Had a very eventful weekend, and my entire Sunday was taking up trying to figure out a weird symptom on my linux installation.

In the weeks leading up to today, I used to get strange behaviour from my Fedora box. The behaviour resulting in an error being detected by the ABRT tool, regarding a null reference. Sunday, my laptop conked out and refused to startup. I tried reinstalling Fedora, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, and even OpenMandriva – none of them could complete the installation. They either failed with error part way through, or hung completely.

I decided to try installing Windows XP over everything. That failed with an IRQ LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO blue screen. Then I tried Windows 7. That installation succeeded, and I started running updates. Then it blue screened me again. This time MEMORY_MANAGEMENT was the message. Hmmm. So, could it be that one of my memory chips was dodgy? That would account for why it was intermittent. I have 2x 2GB chips in my laptop, so I took both out and rebooted. No splash screen. Good. That’s expected.

Put in one of the chips. Booted, BIOS showed 2GB. Good, that’s OK.

Took it out and put in the other 2GB. No splash screen. Looks like that’s the dodgy one. I dug out my 1GB from when I got my laptop originally, and put that back into the other slot, so I get a 3GB installation. Checked boot. Splash screen displayed. Good. So I then ran a BIOS memory check, and all 3GB passed.

So then I decided, maybe I should try doing a restore, in case the dodgy memory was the cause of my failure to restore previously. It worked fine, so now I’m back up with my previous setup. :D

Cause: Faulty 2GB memory

Internet Explorer, a malicious hacker’s dream. Am I the only one to think that as long as you have it installed, you’ve got a hole in your system?

LastPass Passwords Exposed for Some Internet Explorer Users.

In between my running, I am now going to start seeking profession certification in linux. It’ll give me something to get a leg up back into the software world, plus let me use something I care about, rather than the very frustrating (and annoying) Windows 7.

Whilst primarily for Windows 7, there’s plenty of tricks hidden under the Aero hood.

11 Hidden Windows Secrets and Tricks.

A snippet to download and run the latest build of the Chromium browser. Meant for Cygwin/Windows but can be adapted if needed.

If you need to use a proxy, set your http_proxy and https_proxy variables before using this.

Now updated to kill running Chrome/Chromium processes before running the installer (in case of locking issues). Also created a Bitbucket repo here for this script

if [ -f ./mini_installer.exe ]; then
  echo "WARNING: Previous script run did not clean up"
  rm ./mini_installer.exe
fi

if [ ! -f prev ]; then
  echo "No previous build logged"
  echo "-1" >prev
fi

if [[ `wget -q [commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...]([commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/)Win/LAST_CHANGE) -O-` == `cat prev` ]]; then
  echo "No build change (`wget -q [commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...]([commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/)Win/LAST_CHANGE) -O-` = `cat prev`)"
  exit 1
else
  echo "New build (previous: `cat prev`, new: `wget -q [commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...]([commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/)Win/LAST_CHANGE) -O-`)"
fi
echo Downloading [commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/)`wget -q [commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...]([commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/)Win/LAST_CHANGE) -O-`/mini_installer.exe
wget [commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/)Win/`wget -q [commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...]([commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/)Win/LAST_CHANGE) -O-`/mini_installer.exe

if [[ `ps -W | grep chrome | wc -l` != 0 ]]; then
  echo "`ps -W | grep chrome | wc -l` Chrome Processes Running. Attempting to Kill"
  for a in `ps -W | grep chrome | awk '{ print $1}'`
    do
      echo Killing PID $a
      /bin/kill -f $a #This is the cygwin kill, not the bash kill
    done
else
  echo "No Chrome Processes Running"
fiecho "Running installer"
chmod +x ./mini_installer.exe
./mini_installer.exe
echo Done
wget -q [commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...]([commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/)Win/LAST_CHANGE) -O prev
echo "New build recorded (`cat prev`)"
rm ./mini_installer.exe