The Great Flying Tortoise : General

Ben on vacation

benkaras — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:01:00 GMT

I will be on vacation until mid-December, so it is unlikely that I will make any more posts until then, or even maybe January.

-Ben Karas

From bad to worse - the bus ride home

benkaras — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 06:57:00 GMT

Today started out nice. But midday it started raining heavily and the wind trashed around a lot. Our building had several brown-outs and reset our computers. Seeing how windy it was, I checked online for any potential bridge closures. Fortunately, none of the 20 state highway closures involved the 520 bridge. Yes, 20 highway closures.

So I decide to leave work a little early and get to the bus stop at 4:30. My trip is normally about 40 minutes (I bus/bike from Seattle to Microsoft each day). But the bus is running late and arrives at 4:50. This is understandable when we get to the onramp. The bus driver spent 30 minutes trying to get onto the highway. Yes, 30 minutes on the on-ramp.

She gives up and starts taking surface streets. It's been an hour and we've gone 2 miles. Then the power goes out. So we're on side streets, the highway is backed up, and there are no street or traffic lights which causes a further mess. Yes, a power outage.

Then the bus driver starts cursing and pulls over. At the start of our trip she had lost a contact lense. That's OK because her other eye was OK... until now! With both contact lenses lost to the unlit floor of the bus, we're stuck in heavy traffic on a side street with a blind driver! Yes, a blind driver!

After 15 minutes of searching with flashlights we were able to find her lenses. As we get onto the highway (again), I hear over the radio that there is some kind of police action downtown and that they are detouring buses. Boy am I glad that I get off at the stop before the detour!

So I survived: 20 highway closures, gridlock on SR 520, side streets, a power outage, a blind driver, and police action. And it still only took 2.5 hours.

-Ben Karas

Where's Ben?

benkaras — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:24:00 GMT

I'm really sorry to let this blog go dark. I've been moving apartments and have been remiss in writing entries (or even an explanation!!). I'll get back to regular postings next week.

Save the World... of Warcraft

benkaras — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 22:00:00 GMT

Yup, I'm one of "those" people. I play World of Warcraft to pass the time if I don't have anything else scheduled to do. It's the only game I play right now, so it weighed heavily in my decision to upgrade to Vista. At the time, I was very happy to find that it ran without any troubles immediately after ugprading. But as I played, I discovered and eventually solved two issues:

First, after an hour of playtime, various objects would turn black. This was very annoying and made gameplay difficult. I guessed that someone had discovered this before me and would make a patch available to fix it. Since neither Blizzard nor Microsoft had a patch, I looked to NVidia --- yup, they had an updated set of drivers for my video card. Fixed.

Second, my framerate dropped from my marginal 20 fps to 15 fps. Ouch. The updated drivers didn't fix my framerate, so I looked at my resource usage. My disk is always hammered, but I ruled this out by finding a place in the game where it didn't have to load data. Second, I looked at other processes on the system. No programs were using CPU.

Since I wasn't constrained by CPU or IO, the graphics card must be the issue. On a hunch, I tried turning off Aero Glass (since this uses the graphics card) and my framerate jumped back to its old 20 fps. Now I only use WoW for a fraction of my computer time, so I didn't want to just leave it off. Looking around, I found the compatability tab. Here's what to do:

Right click your WoW shortcut and choose "Properties"
Click the "Compatability" tab
Check the "Disable window composition" tab

Now when I play WoW, Windows will disable the glass effect automatically and restore it when I'm done.

Deductive reasoning FTW! Now if only they'd let me borrow the Sword of 1000 Truths....

-Ben Karas (aka Wristwatch on Medivh)

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vista

benkaras — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 02:54:00 GMT

Today I'd like to share the fearful tale about a Vista upgrade gone horribly wrong and of my fantastic recovery. Based on a true story...

It is a still moonless night when I decide to take the plunge and upgrade my home machine to Windows Vista Ultimate. I've been sweating about this procedure for weeks now; I could lose all my applications should anything go wrong. Worse, I have misplaced all the CDs and registration numbers for my applications. Reinstalling them all would use up energy already destined for other purposes.

The very first thing to do is run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. It gives me a preview of the what is to come later in the night. There is an audio driver and an application that it deems "iffy", but I decide to give Vista a whirl anyway... who needs updated drivers anyway?

So, I plop in the install DVD and click Upgrade. I think I hear thunder in the distance. After a few screens it's chugging away and I go read a book. I've read articles that the install takes a whopping 2 hours (which is of course way too long). But honestly, those are 2 unsupervised hours, and we're talking 5 years worth of programming to stuff on my poor machine.

After 2 hours, I discover my machine in a reboot loop. Something went wrong! Setup didn't complete! Think about the children! This is my worst fear come true.

Here's where things turn around. One of the boot menu options is "Restore previous version of Windows". I select this and pretty soon I am back in Windows XP. Whew! So my applications are safe. I'm not going to lose my data to the setup demons after all. (I'm all smiles now.)

Next, I uninstall the audio driver. It turns out this is tied to my video driver, so now I have unaccelerated video too. Plop goes the DVD and I go to bed. In the morning, Vista not only has installed itself, but it grabbed a new video and audio driver that supports glass. Woot! I win! I log in and all my data is there. My applications are there. My chat programs come up automatically. I get ZERO security prompts. World of Warcraft even works! And now I can blog from home!

Maybe the moon will grace my apartment tomorrow night. :-)

Lessons Learned:

Run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor and keep track of any "iffy" drivers or programs. You may need to uninstall or upgrade them. In fact, you might do this first if you feel up to it.
If an upgrade fails to start, you get the option to go back to XP.
Once you're in Vista land, you feel good.

Say Cheese!

benkaras — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:47:00 GMT

I'm sorry I haven't posted recently. I've been busy with an apartment search, softball games, and numerous other things that eat up the free time I need to write detailed posts about the property system.

For filler, I suppose I'll have to talk about something different -- CHEESE!

I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Therefore, people have often asked if, as a Wisconsinite, do I like cheese? The strange thing is that I didn't eat much cheese growing up and I've grown up cheese illiterate.

So fast forward too many years and I'm still pretty fresh at cheese. Maybe it doesn't help that grocery stores either carry cheddar, or they carry $20/lbs imports. Why can't the US make cheeses other than cheddar anyway?

Well, I can now say that my absolute favorite cheese is Camembert. The silky texture paired with its unique but subtle flavor is absolutely fabulous. Oddly, I don't like Brie at all. But the best thing is, Safeway just started carrying it this week! Go Safeway!

Surprise! My success is your failure

benkaras — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 02:14:00 GMT

Windows APIs often use HRESULTs. Almost every function returns an HRESULT and almost every caller is expected to check it. COM provides a few helpers for these tasks: SUCCEEDED()/FAILED() broadly check for success or for failure; HRESULT_FROM_WIN32() constructures a failure code from a Win32 error code; etc.

There is also a naming convension. Success codes are named FACILITY_S_REASON. Failures are FACILITY_E_REASON. But look out! There lurk amoung the multitude of errors, some that disguise success as failure!

Consider ICancelMethodCalls::TestCancel(). This function is supposed to return RPC_S_CALLPENDING or RPC_E_CALL_CANCELED. So a programmer might think they could simply call

BOOL fContinue = SUCCEEDED(p->TestCancel())

to see if the call is pending.

I did this and discovered in testing that RPC_S_CALLPENDING is defined as a failure code: 0x80010115L. So fCountinue is always FALSE in the code above. It looks like RPC_S_WAITONTIMER is also this way.

So much for naming convensions.