Lawrence McAlpin

... in Beth's belly.



I think it looks just like me. But Beth insists its a future Kristen Buggenhagen McAlpin. I guess we'll see...

Here's my new machine, and my thoughts about each part:

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 Quad-Core Processor, 3.2 GHz, 12M L2 Cache, 1600MHz FSB, LGA775
Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) RAM: This will default to a lower clock speed for compatibility, but you can change that easily. You can find this much cheaper than on this Amazon link.
Thermaltake CL-P0401 V1 CPU Cooler: Very large, works well.
ASUS P5E3 PREMIUM/WIFI: LGA 775 DDR3 Intel X48 ATX Intel Motherboard. ASUS sure picked a funny name for the product, but it works really well.
Thermaltake Armor VA8003BWS ATX Full Tower PC Case with 25-Centimeter Fan (Black): Very large case. Indestructible. Well, maybe not, but close to it. The front panel connections are a little short... if I put in a second 3870X2 in my machine, the Fireware internal cable might not reach the port header.
ASUS EAH3870X2: Again ASUS shows their knack for names; this is basically the same as any other 3870X2. The card is extremely long: it was a struggle to get it in my case, even though my case is huge. I sometimes wonder how if I'll ever be able to get it out, if and when I want to upgrade. You have to install the SmartDoctor and GamerOSD programs on the driver disk or else the fans will run loudly at full blast all the time.
Thermaltake W0131RU 850W Toughpower SLI Cross-Fire Ready Modular Power Supply: Powerful, but loud... next time, I will get a Zalman Heatpipe Cooled Modular 1000W; I hear they are extremely quiet.

The only real issue I had with it was that the ASUS P5E3 version 0105 BIOS that it shipped with didn't have support for the QX9770 and Vista would fail to install with random bluescreens. Also, the Express Gate feature isn't compatible with the 3870X2 and the system wouldn't post until that feature was disabled. Upgrading the BIOS to the latest offered on ASUS' web site fixed both of these issues.

In March, I bought a luxury computer: the Area 51 from Alienware. Their computers usually get great reviews in trade publications, so I figured, since I got a pretty good bonus this year, I'd try one out. I needed a new computer since I had outgrown my old Gateway (an 825GM, which worked as advertised, and I was quite happy with). Wow -- what a bad move that was. I knew that many people had poor experiences with them in the past, but most of them were several years ago, before they were acquired by Dell, and for every bad experience there were several positive. Well, maybe not so many positive -- except from trade magazines, but that's what I had been reading.

The machine they sent me had an EVGA 790i motherboard (though it is crippled so you can't update the BIOS yourself) and some "low-latency" Patriot 1333 MHz memory chips that apparently didn't work together well. My machine randomly hard locked -- even when it wasn't really doing anything (such as browsing the Internet, or even leaving the computer on overnight, for instance). I wasted a lot of time with tech support and the best they could do was recommend a few changes to the memory timings in the BIOS (it turns out the BIOS wasn't defaulting to the manufacturer's recommend settings: 7-7-7-20-1T 1.7V). However, even using those settings the hard locks still occurred. After pointing out that the memory timings did not fix the issue, all they would tell me was that there was a BIOS upgrade they were working on that would definitely fix the issue and I should just wait for that. For three weeks straight, I was promised this BIOS upgrade was "almost ready."

Alienware should have detected this when testing the machine. They have a so-called 200 point quality control process. That process must be worthless if it can't detect a problem that occurs with hours while IDLING, and pretty much immediately if you try to stress test the machine (it locked up within minutes when running Prime95 or any similar torture test.)

I'm not totally convinced that their quality control is that bad... when I ordered the machine, they shipped it 30 days after my order. EXACTLY 30 days after my order. You see, if they shipped it one day later, it would be mail fraud, since according to FTC regulations, they have to ship within thirty days, or obtain permission to ship later, or give me the option to cancel the order. I think my shipment got delayed because they found the problem, but they shipped it anyway, so they wouldn't have to risk providing a full refund of my money.

