Tech Fest Aftermath

I talked myself hoarse yesterday at the Tech Fest. Everybody wanted to know one of two things: 1) why we weren't using VMs in the lab already? or 2) how long before they can use this? Overall, I'd say it went very well. :)

First Mac

I bought my first Mac today. Okay... technically it's not mine, it's for my mom, but I bought it for her so that we could get it at discount.

Excellent Weather Today

Fri

86° | 58°

Hyper-V

Friday I, and a couple of colleagues, will be manning a Tech Fest booth involving utilizing virtual machines to increase testing productivity. Our proposal includes four major areas: 1) adding virtual machine infrastructure to the test lab to parallelize test execution, 2) running virtual lab machines on office workstations when not in use to further increase lab resources, 3) utilizing virtual machines to pre-test an environment before committing to a full lab run and 4) taking advantage of Hyper-V snapshot technology to capture a repro environment (pre-snapshot) and post-mortem environment (post-snapshot) of any failing tests.

For those of you who don't know, Hyper-V is Microsoft's hypervisor successor to Virtual Server. It's faster, enables 64bit virtual machines and other advanced functionality.

New nVidia Drivers

Looks like nVidia just released v175.16 of its graphics drivers.

Let's see if that solves my display corruption issue...



Update: After a few hours of playing around with it, it looks like the new drivers were just the fix I needed. The definitive test will be tonight after I go to bed. I'll load up a playlist of dozen or so movies, turn off the sound and let them run. If it hasn't frozen or crashed by morning, then we're golden.

2nd Update: No good. I woke to find this wonderfully fractured image this morning:


3rd Update: VLC actually crashed and burned tonight. So much for the codec theory.

Display corruption

In case you haven't heard, I upgraded my desktop machine to an Intel Core 2 Quad processor, 4GB RAM and an 8800GTS video card. A couple of 500GB HDD running RAID 0 and an SLI capable motherboard round out the system.

Problem is, even with all of that pretty hardware, I consistently get display corruption issues when playing DVD, DivX or XviD videos via Windows Media Player or DivX Player. Shortly after the display corruption appears, the system will freeze.

I've reinstalled the OS, drivers, codecs, but all to no avail. I'm fairly certain now that it is a bad codec interaction of some sort. I'm certain of this because I've tried playing the same videos with VLC Media Player which uses its own codecs and doesn't use system ones. Games play fine. Normal application use is fine. So...

The system remains cool to the touch, so it's not overheating. In fact, it runs much, much cooler than the previous one at only 2.5Ghz vs 3.4Ghz. Of course this bad boy helps.

So if anyone has any suggestions...

Hostony Upgraded PHP

The company that provides hosting for jeppsons.org upgraded their PHP installs to the latest versions recently. This of course immediately broke several of the webapps that are installed. I think the gallery is down. The various MediaWikis that are installed seem to have survived unscathed. Of course, the slaved gallery on borups.org is down as well.

I should get the gallery back up in the next few days.

Blog Readers

Apparently there are actually people that read this blog. Furthermore, many of them are frustrated at the apparent inattention that I've lavished upon it. So here's a post! :-P

I will actually be returning to Utah for Memorial Day weekend and staying through the next weekend. It will be a working vacation though. We've got to get that house sold. Or at least finish renovating it and get some renters in it.