Benj’s Busy Blog

Yahoo was a search engine leader for a long time… then Google comes out and just changes how a lot of things are done.

Google changed how search engines should work
Google’s GMail changed how Yahoo and MSN hotmail works.
Google’s Blooger was one of the first bloggers and everyone followed. Maximizing CSS usage.
Google Maps has done something Yahoo and Mapquest have never done. Maximizing AJAX usage.
Google Earth shows a 3D landscape with 3D buildings for Google Earth Plus.
Google has XML search Engine Submissions
Get paid with Google’s AdSense
Google has a lot more to offer with their Picasa.
Google has their API code downloadable.
Google has a fast Desktop search that can even search within your email softwares.

They got a lot more going on in Google Labs.

I do not work at Google and does not get anything in endorsing Google.

And here comes Yahoo and MSN try to match Google.

They first increased their Email boxes to 200MB (GMail is still 2GB). Yahoo has a better Video search. MSN says their bot re-indexes websites every 2 days. And check Yahoo’s clean search interface: http://search.yahoo.com

Competition is tough, and it is just pushing technology, innovation and business ideals to be more creative in a short span of time.

Yes, when your busy, you can’t blog that much. Even if I thought of something nice to say in my blog, I just can’t blog right away since I’d be finishing something. And after sometime, you forget about what you wanted to write about.

Right now, I needed to run my other computer that I haven’t been using for sometime. And since it has been a long time since I used it, I needed to update everything. All my AVG, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, JavaCoolSoftware Spyware Blaster, Search and Destroy Spybot, Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta, Firefox, Windows, etc.

And I was also managing my hard drives better placing the right files in the right places for better information management. I was copying and moving files from one PC to another on the network. It was slowing everything down and I did not have much to do and I needed to wait until all the copying, installing, scanning is all done.

So here I am blogging away again while all of these processes run.

Ever since school started in the Philippines after summer vacation, I haven’t seen any blog updates too from Ate Dawn, Marcia and Jamie.

I have been learning and sharing on Kangkong.ORG. If you want to talks about anything on Web Design, Web Development and other computer stuff, Kangkong.ORG is a nice place to go.

Work
I may be earning more than I used to in the Philippines, but that is not enough. Too much expenses. But a large bulk of it has been going to pension plans, trust fund, educational plans, insurance and credit card bills. I guess without credit cards, it would be a bit harder to use money when you need it and you do not have any at the moment, but should be used with precautions. Since a lot of money has been going to bills, and a lot of them are plans and credit cards, I guess it is fine than not have any pension plans and educational plans since this may make life harder now but easier later on. I guess that is still better than having life easy now and harder later on.

With all of the work I have with Einstein Industries, once I get home, I still got more work to do. Clients keep on increasing and even if it is manageable right now, I am already thinking about information management, security measures, server backups, customer support since there will come a time all of these will be hard to do is I do not do proper action while problems related to these start to develop.

I am no business management major, but how I run my business is still basically based on my experience being a businessman since 1997. Where the first few years were all mistakes and even up to now, you still experience mistakes, but are minimized since more mistakes you have already learned to avoid them.

Sales is increasing and I can make it increase a lot more, but I am not prepared for that. I am still laying out the process, streamlining all business processes from sales to production to delivery to collection. And when all is prepared, that is when I will go all out on sales. Right now I am building my own information management system that will be used by the company.

Leisure, Recreation
Hmmm… things I like to do aside from work… traveling is not my thing. Going to the mall, watching a movie, seeing places, nope. Unless I am with my family that would be great. But me all alone, I’d rather bike (BMX or MTB), train (Taekwondo, other martial arts), workout at the gym, play the piano or guitar. But I have no piano, no guitar right now. I have no money to train in martial arts. I have no sleep even to train or workout. I even have no air pump for the tires of my BMX, although I know there are cheap air pumps out there, my money is really all used up and every penny counts.

Well the way the problem was software was by simply using the Treo’s Palm Desktop, and synchronized with the Zire. Did a hard reset on the Treo and re-installed the Treo software and synschronized.