So I had the machine for three weeks, and was told empty promise after empty promise about a mythical BIOS upgrade that was coming out real soon now that would absolutely, positively, fix everything. The BIOS upgrade was always coming out "real soon". It rapidly started to dawn on me that "real soon" meant "maybe after your limited money back guarantee expires". I decided to give up and ship it back. And wouldn't you know it? Alienware doesn't stand behind their product, and won't budge on charging a restocking fee despite the fact that their overpriced paperweight never worked properly to begin with.

I'm a reasonable person and I understand and can tolerate an occasional lemon or product defect, but restocking fees should only be enforced when someone returns a working product. There are plenty of posts on their forums from lots of other angry users who are experiencing the same problems I had, so clearly the product was entirely in the design of the machine; they, quite simply, picked parts that didn't work together. Any company that does not stand behind their product is not worth doing business with.

I'm glad I returned the machine. I returned it two weeks ago and judging by their website today, they still don't have a fix out. Unbelievable.

I still needed a new machine, so I decided to order the parts for my Dream Machine from Newegg and built my own computer myself. It ended up being better than Alienware's (with a larger hard drive, faster RAM, and a better graphics card, a much higher 3dMarks06 score, and STABLE), despite spending no more than what was left after their restocking thievery.

Lesson learned: if you want something done right, do it yourself.

We have a photo gallery up of our last cruise. One of the best things about the cruise was that we got to see a lot of difference places. The drawback, of course, is that we don't stay any one place for long. It was nice, though, because we ended up not liking the place we thought we would (Progreso) and we ended up falling in love with Roatan, which we never would have thought to visit before.



Beth and I went snorkeling in Roatan, which was fun. The reef there was beautiful, and it came right up to the beach. Unfortunately, we didn't try snuba diving there. We did try that for the first time in Cozumel, and we enjoyed it, but we would have had a much better underwater adventure if we had done that in Roatan. If only we had known!

One of my favorite drinks to order in Mexico is the Michelada. Its popularity seems to be increasing here in the States as, recently, Miller and Bud have introduced "chelada-inspired" drinks such as Miller Chill and Budweiser Chelada, both of which are terrible.

A proper Michelada is a beer cocktail made with dashes of Worcestershire sauce, Maggi sauce (or soy sauce), some salt, and hot sauce, mixed with the juice from several key limes. Put this mixture in a glass, add ice, then slowly pour your beer in. A European (or Mexican) style lager is said to work best, because American style beers tend to finish sweet. Recently, I have been making my Micheladas using the Vienna Lager I made with my Mister Beer kit. Muy delicioso!

Unfortunately, I can never find a Mexican restaurant in the States that makes the Michelada the way I've had them in Mexico. Often, in American Mexican restaurants, they add Clamato or tomato juice to the mix. I've ordered Micheladas throughout Cozumel and the Yucatan (Progreso and Merida) and never had it with tomato juice, so I guess this is a regional difference in Mexico.

The tomato juice ruins it for me; a Michelada without the tomato juice is much lighter and crisper. Once you add the tomato juice, the bold flavors tend to overwhelm the beer. But taste is subjective, so to each their own. As long as the local O'Malias keeps fresh key limes in stock, I can make it the way I like it, and dream of a day when I have a chance to return to sunny Mexico (but only the parts of Mexico that make the Michelada the way I like it.)

Beth and I have returned from our first cruise. We travelled on the Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Seas which sails out of Galveston, Texas. Our friends Michael and Kristen picked us up and joined us for our weeklong adventure.

The ports we stopped at were Roatan, Hondurus; Cozumel, Mexico; and Progreso, Mexico. There was plenty to do at the various ports of call. Beth and I went snorkeling and kayaking in Roatan. The reef there comes almost right up to the shore and its absolutely beautiful. We went snuba diving in Cozumel (we should have done that in Roatan - you can see things much more clearly when snuba diving.) Progreso was somewhat of a disappointment, with a filthy beach and a lunch interrupted by an uninvited guest: the famous Mexican cockroach. I'll post more about those in detail later.

