J.P.'s Blog

The NEXT time you see a bluescreen on your machine (hopefully a long time from now if ever), one tool you can use to take the mystery out of the problem is the windows debugger.

You can download the tool for free from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx

After it installs, just run it from the programs menu and select “Open Crash Dump” from the File menu. You will need to select the “Memory.DMP” file from c:\windows (or wherever your windows folder is).

When you get a “kd>” menu, just type “.symfix” <enter> followed by “!analyze –v” <enter>.

You shouls see a technical description of why the bluescreen occurred.

Sadly my media center has been crashing a lot lately with the below error: (which means I may need a new motherboard/processor/memory. :(

Loading Kernel Symbols
...............................................................
................................................................
..........................
Loading User Symbols

Loading unloaded module list
.....
1: kd> !analyze -v
*************************************
*                                                                             *
*                        Bugcheck Analysis                       *
*                                                                             *
*************************************

WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR (124)
A fatal hardware error has occurred. Parameter 1 identifies the type of error
source that reported the error. Parameter 2 holds the address of the
WHEA_ERROR_RECORD structure that describes the error conditon.
Arguments:
Arg1: 00000000, Machine Check Exception
Arg2: 85a32024, Address of the WHEA_ERROR_RECORD structure.
Arg3: b2000000, High order 32-bits of the MCi_STATUS value.
Arg4: 1040080f, Low order 32-bits of the MCi_STATUS value.

Debugging Details:
------------------

BUGCHECK_STR:  0x124_GenuineIntel

At whatever time that I was at on June 8th, 2009 (I don’t exactly know the time, so your going just have to assume that I speak of whenever that is), it will have been 946771216000 milliseconds (UTC) since I was actually born. …or will it…?

The strange part is just how hard it is to actually answer that question. You may ask why I chose milliseconds (ok, by now actually some of you may not ask anymore and may just assume as much from me), but in the end it served a purpose. You see, I was reading up on leap seconds for my calculations (there were 16 added since I was born). As such, I was able to calculate that since June 8th, 1979, there were:

      2928 days from leap years
+    8030 days from non-leap years
=  10958 days

   945388800 seconds from non leap days
+     1382416 seconds from 16 leap days

= 946771216 seconds (UTC)

However, a Mean Solar Day is actually 86400.002 seconds. This means that more precisely, it has been:

946771237916 milliseconds since June 8th, 1979 (Which I believe is UT1 actually)

or: ((10942 days * 86400.002s) + (16 days * 86401.002s))

However additionally, each solar day is actually getting longer by about 1.4ms to 1.7ms per century (depending on which wikipedia post you read). So with THIS new data, the numbers are more like:

946771243504.58 milliseconds since June 8th, 1979 (accounting for tidal shifts)

or ((10942 days * 86400002.51 ms) + (16 days * 86401002.51 ms))

So if you really care, there is a ton of data out there on various types of precision. The REAL problem came because UTC defines a second, SI defines a day, and years (or annums) are defined differently as well.

You know the real sad part to all this though? Neither google, bing, nor Wolfram Alpha gave the correct result.

Google: 30 years = 946 707 779 241 milliseconds

Bing: 30 years = 946,707,779,808 milliseconds

Wolfram Alpha: 30 years = 9.461x10^11 ms

At first I thought maybe its just rounding differences, but all three are completely different and none are close to what I calculated (which I triple checked over the last hour… in fact this was supposed to be ready before midnight). Oh well.

In the mean time (17 mins ago) I turned thirty.

J.P.

A friend of mine let me know about the passing of Steve Rider yesterday.

You may not know who he is, but for me he is one of the progenitors of my.live.com (aka start.com/2,3…etc). Since I was introduced to it, it has been my primary interaction with the web as a whole. To this day I have not found anything which can bring together all of the information I track in one place so easily. Not to mention working where I work and sharing many of the same friends as well.

If you are more interested, there is a history here.

My condolences to his family. He will be missed.

With that, I will leave you with the channel 9 interview on start.com.

As you may have noticed, I now have 27 different random banners at the top of this page. Bonus if you can find them all. ;)

I was meaning to do this once I moved to the new server, but never got around to it. Turns out its simple to do in php, so uploaded a little script which seems to work great.

All the pictures are from my camera. Most were taken in 2008. So far, my favorite is the flamingos. Yes, they are real.

J.P.

Ok, maybe not even 15 seconds let along 15 minutes, but myself and some co-workers are in the Tech-Ed keynote today. :) I thought this was cool enough for a post. Granted, not many people know what Tech-Ed is, but whatever.

(that’s me in the center)

Our video starts at about 17:58 in the keynote. All the win7 screencasts you see in this video were performed by me on my laptop as well. (… do you know how many times I had to type “Sticky Note”… :))