I've got several disjointed thoughts for you today.

I'm going to make a valiant effort to pre-order a Nintendo Wii via my favorite online retailer, Amazon.com. The Wii looks like an incredible platform, and is the only modern gaming system that has gotten my attention. With any luck, Nintendo will really score with this system; I can't wait to try it out.

The new theme I'm working on for this site is moving along nicely. I've gone through a number of test designs, and I've finally settled on one that I like. Development work is still taking place (I only estimate it as about 75% completed), but I hope to roll it out here at the site in the next 4 to 6 weeks. Keep your eyes peeled.

Last month, I mentioned the new photo album software I was planning on writing. I've come a long ways with that project, but I still have a long ways to go. A number of design paradigms have changed mid-stream, so code rewrites are plentiful. I'm looking forward to rolling this out on my site. I estimate this at a 40% completion level.

I'll leave you with a great Kent Brockman quote:

Ladies and gentlemen, I've been to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and I can say without hyperbole that this is a million times worse than all of them put together.

There are a few categories of software applications that suck across the board. Instant messaging clients are one primary example (though Google Talk is changing that). Another seems to be CD-RW burning software. I've tried a number of applications, all of which seemed to either not work or not have the features I desired. Does anyone have any recommendations for decent burning software? The free packages I tried (Deepburner and CD Burner XP Pro) didn't impress me, and the Nero Express version I got with my CD writer is really old (5.something). I hear Nero 7 is horrible, but that 6.6 is pretty good. What do you use and prefer?

I recently mentioned the stuttering problems I was seeing in some games (Half-Life 2 to be precise), and my attempts to fix it with nForce 4 drivers and a fix from AMD. One of these changes, strangely enough, has made my computer run hotter (the graphics card now reaches up to 50 degrees under load, which is still somewhat cooler than my previous card, but warm nonetheless).

Before installing the nForce 4 drivers, I created a restore point using Microsoft's System Restore. And, after I noticed the heat problems, I tried to go back to the state the machine was in before I did the driver install. But restoring to my saved point doesn't work! After a reboot, Windows reports that it was "unable to restore to the previous point" and that nothing has been changed. I'm not exactly sure why I tried System Restore, because it has never worked for me before. Has anyone else ever gotten this thing to work? As far as I can tell, it's completely useless.

With Firefox 2.0 RC1 on the horizon (the branch apparently froze last night for check-ins), I think it's time for another of my opinionated views on the new Firefox theme. I have mentioned before that the new theme looked pretty bad, and apparently a number of people agreed. Thankfully, the theme was revamped in the September 11 nightly builds, and it looks a lot better. But people are still complaining. I like the new 2.0 theme much better than the previous attempt, but I still feel the Firefox 1.5 look and feel is ideal. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

So this leads to my main point: themes (or skins, whatever you want to call them) just seem wrong. So much time, energy, and development effort gets put into how stuff looks. Couldn't all of that be better spent in making Firefox better than it is today? Let's have faster start up times. The Places feature looks cool. And I'm sure there are other great ideas on the horizon. Can't we work on those instead of arguing about the icon used for the "Home" button?

At some level, a certain look will always have problems. One can't please everyone all the time, especially when it comes to looks; everyone's idea of beauty is different. So, set a look that most everyone agrees on (e.g. the current Firefox 1.5 theme) and leave it alone! Put all of the development effort on cooler features, not on shinier icons. In the end, I think everyone will be happier.

Yesterday, while playing through Half-Life 2 (this time at 1600 x 1200 ... :-D), I noticed that, after playing for a while, the game began stuttering. Strangely enough, changing the graphics and audio settings didn't make things any better. Even down at 640 x 480 with everything as low as it would go, the game was still quite choppy. So I got looking around the web, and began wondering if my new AMD dual-core processor was the problem.

I found a number of pointers to CPU drivers, dual core optimizers, a hot-fix from Microsoft, and more. But one forum post in particular caught my eye. It has links to all of the aforementioned fixes, and contains a number of tips on how to get games to work properly in a dual-core environment. This morning, I installed the latest nForce chipset drivers from nVIDIA, as well as the dual-core optimizer from AMD. The nForce drivers have unfortunately made my SATA hard drives appear as removable, which is odd but understandable considering that SATA drives support hot-swap functionality. And the dual-core optimizer seems to have removed the stuttering (though I haven't played as long today as I did yesterday; I still need to investigate whether this has truly fixed the problem or not).

