A call to the 1and1 support center (which is open 24/7) and a fifteen seconds wait at a queue, I get this amazing tech guy who is friendly, cooperative, listens to me and promptly offers solutions. He was not condescending or “obviously” following a standard “blonde-secretary” script, but seamlessly moved on to the relevant info as we were tackling each issue. He uploaded a script in my website (after requesting my permission – technicality but highly appreciated), instructed me on how to edit if for my particular needs, as well as to how to edit the database export to work with it. I run the script and all worked out beautifully.

This whole process was 33 minutes, with some large chunks of time being wasted to uploading a 33MB database file and the script running, during which time he never exhibited any sign of impatience, frustration or pause due to lack of knowledge.

Why am I writing this? Because good tech support is hard to find, and when I find it I need to comment it and applaud it. That’s all.

RIP, you will be sorely missed. This is how democracy dies.

WoW economy doesn’t have taxes, expenditures for workers, lobbies, rents for office spaces, supply lines to consider and plan for, lawyers or courts etc. In WoW a person can make money simply by going out and killing things or picking flowers or mining rocks that pop out of the ground. Closest real life equivalents would be the livestock farmers, agricultural farmers and “gold-rush” miners. Each of those has expenditures from day zero, in that he needs food to live (basest of expenditure) to many others.

A WoW player needs nothing to survive and he has to spend nothing (outside of a periodic repair bill to his equipment) to play the game. This basic difference is so important that it already breaks the comparison.

However, there is a lesson to be learned. No WoW player has had his equipment removed because he failed to pay his loan. No WoW player was ever in debt. No WoW player bought anything without paying full value right then and there. If only the real economy would be like that…

Troktiko is a blog that enjoys vast popularity among Greeks everywhere, being the fifth most popular site after Google, Facebook, YouTube and Blogger.

This blog has no advertising nor does it ever wish to. It regularly posts opinions of its visitors and does not shrug at facing off against anyone, from politicians, to taxi drivers, to simple people that appropriate parts of public streets outside their home to facilitate their parking needs.

One of the fronts comes from a high profile journalist in Greece who filed a suit against them for slander. The Greek court this case went to decided to summarily shut the blog down, but the administrators managed to bring it back up as this ruling was illegal; no chance was given to the owners of the blog for rebuttal or explanations and when the admins took action to point that out, there was nothing left to do but put the site back online.
This points out the need for a response in whatever one feels that is wrong. Had the admins not responded or acted on the premise that “a court told us to shut it down so we can do nothing” the blog would not exist any more.

On a personal note, I don’t know if a blog, or any publication or indeed a person, has a right to just characterise someone with an term that is neither supported by or describes a wrongful action he committed but simply is a term of derision. I would hope not, and in that I find troktiko in fault. However, the court’s ruling was reached summarily and without due process and as such it is illegal.

On the other front, it is reputed that there is a football scandal brewing right now for which the owners of the blog have evidence. They claim that Google itself has notified them that the posting of this material will result in the blog being shut down. Currently, posts in the blog say that they will ignore such “warnings” and they will post it soon, not succumbing to intimidation tactics.

However, unlike professional artists, computer geeks like myself want a good overall image from their LCD monitors since their use is more about text legibility. Photos, video, games, all these are vastly more enjoyable with a good overall image quality and many of us try to get it. There are many ways to do it, some free (special image collections to tune the monitor), some inexpensive (like the Spyder 3 in all its versions – google link for it) or downright expensive.

I have never bought a calibrator for myself but I have over the years used many image collections to fine-tune the display. However I have recently come across an online collection that surpasses everything I have EVER seen.

Point your browsers to The Lagom LCD monitor test pages and be amazed at all that it can do for your LCD monitor. After having completed its tests I am amazed at how much better my display has become. Also don’t be afraid to fiddle with values that you think are wrong, for instance I have been using a 80 contrast, 55 brightness, 0 gamma for a very long time now, but after using this website I have gone to a 55 contrast, 60 brightness, -50 gamma. Simply amazing.

One case of warning; those tests will also point out some severe limitations of the LCD technology used in MANY monitors these days, specifically the inability of the TN monitors to provide uniform colour across the monitor. It is the price to pay for cheaper but faster TN technology over the pricier but slower IPS.

Hence I have decided to go for an extremely plain SATA controller in the form of a SI3114 controller providing 4 SATA ports. In my naiveté I believed that since this is a very simple piece of kit it would be a simple matter to install and extend my SATA drive capacity. The hubris…

The problems I encountered were in the following order:

1) Card needs drivers, drivers in the CD were not compatible, none of them, tried them all.

2) Downloaded drivers from a generic driver site that had served me well. They did not work.

3) Tried to find the Silicon Image drivers from the company’s site. I could not find them for one minute of looking so I gave up.

From that point on I tried other things, looked for a new system to house my WHS with a focus on multiple SATA ports in the MB, found some promising options too. However my budget was not up to par on this purchase, so I tucked it away for later. Meanwhile, I started checking the “failed” disks on my main system and found them healthy.
A little frustration always helps to make one more determined. So I went back to the SI3114 controller and started doing all kinds of things that made no sense until by luck I found a post that described where the drivers are downloaded from the Silicon Image website.

