What it does: If you do not have a fishing rod equipped, clicking the button will equip one. If a fishing rod is equipped, it will cast. If you hold down any modifier key it will re-equip your weapons.

Code (insert your object names where indicated in italics):

/equip [noequipped:Fishing Poles, nomodifier] fishing rod name;
/equip [modifier] main weapon name;
/cast [equipped:Fishing Poles, nomodifier] Fishing;


For example:

/equip [noequipped:Fishing Poles, nomodifier] Nat Pagle's Extreme Angler FC-5000;
/equip [modifier] Staff of Dark Mending;
/cast [equipped:Fishing Poles, nomodifier] Fishing;


If you are not using two handed weapons, you will need to enter an equip command for your offhand weapon as well:


/equip [noequipped:Fishing Poles, nomodifier] fishing rod name;
/equip [modifier] main weapon name;
/equip [modifier] offhand weapon name;
/cast [equipped:Fishing Poles, nomodifier] Fishing;


Happy fishing!

This version will work until June 2010 at which point it will no longer boot, also it will have some other restrictions starting in March 2010. That still provides many months to try it out. I have done just that and would like to relate my experiences, and solutions for particular problems that have arisen.

For more details on the promotion, or to register for your own copy visit windows.microsoft.com.

Items of Note

• I am NOT responsible if anything described here damages your PC or causes data loss. The software is ‘use at your own risk’ and so is this article.
• Back up your data. Microsoft will remind you of this, and so do I. Not backing up data before an operating system install is asking for trouble.

My Setup

Here is my configuration:
Motherboard: nVidia GeForce based
CPU: Intel Pentium 2.8Ghz Dual Core (64bit)
RAM: 4GB
Storage: 2×1TB SATA II drives on a RAID 1 (mirror)
Optical Media: SATA DVD-RW
Current System: XP Home / Ubuntu

Where to Start

Firstly, I assume you have succesfully run the Windows 7 Advisor with no issues and have made a working copy of the Windows 7 install disk.

If you are running Windows XP you cannot do an upgrade. Period. Clean install is the only option. This means you either need to start without an OS, or have an empty NTFS formatted partition prior to attempting the install.
If you do not have a blank NTFS partition the installer will stall after the language setting screen.

Once this is ready, reboot your PC with the Windows 7 DVD in the drive – make sure your BIOS is set to boot from it.

If all goes well you should be now installing Windows 7. I wasn’t this lucky.

The Windows 7 Installer Stalls after Loading Windows…

If you get a pretty blue screen with some leaves and a mouse cursor but nothing else after several minutes you may have the problem I had.
There are several reports online of problems installing from a SATA DVD drive. I presume in my case it is because of the way nVidia handles the DVD in relation to the RAID but I’m not certain.

Solution: Create a USB flash drive version of the installer disk (you’ll need 4gb) and boot from that, or (what I did) install an IDE DVD drive temporarily while installing.

Safely Unloading Linux First

Perhaps this should be higher up, but if you have a dual-boot XP/Linux environment and intend on removing the Linux installation to try out Windows 7 be very careful when you delete the Linux partitions from within Windows. Keep in mind that the boot loader (likely GRUB) resides there as well. Deleting the Linux partition will cause your PC to not boot!
With this in mind, I first booted from the XP install disk (after installing a floppy drive for the nVidia RAID drivers) and from the recovery console I ran fixmbr and rebooted. This puts the boot loader back to the original Windows one allowing you to safely remove the Linux partition. (you did back everything up, right?)

Initial Impressions

Once resolving the SATA optical drive issues and creating the NTFS partition (Windows 7 RC 1 does not appear to have a formatting tool like the XP installer) things went smoothly. In fact, the first have of this article was typed up on another PC nearby while I watched the Windows setup run fully automated. The setup will reboot your computer several times during installation.

