The Techie Blog
Entries:
13th February 2002 - Attempts to get a Ricoh 7040 CD Rewriter to work correctly
16th February 2002 - First attempts at CGI script
18th February 2002 - Matrox G200 troubles
19th February 2002 - Attempts to get a Ricoh 7040 CD Rewriter to work correctly (Part 2)
21st February 2002 - Site redesign
25th February 2002 - Attempts to get a Ricoh 7040 CD Rewriter to work correctly (Part 3)
12th April 2002 - Attempts to get a Ricoh 7040 CD Rewriter to work correctly (Part 4)
27th May 2002 - Erm... no news really :(
27th September 2002 - Major upgrade to computer
7th October 2002 - Learning about CGI
8th October 2002 - Learning about CGI (cont.)
3rd February 2003 - Re-vamping my website
The spec of my current PC
As you may notice if you're a regular visitor to this page, I've re-vamped the style a little recently. Specifically, I've changed a few things:
I've optimised the pages for search engines. This has involved a certain amount of fixing HTML tags which had gone awry and making images smaller in file size (using Paint Shop Pro's GIF and JPEG Optimisation Wizards).
I've also learned how to do Image Mapping, which has allowed me to do the somewhat more impressive menu at the top of the page (if you remember, it didn't light up when you put your mouse over it before)
Finally, I've dabbled in Cascading Style Sheets in order to make up-dating my site a little easier and also to clean up the HTML somewhat (particularly by getting rid of the multiple instances of <FONT...> tags
These processes involved quite a bit of learning, for me, and I plan to write tutorials about the processes, to help others who may want to know more about them.
The next steps will be:
Inserting HEIGHT and WIDTH elements into the <IMG...> tags to make pages load faster (and get rid of that irritating re-sizing that goes on when a page which doesn't have these tags is loaded)
Sorting out my MetaTags, Alt Text and some of my links, to help my search engine ranking.
I've been trying to get my damn Ricoh 7040 CD burner working today (using Nero 5.5) - but I'm still getting write errors.
Beginning to despair somewhat and actually was momentarily considering just going and buying a cheapo but dedicated CD burner machine. Of course, then I'd need to buy a hub to connect it in to the network and upgrade my OmniCube KVM switch to a 3 input model, so it's not really a practical alternative (quite apart from the fact that it'd be both "cheating" and allowing myself to be defeated by a lowly piece of hardware!)
It's extremely frustrating when I know that the CD burner in my work machine behaves so well that it can actually burn CDs happily in the background while I get on with other stuff (ok, so I wouldn't start anything too processor intensive, while burning a CD, but I can read mail, browse the PC and network, read Word and Excel files etc., so it's not too restrictive)
Have checked out the Nero HelpTool page to see what they recommend and have even upgraded the firmware of my CDRW drive (which was a bit scary! Last time I tried that I kinda killed the drive and had to get a replacement! Worked ok this time, though, and I'm now up to firmware rev 1.3 as suggested by Nero)
If you've any ideas what I could check, do let me know (there's a full run-down on what kit I'm using further down), but so far, I've:
Giving up for now, but will research more tomorrow and see what I can do on Friday/over the weekend (since I won't have any time for pooter-twiddling on Valentine's Day ;o) )
Instead I'm trying to implement some CGI Script on my site to email the input from an HTML form to me. I found a fantastic tutorial on CGI (and Perl) by a chap called John Callendar who also emailed me back really quickly when I needed some advice and has been really great all round. However, despite quite a lot of time yesterday and today trying to get it working, I'm still getting 500 Errors (Internal Server Error, which means something in the Script is failing). You can see for yourself at choggy.co.uk/perltest (where there's also a link to an HTML page showing the text in the script file). I need to call my ISP (Freeola) and find out where the error logs are, I think, to aid my debugging.
However, for now I'm off out to the Fox and Hounds pub in Little Bromley, near Colchester, to celebrate the life of GPZ, our friend from Gay.com, who died earlier this week in a motorbike accident.
My graphics card (a Matrox G200) has been playing me up since I rebuilt a few weeks ago and had to download the latest drivers because I couldn't find the originals. So I've got my eye on an nVidea GeForce 2. It's 40 quid I can't really afford at the moment, but that's not too bad, I guess.
I'm also looking into building a basic upgrade system for my ikkle sister, Gen. She doesn't need anything fancy and she can keep her current CD and FDD (which will save a few pennies) but I can get her :
I don't want to speak too soon, of course, but I'm up to 80% of the burn, whereas at home, it was crapping out the minute it tried to write, so it's looking pretty good!