The problem just seemed to be a version incompatibility of the Palm Desktop softwares I was using.

-Back up of Zire 72 data Successful.

-Installation of Treo Software Successful.

-Import of data to Treo, has errors.
Compatible Applications Transfered. But Calendar, Memo Pad and Contacts not transferred.

It says some data failed to transfer to SD Card.

My guess is…

On my Zire, I have a 64MB SD Card with some data on it. Maybe also the data is trying ot be copied onto the SD of the Treo and the Treo has no SD right now.

Will first try to move applications from SD card to Zire Memory, and leave data files in the SD Card. Do a back, install Treo Software, and import to Treo. If that does not work… I might but a new SD card. If that does not work either, the applications are not important. The calendar, memo and contacts are. I’ll install MS Outlook, synchronize Zire to that, then uninstall Palm Desktop for Zire. Install Palm Desktop for Treo and synchronize with MS Outlook. If successful, uninstall Outlook after that. A long process, but if it is the only way to save all the information, I have to face it then.

Yeah just received mine a few days ago. My first experience with Palm was with a Palm m100, then Palm IIIxe, then Palm Zire 72, and now a Palm Treo 600.

I jusr like the PalmOS compared to Windows CE on PocketPCs and SmartPhones. A lot just fits so much in PalmOS that sometimes will not fit even a simple Microsoft Word Document. Being a fan of the PalmOS, if ever I wanted a SmartPhone, it would be PalmOS powered and not Windows CE.

My I had before the Treo was a Nokia 6600 as my phone and Palm Zire 72 as my PDA which is fine. But they are two things and at least I can have them combined now in the Treo 600.

Problem now is the switching from my Palm Zire 72 to Palm Treo 600. My first attempt did not go on well.

After synchronizing my Zire 72 with my laptop, then installing the Treo Updates on my laptop, then synchronizing it again with my Treo, instead of transfering everything to the Treo, the Treo transferred things to the laptop too, so the calendar was deleted as well as the contacts and everything. Good thing all data was still in my Zire 72.

I uninstalled everything and is currently trying to do it again. I will Install Zire’s Palm Desktop, synchorize and back up. Update to Treo’s Palm Desktop, and check if data was imported. Then Synchronize again to Treo.

Hope everything works.

I’m currently running an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ at home my Pentium 4 1.6GHz is out of commission right now. All into separate parts, but I think there is a good reason to put them all together again. I’ve been hearing about this so often, but I guess the video did the trick in making me decide to go for it. lolz.

Video of Mac OS X running on an Intel Machine
Original location of this video file is here:
http://rssmac.altervista.org/video

The two previous postings I had on my blog were about the problem with this setup:

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Motherboard: Abit NF8-V
OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP2

I no longer have the problems, but I will just post this here for people searching for solutions on how to get their setups working. I know there are a lot of them having problems, since when I had the problem, I searched online and found tons of forums with people having the same problem.

The problem mainly is: Computer could not enter Windows and reboots all the time. And it starts to happen right after you upgrade to SP2 on your Microsoft Windows XP running a AMD Athlon 64 processor and Abit Motherboard.

Every problem seems to be kind of unique depending on the brand and model of your motherboard, so I will not give any fixed solution for everyone. I will just tell you what I did to make it work, and what I did that made it not work. It was all about the order of installation.

Follow this order in installing your software:

-BIOS update
I initially did not do this at all, since by experience in the past, I never needed an update since everything works fine without an update. And if you do BIOS update errors, it can mess the whole motherboard up and make it totally non-functional.

Until this setup, my USB ports were not working and after all the research I did online, they all point to updating my BIOS. Since this is a delicate process I read everything very well before proceeding. I downloaded the latest BIOS from Abit’s website, read the procedures well and did the update. After doing that, the computer still works, but Windows won’t work anymore. Even if I removed a bunch of startup items and drivers in safe mode. So I needed to installed Windows all over again.

So do this first. But make no mistakes here. It is not my fault if ever you get your motherboards busted. Read the procedures well by the manufacturer before proceeding.

