http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/ The home of custom guitar and piano music, the ProFactor PC game, video game reviews, video captures, and much more! en-us 07 May 2010 13:31:57 CDT 07 May 2010 13:31:57 CDT andypro@vt.edu andypro@vt.edu 180 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/favicon.ico http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/ 16 16 http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a76My websites have been down for the past several days thanks to the death of my PSU in my primary machine. I decided to replace the 4 year old OCZ GameXtreme 700W with a Corsair 650W. Corsair is pretty highly-regarded on Newegg at the time of this writing, and the PSU seems solid, quiet, and dependable. <br/><br/> In other news, the DOW dropped just shy of 1,000 points in intraday trading yesterday; possibly due to the Yen currency moves. This may be the tip of the iceburg where the European sovereign debt crisis begins and the Euro as a currency ends. Only time will tell.07 May 2010 13:31:56 CDThttp://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a76http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a75Here's a video I recorded for Youtube. Some fun facts about the video: <br/><br/> I recorded roughly 28 takes. The one you're watching here is take #12.<br/> It took me 12 days to learn the song and commit it to memory, and a little over a month to practice it up to performance level.<br/> I recorded the audio and video separately and combined them in software afterwards. I also used my laptop's speakers to monitor the sound while I was recording - it was sitting on the floor just outside the camera's view.<br/> I used a velocity envelope on the video track at the end to create a slow motion effect after I struck the last note while the video faded out.<br/><br/> Enjoy!<br/><br/> <object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7Y9rt2yxBSI&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&hd=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7Y9rt2yxBSI&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&hd=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>31 Mar 2010 12:04:03 CDThttp://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a75http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a74<img src="/images/grammar.png" alt="Every team controls. It *is* destiny!" border="0" /> 10 Oct 2009 14:04:12 CDThttp://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a74http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a73I may be the only person in the world who insists on doing this the hard way, but I've found the need to manually delete files with the worst file permissions possible in Windows - that is, files that have no owner. A select few system files may be configured this way, and there's really no good way to script out a solution that I've found. The problem with using any command line or powershell script in this scenario is that nothing will allow you to modify ACL settings for files with no owner. If I'm wrong, please e-mail me and let me know how. <br/><br/> This leaves us with using the Windows UI to make the necessary changes. Since I have to do this on about fifty individual files, I thought I would write out a sequence of keyboard inputs that would fix the ownership and permissions the way I want it, which I have included for you below. If you have a way to manipulate keypresses without needing focus, you might simply enter these commands as a keypress script which will allow you to just press a button and walk away. <br/><br/> Note that you will probably need to slightly modify these depending on the configuration of your system. I have UAC disabled and run my account as an administrator. <br/><br/> This one is for adding my user account as the file owner, where <i>context</i> is the key many keyboards have that brings up the right-click context menu on the currently selected item:<br/> <b>context, r, tab x4, right, tab, space, tab x3, right x2, tab x2, space, down, enter x2, esc x2.</b><br/><br/> And here is the one for removing existing permissions and adding my user account with full control permissions:<br/> <b>context, r, tab x4, right, tab x2, space, tab x2, space x3, ctrl+v, enter, tab x2, space, shift+tab x7, space, esc.</b> In this example, make sure to have your properly-formatted username in your paste buffer.06 Oct 2009 18:57:45 CDThttp://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a73http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a72Are you having difficulty choosing which music to listen to or which program to install? Perhaps you need a little help:<br/> <br/> <img src="/images/funnywindows.png" border="0" alt="So helpful" /> <br/><br/> Windows can think for you! <br/><br/> The link actually opens a help file that discusses CD and DVD burning types and options which makes sense, but the initial dialog is just funny. I have found the language used in Windows 7 has so far been extremely well-written and easy to understand save this one humorous line.25 Sep 2009 12:52:14 CDThttp://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a72http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a71And