Terminally Incoherent

Ah the joys of IT work. They never end. Even if you want them too. Even if you pray that they stop, they chase and hunt you down and make you fix stuff. Today I solved the case of a missing DIMM socket. Yes, apparently we lost a socket in one of the Dell laptops. But let me start form the beginning.

Every once in a while (read every hour on the hour) some user calls or walks over to the help desk and cries that his or her computer is slow. It is usually true because spyware and aware tends to be quite resource intensive, and our users are hell bent on installing all of it. And by that I mean they go out of the way to collect new spyware and trojans they don’t have yet. If they find a new piece on the interwebs they go “Oh! I don’t have this one yet!” and they install it. Reimaging their drives is just a temporary measure. Once they are handed in a clean computer, they go straight back to collecting malware with doubled efforts - as if they were trying to rebuild their lost collections.

The only other thing we can do to fix the “my computer is slow” whines is add more memory. It is a simple procedure, and memory is relatively cheap so we often put in extra RAM chips into the computers we reimage so that the users can have more resources to run their mallware. Today someone dropped off a Latitude D520 which according to the specs (and by specs I mean the Dell website) is supposed to be upgradable to 4GB of RAM and has 2 DIMM sockets. Only they couldn’t find the second socket. We had like people standing around and staring at this machine with dumbfounded looks on their faces. I walk over and they show me: the DIMM A socket is not there.

Normally these Dell machines have a little hatch on the back. You loosen up one screw, pop it open and it gives you access to the memory. This machine was a bit different, in that only a single socket labeled DIMM B was present. I even snapped a picture of it with my phone:

I flipped the machine over, booted it up and checked amount of installed memory. It said 1GB and the chip sitting in that exposed DIMM was a 512MB one. CPU-Z confirmed that the mobo had exactly 2 memory slots. Something was amiss here. For a second I wondered if the remaining 512MB is not by some chance soldered into mobo but CPU-Z said that was not the case, so I was relieved. I suggested that maybe the DIMM fell out when they were moving the machine, and sent my minions to check underneath the desks and in the hallway while I worked.

The DIMM socket had to be somewhere on the motherboard. The question was, where exactly was it located. I studied the machine from all sides looking for other access points but found none. It seemed that I will need to take it apart to find out. So I started breaking it down. I snapped off the hinge guard, unscrewed the keyboard, moved it aside and… PEKABOO! I found it:

Do you see it? It is right there, underneath the keyboard. Very odd place to put memory if you ask me. Let me give you a closer look:

Case solved! I’m not sure if this design is present in all Latitude laptops or only in D5xx line. I have a D830 on my desk so I might check if I have the same odd mobo layout. Most of the other machines in the office are Inspirons and a few new Vostros floating around (yeah, the powers that be like Dell a lot) and they all seem to have their both DIMM sockets located on the back, side by side. Which IMHO is the right way to do it. For the D520 replacing both DIMM’s is a two step process that involves removing and re-attaching the keyboard.

Anyways, I figured I’ll share a heart warming story about loosing and finding a DIMM socket.

I run into an interesting networking problem recently. My company is testing a hosted VoIP solution from Packet8. I don’t think I have ever mentioned our adventures with the PhonePeople™ as we call them around the office. This is probably because unlike every single other piece of electronic equipment in the building, the phone system actually predates me and for some unspeakable reason is not one of my responsibilities. The powers that be are trying the rectify this oversight by going VoIP, but in the meantime the phone problems are usually dealt with by the administrative staff. They actually have a history of support tickets dating back 3 or 4 years - for the same problem. Our calls get randomly dropped every once in a while, and sometimes it is impossible to dial out. They send some guy, he fiddles with the phones, moves around some wires and says it is fixed. The issue is so intermittent that it is really hard to challenge them on it - sometimes we go weeks without any problems, but they always come back.

So you can probably see why we are researching alternative phone system. Someone recommended Packet8 to us and we decided to give it a whirl - especially since they give you a free 30 day trial of their service. I was actually quite surprised how easy it was to deploy. You just take out the phone from the box, plug it in, activate it by typing in the MAC address in Packet8’s online control panel, pick a number and you are ready to go. You can set up a fully functional PBX in less than 20 minutes - that is, if you don’t mind using VoIP and having the servers located offsite and managed by a 3^rd party.

