Thoughts on Fishing

Recently, I've tried my hand a fishing and I guess I'm "hooked" having spent a lot of time fishing and well, not really catching.  I'm trying, on my own, to work my way through the basics and the different aspects of fishing.  While I could spend a couple of hundred bucks on a guide or a charter or otherwise learn from others, I'm thinking I will save that for later.  So, I'm essentially fishing the same area for the same fish week after week, testing different theories, changing just a few variables at a time in order to understand this thing.  To keep things simple, I've been focusing on boat trolling, with a downrigger.  I'm on a medium sized lake going after cutthroat trout.   This is where I fish:

Beautiful winter morning on the lake.

I've managed to increase my catch rate from zero to 1 so I'm not focusing on figuring out exactly what changed and what to build on.

So far, I've found that the following matters:

• Speed of trolling (less than 2 mph per my Windows Phone).
• Depth of trolling (20' seems to be the consistent)
• Length of line out (currently playing with ~ 100')
• Lure (rainbow colored Luhr Jensen Needlefish seems to be the winner)
• Attractors (sticking with a Ford Fender)

Things that don't seem to matter:

• Bait (no bait, powerbait, power worm, etc)
• Noise (lure is 100' behind me, so no sense whispering)
• Fish Finder (all times I've had a fish, I didn't see jack on the fish finder prior to the hit)
• Treble, barbed or single hook.  I'm using single hook no barbs.  Haven't lost a fish yet.  My guess is the big to-do with barbed vs non-barbed is a philosophical thing.  Basically if the fish is on your hook, you got the fish.  If it's going to get away, it's going to get away.

Things I'm not sure of yet:

• Length of leader from attractor to lure.
• Time of day

Some observations:

• Ford Fender creates a LOT of drag - makes it a chore to bring it up.
• When there is a fish on, even a small one, you can really tell.  If you are wondering if there is a fish on, then there isn't one on.

SOLVED: Wireless Limited Network Connectivity

Issue: Wireless connection never completes and shows "Limited Network Connectivity" or it does connect and intermittently disassociates and/or shows "Limited Network Connectivity".

Other Symptoms:

• System Event ID 5060 for the Wireless device:

\Device\NDMP35

Intel(R) Centrino(R) Ultimate-N 6300 AGN

0000: 00 00 08 00 02 00 38 00 ......8.
0008: 00 00 00 00 C4 13 00 60 ....Ä..`
0010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0028: 48 4D 41 43 A5 0F 00 00 HMAC¥...

• Often unable to associate properly with a wireless router but works with other wireless routers

Solution: Disabled Quality of Service (QoS) on the router.  In some routers this may show as "WMM" or something similar.  Just disabling the QoS function altogether caused all wireless connection issues to go away.

Note: This issue occurred with my work laptop and my home wireless router.  The home wireless router worked with everything else - mobile phone, personal laptops, Apple TV, wireless tablets, XBox, wireless connected TVs, etc, etc.  Conversely, the work laptop worked with everything else: work wireless router, Internet sharing mobile phone, other routers, etc, etc.

Hitman: Absolution Easter Egg

Found it by accident.

Mac OS X cannot be installed on this computer

Well, actually it can.  The problem is that if the install disc you are using came from another system (i.e. pre-bundled DVDs) instead of the retail version.  The workaround is fairly straightforward:

1. Create a DMG version of the DVD using Disk Tools.
2. Restore the DMG version to a thumbdrive or external hard drive.
3. Using a terminal window, copy the "System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg" file somewhere (i.e. /tmp):
   cp /Volumes/Untitled/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg
4. Figure out what your system type (i.e. "MacBook4,1") is:
   sysctl hw.model
5. Extract the contents of the file using "xar":
   cd /tmp
   xar -x -v -f OSInstall.mpkg
6. Edit the file named "Distribution"
7. Look for the line "var hwbeSupportedMachines" and add your machine code so it looks something like this:
   var hwbeSupportedMachines = [
                       'iMac10,1',
                       'MacBook4,1',
   ];
8. Save the file.
9. Recreate the OSInstall.mpkg file (again with xar):
   xar -c ./ -v -f NewOSInstall.mpkg
10. Copy this new file over the old OSInstall.mpkg:
    cp /tmp/NewOSInstall.mpkg /Volumes/Untitled/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg

Now you shouldn't get that error message anymore.

