts even boasted a special tiny size, as though I liked coding at size five font. No matter which font I tried, though, I ALWAYS moved back to Courier New. Call it stubborness, call it security, but I had found my favorite programming font a long time ago.

I suppose the perfect programming font is determined solely by personal preference. Personal experience tells me that, for a word document, non-monotype-fonts such as TNR are perfect because they set up words that look more naturally-spaced, similar to how someone would write. When it comes down to programming, monospace fonts are the way to go because of how neat the code looks easy it is to compare various bits of code. Just my two cents.

It turns out things were not as bad as they appeared regarding the apparently "dead" motherboard I received from Newegg.com.

No, the problem was a result of operator ignorance and error...I took the motherboard for granted and applied two year old knowledge to a problem today. It turns out that I had missed a plug when I hooked the computer up. What plug did I miss? Take a look at the picture below and see if you can guess what plug I might have missed:

Now, to find out for yourself what POWER PLUG I missed, just click the picture...I'll wait.

YES! That's right, I forgot to plug in the 4-pin 12v power cable to the motherboard. In my defense, I'd never worked on a computer that was new enough to use this plug, and there was no mention of the socket in the manual. I found out the error in my ways only after going to Fry's, dropping $118 on a new motherboard and power supply, installing the new board, and then having my good friend William point out that maybe, JUST MAYBE, I might want to plug that 4-pin connector in. After getting the new motherboard to beep, I tried the same set up with the board I thought had died and *Beep Beep* it worked!

So now, I have to apologize to Newegg.com (Sorry, Newegg, for thinking that you'd taunt me with faulty hardware), kick myself in the butt (I'm standing as I write this), and then see if Fry's will be nice and allow me to return hardware I purchased out of stupidity...

And so there you have it, my new computer is up and running, and OMG the difference in performance is night and day. I took a couple screenshots of Half Life 2: Lost Coast at 1280x1024 and with 16x AF and 6x AA to show off the power of the ATI Radeon x1600XT I have chugging away under the hood:

A picture of the coastline, showing off HDR

The level of detail on the fisherman is phenomenal, especially with all the graphic settings turned way up.

That's it for the evening, good night!

After removing EVERYTHING from my computer (all boards and drives), and after cleaning the entire case, and after carefully and with the utmost care placing the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and video card, the computer won't POST...

*big sigh*

So I have to figure out what the problem is. I've tried turning the computer on with only RAM and CPU in place, with RAM, CPU and video card in place, and even went so far as to unplug the RAM but keep the video card in. In all instances, there was no system beep and I tested each configuration twice, each time with the speaker plugged in both possible ways.

Initial talks with friends and people in the hardware community indicate that the problem may be a bad motherboard, but I don't want to believe that my brand new hardware has ALREADY failed and it has not been in my hands for more than 3-4 hours.

I'll keep everyone posted about the problem, but I will greatly appreciate your input as to what might be causing this problem

I'm in the process of upgrading my tower PC because its showing signs of motherboard failure. I've found the processor, motherboard, RAM, and video card that I want, but I've been having a bear of a time trying to find out if I can run the RAM I want to buy on the laptop I've chosen.

Maybe you guys can help me. I want to purchase this ASRock AM2V890-VSTA motherboard along with this 1GB stick of DDR2-800 (PC 6400) RAM.

The problem I'm having is with the voltages. The motherboard doesn't have any actual RAM voltage settings in its BIOS (other than Low, Normal, High, and Auto), so its hard to know what voltages the motherboard supports. One site mentions that the motherboard is rated for RAM at 1.8v, but this isn't the motherboard's manufacturer, so I can't be 100% sure. The RAM says its rated at 1.9v-2.0v. The question I have is, will this RAM work with this motherboard, taking into account the voltages? Does RAM work if its functioning under a lower voltage?

And that announcement? It really wasn't that amazing, only that Dell upgraded my Axim x50 to an x51 for free...I have a chat log, so I might go ahead and post that and explain how I cheated the system in my next entry :P