December 2004 Archives
I went to see The Incredibles yesterday. Pixar's story of a family of superheros forced into living "normal" lives by the government is (typically for Pixar) full of quirky humour and should be appreciated by young and old.
The showing I went to was more or less full, most of the audience being children. The small child on a tricycle who pops up a few times during the movie proved popular with them...
A while ago I placed a text ad on BlogShares and only got one hit as a result. When I moved my mood icons/user icons pages to a new location, I thought I'd give it another try and set up an ad for 100,000 impressions.
From those impressions, I got a total of 57 hits. Most of them were from individual blog pages, or the main text ads page. Not a huge return rate, but it still made BlogShares the second biggest referrer (not counting search engines) for the main Tetrap domain for December.
Speaking of referrers, the referrer-spamming bots have been hitting my site again - one hit the NZDWFC site some 150 times or so this month. I've taken to banning any such bots on sight. They're so stupid and easy to spot too.
I noticed there was an update to Windows Media Player, and promptly told my computer to fetch it. Of course, partway through the installation, the CPU hit 100% usage and reset, hosing WMP...
The only thing stopping me from taking this heap in to get fixed right now is the fact then I'd be stuck at home without a PC for a week or so. :P
Winter/Christmas themed entries I found while surfin' about on BE:
I've been discovering one of the hazards of surfing on BlogExplosion is that a few blogs seem to have popups. I guess popup makers are beginning to find ways around FireFox's popup prevention. Already scanned for Spyware, so I'm fairly certain it wasn't that...
But it's makin' me nervous...
On another note, why is there no Google International Zeitgeist for New Zealand?
I realised today that I'd completely forgotten to watch the Firefly premiere last Tuesday. Having enjoyed Buffy and Angel, I was interested to see what Joss Weadon would do for a space series. Fortunately my dad, who also likes Science Fiction, still had it on tape.
In case you didn't get the parallels, all the incidental music appears to have been ripped from a Western, as well as the clothing and the look of much of the worlds they land on. Would probably appeal to fans of Cowboy Beebop. It also reminded me a lot of the group from Alien: Resurrection, which Joss wrote... I took an instant liking to most of the characters, and it's good to see Gina Torres in something again. :)
Shame we're getting to see it two years late, but better late than never...
Jeff pointed me to Ex Astris Scientia, a formidable Star Trek site. I spent hours reading the "Inconsistencies" section, which has some interesting discussions on TOS versus new-style Klingons, various scientific problems, etc, etc.
I installed Prime 95, which includes a "torture test", running your CPU at 100% and testing a number of the functions.
My computer reset by itself after approximately 40 seconds of running.
I tried installing ITE Smartguardian, which came on the disks for my motherboard. I think it's broken - it displays "Temp 1" as 201°C all the time. "Temp 2" is a slightly more realistic 48°C, but it doesn't seem to get any hotter while the stress test is running.
I rang the shop from whence the PC came, and they said they couldn't pass a diagnosis without the machine there to run tests on, so I will probably have to bite the bullet and take it in after work starts in the new year.
Edit: Oh, I should add that after my previous entry, I also downloaded a piece of memory testing software from Microsoft's site, and that checked my memory out as fine.
I have occasional problems with my computer just up and resetting in the middle of doing something. This is, naturally, hugely annoying and I worry that one of these days a reset is going to kill something.
I'm pretty sure it's not the AGP/PCI cards I've got installed, so I guess that leaves the memory, motherboard, CPU, power supply, and two of the four storage devices installed.
Theory #1 is that the CPU is overheating, which is why I usually operate the PC with the side cover off. However doing so hasn't stopped the problem.
The resets most often happen specifically during the process of loading a level in Unreal Tournament 2004. Last night I had one occur while playing a Shockwave Flash file. I've also had one while sending an email in Pegasus with a particularly large attachment. This could suggest some arcane problem with the single hard drive in the machine.
Theory #2 is something wrong with either the CPU (an AMD Athlon XP 2000+) or the motherboard. Perhaps some instruction UT2004 executes during the level loading triggers a bug in the Athlon chip which causes the reset. It's hard to say, because sometimes a particular level will work fine, sometimes it will crash the computer when it's loading.
A while ago I kept finding a DLL in my temporary directory, an odd place to store a DLL, and mentioned it in my LiveJournal in a post titled I have a strange thing. So far that's proven to be the most popular post there in terms of comments, simply because there isn't a lot of information about the DLL on the web.
The library appears to be installed with a number of games. I got it most recently from Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. It may be created by other games, and may well be something to do with copy protection which requires you to keep the CDROM in the drive while you play. One person thought it might be preventing the copying of games altogether. CmdLineExt03.dll is likely to be a variant of 02, though so far no one has reported a CmdLineExt01.dll. The file is recreated on bootup if it's deleted.
Other games which may install it include Unreal Tournament 2003 (possibly only before the patch which removes the need to keep the CD in while playing), Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Nascar Racing 2003, Diablo 2, and quite probably some non-game software.
The latest anonymous comment suggests creating a directory with the same name as the file in order to prevent it coming back. Cunning!
