Automation Adventures

That was an interesting three weeks. Without any posts to the blog.

First reason was my mom coming over for almost two weeks. She’s from the Netherlands (as am I originally), and visits almost every year. It’s always fun to have her over, but it’s also very tiresome – apart from doing my day job, I now have a second job as tour guide of the area, and a third job as translator. She’s home now though, safe and sound.
Second reason was my wife (and me!) having to make several trips to a fertility doctor in North Carolina. It’s only about a two hour drive away, but added on to the tour guide and translator jobs, this started to wear me out.

Third reason is a project at work, being several months in the making, decided to go into testing phase. Of course some bugs appear, which need to be fixed sooner than ASAP.

And of course all this happens in a period with exciting stuff going on:

• TiVo releases the Series 3. And it’s on sale. Very expensive though. And some problems with CableCards (long live our cable companies).
• The release date for the Nintendo Wii is announced (November 19, 2006). And it’s price ($249). It still looks pretty exciting, and I hope I can convince my sweetheart I need one…
• I caved and bought a Nintendo DS. First of all because of the cool game Brain Age. And second of all because there seems to be interaction between the Wii and the DS (wireless).

Apart from that, lots of new exciting stuff is happening at home itself. Ubuntu is getting a strong foothold here, and I’ll tell more about the 4 things I needed to be able to do. So far I’ve been able to do 2 1/2… We might be getting a dog, so there goes that free time. But more about those things in a different post.

Google Reader has changed their look. And it’s a big improvement.

Big change I see is the categories you can put your feeds in, and you can read them by category. That’s the one big thing I missed when I switched from bloglines.
It has the same setup as GMail: you can have All Items, Starred Items, etc. etc.
You can list all your subscriptions, or list only the ones that have updated items.

It looks like it is still in “Labs” status, but I feel they’re ready to make it “Beta”

Don’t tell your wife that with Labor Day weekend, you’ll have plenty of time. She’ll cheerfully make sure you don’t…

It’s not as bad as it sounds here: we were talking about the weekend, and my dear wife mentioned that if I had some time, could I take a look at why her computer was so slow. Sure!

I first checked for the usual suspects, spyware, adware etc. Spybot S&D is up to version 1.4 now, and AdAware is still going strong. Neither one found anything. Then I checked the hard disk space. The disk was about 80% used, which prompted me to do a disk clean up. That helped a bit, but not much. Maybe defrag? Why not? (Well, because it takes forever, that’s why not).

No success. Then I remembered reading an article about the hard disk controller being stuck in PIO mode, even though I’m pretty sure her computer has Ultra-DMA (it seems to have found a controller for it). A quick check, and sure enough, the primary IDE channel had switched to PIO modem. Some digging (haha) around found the article by James Barton. It describes a step-by-step on how to fix this problem, and prevent it from happening again. Just because blogs sometimes disappear, I’ve copied the steps below:

1. Open up the Registry Editor.
2. Navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.
3. There
   are several sub-keys under this one, such as 0000, 0001, etc. You are
   interested in two of them that say Primary IDE Channel and Secondary
   IDE Channel.
4. Make the following changes to both of those keys:
1. Delete
   any attributes named MasterIdDataCheckSum or SlaveIdDataCheckSum. This
   resets the tracking for errors that Windows uses to determine when the
   transfer mode should be lowered.
2. Add an attribute with the name
   ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess and a DWORD value of 1. This tells Windows
   that it should lower the transfer mode when there are six consecutive
   errors instead of six cumulative errors.
3. If they exist, set the
   following keys to a hexadecimal value of ffffffff (eight F’s). This
   will change the transfer modes to UltraDMA-6:
• MasterDeviceTimingMode
• MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed
• SlaveDeviceTimingMode
• SlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed
• UserMasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed
• UserSlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed
4. Reboot your computer and check the devices to see if they are set to UltraDMA Mode 6.

Reading through some of the comments, you need to check the BIOS to make sure it’s setup to support DMA for the hard disks (another article states that Dell is known to turn this off – guess what, my wife has a Dell…), and it is prudent to make a backup before mucking around with these settings.

So I guess I’ll be making a backup today, and see if there’s anything I can do about that DMA mode…

Update: I just finished backing up and modifying the parameters, and her machine sure is a whole lot snappier. As a test I ran iTunes playing her music library, and starting up both Firefox and Thunderbird. The sound didn’t hiccup once. Thanks James!