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CoffeeFiend

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Everything posted by CoffeeFiend

  1. CoffeeFiend
    Go in device manager, find the said "ITE IT8211 ATA/ATAPI Controller", double click on it, pick the "Driver" tab, and make use of the "Roll Back Driver" button.
  2. CoffeeFiend
    I'm using HDDs in RAID0 with the older ICH9R. I have it set to spin down after 20 mins (Win7 x64 too), and I get no such errors so it should work. It would be helpful to have more information about your setup (RAID/AHCI/etc settings, driver version, BIOS version, actual error messages, etc) Chances are that it's the particular drives you're using that aren't very RAID-friendly e.g. take too long to spin up, and the "card" doesn't care for it... There's a LOT of possibilities, and here we have very little to work from. Edit: I am using driver 8.6.2.1012 seemingly (wow, that's old -- latest is 9.6.0.1014, I'll update ASAP). Also, I don't think it's usually that problematic as my SiI3114-based cards have no problems either.
  3. CoffeeFiend
    I have to agree with Tripredacus on pretty much everything he said. And it's somewhat understandable too. Knowing what you're doing (writing markup) is one thing, but knowing how the business works overall, being able to work on a deadline, with client requests, etc is another. Very much like knowing the basics of Photoshop by itself wouldn't get me graphic design contracts, I also have to know how the business expects me to work, deal with their "design by committee" policies, be committed to deliver within tight deadlines, etc (and obviously be able to deliver quality results too, and on a budget) As a beginner, you have to focus on the markup and how the various techs in use work. You want to be able to build a site using something as plain as notepad (or something a little nicer like notepad++). Using frontpage (doubly so for older version) is usually frowned upon (looks n00b-ish, and frontpage has the long standing reputation of producing absolute crap). Once you are good at that, then you can look into something like Dreamweaver (not so much for the WYSIWYG editor, but transferring files and what not) Now, down to the page content itself. Although a lot of pages are still served as HTML4 these days, most of the markup is usually written like XHTML requires it. That means tags in lowercase (e.g. not <BODY> but rather <body>), properly nesting tags (you seem to have been pretty good for that), closing all your tags properly (i.e. any tag that doesn't look like <sometag></sometag> looks like <sometag /> and NOT <sometag> -- see your <meta> tags for instance). Setting style in markup is a last resort. You want to keep content (markup) and style (using CSS) separated. And setting part of it in markup & part of it (on the same element no less) in 2 different places is even worse. You don't really want to use <BODY bgColor=white> or <TD width="268" align=center>. Also, CSS-wise, you don't really want to split your CSS in a dozen different blocks like that, and it would normally be served in another file (an include) so it gets cached and pages load faster. Also, this might be (mostly) compliant HTML4, but that's a really old standard, and how it's used has changed a LOT over the years. Again, not just the "using CSS for style" part, but that also means using paragraphs (<p></p) instead of a million <br /> tags like people did back in 1995. The other thing that has changed since then is that we don't use tables for layout anymore (it's meant for tabular data, NOT layout). See this. A good understanding of CSS and the box object model is all you need. Good knowledge of CSS is not optional (if I was looking at a portfolio, I'd look closely at how you defined your fonts and such; it's a pretty good indicator of skill). There's a lot of "tricks" you have to learn too, like using nested lists (styled in specific ways) for site navigation and the like. Comments should hardly ever appear in markup. Most comments are either stripped off, or most often written in server-side code (not in the HTML markup). You used a doctype, well done (a lot of sites still don't get this right these days, it's aggravating!). However, you also want to specify a character encoding, like UTF-8 for instance. You also have to test your sites using most browsers (recent versions of IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome ideally). Following standards should make it work pretty good across most, save for the older IE versions. Once you are done with all that (that's perpaps 5% of the job), then there is plenty more to learn. You want to learn the basics of javascript (and ideally some popular libraries like jQuery). You want to learn to use the document object model (DOM) with javascript. And you will have to learn one or more server-side technologies (e.g. PHP or ASP.NET) as sites nowadays aren't static HTML like that anymore (the markup is generated by the code running on the server). And to do this, you will have to pull your data from somewhere which usually means from a database, so you will have to learn the basics of SQL too (although not knowing enough can be fairly dangerous and expose to to being hacked) Basic image processing knowledge is a must. Your picture (Me_half-stax_ACSmiddletown.jpg) isn't cropped or sized properly, unless you really wanted scrollbars in both directions. Cropping, resizing, setting transparency, saving an optimized version for the web is the strict minimum. Then after all that, there are many other things that can get you the job (or vice-versa) over another guy, like knowing Flash/ActionScript. Of course, previous experience and a nice portfolio helps getting the job. It takes a good while to become pretty good at all of this, and there will always be something else "new" to learn. The technologies used are always evolving. You can't just learn and be set for life. Like a lot of technology-related careers, you have to be fairly committed to be able to stay current.
