Friday 19 November 2010

just the one

This last weekend's weigh in was a little disappointing.

Well, I say that. Basically, I'd lost 1 pound.

The upside of this is of course that I've lost more weight and in my current situation all weight loss is good. The downside is that it's only 1 pound. And if I'm going to hit my target I need to be loosing more than 1 pound a week. Indeed, I need to be loosing about 2 or 3 pounds a week.

Now to be totally fair when we get to Christmas the possibility of doing plenty of walking opens up, although of course that may be offset by the excess consumption that Chrimbo gives rise to. I could take a stern view and not give in to that excess, but I have to be sensible here.

If I completely avoid eating and drinking and having fun, that will likely make me feel a bit miserable and could easily trigger a negative effect. The worst thing would be to go off the diet completely, so I think it's far better to have a few days where I enjoy the excess (Chrimbo weekend with the family and New Year's eve are the most obvious) and then I can do normal diet on the other days.

Not sure I've got any spectacular plans this weekend coming.

I'm kind of thinking of having a normal quiet weekend. The last few weekends have been rather busy, so I think having a more normal, boring one will be good. That includes ignoring the whole PC thing.

Thursday 18 November 2010

more on the PC

So yes, I was getting loads of error messages which suggested RAM, but running Memtest 86 showed up no problems.

There's another testing tool called Prime 95. This can be run in what's called a torture test and it's a way of testing a mix of things. You can do three test, which test the CPU and RAM to a greater or lesser extent.

Running this the machine completely flaked out on all three tests. This actually suggested there might be a power problem, as in the system wasn't getting enough juice. A quick trip to the BIOS revealed that something called Intel Turbo Boost was turned on by default.

This is meant to increase the clock speed of your CPU with no effort, but often overclocking requires more power, so I thought maybe that was the problem and I turned it off. Doing so meant that Prime95 now passed two of the tests, but the third still failed. This third test was one that mainly tested RAM.

But given Memtest 86 had passed I was now thinking that the mobo/PSU combo couldn't supply enough juice to run all four sticks of RAM. So last week I took the brave decision of buying a new mobo (it's actually about the most expensive you can buy) and a new, high quality 1,000W PSU.

This last weekend I rebuilt the system with this new mobo and PSU and the initial results were good. I spent most all of Saturday building the system, installing Windows 7 and all the updates (this was the bit on the previous system that was a crash-fest of epic proportions) and then playing Anno 1404 and CoD: Black Ops with not a single crash.

But then on Sunday, it wasn't happy. However, I checked the RAM modules and one of them was definitely slightly loose (I'd touched them the day before after I'd shut down to see how hot they'd got). So, I pushed it back in and the machine ran fine all day.

But then I switched it on this last Monday evening and last night and it initially seemed to be having the same problems.

Actually, I should note I'm skipping a point here. See, the weird thing about the BSODs is that they really only occurred from what's known as cold boot - literally booting up after the machine has been switched off for a good while and has gone cold.

And that was one of the problems I've been having working out what's wrong. See, I'd boot it up, it'd crash and then I'd start investigating. However, as I'd do more testing (swapping the RAM modules, for example) the system would no longer be booting from cold, so the BSODs would clear up.

But also there's another aspect there I mentioned - swapping out the RAM modules. See, the weirdest thing is that the problems on Monday and last night were simply solved by me pushing on the RAM modules. Now they weren't loose that I could tell, but I applied some pressure to them and the machine was totally fine after that.

It's almost like as one or more of the RAM modules cool down they become slightly loose in the slots and so as they warm up from use they expand a little and then when I reseat them ever so slightly by applying pressure they then run fine.

To me, this seems like a bonkers explanation, but it's the best I've got. It also suggest I've spent a lot of additional cash on a mobo and PSU when perhaps the RAM really is the culprit. Problem is, I'm still not sure. See, a complicating factor is that the memory controller is actually located on the CPU.

So it could be the processor and my bizarre conclusion above is simple coincidence.

Wednesday 17 November 2010

ai

The weekends DVD was AI, which was directed by Steven Spielberg, but was actually pretty much developed by the late, great Stanley Kubrick.

And I have to confess I found it to be a bit of a mixed bag.

The AI of the title is of course Artificial Intelligence. Specifically, he film is set in a future where the Poles melted and bits of the world sunk into the water. This triggered a bit of a global disaster and as a result people in the western world can only have children if they get a license to do so.

However, technology has also advanced dramatically and robots (it's odd that the film never uses the word android, which is the common name for a humanoid robot, but does the Japanese term Mecha) now look and pretty much act like humans. It's never really said, but the feeling I got was that labour is therefore cheap and easy, presumably supporting the reduced human population levels.

