Soyo Topaz S - Hacking Native Widescreen Resolution on an Intel 945GM Express

This evening started out disappointing, but here lies the key to a simple, relatively safe hack that helped me. I’ll start at the beginning…

I was so stoked today when my new 24″ monitor came in! A Soyo 24″ Widescreen 1920×1200! Nothing fancy of course, but it was a whopping $200 at geeks.com. First thing that happened was I plugged it in to the external monitor slot on my home laptop - a Dell XPS M1210.

It came right on, but hmmm… I couldn’t set anything but 1024×768 resolution! WTF!?!

I tried everything, tweaking the registry settings, hacking the inf file, installed PowerStrip… nothing worked.

I searched google one last time hoping to turn something up before I was going to just return the damned thing. Lo and behold I stumbled on this:

http://www.ryosa.com/widescreendrivers.html

That link explains how to use the Intel Embedded driver development kit to create custom drivers. I know it sounds daunting, but really, it’s simple. They have a wizard for the whole thing.

A quick run through the instructions at the above link, and I had it all working. I also used the linux documentation project to find the Modeline for the monitor, which is a good key to use to figure out what the timers should be. In case you happen to be using this exact same Soyo Topaz S 1920 x 1200 on an Intel 945GM Express chipset, then you’ll want the following settings:

I’d have really liked to have found that somewhere before digging around. Thanks to the modeline on tldp, it worked on the FIRST TRY of this trick because I had the right numbers. It’s beautiful, and I’m happy! YAY! Hopefully this helps at least one other person out of a jam. I’m just contributing to the massive store of knowledge google can bring to you and your kin by posting this. Feel free to ignore it if has nothing to do with you, your laptop, or your monitor.

I have a story to tell you. (Non-technical)

I know this isn’t par for a programmer’s course, but oh well. This started off as an email I sent my brother, and I’ve added a bit and well, here it is.

The other day I went for a run in Downtown Tampa. I intended to be out for, oh, like 30 - 40 minutes. I ran up and down small streets ending up in some huge (and by huge I mean it was for at least a mile in each cardinal direction) upscale residential neighborhood where there was a Hummer and a Beamer in every driveway and a Mercedes in the garage. The property was all beach front vista. Actually, it was ‘bay front’ and the difference between the two was very obvious to me… it stunk like rotten sewage in the whole neighborhood. These people paid millions of dollars to live in a so-called upscale neighborhood that smells like a trash heap. I laughed to myself about the kinds of life-pressures that push one to do such a thing. I knew it wasn’t just that night that it smelled like that, because I’ve been in the general area before a few times, and it always had, I just never really thought about it all that hard. Well, I had been gone about 40 minutes at this point and it was starting to get dark. I realized that I was totally lost, and to my surprise I found that I had been going south after I thought I had turned around going back north and that for the entire 40 minutes I had been running further from my hotel. So I turned back around, my lungs burning, thinking to myself that I might as well stop and walk, start to panic and find my way back as fast as possible. Then I did actually stop, just for a minute. I looked around, and noticed that I was surrounded by palm trees, and that the air was 80 degrees. The stars were sparkling clear, and the moon was almost full. I was in a tiny little stinky paradise, while my co-workers were at home setting their alarm clocks to get up the next day and troggle off to work. My veins were bursting with my heartbeat, and I couldn’t quite see straight because of the oxygen debt. I was smiling to myself as I took off my shirt, and picked up at full speed back north. I was thinking, normally, I’d be upset. I’d be trying to hock some device I had on me to grab a taxi, or avoid the dark alleys so I wouldn’t have to worry if this were the right way to go or not, how long would it take me? How far off course was I? But in this instant, I realized I was living a moment that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to ever live again, and even the experience of the burning in my lungs was something I wouldn’t trade for the world at that moment. I was ecstatic, and I pushed myself harder than I’ve ever done before to run all the way back. Through the sprinklers that people had on for their lawns. Past the folks cruising by in brightly polished Miata’s and perfectly plated Benz’s wondering “Who’s the idiot running in the dark, while I’m in this fancy car? Must be a loser.” All the while I knew that I really had the upper hand, I didn’t have to worry about any of it. And I don’t live in a neighborhood that smells like a sewer.

It was a good night. And boy was I sore the next day.

Seriously, quit bashing Microsoft for being successful.