  4. CoffeeFiend
    This website isn't a store, and since your request goes against forum rule #13 (trading, etc) I'm closing this topic. Please make yourself aware of the forum rules.
  5. CoffeeFiend
    Never been to Russia, so no idea. But it's jam packed with university students. In fact, sometimes I almost wish for double price coffee, so there would be place to sit down for sure I'd sure love to visit a Starbucks that looks like this though. I don't have anything special to talk about so I don't have a personal website. There's well over 100 million blogs out there, so I don't think starting yet another one is going to really change anything. I think it would mainly be a drag (a commitment to write something worthwhile regularly). Definitely not my bag.
  6. CoffeeFiend
    I didn't. However, it's at least a 15 minutes away (1/2h return trip). And even when it's not free the place is jam packed so you have to be pretty lucky to find anywhere to sit. Last time we went to 2 and ended going somewhere else instead. I can't imagine what it's going to be like tomorrow (assuming the promo even applies in Canada). My problem isn't paying for our lattes, it's finding time to go and being lucky enough to have somewhere to sit and chat with the lady Edit: seemingly it was already on slashfood, not sure how I missed it.
  7. CoffeeFiend
    gzip is working: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:01:00 GMT Server: Apache Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie Cache-Control: max-age=300, must-revalidate Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Encoding: gzip So is caching: HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:01:01 GMT Server: Apache Connection: Keep-Alive, Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=99 ETag: "cf2031-a19-4bc37ee0" The javascript (it's NOT java -- completely different thing!) i.e. jQuery is loading from Google's CDN: GET /ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js HTTP/1.1 Host: ajax.googleapis.com ...at least partially! It still tries to fetch a 2nd copy of it, and all includes, from your site right after: GET /wp-content/themes/premiumnews/includes/js/jquery-1.3.2.min.js HTTP/1.1 Host: skeetabyte.com GET /wp-content/themes/premiumnews/includes/js/jquery.easing.min.js HTTP/1.1 Host: skeetabyte.com GET /wp-content/themes/premiumnews/includes/js/jquery.lavalamp.js HTTP/1.1 Host: skeetabyte.com GET /wp-content/themes/premiumnews/includes/js/tabs.js HTTP/1.1 Host: skeetabyte.com GET /wp-content/themes/premiumnews/includes/js/superfish.js HTTP/1.1 Host: skeetabyte.com GET /wp-content/themes/premiumnews/includes/js/jquery.bgiframe.min.js HTTP/1.1 Host: skeetabyte.com It's already quite a bit faster, but fixing that would further reduce page load time.
  8. CoffeeFiend
    7 and 10mbit. Page compression done by the web server. It saves bandwidth (cheaper) and makes pages load faster. About 125KB or so (again, would be lots less using gzip compression), which for the main part is jquery. You could use a CDN (e.g. Google's) to deliver it (just about guarantees it's already cached, faster, saves you BW, etc) Anyway, it's loading significantly faster at the moment, about 10sec or so but there's still plenty of room for improvement. In 4h or so, the server load (database, disk IO, CPU, network, etc) and a whole lot of other factors (routing tables, etc) might have changed quite a bit. That's the thing, it could be loading lightning fast in a couple hours then a couple hours later be slower than a dead snail -- especially on heavily-oversold hosting (there's "only" 3000 or so sites served on that box)
  9. CoffeeFiend
    It takes nearly a whole minute to load the front page from here (and no, I'm not exactly on dialup!). Hopefully it's not always this slow. It would likely help quite a bit if you enabled gzip compression. The html size would be perhaps 1/4 of what it is now, and you'd also save a LOT on the fairly large amount of javascript, resulting in far faster page loads (although latency seems to be more problematic, at least now and from here)
  10. CoffeeFiend
    It's already released. There's the "client" installer (for your typical user) and the "full" installer (mainly for developers although I would expect most to already have it from installing some flavor of Visual Studio). There is also a new VC++ 2010 redist here. For devs, there's also the free express editions as well as a launch kit available (besides the usual and fairly extensive "training" stuff) Now if Adobe made the CS5 trial available today I'd be really happy. I dunno what's with the having a launch event but no deliverable product idea they had... "This is all really exciting with all the latest [amazing] features. Now patiently wait until mid-May to actually use it!".
