Marcus McCurdy's Blog

Image by taberandrew via Flickr

This morning I woke up and was greeted by a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on my computer. For most people, this would be terrifying, but I worked for 5 years fixing problems just like this. If you do have a BSOD there are some steps you can do to find out why you are having it. These tips work if you can still access your operation system. If you can’t you would have to plug your hard drive into another computer to try and analyze the crash dump from the working system.

In my case, the BSOD showed win32k.sys as being the culprit, but sometimes all you will have is a stop error. These stop errors may look cryptic, but a Google search can turn up a wealth of information about it. This site has a big listing of stop codes http://www.aumha.org/a/stop.php. Just write down the stop code that you see on the blue screen then look it up to see what could be causing the problem. For example, STOP: 0×0000000A: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is usually a bad drive so that narrows down what is causing your problem. If say you install a new video card then you start getting STOP: 0×0A then that new card is a likely cause of your stop error.

Something that is a bit more advanced that you can try is called the Windows Debugger. If you look at the bottom of the BSOD you will hopefully see a line that says “Begining dump of physical memory”. You can use the windows debugger to analyze this crash dump and find out what caused your computer to blue screen.

When using the debugger the first thing you need to do is download it. For the debugger to work you also need something called symbols. The symbols are operating system specific so you need to make sure you get the XP symbols if you are using XP or the Vista symobls if you are using Vista. However, you can also have the debugger download the needed symbols automatically from microsofts online symbol server. I usually go with this method since the symobls files are nearly 300MB. Here are the instructions from microsoft on how to use the symbol server:

To use the Microsoft Symbol Server

For example, to download symbols to c:\websymbols, you would add the following to your symbol path:
SRV*c:\websymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

To use the Microsoft Symbol Server

For example, to download symbols to c:\websymbols, you would add the following to your symbol path:
SRV*c:\websymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

Now, if you have you debugging tools installed and your symbols all setup you need to actually analyze the crash dump. The debugging tools install in the start menu under all programs >> debugging tools for windows >> windbg.  To open the crash dump you can either click file >> open crash dump, or press CTRL + D to hotkey it. By default, the crash dump file is located at C:\windows\MEMORY.DMP. Here is a sample of what I got on my crash dump.

Now !analyze -v

After you load the crash dump the debugger will take a few moments to read the file then you should see something that says type !analyze to analyze your crash dump. This is where you will hopefully find out what is causing the problem. In my case, the debugger found this

PROCESS_NAME:  LCDMedia.exe

to be the process that caused my problem. This process is for my logitech G15 keyboard software so I uninstalled it. If you don’t recognize the process you can do a google search to find what it is or search your computer for the process name and see what you find. Be careful though and don’t just delete the process because this could cause more problems.

Any questions?

That is about it if you have any questions please post a comment and I’ll try and answerr it.

Headshot

Over the weekend I went paintballing for a friends bachelor party and we all wanted to share our pictures with each other. There is a cool service called Dropbox that let us do just that. Dropbox lets you share files between multiple computers very easily. Dropbox installs a small program that handles the syncing and adds a My Dropbox folder to your computer. Any files you put in the My Dropbox folder are synchronized between all the computers you have Dropbox installed on. Dropbox also allows for collaboration of folders and thats how we used it. Those of us who took pictures put their photos into a shared folder then added all the participants as collaborators so we could all have a central place to put our photos. It worked out really well. You also have a public folder so if you want to share a file that is too big for email with a friend just drop it in the public folder then right click on it and there is an option to get a public link to the file. Email the link to the friend and they can download it from your Dropbox.  Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage for free, but you can upgrade to 50GB of storage for $9.99 a month or $90 dollars a year. Dropbox also keeps track of revisions so if you are working on a school project and a critical portion is accidentally deleted you can revert back to a previous version and save yourself from a thermo nuclear meltdown. I highly reccomend checking out Dropbox if you user more than one computer and even if you don’t it is a good place to put critical files that you don’t want to lose.

Found this out via lifehacker, but you can now enable POP3 in your Hotmail accounts. I don’t like wasting time by logging in to several different webmail clients to check my mail so I add as many as I can to my Gmail account. However, Yahoo only allows you to enable POP3 if you have the upgraded mail servce and until now Hotmail didn’t let you do it at all that I could find.

