Technically minded Weblog

Haven’t noticed that, but it seems that our email provider (hotmail) now has free SMTP and POP3 available.
Thanks to that, we can get emails quicker, without having to go to live mail website.
Now text-only mails work fine too, and no ads or links are added to them.
Along with free MX, Hotmail has become a great service, much better than the crappy webspace.de one we were using.

Ok, now the Update part. I bought a new DVD burner, to replace a DVD/CD-RW combo drive (which is already 5 years old), new drive works well.
The IDE-SATA HDD to USB cable (package with everything that was it it) was returned to the shop for a replacement. Haven’t got a reply yet, I hope it arrives in 1-2 days.
I don’t think I will use the included PSU much, because most of those cheap ass supplies bundled with connectors are crappy. They do work (for a while), but I want them not to only work, but to work reliably (eg. to not smoke or explode after just a few uses) and cause no damage do the drives they are powering.
I have an old (circa. 1996) 100W supply that works well powering the HDDs I used with this connector. But it’s too big to carry around just to power a single drive.
Ok, that’s all for today.

Bought a connector to convert internal harddrives to external. Tested it with 4 untested old hard disks (2x 1.2GB Quantums, 1x 6.48GB Fujitsu, 1×3.2GB Seagate Medalist).
Fujitsu drive was totally dead, Both Quantums worked but one was loud as hell and other had bad sectors. The only more or less useful drive was Seagate. Filled it with MP3 files and connected to a music player (which has USB port) to use as a storage for MP3 files.
The bad thing is that someone has opened the box where the IDE to USB connector was before I received it, because there was a cord to connect PSU to a wall socket, but the PSU itself was missing (I called the shop where I ordered the IDE2USB cable and they told me to return the box for a replacement). Had to power the harddrives using an old 100W Delta PSU.
The cable seems to work with CD/DVD drives too (at least my old LG DVD/CDRW drive worked with jumper set to Slave) although manual that came with the cable does not mention CD/DVD drive support.
I will probably buy a cheap internal DVD drive (I often have to reinstall OS for someone and it is burned onto a DVD and not all of PC I service have an DVD drive, but most newer PCs should be able to boot from USB, unless PC is a dinosaur or some laptop with no boot through USB) to use as external drive.
OK, I see that I’m making a long story out of this post, so that’s all for now.

I’ve had an unused old Pentium 4 processor salvaged from a dead motherboard (bad capacitors) for a while. The processor was the only useful part of that dead system.
I have no socket 478 board to test the processor. I’ve found one board which would work with my old Pentium 4 CPU. This board also has DDR2, so I have 1GB RAM for it (removed from my PC, replaced by 2x2GB modules), PCI-EX slot and onboard video (so videocard not required). That would be a nice office system to replace the uber-old Celeron 600mhz based PC (That will most likely be converted to a small server).
However, I can’t buy any hardware until I know that the CPU is not trash (bad capacitors on motherboards often kill CPU). I hope it is not. It’s old, but it is more than enough for office PC.
I will probably find a board to test that CPU, wait for more blog updates.
OK, enough for now.

Well, at least I found some time to update my blog.
Installed Win 7 beta to my old secondary PC (Athlon 2.1G, 1GB ram, Radeon 9550 agp) and it runs fine, not as fast as XP, but fine. I like it. Has all features found in Vista (even more, there’s dx11, too bad I can’t use it), but uses less memory and runs great even on my older secondary PC.
But the video started misbehaving when I tried to play 3d games today. It’s strange because these games worked fine on Win 7 when I last played them.
I hope this is not hardware related. I don’t want to spend any more money for upgrading that old PC.
I don’t want to make a long story out of this post, so that’s all for now.

Ok, our email service is now “one way”. SMTP dead (got to work once, but it seems to either not respond at all or do it REALLY slow, like if it’s overloaded), POP3 seems okay (but VERY slow to respond too). So we can only receive and can not send.
Created a .co.cc free domain, ddscentral.co.cc, added email using hotmail MX server.
It seems that webspace.de servers are crappy as an email solution.
Our new email address looks the same except .co.cc instead of .net.tc.
P.S.: I got a legit notification about winning something on some website. Checked the site, found out that the mail was most likely legit. It requested some of my contact info (eg. nickname, email). Tried to reply with that info but it seems that webspace smtp refused to work so my mail did not arrive on time.
I think I’ve had enough of their crappy email service.
I’m going to switch to out .co.cc email which uses hotmail MX servers. It does not have SMTP but I do not have to worry that emails I try to send will not be sent.
P.S.: Win7 beta still offline.

Ok, I might have to stay online for the whole night tonight because of the following:
MS released a public beta for Windows 7.
But due to server overloads, Beta is offline.
I migh have to stay online for the whole night to get the beta key.
Can’t wait to try out the new Windows. I wonder if it’s possible to get 2 working keys… (I need one copy for VMWare and maybe one to run directly on hardware).
Maybe will post an update tomorrow if there are any news.

Bought myself a 640 GB harddrive for my PC (I now have ~2TB space) and 8GB flash for my Sansa MP3. As always, was too lazy to update this blog.
Nothing too special about Christmas holidays. They were good.
The new year party was really good. Lot of fireworks as always.
I’m too tired to type so I’m going to bed. It’s 5:19am now… (GMT+2)
Happy new year 2009 everyone !!! (jeez, how fast time flows)

Oh, I love winter holidays. They’re also a good chance to buy something new (this time – for my PC).
Will add an additional 500GB or 750GB hard disk to stop these annoying “Low disk space” messages from appearing. I’m running out of things to delete.
That’s all for now.
Will update the blog during holidays.

Found a nice way to make those uber large (and not so large) applications portable. ThinApp is a nice solution for making applications portable. Too bad it doesn’t support apps using their own drivers.
I need to make a little program in Maple (large math tool suite), but I dunno if my program will work on a very old version of Maple, on which I’m supposed to test/demonstrate it, so I made Maple portable. Now it can run directly from my USB flash in case if I need it. The funny thing that Maple is about 600meg in size when installed, portable version is only 167meg.
Maybe I will also make my good old Delphi 5 IDE portable, if possible.
Ok, I’m will need a laptop in the future… Because I need to run these all apps somewhere…

Yes, it’s 3:30 am now here, where I live (my gmail account timezone is incorrect)
Haven’t updated my blog for a while, so today I decided to update it.
Trying to get a binary number (of any length, stored in two files, result in file) XOR program in macro assembler. Not that easy as doing the same thing with C, C++ or Delphi. I am supposed to do the task using Turbo Asm, but that would be a programmer’s nightmare (raw assembly, ancient CPU architecture (circa 1989, my old unused Mendocino CPU from 1999 is 10 years newer), so I switched to Masm32. Almost finished, hope it will work.
Also made a small program to open IPTV from my browser. Just enter channel address and VLC will fire up and view my IPTV.
Also installed a bunch of things in one person’s laptop and got rewarded for that.
Also, maybe I found a way to get things shipped to me from USA. Some PC parts are cheaper there. I wonder how much the shipping would cost…
Will try to update this site in december.