Time for an update -

My new computer shall be arriving soon – in pieces; that I will have to build together into one intricate, yet delightfully powerful gaming powerhouse. And this is the whole package deal, with the monitor and everything, since my last computer (and the one I’m currently using) is a laptop. Not many laptop parts fit with regular PC parts, unfortunately. Luckily, I’ll still have a backup/portable computer if something does go awry.

The price was steep, but not as steep as it would’ve been if I purchased everything in a bundled package. Partially, this was because I overestimated the price on some things and decided to go for more quality and faster items/chips. It’ll work out great for me in the long run, with some overclocking here and there. Speaking of overclocking, I can safely do that and have a nice and cool environment, apparently. With 4 fans in the case, plus another few here and there, I’m not sure how loud it’ll be, but the cooling is a definite plus.

I’ll bring more in depth reviews of the products and their price once I get the computer and assemble it. Perhaps I shall write a post on that computer, perhaps not. We shall see.

Camera Blues

In other news, my FujiFilm S700 Digital Camera broke down on me and gave me an infamous “Zoom Error”. I tried all the suggestions, replacing batteries, shaking it up a bit, hitting it against an object (said to work, but it didn’t). The problem was probably due to the two tiny gears inside the camera that controlled the powerful 10x optical zoom that somehow got misaligned. Either way, it was too much of a hassle for me to try anything else, so I returned the camera back to Wal-Mar and it was easily taken back since it was under the 30-day warranty (yeah, it broke down that soon). I took quite a few good pictures with it, though, and you can view the results on my gallery. The other problems I noticed with it were that it blew out highlights like none other and had a few problems with purple fringing (things that you can find out on any camera review site, really). And when taking scenic pictures (of buildings, especially), the picture would get distorted in a bubble fashion, making the object look bloated or curved depending on the picture.

The good part of the camera? The price, being only ~$200, the quality with 10x optical zoom and 7MP pictures, and of course the size was quite manageable. Other things included the camera taking 4 AA’s, an SD or xD card, and having a nice viewing LCD screen.

My next camera will probably be a Canon Powershot or a Canon Digital Rebel; still weighing the options of both.

So the scenario of course is simple – you’re working along on your computer with some sort of hard drive (in this case, external) and you decide to do something with said hard drive that somehow screws up your partition table.

For me, I had an NTFS formatted 500gb external hard drive with all my data collected on it. What made it not work is still beyond me, but one day when I came into to work, I plugged it in to my Vista work computer. It usually took a minute or two to appear and so I did other things to occupy the time. By the time I returned to look for my drive, I still could not see a drive letter. Strange.

Turning it on and off did not help the situation and plugging it into a different USB socket didn’t solve the problem either. I decided to look into the Device Manager. It showed up. Strange.

So then I decided to go over and look at the storage devices part of computer management admin tools. It showed up there, too. But instead of reading it as NTFS, the computer I had read it as RAW format. Strange.

Testing on a couple of different other computers at work showed the same result – it seemed that the hard drive partition table was in some way corrupt, and I’m not exactly sure what caused it.

Well, luckily I found a nice free partition repair tool (download link on bottom of page) that was simple and straightforward, though the user interface could have been a little nicer with remembering options. But, with the help of Google to search for the number of sectors my particular drive had, and the tutorial on the page, I managed to fix the table cleanly, without losing any precious data, and without having to invest time and energy into recovering files manually, one at a time.

Thankfully though, it was only the partition table this time and not some hardware malfunction like my last drive.

Well, I am currently in the process of changing the blog’s theme, trying out a few experimental things. If it starts looking like something is way off-center or something is amiss, that would probably be me.

Thing is, however, that changing the default WordPress theme is (or was) quite a challenge. When I thought I had edited the settings for the header, I found out that none of my changes worked, even though the style sheet was loaded up from the site (not cached) each time. I would change a background color only to get the same color over and over. Then I scrolled down a bit more in the stylesheet, only to find a duplicate entry for the class that not only overrides my changes made in the earlier part of the stylesheet, it overrides its own self by default. It got me thinking, just how unoptimized is this technology that I’m working with? Well, hopefully it’s just the template (which I’ll be throwing away anyways and making my own), although I have heard other stories.

Also, this site (from this front page point on) is now “XHTML 1.0 Strict” Validated. Yes, I’m one of those standards people, not just because I like having the little button (although that is a plus) but also because as a programmer, I know why this validation is in place and it can only help save precious time later on in next-generation developments.

Well, it’s been a while, I must admit. So much has happened yet it seems all so normal now. Why haven’t I updated my precious blog? Well, time constraints were just one of the many issues. Laziness was another. But now I’m back, and hopefully I’ll be updating my blog a bit more regularly, now that I have a cause and all. Somewhat.