Anyways, if you happen to have a dual-core processor, and are concerned about game stuttering, I highly recommend the forum post above. Perhaps the steps I've taken so far will fix the problems I was seeing.

I've been meaning for some time to comment on several fast food commercials that have been airing on TV. I find each one quite repulsive, and each motivates me to stay away from its respective establishment.

First up is a McDonald's ad. In it, a team of girl soccer players plays a game on an incredibly muddy field. I guess that the McDonald's folks are trying to appeal to those who have a thing for mud-covered young women. But what really gets me is what the narrator (one of the girls in the ad, presumably) says. She tells the viewer that she is someone. And not just someone, but someone like you. So, are they trying to say that if you work at McDonald's you're a nobody? Or some kind of freak? I've certainly never thought that way of McDonald's employees. While I do consider McDonald's among the lower echelons of the job pool, I don't go around each day making fun of those people. It's sad that McDonald's own self image is so poor. I guess it's somewhat deserved, however.

Next up, is any Hardee's ad that's aired in the past few years. Hardee's has tried vigorously to change its image, after suffering incredible setbacks a number of years ago. Their new image strives to be "tough" or "macho." But, at least to me, they end up being homoerotic. There's something about listening to two scruffy guys chew that's just not appealing. I get a major case of the jibblies any time I see one of these. Jibbly jibbly.

Finally are the recent Wendy's ads. What's up with the off key whistling that goes on? It's not musical and it's incredibly disturbing. I really miss Dave Thomas; his ads were simple and to the point.

I don't know what it is with ads these days, but the quality has really gone down the toilet. Not that ads were that good to begin with.

Apparently Steve Irwin, of Crocodile Hunter fame, has been killed while filming a documentary. I always enjoyed Steve's shows, his sense of humor, and his passion for animals. He loved doing his work so much that it made viewers love it too. It's always great to see someone so devoted to their work. He will certainly be missed.

The second beta build of "Bon Echo" (what will become Firefox 2.0) is nearing completion, so I am officially switching to the nightly builds for my browsing needs. And I've already been quite pleased. By default, the nightly builds come configured to use the nightly update channel. Through this channel, you can receive each day's updates just by using the Help » Check for Updates... menu item in Firefox. They get downloaded, applied, and the browser is restarted. And with the new session saver feature in Firefox, you start right back where you left off when you downloaded the updates. How cool is that?

I still dislike the theme, and the list of bugs written against it continues to grow. Thankfully, the list of fixes is also seeing some growth. Hopefully things can get polished up by release time.

Sometime at the end of this week, or perhaps this weekend, I will be updating both CoLT and Googlebar Lite to work in the beta 2 builds (stupid maxVersion, grumble, grumble).

For whatever reason, I've been in an incredibly lazy mood over the past several weeks. Every day brings a new stretch of boredom, and I don't know what to attribute it to. Perhaps I need a vacation. Thankfully, I'll be taking one in two weeks. A new PC game couldn't hurt either. I recently realized that I've been growing more and more tired of the games I've got. This past weekend, I reinstalled Quake 4, to try out its dual-core support. Although it was an enjoyable experience, it felt hollow. A new experience would be most welcome, but sadly there aren't any games on the market that pique my interest. Prey looks interesting, but I'm not willing to pay $40 for it. Oh how dry the well seems to be!

In other random news, I'm working on a new theme for this blog. It's still in the concept stage, but maybe I can get it up sometime this fall.

This weekend I had the great fortune of rebuilding my personal computer. It turned out to be quite an experience, and surprisingly frustrating at times. Before I detail the problems I ran into, here's a list of the new components I put into it:

• Asus A8N5X motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ CPU (dual core)
• 2GB Corsair XMS DDR400 SDRAM
• Antec SmartPower 2.0 500W Power Supply
• eVGA GeForce 7900 GT 256MB
• 2 Seagate Barracuda 160GB SATA 3.0 GB/s hard drives

I have also put up a small photo series detailing my progress, for those interested (more on this in a moment). Fortunately, it doesn't contain any photos of my frustrations.

After assembling everything in the system, I plugged it in and turned it on. For a fraction of a second, the system begins to boot; after that, nothing but silence. I try again, with even worse luck the second time: nothing happens at all. Panic instantly sets in. Frustrated, I surf the web looking for answers but come up empty handed. My dad suggests that it sounds like power supply issues so, one by one, I disconnect every device from the supply. After getting down to just the motherboard, CPU, and memory, things begin working. Slowly but surely I replace the items and, to my delight, everything eventually works.

