Ravy 2011 Pg. 43.

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Ghosts of Vista.

My biggest complaint about C 64 was having to type in that command every time and wait forever for the game to load. Imagine my pleasure with Win 98 at having to just double click on an icon and just go.

Had some difficulty moving from 98 to XP, but most of that was resolved by downloading updated versions of my software. This week I got reminded why I went form XP to 7.

Ubuntu 11: Onerous Ocelot. The great thing about earlier versions of Ubuntu is that even though you had to do some deep digging to get some stuff to work, it was still pretty straight forward. The commands were there in the menus. You might have had to look up what they were, But hell, I could figure it out.

So why do programmers that are way smarter than me do dumb stuff like remove the easily clickable restricted drivers option and the Synaptic Package Manager? Now we have Ubuntu Software Center which was no help what so ever in getting the wireless on my laptop to work. It's always worked before. After about five hours of reading one tutorial and forum post after another I accomplished screwing up the install and having to start form scratch. Then I found some obscure site that I forgot to book mark that had the real instructions. It wasn't Canonical by the way.

Look, I love Linux. It has saved my bacon many times over the years. Mostly due to my own errors. But this was frustrating as hell. If that was pissing me off, think of everybody else that just wants to turn thier computer on and go. Why in the hell should anybody have to type in some long and easily misspelled command line in Terminal, or XTerm, or is it UXTerm?

My dream job would be a tester with hire/fire authority. The only thing I would tell some dumbass programmer that removed the two pixel wide option is fix it. If I get any sass, then your ass is going out the nearest exit. Especially if it's a window that's not exactly on the first floor.

You'd think people learn from Vista.

Said enough on Monday.

Title says it all. Of course, this post will be trapped between two Mondays. Could cause a lot of confusion.

Or as I call it: S.O.P.

Ravy 2011 Pg. 42.

Click Here.

Recently discovered that the upgraded web editor I use has decided to scrunch all the code on a page down to about a couple of lines. Fortunately there is a right click option to "Reformat HTML." Not going to fix everything. Pointless. Too much work to retinker with something that isn't really broken.

But hell.

Why was it necessary to jam all the code together from what had been working fine for the past seven years anyway? Thank a lot Micro$oft.

In other news: Currently working on comic 1800. After about two weeks of messing with stage size and test uploads to YouTube I finally got the third scene done. I was stuck trying to get a five second bit with a carrot topped bikini wearing paranoidal Deutschlandic magic girl to work. I could get it to work fine in its own FLA. But when I copy/pasted the frames over to the actual movie, everything screwed up. Eventually I discovered quite by accident (usually the way) that I needed to click don't replace existing items in the library. (Note: I didn't put that in quotes. I don't want to fact check it because there's the possibility of a crash that would ruin everything I typed out so far. Thanks a lot Adoobie.)

The next part may be a scene from a show about a pill popping doctor that is very similar to a sci-fi movie from the 60's about the future that has long since come to pass, and is best enjoyed while popping pills.

Double checking ones self.

Believe it or not, I do take the time look over my work several times before it is published. Every few weeks I'll reread all the comics waiting in the queue and I'll often catch spelling and graphic errors. Often I'll miss a few and wind up correcting them while placing the comic on the page for publication.

Every few years I'll go through a read over a season and I'll still find mistakes and correct them. (Of course by that time I have forgotten whether or not it was intentional.)

For the blog first I'll usually write everything out in a word processor. Proofread it for spelling, grammer, and fact check. Then copy/paste it over to the blog. Then proofread it again. Then usually the day before I'll take a look and wind up adding in some more or even deleting some.

And of course much later I'll find that I overlooked something still because spill chucks wont cats gamma.

Winning Great with Win 98: Fluxed Capacitors.

No I didn't change my mind about Win 8 and misspelled it in the title.

If you're expecting this to be one of my long drawn out diarrhea of the keyboard sessions with lots of unrelated twists and turns and ultimately ends up with me realizing that what I wanted was in front of my face the whole time making all that work moot, you're right. Let's get started.

A while ago a friend of mine got a butt load of ancient copiers and was tearing them down for the scrap metal. I blundered by and took a look around to see if there was anything worth saving. I saw nothing and told her to make sure to separate out the aluminum. As I was getting ready to leave I stumbled over this:

 

 Cool. "Do you mind if I take it home and look at? If it's good enough I could take it to the auction and sell it for you."

"I was hoping you would. I know nothing about computers."

Skipping ahead to my workspace. I open it up and was surprised to see a couple of SATA ports and a stick 1 GB, 256 GB, and 128 GB of ram. Somebody must have added that ram in at some point. Now I plug everything in and peek through the bios and see a 2.6 Celeron. Nothing fancy but an interesting choice for a computer meant to run some copiers. I leave the bios and note on the post screen the option for a boot menu. Now even more surprising is that I can boot from a USB. Now I'm impressed. For a pretty old machine it has a function my brand newer rig doesn't.

Alas it turns out that hard drive is scrap metal. Throw in another and proceed to find the drivers. Going from HP's home page I drill down until I find the HP Compaq D530 SFF. That page says "Huh? We don't know what that is." You got a picture of it right there! "Huh? We do?" (By the way, I just looked again, it's worse, they won't even show me the page.)

It's Google time. First page is drivers for XP. Good good. But I need drivers for Vista at least. I click the link on the left and am presented with a whole list of OSes. Usually when presented with such a list all I typically get is the drivers for XP and maybe a network update for everybody else. Well not quite, OS/2 had audio drivers. Meanwhile 2000, XP, Vista, and 98 and audio and video drivers.

HOLD IT! You mean this thing has drivers for Windows 98? I have been wanting this for such a long time. I have some old games that won't work on 7. (I've tried DOS Box and it's a real pain in the ass.) Driver for Win 98? Especially on a machine this new. It was probably built in 2004, maybe 2005. I have a couple of machines from the 90's, but they're like bottom of the barrel even then. So I try downloading the drivers and the links are surprisingly good. (By the way, I'm not sure if that website is an actual HP site or a clone of it.) I go to my Windows Museum and grab out a copy of Win 98 SE. (Again, by the way, it has to be SE. I made the mistake of loading up Win 98 and the drivers didn't work.)

Drivers are all loaded up. Things are going great. I decide to keep it for myself. I go back and pay my friend. She wasn't too happy about it. She'd seen computers go for $200. I told her that was one of mine. I also sold one just like it a week later for $20. Minus a ten percent commission. I'm giving you a guaranteed $100. "$100!? Oh I'll definitely take that!
(My words. Hers were more like "(Bleep) YEAH!")

Back home  it's time to load up all those great old games, everything goes to crap. Change out the DVD, ram, reconfigure the PATA setup, (I hope it's not the power supply, it's one of those proprietary ones,) even Lunix wouldn't load up, and lastly I try the CPU. I removed the heat sink and find that 7 out of 10 capacitors are corroded over. This motherboard is crap.

I take the board to another friend's computer store. (My family has put his grandkids through college by now.) He lets me dig though his pile of similar machines. Unfortunately the boards are different and don't have Win 98 drivers. I keep digging and find an unlabeled one with an almost exact motherboard in it. The numbers are different, but hey, it's worth a try.

I am now happily playing Discworld Noir. Let's see if I can get Discworld 1 and 2 loaded. Wait, what's that? They're available on Scumm VM and it works in Win 7?

DAMMIT!