Zxian.org

Phew… long time no post.

2009-09-15T21:51:30Z

Man… it’s been a while since I wrote anything here. I’ll try to keep things going more often, even if it just is a blurb here and there. Here’s a list of the things that have happened since I last posted:

Almost done my research for my masters. Only a few more months until I’m done!
Dave Matthews Band concert at the Gorge! Amazing times with friends. Good music, lots of raw dogging (if you weren’t there, don’t ask), and plenty of empty Corona bottles.
Upgraded the main video card in my desktop to an XFX ATI 4890 (900Mhz core, 3.9Ghz Mem). This thing screams…
Upgraded my desktop and netbook to Win7 RTM. This is a legit final build copy (I’ll be buying my licenses on Oct 22), and it’s awesome. There’s a couple of small quirks when it comes to UltraMon and some other apps, but those will be sorted out soon enough.
I became the guild master of our guild in World of Warcraft (I’ve been playing for about a year now). Herding cats is fun!!

I think that should do it for now. Like I said, there will be more frequent updates in the future. =)

Getting with the times…

2009-01-13T21:45:08Z

So… I’ve got quite a few computers (I need to update the “My Computers” page soon) that are used for various purposes. Eclipse is my main computer at home, and the biggest beast of them all. A few months back, I upgraded the video cards and installed Vista on it. After a couple of days of figuring out my way around the OS, I really liked it, and was somewhat depressed every time I had to go back to an XP system.

I had also built a media center a while back that would double as a downloading machine for my girlfriend and her roommates. Because of the way their house was setup, running ethernet to all the rooms was simply impossible, so everyone was on wireless. Everyone in the house also tends to download a lot of stuff. Let’s just say Bit Torrent and wireless don’t always like each other. It ultimately brought the network speeds to a crawl, so the media center was setup with a single copy of uTorrent installed. There were a number of bugs with the initial setup that were just bothering me, so last Friday night I installed Vista Ultimate x64 on the machine. All I have to say is that Vista MCE is glorious.

My workstation at UBC was the last Vista capable system I own that hadn’t been upgraded. That all changed this morning, and I’m now writing this from a Vista Business x64 system. Let’s just say, I’ll probably never move back to XP.

Hiding Microsoft SyncToyCmd for backups

2009-01-09T17:44:38Z

The more work I do, the more paranoid I become of possibly losing it all. I’ve got a pretty elaborate hardware setup in terms of disk storage, but I was lacking a simple, functional tool to do the backups of the data on a regular basis. I looked at Microsoft SyncToy for the backups, and it seems to do everything I need/want it to, except for one - scheduling. Their help documentation tells you to use their command-line application and the built in scheduler. This seems to do the trick, but there was one snag - it shows the ugly command prompt. This simply wouldn’t do….

I fired up Visual Studio 2008 and started writing a simple little .NET app to act as a wrapper for the command-line window. At the moment, it just runs all of your folder pairs, but I’ll be expanding the command line parsing to search for specific pairs. You’ll need the .NET Framework 2.0 installed for the software to work. Simply extract the file into the SyncToy directory, follow the help instructions for setting the scheduled task, but replace the program path with the following:

“C:\Program Files\SyncToy\SyncToyHidden.exe” /hide /quiet

Obviously you’ll have to replace the path with the one that’s relevant to your system.

Please let me know if anyone runs into any troubles with the software.

Download Link

P.S. Thanks to jcarle for the help with the command line switches.

Snow - How do I love you? Let me count the ways…

2008-12-22T02:59:41Z

Ah snow… how I love you. You make things pretty and romantic. You make it possible for me to go skiing. You give me excuses to stay in all day and do nothing but drink hot chocolate and sit infront of the proverbial fire (aka, TV).

And yet… I hate you. You make drivers in Vancouver turn into complete and utter morons with no sense of the word “grip”.

EEE 1000 and upgrades

2008-12-22T02:49:09Z

A little over a month ago I sold my trusty Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop to a family friend since I found that I was basically just using it for movies and nothing else. However, I still needed some sort of mobile computer for email and basic web browsing. On my list of possibilities were one of the netbooks, a smartphone, or an iPhone. After using my friend’s iPhone now and then, and looking at the web capabilities of most smartphones out there, I decided that a netbook was probably my best option. The next question was, as often is the case, which one?

The original ASUS EEE models (700/701) only came with a 4GB flash drive for the system files. Since there was the chance that I’d be running something more than just plain Windows and IE, I needed a model that had a proper sized hard drive. Of the choices on the market at the time, the EEE 1000H seemed like the best fit. For $450 on sale I really couldn’t complain.

The basic package was great. 10″ screen, 1GB DDR2-667, 160GB 5400RPM hard drive, and 5 hours of battery life (actually using the thing). However, there were times that 2GB of RAM would be nice, and the hard drive was a little sluggish for my tastes (I’m impatient). After $30 for a 2GB stick of RAM and $90 for a Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB drive - the difference is clearly noticable.

While I was at Anitec the other day, I also noticed that they had a Western Digital Blue 500GB drive on sale. I’ve had times where my 160GB external just doesn’t cut it, so having the massive portable storage will come in handy.