I tried out Windows slipstreaming for the first time, and was pleasantly surprised with how well it worked. I was able to load Service Pack 2 instantly, bypassing the oh-so-annoying Windows update process. Interestingly enough, I still had a total of 55 critical updates to be applied, and even more for Microsoft Office. I'm slowly getting things back to normal, and I look forward to doing a little gaming in the near future.

I'll have another Zalman VF-900 blog post here soon, detailing the install process (as well as my second no-power adventure with my new machine).

As I noted earlier, I have posted a photo series here at this blog covering my computer building experience. I am trying out the Plogger photo gallery software for my photos, so feel free to check out my main collection (I have replaced Plogger with Monkey Album, my own photo album software). Plogger has a few bugs, and a few features I dislike, but I'm going to try it out for a while (until I can write my own). If you see a problem anywhere in the gallery software, let me know. Hopefully things will work as they are intended to.

The new look and feel coming in Firefox 2.0 recently landed on one of the branch builds, so I downloaded one this weekend's builds and tried it out. My verdict? It has a long way to go before public consumption. In other words, it's pure crap in its current form.

A preview of the new theme is available over at the Mozilla wiki, and it looks pretty nice. Too bad the real thing looks nothing like that. Every icon looks grayed out, there are toolbar button hovering problems, widgets aren't properly aligned, etc. A catch-all bug over at Bugzilla has been filed for the new theme and, as of this writing, there are 38 dependencies (38 other bugs) written against the new theme (and only one has been fixed so far). That list has grown steadily over the past few days, and I can only imagine that it will continue to do so. I'm excited about Firefox 2.0, but if Mozilla screws up something this basic, it will certainly be a disappointment.

In somewhat happier news, a bug that's been around for some time has just been fixed in today's branch build. Bug 318793, Firefox caches extension update file, has been a minor thorn in my side for a while. I'm glad to see that this issue has received the attention it so sorely deserved.

Since early February and March, I've been talking (and thinking) about upgrading my home computer. And I'm finally making some inroads to the situation. For whatever this is worth, here are the components I've firmly decided on:

• Asus A8N5X: This motherboard has great reviews at NewEgg, and the socket 939 platform from AMD is way more mature (and stable) than the new Intel stuff (or even AMD's socket AM2, as far as I know). It looks like this isn't available anymore at NewEgg. :-(
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+: A great processor for a very reasonable price (although it went up $15 just today). Dual core should be fun to play with.
• CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM: Going from 1GB of RAM to 2GB will certainly be an improvement.
• Antec SmartPower 2.0 SP-500 ATX12V 500W Power Supply: I'm going to try a modular power supply and see how well I like it. Antec makes quality units, so I don't doubt that I'll be pleased.
• Seagate Barracuda 160GB SATA 3.0GB/s: I'm planning on getting two of these, doubling my available storage (not that I need double the storage mind you). My current Maxtor drives really suck; they're loud, slow, and I'm tired of dealing with them. Hopefully these Seagate's will do better. These drives are no longer available at NewEgg. :-(

I'm also looking at upgrading my video card (preferably to a GeForce 7900GT), but I don't know which brand to go with. I currently have a card manufactured by eVGA, and as I have mentioned before, it runs a tad warm. I've also been reading about a number of stability problems with eVGA 7900 cards, although they recently did a 7900 series reload to fix some of the issues. As a result, I've been focusing on the XFX GeForce 7900GT (470MHz). The XFX model comes with stock speeds (most 7900 cards come factory overclocked, something I'm thinking I'd like to avoid) and it has fairly good reviews at NewEgg. The price, around $225 after rebate, isn't bad either!

Had I fully made up my mind about a video card earlier this week, I would have gone ahead and ordered these components. But I'd rather spend some more time weighing my options. Suggestions? Comments? As always, they are welcome.

It's time for a rant that I've been saving for some time now.

I spend more time these days walking the virtual aisles of Amazon.com than I do the aisles of a brick and mortar store. And I couldn't be happier. No lines, no travel, and no hassles from the sales staff. But I have become startlingly desensitized to the actual shopping experience. I recently went into the local Best Buy in the hopes of looking at a Canon A620. Not only did they not have a Canon A620, their camera selection was literally worse than the Wal-Mart next door (I know because I drove over there to look).