Internet Explorer Bad Grammar

Is it me or is this bad (or at least awkward) use of the English language by Internet Explorer?

Security protects something, so why would my security need protection?  Perhaps a better way to state this is "To help enhance your security, Internet Explorer has shut itself down."

Date Ranges in Web Apps

I find it extremely frustrating that date ranges, especially in but not limited to online banking, will typically show you the "current month" as the default view.  Simple use cases will show that while this works extremely well for the later part of the month, it is not so helpful in the earlier part of the month.

Seriously?  How does this help me?

A more reasonable approach is to have the default view as the "last 30 days" or something like that.  Month-views should be optional.  When viewing your history, do you really just care about the last three days???

Much better.  KTHXBYE

Bloatware

Installing a Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in needs 100MB in space?

Installing a printer driver requires a 200MB in disk space?

How about a video card driver that needs a 160MB installation file??

Can we cut the please, please cut the bloatware before we need a 4GB printer driver?

LinkedIn Password Hash File is Real

Yep, just checked it - my unique LinkedIn password SHA-1 hash is in there.

If you have a LinkedIn account, login NOW and change your password.  If you've used that password with other things associated with your LinkedIn login (usually your email address), then change those passwords too!


Here's a link to the hash file: combo_not.txt.zip

Here's a nice write-up on the details as well as a online SHA-1 generator so you can check for your own hash: Errata Security

iTunes Home Sharing Not Working [SOLVED]

Not working and sometimes when it is working, it cuts out in the middle, or when you click on the computer name, the focus goes away from the library.  In other words, really weird.

What it is
iTunes has a feature called "Home Sharing" - it basically allows you to share your entire or part of your library with other instances of iTunes in your home network.  It requires you to login to your iTunes account on both computers.  A typical scenario is to enable Home Sharing on your desktop machine and then access the library from your iPad, Apple TV, iPhone, Mac, etc.

In my case, I have iTunes on my desktop machine running Windows XP in the attic with Home Sharing enabled and then I access the library from my Macbook and Apple TV, depending on what I want.  How to use Home Sharing can be found here.

Symptoms

• Home Sharing machine not showing up in Apple TV or the Macbook
• The Macbook home sharing not showing up on my desktop 
• Home Sharing working intermittently
• Connections getting cut of intermittently
• Usually, restarting iTunes or the desktop computer will make things work.
• Sometimes, restarting the Macbook or the Apple TV will make things work.
• The "working" doesn't last long

The Fix

On the desktop computer where the Home Sharing is enabled, I disabled the "QoS Packet Scheduler" from the network connection:

1. Open Control Panel
2. Open Network Connections
3. Right-Click on your connection (in my case, it was "Wireless Network Connection 4"
4. Select Properties
5. Uncheck "QoS Packet Scheduler"
6. Click OK
7. Restart iTunes if necessary

After doing the above, Home Sharing worked like a charm.

System Temperatures

I often see posts on OC and hardware sites about system temperatures: is it normal? Am I overheating? What is the maximum temperature for my CPU? etc, etc.

Over the years, I've found that the best and most logical approach is:

• Computer components, especially processors, hard drives, RAM and video cards will heat up.  It's a fact, get used to it.  They are designed that way.
• The heat needs to escape your system.
• If the system is designed well with proper fans, you should feel a lot of heat escaping the computer.  This is not a bad thing.  Hot air being blown out of your machine is a good thing.
• There are three times to watch for:
• Idle temperature - when doing mostly nothing, how hot do your components get?
• High utilization temperature - when doing things like playing high end 3d games, how hot do your components get?  What is the rate of increase from Idle?  Does it level off or keep going?
• Cool down temperature - when you stop doing high utilization stuff, how long before you go back to idle temperatures?

Airflow

The flow of air in and out of your system matters:

• Always have more air being blown out vs being sucked in
• Hot air rises, so exhaust fans should be on the top of your case
• Cold air goes down, so intake fans should be on the bottom of your case
• Imagine the air flowing in your case and look for dead spots where:
• Heat is generated
• No airflow takes the heat out.