Google Latitude a new Google service that supposedly allows you to find your friends through their mobile phone. Here are the phones it is currently working on:

• Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1
• iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soon)
• most color BlackBerry devices
• most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices
• most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones)
• many Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones, such as Sony Ericsson devices (coming soon)

My poor little iPhone will just have to wait. The page also has a video you can watch.

I just read on the Android Developers Blog that they are releasing the source code for Android. I don’t know of any other cell phones where you can view the source code of the OS that is running on the phone so this is pretty exciting. I’m looking forward to downloading and perusing the code later tonight. [Photo Credit http://www.sxc.hu/profile/mrceviz]

I can understand Apple’s desire to put a NDA on iPhone app development, but this seems to be taking it too far. I can guess why they did it, namely to avoid negative press, but I think it will do quite the opposite. The community on Digg already seems to be frothing at the mouth over this and not entirely unjustified in their reaction. It upsets me that they chose to do this because it makes them appear to be covering up the fact that they reject certain apps. It could be they don’t want anyone to know what apps they reject because competitors could use this to try and discover what types of apps Apple doesn’t want on the iTunes store and then leverage this against them. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how how far Apple is willing to take this. [Photo credit GiniMiniGi]

Via Digg | digg story

I’ve been excited since I learned about the 2.1 iPhone update that Apple dropped this past Friday and I wasn’t disappointed. The update fixes several issues including:

• “Significantly” increased battery life
• less dropped calls and call setup failures (I had lots of setup failures)
• “Dramatically” faster iTunes backups
• Create genius playlists on the go (awesome)

These are juts some of the fixes and the link above will take you to Apple’s announcement so you can read all of the changes.

So far, one of the first changes I noticed is that there are new icons at the top of the iPhone screen for 3G or Edge network connectivity.

And here is the new icon for Edge connectivity

They weren’t joking about the battery life either. My battery lasts at least twice as long now. Previously, I could almost watch as my battery life indicator dwindled down, but now I can use the phone all day and still have at least half battery life left. It was so bad I would turn off 3G and WiFi to try and save battery life. I still keep WiFi off unless I want to use it, but I can leave 3G on now and still have plenty of battery life left.

Apps install and update way faster now, which is a welcome change because before 2.1 even on WiFi it would take several minutes to download and install an app. This wasn’t that big a deal if I was sitting at home, but sometimes I would want to grab an update really quick while connected to a WiFi hotspot only to have to wait 5 or more minutes for the app to load.

Backups, as promised, are also much faster. I can sync much quicker now.

If you haven’t updated your iPhone to firmware version 2.1 I highly reccommend doing so as soon as you can. It makes the iPhone work so much better you just have to try it to really appreciate it. I just wish they would have released the 3G model with this firmware because before the battery life was just atrocious.

Today Apple released iTunes 8.  Here are the new features:

• Genius: A sidebar that will suggest music from the iTunes store that is similar to what you are currently listening to and will also automagically create playlists for you.
• HD TV shows.
• A new way to view your music called grid view that displays the cover art of the albums. (I don’t know about this I have problems with cover art in my library since I don’t buy all my music from iTunes.
• A new visualizer.

I just hope they fixed all the bugs in iTunes 7. Probably 90% of the time I load up iTunes it loads up in all black and I have to minimize it then maximize it to correct the problem. NBC programs are also available again via iTunes store.

You can download iTunes 8 here

Apple also changed the iPod Nano’s design from the fat squat version back to the skinnier version (which I like better) and it now comes in 9 colors according to the graphic on Apple’s website.

There will also be a new iPhone update on Friday that will supposedly fix drop calls, improve battery life, and make it easier to backup your data to iTunes.

[photo via flickr]

Sign Up

Google Analytics is a great resource for anyone who runs a website. It is free to use and the statistics that it provides you with are very eye opening. The first step is signing up and it is totally free just go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ to sign up if you already have a gmail account it will add analytics to your Google account.

Continue Reading

I’m so excited for this game I can’t even describe it. I was just starting to get bored with all other games as of late. It seems like developers try to pack in so many gimmicks and crazy graphics that they forget about a good story with excellent game play. (more…)