Overall, the trip was nice. The boat was huge and there was a lot to do on board. We saw some comedians, and a show tune performer, as well as the master illusionists known (collectively) as Laraf. There was a Carnival-style parade at the end of the tour that ended the vacation with a bang.

Most of the time, however, we laid out around the pool area and enjoyed the various pools and hot tubs and the libations from the pool-side bar. The bar staff were very friendly and surprisingly good at remembering people (and what they drink) despite the thousands of guests they interact with daily.

Almost everyone on the boat were very friendly. The only real disappointment of the trip was that some of the guest relations staff were incredibly rude. Apparently, some of them snoozed through hospitality school. Not all of them gave us bad service, though, and it didn't detract too much from our vacation.

The staterooms, as one might expect are relatively small. They do have to cram as many people on to the boat as possible to make a profit. As one of the comedians pointed out, if we dropped a washcloth we'd have wall to wall carpeting. But the balcony gave us fabulous and convenient views of the ocean. The bed was very comfortable, and Beth slept soundly without once waking up because I rolled over. Our room attendant left us cute animals made out of towels to come home to every night after dinner.

The food was good; it was one buffet after another, and there was no shortage of it. They even had midnight buffets with roasted pigs and taco bars. Our favorite food actually came from a Texas Chili cook-off contest they had on the pool deck. But the table service dining was also really great, mostly consisting of your standards like shrimp cocktails, fried chicken, sirloins and fillets with various sauces, and pasta dishes, but also including some more interesting fare such as samosas. We did feel there could have been a wider variety of cuisines represented, so I guess the only bad part about the meals is that they have to play it too safe (after all, it has to appeal to thousands of guests onboard.)

All in all, it was an enjoyable vacation. We will most likely try another cruise line besides Royal Caribbean next time, to see if the food (and guest relations staff) are better, but if you have a chance to go on a Royal Caribbean cruise yourself, I would recommend doing so. You won't regret it!

Anyway, now we have to head back to the daily grind of working.

After years (I kid...) of taunting us with promises of a collection of his earliest funnies, my brother has finally released the Multiplex e-Book Volume 1. And it has new, never-before-seen funnies! And its free! What can be better than that?

If you aren't familiar with Multiplex, its a humorous web-based comic about various people who work in and around a Multiplex theater. Check it out here: http://www.multiplexcomic.com/

I've uploaded a few more "The Lost Mind" songs to the "My Music" page.

• Ascension


• Enigmatic


• Untitled

It never ceases to astound me how many developers don't know how to get a stack dump of a running Java process. It couldn't be simpler. On UNIX systems, you send a QUIT signal to the running process (kill -3 pid or kill -QUIT pid). The process that receives the SIGQUIT signal does not stop running; it simply dumps its current stack trace to standard output and continues processing normally. On Windows systems, you use Ctrl+Break in the DOS window the Java process is running in. If your process isn't running in a window (such as a service or a child process running inside an IDE), you will have to use a third-party program to send the Ctrl+Break, such as SendSignal.

What do you do with this stack trace? Well, its most useful when your process is hanging for some reason, which is a problem you're likely to face at some point or another if you work with highly concurrent systems.

Recently, we faced an issue where our application wasn't processing some of the messages it was receiving. All of our servers were processing messages, but one of them was partially hung. We have two server instances in each of three clusters in the business tier of our application, so we quickly set out to figure out which server instance was the culprit. Once we fingered some suspects, we got stack dumps for each server instance to figure out what they were doing. With stack traces in hand, we quickly determined which server was holding us up; there was a deadlock in log4j code that was causing several threads to hang. It took only a few seconds to find, and just a few more to fix and verify. Problem solved. I can't imagine how one would diagnose an issue like that without a stack trace. Life would be much harder, that's for sure.

Asking potential job candidates how to get a stack dump of a running program has quickly become one of my favorite interview questions.