-Windows XP
If you have problems with your CD Drive not being bootable, Microsoft has boot diskettes on their website. Download the file and it will create 6 diskettes that you initially use to boot and install Windows XP from the CD.

-Install the only drivers you need to get online. (Modem or Ethernet or USB)
My mistake, I installed nearly every driver I could install, and after doing that, updated Windows to SP2, and it never booted into Windows again. Read on about the next procedures.

-Windows Update, all critical, SP1 and SP2
Do this first instead of installing the rest of your motherboard drivers. Since most of the drivers need SP1 and SP2.

I also had problems installing SP1 and SP2 right away. What worked with my computer was install all critical updates, restart, then critical updates again, and restart, and doing it over and over until you use them all up, then SP2 is last.

-Windows Update, DirectX9.0c
The drivers, during installation was looking for the latest DirectX. So before installing, install DirectX first. DirectX is also on Windows update under the optional updates.

-Motherboard Drivers
Instead of using the CD my motherboard came with, I decided to download the latest drivers from the manufacturer’s website. After doing that, my computer was running flawlessly. Remember to install AMD Athlon 64 drivers on the motherboard.

-Video Card Driver
Another mistake I did, I installed the driver of my video card right away before everything else and it never installed successfully since the video controller port was not working well anyway since I needed to install the motherboard drivers first. And the motherboard drivers will not work without SP2, that needed SP1 first. And SP1 needed the driver of your modem. But this will all be useless if you do not do the BIOS update first.

-Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware Softwares
To stop the annoying SP2 from reminding you that you have no Anti-Virus software installed yet, install them now.

-Install the rest of the software you need

No more problems. All fixed and you may now start working. It was all with the order of installation. Other people with the same setup, try doing these steps and it might help you too.

Disclaimer: I am no lawyer who knows how to make disclaimers, but all I want to say is my procedure does not guarantee your computer will work in perfect condition, the problem of your setup may be different from mine. Don’t sue me if you get your systems messed up.

All my USB problems seemed to point to my BIOS. That my BIOS needs to be updated by flashing it with the latest BIOS version. My board had a lot of on-board stuff, on-board 5-channel audio, on-board SATA/RAID controllers, on-board LAN, USB 2.0 ports. So these all had controllers and drivers. Now that I updated my BIOS, Windows won’t continue, probably a problem with the drivers of these on-board equipment. Even if I delete them from the device manager, and refresh it, it still seems to pull the old driver from it’s old location and still does not work. I took out almost every startup item I can remove too but Windows won’t even continue. I tried doing a repair but Windows won’t install once SP1 and SP2 are already there.

1. A lot of people have been having trouble running an AMD Athlon 64 processor on Microsoft® Windows XP™ SP2. I had the sample trouble. I found a lot of forums talking about it. Some forums you know they know what they are talking about, some other forums as full of guesses. Guessing the problem and guessing the solution. And a funny common guess is a Virus or Spyware and the the forum writers recommend installing the AVG, Ad-Aware, Spybot and SpywareBlaster. Funny, a lot of people initially think their problem is a Virus or Spyware problem. I got mine to work after disabling the IPVMon driver in safe mode. Computer is now working but since I did a fresh install again, i have no softwares on it and still has to do some installing to get it working.

2. USB ports working, but not for data drives. Probably some problem with my USB controller drivers. And I also read an article that AMD processors have problems with USB Flash disk due to some timing issue. Something I still have to research on. Right now, since my laptop is networked to the desktop, I have to plug in data drives in the laptop, share it an access it from there on the network.

3. Mama has an interview at the US Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. I’ll be driving her there even if I do not know how to get there. But Google maps is really cool. Compared to Mapquest and Yahoo because of their satellite photo maps. At least I know what kind of land marks I might be passing by and I am also taking note of the plain land areas and heavy residential house areas.

3. After installing all softwares, first thing to do is nothing but the Graveyard Chef. I need to finish that site real quickly.

