Mindful Musings

I got this message on my blog today…

We are interested in your project and will like to invest,please detail us more via email and we will respond urgently.

Thank you;

Barr.Hamman MCkenzie

as a comment on the “Looking for a Couple of Good People” post.

Do you think this is a Spam comment or is this the real deal?

I tried, with some apathy, and then decided I did not stand a chance. Try your hand at Google’s new Game Show. I understand trying to recruit over achievers. I understand trying to grab the cream of the crop. I understand wanting to employ geniuses. I understand someone wanting to be the best and grabbing the brains to do so from a crop of computers nerds willing to jump through fire to get there. I understand the theory that clever people will make a clever company more successful. I had WANTED to work for Google myself, dazzled and confuzzled by the glitz, glory and the Roasted Eggplant Medallions on the lunch menu. But I have to say that Google is a little misguided. If everyone is a genius, if every employee has an IQ of 125 or above, if every employee has to be Ivy League educated or has to have invented Cold Fusion (not the scripting language either) or written the “primary resource textbook you used in graduate school” to be qualified, Google must be a “fun” place to work. Sour grapes (from Aesop’s Fables), I know.

But, to be really honest, I would rather work for a company TO make it successful than work for a company that IS successful (this idea comes from a thread at /.). Then again, this kind of crap gives them publicity (like I am giving them right now) and maybe thats what they were after. Who knows what those genius people think?

Do you know of anyone that owns a Kia Sorento? Do you own/drive one yourself? I am looking into buying a larger vehicle for myself (and my growing family) and have been delving into the compact SUV market. I am looking for relatively good mileage (I know thats hard to get, but the Ford Escape hybrid is a major possibility, though I don’t believe in Version 1.0 of anything), comfort in long drives, and some aesthetics.

Every review and every customer comment that I have read points to the fact that the most popular compact SUVs from the most popular makers are very unreliable. The Ford Escape produces about 50 lemons out of a hundred cars, the Jeep Liberty is uncomfortable, is a gas guzzler and has various mechanical problems, the Saturn Vue simply sucks in every way, the Honda CR-V is stripped down, weak and with few features and a plasticky interior, I don’t like the Rav-4, I’m never buying a Hyundai again (so the Santa Fe is out of the question) and the Mazda is sucky.

This leaves me with very few choices. They include the Mitsubishi Montero (and one other that I did not look into), the Kia Sorento and a few other lesser known models. Out of these choices, I find that the Kia Sorento, by a large margin, is the highest rated among customers.

Does anyone have any other suggestions that I should be looking at?

A reader posted this comment

I own iPod 3rd gen (20 GB), Zen Touch (20 GB) and Philips HDD120 (20 GB). The MP3 file that I used for benchmark is 320 kbps. They all have their pro and cons. iPod is definetely the best in term of user interface, it is dead easy to operate with very intuitive menu. Soundwise, it is the weakest among them. The iPod sound give me sense of light (too much treble) and lack of “deep” tone. Zen touch is nice, sound better than iPod BUT fiddly to operate. The vertical touch pad is quite a challenge to operate, far below iPod touch pad. It is also a bit bulky compare to iPod. Philips HDD120 looks better than Zen Touch, while soundwise is slightly better than Zen Touch. The tone is “deep” without leaning toward “boomy” type of sound. Operating wise, it is not as easy as iPod. Original software from Philips is a CRAB one, you have to set your windows to assign this Philips DMM to one CPU only (if you have hyperthreading CPU). However, you can replace this DMM software with Sveta Por!

table ! Jukebox from dbPowerAmp. I review all these gadgets using three different headphones, Etymotic ER-4P, Shure E2C and Sennheiser PCX 100. After all, you can’t go wrong with those three, they are all good for casual (like me) and audiophile ear.

Anyone concur or counter? My iRiver iHP120 sounds quote nice with the SRS boost and my Philips Noise reducing headphones are also a Godsend! I should review the Philips headphone soon.

I have, twice. This time, I forgot about the stereo anti-theft code and it caused me a lot of headaches but thats another post.
If you own a newer model vehicle in which a computer chip controls the fuel/air mixture and keeps track of the “under the hood” equipment, you might benefit from a reboot. A reboot, in many cases, can be as simple as leaving your battery terminals unplugged for a few seconds. Yes, you have to re-program everything that depends on that battery for juice such as your clock and your radio, and yes, you HAVE TO make sure that the reset will not kill the remote car start or the remote door lock/alarm system, but other than that, you might have a new-ish car on your hands again.

My Honda Accord (98) runs better, gives better gas mileage and feels brisk again. My meagre research tells me that these computers try to keep track of the driver’s usage of the engine. If you tend to be a lethargic driver, the engine tries to modify itself to suit your needs and vice versa. The process of understanding the driver’s needs is less than perfect and more often than not, the engine just becomes less energetic and responds slower to throttle requests. As usual, not being a mechanic or a car chip programmer, all of this is heresay and can be easily disputed. All I know is that my car feels a little more fun to drive now that I have rebooted it!