My computer scores an average 5.9 for the user experience rating, and things are working mostly as they should. My Belkin wireless adapter does not have working drivers (Belkin hasn’t made them for Vista yet either – no fault to Microsoft for this one). I was able to use another USB wireless adapter sucessfully.
My WinTV-GO (analog PCI tv tuner card) does not appear to have working drivers at the moment either, which is frustrating since I wanted to try the Windows Media Player tv functions and the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor said they would be available via Windows Update.

Overall, it works fairly well. I found switching between World of Warcraft and the desktop to be agonizingly slower than the same task on XP. I am intending to do a reinstallation of the game (rather than a program folder copy) on Windows 7 to see if it perhaps will install a more compatible version of the programs and perform better.
Actual game play has no noticeable differences.

I’ll try to keep an updated set of entries here over the next few months detailing more tests of this new system. Overall, I would say that I’m not about to run out and buy it yet, but it’s more promising than Vista.

As of late, I’ve been looking into going back to school. It seems the Ottawa region is flooded with support analysts who have been laid off and the demand doesn’t meet those levels. Perhaps I can either supplement my skills, or maybe it’s time to move into a new career. We shall see.

I recently pieced together a new song concept demo, which can be found on my MySpace page – it’s the track labeled ‘Boneyard’. Check it out.

That is, until winter arrives.

Most winters, I can honestly say, I’ve been a wimp. I put the bike away and take the bus or walk to my destination. Last winter was the first time I ever rode a bicycle in the snow to get to the store. It was surprisingly easy, but I didn’t really have a bike in condition to do it on a regular basis – so I filed it away in the back of my mind.

Over the course of the summer of 2008, I collected a few bicycle frames, wheels, parts and whatever bicycle related items I could scavenge when people cleaned out their garages. I found a fairly intact department store mountain bike – I’m usually fairly picky about these because of their low-quality manufacturing and questionable design decisions. This one I saved with the intent of putting it on the heavily salted roads in Ottawa. It’s a bike that I can get to the store with, but can leave covered in slush outside without concern about how badly the water and salt are corroding the parts.

Here we are, part way into January and I’m still riding it nearly every day. I even took it out twice yesterday during the massive snow fall we had, just for kicks. I’ve discovered not only is it a great workout, it’s fun and easy! The roads are usually kept clear for the cars, so riding on those is not much different from riding in the rain. The snow, when it’s powdery presents little challenge to cut through in a low gear.

I guess people just aren’t used to the idea – I wasn’t until recently, so I guess I can’t blame them. These same people would likely go skating or skiing in the same weather however, so the name calling is a little undeserved. I think the neighbor that called me ‘brave’ was really only searching for a polite term because I’d shoveled her walkway that day.

After placing the jquery.js (obtained from jQuery.com) file in your website’s path (ex. yoursite.com/include/) you simply need to add two javascript references in your page header:

<script src='include/jquery.js'></script>
<script src='include/scripts.js'></script>

The scripts.js file is where all the custom functionality code goes. Here’s an example, where links clicked in a div named #nav will load the new content into the #content div without refreshing the whole page:

$(document).ready(function() {           // after page is loaded, this is called automagically $('#nav li a').click(function() {     var query = $(this).attr('href');                  // this is what appears in the href tag     $('#content').hide('slow',loadContent);            // hides the div, calls loadContent()

     function loadContent() {         $('#content').load(query,'',showNewContent()); // pull the request into the div     }                                                  // calls showNewContent()

     function showNewContent() {         $('#content').show('fast');                    // show the new page content     }     return false; // returning false indicates the event was processed });});

No change to the actual page markup was required to make this happen at all. A small hurdle I encountered working with jQuery was that having an event bound to content inside the div #content would cease to function once new content was brought in. The reason for this is that jQuery loads the event binding based on what is on the page at first load. The easy way to solve this is to add the Live Query plugin for jQuery. Put it in your include directory with the other two scripts, and reference the script after jQuery but before your site’s script:

<script src='include/jquery.js'></script>
<script src='include/jquery.livequery.js'></script>
<script src='include/scripts.js'></script>

You will need to perform the related event binding to use Live Query slightly different from a normal jQuery binding:

$(document).ready(function() {    // after page is loaded, this is called automagically $('#content a').livequery('click', function() {        // livequery auto-binds when tags change     var query = $(this).attr('href');                  // this is what appears in the href tag     alert('You clicked this link: ' + query);     return false; // returning false indicates the event was processed });});

Yup, it’s just that easy – and once again, no change was made to the page markup. There is no end to the applications of jQuery and it’s related plugins. Happy coding, and welcome to Web 2.0!

