By Jeremy Hilts on February 28, 2010
After the failure of my 10-year-old P4 system, I was recently motivated to purchase an HP Envy 15 1100 custom laptop. Normally, this wouldn’t be a noteworthy occasion; however, it turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. Luckally, I found solutions.
I desired a clean install, free of all of the junk and partitioning that comes with a commercial PC. Hewlett-Packard made two bold moves with the new Envy’s:
- It has a USB 3.0 Host Controller
- It’s using a cutting-edge ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5830
A clean install of Windows 7 Professional 64bit yielded a very cryptic error message: “Required cd/dvd drive device driver is missing”. The Envy has no internal optical drives, but came with an external USB drive. After a few days of pulling my hair out, it turns out that the bootstrap OS for Windows 7 did not have drivers for the USB 3.0 Host Controller. The BIOS did; and thus, after the bootstrapper loaded the OS into memory, the computer no longer knew how to use anything attached to USB. After a lot of hunting, I finally found the drivers and I was able to install Windows 7 successfully.
This was not the end of my headaches; the video card would also provide many hours of frustration. As it turns out, the Mobility Radeon HD 5830 is so new that not even ATI has released WHQL-certified drivers. I contacted HP support, but they referred me to a driver download to the Mobility Radeon HD 4830. That simply did not work.
In a desperate attempt, I put the official HP recovery discs into my external DVD drive in hopes that I could undo what I did. No such luck. They didn’t support the USB 3.0 Host Controller, nor did it give you an opportunity to load them. This was made all-the-more frustrating by the fact that HP charged me to have the recovery discs in the first place.
It took many hours of google searches and forum reading to find all of these solutions. So, dear readers, I will save you a weekend of frustration.
I hope that someone will find this helpful.
Posted in Hardware | Tagged Envy 15, Hewlett-Packard, HP, USB 3.0
By Jeremy Hilts on February 7, 2010
It seems that the great Snowpocalypse of 2010 ended up being a lot more fun than everyone first believed.
In the beginning, we were supposed to get 12-20 inches of snow. Then 18-24 inches of snow. Then 20-30 inches of snow. A rumor dropped that it may actually end up being a full 36 inches.
Now, I’m not sure how many inches we actually got. About knee high. 20 inches maybe? Regardless, I saw far less panic after it actually happened than I did shortly before. Saturday afternoon, toward the end of the wind and snowfall, I decided to investigate the aftermath with my camera.
Unfortunately, my neighborhood wasn’t plowed. I had to hop-skip-and-jump from the sidewalk, to the curb, and out into the road. Luckily, there were very few people out driving. I made my way to Stadium Armory metro and commuted out to Smithsonian station. I was surprised at how many people had shown up on the National Mall to enjoy the snow. There were plenty of people having snowball fights, playing football, or just goofing around with their friends. There were only a few narrow paths to traverse. Every time someone fell, it would hold up everyone behind them. It was a good thing that everyone was of good spirit and no one seemed to mind.
I made it all the way out to Lincoln Memorial, past the buried World War II Memorial and frozen reflecting pool, and then around Constitution Gardens. Around Constitution Gardens, as the sun began to set, the cold had sapped the charge from both of my batteries. I wasn’t done yet; I warmed my batteries as best I could. I was able to finish the trip before my batteries gave up entirely. It was a good thing, too — some of the best shots came out in the dusk light over the snow. It was dark by the time I got home.
In lieu of adding the photos to my photography site, I’ve created a public facebook photo album.
Visit “DC Winter Wonderland” album on facebook
Posted in Photography | Tagged Constitution Gardens, DC, facebook, Lincoln Memorial, National Mall, snow, Snowpocalypse, World War II Memorial
By Jeremy Hilts on December 28, 2009
I made this joke at work and some people thought it was funny. Others wanted my head.
try {
if($do) {
do();
} else {
doNot();
}
} catch {
die("there is no try");
}
The Yoda Pattern: An instance where an exception is unrecoverable.
Posted in Random, Work | Tagged design patterns, Star Wars, Yoda
By Jeremy Hilts on December 20, 2009
Some more Mandelbrot sets. These are, mostly, renderings of locations found within the default QuickMAN log files. There’s always something interesting to be found…
Posted in Fractals | Tagged Mandelbrot set
By Jeremy Hilts on December 16, 2009
“Have you ever made a just man?”
“Oh, I have made three,” answered God,
“But two of them are dead,
And the third –
Listen! Listen!
And you will hear the thud of his defeat.”
- Stephen Crane
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Stephen Crane
By Jeremy Hilts on December 16, 2009
A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
- Stephen Crane
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Stephen Crane
By Jeremy Hilts on December 16, 2009
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter – bitter”, he answered,
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
- Stephen Crane
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Stephen Crane
By Jeremy Hilts on December 15, 2009
Recently, my business had a need for some Flash development and I had just come off of a rather demanding project that, today, finally went live (yay!). Now, I’d never done any Flash to any degree of seriousness in the past; however, there was a need to be filled and I’m not afraid of a challenge. In a couple of days I was able to write a pre-loader that could be configured to play multiple videos in a time line for set intervals. For those of you out there on the Flash scene, that’s a rather minor accomplishment… but I’m pretty pleased with it, having never done such a thing before.
I’ve never been a big fan of Flash for general purposes. It’s too heavy for my liking. I like the web to be neat, structured and nicely degradable. Now, I never said that I don’t like it. I believe that there is a purpose for it; that purpose just happens to be its nom de plume. Should you want it flashy, so shall you do with Flash. Hey, all-in-all, it’s a neat trick.
Well, it used to be just a “neat trick” back in the archaic days of ActionScript. ActionScript 3 is, actually, quite respectable. After writing my pre-loader, having abstracted my objects to levels that made me happy, I took on a whole new respect for the use of Flash. Sure, ActionScript 3 is practically Javascript with a shiny coat… but I’ve also come to respect well-written Javascript a heck-of-a-lot more than I used to. Key word being: well-written. I guess that’s two words…
After writing a few things in ActionScript 3, I started thinking of the possibilities… Oh, the games I could write… Oh, the fun little effects I could accomplish. I still don’t think it should be used as the multi-purpose happy-web-solution that it’s often hyped to be; but I can definitely think of a number of things that I’d use it for.
Posted in Programming, The Web, Work | Tagged inspiration
By Jeremy Hilts on December 12, 2009
Recently I’ve been a bit obsessed with Mandelbrot sets. It turns out, there are a bunch of programs out there on different platforms for generating Mandelbrot sets. One of the better optimized that I’ve found so far is called QuickMAN (get it here). Here’s a pretty high-quality image that I generated using QuickMAN:
Kinda looks like a dragon, no?
Posted in Fractals | Tagged Mandelbrot set
By Jeremy Hilts on December 12, 2009
It’s amazing how fulfilling a morning of Rockband can be. I played some drums, dropped some lyrics on the mic and felt inspired.
How inspired? Only time will tell…
Posted in Games, Music | Tagged inspiration, rockband