Anyway, these humanoid robots are perfect except in one regard - they're not capable of feeling emotion. Except that's where the story really starts - one of the companies is just on the cusp of building an actual feeling robot.

The niche this fits into seems to fit into is that of children - childless couples can buy one f these feeling robots that, a bit like a newborn chick, will implant on the parents and be capable of feeling love and other emotions like a real child would.

This of course opens up a huge minefield of potential problems and issues and it's these that the film explores. In particular, the first child developed is given to a couple whose son is crippled and kept in cryo stasis as they can't heal him. Only of course they do, so now the couple have their robot boy, but also their real boy.

The grand parallel of the film is Pinocchio - the wooden boy who wanted to become real. But there are also a lot of complicated issues that are explore din the film. So you have a section where those who have reacted against the robots destroying them at a 'flesh fayre'. Then you have a support character who is essentially a gigolo robot. And all the while you've got a robot who is exploring and coming to terms with his new emotions and what the implications of those are.

And as far as that film went I thought it was really good. There's a genuine attempt to explore the complex issues and the circumstances and their conclusions.

But then when you get to the last half hour of the film it takes what I can only really describe as a sharp sideways turn.

I won't spoil it in case you haven't seen it, but it really is a little odd.

And I was rather conflicted. The problem was that, logically, it did sort of work, but it also opened up all sorts of other questions that never really get answered. It also doesn't hang together as well from a scientific point of view where the earlier part of the film does.

But what's worse is it gives an ending that I found somewhat touching, but also ultimately unsatisfying.

Tuesday 16 November 2010

pc building woes

I've been unsure about posting about this for the last few weeks.

The reason I was telling myself was that I was afraid I might curse myself, as I kept thinking I'd solved the problem and then finding myself. So I didn't want to find what I thought was the final solution, but then the "yay" post caused it to fail.

This, of course, is superstition. It also isn't true. My fear was mainly of embarrassment - "yay, I've fixed it" followed by "no, I haven't." But then I realised I could write the post as a "I'm still trying to fix it" because I still am.

Anyway, a while back I think I mentioned how I was building a new PC. The reason was that the newest version of Civilization - Civ5 was coming out. No, that's not right. The excuse was that Civ5 was coming out. The reason is because I'm a huge nerd who isn't very sensible with his money.

The point is that I bought a load of new computer kit and built myself a new PC. The specs for the PC were:

  • 850W power supply
  • Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3 motherboard
  • Intel 2.8GHz socket 1156 Quad-core Processor
  • 4 lots of 2gb 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM
  • 150gb SATA2 Hard Drive
  • ATI HD5970 Graphics Card (this is a dual GPU graphics card)
  • Windows 7 Pro 64bit

I had a Dickens of a time with a case to put it all in as I ordered a really swanky one, but it turned out that the graphics card was an absolute monster and it simply didn't fit. The case I use for my then current games machine was actually an oversized one, so I ended up doing all sorts of switching over.

So yeah, I put together the machine and then started the process of loading on Windows7. And that's when the problems started.

See, as windows was loading, there was an error. The error message wasn't hugely helpful, but a Google search suggested that there'd probably been some sort of copying error from the CD into either memory or RAM. This seemed very odd and what was more worrying was that restarting everything and giving it another go kept producing the same error.

But it was late when I was doing it, so I left it and tried again on another day. And that time it worked. But, when I finally got into windows proper, the real problems started. Basically, every so often the machine would crash. What's more it was a proper full-on crash - what's known as a Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD.

But weirdly, every time it crashed it gave the same error message of a "Memory Management" error. This gave the initial impression it was the RAM, but a search of the error codes online was inconclusive, because although other people had the same codes, the meaning of them was not explained by Microsoft.

But it seemed like RAM, so I downloaded something called Memtest 86. This runs from a CD and test your RAM by sending it binary codes and checking the accuracy of what comes back. Now because I had 4 sticks, the best thing to do was to run each stick during the day while I was at work and see which one failed.

Only none of them failed. I even tried slotting all of them in and running them all and that still didn't produce any errors.

So what the hell was wrong?

This post is already quite long, so I'll pick up on another day.

pc building woes

I've been unsure about posting about this for the last few weeks.

The reason I was telling myself was that I was afraid I might curse myself, as I kept thinking I'd solved the problem and then finding myself. So I didn't want to find what I thought was the final solution, but then the "yay" post caused it to fail.

This, of course, is superstition. It also isn't true. My fear was mainly of embarrassment - "yay, I've fixed it" followed by "no, I haven't." But then I realised I could write the post as a "I'm still trying to fix it" because I still am.