Before I begin, I’d like to point out that I like open source. I use it and I contribute to it. I think the educational value, and the practicality of it in lots of situations warrants its existence, as we can see because it still exists. I relish the fact that both open source is here and helps me to learn and diffuse essential knowledge, and yet there is still a thriving market for proprietary software that makes ones skills profitable. But the bashing of software for profit, it’s senseless. I can’t stand it any more. What is the whole idea here? I’m a regular reader of Slashdot.org, an occasional reader of Digg.com, and various other news sites, and I’ve come across such an endless stream of anti-Microsoft and closed minded jealous raging rants against large companies that I just can’t stay silent on the issue any more. It makes my blood boil. I have so little respect for the ignorance of folks who can’t see their nose in front of their own green clouded eyeballs that I’m going to do some ranting of my own. Are these people really seeking the destruction of our economy? When did profit become a dirty word?

I’ll start with the obvious. What is the point of a for profit corporation? A for profit corporation is an entity which exists to make money. That’s why they call them “For-Profit.” It’s very subtle I know, but if you can’t fathom that, bear with me. I have heard it said that the government only allows for the establishment of such entities as corporations so that the public interest is served. This is true. However, this service of the public good isn’t what one might expect at first. I’d venture that the average American imagines that the public good is best served by creating a company that doles out employment and benefits, and that’s the best way to serve the public good. It isn’t. The best way for a business to serve the public good is to drag as much money from outside the economy into it. Wherever you put it, be it in the pockets of the higher ups, in the concrete that the buildings are built on, in the shops surrounding the offices, in the gas tanks of the employees as they drive to work. You can put it in the supply chain, in the pockets of the ISPs that host the traffic for their enormous websites, in the hands of the developers who use their platforms to generate their own Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and sell their own minor empires worth of software halfway across the country or indeed the world. Stash away cash in the refrigerators of the caterers who bring in executive lunches, or the company that handles the accounting and payroll transfer. Give it to the advertisers who make money on the fact that there is a reputable publication carried on the shoulders of giant companies, whose every word is read by scores of thousands of people all across the globe, and as a result of this exposure now have the opportunity to benefit the public good themselves. This giant corporation has given them a forum for their own little voice to be heard. In pursuing its own self-interests, the coattails of a large corporation become very long, and allow for countless other entities to hitch a ride around the entire globe on them. What the hell is wrong with that?

If you’re a tiny little ISV trying to start up your own business, it’s up to you to pick a good and viable business model that suits your target industry and market space well. If you’re attempting to fill a need that has already been filled by a dominant force and you do not have the clever product or wear-with-all, or business structure to support a takeover of that industry space, then you’re the one making bad decisions. You don’t have the ‘right’ to be successful, you have the right to try. If you can’t push the leader off his pedestal then you have chosen the wrong field. If you can’t establish a sufficient specialty niche for yourself, your business model is wrong. Equal opportunity is not the same as equal results. More generally, fairness and justice are two totally different things. Justice is a right which should be enforced, but fairness is not. It is just for the best product or marketing to prevail in an open competition scenario. It is not fair that it’s tough for a little guy to break in. Ultimately, and over time, the results become more pronounced than in any one decade or small years span — the customers vote for the winner with their dollars. The fact that a person decides they should be able to compete in the web browser market, for example, does not mean that he should automatically inherit an equal slice of the market share just for having laid a public claim to it. In the case of Firefox, for example, they give away the product for free, and still, they have a smaller market share. Does that mean that some government somewhere should come in now and mandate that X% of all people in the world now need to use Firefox? No, that’s silly, and we all know it is. IF Firefox really fills a glaring need that cannot be so filled by Internet Explorer, then it will be taken up by the section of the market that has this need. People aren’t the idiots that some would have you would believe they are. Users and developers of software don’t choose Internet Explorer because they ‘want evil to win.’ They do it because it’s more practical for whatever situation they are in. This practicality comes from two factors, one: they don’t know about the other one, and don’t see a need to look for a new solution to a problem they’ve solved, and two: perhaps there is some feature of IE, however ill-advised it may be to use it, in whatever situation that they perceive as being necessary (this might include Microsoft investment in their company.) That perception is theirs to have. It isn’t some governments to give or demand. Eventually even super-dominant industries fade and fail giving way to new and better ones. Sometimes large companies survive the evolution of disruptive technologies, sometimes they don’t. Nobody makes horse and buggey whips anymore. Should that have been protected on the grounds that it might not have been fair to let the auto makers have their run of the economy? It’s the way of the world, and the truth is that it works. Look at where we are now. We got here because it works. It’s not nice in some small, short term, slice of life views, where large swaths of workers are laid off or have to take pay cuts, but eventually these things correct themselves. Whole towns spring up and die around industries and it’s always been that way. Walmart and Microsoft didn’t invent the idea of inequity. Inequity is the driving force behind progress. It’s the inspiration for ambition. It drives those who have the will and the knowledge, and especially those with the will to develop the knowledge, to do ever better and be steadily more useful and more productive. It forces those who are on the losing side, who will not give up, to try harder to get on the winning side. In the process, the stuff you can find on the shelves at the super market grows in variety, and drops in prices.