4. In the Philippine Graphic Designing community, everyone is talking about Bayoâ„¢, the grament manufacturer in the Philippines for ripping off the designs or a small time Japanese artist placing her artwork on the web. Copyrights belong to the artist and the website really says that you are not allowed to use any of the graphics in anyway without permission. I have read that the artist was trying to contact the Japanese Embassy in the Philippines and the Philippine Embassy in Japan.

5. DoS flaw in DNS protocol? What? Does this mean all of us web hosting companies are doomed? Got to talk to Mike Lopez about this as we exchange notes on server administration. He’s more of a Linux master than I am.

6. I want to start with the Gracie Brazillian Jiujutsu after I tried the trail class, but I have no money right now. So many bills to pay. I’ll go back to Taekwondo then since I can practice there for free since I worked on their website.

7. Tiring life going in circles, work at work, work at home, if there is free time, it is either BMX, Gym, Taekwondo, and soon Jiujutsu too. Wifey is far away back home. Family is far away. My Wifey is feeling the same way.

8. New clients, recently paid, was monicakelly.com, batangsayantist.com. Others are still proposals. So far I am having no month with no sales with December last year which is good.

December: kabalikatnec.com, drukelly.com
January: martalexterminators.com
February: robustness.org, rsi-insure.com
March: plumstudio.net, gskelly.com, aspect-studio.com, graveyardchef.com
April: dodeci.com, metropolitanart.net, shalinaonline.net
May: monicakelly.net, mookchoi.com, alibiproductions.com, sunvideoproductions.com, batangsayantist.com, pinoyfoodsmacau.com, i-nk.net

You might think I am rich already, nope. Hosting is not really that expensive. What has big money is designing and development, but this consumes so much time. Hosting and Domain Registration does not eat much of my time and is a recurring payment, even if it is small, it is recurring.

Finding out if my problem was the CMOS battery, motherboard, processor, temperature, power supply, incompatible hardware just uses so much time. So instead, I did this:

1. Bought an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ and Abit Motherboard.
I am not much a fan of AMD since back in the day, I used an AMD 586 and an AMD K6-2 and I was not pleased with it comparing it to the Pentium I 120MHz, 166Mhz, 166Mhz MMX, Pentium II and Pentium III’s I had in the past. And it just generates so much heat compared to my previous Intels and they hang when extremely hot. I needed fans everywhere, and a good airconditioned room since it is always hot in the Philippines whole year round.

The Athlon 64 has real 64bit processing and I think the Intel counterpart is included in one of the Xeon Processors. The Athlon 64 seemed promising, and the price was good and there was a good promo at Fry’s that included an Abit NF8 Series Motherboard.

Why buy this? This takes out the possible problem of a Processor or Motherboard problem, aside from that, the upgrades will be…

- Processor Speed, I used to use a Pentium IV 1.6Ghz.
- USB 2.0, my old motherboard was still using USB 1.1. And this will make my printing, scanning, file saving and retrieval faster. Aside from that, the new DSL modem I have has a USB connection aside from the RJ45 Ethernet, which will run 4 times faster.
- 5 channel speaker system. The built-in sound chip on the Abit has this feature. My old board had the plain 2 speaker system.

2. Took out 2 Ethernet LAN cards, and the 120GB Hard Disk drive and my old CDR-RW drive.
I had a 230W power supply and if you have more devices that need more power, the higher the watts needed. I still have a 40GB hard disk in there that I left along with a 10GB and 1GB, yes 1GB hard drive. If I were to compare my hard disk to paper, the two smaller hard disk drives are scratch paper.

Aside from lowering the power consumption inside, I also give more space around the processor for air to freely flow from vent to vent to keep the temperature down. The LAN cards were there since in the Philippines, my old DSL modem just had one RJ45 jack and to network them, I had another LAN card to connect to my hub to network all computers. And the new Abit motherboard had a RJ45 Ethernet jack on it already.

I did not need my old CDR-RW drive since I already have a DVDR-RW/CDR-RW drive. And besides, my old drive won’t even open anymore, I always needed to poke in the emergency eject hole to use it. It had that problem since July last year.