Immediately upon entering the Best Buy camera department, one of the oh-so-helpful sales staff came up and, unsurprisingly, asked if I needed help. I said no, he said OK, then followed that with something which I have yet to fully understand (he said it all so fast). The only part I truly remember were the words "non-commission." After realizing they didn't have what I wanted, I began to wander around the store aimlessly, pondering the Best Buy shopping experience as a whole.

The particular store I happened to visit is surprisingly small. As a result, each aisle is, quite literally no more than 2 or 3 feet wide. Two people can barely pass each other on any given aisle, making it difficult to even browse their merchandise. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more obese shoppers occasionally get stuck, requiring the aid of the local rescue squad and the Jaws of Life to extract them from their predicament.

As I'm wandering around, I casually glance at their CD collection. They have absolutely nothing from my wish list. Which isn't too surprising, considering that I'm into some rather obscure music. But I've been to Best Buy stores in the past looking for the staples, stuff like Abbey Road and Pet Sounds, and they didn't have either. How shocking is that?

As I'm leaving the store, disappointed in my quest and vowing never to return, a Best Buy manager busily chased after another guy who was also leaving. This particular individual had a bag with what looked like both an item and a receipt, but the manager kept insisting on writing him a citation. If the local police force is turning to Best Buy employees for help, we're all doomed. Doomed I tells ya!

This final little charade a least brought a smile to my face. Something that the Best Buy shopping experience has never done. Or never will do. Why go to a store that doesn't have what I want, charges higher prices, is cramped, and has surly employees? Until I can find an answer to that question, I'll be doing my best to avoid all Best Buy outlet stores. I couldn't be happier.

Last night I posted a Firefox profile tutorial. The guide describes what profiles are, what they are good for, and how you can make use of them. I'll probably add to it over the next week or two. Some troubleshooting tips would make a good addition, and hopefully some readers will have suggestions on ways I can improve things. As always, let me know of any problems you might find.

After graduating from school with a bachelor's degree of computer science, I must admit that I knew virtually nothing about developing *NIX based applications (that's UNIX / Linux based applications for the non-geeks out there). Granted, I did do a little bit of non-Windows based programming while in school, but it was always incredibly basic stuff: compiling one or two source files, or occasionally writing a make-file for larger projects (three or four source files). Having never had a Linux or UNIX box to play with outside of school, I just never got a chance to get my feet wet. Thankfully, my job at IBM has changed that.

Over the past few weeks, I've been doing a great deal of Linux programming, thanks to the cross-"platformedness" of one of the projects I'm working on. And this project is way more complicated than your typical school assignment. I'm now horsing around dynamically linked libraries, also known as "shared objects" in Linux land, like nobody's business. Not only that, the project itself is essentially a multi-threaded shared object, making it all the more exciting. I've learned more about g++, ld, and ldd in the past few weeks than I ever knew before.

Unfortunately, debugging multi-threaded shared objects is easier said than done. The debugging tools in Linux (at least the ones I've played with) all suck so horribly. They make you really appreciate the level of quality in Microsoft's Visual Studio debugger, or better yet, in WinDBG (this thing is hard core, and it's what the MS developers actually use in practice). Fortunately, printf() always saves the day.

One cool trick I recently employed to debug a library loading problem I was having, is the LD_DEBUG environment variable. If you set LD_DEBUG to a value of versions, the Linux dynamic linker will print all of the version dependencies for each library used for a given command. If you have a Linux box, try it out. Set the LD_DEBUG environment variable, then do an ls. You'll be amazed at the number of libraries that such a simple command involves.

Although Linux development can be frustrating at times, I've already learned a great deal and consider my experiences a great success. If I come across any more useful tips (like LD_DEBUG above), I'll try my best to post them here (as much for my sake as for yours). Until then, you'll find me knee-deep in my Linux code. I've got a few more bugs to squash.

Checking out of the local Food Lion tonight, my eye happened to catch the second page of an opened copy of that most trusted news source, the Weekly World News. The story that happened to grace that page was one of hope, innovation, and pure genius. It seems that an enterprising woman has discovered an affordable alternative to plastic surgery. You see, having a limited income prohibited this woman from being able to realize her dream of true beauty. So she whipped up an easy, simple, and (apparently) affordable solution: using small amounts of C-4 to reshape her face. Yes, that C-4. I have to admit that the results were quite surprising. A homely woman had become a beauty queen in no time at all. She too seemed pleased:

I couldn't be happier with the results, and my hearing should return in the next day or two.

