Apparently I hit the maximum post length for Xfire blogs... continuing here.


Now to Wednesday. The morning at work as usual, then afternoon continuing with the new parts. I already had opened the motherboard box at Tuesday to try if the cooler at least would fit on it, and it did. Anyway, here's the unboxing of it:



Wiser from yesterday installing the giant cooler for the new AMD Phenom II 955 was a lot easier, especially since it could fit on the Gigabyte motherboard without cutting off the metal. It still had only one hook on each side, so most of the holes were unused, but at least it fits there nicely and doesn't even move around like the previous installation. Here you can see the new black Nexus Cloudius case with the Corsair TX650 PSU installed in it, and the motherboard with CPU, it's cooler, and the DDR3 sticks on it. Of course the floor is filled with all kinds of other necessary stuff such as the hard drives and PCI cards as well as the old GPU since I still don't have the new one. Fortunately the server's BIOS is able to boot up without a graphics card, my previous server couldn't.


Here's a more close-up view of the motherboard:


And here's the whole stuff inside the case:


Thanks to the many hard drives in it (3 of them, 2 with SATA, 1 with PATA) and the small case, it was quite difficult to arrange all the cables and wires for best possible cooling solution. A bigger case would have helped with that tremendously, but since I have a specific place to place the computer to, the possible size is limited. Even this case was a bit too big to fit to the "hole" dedicated for it. I did clean up the wires a bit before closing the side panels, but it's still not perfect. But it is good enough for me. After all, I didn't even buy the most expensive and fastest stuff like Core i7 and GTX 295, because what I bought was cheaper and follows what I said: "good enough for me".

The next two days went with adjusting the computer's settings and installing Operating...

Let's take a look back to last week, starting from Monday August 10th 2009. On that day I saw that the order I placed on Finnish on-line computer shop has been handled and sent. At that point I was not sure whether the packets would arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday, but as I had been waiting for almost 3 months for them, you can guess how glad I was to know they would finally arrive.

Why did it take so long then? Well, I got most of the parts ready in a week after placing the order, except for the video card. For various reasons I wanted to try Radeon HD4770 but as many people might know, the new 40 nm manufacturing process didn't really work so well. Producing the 40 nm RV740 chips has been too slow to meet the market demands. So two weeks ago I finally called in and asked them to send all the parts that they could and wait for the GPU and send it in whenever they can (of course this adds extra postage).

On Tuesday while I was working in the University Clean room laboratories handling the e-beam equipment, I felt my cell phone vibrating, indicating me that someone was calling me. Well, since due to the nature of work we need to wear protective suits there, I couldn't answer the phone. And no, the suits are not to protect us, the suits are to protect the labs from us! (for real!)

When I left for lunch break I took a look at the phone's logs and saw that there were actually two calls at different times from the same number. "Could it be from the post office regarding the delivery?" was my thoughts. I took a look at the online packet following page and indeed for both packages there were reports of "trying to call the recipient". And even the times marked there matched those on my phone. Time to call back! I would be getting the parts "after 5" (after 5 pm) delivered to home. YAY!

When I got home after the work day (around 4 pm) I was very hungry and didn't really have anything to eat in fridge, so I immediately took a trip to local Citymarket to get something to fill the...

Well, since WinPcap team doesn't yet have an official Windows 7 version of WinPcap driver and the current installer refuses to install it (should work in Vista compatibility mode, but I had some problems with it), I went ahead and compiled and installed it manually myself.

Since compiling drivers on Windows requires the correct version of Windows Driver Kit, compiling it for Windows 7 was impossible because the version of WDK that supports Win7 was not publicly available. Yesterday I got e-mail from Microsoft telling that I now have download access to the kit, so I downloaded and got to work.

So this is my story. I'm writing this in a tutorial-style so that it would be easy for others to also try it and act as a reminder for me how I did it.

List of software needed:

• Microsoft Windows 7 x64
  
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
  
• Windows Driver Kit 7
  
• WinPcap 4.1 beta5 source code
  
• AirPcap Developer's Pack V 4.1

I assume that you have the Microsoft products installed and ready for use. Download the WinPcap source code and AirPcap dev pack. Both come as ZIP files. Create a new folder where you will be working in. Extract the "winpcap" folder from the WinPcap zip to the working folder (make it as a subfolder), and the "Airpcap_Devpack" folder from the AirPcap zip.