I look through the menus and control panels and cannot find an entry for it. Next step, I check to see if the drive has an ‘Eject’ option. It doesn’t. Only two things I can do – pull the drive and hope it’s all written, or shutdown the PC and pull it out then. Since I was short on time, I yanked the USB drive and everything went OK – but where did that icon go?

Rebooting did not resolve the issue. I searched Google and there wasn’t too much help there at all – although I did find numerous sites with the following tip:

Create a new shortcut on your desktop – right click and slide down to “New” then click on “Shortcut”.

Copy this “%windir%\system32\RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll” (excluding the quotes) and paste it in the field that comes up in the next dialog box, under where it says “Type the location of the item:”, then click “Next >”.

The screen that follows prompts you to give the shortcut a name and is already pre-filled with “rundll32.exe” which is not helpful at all. Name it something obvious, such as “Safely Remove Hardare” and click “Finish”.

Double clicking the shortcut should launch the Safetly Remove Hardware window with your list of devices.

A nice touch is to edit the shortcut’s properties and change the icon to the usual one by using the icon browser. The icon can be found in “c:\windows\system32\hotplug.dll”.

In these clips, David Letterman makes some very good points about the USA’s invasion of Iraq, and boils it down to what it’s all really about. Oil. It’s definately worth watching the whole thing.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWOGMKQ1aHo
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_LO-BuhxW0

You can download it at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75078.

The screenshot I’ve included shows the theme after installation on my system. The background is not included with the theme, I found that one at http://wallpapers.jurko.net/pic/9005/. I’ve got a calculator window open as well as the start menu with a hilighted item and tooltip showing the general color scheme of things.

Naturally, this means that all their products need to be carefully hand-washed and can only be folded parallel to the optics to prevent damage. I think this explains why the clothing seems to be oriented towards females since most of their clothes requires special care anyways. Still, I really like the light-up table cloth they have.

It started off as a mountain bike in rough shape that my brother gave me. I cleaned and lubed the whole bike, upgraded the brakes, added fenders, added road tires, and swapped out the cranks. Sadly, none of this resolved a drive train issue where it seems to skip on the smallest rear cogs while under any sort of load.

A little creative thinking later, and I took a three-speed internal geared hub and built it up to a modern 26″ aluminum rim. Immediately upon attaching it to the bicycle I realized I was going to have a few technical issues to contend with.

The first problem was that the derailleur chain was the wrong size. I was very dismayed by this issue since the chain that went with the hub is destroyed by a mass of rust and not worth attempting to recover. A little research revealed that there was a pretty good chance the issue was the chain width – internal gear hubs and single speed bikes use a 1/8″ wide chain which is slightly wider and less flexible.
A quick visit to the local bike shop was very helpful since they had such a chain for $9.99.

I cold-set the rear triangle to the narrower width of the internal hub and sized the chain. Ideally the chainline wants to be to the innermost gear on a 3-gear crank, however the gear ratio that produces leaves little to be desired. Coasting works fine, however back pedaling quickly will throw the chain so it needs to be tensioned. The reason for this is the rear dropouts are vertical, meaning the wheel cannot be pulled back into position to tighten the chain.
To solve this, I filed an axle sized groove into the dropouts so the chain can be tensioned. Unexpectedly this raised another problem – since the chain is going to the middle cog, the chainline is not perfectly straight. Once the chain is tensioned it starts to bind on the cogs since it is less flexible than the narrower chain.

That’s pretty much where I took a break from it so I can devise the best method of resolving this. Somehow I need to reduce the angle of the chainline while maintaining an adequate gear ratio. I may have to re-examine the angles on the rear triangle and do another round of cold-setting the metal.