Author: wyred

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The PC that wouldn’t shut down

Time for another spooky IT-related story.

A friend of mine decided to try the sleep button on her keyboard.

Something weird happened at this point which I could not remember, all I know is from this point on, her PC wouldn’t shut down after selecting the shutdown button on Windows 7.

It would shutdown and after 1-2 seconds, boot up again by itself. Only way to shut it down is to press and hold the power button, but no one should have to do this to shut down their computer.

I got her to install remote software for me to login and check her power settings. Everything seemed fine. Even tried resetting BIOS settings to factory defaults.

It just so happened that we were planning a lan party at another friend’s place so I got her to bring down her computer so I can check after the games.

Since there’s nothing else to try on Windows, and even resetting the BIOS didn’t help, I first tried reinstalling the OS.

Didn’t fix the problem.

By now, it’s already 7am and it’s starting to get bright outdoors and I’ve run out of ideas.

All I could do is stare at the motherboard.

My eyes looked around, admiring the circuit patterns and electronic components.

Then my gaze fell upon the motherboard’s CR2032 battery.

*takes out battery, set my alarm to ring in 15 minutes, nap*

*alarm rings, puts in battery, boots up computer*

Shutting down…

Shuts down…

Silence…

2 seconds passed….

5 seconds passed…

10 seconds passed…

Fixed!

Since the battery is used by motherboards to save configuration settings, my guess is the sleep signal on the keyboard triggered something on the motherboard, which by only taking out the battery, will force it to forget all settings.

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Golden period

Things have been going very well for me these days.

Landed 2 freelance projects. 1 has potential to bring in lots of money in future, the other has been giving me a good opportunity to build my base code which caters to my style of PHP scripting, allowing me to build new apps faster in future.

I spend about 2 hours, 2~3 times a week after office hours, at any random place on my laptop working on these projects. So I usually reach home at 10pm~11pm, with enough time for a shower and some anime before I sleep.

Thanks to these projects, I found out what I want to do in future for my career. Web applications.

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Things at work have been getting better. My salary has finally reached an acceptable level. I’ve been pushing for work that interests me to the point I don’t mind coming back on Saturdays to work some more.

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Having less time for Final Fantasy XI now but since I spend almost the whole day during weekends on FFXI, it’s a good balance.

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Also trying to go into property investing to earn more with my savings. One feasible suggestion for my low budget that I’ve gotten so far is to buy a small apartment (SGD$200k~) in Australia and rent it out to people. Much cheaper and safer than buying a condominium unit in Singapore (SGD$500k~700k) and renting it out.

Got to find out how to do this quick!

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Never felt the need for earning more money until certain “incidents” that happened early this year. While I felt depressing for quite some time, it’s just what I needed for me to change for the better. Right now, I’ve never felt happier in my life.

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I’ve also begun taking driving lessons. Hopefully I can buy a cheap second-hand hatchback car for myself by the end of this year.

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One group of friends who are health concious invited me to jog together once a week. Maybe it’s this jogging thing that’s been giving me the energy for this busy schedule.

I like jogging. Once I get warmed up, I can jog for an hour or maybe even more. Sadly my knees start hurting after about 40 minutes. Only regret here is not jogging regularly after I started working full time. :(

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After 4 years…

… I’ve finally finished Aegis!

Yes… I know a lot of people are able to finish relics within months. But they usually have a strong LS to help them.

The plan began in March 2007, after reading Kaeko‘s advice. I’ve even printed a picture of it to motivate myself.

But alas, my PLD seems pretty useless in the era of Abyssea.

My MNK in counter build makes tanking so easy. And there’s also pretty insane boosts from the Atma and stats in Abyssea. Damage output is already high even without switching to WS gear set.

SE did hint that Aegis will be given a boost in the upcoming version update. I hope it becomes good enough for me to tank on PLD more than on MNK.

The final stretch in collecting currencies turned out to be faster than I expected. I crafted a lot during the day and did lots of buying low and selling high during the night. I could earn enough to buy 1~3 Montiont pieces a week.

There are many ways to earn gil, but the one I find that suits me most is crafting. I can do it while reading manga :D

I worked on several crafts, mainly those that have recipes for perishable items such as food, ninja tools, medicine.

Smithing was profitable for a while until the armor market crashed. In my opinion, the best armor pieces come from Abyssea now, not some damascus ingot. Fortunately, I was able to make a bit of profit to invest into other crafts before the crash.

Over the years, a lot of friends donated their spare dynamis currency or sold them to me at really low prices.

Sollanon, Tuufless, Vector, Grepa, Tatto, Zeek, Sodalitas, Walrus, Joachim, Radish, Yuchi, Ryagipibomyupi, Aerroenu, Noepon.

Social LS, Doom.

Dynamis LSes, Explorer and ZorinSoul.

Wasyuu and Tukuyomi, who trusted me enough to lend me the last 26 Montiont pieces I needed for the upgrade.

And finally, TeamKANICAN!

Many thanks to all of you!

(My apologies if I forgot someone >_<)

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Japan Earthquake 2011

After reading all the articles about the earthquake that happened in Japan recently, and despite the fact that there may be more earthquakes in future, it only further fuelled by desire to live there.

Many shops remained open to provide free shelter to people who couldn’t go back home when the trains had to stop running.

When they had problems with their power supply and requested everyone to co-operate by cutting down electricity usage, many shops did. In Akihabara, the famous electronics district, shops switched off their monitor displays. Some remain closed for business.

Square-Enix shut down their FFXI and FFXIV game servers too and offered to compensate players by making the month of April free.

Everyone is working together to overcome this huge challenge placed in front of them.

In Singapore, we’re fortunate that we’re safe from all these natural disasters.

But in return, it has made a lot of it’s citizens pretty selfish and uncaring towards others.

Update:

I’ve also did my part and made a small donation to Red Cross Japan via google.

I’ve never made donations before and I probably never will in Singapore with all the donation scandals that’ve happened here before.

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The case of the undeletable files

Recently came across a few spooky IT-related situations.

Let’s start with the story of my company’s NAS.

It’s a QNAP TS-201 with 2 150GB harddisks configured in mirror raid. When the disks have less than 10GB space, it will emit a beeping sound like every 10 minutes and I’ll have to clear it’s “Recycle Bin” to free up space.

When you delete files on a NAS, it gets deleted instantly unlike deleting files on your desktop where it goes to the recycle bin first.

So I sent in a request for some new 1TB drives to upgrade to. Spent my weekend upgrading it because that’s when no one needs access to it.

When Monday came, I got a report that excel was creating .tmp files when saving the document and they weren’t deleted when the excel file is closed. When I tried to delete the .tmp files manually, the files disappear but reappear when the page is refreshed.

Thinking it was an access issue, I SSH-ed in and set ownership to Guest, group to Everyone, chmod777 every file but it still didn’t work.

Then I decided to try SSH into our second NAS which is used only by my department. I compared the folder structure of both NASes and see that there’s a missing “Network Recycle Bin 1” folder on the upgraded NAS.

To fix this, I logged into the web administration panel of the NAS, went to the Network Recycle Bin page, the checkbox that enables this feature is already ticked, so all I did is just click the save button.

I checked the folder structure and see that the folder has been recreated.

Tried to delete a file and it worked.

Case solved.