We are using the Packet8 6755i phones which are actually very nice:

There is only one problem I have with them: they are not wireless. There is nothing wrong with that per se. In fact, I anticipated that. Still this is an issue since our office is pretty much all wireless. We actually do not own the building and we have no cat 5 running through the walls. Or rather there is but it is not ours and we can’t really use it. In effect our setup looks roughly like this:

I’m omitting bunch of people with laptops who migrate from cube to cube on any given day and I might be missing a workstation or two in there. But roughly this is the network - everything except the servers, and 1 or 2 workstations that are located close to the switch is wireless. The little hub where we have a piece of Ethernet heaven is divided from the rest of the workstations by an area with a rather heavy foot traffic. No way to pull cables there. Shit has to be bridged.

I needed a network bridge device of some sort, which would pick up the Wifi signals from across the hall and allow me to plug in bunch of phones or a switch into it using a regular cat 5 cable. I needed a Wifi to Ethernet bridge. Fortunately these things are not so hard to find.

Initially I was hoping to just use the hardware which I had in the office. There was an old Linksys WRT54G router lying around somewhere. Naturally it did not have a network bridge functionality - that would be way to convenient. I knew that it should be capable of it though - it’s just that Linksys firmware is crippled by default. I figured I would flash it and with the open source, linux based alternative firmware known as dd-wrt. It can make your average chepo router into a high end piece of hardware with more options you could think of. Unfortunately it turned out that I have one of the “netutered”, easily brickable boxes. It had half the memory that was needed for running dd-wrt and required a whole slew of extra preparatory steps to be made to flash it with the stripped down version of the firmware. There is a big warning on the wiki that the chance of bricking the device is actually much higher than the chance of actually flashing it. They advise against even trying and recommend investing in a version of the router which is not crippled.

So I gave up the WRT54G and decided to pick up something that would work out of the box without additional labor. Enter Linksys WET200:

It is actually a designated bridge which was pretty much designed and built for providing Wifi to Ethernet interface that I needed. Setting it up was a cinch - I simply needed to plug it into a spare laptop, set it up with a static IP and point my the browser at 192.168.1.226. You can actually change that once you log in for the first time and put the thing in the correct subnet. Setting up the bridge took literally seconds - all I had to do was to click on Site Survey, pick my SSID from the list, and type in the WPA encryption key. That was it! I was able to just plop it on the other side of the office, and plug 4 of the VoIP phones into it like this:

Packet8 doesn’t really support this sort of thing. They actually warned me that this may not work, but so far we haven’t had any trouble with reception or lag. If things hold up and the phones work fine across the wireless bridge we will likely switch over to the VoIP system over the next month or two. The quality of service over Wifi will be our deciding factor.

If you need a Wifi to Ethernet bridge WET200 is a really decent investment. It is a no frill’s device, aimed at business networks so setup is clean and without any user-friendly bullshit. It works with both B and G networks and does WEP, WPA and WPA2. You have 4 general purpose ports on the back and 1 special purpose port you can use for powering the device if you have PoE setup in your office. I don’t, and I actually never seen it used - fortunately the bridge comes with a regular power adapter that you can plug into the wall as well. It will cost you a little over $100 at most retailers so it is a bit more expensive than your average lower end router (like the WRT54G). But it works out of the box and you are not voiding the warranty by flashing it with 3rd party firmware which should be more than enough to justify the purchase to your boss.

We have bunch of old broken laptops lying around at work. Most of them are unusable, but I don’t like to throw them out because they are a great resource of spare parts. Sometimes I’m able to dig in that pile and use stuff like display hinges, bezels, arm rests, touch pads and etc to quickly fix some of the older machines that are still floating around. Naturally all these machines have been stripped out of memory, hard drives and CPU’s long time ago. One thing that doesn’t get replaced that often are LCD’s. There is probably 6 or 7 displays like the one below in that pile.

They are just sitting there and not doing anything constructive, so I started thinking about putting them to a good use. There is another problem I often face - lack of spare monitors. Every time someone brings in a desktop for service we have to go an pull a monitor from one of the currently unused machines available in the office. Which is not the end of the world, since I usually have some flat surface available to set it all up.

Sometimes however a friend or relative brings their machine to my house asking for help. This is where the fun begins. I do have a spare CRT up in the attic that I keep for just hat occasion. What I don’t have is space. When I’m fixing someone’s computer you will usually see a scene of pure mayhem on the floor of my room:

I’m usually forced to squeeze the old CRT, the desktop, the keyboard and mouse in the tiny little amount of free space between the bed and the TV, and essentially sit with my back wedged against my desk, occasionally turning around to Google something on my desktop in the back. I could buy a LCD screen, but even a tiny 15″ cheepo sells for almost $200 at neweg - which seems a bit high for something that I would use twice a year, and then stash in the attic or at the bottom of some closet.

