Wednesday, January 16, 2008

House: Living Room

Side Door


Life is full of switches


The IKEA Stand lamp is a gift from Mrs. Nerdy's brother. Nope, I'm not a fan of IKEA.

All lights are off

Half of the down lights are on

All down lights are on

Downlights are off while the light trough lamps are on

Everything turns on

Don't know what they called this. Boxes with light?

Stainless steel handrail and a simple sofa set (2+3).

Another view.

Lastly, this is what get me connected to the rest of this world. Everything are plugged on the Belkin protector. That RM10K insurance should enough to cover any disaster.

This is part A of the living room area, The other half of the area is the prayer area and I heard it's not that good to snap pictures about it, so I will just skip that.

I'm done here, going to sleep now.

Sick Day. Literally.

Same old craps. Running nose, sore throat and tiredness, all symptoms points to either flu or cold. Darn, CNY is near by, better now than then.

The 1 million dollar question, "What should a sick person do"?

Practically, he should do nothing. Nothing in this context is refer to exclude those activities that assist in reaching the objective of recovery, i.e. resting, sleeping, eating, watching TV and etc non physically exhausting stuffs.

Maybe it's time to snap some photos about my new living place and post it later.

If and only if, I haven't fall a sleep.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Terrible Networking Day

A day for damned networking

When I first turned on my home computer screen, the Bit Torrent client I'm using to do P2P stuffs strew up, application window hung. Most windows icons turned black without properly displaying the supposed images. Treated it like another "MS did it again" day, without hesitation, I pressed the restart button.

Things start to get ugly when Windows restarted. I was unable to connect to my Wifi access point. It keeps on showing the message "Waiting for the network..." blah blah and at the end I got my self an Automatic Private Address with limited connectivity.
Shoot, someone hacked my AP and changed the network key? ? ?

NOPE, I tried the same key on my laptop and it worked perfectly.

Reverted back to the normal Power On/Off cycle on AP and the Wifi client, nothing seems improving.

I've made a wrong step by changing some values in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/NetworkCards and this causes a big hassle when I next restarted the PC. Everything's strew up. DB2 was down, DHCP client was failed to start, and other applications which are relied on the TCPIP communication protocol stacks doesn't seem to like you anymore... jesus christ. And all this happened just because a simple change of value in the registry. Hahaha. Well done, MS.

Struggled for a few minutes, I decided to repair the TCPIP stack and also Winsock.
MS Knowledge Base got few articles that illustrate the steps for doing so, but basically it involves the following:

1. Log into Safe Mode
2. Delete the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/Winsock and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/Winsock
3. Edit the nettcpip.inf file in %SYSTEM_ROOT%\inf\nettcpip.inf, locate the below lines:

[MS_TCPIP.PrimaryInstall]
"Characteristics = 0xa0"......

And change the value 0xa0 to 0x80

4. Go into command prompt window, type "netsh winsock reset"

5. You can try also this command "netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt"

6. Restart your machine

7. Go to control panel -> Network Connections -> Right click on any of the connection that has TCPIP installed and check out the connection Properties

8. Click on Install button, then select Protocol from the available list. Then click on the Have Disk button, type in the "C:\windows\inf" in the "Copy manufacturer's file from:" text box. (Assuming your Windows is located at c:\windows). Lastly click ok.

9. Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) from the Network Protocol list. Click Ok.

10. When you return to the connection properties screen and this time if you select the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the Uninstall button is now enabled. Click on the Uninstall button.

11. This step is particularly important. You should wait for at least 10 minutes for the process to be completed. If you terminated your system now, the stack shall get corrupted and you will need to restart the above steps again.

12. Restart the machine

13. Now reinstall the TCPIP stack by performing the above step 7 to 12.

Lastly to ensure everything ok, do the power on/off cycle on the AP and your machine.

And this works for me finally, in the early morning of next day. Indeed a bad day.