So, new things, well, firstly, a newly acquired host. Somewhat paid host. It’s free, advanced, and more details can be found on the first news item of austrian.uni.cc. A lot more details there and such. And links to the gallery that I set up can also be found near there.

What else? Well, the new job, of course. I’m actually employed in two places, it’s just one of them never called me in for work quite yet. I’m a web developer at Eastern Washington University, and also a tech-support kinda guy. The second job I have is kind of a sub-job of my primary web-developing job – to be the University Honors Webmaster. It’s a little less glamorous than the title actually sounds. At least it still pays well enough.

Finally finished my freshman year of college – pretty much went through the whole year and got Dean’s List awards from my department (Computer Science). I just find programming to be simple, challenging, and fun. And I just love to see people squint in confusion when I start talking about Euclid’s recursive algorithm.

So, now, for the purpose of this blog, I’ll have it maintain its blog status but I’ll integrate more technical stuff, possibly something like programming tips, or pretty much the stuff I’ve already been putting on here, except not as lame or outdated.

So yeah, there ya go, more to come soon.
-Alex

Having sold my old car to a dealership and traded off with my mother’s Toyota Camry (nice V6 btw), I also lost an essential part of me…or sort of me. In any case, my new car lacked an MP3 player of any sort and could only play conventional CD’s which are a pain in the butt to burn over and over again in comparison to just burning a CD filled with MP3′s. So of course, one needs to remedy the situation, and as such, I decided to go out and get some other kind of MP3 player that you could actually carry around with you and listen to once you left the car. Add to that the ability to carry all of your music on something, not just one MP3 CD at a time, and not have to switch CD’s while your out in traffic trying to look at the snowy Spokane road. I don’t know which is worse, the snowy or the Spokane part of that. Both combined just makes it disgusting. Anyways, I took one good look at the iPod and basically crumbled in disgust. It required iTunes (which I’ve had very bad experiences with), couldn’t play my WMA files, and converted all of your music from your computer to a jumbled up disorganized version onto your iPod (don’t believe me? If you have an iPod, go take a look at the files yourself and see that all of them have been put into 2 letter folders at random with some random name for each file in those folders. Luckily the ID3 tags are all still there, but I’d rather not deal with that mess). So were there any alternatives? Of course! Microsoft released their first generation model of the Zune, which could take my WMA files along with the AAC’s that the iTunes loved. Add to that the fact that had a bigger screen (same resolution as the iPod for video viewing, though), no weird scroll wheel ordeal, and wi-fi capability. Yeah, they put in a wi-fi card to have Zunes connect to each other and share stuff. Currently, the sharing is limited by DRM, but if something like Linux ever gets put onto the Zune, the DRM thing won’t be a big problem because it won’t even exist. The possibilities with linux are certainly interesting but it would be kind of hard to use the wi-fi with anything apart from other Zunes
(connecting to something like a router and trying to use the internet with only 6 buttons would be kind of hard, unless there was like an “on screen” keyboard). The storage amount remains the same as a standard video iPod (30GB). And an interesting tidbit that also stunned me once I bought the Zune and was fooling around with it – while an iPod cannot play music and do other things while charging through a USB cord by means of a computer(from my experience), the Zune can. Its nice playing Oblivion and listening to my Zune at the same time without wasting any battery life (which is 14 hrs on it). But what about the part I really care about – the price? Well, eBay is a good friend of mine, and $200 dollars seemed to be quite a bargain. In stores, the Zune regularly costs $250. That’s all well and good, but I still also need someway to hook it up to my car, in which case I plan on getting an FM radio transmitter from one of the Zune car packs (since the CD player in my car doesn’t have any type of inputs other than a CD, and radio, of course).

So basically, Zune FTW. Better clarification – Zune without DRM (Dumb Retarded Monkey) FTW.

Well, I went back to my old high school with my friend Trevor to go and watch a basketball game. What I wasn’t expecting to see was this horror parked in the lot. The paint was…pink…and…black and…white. The back part of the car (the tail lights) could actually be pushed in. It was covered in grime and dust. The things on the side of the car (okay, I’m not a car person so I don’t know what they’re called, those tube like things sticking out below the car door) weren’t welded on, they’re STRAPPED on. The inside is even worse, the seats are dismounted and the dashboard is a horror to look at. But apparently, people still drive this…thing…around town. If I had to drive it, I’d personally take a gun, put it up against my head, then point it at the car’s gas tank, and then shoot. Yeah. Enjoy.

Ah, now I just downloaded w.bloggar, great little blogging tool, me likey. No more blogger beta crap, although I’m still on their servers in a way.