This is where the two needs begin to merge: my need to do something useful with the spare laptop LCD’s and my need for ultra-small portable LCD screen. I figured that if I could find an Laptop LCD to VGA adapter I would be all set. Or not…

It turns out that I’m not the only person who had this brilliant idea. Unfortunately, it turns out that it is not as easy as one might think. The laptop LCD has a digital output that is designed to pin into a controller circuit which in turn talks to the video card. These things are mostly proprietary, not standardized and not widely available. The difficult part is figuring out exactly what kind of controller circuit do you need, then locating and ordering one. It’s definitely possible though.

For example, I have found this blog describing the process. Unfortunately it is very light on technical details to the point of being relatively useless. It’s more or less photographic proof that it is possible, but not much more:

The last entry is particularly discouraging - apparently the merchant who was supplying the circuits used in the example no longer produces them, and is currently out of stock.

A slightly more informative but less complete post can be found on the mp3car forum. They actually post a link to a vendor who seems to have quite a few different models for sale. There are two caveats though - the vendor seems to be located in Europe, and they only sell in bulk (100 units of more) which makes them useless as a resource. I found few others but none of them was really selling anything online.

Then I remembered a piece of old internet wisdom - if it exist, someone is probably selling it on ebay. Believe it or not, I found some interesting looking kits for sale. Here is a closeup pic of one of them:

It is a TFT LCD controller with a back light inverter, which seems to be exactly what I would need. It also looks astonishingly simillar to what the dude in the first blog I linked to was using. Good news is they seem to be selling for $35 + shipping and handling (which will probably be another $30 or more knowing these types of ebay stores). So I’m tempted. It could work, provided that my LCD is one of the models supported by this device and that there are no funky drivers required to actually run this thing.

Anyone ever did something like that? Should I do it? It could make for a nice, space saving, ultra portable monitor, provided that I could find a semi-decent frame to mount the circuit and LCD…

It appears that I was dead wrong about the winner of the HD Format war. Since Toshiba officially declared stopping production of HD-DVD players on Tuesday it seems that Blu-Ray is going to move in as a market leader. It seems that we were all wrong - remember the HD-DVD vs BluRay poll. Yeah, we all got fooled. Oh, and btw, since my cousin is blaming me for making her waste money on the loosing technology, I am in turn blaming you guys and I have that poll to prove that you have given me the wrong advice.

Why did we pick the looser back then? I think we looked at this assuming the choice will be made by customers, not the movie studios. My logic went like this: HD-DVD is cheaper, and so more accessible. Early adopters will likely go with the less expensive technology and will start building their collections in that format. BluRay being the high end, more expensive choice will have a smaller initial user base, and a slower uptake. I assumed movie studios will go with the flow of the market and support whichever platform gives them access to a bigger chunk of the market. Logically it worked out.

But I forgot that free market rules do not apply when you are dealing with extortion racket. Everyone loves Hollywood movies, and Hollywood has practical monopoly on them. They don’t really need to follow the market on this one. As long as enough big studios throw their weight behind some format, because it has “moar DRM” this format will become the de-facto standard. It’s that simple. It doesn’t really matter how many people buy HD-DVD - if there is no good movies coming out in that format because the studios decided not to support it, then it will die a natural death sooner or later.

Now that I think about it, it figures that overwhelming number of big studios picked Sony. After all, Sony is also involved in the content distribution racket. Who can understand Hollywoods silly DRM needs better than the company that already illustrated blatant disregard for both their customers and talent by silently installing rootkits onto millions of systems worldwide as means of copy protection. Sony is their people. How come I didn’t see it earlier. Sigh, I guess hindsight is always 20/20.

I have noticed that prices of the HD-DVD hardware has already plummeted down and will likely continue to do so. When I checked last night, Wallmart was selling some of the cheaper Tochiba models a little bit over a $100 which is almost half of what they were when I was last shopping for HD players few months ago. Retailers are probably going to slash the prices very drastically to sell as many of the now obsolete equipment before people catch onto this. Blu Ray players are still comfortably in the $400 range.

I guess the new question is, is it better to buy the slightly more expensive PS3 or a standalone Blu Ray player? Which one would you get?

As you may know, I got the Microsoft Sidewinder Mouse for Christmas. Ever since I inherited Logitech VX Revolution at work I caught the fancy mouse bug. I figured that since I spend inordinate amounts of time at my computer, I might as well have high quality mouse and keyboard. So Sidewinder and Logitech G9 ended up on my list.

Sidewinder is a very nice mouse, but I have one small complaint. It’s a little bit to long. I don’t know - maybe I have small hands or perhaps I’m just used to smaller mice but something, but if I loosely grip it I can barely reach the scroll wheel and the thumb buttons. I never actually had this problem with any mouse before. In fact when I unpacked it at the Christmas table several people remarked that it was a little on the large side. So it’s not just me.