A friend of mine made a program, called Kuler Creator, that creates generative art pieces based on Adobe Kuler color themes found by searching on a user-supplied tag. Its a pretty neat program that can give some pretty nice looking results.

We just bought a new TV. Its a Samsung LNT4665F 46" 1080p LCD HDTV. We ordered it via Amazon. Little did I know what a debacle that would be. We were plagued with shipping gremlins like you wouldn't believe...

I'm hesitant to recommend ordering the TV through Amazon because they use Eagle Global Logistics to ship it and our experience with their service wasn't that great. Amazon won't use anyone else. EGL messed my order up somehow because it didn't show up at all in their tracking system. I ordered the TV on the 12th, and Amazon claims it was picked up and shipped on the 13th via 5-day shipping. The 24th was the original estimated arrival date, and it came and went... and no TV. So I had to call EGL and ask where it was, and they acted like it didn't exist. They had NO record of the shipment. So I had to call Amazon to ask them to find out why EGL didn't think it existed. And then finally I got a working tracking number and the TV moved from where it had been... in Cincinnati. It finally gets moved and gets to Indianapolis the next day according to the tracking info online. I get a new estimated delivery date of October 2. And that passed and I heard nothing from EGL. So I had to call them, and it turns out it had been in the factory for about a week but nobody bothered to tell the Scheduling Department to put it on a truck for me.

The TV finally got here yesterday... at least the lady I spoke with in the Scheduling Department was prompt and professional, and the man who actually delivered the TV was as well.

This TV would have cost about $600 more at the Best Buy here in town, so I suppose I can't complain too much, but still. That was a lot of shipping gremlin hassle.

But my troubles weren't over yet... Wouldn't you know it? As soon as we turned it on, we received an error message. The text 'T-TULPAUS0-1034 (00:03) 46(AMW)-INT' appeared in red text that overlayed everything, blinking incessantly. The text meant nothing to me. And, as luck would have it, after an hour with the tech support, it became apparent that it meant nothing to them either. After I patiently explained to the level one tech support script reader that it was most definitely the TV and not one of my other devices because none of my other devices were plugged in they finally moved me up to level two tech support. The level two lady didn't even bother reading a script and moved me up to level three. What fun. Finally, they revealed the magic combination of button pushing that would reset the TV.

In case you are reading this because you have this problem, these are the instructions I was given for resetting my TV:

Hit the menu button on the top of the TV. It has to be the button on top of the TV, not on the remote control. A blue panel should appear with a lot of options. Ignore it. Hit the down volume control a few times until the volume bar appears. It doesn't matter what volume you set it to, just that the bar the shows the current volume shows up onscreen. Now hold the menu button down again. After about five seconds you should see a small box at the bottom of the screen. It will say something like "Shop" or "Dynamic." Either way, when it appears, let go. If it says "Shop", repeat these instructions a second time. When it says "Dynamic," your TV is set the way it should be.

Now it works like a charm. The technology gremlins appear to have moved on.

As for the TV itself, its wonderful! Well, now that its not blinking its firmware version on top of everything I watch... The image is crisp and my Blu-Ray movies look amazing.

Anyone else have any shipping drama stories worth telling?




Edit: Added more detailed instructions for resetting the TV since I noticed some Google searches that appeared to be related to this issue. It has been a few months since I bought the TV and my TV has been working wonderfully with absolutely no problems since then.

Lots of brave people took to the streets to take a stand against the military junta that took over their country, demanding democracy. We should all stand with them and support them in their peaceful revolution.

Burger King has a website that will turn your photos into Simpsons characters. So if you ever wondered what you would look like on the Simpsons, this is your chance! This is me:

Of the beer I brewed. Quite literally. I drank them all. They were very good, especially after they lagered a bit in the fridge. Now I've got a new batch (this one is a pale ale) that has finished fermenting in the Mr. Beer keg and has been transferred to my bottles.

Don't worry, Mom, I won't take after Dad.