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It looks like this blog is going to be the diary for technical stuff that I experience. Here's something on what I found out while trying to fix a mate's laptop.

The main problem was World of Warcraft. It wouldn't work with one of the latest patches (1.9.0 or around that level) and some playing around told us that it was the 3D acceleration that was freezing the system. The video card was the obvious suspect.

I thought that it might be an actual hardware problem. Fortunately I have _exactly_ the same model laptop; the Dell Inspiron 5150 with SXGA screen and GeForce FX Go5200 64MiB video card. All I needed to do was swap my HDD with his and boot it up. My copy of WoW worked fine on his machine, so it was obvious that it was not a hardware problem and that what we probably needed was a video driver update.

This is where things become intriguing. The vanilla 81.98 driver for GeForce cards from nVidia would not recognise the FX Go5200 card and would then fail to install. After digging around, I found a site that deals with this specific problemLaptopVideo2Go.

Apparently, nVidia haven't supported laptop video cards, and their drivers need to be modified by the integrators (Dell) so that they recognise the cards in their machines. However, with older models, this practise isn't kept up, so it's difficult to get later generation drivers from integrators.

LaptopVideo2Go fix this by doing Dell's job for them. I.e. they modifiy the INF file that comes in the driver package so that the driver recognises the card and proceeds with the install.

All I had to do now was go through the configuration form on the website and grab the INF file it spat out. It seems possible to download pre-configured driver packages, but I only get my binary packages from trusted sources. So I unpacked the 81.98 driver package from nVidia and replaced the INF file with the one from LaptopVideo2Go, and then ran the Setup.exe program.

The driver went on fine, and WoW began to work properly. After doing some updates to the system, it was all wrapped up.

Slashdot posted an article on the release of MythTV 0.19. Unfortunately, the Gentoo package hasn't appeared yet, but that's ok as I haven't fully completed my Dev environment for the TV yet.

Inspired by excitement from the announcement, here's a brief run down of my system:

Television: LG Lafinion 82W (using component-in for HDTV)
System:

• Athlon XP 2000+
• 1GiB RAM (mixed DIMMs set to CAS 2.5)
• Gigabyte 7VM400M-RZ
• DVICO FusionHDTV DVB-T (not Plus or Lite)
• GF6200 128MiB with component-out adapter
• 1 x 40GB HDD
• 1 x 80GB HDD

OS: Gentoo 2006.1
running slightly behind latest updates, but I also have UAT and Dev environments that I keep in sync with the latest releases.

I'll have to find the best way of sync'ing up the webserver with the content created on the workstation/laptop. Hopefully an rsync will do the trick, but I'll have to work out permissions and shared-keys and stuff.

Finally, I've found a weblog tool that generates static HTML. This is the new website for the new domain. nanoblogger rocks... so far. :-)

The basic syntax is: nb [-b blog_dir] [options]

How to ...

• create new weblog (directory) = nb -b [blog_dir] -a
• create new entry = nb -a
• create new category = nb -c new -a
• create new entry with category = nb -c [cat_id] -a
• list entries = nb -l [all|DATE|max]
• list categories = nb -l cat
• list entries by category = nb -c [cat_id] -l [all|DATE|max]
• edit entry = nb -e [entry_id]
• move entry to category = nb -c [cat_id] -m [entry_id]
• delete entry = nb -d [entry_id]
• delete category = nb -c [cat_id] -d cat
• delete entry from category = nb -c [cat_id] -d [entry_id]
• draft entry = nb -E [draft_file]
• import draft as entry = nb -f [draft_file] -a
• force update of weblog files = nb -u [all|DATE|main]

Thank you for trying NanoBlogger. Please direct comments and suggestions to the mailing list or submit a bug report to the project page on sourceforge.net.