Max Temperatures

My setup:

• i7 2600k @ 4.2 GHz
• 16GB RAM
• 2x Gigabyte GTX 570 SLI

I have a mini-tower case and everything is packed in there tight.  I'm using liquid cooling for the CPU and have an intake fan at the bottom of the case (sucking in from the floor) and an exhaust fan on the top of the case (pointing at the ceiling) and another exhaust on the side (right above the two video cards).  The max I've seen so far:

CPU MAX TEMPERATURE    : 84.0C
CORE0 MAX TEMPERATURE  : 83.0C

CORE1 MAX TEMPERATURE  : 85.0C

CORE2 MAX TEMPERATURE  : 82.0C

CORE3 MAX TEMPERATURE  : 81.0C

MAX CPU POWER          : 79.734W
AMBIENT MAX TEMP (MB)  : 63.0C

GPU1 MAX TEMPERATURE   : 74.0C

GPU2 MAX TEMPERATURE   : 67.0C

Idle temperatures are somewhere in the high 30s for the CPU, low 20s for the Ambient and low 30s for the video cards.  The rate I hit these temps are pretty quick (minutes) and it tends to level out.  After quitting a game, for example, the hot air blowing out of the case turns cool in a matter of seconds.  The temperature drops rather quickly.  I'll chart it one day, but I'm not so worried about it right now.

I hit these temps last night with Assassin's Creed Revelations at max settings for everything.

Dead Island: Something is Wrong

There is something wrong with the game Dead Island.  It's not the story or the game premise.  It's not the idea. It's the execution.  Too many little issues with the execution that bugs me and I'm not talking about the bugs.

• Re-spawning zombies: this takes away from the immersion aspect.  If I walk into a bungalow and slaughter whatever zombies are in there and then I go back a few minutes later, I should not find them back to where they were in the beginning.  Also, I had a great panic when several of them came streaming down the stairs from all directions.  I got through it only to find when I pass that same area a short while later, they are back.  That really takes so much away.  Same with having to run over them over and over again.  At the very least, take the bodies away but don't make them come back!
• But, the bodies also disappear, making it hard to recognize areas you've been in before.  This would have been super useful for again, immersion.
• The "Thug" zombies are just nonsense.  There's a repetitive nature to it, which again, takes away from the immersion.
• Your character pleading with you not to let them die is kinda corny.
• The game feels unfinished.  Even AA is missing altogether.

How NOT to Run a Banking Site

This is not what you want to give your customers if there is something wrong with your online banking site AFTER they login.  It makes us feel uncomfortable, abandoned and generally the opposite of what you intended.  I do not feel like you value me as your customer.

The New Hotness

Literally.  It's like 66C up in there.

With dialog bubble.  Because G+ Creative Kit.

Sound card straddled by two GTX 570s.  HOT.  Literally.

But the crashing is gone with the replacement card.  And performance is much better with dual GTX 570s.  Now, I can move on.

Driving a Wedge

In an earlier post, I wrote about the sound card which was hitting the video card fan since it was so close together.  I gave the on-board audio a try but found it lacking.  So what to do?  I decided that some sort of wedge was needed to keep the card apart.  I found a red rubber washer in my toolbox and electrical taped it to the back of the sound card.

Not only does this keep the cards apart but also gives a bit of room for airflow.

New GTX 570 = No More Skyrim Issues

Well at least the whole system reboot/black screen of death thing.

I got a new GTX 570 in the mail today, installed it and also tidied up the cables in the system.  So far so good.  Still a little nervous, half expecting the system to crash, but nothing like that so far!  Skyrim had a few issues, but nothing I couldn't recover from.  Which brings me to an interesting observation.  With the previous video card, I never saw Skyrim (the program) fail.  I would only see the whole system crash.  Now, I see the crash to desktop (rare) and the occasional video driver crashed thing (also rare).

One scary thing - about an hour into play, I heard a loud grinding.  Turns out the sound card was touching the fans on the GTX 570.  I couldn't do much more to separate them, so I ended up removing the sound card and switched to onboard audio.

See how close the sound card (top) is with the video card?  Yikes.