So back to the lake cabin, we got there safely at about 11:30 at night, and started moving our bags and groceries into the cabin. We then needed to turn on the propane heater for warmth and the water heater for, well, warm water. Both became problems for us however. The water heater could be turned on but we soon found out that the pipes had broken and there was some minor leakage. So, we had to completely turn off all the water and pretty much go without any kind of tap water for the weekend. This caused two major problems – first of all, no showers, and secondly, no #2. Then the regular propane heater was a problem too because the propane tank was refilled and as a result, all the pilot lights went out for all the heating stoves. We of course, had no clue on how to turn the pilot lights on, so we decided just to head off to sleep and see this situation out more thoroughly in the morning. Until then, we put up a little electric heater and watched our breath as we fell asleep…

We woke up the next morning and decided to go to Yokes to take care of our #2 problem. Once finished, we went over to clayton burger and ordered ourselves some breakfast – it was pretty darn good, too. If you’re ever around the Deer Park area, make sure and stop by, good food, made pretty fresh. Anyway, we came back to our cabin, and finally figured out how to turn the pilot light on the heating stove on, so we had a good primary source of heat. Well, that fixed one of our problems, but the pipes still couldn’t be fixed until later that week, when we weren’t going to be there anymore. So for all our watery problems, we had to either go back into town for the #2 or go to the lake for the #1 (although Josh found quite an interesting way to use the #1 while partially inside the house…no more details on this one). Time for the hanging out then, since all was set. We started out by playing multiple rounds of halo in which either Josh or I won (shotguns, swords, juggernaut, slayer, all kinds of variants went on) and then once we got done with that, we went and watched accepted on my laptop with my Uber-cool speaker system. Basically, we just hung out all day, ate food, played video games, talked about what guys talk about, bugged Josh when he was talking with Courtney (it was quite annoying when they talked for hours on end, and even more annoying when she called him at 7 AM the next morning – I just wanted to go and start beating Josh up for his girlfriend waking me up, but was too tired to do so). Yeah, pretty much that was it for the main highlights, went back to town, took a shower that I desperately needed, and that was that.

Mmm, the end of the first semester of college. And now I have a month off to bore myself with, yes, bore myself I shall. Not much has happened between the last time I wrote a post, or maybe tons has happened, it all depends on your perspective. Like if you usually have crazy stuff happen to you on a daily basis, you know, like your house flooding, your sister coming back into town to live with you again (this is a married sister, btw), a myspace whore deciding to delete their myspace (and never really ending up doing it, mr. computer literate ^_^), going skiing for the first time in your life, and getting a cool new cell phone (and voiding the warranty on the first day because Verizon is a monkey about not allowing file transfers on their Razrs’). Its all about perspective and what your current view of reality is based on your current mood, emotions, heritage, etc (not saying that all “truth” is relative based on an individual, but that it is in fact a distorted image based on the individual’s biases). And that brings up plenty more philosophical discussions that I’d rather not get into right now.

So Robert, Josh, Trevor, and I decide to head out to Robert’s lake cabin to…well, hang out and play video games. It’s December after all, so we can’t really swim around or go on the boat, especially since parts of the lake were already frozen over. The trip to the cabin was quite treacherous, again, on one of the worst highways in the state at night with fog and plenty of black ice to boot. I mean, honestly, could it really get any worse than that? Oh yeah, Robert was driving (I do have to give him props though, he did drive pretty well). While in the car, we made a deal with Robert to not play a certain game if he agreed not to say “your _____” the whole time up at the cabin. Needless to say, he complied, because the “game” was not something that he wanted to play. <_<

…off the topic, I had just written a whole couple of paragraphs and blogger decided to randomly erase them while I was typing out a third. Well, this is the last time I’m writing with these $*@(# blogger tools, switching to something else…

Part 2 of this post coming up when I can find such a tool, and when I get over the fact that I lost 15-30 minutes of my life typing up something that got erased. Yeah…that might take a while

This was too funny to resist putting up. One of those things that you won’t forget when you’re the one trying to explain things with people who don’t know computers or the internet outside of myspace. The scenario is trevor has a trojan on his computer that displays porn pop-ups. Should it be cleaned with antivirus or spyware? I dunno, I hadn’t personally seen it so I told him to get both.