If one company abuses its position of power and doesn’t put the needs of the customers first, they will eventually suffer the consequences. If Microsoft would gouge the IT industry because they believe they have a position of infallible dominance, they will find that one by one, year by year, enterprise agreement by enterprise agreement, they will lose their market share. If they don’t adjust to the new situation, eventually they too will fall off the map. In serving the needs of its customers, a large company serves its own interests. The customers of a super corporation are not just the folks who live in the neighborhood. They are the collateral benefactors of all of the industries that go into supporting that mega entity, and are supported BY the mega entity, and they can live anywhere in the world. Tell me now that this isn’t to be considered the good of the public.

Are the haters of large corporations to say that it is not good for a company to make money? Or maybe just not large amounts of it? Probably they’d say it’s the second one, but they’re forgetting the fact that for a large company to just exist on planet earth for a single day, they have to spend a lot of this money on other folks, like their employees, for one. They have to pay the bills, they have to hire advertisers, so ultimately it’s the mega-sized companies that bring you Frasier, Survivor, Oprah, and even (shudder) Lou Dobbs Tonight.

My ultimate beef though is not a practical one. It’s an idealogical one. We should encourage those who succeed to lead as examples for others so that they can see that success is something that’s worth pursuing. The more successful people and companies we have in this country (or any country,) the more successful the economy at large will be, and the higher the standard of living we’ll have. And individually, it’s rewarding to see your ideas through to production, and moreso on a mega-scale. Bill Gates has earned the right not to comb his hair on TV, and I’ll bet that even Brooke Shields would like the same right. The cowering masses of admirers aren’t what the real winners seek. They’re a side effect of doing something that nobody else has done, and doing it exceedingly and emphatically well. Everyone admires Bill Gates, whether or not they’ll admit it. He’s a man of action, a man of success, and for some, the picture of what they can not aspire to be. They think that because they can never become like him that they should instead try to seize some of that which he has created (as in with lobbyists or legislation.) To slice off a chunk for those who will never do the things he has done, and will not lift a finger to that end. That’s where they’re wrong. You can aspire to be as great as you like. You can pursue your path to the end of your days. Nobody is going to give it to you, and they shouldn’t. It’s the ‘hard’ part that makes it so great. If you don’t make it to be as successful as you had aimed by the time you die, you won’t be walking around cursing the fact. But at the risk of sounding like I’m making a bad pun, (or worse, a pro basketball coach,) “You’ve gotta play to win.”

A Picture of The Competition

A good friend of mine went to India recently. I’ll let his commentary and the picture he brought back with him speak for itself.

“While in India recently I visited a temple in a town called Kalahasthi in Andhra Pradesh. This photo was taken around 7:00pm under heavy street lights (see the lights in the stores it was night time). This girl was studying on the divider surrounded by heavy traffic….of course this photo does not fully show the traffic, but Uma (my friend who took the picture) had to wait a few minutes and got a clear shot only after taking 5-6 pictures. As you can see the vehicles are moving and there was a lot of truck traffic as well……the girl was really oblivious to all the humdrum surrounding her, she was just doing what a student was supposed to be doing on a school night. When the power is out at homes or when there is no power at homes at all, studying under street lights is a very common scenario.”

“We have a video that shows the street light and all that, but anyway it is a very powerful picture showing the face of the competition.”

photo by Uma Shankar

SuperDeluxe.Com - Stop the MAdnesS

Ok I’ve had it with SuperDeluxe It’s too much funny, smartness in one place. I can’t take it. It’s sucking my humorous response enegry reserves to the dregs. If they put out one more episode of [(Layers)] or the Maria Bamford Show, I may never write another line of productive code again.

I actually don’t go there or any video sites, or even watch anything on TV that often, but when I do go there, it’s like I get stuck. I can’t hit the stop button.

What’s with the widgets?

Ok, I’m a sort of almost a blogger, and I write things that sometimes roughly resemble blog postings. I admit it takes a certain level of vanity to do that. I like to think I’m not being too ridiculous, and I admit that I only have a very narrow crowd of people who even care what I have to say… Most of them are people I collaborate on projects with, or people who look at it to be nice to me… but certain websites in the endless pursuit of, I’m not sure what, are getting ridiculous today. It’s vain enough to put a ‘Slashdot this!’ or ‘Digg It!’ widget on your page, but if you’re ’sort of a big deal’ then I guess that makes sense. HOWEVER, things can quickly get out of hand, and I kid you not, I actually saw this on a real live site…

Great Idea! That’s right, for your convenience, you can digg it, facebook it, del.icio.us it, newsvine it, stumbleupon it, reddit, yahoo it, fark it, technorati it, furl it, ma.gnolia it, embed it in your site, or just spam the hell out of your closest friends. All with the click of a button. Brilliant! But still a little too much work for me.

