Second Asus Graphics Card Caught Fire

 FacePalm  Comments Off on Second Asus Graphics Card Caught Fire
Oct 312012
 

For the second time now I’ve had an Asus EN9600GT catch fire on me. The first time was a few years ago when I first built my media centre. At the time the media centre was on but wasn’t actually doing anything, when suddenly there was a loud pop and flames shooting out the back of the computer. I RMA’d the device, which is a needlessly painful process with Asus, and installed the replacement.

This evening I was logged into the media centre from another computer and running an update on it (I run MythTV). Suddenly, progress seems to stop. I turn on the TV, and there’s nothing there. I try to power cycle the media centre to no effect. Finally I pull out the computer and pull off the cover – nothing is happening. I pull the power cord, give it half a minute, plug it back in and try again. Fire.

The burned component

The burned component

The first one was far more spectacular than this one. But regardless, I certainly don’t need the extra expense and hassle of having to rebuild or replace my media centre right now.

 Posted by at 10:48 PM

Oracle’s Möbius Strip Of Stupidity

 FacePalm, Software  Comments Off on Oracle’s Möbius Strip Of Stupidity
Jan 262011
 

I need to patch and update some Solaris/SPARC boxes, using the latest Solaris Patch Cluster from Oracle. Nevermind the flash animation that their support website consists of, the best part of the process so far has been this: The zip file that the patch cluster is distributed as is continually failing to unzip successfully on the box. So I finally just unzipped it on my laptop. It unzipped fine. I checked the README file, and I found this:

If you experience problems unzipping this patch cluster please refer to MOS article 1020109.1 ‘Unzip of Solaris 10 Recommended Patch Clusters and Solaris 10 Sun Alert Patch Clusters fails’, available from:

Oracle Support URL

Which contains this helpful explaination:

The size of the Solaris 10 patch clusters now exceeds the size limit for the standard unzip utility. Patches need to be applied to resolve this issue.

It’s like a Möbius strip of stupidity.