By my calculation, if they shaved off a half an inch it would be a perfect fit. I’m not saying it’s uncomfortable - it’s just that it gets some getting used to it - and I usually have to slightly shift my hand to go from using the scroll wheel to reach the thumb buttons unless I grip it just right.

First thing you notice when you get this mouse is the set of weights and spare sliders that come in the box with it. Sidewinder ships with three 10 gram weights and one 5 gram weight that you can use to give it just the right feel. You can easily add up to 30 grams of weight to the device just by pulling the snap in attachment and placing appropriate weights in the 3 available slots. I experimented with different setups and the max weight seemed a bit to much. I currently have 5 gram inside and it feels about right, but I’m still messing around with it. The difference is very subtle, but it’s nice to have that fine degree of control over the way your mouse glides. It almost makes up for the unusual length.

Another striking feature of this mouse is the LED which actually works. It usually displays your current sensitivity setting. By default you can switch between 2000 dpi, 800 dpi and 400 dpi settings using the 3 buttons on the top of the mouse. On the highest setting is perfect if you need to move your mouse from edge to edge in quick strokes. In this mode you hardly ever need to pick up the mouse but it’s easy to overshoot your targets. On the lowest setting you get slow deliberate movements. This mode is great for work requiring accuracy - for example retouching images pixel by pixel on high zoom setting.

I upped the middle mode up to 1000 dpi using the Intelisense software, and here is the kicker: the mouse detected that change and displays the correct dpi value as configured in software. Awesome!

The extra buttons are great. The dpi switches are easily accessible right below the scroll wheel. However, they are positioned in such a way that it is almost impossible to hit them by accident. The thumb buttons are perfect. I hardly ever use the thumb buttons on my VX Revolution because of the weird position. In Sidewinder they are easy to find even without looking, and they give you a pleasant click when you press them.

All the buttons are configurable with the Intelisense software which can be conveniently called up using the Sidewinder logo button located on the “butt” of the mouse. It’s funny, since your hand is usually resting on top of that button, but it is virtually impossible to depress it with your palm or ball of your hand. The configuration screen is very simple and intuitive:

You can reconfigure actions for all 5 standard buttons and the scroll wheel. The sensitivity switches and the logo button can’t be reset, but I don’t think I would want to do that anyway. There are plenty of presets to choose from - ranging from the usual back and forward browser keys to fancy built in features such as the Instant Viewer which is a poor man’s Expose clone:

If you don’t like any of the preset options you can us the macro feature which lets you bind a given button to a series of actions. You can essentially configure any chain of keystrokes, with pauses, modifiers and etc. The macro editor is pretty straightforward and user friendly:

What is even better is that you can configure buttons on a per-application basis. This is great news for me as a gamer since I can bind the thumb buttons to different key combinations for every game. In fact, the Sidewinder promo materials tout it as the ultimate gaming mouse and the brochure included in the box talks at length about the “Quick Turn” feature. Naturally it doesn’t work out of the box - you actually have to choose on the intelisense config screen before you start the game. Then, you have to configure it in the game by pressing and holding the bound button, and doing 360 degree turn. Once you do that and release the button a quick stroke will do a half turn which should swing you around 180 degrees. It’s a nice feature but nothing spectacular.

One thing that really seemed odd to me was that the drivers were not included in the box - I actually had to go and download them from the MS site. The mouse worked fine out of the box on WinXP but there was no way to really configure the extra buttons or change the dpi presets.

Here is a show stopper though - when my machine crashed and I booted Knoppix the sidewinder went completely dead. I had to switch back to my old Microsoft Optical USB Mouse to actually back up my data. Of course this was an older (last year or so) Knoppix release so maybe things have improved. I haven’t tried this mouse with Ubuntu or any recent live CD yet. But be warned - Sidewinder is not really a standard mouse and Linux support might be spotty. If you are a Linux user I would probably recommend one of the fancy Logitech mice that is supported by the Btnx package.

Would I recommend it? Yes, it’s a great mouse. If you have big hands, you are going to fucking love this one my friend. If not, you will still appreciate the slick design, the weight system, the dpi switching and the great tactile response you get from the thumb buttons and the scroll wheel. The size is really not a huge issue, and I hardly even notice it anymore. So yes, I think it’s money well spent - unless you are a linux user, a person with very small hands/short fingers or a lefty. It’s actually not the worst mouse to use left handed (it doesn’t have that heavy slant and profiled thumb groove like some other mice) but the thumb buttons are hard to press with your pinky.