Anyway, a while back I think I mentioned how I was building a new PC. The reason was that the newest version of Civilization - Civ5 was coming out. No, that's not right. The excuse was that Civ5 was coming out. The reason is because I'm a huge nerd who isn't very sensible with his money.

The point is that I bought a load of new computer kit and built myself a new PC. The specs for the PC were:

  • 850W power supply
  • Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3 motherboard
  • Intel 2.8GHz socket 1156 Quad-core Processor
  • 4 lots of 2gb 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM
  • 150gb SATA2 Hard Drive
  • ATI HD5970 Graphics Card (this is a dual GPU graphics card)
  • Windows 7 Pro 64bit

I had a Dickens of a time with a case to put it all in as I ordered a really swanky one, but it turned out that the graphics card was an absolute monster and it simply didn't fit. The case I use for my then current games machine was actually an oversized one, so I ended up doing all sorts of switching over.

So yeah, I put together the machine and then started the process of loading on Windows7. And that's when the problems started.

See, as windows was loading, there was an error. The error message wasn't hugely helpful, but a Google search suggested that there'd probably been some sort of copying error from the CD into either memory or RAM. This seemed very odd and what was more worrying was that restarting everything and giving it another go kept producing the same error.

But it was late when I was doing it, so I left it and tried again on another day. And that time it worked. But, when I finally got into windows proper, the real problems started. Basically, every so often the machine would crash. What's more it was a proper full-on crash - what's known as a Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD.

But weirdly, every time it crashed it gave the same error message of a "Memory Management" error. This gave the initial impression it was the RAM, but a search of the error codes online was inconclusive, because although other people had the same codes, the meaning of them was not explained by Microsoft.

But it seemed like RAM, so I downloaded something called Memtest 86. This runs from a CD and test your RAM by sending it binary codes and checking the accuracy of what comes back. Now because I had 4 sticks, the best thing to do was to run each stick during the day while I was at work and see which one failed.

Only none of them failed. I even tried slotting all of them in and running them all and that still didn't produce any errors.

So what the hell was wrong?

This post is already quite long, so I'll pick up on another day.

Monday 15 November 2010

thank you, come again

So, it's all over.

The 2010 Formula 1 season has finished, with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix this last Sunday. And the winner was Sebastian Vettel, who also managed to take something of a surprise World Championship title with it.

I say something of a shock, because Vettel was pretty much an outside bet. In order to take the title, going into the race he had to win, with Alonso and Webber getting poor results. In qualifying Alonso ended up third and Webber a poor fifth. That meant it seemed really likely Alonso would take the title.

But, on the very first lap Michael Schumacher spun and ended up in a bit of a scary accident where one of the Force India's ran up the side of his car. This meant there was a long safety car period and some of the lower down drivers took the opportunity to pit.

Once the race was back under way, Webber came in for tyres after a few laps, because his seemed to be going off and Ferrari covered his decision. But, and here's where things get a complicated, Vettel stayed out and so did Hamilton and Button.

The reason this is complicated was because Alonso and Webber ended up behind Petrov, who had come in for tyres with the safety car. However, Vettel, Hamilton and Button's tyres either weren't that bad or they came back to them, so those three stayed out for ages.

When Hamilton did eventually pit, he ended up behind Kubica who, because he was outside of the top ten, was on the harder compound of tyres and so didn't come in for ages. Vettel was able to time his pit stop so he came out in front of Hamilton. Mclaren tried a similar trick with Button, but it didn't work and he ended up behind Hamilton.

So why were these important? Well, Abu Dhabi kinda typifies the modern bread of circuit, which is to say that overtaking is almost impossible. I mean, you basically ended up with Hamilton and Alonso trapped behind Kubica and Petrov. They were both in Renaults, which have basically been proven to be an inferior car - indeed, the word is that there's been no development of the car for ages.

Of course, the fact that Renault engines are in the Red Bulls inspired some conspiracy theories, but these are clearly rubbish as the Renault car is Renault in name only - the team was bought out last year. No, the problem is that at certain circuits, the combination of the track layout and the almost complete reliance on down force generated by aerodynamics (the wings) means overtaking become impossible.

So you end up with this situation that some circuits are great, with actual chances of overtaking, but others there's no overtaking at all. That means that, as this last Sunday, you're reliant on tactics and other aspects to bring any sort of interest to the race itself.

I mean, if this race had happened earlier in the season, it would have been dull city. The fact that it decided the world championship was all that made it interesting.

So while we've had the best season in ages, we've still had some frankly dull races. Let's hope that some of the changes to the rules proposed for future years - turbos, allowing the use of ground effect and some of the things like KERS make all of the actual races good ones.

Which is to take nothing away from Vettel - well done that man.