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Program: Unknown Devices
Hardware screwup pictures
Something of the Week (SOTW)

Site News:

June 2nd, 2007

I've posted another public beta version of the new Unknown Devices (UKD).

I also setup new forums! Visit http://forums.halfdone.com, where you can post comments and bug reports about the site and Unknown Devices. As always you can still email me directly if you wish otherwise.

Jan 11th, 2007

I'm currently working on a new version of Unknown Devices (UKD) that will have complete Vista support. If your interested in getting a beta version of what I got so far you can email me at catfish@halfdone.com.

Jun 7th, 2006

I got full control of Halfdone.com back!

Jun 6th, 2006

I was able to contact the current owner of halfdone.com and I am currently working something out with him. I have access to halfdone.com now but not control yet. Please see halfdone.org to learn verified news.

Dec 31st, 2005

OK I screwed up big time, I let halfdone.com expire. I completely forgot about it and I never got a notice from register.com nor did the site actually die for a month and a half until someone else bought it out. I noticed it within four hours too so I really wish they killed the dns on it. Well I got halfdone.org (.net is taken as one of those junk pages) and I'll tring to contact the new owner of halfdone.com to see if I can buy it back.

Jul 9th, 2005

Ok I moved the website completely over to the new hosting server. Since they have some limits to php access (direct file access, understandable) some pages are broken or badly fixed. This will be fixed over time.

Oct 31st, 2004

I had to make some changes to the website, mostly moving the screwup pictures and program downloads. Will look into getting a true offsite server. I can't even play a simple game of UT2004 without pings bouncing from 30-250 every few seconds.

Oct 21st, 2004

Go Red Sox! Three game loss comeback to beat THE YANKEES in four games in a row! Outstanding! Oh, and congrads on the world series win!

Sep 11th, 2004

I guess the spammers are getting smarter since my guestbook has been getting more spam then ever. I setup a security code image to help prevent it. Let me know if this becomes a problem.

Aug 16th, 2004

I made some changes to the menu on the left which should help with overlap problems if the text size is too large. Let me know if it's not enough and you still have the issue. I'll have to change to graphical images instead which I prefer to avoid.

Jul 25th, 2004

The site was down today for several hours as I'm still redoing my server room/office. In a few more days it will go down again as I setup a CWP (central wiring panel) for the house and move the modem/switches in there.

Jul 5th, 2004

The site was down this morning for several hours due to my dsl modem and also because I moved down to the basement again. This week the site might be down a few times for a few mintues as I redo my office/server room.

May 14th, 2004

I just did some software upgrades to this server so it was half working or not at all for about a hour or two. Everything is all up to date. Oddly enough APC software had 1,597,847 handles open (why?), soo many I wasn't really able to see what it was doing to cause that. I updated the software so I hope that resolves the issue. I hope it wasn't because the software was running 90days and had a idle time of 2053 hours 43 min and 40 sec. Also what I like was that I haven't done windows update or any microsoft patches in 3 months including the latest sasser and RPC/LSASS stuff and I wasn't even effected. I don't even run a firewall currently. I forced close all the usually ports that windows creates.

May 6th, 2004

I managed to free up a lot more space on the server which should take care of the issues where the website would act weird like not show the guestbook or other pages and possible email bounces.

Mar 31st, 2004

A paper Magazine in China, called China People Computer Weekly Paper, has written an article that mentions Unknown Devices and copyright issues. You can find it in Chinese at http://www.cpcw.com/dzb/display.php?chanel=rjsj&id=1079953926. I ran it though babelfish and the person who pointed it out to me gave me a quick run down and it's interesting. I do have comments about it but I would prefer to get an accurate translation first. If anyone is willing to translate the whole article to english for me please email me at catfish@halfdone.com.

Feb 28st, 2004

Speakeasy, my ISP, is continuing to have problems with their Boston NAP and so my internet access and hence this website has been going up and down. They are working on it and hopefully resolved soon. I will likely get more info on Monday. Except for these receint problems this ISP has been great!

Feb 1st, 2004

Go Pats! 32-29, 15 wins in a row and their 2nd Superbowl win in 3 years!

Jan 21th, 2004

I'm getting my speed increase today, 608/128 to 1.5/256 so this should help the website quite a bit. Because of this, the website will likely go down for hopefully a short while. I will not be home to watch. My email will be down also but if it's short enough it will still get to me. If you get a bounce wait a day and send it again. Thanks.

Jan 13th, 2004

Speakeasy in Boston was down for the last five hours (4:27pm - 9:34pm). This was due to some problem between my ILEC (Covad?) and Speakeasy's POP (There is one in Boston but they said it was going to moved to NY, unsure if they did yet). Because of the outage this website, and my own internet use, was down. The Covad service we have at work had no problem.

