Rock Band 2 for Wii: Guitar Hero 3 Guitar is Compatible!

I got a copy of Rock Band 2 Special Edition for the Wii for Christmas this year (thanks to my beautiful wife, Missy!).  The Special Edition bundle includes the game disc, the drum set, the microphone, and one guitar.

The one other guitar that I already own, an "official" Guitar Hero 3 guitar that was packaged with my copy of Guitar Hero 3 for Wii, does work successfully with Rock Band 2 for Wii!  It "just works" -- no special configuration or setup was necessary.  So with the Rock Band 2 Special Edition set plus the Guitar Hero 3 guitar, my family has been able to play Rock Band 2 with the full four-person band (singer, lead guitar, bass guitar, drums). 

Really excellent job by the folks at Harmonix for taking the time and effort to make the Guitar Hero 3 guitar compatibility work, and also for making the Wii version of Rock Band 2 feature-equivalent to the XBox 360 and PS3 versions!  Thanks, guys!

Fix: InvocationTargetException in Eclipse while using CVS

I ran into an issue while using Eclipse 3.3 today where Eclipse was throwing a java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException while trying to get another version of a project using Eclipse's built-in CVS client. I initially encountered the error after pressing the "Refresh Tags" button on the "Replace with Branch or Version" dialog.

Some brief experimentation revealed that I wasn't able to do any CVS operations from within Eclipse. Either I would get the above error, or else the operation would just silently fail.

Checking the Eclipse log file (at workspace\.metadata\.log) showed that a "Connection refused: HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden" error was occurring whenever I tried to perform a CVS operation.

This error message turned out to be the key; there was an issue with Eclipse's proxy settings. In the Preferences dialog (Window menu | Preferences), under General | Network Connections, in the "No Proxy for" section, I needed to add the hostname of my CVS server.

After adding the hostname of my proxy server in the Network Connections section of the Preferences dialog, CVS operations in Eclipse once again stared working properly.

Adding a 3rd Monitor to a Laptop

Back in September, I set up about researching how I might be able to add a 3rd monitor to my laptop PC at work, a Lenovo (IBM) ThinkPad T60.

The built-in video card on the laptop PC, an ATI Mobility Radeon X1300, supports only dual monitors.  The card can run the built-in laptop LCD display plus one external monitor, or two external monitors (via the additional DVI port on the machine's docking station), but not two external monitors and the built-in LCD at the same time.

Since simply opening up the case and popping an additional video card into a free PCI-e or PCI slot isn't an option with this laptop machine like it would be with a desktop machine, I considered several alternative solutions:

Docking Station PCI Card

I first considered purchasing a new docking station, the Thinkpad Advanced Dock, which supports adding a standard PCI-e card directly to the dock; then plugging a PCI-e video card into the dock, and running the 3rd monitor off of that. 

However, this solution was cost-prohibitive (around US $380 for the dock -- not including the cost of a PCI-e video card).  I also ran across multiple reports from Thinkpad owners trying and failing to get this solution working on the official Lenovo forums (particularly in this thread).

PCMCIA Video Card

Next, I looked into the possibility of getting a PCMCIA video card for my laptop's free PCMCIA slot, such as the VillageTronic VTBook. 

However, I was somewhat concerned that the card might "stick out" of the side of my laptop, making the laptop a hassle to carry around with the card installed.  I was also concerned about potential difficulties with docking/undocking the machine (which I do a few times a week) while using the card.  Finally, the VTBook solution was also somewhat cost-prohibitive (around US $250).

My solution: USB Video Card

The solution that I finally settled on was to purchase a USB 2.0 video card.  This is a self-enclosed video card with a USB connection on one end to connect to the PC, and a DVI port on the other for connecting a monitor.  The specific model I picked up was an IOGEAR model GUC2020DW6 external video card.  The price was right (particularly compared to the other available laptop multiple-monitor solutions I considered): the IOGEAR card was on sale for about US $80 when I purchased it back in early October 2008 (and it's even lower now, down to US $68 on Amazon, as I write this post). 

I've had the card for just about two months now, and it's been working great -- better than I expected!  I had been concerned that there might be noticeable display "lag" on the monitor connected by the USB video card, but in practice, there's no noticeable difference when working on the USB-connected monitor or working with one of the others.  The only time that I notice the difference is when dragging a window around on the USB-connected monitor; there is just a bit of "lag" as the window moves around the screen.