*waiting with baited breath*
Yippee!!! The burn went fine here, so it's obviously not the burner!
Of course the down side is that means I now have to try to find out what the setting is on my PC which is messing things up :(
I'm considering upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 to see if that makes any difference.
But hey, at least I know it's not the burner which is at fault!
I'm also working on a new way of doing the links at the top of this page, working on doing a calendar style links pane for the dates of entries to this Techie Blog. I can either do it with an image map, or with a table. I think an image map will be easier to program, but of course a table would take less time to load in the client browser than an image map - I'll have to try them both out and see how it goes.
Later the same day...
And here's the new look...!
My Ricoh has been burning CDs happily in work all day today, so I'm confident it's not the drive which is at fault. I'm getting closer and closer to buying the new bits for my PC - I'll probably order them on pay day or thereabouts.
As an aside, I took delivery of three 32MB smart media cards today, intended for my camera, but also fitting and working in my Rio PMP300 MP3 Player. If I use all three as media for my camera, I can now store night on 150 pictures in the best quality my camera is capable of shooting at. That should keep Sarah and I happy for the first three days of any holiday we take from now on ;o)
On the plus side, I've installed Windows 2000 on my home PC now and have got the scanner working. Only about 400 other bits and pieces to install and it'll be ready and waiting to be ripped apart again once I've bought all the new bits!
On the web page side of things, I've now fixed the broken links that my good pal Matt drew my attention to, so there should be no more of those irritating Freeola 404 messages. Hurrah!
The more observant among you will also notice that I've implemented my "calendar style" links pane at the top of this page for the shortcuts to each blog. Of course, it was a pain in the neck to code, but since it looks pretty good, I'm not overly bothered ;o)
Anyway, it's time to do very dull things like hanging my washing and having a shower now, so... "cheery-oh" (I've never met a depressed oh, but that's beside the point)
As you can tell from this page, all's been a bit quiet on the pooter front recently. Primarily, that's because work gave me a spangly new laptop with a CD burner in it, thus I don't need a CD burner on my home computer so much any more. I've just recently "procured" a hub, too, so I'll be putting it into my home network tonight, to allow me to plug my home laptop, Sarah's computer and my own home PC all into the same network (this is particularly handy, because it now means that we can burn off all Sarah's data on my laptop's CD burner, so that we can rebuild her PC - which it really needs at the moment!)
I've also got a firewire input on my laptop, so I'm hoping to play around with that at the weekend and grab some video from my Sony TRV900 digital video camera so that I can (finally) edit some of the footage I've taken over the years (like the stuff I shot in Barcelona when Sarah and I went there over a year ago!!!!)
A friend of mine from work, Lee, borrowed my Richo CD burner the other day and has basically confirmed for me that it's not really a working device (his actual words were "your drive shagged my computer!"... oops!)
So there will probably be more techy blog updates in the nearish future, but for now there's nothing much to say.
Oh, except that the afore-mentioned Lee has lent me a magazine with instructions for how to attach a webcam to the eyepiece of a telescope! OK, so I don't have a telescope, but when Sarah and I move to a bigger place, it'll be on the "we gotta get a..." list!
Well, I've basically done very little with my home PC. I've hooked it and Sarah's PC up with a hub now, so that I can connect my laptop up to them both, but that's about it. I haven't even grabbed my digi video footage using my laptop.
Sarah and I are considering getting Broadband Net access after we come back from Italy. It's going to be more expensive than dial-up of course, but we're considering it none-the-less.
But, erm, that's about it for techy stuff this month. Shocking, isn't it!?
As you can see, I've not done an awful lot of stuff on my PC between May and now. Recently, however, I have ordered a whole load of stuff from EBuyer (except the RAM which I bought directly from Crucial Technology and the thermal compound, which I bought from OverClockers UK) to upgrade my computer. This is what I got:
On top of this, I have Pinnacle's Edition.DV package (software tied to a firewire card) which I've installed and which was the reason for the upgrade in the first place (because my old pooter wasn't anywhere near the minimum required spec for Edition.dv to run on.
In order to back up my old system, I installed the Liteon CDRW straight into my old computer (bearing in mind my previous experiences with installing the Ricoh CDRW, I was somewhat nervous!) and was tickled pink when it burned reliably and quickly as soon as it (and Nero Burning ROM version 5.5 which came with it) was installed. So, I burned off the data from my old computer to CD.
