Sunday, August 13, 2006
Fireworks
Went to watch the last day of the fireworks with kev, chris, zq and jol. We met at 8pm. However, it was already very crowded. We squeezed for an hour to get to the bridge near the esplanade, and finally ended up blocked by the trees near the river.
As chris predicted, the crowd moved forward a little when the fireworks started, but we were still blocked by trees, so I could only see through the gaps in the leaves and extrapolate the rest of the patterns based on that information. Definitely not the ideal way to watch fireworks. Will have to go much earlier next time. Unfortunately, most of the pics are too blur for anything to be seen so I won't bother putting any up. Go to zq's blog for a couple of nice pics.
Haven't been blogging much lately as I've spent the last week troubleshooting the fujitsu laptop. The preconfigured installation from the school was very slow, and my 1st couple of tries at reinstalling the OS led to blue screens. I'll put the details here so those with fujitsu laptops won't have to figure this out again. Those who aren't interested could stop reading 1 paragraph ago.
The first difficulty is the default partitioning scheme, it was split 55GB/20GB. Personally I felt it should have been the other way round. You don't need 55GB for windows and other programs. Unfortunately the recovery disc offers no option for partitioning. The hard disk is SATA which means that XP installation discs don't have the drivers for it and thus can't detect the drive. The IT Co-op uses Ghost, YH used a slipstreamed XP disc, I used Ubuntu linux. Use whatever works for you.
After recovery, the system will prompt you for the driver disc. It'll seem to hang when it says something like "windows desktop service", or something like that. I only remember it definitely had the word desktop in it. Just be patient and wait.
Next comes joining the domain and doing windows updates. Both should go off smoothly. Do NOT give the domain account administrator rights on your computer. If you do the server will happily push down some software and install it on your computer silently. It'll also ask you if you want to install trend micro office scan. DON'T do that either. It requires a password to uninstall and it can't remove viruses. It'll only tell you they're on your system. Anyway, if you've done windows updates and it asks you about trend micro, you should be getting a blue screen soon. At least I did. It said something about a program trying to execute code in unexecutable memory. It's not a one off error either. Restarting won't help, unless you do it in safe mode. Then you can do a system restore to before the updates. However, I don't think living without critical windows updates is a good idea.
The blue screen will appear in about 4 out of 5 restarts or so. You may get lucky and you won't encounter a blue screen. Most of the time it'll hit within a few minutes of logging in. Sometimes you don't even get to log in. It's that bad.
I brought it down to the co op, and the guy wanted to take it in for checking, but at the last minute he thought of disabling the XD bit functionality in the BIOS. It's under CPU features. That solved the problem, but he didn't know that the function does, and at that time neither did I.
When I got back, I found that it's a hardware feature that can help prevent buffer overflow attacks. That could come in useful and it's such a waste to disable this feature. I did a recovery again, and so far I haven't encountered a blue screen, as I didn't give the domain account admin rights. It also starts up much faster as compared to the preconfigured installation. So far I haven't had to use anything in the network starter kit. I suspect the join domain utility will also give the account admin rights. Whether it'll result in a blue screen I'm not sure, and I'm so sick of doing recovery I'm not going to try anymore. Someone else can experiment and tell me.
Alternatively, you can disable the XD bit function in the BIOS.
As chris predicted, the crowd moved forward a little when the fireworks started, but we were still blocked by trees, so I could only see through the gaps in the leaves and extrapolate the rest of the patterns based on that information. Definitely not the ideal way to watch fireworks. Will have to go much earlier next time. Unfortunately, most of the pics are too blur for anything to be seen so I won't bother putting any up. Go to zq's blog for a couple of nice pics.
Haven't been blogging much lately as I've spent the last week troubleshooting the fujitsu laptop. The preconfigured installation from the school was very slow, and my 1st couple of tries at reinstalling the OS led to blue screens. I'll put the details here so those with fujitsu laptops won't have to figure this out again. Those who aren't interested could stop reading 1 paragraph ago.
The first difficulty is the default partitioning scheme, it was split 55GB/20GB. Personally I felt it should have been the other way round. You don't need 55GB for windows and other programs. Unfortunately the recovery disc offers no option for partitioning. The hard disk is SATA which means that XP installation discs don't have the drivers for it and thus can't detect the drive. The IT Co-op uses Ghost, YH used a slipstreamed XP disc, I used Ubuntu linux. Use whatever works for you.
After recovery, the system will prompt you for the driver disc. It'll seem to hang when it says something like "windows desktop service", or something like that. I only remember it definitely had the word desktop in it. Just be patient and wait.
Next comes joining the domain and doing windows updates. Both should go off smoothly. Do NOT give the domain account administrator rights on your computer. If you do the server will happily push down some software and install it on your computer silently. It'll also ask you if you want to install trend micro office scan. DON'T do that either. It requires a password to uninstall and it can't remove viruses. It'll only tell you they're on your system. Anyway, if you've done windows updates and it asks you about trend micro, you should be getting a blue screen soon. At least I did. It said something about a program trying to execute code in unexecutable memory. It's not a one off error either. Restarting won't help, unless you do it in safe mode. Then you can do a system restore to before the updates. However, I don't think living without critical windows updates is a good idea.
The blue screen will appear in about 4 out of 5 restarts or so. You may get lucky and you won't encounter a blue screen. Most of the time it'll hit within a few minutes of logging in. Sometimes you don't even get to log in. It's that bad.
I brought it down to the co op, and the guy wanted to take it in for checking, but at the last minute he thought of disabling the XD bit functionality in the BIOS. It's under CPU features. That solved the problem, but he didn't know that the function does, and at that time neither did I.
When I got back, I found that it's a hardware feature that can help prevent buffer overflow attacks. That could come in useful and it's such a waste to disable this feature. I did a recovery again, and so far I haven't encountered a blue screen, as I didn't give the domain account admin rights. It also starts up much faster as compared to the preconfigured installation. So far I haven't had to use anything in the network starter kit. I suspect the join domain utility will also give the account admin rights. Whether it'll result in a blue screen I'm not sure, and I'm so sick of doing recovery I'm not going to try anymore. Someone else can experiment and tell me.
Alternatively, you can disable the XD bit function in the BIOS.
posted by cosine @ 9:43 PM 