Here's the card, connected, behind my PC, along with a penny to help show the size of the device (apologies for the low quality cellphone-cam photo):

And here's the 3-monitor setup at my desk at work, using the external USB video card to drive one of the external monitors:

USB video cards do have known limitations with displaying very rapidly-updating content (e.g. movies, 3D games) due to the limited throughput of USB 2.0, so I wouldn't purchase one of these cards to use on a gaming machine.  However, I knew that I'd only be using this monitor for business use: Writing code, viewing documents, doing email, surfing the web; that type of thing.  Also, in the event that I do want to view some rapidly-changing content that the adapter can't handle well, I can always just put that content on one of my other monitors.

Footnote

I got some great help in my research on this issue by posing the question of ways to add a 3rd monitor to a laptop over on StackOverflow, a fairly new community-run site for asking and answering programming and programming-related questions.

Troubleshooting new PC bluescreens

When I first got my custom-built new PC running 64-bit Vista put together a few weeks ago, everything seemed to be running great: It was very fast and responsive, all of the hardware components appeared to be working, and I could play 3D games on the system with no errors.

However, after a few days of using the system, it became clear that there was a problem: On four occasions, after I left the machine running overnight, I woke up in the morning to find that the machine had bluescreened while it was unattended overnight.  Each time, I found that all of my open programs/windows had closed, and a error dialog was open with a message saying that the machine had bluescreened (using that term, "bluescreened"!).  (However, on two occasions, the machine ran ok overnight, without bluescreening.)

Also, on one occasion, the machine bluescreened while I was actively using it, while I was playing a game of Bionic Commando: Rearmed, which was especially aggravating.

I really dislike system instability.  I've always placed a premium on stability on systems I build; while troubleshooting and tracking down problems can sometimes be interesting, I'd much rather be spending my time on my computer to work on a project, or to play a game.  So, I set out to track down and fix the cause of the bluescreens.  (Note: This is the time that having a custom-built machine can be "interesting" -- if I couldn't figure out the cause of the issue, I wouldn't have the fallback option of dialing up a vendor's 1-800 number to get help dealing with the problem!)

Bad RAM?

My first thought was that one of the sticks of RAM in the system might be bad, or maybe that the two sets of two RAM sticks that I had put into the machine -- a set of 2 2GB sticks from Corsair, and a set of 2 2GB sticks from Crucial (8 GB total) -- were incompatible with one another.  I wasn't terribly happy about this prospect, since it would involve additional troubleshooting which stick(s) of RAM were responsible for the problem, and then having to ship the parts back to the store for a replacement or a refund -- something I've never needed to do before.

I decided to use a memory test utility to try and determine whether there really was a RAM issue.  I found a nice blog post by Shivaranjan Bhoopathy detailing Vista's built-in memory diagnostic tool (thanks Shivaranjan!).  I had been previously unaware of this utility; I'd had it in mind that I'd need to find a 3rd-party utility to do the job.

I ran the utility (which was designed to run after a reboot of the machine, and then automatically running the utility on the subsequent boot before Windows loads).  To my relief, the utility reported that all of my RAM was ok!  However, this meant that I needed to continue looking for the cause of the bluescreens.

Heat Issue?

My experience over the years has shown that weird, sometimes-reproducible, sometimes-not, hardware-related issues are often attributable to overheating. 

I found a nice, free utility for Windows, SpeedFan, which gives a readout of CPU temperature (among other features).  SpeedFan reported that my two CPUs were running at a temperature of between 70 and 75 degrees C -- very hot, dangerously so, for the CPU! 

I also rebooted the machine, entered the built-in BIOS utility program as the machine was booting, and checked the temperature there; the BIOS utility program confirmed that the CPU temperature was a very high 70+ degrees C.

So, at this point I thought I'd found the cause of the problem; the only question was how to fix it.  I turned off the machine, opened up the case, and checked the heatsink.  I found that the heatsink was slightly loose -- I was able to wiggle it back and forth slightly with my fingers; if I had installed the heatsink correctly, then I shouldn't have been able to move it at all. 

