So, what did we wake up to today? A firewall that had been locked up due to the manufacturer doing maintenance on the license validation servers last night.

After about 5 reboots, we finally got the stupid thing to link up and authorize again – but only the wireless was working.

Yeah, I said that too.

So, after much begging and pleading to get some support on a Saturday, it turns out the stupid thing had a corrupted firmware that needed to be (you guessed it) nuked and paved.

Not really a problem, except I wasn’t able to log in to download the firmware until about 8:00pm. In the meantime, Greyduck was forced to do some modifying to his gaming computer so Kyla could make a raid.

Thankfully, the nuke process only takes about 15 minutes on our little home unit. I’d hate to have to do the same with the offic firewall.

Let’s just hope it stays fixed, eh?

Some good news discovered whilst tripping through the local game store: Space Empires V is available at your local store. I could have sworn I signed up for the notifier, but I didn’t get anything.

Anyway, I happily dumped cash on the counter and took a copy of this awaited favorite sequel, and installed it on the work laptop as a test-run. Very pretty, and especially nice in the wide-screen, which is different. You can move all the sub-windows around to maximize use of the whole screen.

When I got home today, I went to install it under Vista, but Vista wouldn’t even start the installer. No idea why, it just balked completely to do anything with it. Now, the Vista install was merely a test platform from the get-go, so I had no qualms at all about shutting it down and booting back to my old XP install. With one minor problem, that I did not see coming.

You see, in the Vista Start menu, there is an icon with a rendition of the standard line-in-a-broken-circle “Power” icon. This is actually the Hibernate button, not the shutdown button. The system went dark, yes, but then my keyboard lit back up, something it had not done before. I shrugged, turned off the power switch at the power supply, plugged the IDE drive back in, hit the switch again and then pressed the power button.

Nothing. No lights, no fan spin, no response.

A wail of anguish split the clammy afternoon air across the town.

Further troubleshooting tells me it’s either the processor or the motherboard, most likely the latter. (When the proc goes, the motherboard will at least beep at you; I get nothing.) An email has been sent to the mobo manufacturer, as the system is less than a year old and should be under warranty. (I is a smart monkey and kept the receipt.) Hopefully they won’t send me through too many hoops before authorizing an RMA.

I will probably be relegated to the laptop for about two weeks if they have any decency, three if they don’t and I end up having to purchase a replacement – from a competitor. All in all, I really shouldn’t be that surprised, as the on-board NIC failed about two months into use, and the northbridge fan has been making noise this last week or so.

Yep – another beautiful Sunday at Chez Wolfe.

Some geekery for the weekend-

A while back, the new Boss gave me and the Roomie a new Sonicwall TZ170W to play with here at Chez Wolfe. This is cool, because it does offer some nifty extra security features.

This is bad, because some of those new security features mean that the old Orinoco wireless card I had in the garage lappy no longer works. So, I bought a new Linksys model to replace it. Works fine in Win2K, but the older version of Kubuntu I was running had no idea.

So, I installed the latest release of Kubuntu, but I was unable to get the wireless working in that as well. Honestly, wifi is one of Linux’s weakest points, mainly because the wifi makers have no real interest in devoting dev time to the open-source community.

It had been a while since I had done anything with the Win2K install on the lappy, so tonight I decided to upgrade Firefox from 1.0 to 2.0. Normally not a big deal, but for some strange reason, it won’t login to my blog admin interface. It doesn’t throw any errors, it just punts me back to the login page. (If I try the wrong login, it gives me the correct error, but the correct creds just go back to login.)

WTF?

**Update** – Duh, friggin’ cookies were turned off. I am such a yutz.

A few thoughts after having run Vista for the week:

The stupid thng couldn’t identify a simple network card, but it did correctly identify my Creative Zen Micro MP3 player, and asked me if I wanted to sync my music files when I plugged it in.

They almost have security figured out. It only asked me to create user passwords on install, not a user and an administrator password. When installing software or mucking with system settings, it pops up a window telling you that something possibly hinky is going on and asks permission to continue. Better than before, but still not on a par with the Unix / Linux model.

The built-in games have a new look to them, and a couple new additions. These include Chess, Mah-Jong and another bouncing-ball based game where you draw lines on the board to deflect the path of a ball towards a goal. Beats playing solitaire all day.

Hardware management now includes a way to rate your PC for performance, which is pretty cool. If ths works right, game publishers will be able to give you rating numbers to hit, instead of making you remember all the minutiae of your system specs. “Graphics score of 3.7 or better” is so much easier than “Video card: 32 MB with 3D Transform and Lighting capable, DirectX® 9.0 or later.”

(As a side note, those are the specs for Microsoft’s Halo, which makes me think the rating system won’t work. Sure, Halo will run with 32MB of video RAM, but you’ll get maybe 4 FPS.)

As for software compatability, there are some quirks still. Yahoo! Widgets must be launched through Widget preferences; double-clicking a widget file in Explorer won’t launch it. Settlers: Heritage of Kings installed and plays just fine, and the no-cd patch still works. OpenOffice.org gave me no problems. I haven’t tried the new version of Outlook Express (which is back to being Microsoft Mail again.)

All in all, it looks like the extra time the developers took has been for the better. Time will tell.

The Pookster has recently joined a Brownie Troop, and tonight they had a special event at OMSI, which is always a fun place to visit. This month, they are having a special Star Wars exhibit, featuring a nice batch of movie props – including the original 4-foot model of the Millenium Falcon.

As many times as I have watched the original trilogy, this is the first time I’ve had leisure to really stop and look at the old Lady, and it was really neat to see all the detail. She sits behind glass, so it is hard to tell for sure, but it appears they used a combination of aluminum and plastic in the manufacture.

They really did go all out in the construction – the use of metal appears to be solely for the purpose of correctly rendering the dings and dents she has accrued over her lifetime of service. The ventral plating on the starboard side has a delightfully nasty-looking curl to it, as if Han bounced that side off a docking clamp making a getaway.

If you look closely, you can see where the makers utilized existing pieces to speed the process. On the ventral surface back toward the engines, it appears that the forks off a Harley FLHTC adorn the plating. On either side, at the point where the mandibles join the main disc you can see the side of an automotive transmission casing. (It’s mounted backwards, with the output shaft pointing forward.)

Well worth the money to see the exhibit, even if you didn’t like the second trilogy.