Pet Peeve of the day

From time to time we run network cable around the building. It's normally Cat5e Plenum rated. This is 8 conductor specially coated cable (for the Plenum-the airspace in a building used for air circulation) This is supposed to give off less toxic gases when burned.

Anyhoo, the last couple of boxes of cable were from our head office and to put ends on a wire or to punch it down, you need to strip off an inch or so of the insulation and untwist the 4 pairs of wires. (green, green stripe, blue, blue stripe, orange, orange stripe, brown, brown stripe) Well these last boxes (AMP brand), you could hardly tell the striped wire from the non striped. It's very easy to lose track of your wires if they colors are very close. More than once, I've had to cut a new end to find the correct pairs.

This picture above is from a good wire brand.

Oh yeah, and another thing since I'm venting is that this wire doesn't have any length marked on it. By this I mean, one end doesn't have 0 feet and the other end 1000 feet. You need to keep track of how much wire you pull off the roll and figure out how much is left for the next job. Come on, how easy would that be to do at the factory? Thanks for listening.

Distributed Computing for a Cure

For over a year now I've been using my free CPU time to help to find cures for diseases. Stanford University is studying protein folding and misfolding. (Don't ask me what it is -0 the link below explains it.)
Using Distributed Computing, data can be processed on multiple computers over the internet. The Folding@home project uses thousands of volunteers (actually their stats show over one million 'donators')to process data which would otherwise require supercomputers.

The 'folding' program running on my computer runs in the background using free CPU cycles when I'm not doing anything else. (Which is often. Just kidding)

Check out their site to see how you can help their research.
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Main

New Toy of the Week

This week's new toy is the EZ-Swap hard drive enclosure. What you get is a portable enclosure for a 2.5" SATA hard drive and a 3.5"/5.25" drive bay for your computer along with necessary cables and carrying case.

You can use the drive by itself connected with a data cable to any computer's USB port. There is a power cable (another USB port is required), but I have found that this is not needed, (with an 80 gb drive at least) as there seems to be enough power from the USB data cable.

If you mount the drive bay in a desktop computer, you now have a hot swappable hard drive. We use it around the office for quick re-imaging of computers.

Very handy, compact and fast.

Network Cable nightmare

Found this picture on my hard drive. This is the back of a set of server /patch panel racks. It looks real, but how could any company ever let it get this bad. Hopefully it's a 'before' shot.

Athlon64 x2 6000+ upgrade

Just recently upgraded my home computer. Nothing major since I'm on a budget. Upgraded to a Athlon64 x2 6000+ (dual core 3 gigahertz). According to Asus PCProbe, the CPU was running very hot. (about 50-60 degrees Celcuis) The stock heatsink should have been okay, (but wasn't) so I've had to upgrade to a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme heatsink with a Scythe 120mm fan strapped to it and temps are now in the 40s. Picture to follow.

Found this picture from the HardOCP website. Good site for computer hardware, games etc. It shows cable management trays with a ton of cables running through it. It looks like phone cables. Wild.

Burning Movies to DVD - Episode I

Okay, I downloaded some movies from the internet. (won't say where or what kind-;) ) and I am trying to burn them to DVDs.

The downloaded files are MKV format videos. Play fine on the PC once I got the correct CODEC. (I am using the CCCP codec pack currently) I'm still working on it, but here are the steps.
1. Got MKV playable clip on PC
2. Nero can't use MKV files to make a DVD
3. Tried AVI2DVD. No good - errors I couldn't resolve. (error 57 - tempsox.wav)
4. Tried to use VirtualDubMod to convert to AVI to put on a DVD - no good, errors
(yes, after the error message I spent a good deal of time searching the internet for solutions)
5. Now trying AllToAvi program. I got the MKV converted to to an AVI. Plays but no sound. I think all the problems have been CODEC issues I cannot resolve.
6. keep trying things. Stay tuned

Woo Hoo! First Blog!

Okay, here it is, my first blog.

I've been in the IT field for some 23 years now and this is my first foray into the world of blogging. (either reading or creating) Why am I doing this now? Not sure. I guess I want to share some of my projects, problems and solutions with others. (If anybody manages to find this blog.)

I won't post too much info on my personal life on the internet (and you shouldn't either!), except to say that I've been in the IT (information technology) field for 23 years (from programming to network admin and finally now in more or less a help desk role)

I'll try to keep updated every few days, but who knows, maybe I'll tire of this and this may be my first and only post. We'll see.