Author: Andrew Huey

new motherboard

I installed a new motherboard in my machine today, and it actually worked! (Not on the first try, mind you, but eventually.) It’s an ASUS A7V333, with an Athlon XP 2200+ processor, a Vantec fan/heatsink, and a 512 MB memory module from Corsair. It’s working fine so far, except that the processor is running at 53 C, which seems a little hot. Next week, I should be getting a new hard drive and video card.

Linux Adventures

I spent some time today trying to get Red Hat 8 working on my laptop. It works fine, but I couldn’t get it to recognize my wireless card properly. Oh well. Also, I don’t like the way the interface looks on my wimpy 800×600 display. Oh, and there seem to be a number of bugs in various things. I probably could get it all running well, given enough time, but I’m getting lazy in my old age, so I wiped it out. I may try Madrake 9 on the laptop next. I’m curious. It sounds like a lot of people are using Mandrake now. I can’t do any Linux stuff on my desktop right now, since I’m just about out of room on my hard drive. Maybe I’ll get a new one and set something up next weekend.

Geek Stuff

Spent a bit too much time today trying to figure out how I could create a DLL containing user-defined functions callable from Crystal Reports 8. The obvious route was to use Visual Basic. Well, I don’t normally use VB, I use PowerBuilder. However, creating a DLL in PowerBuilder resulted only in a new and exciting way to crash Crystal every time I tried to open a report. So I went hunting for VB. I have no problem buying a copy. However, I couldn’t verify that VB.NET could create the kind of DLL I needed. I knew VB 4, 5, and 6 would work, but no one reputable seems to have VB 6 for sale anymore. Eventually, I found a dusty copy of VB 5 in a box on top of a bookshelf, underneath a bunch of other stuff. And it worked! Yay!