Dec 13th, 2003

Perhaps I should just ask here. If you increase the text size in this browser to a certain point the menu to the left overlaps the main windows text. The code for the menu is actually near the bottom so if the browser doesn't support CSS (I only take into account for text based or speech based browsers) it will show the menu last, so I can't move it in the code. I also want to avoid using a fix text size (which seems different in IE vs Mozilla) or using just graphical links. Any thoughts?

Nov 19th, 2003

Hey! I found out that IE can handle PNGs in Index mode. It brings PNG down to the level of dumb gifs but for most images on my site it would work fine. Also temp pulled the screwup pictures again.

Nov 19th, 2003

I temp removed the PNG transparenty hack, that should stop Internet Explorer appearing to freeze (you just need to wait a long time). The site will look odd in IE now but still usable.

Nov 18th, 2003

Is this webpage slow? Does it cause Internet Explorer to freeze? Want to know why?

These are actually related. If you haven't noticed this website uses PNGs extensively. I Love'em. Supports full color, full alpha effects...etc. The problem? IE stinks at PNGs. It has extremely limited PNG support and it's been this way for YEARS. Their solution for this problem? Use a CSS filter hack to run PNG images though AlphaImageLoader. The major problem with this is that IE freezes while it downloads all the images. Since my site is a crawl right now (just look at the graph below) it takes a long time to download the png pictures so IE freezes the whole time.

Possible fixes? Everyone moves to another browser like Mozilla or Opera which have full support for PNG images. I still use IE myself but I use to run Netscape Navigator until version 6 came out (it stunk) but the newer version of Mozilla are much better. I am seriously considering using Mozilla Firebird from now on. It has pretty much all the features of IE (that I care about): fast load up, Ctrl-Enter autofill, back button on mouse support, dragging urls to make shortcuts and someone even made a GoogleBar for it (must have!). And of course full PNG support.

All this being said, I will redesign the site shortly with bandwith in mind. I do tend to think as if I and the rest of the world has 100mbit connections to the net. I think having the server on your lan spoils you.

Nov 14th, 2003

Ok I think the hits have lowered enough to put the site back up to normal. I want to thank you guys for the support and the encouraging emails! In about 24hours I got over 20,000 hits!

Nov 13th, 2003

Ok some drastic measures are called for. The site has been simplified and a lot of pages temporarly removed. Please come back at a later time to see what this page should really look like and if you want to check my hardware screwup pictures. Thanks.

128k is my max uplink, will be fixed but in 2 months :(

Nov 12th, 2003

The Langa List today posted a link to my site and information about Huntersoft ripping my program Unknown Devices. you can read more about it starting here.

Right now my site is crawling. If your trying to get Unknown Devices you can try Major Geeks or Simtel.

Nov 2nd, 2003

I wish that webpages used more anchors so you can jump down the exact part of the webpage you want. I told myself I would put tons of them all over any page I made. Well I wasn't doing it. So I added a few hundred or so today. Some are hidden in the xhtml code but most headers are jump links so you can copy the direct URL easy.

Sep 29th, 2003

Wow that a difference that Apache 1 made, I'll be sticking with 1.3 for a while. I read that Apache 2.1 is likely to resolve the problem so I'll try it then. I think I got all the change over bugs cleaned up and rewriten so it works with 1 or 2. Let me know if I missed something.

Sep 18th, 2003

I switched over to apache 1.x from 2.x I was using for months now. So far it seems to help with the networking issues I was having (like problems loading images). Some parts of the site, like mrtg stats don't work. If I see this version working out best, I'll make the minor changes needed to fix them.

Sep 15th, 2003

I'm getting some odd apache networking issues, trying to figure it out. Sorry for the problems, please try again later.

Aug 31th, 2003

I posted a new step by step tutorial on how to setup XMail on a windows system

Aug 28th, 2003

Now that the new email has moved to the server ip, I realized that all of my email going to my old @catfish.homeip.net and @halfdone.homeip.net was bouncing. I now see why that happened but I'm suprised that it took this long to have an effect or I would have realized it a lot sooner. I thought that my temp server was just dieing. If you sent an email to me and it bounced, please try sending it to me again at my current address of catfish@halfdone.com.

Aug 26th, 2003

I'm finally moving my email to the new server. There might be problems emailing me when the dns records change. If you get an error message, just try again later.

Aug 18th, 2003

Huntersoft has pissed me off again. Today's SOTW explains why. A Message to Huntersoft.

Aug 18th, 2003

Huntersoft has a "new" version of his ripped off version of my Unknown Devices. See the updated note about it in this SOTW.

Aug 17th, 2003

Old Trident video card died on server, replaced with a tad newer Cirus Logic one. I can do 1024x768 now!