Once I'd done that, I started to build the new computer, installing the motherboard into the case and then the processor, heatsink and fan (with the thermal compound between the heatsink and processor, after having carefully removed all of the thermal pad on the bottom of the heatsink, of course). Next, I installed the RAM and finally the graphics card. At that point, the machine is up to it's most basic possible configuration and it's time to try booting it and see if it POSTs. Sure enough, it posted first time... yippee!
Time to install the hard drives (my old ones - an IBM Deskstar 14GXP which is 14.4GB and partitioned into C: (6.83GB) and D: (6.81GB) and a Seagate Barracura 30GB drive which is drive F and will be used pretty much exclusively for Video Editing (Yeah, right!) and the Liteon CDRW. I first installed the Seagate and the CDRW so that I could start to install Windows 2000 Professional. It took me a while to notice that the jumpers on the hard drives and CDRW were set in such a way they would conflict (Doh! I was rather unwell, however, so wasn't able to concentrate properly. That's my excuse, anyway!). When I finally got that sorted out, the Windows installation went ok.
Finally, I installed my old SMC network card, the modem, floppy drive and the Firewire card for Pinnacle Edition.dv and it all (eventually) worked smoothly.
Towards the end of last week, I discovered that my ISP has finally got around to getting CGI software working properly on their servers and giving some basic guidance about how things should be set up. Not one to miss out on such an opportunity, I went about getting some interactive content onto my site (which you've probably already seen on the front page of the site) in the shape of a "form-to-mail" style questionnaire about the site. Shortly thereafter I was to be found scouring the web for free Polling software and the result is the "Poll" link on my front page, right underneath the Site Map, Recipes and Gallery links. Unfortunately, the CGI script used for this poll doesn't seem to be too easy to modify in terms of how the output looks (well, it probably would be if I knew a little more about Cascading Style Sheets and Perl script, but I don't)
Consequently, I'm currently trying to learn some Perl, so that I can make up my own scripts to do whatever I want. In order to learn Perl, I'm working my way through the Beginners Guide to Perl by John Callender. So far, so good - it's clear, concise and doesn't assume you're already a whizz at Unix. Which I'm not, so it's just what I need!
I'm also working on my own Beginners' Guide to Perl page (not yet uploaded), partly because I tend to understand things better if I've had to explain it to someone else, partly to collect all my knowledge about Perl in one place (for when I forget stuff) and partly because there are certain peculiarities to do with my particular ISP (Freeola) which I'd like to be able to point out in my page, in case it helps other Freeola customers to get CGI content working on their site.
My PC is home built
with the following components:
3rd February 2003
13th February 2002
16th February 2002
True to my usual form, I've given up thinking about my CDRW for now (I may take it into work and check it works in my "known working" CD burner there, to make certain it's that my pooter that needs tweeking and that it's not a duff burner).
18th February 2002
Not a lot to report today :( I've called Freeola asking where the error logs are stored, when you use the -w switch on the path to perl, but the guy I spoke to didn't know. He's going to find out and email me, but that means no news for me for now.
Which I think she should be happy with (in fact, I might get a bigger better chip, a bigger better Motherboard, Some DDR RAM and give her my old bits for a bit less money - which I'm sure she won't complain about.
19th February 2002
Today I've brought my little Ricoh into work and have just now put it into my work PC (which I know burns CDs fine, because I've been burning them in another writer all this week)
21st February 2002
I've been working on a new look for the site for the last couple of days. I'll probably be revealing it pretty soon, so keep your eyes peeled! I'm keeping the colours, but am revamping the general style.
25th February 2002
Lo and behold, after a week of thinking there was a problem with my home PC, today at work my Richo MP7040A CDRW has started to fail again... so there's no doubting that the damn thing has an intermittent fault. Of course, the bloody thing's bound to be out of warranty now *raises eyes heavenward*. I thus have my eye on a cheeky little Plextor number *big grin*
12 April 2002
27 May 2002
27th September 2002
7th October 2002
8th October 2002
I've been working more on my Beginners' Guide to Perl during my lunch break at work today. It's still not online, but I'll try to upload the beginnings of it tomorrow. It's going to be rather a work in progress, so I've got a disclaimer at the beginning of the page, re-directing you to John Callender's Beginners Guide to Perl if you're keen to learn, but I hope that what I have to say might help other Freeola customers.
For serious backups, I use Kodak Gold Ultima CDR Media, whereas for less important CD burns, including audio CDs, I use Smartbuy 16X Silver CDs