Windows 7, for that matter. I've been using an almost nine-year-old operating system for so long, I've forgotten what sort of advancements have occurred in user interface design. At the very least, I've forgotten that eventually, some OS problems *are* addressed. <br/><br/> Sorry for the temporary site outage. I was performing open-heart surgery on my main machine and my server to swap processors. No casualties on the operating table, I'm happy to report. <br/><br/> Anyway, the SSD: what can't it do? Firefox installed in 3 seconds. Thunderbird installed in 3 seconds. iTunes even installed in under a minute, and if you've ever sat through a Windows iTunes install, you'll know that's quite fast. I had one issue with the install, and it turned out to be a problem with my old nVidia 7900GT graphics card. The nVidia ForceWare drivers have had this problem for so long, I found forum posts dating back before 2007 with this same, unresolved issue. Fortunately, the only known solution, short of buying a new card, is to use an overclocking utility to change the core and memory clocks. I used nTune, because it integrates directly with the nVidia control panel and because you can save custom profiles which can get applied on OS startup. I played around with the clocks on my card, and found that my primary screen was garbled and unusable until I hit 760MHz on the memory clocks. Core clock didn't seem to have an effect, but sure enough - 759MHz memory clock was still garbled, and 760MHz memory clock was perfectly normal. I'll be upgrading my video card pretty soon, but I'm glad to have found this stop-gap solution for now so that I can enjoy Windows 7 the way it was meant to be enjoyed.23 Sep 2009 20:15:54 CDThttp://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a71http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a70I have discovered an undocumented bug in Microsoft's Internet Information Services 5.0 web server. I'm posting it here in hopes that Google will return at least one hit about this when someone else searches on it. <br/><br/> When you specify a custom redirect on a directory in IIS5, you start with *; followed by pairs of redirections separated by semicolons. You may need to use one of the special redirect variables provided by IIS like $Q or $V. These typically come at the end of a URL string that you're building. However, IIS5 refuses to interpret these variables when they are followed by a semicolon. This means that if you need to use these redirection variables in IIS5, you must put them as the last pair in the list. An example follows: <br/><br/> <b>Will not work:</b> *;/default.asp;/redirects/processor.aspx$Q;/help.asp;/help.aspx <br/> <b>Will work:</b> *;/help.asp;/help.aspx;/default.asp;/redirects/processor.aspx$Q <br/><br/> I hope this can help you deal with those legacy Win2000 IIS boxes that still plague so many datacenters today. If you need to redirect more than one pair of files and include querystring parameters for both, then you need to come up with a solution like the above. Use a single processing page to re-redirect from multiple sources so you only need to use one set of these special IIS variables. This problem does not exist in IIS6 and later. <br/><br/> Here are some keyword tags for the Google searchers: <b>IIS5, redirect variables, $Q, $S, $V, custom redirects, semicolon delimited, a redirection to a URL</b>09 Sep 2009 16:20:05 CDThttp://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a70http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a69It seems as if Activision realizes its hit series of rhythm games is waning in popularity. I have just pre-ordered Guitar Hero 5. If I hadn't learned of a special promotion, I never would have bought the game. I don't think it will be particularly good because I don't care for most of the included music tracks. <br/><br/> Thankfully, I am a Van Halen fan. Any purchases of Guitar Hero 5 before the end of September will include a promotional code good for one free copy of Guitar Hero: Van Halen, which will be shipped within 4-6 weeks of the game's release - currently December 22, 2009. Guitar Hero 5 retails for $60, even on the Wii, but if you check Google Product search, you'll see that BestSKU has the title for $47 which includes shipping. <br/><br/> Let's see what we get here. 83 songs from GH5 + 44 songs from GH:VH, and that means I get licenses for 127 songs at $0.37 per song. Thanks Activision; you've just made an acceptable offer to me, the consumer.28 Aug 2009 14:05:44 CDThttp://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a69http://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a68Is progressing much more slowly than I had hoped. I have put my upload tool as the highest priority, but creating it just the way I want it has been rather difficult. I have learned so much about web application design and optimization over the past few years, and so I'm excited to move forward. <br/><br/> I don't expect to have anything outwardly visible finished this year, however I hope that the fall season will put me into gear for this sizable project.28 Aug 2009 13:56:16 CDThttp://suspendedinthemeantime.com/index.asp#a68