The problem turned out to be that two of the four "posts" on the corners of the heatsink which bolt the heatsink tightly down against the surface of the CPU were not tightened down all of the way.  As a result, the heatsink wasn't making tight contact against the CPU surface, and consequently wasn't doing a good job of drawing the heat away from the CPU. 

I properly tightened down the heatsink, and confirmed that it was now tightly bolted down against the CPU surface, and couldn't be "wiggled."  I turned the machine back on, and monitored the temperature with SpeedFan.  This time, the CPU temperature never rose above 40-45 degrees C, even after the machine had been on for a while.  Much better!

Unfortunately, after I left the machine on overnight once again, I came back to it in the morning to find that it had, once again, bluescreened while it was unattended overnight.  This meant that I needed to continue looking for the cause of the issue. 

BIOS and Network Driver Update

At this point, I was running out of ideas of things to check.  I had been doing some large file copies over the network while the machine was unattended overnight (copying photos and music files from my old PC to the new one); I thought that maybe a problem with the network driver or the machine BIOS might be responsible for the bluescreening problems.

I visited the Foxconn downloads site (my motherboard manufacturer's site), and downloaded a new Network driver and installed that; then (unfortunately violating the troubleshooting principle of "only change one thing at a time between tests"), I also downloaded and installed an updated BIOS, using the Foxconn LiveUpdate utility, also from the Foxconn site.

After the BIOS update, I was afraid momentarily that I had "bricked" my motherboard when, after the machine rebooted following the update, I was presented with a scary-looking error message following the machine's power-on self-tests:

CMOS Checksum Bad

However, after some hurried research via Google search (on another machine), this error message turned out only to represent a notification that the machine's BIOS had been updated.  I was able to just bypass the error and continue to boot into Windows, and the machine was fine.

This notification is a good thing, in the case that I might have had a virus that had performed a BIOS update (for who-knows-what purposes).  However, (1) the error message was somewhat unnecessarily scary/unhelpful, and (2) it might have been nice if the Foxconn update utility would have warned me about the message in advance, so I didn't have to get so worried upon seeing it! 

The same "CMOS Checksum Bad" error message appeared again upon a subsequent boot, but I was (apparently) able to clear it simply by going into the machine's boot-time BIOS utility, and then doing a save-and-exit from the utility (without changing anything).

Conclusion

In any event, after installing the BIOS and Network driver updates, I've had no further bluescreening problems!  The machine has been rock-solid stable ever since -- just the way I like it.

I can conclude that either or both of the BIOS and Network driver updates was responsible for fixing the problem -- although as I noted earlier, it would have been nice if I'd performed the updates one at a time, so I could better conclude what the specific solution to the problem was.

I'm also happy in retrospect that the bluescreens occurred, since it led me to discovering the heat issue with the machine and the improperly-installed heatsink; if I hadn't noticed that, letting the machine run for a long period of time at 70+ degrees C might have had a significant negative impact on the life of the CPU.  I also got to discover a couple of cool utilities that I hadn't been previously aware of, namely, the built-in Vista memory diagnostic tool, and the SpeedFan temperature-monitoring utility.

Fix: Front Audio Panel doesn't work on Foxconn P45A-S Motherboard

After recently building my new PC, one of the few problems I had is that the front audio connection on the PC wasn't working.  The PC case (a XION II XON-101) included an audio jack on the front panel of the case, and the motherboard (a Foxconn P45A-series) supported that front audio connection, but when I would plug in headphones to the front audio jack, nothing would happen; sound would continue playing through the speakers (connected via the PC's back panel audio jack), and no sound would come through the speakers connected to the front audio jack.

I opened up the case and double-checked that the audio cables from the front panel of the case were properly connected to the motherboard, but everything appeared to be fine.

After some Google searching, I ended up finding the clue to the solution in a post near the bottom of this forums.whirlpool.net.au forum thread: A manufacturer-specific audio driver needed to be installed, instead of the default Microsoft driver provided with Vista. 

Checking my motherboard manual, I found that the onboard audio was provided by Realtek. I downloaded the Realtek audio driver from the Foxconn support site, installed it, and the problem was solved!  Audio now plays properly through the headphones when headphones are plugged into the front audio jack.