I’m going to invent my own button. I’ll put it at the bottom of my posts and sign up for adsense… I’ll call it ‘Give Me Ad Revenue!’, and it will do all of those things with one click. It’s honest, straight to the point, and best of all, it saves you the trouble of clicking on all of the buttons individually. How Convenient!

Vista: Thinking of you

So, Windows Vista is in RTM. I’ve been sort-of working on it now for a little over a week. I’m starting to get a feel for what it’s about.. and some of it I don’t like.

When you are learning to drive a car in a new place, you have to be very careful, and go a little slower. You confuse some small roads with others, and you don’t have the locations of the traffic signals memorized, so you read them each time you pass, carefully analyzing the messages, like ‘Stop!’ and ‘No Parking!’

After a while though, you get used to the surroundings, and you instinctively slow down and coast to a stop without even noticing the stop sign. You know where the crosswalks are that you have to pause and let the pedestrians walk across, all the while giving you dirty looks, like ‘What? You’re driving? Can’t you see I’m WALKING here? You WILL wait for me to cross, and so I’ll walk slow to prove how smug I am…’ Anyway… you start to know where you need to do what, without having to be constantly reminded.

Well, in Vista, unless you hack around a little, you never get that chance. You will always have the stop sign blinding your view of anything else, and you’re forced to interrupt whatever you might be thinking about to click ‘OK, yes I’m an admin.’

Sure the average consumer might need a little cajoling to not install that malicious software, but that really shouldn’t mean that I need to approve any and every attempt to change my clock settings. Not to mention that if I’ve approved the installation of a particular piece of software, I shouldn’t have to also click ‘yes’ on every HKLM registry entry it tries to write. Granted, I know that microsoft is trying to force the hands of the developers, but what about the critical adoption period? I already know a lot of people, especially developers, who run visual studio 2003 who are crying FOUL for other reasons — VS.Net 2003 does NOT run on vista unless you turn off User Account Control (UAC). Period. Doesn’t.

I know they sort of mean well, but taking such a hard line to consumers who are dumb enough to need that sort of smack you in the face lockdown is really going to alienate the base… Users who only use windows because they think it’s easier than learning something else. When you have to approve ten popups, and open new windows, (and think ‘What is a Zone anyway, isn’t it all Internet?’) before you can check your normal old ssl protected web-based email, you may not be so keen on the easy factor.

I don’t claim to know how to fix the problem, but I do know that this probably isn’t it. I expect there to be a rash of ‘utilities’ on CNET that will let you ‘turn off the annoying vista features.’ Not unlike popup-blockers are today.

So ultimately, we have a platform that is technically superior, and configured by default to be more secure, but at times is downright unusable to anyone but a relative expert… I don’t know. Sounds like Linux.

Edit: after thinking about that a while I’ve decided that if I have to run a more secure OS, and I can’t run my precious Visual Studio (even 2k5 doesn’t work — yet — with AUC on full blast, but they’re fixing that,) it might as well BE linux, and I think I’d like that better anyway. In fact, I run a redhat box that only prompts you for admin creds when you do a very few certain things. Now THAT is the right idea.

Disk Space Race Condition

Hah! This is one for the record books or something… I’m maintaining a production SQL Server 2000 host with about 20 databases on it. None of them are huge or anything, and the hard drive the data and backups live on has about 120 GB free at any given time… Last night during the backup rotation something happened in which the server created over it’s limit in temp files. I can’t tell exactly what was going on from a cursory look at it, (I’ll have to comb the logs more thoroughly) but some operation or set of operations make the temp directory exceed the 100+ GB of freespace that it had before it started the process. I found an old archive file containing 40 MB of data, which I deleted, and within 5 seconds 111 GB of free space opened back up. (That is not an exaggeration, 5 seconds.) Apparently whatever operation was waiting for space found enough in that 40 megabyte window and completed, freeing up the temp files… All I have to say is WTF! Who would have thought that could happen? The total amount data stored on the disk in database and log files is around 20 gigs, the hard drive itself is 300 Gigs, and there are various backup files laying around for the rotations to be able to keep two older backups of each database. So, that means that the simple operation of backing up 20 gigs of data triggered 110 - 120 gigs of temp files and caused the server to deadlock the operation (with good reason!) I guess that means that you need a LOT more space on the drive than your production data and backups… I mean there was still 500% of the data size left on the drive before the operation began, you’d think that would do it. Oh well. Lesson learned.

Self Doubt…

… is what you feel when you’re slowly digging a ditch to run a pipeline from the well, as you watch everyone else go by all day carrying buckets two at a time.

The ultimate implementation of DynamicMethod

Ok. Here.