  11. CoffeeFiend
    I don't have a wifi card handy so I can't really do a whole lot. However, before resorting to crawling the registry by hand, I'd look at the AdapterTypeID property (or AdapterType; pretty much the same idea) of the Win32_NetworkAdapter WMI class first. Hopefully it would return 9 (or "Wireless") for WiFi NICs. The rest is easy enough to accomplish if this works.
  12. CoffeeFiend
    That might be why it costs $11,899 Although the $549 Pro upgrade is sufficient for most people.
  13. CoffeeFiend
    32 grams of arteries-clogging fat. That reminds me of that "supersize me" movie.
  14. CoffeeFiend
    I knew there had to be uses for this thing!
  15. CoffeeFiend
    That would be it.
  16. CoffeeFiend
    Well, most likely not desktop-style "plain" PC133, more like plain ECC registered PC133 SDRAM (that would be fairly "plain" as far as servers go). Sorry for not being clear enough.
  17. CoffeeFiend
    I haven't looked for it more than 5 minutes (I just don't care that much), but I know your current method (using wmic) and other methods relying on WMI won't work. I would normally use the Get-Hotfix command (powershell), but as it says in its documentation: So if you want a complete list, you'll just have to find another way. Apparently reading subkeys inside HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall doesn't work either.
  18. CoffeeFiend
    You are making me curious with all this RDRAM talk. I don't see how it's even related to his server, I figured I must be missing something. About the RAM costing more, well, old computers are like that. Older parts cost more, and the computer ain't worth a whole lot either being so old (P3 era). It's a good part of why I don't stick with older stuff, it always ends up costing more than it should (doubly so for servers). Pretty much everything this old box can do, can easily be done with a virtual machine. Dell PowerEdge 2550 Technical Specifications, for those who might want to peek. It lists RAM as being plain old ECC registered PC133 SDRAM.
  19. CoffeeFiend
    Same here. Never had a problem with Firefox and this site and I've been using it since v0.8 from 2004. Logging in works fine. If everything else mentioned above fails, you can always try the safe mode too. It could be a misbehaving addon causing troubles.
  20. CoffeeFiend
    I agree with everything jaclaz said. To start such a business, you would not only need FAR more experience in both electronics and computers, but there's also the mechanical side of things. You'd likely have to train replacing heads and platters on a lot of drives from different manufacturers and designs before you'd be decently good at it. You'll also need to learn pretty much every last detail about every drive type (like how Seagate drives' PCBs can't be swapped as-is and associated terminal commands and what not). Add to that the costs of everything else you may need: tools for replacing heads/head stacks, a fairly "standard" electronics lab, specialized & expensive tools like the PC-3000 UDMA (with the expensive support), a good supply for any kind of specialized/compatible hard drive parts you may need, etc. Finally, once you've spent thousands of dollars and years learning stuff, then you'll have to compete with long-established, well known data recovery services, for whatever will be left of the magnetic-storage-on-rotating-platters business as a lot of people will be moving to SSDs in the upcoming years. And of course, doing that as a business, you'll also have to learn about all the aspects of running a business (taxes/billing/accounting, advertising, legalities, etc)
  21. CoffeeFiend
    Well, it is fairly old. The 555 is from 1970, the 741 is from the 60's, and the 74 series would be from the 60's as well. That's universally older than the original PC XT (which I would also call old, although I've had FAR simpler computers too), and older than a sizable amount (majority?) of our forum members. As for tubes, I've mostly used them in RF applications. I'm not as familiar with them mostly because I'm not one hundred years old yet And to have used them outside of audio applications such as digital logic, you pretty much have to go back to the ENIAC era in the late 1940's. I would perhaps have included a couple on the list if this post was read by folks in retirement homes *ducks* BC* BJTs never got popular in North America. That was mainly a source of frustration and hours wasted searching into a ECG or NTE xref book (no fancy internet back then obviously). Here you'd be talking about 2N3904's & 2N3906's, and to a lesser extent the 2N2222. I left those off this list precisely for this reason: I knew people outside of NA might be more familiar with other stuff. Although the 2N3055 is sure one of the classics around here too (when more power was involved, that was pretty much the first thing you'd think about). Also, I figured a lot more people would likely know about classics such as the 555 (I think even my neighbour's dog knows about this) than specific transistors. I've worked with much older stuff like core memory, or programs that would load from tapes (which were almost as big as a VHS tape) at 50Hz (which includes parity and start/stop bits), systems built entirely in wire-wrap and such. That's not old, that's older than dirt