You see, the support page has a huge area devoted to different areas of interest and on the very bottom there is one little drop box to pick a product. I missed that, mea culpa.

With the drivers being so many I started checking online for other SI3114 users, most offering systems working with the non-raid driver. Got that, installed it and it worked… until the next reboot that is. System froze at a prompt that said Press CTRL + S or F4 to enter the RAID utility. More research online and I saw this was a common problem amongst users of this card. In fact, most people that recommended the use of the non raid drivers were also faced with this problem, however I had missed that this driver NEEDS the presence of a non raid bios.

So I ask, why is a little simple card trying to play in the RAID playpen while lacking the proper tools to do so? Software raid is so ineffective and such a resource hog, especially as we are moving in the area of parity RAID settings and multiple disks. It’s like a 10 year old driving a rig, sure it’s doable but only at very low speeds to keep it safe.

In any case, my card had a raid bios installed and that caused it to freeze the system. Why it froze is something I don’t know and seemingly no one else knows. On to flashing the bios with a non raid one. SI website has multiple bios,for the non raid one we need the IDE BIOS. Next we need the flashing utility, thankfully there is windows flash utility on the same page, first one. Downloaded that too, and run it. No joy. The command would run but it would return nothing as if it could not continue but with no troubleshooting message or error message or exit variable. SI suggested in a how to flash bios document that if one forces install of the non raid driver (link specifically for the WHS compatible driver list – I used the SiI3114 non-RAID 32-bit Windows Driver which by the way IS the correct driver and ended up using) and connects it to a drive, then in the properties of the controller device a tab would appear labelled Flash Bios that could do the work. Tried that too, about 6 times, uninstalling and hot swapping the drive and going back and forth between the raid and non raid driver. The result was disappointing as it would not allow the flashing of the bios without a restart and a restart would throw an error and the device would not load in the OS. Already getting tired…

More research, many people have this problem and again suggest to use the FreeDOS bootable CD-ROM which means downloading the .iso, opening it, appending the flash DOS utility and the new bios, remaking the .iso and burning it to a CD-ROM.

All of this to make a card work… also I don’t know how to edit .iso files and don’t care as there is also no CD-ROM drive in my WHS anymore (removed it after the initial install – cables in there are already tidied up and I don’t wanna…)

At least this motherboard is USB bootable, and I already have a stick that boots to DOS, put in it the DOS flashing util, the bios and take it to the WHS… which does not boot from it. Seems that my USB flash drive was recognized as a USB HDD and hence the boot order menu didn’t consider it a USB device but an HDD (confused yet?). So when I set up only USB boot devices (USB-Floppy, USB-Zip, USB-CDROM) it ignored the flash drive… Looking why and checking EVERY option in the BIOS as a good paranoid system troubleshooter does, found the Flash drive listed under the HDDs recognized in the boot HDD order. Popped it in first position and finally worked. DOS environment, flash worked bios updated WHS recognized the device and popped the right driver and the HDD was recognized and added to the pool.

That’s 6 hours of troubleshooting and frustration because the manufacturer wanted a RAID bios on a card that is ill-equipped to do proper raid. Congrats and thank you for this adventure.

I’d like to thank the University for being an excellent educational institute. On the whole, the staff and faculty have always been helpful and present which was a very rewarding experience and in vast contrast to the Greek university.

I got all the merchandise that was on offer, simply because I could. I realize it is an expression of consumerism, but they are also memorabilia, like my T-shirt and sweater with all the names of the graduates, engraved frames with the logo of the University, mugs and engraved champagne glasses.

Also, in the free graduate grab bag there were two pins that were of a surprising wit. Don’t get me wrong, English humor is very nice and good, but it is of a certain flavor that does not match that of the pins.

They read: “Pro-gram-mer: an organism that turns caffeine to code”, and “127.0.0.1 no place like it”

They are both excellent and gave me a laugh.

Here are some pictures of the day.

P.S. Soooo looking forward to hearing “Worf” again…

They have asked MMO developers the same questions about betas and there are some interesting points to read in this Q&A. I will not express an opinion as I have already done so, for one, and the views of each developer is plainly laid out. Just go read it and see for yourself.

At first I saw the Corsair Fast Voyager 8GB flash drive. Costs £17.23 and is rather fast at 32.7MB/s average read and 20.3MB average write according to this test.

Next I saw the Corsair Flash Voyager GT 128 128GB flash drive. It was more about curiosity to see this massive drive. The site also had a review on it. This drive costs £310.47. Quite a lot, but more surprisingly, not all that faster, with 31MB/s read and 23MB/s write.

So speed-wise, the drives are the same, so how about size-wise? For the 8GB drive you get 475.45MB per pound, while for the 128GB you get 422.17MB per pound. Not that big of a difference, but still more than 10% worse.

But here comes the real blow. In the review, the 128GB flash drive is pitted against the Corsair X128, a solid state drive with eSATA connection. Costs £321.97 and averages 94.2MB/s and 91.9MB/s for read and write respectively. Look at this page again and do the math.

Here is a table to digest these numbers.

Now tell my which is the most worthless buy…