When I get the 2nd GTX 570 in, it will be really crowded in there with the sound card.  I'm thinking of gerry rigging some kind of wedge between the sound card and the video card, but in the meantime, I'll give the onboard audio a try.

It's been almost a week and so far so good.  Now if only the 2nd GTX 570 gets here soon...

Amazing Skyrim Story Engine

Don't want to reveal any spoilers, but when talking with a friend about Skyrim and he shared that at one point in the game, if you kill a main character in an abandoned shack, it will spawn a whole new set of quests.  When I was at that point in the game, it never even occurred to me to do that.  It's amazing that the Skyrim developers programmed that alternate storyline in.

Apparatus Update

Couple of quick notes:

• System has been behaving as intended (no black screen/sound loop crashes) since I replaced the GTX 570 video card with a GT 8800.  Hopefully, when CyberpowerPC sends back a new GTX 570, the problem will not return.  At this point, I am extremely leaning (99.999999999999%) towards a video card hardware problem causing my Skyrim issues.
• I'm using 12 Skyrim mods now (can't remember them off hand, but mostly graphics related) and it's working awesomely.  The only thing that would make it more awesome is if I could use the GTX 570 that I paid for. :-)  So, yes, anxiously awaiting for the RMA process.
• I'd love to use Skyrim UI since the inventory menus are so badly designed, but I don't want to deal with the hassle of continually updating SKSE.
• Eagerly waiting for the first Skyrim DLC
• Still looking for a good Bokeh mod that can be installed from the Steam Workshop.  I could use the Nexus ones, but I don't want the hassle, similar to maintaining SKSE.  Is that asking too much?

Bokeh

Liking CyberpowerPC

I'm really liking CyberpowerPC.  They consistently respond to my emails with quality customer service response, even if the answer is not positive (i.e. they don't do advance RMAs).  That, along with great support while purchasing and quick, quality shipping, will make me buy my next system from them.  After that I got this response to an email inquiring about the RMA process:

As we do not repair the video cards here at Cyberpower we will be replacing the video card all together. Once we receive your video card for replacement you will be notified by email.

Nice!  This should fit right in with validating if the problem is the video card or not.  In the meantime, I have a 8800GT 512MB video card and I'll be testing that to no end to see if it produces the same crash in Skyrim.

More On Video Card

After several more hours of testing and researching, I had a few more observations:

• Skyrim utilizes DirectX 9 and possibly some DirectX 10.
• Grid utilizes DirectX9 and possibly some DirectX 10.
• Battlefield 3 utilizes DirectX 11
• Batman: Arkham City utilizes DirectX 11

So far I've only experienced problems with Skyrim and Grid (the latter only in the past two days).  The crashes are the same: video feed goes out, sound loops, system unrecoverable.  This can happen after several hours or after just a minute (or even straight from power off, boot, game load, crash).  The usual suspects are out:

• Heat (measured over and over, max GPU is like 72C and max CPU is 68C.  This was extreme testing.  Normal operations is about 35C CPU and 42C GPU lower.
• Overclocking - the crashes are seen without overclocking, with overclocking and with underclocking.  It ain't the overclocking, okay?  I tested it.
• Malware - no malware on the system.
• System errors - NO ERRORS IN THE OS EVENT LOGS.
• Power Supply - replaced 750W power supply with a Silverstone 1000W power supply

Now, the fact that no issues are seen in Battlefield 3 and Batman and only the games NOT using DX11 led me to this article which describes how installing an older DirectX 9 game can muck up your DirectX 10 but leave DirectX 11 intact.  Weird, that sounds like my issue!

Quote from article:

Obviously, something is wrong with the DirectX 9 redistributable package. However, I don't think Microsoft can do anything about this since the DirectX 9 redistributable is everywhere and has been in use for ages. We just want to warn you about this problem so you won't need to scratch your head if your DirectX 10 game does not work. It could be because you just installed a DirectX 9 game. Try reinstalling the DirectX 10 redistributable.

Well, I tried the fix (install DirectX 10 runtime manually), but to no avail.  I still get the crashes in Skyrim and (now) Grid.  YARH (Yet Another Red Herring)?  Likely.

