Kerblam! by Christopher

Sunday, January 10
Like of the Week: 10/01/10

A Diagram of Geek Culture, courtesy of the Gawker

Labels: geek, geek culture, geekery, humour, irony, truth

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 1/10/2010 05:29:00 AM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 2010129445116172999· | Permalink

Sunday, November 1
Hmm...

Been busy since I graduated. Wondering what I should turn this blog into? It needs a redesign regardless, and I quite fancy going more retro. Batman style.

I might turn K! into a tech-related blog, but then I already have my technology related blog, Into The Unknown. I have a tumblr blog, nontitled. I just set up my personal site with WordPress but I really like this domain name... Any ideas people?

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 11/01/2009 12:52:00 AM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 7770389548194170664· | Permalink

Monday, August 3
And so it is that efnet.demon.co.uk closes for good

Sad day today (3rd of August 2009) - efnet.demon.co.uk was finally shut down. This man had a hand in it (frankly I think he might've done it for the lulz while he was bored inbetween his soaps ;)

It is sad for the EFNet community though. efnet.demon.co.uk had been running and hosting EFNet for millions of users for a very long time, and it was the only UK EFNet node left.

Get in touch if you want your own brand new, hot off the press,

I WAS THERE WHEN EFNET.DEMON DELINKED

And all I got was this lousy T-shirt

T-shirt! Comes in any colour and size as long as it's Black Large.

Labels: a lulzy move, demon, efnet

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 8/03/2009 09:31:00 PM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 797113982076594180· | Permalink

Sunday, July 19
Finally, my very first web site gets a lick of paint

ChrisWoods.co.uk was my very first domain name. I've had it for years (literally, since 1999) but I've only recently revamped it and updated it from its previous incarnation. I think it was 2003 or 2004 when I last changed the site, and it was beginning to really show its age.

So, now my personal site has a spangly new WordPress install, a short bio about the site, domain name and myself along with some links to my other main blogs and sites. Soon it'll have a summary CV on there too and various other appropriate nick-nacks and hopefully it'll get spidered fairly well by all the search engines - I've been thinking that I could do with one focal point on the web from which I can link out to all of my other bits and bobs and now that's one step closer to completion.

...It never ceases to amaze me as to what can be accomplished through sheer force of procrastination on a Sunday afternoon!

Labels: bio, blogging, CV, personal, random musings, web sites

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 7/19/2009 08:11:00 PM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 3283240334489118365· | Permalink

Monday, June 22
Problems with shaderapidx9.dll? This fix worked for me

I was doing some housekeeping on my PC earlier, and as it was taking up a fair amount of space on my C: partition I decided to backup my Steam install, uninstall it and reinstall to another HDD.

I backed up my installed games using Steam's Backup feature, then reinstalled Steam and restored my games (also downloading the newly released Smashball for good measure, which is an HL2 mod). Strangeness ensued however... Any time I tried to load HL2 or Smashball, I got a DX9 error relating to shaderapidx9.dll.

However, I stumbled upon a YouTube video seemingly offering a one-line fix... Here's my message to Steam support describing it all in more detail:

Hi,

I'm running Windows XP Service Pack 3, fully patched and up to date. I uninstalled Steam earlier this evening so I could reinstall it to a different HDD - this went perfectly. Before uninstalling Steam, I also backed up my games using the Steam Backup facility. Once Steam was reinstalled on my secondary HDD, I restored the games. The only two games I had installed were HL2 and CS:s - after restoring those, I also downloaded Smashball.

My original Steam and games installation worked perfectly, however when I tried to load HL2 or Smashball (which is an HL2 mod), I got an error regarding shaderapidx9.dll and the game crashed out to the desktop. CS:S continued to load fine.

I did some searching around, and almost by chance I came across this youtube video: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRcFfFxigpE. The video instructs you to open a DOS prompt and enter "net localgroup administrators networkservice /ADD" (without the inverted commas). I did this, and the command was issued successfully - I immediately tried to load HL2 and it worked perfectly, first time - the same for Smashball too.

Why should uninstalling and reinstalling Steam make this happen? It was working perfectly before, so why should a simple uninstall and reinstall cause this problem? Also, why don't you offer this advice as a potential fix on your Support pages? Cheers...

While I understand that there's quite a few Vista users out there who are having to muck about with the WMI service to get their Steam games running, this simple usergroup fix seems to have solved whatever the Steam uninstallation process broke. However, I'm not discounting that it was something the Steam platform update did (my client updated when it first connected, before I uninstalled - and I didn't play any games after updating the client, so it could've overwritten a DLL or modified something which persisted across the uninstall and reinstall).

That said, if you're using XPSP3 and suddenly any HL2-based game stops working, try inputting

net localgroup administrators networkservice /ADD

from a DOS prompt and seeing if your games start working.

Labels: fix, hl2, shaderapidx9.dll, source, steam, workaround

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 6/22/2009 03:04:00 AM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 8178185947995077977· | Permalink