Aug 14th, 2003

I'm surprised I have power right now.

July 21th, 2003

Oddly the new server has stability and networking issues now that it's under even minor load. Sorry for the inconvenience. worse comes to worse the old server is still up at http://mail.halfdone.com. My email is still on the old server so it's not effected.

July 19th, 2003

Fixed the broken downloads, sorry.

July 19th, 2003

"New" Server is done! Because of an IP change it might take a day or two before people constantly hit this server and not the old one. The site should also not go down for a few hours every few days because of my router; this server bypasses it.

But actually it's more like the server is halfdone, I still need to move email to it and setup dns. At least I was able to put it back in the basement, perhaps my bedroom will not be so hot but I just realized I lost my foot rest.

Some of the new features of the site is some pictures I've been putting off. A new guestbook, page/download counters and mrtg works now. I will try to keep up with the SOTWs now.

June 29th, 2003

Ok, fixed the temp server. The IBM drive I had was doing the famous IBM death grind (fixed link, oops).

June 28th, 2003

This weeks SOTW mentions about the program rip.

June 20th, 2003

Someone actually ripped my Unknown Devices program and posted it on several online software lists.

June 12th, 2003

Heh, Tucows gave Unknown Devices 22 points, I think it would be equivalent to one cow and they are not listing it. I would have to pay to know why, well either way...

June 6th, 2003

For some reason my "new" router stops working after several hours and the site goes down. I have to run to the basement and reset the stupid thing when it happens, assuming I'm home in the first place. I'm trying to hurry it up with the new server which will be on a different IP and not behind this router. If it's down try back again in a few hours. Sorry for the problems.

June 4th, 2003 (well should have been)

Digi.no gave Unknown Devices Today's Neat Jewel . I can't really read it but looks like a nice quick review, they called it "UnknowDevices" though, I don't know if that was a typo or a translation :P If anyone can translate that page for me, that would great!

May 26th, 2003

NoNags gave Unknown Devices 5 ducks.

May 25th, 2003

New version 1.2 of Unknown Devices. Oh, and happy birthday to me!

April 20th, 2003

Updated my Unknown Devices program, now includes web searching and more.

April 13th, 2003

Created the PDA on the left side, even got the logos inside them kinda looking pixilated. I also moved everything I wanted from the old site to the new one and put in some redirections to the new places. That just about finishes the site design.

April 9th, 2003

I finished up my Unknown Devices program and now available!

Mar 11th, 2003

"halfdone_catfish(0) is the winner."
Ok, it doesn't relate to the website but now I feel that I'm taking a major online milestone, 7 years after I first got online :P

Feb 20th, 2003

I found out that the jpegs in the picture collection where uncompressed or something so I did some quick batch job and it should load faster now.

Feb 12th, 2003

I got MRTG (The Multi Router Traffic Grapher) up and running on the site. Its a but old and uses html 3 so I wrote a filter script to make it fit into my site and also make it xhtml 1.1. Now you can check when I'm home and playing 128bit shoutcast. More stats coming. Check it out

Feb 3rd, 2003

Posted several pictures of my cat. Also posted my a bit old PC-software-I-use in the new format and a plain text file of palm-software-I-use. To be updated later.

Feb 2nd, 2003

I have my Job pictures (the pictures of the computer screwups) up in the new format now including comments. Writing php scripts while still xhtml is a pain!

Feb 1st, 2003

Just to show off the transparency and alpha on this page like the title bar and printer, click these (requires javascript):
White, Redish, Greenish, Bluish, Yellow, Monitor, Fluffy ... Original

Also notice that subtitles use random cables.

I also got a better object for Printer Friendly, now perhaps the w3 thing on a palm?

Jan 25th, 2003

ok I give up with the perfect solution for a webpage backend. Decided I'll just add a header and footer line on each page, oh well.

I also got the two articles I have so far into the new format

Jan 19th, 2003

I posted a SOTW about this webpage. Any thoughts?

Jan 8th, 2003

Per request, links to the articles I have so far:
How Windows filesystems work and
IPC$ Problem

Jan 6th, 2003 (~1am, ZZzzz)

OK the site is almost up! Any thoughts? Email me (I didn't setup the halfdone.com mail server yet, it's halfdone).

Basic layout is done, including the "case" menu but need to work on titles, the small window for printer friendly versions and other quick links. Also need to work on the backend and content. Everything will be done mostly in CSS and XHTML 1.1 strict (strict is a big pain in the butt). And yes, there will be more links in the menu.

One problem I have is that if the text size is larger then "normal" the menu will overlap the main content. But I still want the menu coded below the content so plain text or screen readers will work better... oh well.

Here [was] the Old Page.

Oh, and can someone remind me to edit php.ini to remove the displaying of errors once this is done... thanks.