3. Bought external hard disk enclosure and external floppy disk drive.
Since I took out my 120GB drive, which was mostly data, I bought an external enclosure box with a USB2 connection so I can easily connect if anywhere when needed to work on other computers for emergency purposes.

Windows XP works fins when changing hardware parts, but when you change your processor and motherboard, Windows XP sometimes can’t take that. Instead of domain a repair, I wanted to do a fresh installation since my Windows was not that clean anymore. Too many things installed and uninstalled. There was a lot of garbage in the files and folders, as well as the registry. Problem was my Windows would not boot from the CD, and the only place I got startup disk for Windows XP Pro was from Microsoft that had a free downloadable program that creates startup disks so you can start your installation in floppy diskettes. It creates 6 diskettes that you will all use during the installation.

The only functional computer I had was a laptop and it won’t create the diskette files on the hard disk, nor on a USB drive. It is really looking for a floppy disk drive, and my laptop does not have one. So I bought that too, there were so many brands to choose from with all the same price… so I decided to choose a good brand and good appearance since function and price were all the same, until I saw the iOmega one, for an additional $10 more expensive, it came with a Compact Flash, SmartMedia, MMC, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, SD Card and MicroDrive card reader. My phone, PDA, Video Cam all use MMC and SD Cards. My old camera (with a busted flash) uses Smart Media. So it was worth it I guess.

I was able to create the diskettes, and reinstall Windows.

Am I done? Is the computer fixed? Nope.

First thing to do is install the drivers, to use the USB2.0 I needed to install the motherboard drivers. Even the AMD Athlon 64 drivers needed to be installed. And all these drivers were looking for Microsoft’s Windows XP SP1 and SP2 updates. So I needed to be online first, but my DSL model won’t detect any DSL line signal yet. They said it will take 7 to 10 days after installation of the line. DSL was installed on the 16th. And I still do not have it yet. So all I can do is wait first. I am using dial up right now using AOL’s free 1175 hours and I do not want to install this on the PC. Too much installing and uninstalling is not good. I’ll just wait for the DSL to keep my Windows nice and clean.

PC not yet done.

My PC, since January 2005, sometimes had problems during start up. It just won’t boot sometimes. I suspected it to be a Windows problem as most people would suspect, but I noticed the hanging, occurs even before it enters Window. During memory check, or detection of IDE devices, it was happening quite often already, but I still remember even before I left the Philippines in July 2004, this problem has already occurred but in rare occasions only. And just turn off the power, wait a few seconds and turn it back on until it boots.

Around February, random rebooting started to happen. Although some viruses that plant Trojans may be capable of doing this, I can say I had a pretty secure system. My anti-virus software and anti-spyware softwares were always up-to-date, as well as obtaining Windows updates. The rebooting was not related to any instance that I do, it happens at different situations. I did suspect a memory and video card problem, and I got new ones last February. It helped make my PC run faster, but the problems were still there, random rebooting and failed start ups.

Last April the rebooting started to occur more often as well as the startup hang. Aside from that, CMOS settings always reset. You may think it was the CMOS battery but I do not think because I do not think it can cause and hang and reboot problem, but I can do a CMOS setting reset. Things were getting worse. I knew the end was near and all I can suspect that can cause the problems are:

1. Too many devices, low watt power supply which was only 230W.
2. Motherboard problem. Defective Motherboard.
3. Defective Processor
4. Temperature Problem.
5. Another hardware component causing the problem.

Just to discover the real problem to narrow down my list would consume time and I was not happy just thinking about it. I felt burned out already without even starting. I felt bad the first day my PC died. Although my projects have lessened already, I still have one major one, The Graveyard Chef, more updates for AME. Thanks Amor for working on MarkProf, and for helping out with the billing of clients in the Philippines. I’m doing passive selling for design, development and SEO, but active selling in hosting and domain registration since design, development and SEO consumes so much time and that is something I lack right now. Hosting and Domain Registration may not earn as big but is a regular payment for a long time. Just have to keep them all happy and make sure the server is secure and running fine.

To catch up with work, I need to get my desktop running. I get to get into the mood in fixing it too. Thanks babe for just being online when I wanted you online.