Edit: For those not already in the know, the Weekly World News is a tabloid newspaper, but they do have a website. Unfortunately, this particular story has not yet been published there (and I'm not certain that it ever will). Maybe I'll buy a copy of the paper and put up some scans...

Early this morning (at 1:03 AM to be exact), I bid and won on volume 35 (Doppelgänger) of the Prince Valiant series published by Fantagraphics Publishing. This volume completes my Prince Valiant library, a goal I have been trying to reach for some time now. Once the book arrives, I plan to read it and then go through them in order, beginning with volume 1. I can hardly wait!

I've been battling several minor medical problems recently, which has slowed my blog posting efforts. With any luck I will get back to normality sometime soon. The Firefox profile tutorial I've been working on is nearly done, and a new release of Googlebar Lite is on the horizon. I've also had an idea for a new Windows application that I might write, should I find the energy and motivation to do so. Writing C++ all day for The Man sure makes it tough to do so in one's spare time.

In other miscellaneous news, I recently purchased some new rims for my car. They replaced the original factory wheels (the standard steel ones with hub-caps). Over time I had lost or broken several of the caps, so I eventually took them all off. As a result, it looked pretty bad. The new rims have improved things quite a bit. I'm looking at buying a Canon A620 digital camera in the very near future, so I'll try to get a shot or two of them. Lots of picture goodness is heading this way; I can't wait!

Bug 343825, "Enable official branding and set version to Firefox 2 Beta 1 for upcoming release", was recently checked in to the 1.8.1 branch. This can only be good news, and a sign that the first beta build of 2.0 is on the verge of being released. Perusing through the change logs over at The Burning Edge, as well as the nightly build notices in the Firefox Builds forum at MozillaZine, yields some cool new features and fixes. The ability to undo closing a tab has recently been added, although you should be forewarned of bug 343801, which causes the history menu to intermittently disappear. Also, passwords are now auto-filled before all images are loaded. This is a great bug fix; no more eBay login trouble!

I am really excited about Firefox 2.0, and when the first beta is officially released, I'll certainly switch over. The nightly builds have been getting more and more stable, and they're certainly a joy to use. Thankfully, release day is only getting closer.

I recently ordered a Zalman VF900 VGA cooler for my NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT. As I previously mentioned, the temperatures I've been seeing on this card have been incredibly hot. It would probably be safe to say that this was the primary factor in my frequent system crashes, but only time will prove that theory. Well, yesterday the cooler arrived and I installed it. Read on for my thoughts on the card, the results I've seen so far, and more.

A photo set detailing the install process is now available. Much to my delight, I encountered no problems during the whole process. Removing the stock cooler took some time, mostly due to the number of screws that were holding it down to the card. After removing the stock cooler, I cleaned the memory chips and the CPU with a dry paper towel. I probably could have done better during this step, but it seemed to do the job.

Next up was the application of the Arctic Silver 5 thermal grease that I purchased along with the cooler. This was the step that I was most worried about, mostly because I had never done it before. It turned out to be quite easy, although spreading the stuff over the chip definitely required a steady hand and some patience. I then attached the cooler to the card, and plugged it in to my motherboard. It was time to test!

For a reference point, here are two screenshots of the stock cooler:

As can be seen from the first screenshot, the idle temperature is 71°, with an ambient temperature of 45° (all temperatures are in degrees Celsius). The second screenshot shows the card after a high load (specifically the Lost Coast level from Half-Life 2). Under load, the card reached 81° and the ambient temperature shot up to 54°. These temperatures were quite ridiculous. Let's see if the VF900 can correct this problem:

Wow, what a difference! The idle temperature has dropped down to 56° while the ambient temperature is now only 36°. Under load (the same test as before), the temperature only reaches 64° while the ambient temperature is 45°, which happens to be the same temperature as the idle ambient reading using the stock cooler! So we've come down a total of 15° on idle and 17° under load. Although the load temperature is still a tad warm, we've improved greatly. My next system will be even better in the cooling department, thanks to a lower power CPU and graphics card.

As one can therefore conclude, this VGA cooler works wonders. I'm very pleased with this product and will most likely purchase another one in the future (when I finally upgrade my system). Or I might reuse this one (I would just have to buy some new thermal tape for the RAM heat sinks). If you're machine runs hot, I highly recommend the Zalman VF900 (be sure to snag some Arctic Silver 5 as well). Again, we'll see if this corrects the crashing issues I've been seeing lately. In a few weeks time, I'll report back with the results.