If you own one of those electric-gas hybrids (or all electric car), I would not try the above. Delicate voltage measurements and tweaks could be lost and you might end up with a large repair bill.

Standard Disclaimer: I assume no responsability for any damages, any loss of income or any expenditure from your foray into car reboots, if you choose to try the above.

I ran into this problem this morning after I upgraded my computer. Many sites on the internet suggest that in order to upgrade your computer to use the Hyperthreading on a Pentium 4 you have to upgrade the driver under the device manager.

However, as in my case, no other HAL was installed when I had installed Windows XP. Other Microsoft “MVP”s suggest that if a multiprocessor PC does not show up under the list of new drivers, install Windows XP on top of the existing installation to get the right HAL installed. This would mean loss of all application settings and you would have to reinstall all the security patches from Microsoft, all over again.

I did something much simpler and it seems to have worked all right. Here are the steps to enable hyperthreading support in Windows XP if your original install did not have Hyperthreading or SMP enabled.

1) Download and install Windows XP Service Pack 2
2) Find the following files (normally in your c:windowsservicepackfiles) – ntkrnlmp.exe – halmacpi.dll
and copy them to your c:windowssystem32 folder. (This is considering your new motherboard has ACPI support. I know that these files will support non-ACPI computers as well, but that has not been tested)
3) Open up boot.ini in your text editor and find the following line:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn (or something of this sort)
and replace that line with:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS=”XP Professional MP” /fastdetect /kernel=ntkrnlmp.exe /hal=halmacpi.dll
Make sure there are no line breaks in that line.
(backup your boot.ini and your hardware profile if you want, that might be a good idea)

Now reboot, go through the installation and reboot of the new kernel and you are done. To test that you have SMP or hyperthreading enabled, hit ctrl-alt-del and task manager to see two seperate graphs for the processors.

All done.

This “advice” does not come with any warranty or support. If you use this, I am not responsible for any damages or difficulties caused by this. Please use at your own risk.

[EDIT] Interesting followup from comments:

If you have applied this fix and your computer reboots while windows is loading, try this:

1) Copy ‘ntkrnlmp.exe’ and ‘halmacpi.dll’ to C:WINDOWSsystem32
2) Keep both a non-HT and HT enabled boot selection in boot.ini as shown below

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(4)partition(1)WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS=”Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS=”Windows XP Professional (HT)” /fastdetect /kernel=ntkrnlmp.exe /hal=halmacpi.dll

3) Run “Windows XP Professional (HT)” in Safe Mode (to run Safe Mode, hit F8 at the OS Select screen)
4) While in Safe Mode, Windows will update the drivers for your HT processor
5) Restart your computer and select “Windows XP Professional”

Even though you are not specifically passing boot parameters to Windows XP for your HT processor, Windows already loaded the correct drivers while you were in Safe Mode.

You can test this by opening the task manager and selecting performance. You will see two separate graphs.

My desktop was running just fine with Windows XP and the normal crud of software. Nothing changed on it, nothing was replaced, nothing was taken out or added. All I did was reboot the computer after Windows XP did its ritualistic upgrade day before yesterday. Ever since then I have had the computer freeze after a few hours of inactivity. My mistake was to try and fix the damn error. I looked through the event viewer to find some SCSI timeout errors from my Ultra100tx Promise controlled for my 160GB drive. It had started occurring right after the latest set of updates.
Well, I figured that if the updates are the cause of the problem, I will back them out and life will be good again. I was wrong. No backing out of these updates, heck the accounting of these upgrades are shoddy within the OS. “Thank God for the System Restore”, I thought to myself. I had of course, counted my chickens before they hatched! System Restore did exactly nothing to solve the problem.
Hmmm. So, the code problem is not reversible. I will have to do something drastic. I looked through the driver database on my computer and noticed that the driver for the card was over three years old. I decided to look through Promises’ website for updates and Googled the problem. Apparently, a bunch of other people have had the same issue with a Win2ksp3 upgrade. Maybe this is a driver incompatibility with a Windows Upgrade? But Promises’ website is down, for two days!! I find an older (older than the latest, newer than mine) driver and install it on my computer with my fingers crossed. Reboot.
Long story short, I my desktop will not boot now, not even in safe mode, not even in safe mode command prompt. Now I am faced with the dillemma that either the card, or the physical drive, or the card and the drive, or the driver, or the windows update or ALL of these things are bad. Do i spend two hours reinstalling Windows XP and copying hundreds of gigs of data around only to find that the problem was not solvable with the present hardware anyways? Do I go and buy a new motherboard/processor (with an onboard IDE that can handle > 130GB) and get around the driver issue? There goes my freakin weekend!!

My laptop will save the day (again!) for the time being. Is the extra dough for the 1MB cache on the Pentium 4 worth it? Any mobo suggestions?

viksoe.dk – GMail Drive shell extension
: Your your GMail account as an extra hard drive from your Windows computer. A link to a Linux/Python extension is also on that page.