  22. CoffeeFiend
    There's no need to buy a whole new computer for that. You can get a card with SATA + eSATA ports for fairly cheap, such as this one which gives you 4 internal SATA + eSATA (external of course) for $30. All new drives are SATA (natively). Anything else just adds cost. You can connect the drive directly to the card, no need for an enclosure at all, although you do need to power the drive somehow. So for $30 or so, you can get an enclosure with a power brick, or a eSATA docking station into which you just "drop" your drive. As for your old stuff... Buying FW800 cards, cables, new enclosures for the old drives, new expensive firewire DVD drive (if you can even find one) and all that, isn't going to be much cheaper even short term. As for the speed boost, it very much depends on the particular enclosure and drive, it might not be all that amazing. And when you look at the long term, where mostly everything will be either USB3 or eSATA, I don't see it becoming any cheaper (old computers will still need new cards for new devices, and new computers will likely need a card as well for the FW drives, etc) I've recently gotten rid of several FW cards and I don't particularly miss them. Pretty much everybody is ditching it (it's quickly becoming even more of a niche), including Apple themselves.
  23. CoffeeFiend
    Cable length, shielding, quality (some cables are absolute junk), what other cable(s) run along it (interference) and many other things may affect it, as well as the card's design itself (impedance mismatch, design of the DAC's output filters, etc) and a whole bunch of other problems. VGA is notorious for problems with longer cables and high resolutions. Either ways, DVI (or HDMI) normally looks far better. DVI KVM switches have come down in a price too, you can get a basic 4 port DVI KVM (with USB) for like $200, or about $300 for a HDMI model. Well, it's cheap, unless you ever decide you need more than one DVI port, or that you need dual-link DVI ports, it that it has to be a multi-user switch (and forget about digital audio altogether).
  24. CoffeeFiend
    If you're using the old VGA connector, this is a VERY common problem (video ghosting). If you're using a KVM with a DVI port it should work fine.
  25. CoffeeFiend
    Everything I said is really basic stuff. You have a long journey ahead of you Electronics today aren't anything like the "old days" (based on 555's, 741's, 74LS series, etc). It's one of the most rapidly changing fields (that, and programming -- it kind of goes together). There is a whole new world beyond simple electronics... From microcontrollers to DSPs, to CPLDs and FPGAs and so on (and everything else that goes with it: C/C++ code, Verilog/VHDL, etc) I would normally recommend getting "The Art of Electronics" by Paul Horowitz but it's over a decade old, and the 3rd ed should be out this year. I am not a data recovery specialist (I have very little interest for that), I just happen to work in the embedded electronics field. So I can't be of too much help here. I've had good luck with R-Studio personally. I would be better at answering electronics-related questions That covers the basics There is no way around having a decent multimeter. As for PSU, lots of times we can get by with a spare ATX PSU rigged with a switch and a dummy load, but sometimes you just need adjustable (although a classic LM317T will do in a pinch) and dual polarity... I wouldn't personally bother as he will likely have access to one in labs anyway. And something nice isn't always cheap. If I was going to buy one now (on a budget), I'd likely go for a Rigol DS1052E (not as well known a brand as Tektronix, HP/Agilent or LeCroy for sure; however they are the ones who manufacture Agilent scopes!) for around $400. Then again, there are so many other things one could use... A decent soldering station is a must -- doesn't have to be fancy or expensive, even a classic Hakko 936 will do just fine (dirt cheap, a large number of tips are inexpensive and easy to find, etc). I could make a fairly long list Anyway. Good luck to you.
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