My photos are slowing being destroyed. How? I’m not entirely sure. But I’ve noticed that ever since I upgraded to Vista, my photos have been getting corrupted randomly. I’ll be browsing through them and notice that some have turned funny colors, or have lines through them, or a myriad of other distortions. And I’m not the only one. There’s a whole thread on Microsoft Technet of people complaining about the same problem.

I would bet that Vista is trying to add some kind of information (maybe some kind of tag? a reference to the thumbnail?) to the files and on some it just fouls them up. Really though, it doesn’t matter why, it’s still completely unacceptable to have my precious photos/memories screwed up by a piece of buggy software.  Oh, and it’s not just the photos either.  It seems as though several programs and iso files that I’ve been storing have been getting corrupted.

Also, I don’t know why, but most of my games seem to run a lot slower in Vista then they did with XP. And that’s with Aero turned off and only basic services starting. There’s no reason for it. I do not have a slow machine by any means.

Add to that the fact that while Vista looks nice, things have been shuffled around ridiculously. For example, it takes like 5 clicks and three different screens to get to where you can see your network connections. It only took 1 in XP.

Screw it. When I get home, I’m putting XP back on so I can be happy again.

EDIT:

I’m back in XP and my TF2 framerate went from an average of 25 in Vista to an average of 45…with higher settings even.  I cannot figure that out.

Maybe I’m not the first one to figure this out, but I didn’t find anything when I was googling for an answer yesterday.

So I was trying to do some conditional formatting in Microsoft Reporting Services…in particular, I was trying to change the background color of a cell depending on what the value in that cell was.  I could only find instructions on how to change the color for two possibilities.  I had three possibilities, and needed three colors.

The instructions that I found said to use an expression like this in the background color property for the cell:

=IIF(Fields!Whatever.value=”Yes”,”Green”,”Red”) (If the “Whatever” field contains the value “yes” then make the background green, or else make it red.)

That didn’t work for my three color option, since IIF statements can only do two colors…one color if it’s true, one color if it’s false.  Actually, now that I think about it, I probably could have used another IIF statement for the false value, but oh well, I like this solution more.

What I did was I added a case statement to my SQL query for each color.  It looked like this:

SELECT
CASE Some_Field WHEN ‘Yes’ THEN ‘Green’
WHEN ‘Maybe’ THEN ‘Yellow’
WHEN ‘No’ THEN ‘Red’
ELSE ‘White’
END AS ‘Color’
FROM Some_Table

I then set my background color for the cell in the report to:

=Fields!Color.value

It worked perfect.  I hope someone finds this useful.

I bought some tomato hornworms (a kind of caterpillar) off of the internet to feed my bearded dragon Gus. Here’s a picture of one of the suckers. They’re flippin’ huge.  (The left side of worm is it’s real head.  The other side is a decoy head.)

Now here are the pictures of Gus eating one of these bad boys:

*burp*

This is an awesome deal that’s going on until May 16th perpetually, so if you’ve been needing a copy of Microsoft Office (or if you’ve been using a pirated version and you wish to go legit), this is the time to get it.  You can get Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate edition for $60.  It’s normally $600.  Heck, even the Student and Home edition is $250.

All you need is a .edu email address (alumni .edu addresses work too) and $60.  Go here to buy it: http://www.theultimatesteal.com/

I’ve never been able to use the Linux driver for my RTL 8185 in Ubuntu.  Instead, I’ve used Ndiswrapper with the Windows XP driver.  It works great.

Here’s the download for the XP driver: rtl8185

Once you have that, you’ll want to install NdisWrapper.  Open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

Once you have ndiswrapper installed, unzip the file you downloaded and change your terminal to that directory.  Then install the drivers with these commands:

sudo ndiswrapper -i net8185.inf

sudo ndiswrapper -m

sudo ndiswrapper -mi

sudo ndiswrapper -ma

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

At this point, you should be able to use your wireless card.  If you type “ifconfig” in your terminal, you should see “wlan0″ listed.

This has worked every time for me, so I hope it solves any issues you are having with this card too!

EDIT:

If everytime you reboot, you have to run ‘sudo modprobe ndiswrapper’ command, try adding ndiswrapper to your  /etc/modules file.

To do that:

Open a terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/modules

Add a line and type ndiswrapper

Save and close the file.

Reboot.

I was looking for an easy way to install Pidgin Instant Messenger on Feisty (since it’s not in the repositories) and found a site that has recent Pidgin .DEB’s available for download.

You can get them here.

Click the folder for the newest version, download the file, and double click to install.

From http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=622101

“We pulled a bad drive apart at work this afternoon. It had a nasty rattle to it before we opened it, but we didn’t expect this:”

If you want to install Windows XP on your Gateway MT3418 laptop instead of Vista, you can use the drivers from the Gateway MX3417 laptop.  They’re the same machines, only the MT3418 came with Vista and the MX3714 came with XP.   I successfully installed the MX3417 drivers on my MT3418, and XP is running smoothly.

Here’s a link to the driver page on Gateway’s site.

I just found this link to control web cams in a couple of parks in Eugene, OR.  Geek factor = 9.8.  Check it out.

So I was messing around with the partitions on my laptop the other day trying to install the new version of Ubuntu (7.10, which for some reason refused to run on my laptop) and managed to break whatever it is that tells XP to boot. I kept getting the error “Invalid Device Requested” when selecting XP in Grub. I checked the Grub entry in menu.lst, and checked the partition that XP was installed on, and it looked fine.

Then I realized that I had deleted the first partition on my HD to put the new Ubuntu on…and that partition, while not my Windows XP partition, was an NTFS partition that was some kind of backup/restore partition that Gateway had on there. I think it must have had all the Windows XP boot files on it, because when I looked that my XP partition, it was missing boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect, etc. That would explain why Grub was not seeing it as a bootable disk.

So I read a bit on the intarweb, and saw that a few people were saying that XP’s boot files need to be on the first partition of the disk. I’m not entirely sure that this is true, but to be safe I moved my XP partition to be the first on the disk.  EDIT: I’m not sure if XP has to be the first partition, and if someone else is having this same problem, try sticking the partition number with XP on it into the boot.ini file where it says “partition(1)”. Might save you some time.

I then made a new boot.ini with the following entries (pretty much default):

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect

I then copied the AUTOEXEC.bat, CONFIG.sys, IO.sys, MSDOS.sys, NTDETECT.com, and ntldr from another XP machine to the root of my laptop’s XP partition. I rebooted, and voila! XP booted right up from Grub. (You can also get these files off of the XP CD in the i386 folder.) EDIT: After doing some research, all you *should* need to fix this is NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and a BOOT.ini file.

Post a comment if this works for you.