Sticky is good

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Tuesday, September 12. 2006 in Junk Drawer

Over my years I've likely built and repaired dozens of computers. It's fun and it's a great way to get a custom-built computer on the cheap. My oldest son Jonathan needed his own computer, so we sat down and designed one from scratch, ordered the parts, put it all together and after a few hours, had a really nice system up and running. Then yesterday he comes up to me and says that the computer keeps shutting down after a few minutes... I go into his room and we fire up the system. Immediately I hear this weird sound, almost like a baseball card in the spokes of a bicycle wheel. We shut down, open up the case, and I start look for a cable that might be rubbing up against a fan. No luck. Then I recall Jon saying that the system kept shutting down... Hmmm. That sounds like a CPU issue. So with the case open we power up the computer again. Sure enough, the noise is coming from the CPU fan. The stickers on the fan had come loose, and peeled up a bit and started rubbing against the fan and the heatsink on the bottom and the wire-cage on the top. Nasty. So I took a pair of tweezers (after shutting down of course) and removed both stickers. That did it. No damage and the system's been up and reliable since then. I did some further research on the fan (from Ultra) and found that it's a common complaint. Never had something like that happen before... I usually buy Masscool fans... I should have continued that. I won't switch again.
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Small side project

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Friday, September 8. 2006 in Programming

I've mentioned a few times previously about the Telaen Webmail side project that I work on. It's pretty neat, since, IMO, a small, lightweight Webmail system is more useful than larger more complex ones, especially if it's designed to complement (instead of replace) more "traditional" Email clients. We recently announced a release candidate for version 1.1.1, which adds some features and fixes over 1.1.0. Anyway, I found it curious that the project that Telaen was based on, (Uebimiau, appears to be dead once again. The Forum is down, and has been for quite awhile, and the site itself is little more than an advertisement for a commercial offering for a webmail system that also seems to be based on Uebimiau. This commercial offering is expensive and has a much deeper list of dependencies and requirements than Telaen (and even Uebimiau) which, again IMO, deviates from what makes them worthwhile. Uebimiau was not being actively developed (that's why we "forked" off Telaen in the first place) and so one wonders how active development on this commercial offering will be. I won't even bring up any licensing issues and whether it's using code or patches that were GPL'ed and not providing their updates back to the community... So, long and short, if you're using Uebimiau (or some other webmail system) and are looking for a replacement, look at Telaen.
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