More uninteresting crap… Now from England!

Are you really coming to to read my blog directly? That’s a shame, because more often than not lately, you’ve either seen no updates for weeks at a time, or better yet the 500 Service unavailable error page.

The error was thanks to my server host’s ( overly severe resource enforcement bots killing my blog processes with extreme prejudice. Textdrive is a proud sponsor of the Ruby and Ruby on Rails communities… however their server setups making hosting non-static content (i.e. Ruby on Rails) a particularly trying experience. The worst was trying to migrate my database schema to sync with a small update to my blog software. Again the resource bots would pounce on my scripts killing them mid-process (after only like 30 seconds!) leaving me with a junk database. I complained, but was told to just do the migration on my own PC, and upload the results. Hey, thanks a lot.

Back from sidetrack: You really should be reading via a blog reader. I think Google Reader is the best. By subscribing to the feed you don’t have to come back here and be disappointed when there’s nothing new. When new posts are posted, you’ll see them…

But if you must visit directly, at least I prettied-up the site last night. Enjoy.

From day 1, my company provided IBM T60p has had the acoustical properties of a 747 at idle. The fan had two settings, loud and LOUDER… the fan never turns off. At first I didn’t care too much, but my wife has since appropriated my “good” laptop, a Dell E1705 (a.k.a. the Boat Anchor) forcing me to live with this noisy, dim screened beast day and night.

The fan noise complaint is a regularly posted problem on the Thinkpads Forum. Until recently there wasn’t a lot you could do. But if you read this thread specifically the last few pages you will find a link to: http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~schmitzr/tpfcserv_t60.zip

This will install a fan control service which tweaks some of the temperature settings, allowing the fan to run more often at the whining speed as opposed to howling speed.

Still just a small band-aid on pretty poorly designed cooling system. It’s really pathetic for such a spendy laptop.