Frustrated and unable to get away from the observations:

* Crashes in DX9/10 games (Skyrim & Grid)

* Does not crash (yet) in DX11 games

* Just started crashing in Grid a few days ago

* No errors found using OCCT, Furmark, Heaven, etc, etc, etc

* No OS errors (this means the OS does not even catch the error, indicating it is likely NOT the video driver).

* Was able to change the crash slightly by disabling Timeout Detection Recovery (TDR).

All of the above points to a video card that is not behaving properly. 

Frustrated, I removed the Gigabyte GTX 570 from my system for packing up for the RMA and I found an older Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 sitting around, so I installed that.  I tried and tried to replicate the crashes, but I could not.  Changing the video card eliminated the observed crashes.  The logic is inescapable: it's not software, it's not my setup, it's not my configuration.  The only variable that changed was the video card itself.  Observation: video card is causing the problem. 

Guilty? We shall see.

It's weird that this would indicate that so many people have faulty video cards.  But then again, is it really so many?  In hindsight, no.  Sure, there are a lot of forum posts about it, but then again there are probably a lot of forum posts about....well, anything.  More than half of the posts tend to be trollers, leaving only a few with the same actual issues.

And then I remembered how my video card got a low rating (around 68%) for the ASIC in GPU-Z.  Perhaps it's true: Skyrim does push your hardware in ways other games and stress tests do not.  Here's another interesting fact: Had I not played Skyrim, I would have had zero issues with this system.  Well, at least I think so.

This is a very good video card.  When it works.

Hopefully this is the final test.  It is important to note that prior to the video card swap, I was already up to over 10 crashes in one day.  It was getting crazy.  After the swap and after several hours in Skyrim, loading saved games that would consistently crash, I got zero crashes with the older card.  

The GTX 570 now sits in a shipping box, ready for RMA.  However long it takes to get there and for CyberpowerPC to send me a replacement will hopefully be worth it if I've found the root cause of the problems for the last four months.  Now I just hope CyberpowerPC doesn't get the card, run Furmark against it and then send it back to me.  If that happens, I may just have to get another video card altogether.

"Video card, huh?  You were losing the video feed?  And then crashing?  Must be tough to be so frigging smart!"

TDR: Helpful. Next Stop: Video Card

After the TDR disabling, the crashes still happened, but more slowly.  In what previously was a quick video feed shutoff followed by a buzzing that was the last 1/2 second of audio looping now became a video feed shutoff, audio still playing with some distortion and the keyboard still responding.  I was unable to gain control though, since in about 10 seconds the keyboard became unresponsive and the audio eventually became the same buzzing.

This is at least something in the crashing that changed - and it means... something.  Previous changes were only on the frequency of the crashing, but this is the first time I was able to change the crashing method.  Another interesting change was I was able to get a single Windows Event Log entry:

Log Name: System
Source: nvlddmkm
Event ID: 14
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
Task Category: None


Binary data:
In Words
0000: 00000000 00300002 00000000 C0AA000E
0008: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
0010: 00000000 00000000


In Bytes
0000: 00 00 00 00 02 00 30 00   ......0.
0008: 00 00 00 00 0E 00 AA C0   ......ªÀ
0010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ........
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ........
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ........


The description for Event ID 14 from source nvlddmkm cannot be found.
Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.


If the event originated on another computer, the display information
had to be saved with the event.


The following information was included with the event:


\Device\Video5
An uncorrectable double bit error (DBE) has been detected on GPU (03 03 03).


What this means to me is that the crash is centered on the video card.  Probably bad memory chips on the video card.  I ran GPU-Z and I got 68% on the ASIC - not clear on what that means, but the general consensus on the Internet is that the higher the percentage, the higher the quality of the video card build.

Shortly after this, with TDR still disabled, I saw the same crash in Grid.

Conclusion #1: Having TDR enabled is good, because it catches most crashes, preventing the system from going down.

Conclusion #2: Having TDR enabled is bad, because it hides these crashes from us and only when a crash is not recoverable (i.e. in Skyrim) do we think there is a problem.

Obviously #2 causes us to run down some crazy rabbit holes, while technically related, is really not something I can do anything about.

I've sent in an RMA request for the video card.  So we'll see what happens next...