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Mar. 21st, 2005
geek stuff
Mar. 21st, 2005 07:33 pmi'm normally *not* a hardware person. my usual requirements for a PC are "get me something that's sure to work".
when even those requirements can't seem to be met, I'm *usually* either in trouble, or i just live with what does work.
2 years ago, parts of my linux box seemed to die -- i couldn't find a power-cable mapping configuration that would allow both the scsi cdburner and the ide cdrom to actually both work at the same time. one, or the other, or one of my hard drives would simply not show up.
sometime last year, i started having IDE problems. the secondary IDE slot (which had one hard drive and the IDE cdrom) started having minor problems. usually a reboot with its requisite fsck would take care of things, but they would return within a couple of days. files would *seem* corrupted, though they'd actually be fine on the disk (and of course, HAD to be fine on the cdroms which worked fine in other machines). in spite of things being really ok in the end, the annoyance factor continued to grow, and i definitely decide to accept the potential loss of the 2nd ide system entirely and move the disk over to ide #0....when i found the time (hah hah).
so i finally, today, managed to get away from work with a little free geek-time to myself. i undid *everything* inside it and rewired it from scratch. in the course of that, a metric ton of dust was kicked up (i'm still sniffling), and some of that came out of the 2nd IDE cable connection when I undid that (maybe, hopefully, that was the problem, causing a weak connection?).
i then rearrainged everything, switched everybody's master/slave settings to cable-select on the grounds that i fully expected to configure the cables correctly this time. hit the 'net to make sure i was doing it right. turned on the power...
wow.
everything worked, first time, and my SCSI cd-burner seems to have come back to life! and redhat managed to re-locate my second disk's filesystem to its new location as slave 0 instead of master 1.
now that everything seems to be working (i'll give it another day or two to be sure), I feel more confident finally upgrading this box off of the ancient-history RH9 to a fedora or something else (I have *tons* of distribution cdroms to consider, thanks to picking up british magazines).
and heck, I also don't feel so nervous about going and buying some more memory for this thing...yeah, its an old box (1998), but for linux its fine if there's enough memory to handle java and firefox.
when even those requirements can't seem to be met, I'm *usually* either in trouble, or i just live with what does work.
2 years ago, parts of my linux box seemed to die -- i couldn't find a power-cable mapping configuration that would allow both the scsi cdburner and the ide cdrom to actually both work at the same time. one, or the other, or one of my hard drives would simply not show up.
sometime last year, i started having IDE problems. the secondary IDE slot (which had one hard drive and the IDE cdrom) started having minor problems. usually a reboot with its requisite fsck would take care of things, but they would return within a couple of days. files would *seem* corrupted, though they'd actually be fine on the disk (and of course, HAD to be fine on the cdroms which worked fine in other machines). in spite of things being really ok in the end, the annoyance factor continued to grow, and i definitely decide to accept the potential loss of the 2nd ide system entirely and move the disk over to ide #0....when i found the time (hah hah).
so i finally, today, managed to get away from work with a little free geek-time to myself. i undid *everything* inside it and rewired it from scratch. in the course of that, a metric ton of dust was kicked up (i'm still sniffling), and some of that came out of the 2nd IDE cable connection when I undid that (maybe, hopefully, that was the problem, causing a weak connection?).
i then rearrainged everything, switched everybody's master/slave settings to cable-select on the grounds that i fully expected to configure the cables correctly this time. hit the 'net to make sure i was doing it right. turned on the power...
wow.
everything worked, first time, and my SCSI cd-burner seems to have come back to life! and redhat managed to re-locate my second disk's filesystem to its new location as slave 0 instead of master 1.
now that everything seems to be working (i'll give it another day or two to be sure), I feel more confident finally upgrading this box off of the ancient-history RH9 to a fedora or something else (I have *tons* of distribution cdroms to consider, thanks to picking up british magazines).
and heck, I also don't feel so nervous about going and buying some more memory for this thing...yeah, its an old box (1998), but for linux its fine if there's enough memory to handle java and firefox.
how's this for a pain in the arse...
Mar. 21st, 2005 09:44 pmTurbo-Tax, in spite of having such a well done forms-based system, decided for their 2004 release to utterly destroy that entire codebase in favor of a dynamic-html based site written entirely for IE.
And they couldn't even do that right. On cyd's win98 box where the older tax stuff is (and the only windows box in our place that's next to a printer and it won't talk windows-sharing with anybody else on the network), the forms won't render right. They all are at the top, as if the positioning was totally screwed up. And its not IE that's the problem per se, as we do have IE 6 installed.
so, we have a relatively useless piece of tax software at present. now we *could* move everything onto the XP box downstairs, but I *really* don't want to have that box be used for anything except multi-media and netsurfing...
*sigh*
something so simple...
and why the hell would ANYBODY replace a perfectly stable application with a version that's utterly dependent on what is, by deserved reputation, the buggiest piece of software in mass-marketting history?
Update: Ok, it has nothing to do with the version of IE specifically and everything to do with some oddball dependency they have on the "normal" setting of 96 DPI fonts. This bug was reported back in December and they still haven't made a fix for it yet.
And they couldn't even do that right. On cyd's win98 box where the older tax stuff is (and the only windows box in our place that's next to a printer and it won't talk windows-sharing with anybody else on the network), the forms won't render right. They all are at the top, as if the positioning was totally screwed up. And its not IE that's the problem per se, as we do have IE 6 installed.
so, we have a relatively useless piece of tax software at present. now we *could* move everything onto the XP box downstairs, but I *really* don't want to have that box be used for anything except multi-media and netsurfing...
*sigh*
something so simple...
and why the hell would ANYBODY replace a perfectly stable application with a version that's utterly dependent on what is, by deserved reputation, the buggiest piece of software in mass-marketting history?
Update: Ok, it has nothing to do with the version of IE specifically and everything to do with some oddball dependency they have on the "normal" setting of 96 DPI fonts. This bug was reported back in December and they still haven't made a fix for it yet.