(10:01 PM) Alex Chernikov: but the weird thing is
(10:01 PM) Alex Chernikov: if you actually type out your msn password for your account into the messenger window, it’ll turn into a bunch of stars
(10:01 PM) Alex Chernikov: ******
(10:01 PM) Alex Chernikov: see?
(10:02 PM) Alex Chernikov: i hate that
(10:02 PM) trevor stewart: weird
(10:02 PM) Alex Chernikov: my password is actually pretty common to type
(10:02 PM) Alex Chernikov: like a common word
(10:02 PM) Alex Chernikov: so whenever i want to say ******, it turns out in stars
(10:02 PM) Alex Chernikov: ******!!!!
(10:02 PM) Alex Chernikov: gah
(10:03 PM) trevor stewart: lol
(10:03 PM) Alex Chernikov: didnt fall for that one, now did ya?
(10:04 PM) trevor stewart: stop it! it is pc genius vs. pc literate….of course i’ll believe you
(10:04 PM) Alex Chernikov: illiterate
(10:04 PM) Alex Chernikov: ok, change that
(10:04 PM) trevor stewart: hey…i’m not dumb…..i’m average
(10:05 PM) Alex Chernikov: yes, you know how to use myspace and you only get trojans once in a while
(10:05 PM) Alex Chernikov: makes you quite average id say
(10:05 PM) trevor stewart: lol thanks

…some time later…

(10:23 PM) Alex Chernikov: on the other hand, those popups will stop you from getting on myspace in class
(10:24 PM) Alex Chernikov: which equals better grades
(10:24 PM) Alex Chernikov: nothing will help you trev, not even reformatting your computer
(10:24 PM) Alex Chernikov: sorry, its a lost cause
(10:24 PM) trevor stewart: really
(10:24 PM) Alex Chernikov: better luck next time?
(10:24 PM) Alex Chernikov: and the trojan is airborn
(10:25 PM) Alex Chernikov: so every laptop that enters your house that you think about using for myspace at college will get that infectious trojan disease
(10:25 PM) Alex Chernikov: and the hardrive will fill up at the brink of destruction
(10:26 PM) trevor stewart: are you serious?
(10:26 PM) trevor stewart: plz say no
(10:26 PM) Alex Chernikov: WTF!?!
(10:26 PM) Alex Chernikov: AIRBORN TROJAN!!!

Ah yes, indeed, on the subject of free hosts yet again, and things that I thought would change from last time. If it’s too good to be true in terms of hosting, there has to be a catch somewhere. Somewhere indeed…

The hosting service starts out good
It’s just too good to be true, and they’re still on the internet! First things first – check how long the host has been operating and see how their uptime has been (just because the host says their uptime has been 99.5% or higher doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way). Get to know your host, see how many servers they have running and in which part of the country (stay the heck away from Florida and places that have hurricanes – water + electronics = BAD JUJU!). I don’t know how many times I’ve signed up for a host only to find a week later that there are SQL connection errors, slow load times, or even extreme downtime that goes on for days. And then the host just shuts down and takes all of your files with them (luckily if you know the concept of free hosting, you also tend to know the concept of backing things up).

Ads are evil, even with Firefox and AdBlock
Well, that is, unless you don’t mind them. Problem is, I do! And so do many other people. If your website isn’t selling products with the advertisements that are put up, it’s usually a bad thing. And when your host forces those ads on you, that’s just pure agony (and some ads make it worse with flashing colors and annoying roll down menus). There are only a few ads out there even worth looking at from a designers perspective, the rest suck. Which brings me to my point – if your host makes you put up ads, or even worse, forces them on each page, move to another host. Ads will mess up layouts, destroy any chances of returning visitors, and will make your site look less than professional.

Bandwidth and Space limitations
The more the better (in terms of actual space and bandwidth)…but do you really need that much anyways? My blog actually consists of less than 10megs worth of files. But I always look to the future, and since I’m going to start hosting files and such, I expect my host to be able to hold that up. And even if you only have one 5 mb file being hosted, and that file just got “dugg”, its pretty much DoS for the host in general, paid or free (in most general cases). And if the host doesn’t go down, your bandwidth will go up and strike you upside the head. The worst website is the one that you can’t even see (arguably the one that doesn’t exist). Free hosting may be good for now, but not for later.

Free hosting and free support just doesn’t come hand in hand
There are exceptions, but generally, if you have a free host, you’re not going to get any kind of support. Sure, some people don’t even need support, but if something on your site goes haywire with something that you can’t fix (say something with an SQL connection or FTP going down), you absolutely need to communicate to the support/webmaster to get it fixed. Even for paid hosts, make sure you’re getting proper support, check it before even signing any sort of deals. Ask them for a trial hosting service for a couple of days to check out support response times.

So basically, the main thing I’m trying to get at here is don’t rely on free web hosting because it will actually cost you something in the long run.
Want a free web hosting service? Get any kind of computer, install Ubuntu LAMP on it, hook it up to a 256kb+ line, and there’s a free reliable start for you. Ok sure, it costs you a computer and your internet connection, but isn’t that what you use anyways to read this blog? Maybe then, you can start up your very own free hosting service for others as well and see exactly how all those other free hosts are doing it!