by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 22, 2007 | Usefull Things
I’ve a number of machines that needs memory upgrades, I didn’t want to turn them off to see what is inside in order to plan this. Under windows it’s pretty easy, just download and run CPU-Z and you’ll know all there is to know.
I did a lot of searching etc and eventually came across dmidecode, you just run it as root and it parses through /dev/mem and loads the DMI tables, parses them and prints them in human readable form.
It shows a lot of useful information, on my IBM HS20 Blade it shows model, serial, hardware numbers etc. Here is a sample of the memory section:
Handle 0x0017
DMI type 16, 15 bytes.
Physical Memory Array
Location: Proprietary Add-on Card
Use: System Memory
Error Correction Type: Multi-bit ECC
Maximum Capacity: 16 GB
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Number Of Devices: 4
Handle 0x0018
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 1
Locator: DIMM1
Bank Locator: Slot 1
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x0019
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 1
Locator: DIMM2
Bank Locator: Slot 2
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x001A
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 2
Locator: DIMM3
Bank Locator: Slot 3
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x001B
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 2
Locator: DIMM4
Bank Locator: Slot 4
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous |
Handle 0x0017
DMI type 16, 15 bytes.
Physical Memory Array
Location: Proprietary Add-on Card
Use: System Memory
Error Correction Type: Multi-bit ECC
Maximum Capacity: 16 GB
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Number Of Devices: 4
Handle 0x0018
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 1
Locator: DIMM1
Bank Locator: Slot 1
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x0019
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 1
Locator: DIMM2
Bank Locator: Slot 2
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x001A
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 2
Locator: DIMM3
Bank Locator: Slot 3
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Handle 0x001B
DMI type 17, 21 bytes.
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 512 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: 2
Locator: DIMM4
Bank Locator: Slot 4
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
So I have 4 total memory slots, each slot has a 512MB DDR module in it, this means I’ll be throwing it all away and buying new RAM.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 18, 2007 | Front Page
I bought a Nintendo Wii, it was not easy I’ve spent hours trying to source one eventually the guys over at Stocknetwork delivered the goods, they notified me by email that the someone would have stock the next morning and managed to get it in the 10 minutes they had stock.
I bought a few games apart from the Wii Sport. I got Need for Speed Carbon, Zelda and Call of Duty 3.
The console is totally addictive and I wouldn’t have thought it but the Wii Sports package is the killer. Call of Duty totally disappoints due to the difficult controls, Need for Speed is fun I like driving with the nunchuck it’s the first driving game that I actually manage to play well since before I was stuck with keyboards and xbox controls, neither great for driving. The most time though is spent in Wii Sports so far.
The appeal of the Wii Sports is its simplicity, I tried as an experiment to get my girlfriend into playing something on the Xbox – we tried Gotham 1 and 2, Unreal Tournament and The Suffering, the controls were just no good but she immediately got the hang of the Wii controls and is totally into playing tennis. My 2nd set of controllers are on their way then we can play against each other which should proof fun but might ultimately convince me to get a bigger tv for the split screen.
While its simplistic it also has some depth, Tennis is the best of the lot and you can really control the ball well, put on some spin, control the power of your strokes etc, all this without the added hassle of maneuvering your men since the console takes care of running to the balls for you. I think these party games are going to be the genre that dominates, I’m already dying to get my hands on Wii Play.
Anyway, this console kicks arse, if you’ve got one my Wii number is 1405 1552 0430 8836. Drop me a line with your console number and be sure to enable Mingling! If you don’t want your number out in the open just say so when you leave a comment here and I won’t approve it.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 11, 2007 | Usefull Things
I bought a Sagem PVR6200T Freeview PVR back in August from Comet in Greenwich.
The device was OK at best, it was noisy and a bit slow to respond sometimes, never coped well with playback of something while recording something else and often just crashed randomly. This was after a software upgrade that took away the repeatable crashes and reboots leaving just the random ones.
Most annoyingly it’s only means of upgrade was Over The Air broadcasts so even though a upgrade was out to fix some of my problems I couldn’t download it and fix them, I had to wait for Sagem to schedule a OTA again.
Night before last it’s HDD packed up – much ticking and retry sounding noises at bootup and it never displayed anything on the screen.
I immediately thought it is going to be hell to replace this thing, probably involve me sending it back to Sagem myself, being without a PVR for months and then getting a refurb version of the same crap back. Had a look on the Comet site and they said one can just bring it back to them for repairs – so still much waiting?
I drove to the store I got it from – Comet Greenwich about 10 mins from me – and put it on the counter with a very quick explanation of what was going on. The guy behind the desk just looked at it to ensure all the bits where there and asked me if I wanted the same type again or a different one for replacement? I was shocked it was totally painless, no hassles, no questions asked, just go pick a new one.
So I looked at the various options and settled for a Humax PVR-9200T – had to pay the 20 pound price difference – my first impressions are that this is a great bit of kit. It’s fast, the UI is much prettier, it supports upgrading via RS232 port and OTA. It has a USB port and some software that lets you download recorded video to a PC for viewing. It also has double the storage of the old Sagem and a 2 year warranty.
So major kudos to Comet for getting customer service right, totally unexpected and unique in my experience with high street electronics places. I’ve bought many things from them in the past this is the first one thats broken, but it does inspire confidence.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 6, 2007 | Photography
I’ve always loved panoramas ever since I got my first Olympus camera that had the on-screen display for composing panoramas. It required – and Olympus still stupidly have this requirement – that you use only over priced Olympus memory.
Things have come a long way since with almost every point and shoot now having a on screen guide for doing panoramas and give away free software for it, but what to do with a DSLR?
There are several methods, you can do them yourself in photoshop or any of a number of apps that require you to carefully line up your photos and make little dots on them etc. but none of these compare to Autostitch in ease of use. You literally just point it at your photos and it does it all, you don’t even need to tell it what form the panorama takes.
The end result is a good quality JPG (quality is adjustable) that only requires cropping, below are some examples of what I’ve done with it in the past. It can not be easier to shoot them, no tripods or anything, just line them up.
Click on each for the flickr page, then click on All Sizes to see big versions of each shot.
I’d definitely suggest giving it a try, it’s a great way to get more detail in shots, look for example at the last one in detail you’ll see Emma in the shot bottom left to give you a sense of scale, that is 6 x 10 meg pixel images stuck together. More examples by me can be seen here and there is a Flickr Group as well with some excellent examples.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 28, 2006 | Code
After my recent release of version 1.6 I realized you wouldn’t always want to have a clickable point at every line point so version 1.7 introduces a fix for this.
First a sample:
You can see there are few points and the line just gets drawn through points that aren’t clickable. This is a much more practical approach to it since with version 1.6 you’d have had 2000 clickable markers on that map, not good.
To activate this feature there is now a special type called none, if you specify this as the type for a point it won’t get a marker, no comments, not clickable etc. You can also therefore not define your own types using the word none since they just won’t work.
As a side note, the image you see above is from a map with very close to 2000 points on it, the map works on my iMac with 1GB RAM but I’ve seen it fail on other smaller machines, it seems the problem is related to the time the javascript takes to run so the browsers kill the javascript. This is the first time I came across limitation in this so all I can say is if you intend to make huge maps, test it on smaller machines as well.
This version also fixes a small error in the HTML that my code produce, this didn’t break anything but it’s best to stick to what GMap EZ expect.
Version 1.7 is available at http://www.devco.net/code/gmapsphp-current.tgz as always and the docs at http://www.devco.net/pubwiki/GMapsPHP have been updated.