So at this point you should have two folders in the working folder you created.

Compiling the NPF driver

The lowest level component of WinPcap is the virtual device driver. As the name says, you need to use Windows Driver Kit to compile it, so start x64 Free Build Environment from the Windows Driver Kit start-menu group.

The build command prompt opens, navigate to your working folder with usual commands. Go inside winpcap\packetNtx with cd command and type in CompileDriver command. It may list some warnings or defects, but the compilation should finish up successfully. The compiled driver npf.sys can now be found from winpcap\packetNtx\driver\bin\amd64

Compiling Packet.dll

The next component required by WinPcap...

What's the point of having spambots spamming a wiki site that has only one regular visitor, that visitor being a mean sysop that hands over permanent bans to spammers with a great delay of approximately 2 minutes after the spam message was posted?

Seriously now. Why?

You might have read about my free Audigy 2 card. It has been working fine in Windows 7 after installing unofficial beta drivers for it, even power savings work correctly.

Yesterday something happened, though. First I just lost audio service, making all programs hang up when they tried to do any sounds. Well, simply restart of AudioSrv fixed that (Windows 7 has audio controlling as a service, so one can simply restart the service to reset all things related to sounds) but not everything was like before. The sound balance was off, way off.

Firstly all sounds played with less volume even though the settings and volume were the same, both in software side and on physical speakers. Secondly, the sounds were biased to front speakers while I would prefer the volume to spread equally to front and rear speakers for a nice surround sound. So I thought maybe restarting computer might make it better. It didn't...

So now all volume levels are dropped to half (or even less) with the same settings as before, with rear speakers lost the volume even more. I really don't like the way this is going, even though losing the card is not that big of a financial loss since I paid nothing for it...


On the same day we had some nice Left 4 Dead survival gameplay. As I had to beat Artaxs's time in The Drains, this is what we accomplished:


Shortly after the game we encountered a thunder storm here. It didn't take very long for it to somehow shut down my computer. At that point I deemed it better to unplug all the devices for the night.

Here you can see overdramatized thunder radar picture: http://screencast.com/t/Lma3whhyeQK

It's been a hot day. My new wireless cycle computer (!) has a thermometer in it and it says 26 °C. The local weather station says 21.4 °C, though. Still, it feels quite hot here especially it has been chilly spring some time ago.

And seeing the weather forecast, tomorrow should be even hotter day. Maybe I'll get my new cycle computer a real test drive tomorrow then.

On Monday I will start my work at the Physics department of the University of Joensuu. I don't know what I will exactly be doing there, but I think I'll see what they have in mind for me then. Thanks to this summer job I will have money for the new computer. I had already placed the order for the parts but I have still not received them, the online shop is still short of the HD4770's, so I will need to wait for a little more for them to get more of those to also put one to my shipment.

For now I still use this older computer that I will then be turning to act as a server. I have not yet fully decided what OS I will put as the base, but I think I'll go with the new ClarkConnect beta. Until then I'll be mostly just chatting on IRC and browsing forums using Opera.

Prove it!

Write a program that prints out "hello world" without actually using any of those characters in the code.

Read more about it and user posted solutions here: Hello World without hello world

Collect all the hidden eggs to uncover the secret message!

Here's an egg for you:


Post your answers, questions, hints, etc. as comments here.


Note: There are at least 18 eggs in total. If you can find them all, there might be a special prize for you!

Note 2: This event is not affiliated by Xfire in any way, it's my personally arranged hunt.

The part where I said " So to save yourself from even more humiliation, I am going to lock this right now." was a joke.

My apologies to tx3000 for going a bit overboard.

Is this a big April joke or what? The forums have suddenly got infected.

I mean, come on people, what are these about?
Troll eXchange 3000
Games Discussion is the new Atlantica Online forums
Pocoyo on crack
Homosexuality-obsessed alt?
You want me?

If you want more, just read some random topics on the forums.

Quote

[00:17] GODJonez: why do I feel like I don't always understand people who post on the forums
[00:18] [Xfire] Frostrocket: cuz they're...
[00:18] [Xfire] Frostrocket: aliens