demodulated

**NOTE**

September 10, 2007

The story below recounts my positive experience with BFG’s customer support. I’ve since had a rather negative experience and will likely not purchase BFG’s products again. To make an informed decision about whether BFG is the company for you I recommend reading my more recent story as well to better equip yourself with the facts to make your own informed decision.

The first thing I remember reading about BFG Technologies was in PC Gamer magazine a few years ago. The review was unfavourable, commending the company for their concept of selling pre-overclocked and warrantied Nvidia video cards but berating their product’s instability. BFG has come a long way, baby; the company quickly became renoun for their creative GPU solutions and now pretty well every third-party video card manufacturer overclocks their products out of the box. What still sets BFG apart, though, is their hitherto unheard-of lifetime warranty, contrasted with most other companies’ one- or three-year offerings.

Unfortunately, I had the opportunity to put BFG’s warranty to the test. My 5-month-old 7900GT began exhibiting odd behaviour in Windows, at the BIOS, and on the WinXP loading screen. Seemingly random white and coloured pixels were toggled in inappropriate places, and some games exhibited serious artifacts like huge polygons connecting to a model vertex and taking up an entire corner of the screen. I didn’t have a second PCI-E video card to test with, but I experienced no graphical corruption while accessing my computer via remote desktop. Flushing the drivers with Driver Cleaner Pro and re-installing the newest ones didn’t help. I was pretty certain the problem was my video card.

I called BFG tech support at about 4:30pm on a weekday. I was placed on hold for 10 or 15 minutes. A technician answered in a rather blase tone, and I got a little nevous. I hadn’t registered my card (BFG’s website insisted this was not necessary to receive tech support) so I surrendered my name and address. I gave a brief description of the symptoms which prompted the technician to insightfully ask me whether the issues were limited to Windows. I said they weren’t, and he told me it sounded like a hardware error and he’d have a replacement sent to me. We’d spoken for about 4 minutes by this time.

I’ve had some crappy customer support and RMA experiences (especially with Linksys - avoid that company at all costs!!) in the past, so I was literally shocked at how incredibly competent and honest BFG portrayed itself.

I was offered the option of simply courioring my card to BFG where they would send me a replacement upon receipt. I asked whether a cross-shipment was possible, but that required my original receipt which I couldn’t find. Incredibly, the ordinary RMA process requires no receipt.

I was instructed to carefully package my card and courier it to BFG in the States. Other than the cost of one-way ground shipping ($20 CAD) the RMA cost me nothing. I scrounged up a static bag and some bubble wrap and sent it on its way.

What was I to do for a week - use my crappy laptop? Heck no! I double- and triple-verified the return policy at Future Library– er — Shop, and , after expressing my great interest coupled with valid trepidation (”I’ve heard this model is louder than others. Can I return or exchange it if I don’t like it?”) I took home a snazzy and highly overpriced (by about 20%) BFG GeForce 7950GT. I installed the card and took special care to preserve the packaging and receipt, which was no small feat considering I moved into a new apartment a few days later.

I’ll briefly mention that the 7950GT is a little faster than the 7900GT, but it the fan is indeed a great deal louder. It’s nigh impossible to find the 7900GT for sale anymore, and where sold it’s been substantially marked up due to low inventory, so the 7950 is the way to go nowadays as it’s far more economical than the superbly beefy 8800GTX or SLI-in-one-card 7950GX2. Still, it yielded better frame rates in MS Flight Simulator X which I greatly miss now.

So anyway, I tracked my outgoing shipment via Purolator’s website and was pleased when it arrived Thursday, a full day ahead of schedule (4 days instead of 5). The following Monday my replacement card arrived. Again, I was in shock. I installed the card and it worked great. Returning the 7950GT to Future Shop was only a small hassle - they accused me of losing a necessary barcode from the box which turned out to be affixed to the card itself.

BFG rules. I’ll certainly not hesitate to give them my business in the future.

As per the recommendation of a wise third party I’ve configured Google Analytics to omit inktomisearch.com from my web log analyses. Since making this change my logs seem to be returning to sane levels again. I’ll keep Snap Previews active for the time being, pending my indifference to this superfluous but very nifty plugin.

Also, note the parenthetical numbers beside my categories. These figures indicate the number of posts per category.

Keep your eyes open for new hacks! I love WordPress!

EDIT - this article was written in reference to Cloudy version 0.4. See the end of this article for a copy of my customised source code along with installation instructions.

I’ve hacked the source a little bit to make each word in the Cloudy cloud clickable. Clicking a word searches my blog for that word. Here’s what I did: (I hope these blockquotes will show HTML code!) I scrolled to the bottom of the source just after the 4 lines starting with this code:

if ($val >= $this->range………….

I then found the folliowing line of code:

$this->my_cloudy_text .= “<span style=\”font-size: $font_size%;\”><a title=\”I have used ‘$key’ $val times!\” name=\”$key\” class=\”cloudy\”>$key</a></span> “

At this point in the code the string variable “$key” contains one word in the cloud. I performed a search on my blog which showed the format of a URL crafted to perform a search. It’s basically http://blog.yourdomain.com/index.php?s=searchterm

So I just added an HREF option to the A tag. The following code is crafted for my site, so just replace my domain name with yours:

$this->my_cloudy_text .= “<span style=\”font-size: $font_size%;\”> < a href=\”http://blog.demodulated.com/index.php?s=$key\” title=\”I have used ‘$key’ $val times!\” name=\”$key\” class=\”cloudy\”>$key</a></span> “;

Enjoy, and many many thanks to Chris Compton for this excellent and superbly documented lump of code!

Note - don’t try to copy and paste this code because WordPress converts double quotes to fancy quotes. Pasting this code won’t work. Just insert the bolded href command above into the appropriate place.

EDIT - You may download an exact copy of my customised source code here. Right-click this link and save the file as “cloudy.php”, then upload it to /blogdir/wp-content/plugins/, and activate it. Look near the bottom of the file for the code I edited - I left a comment just above it so it should be perfectly clear what you need to do.

Note that this is an unofficial, unsupported hack of the source code. In general you should not trust source code coming from anyone but the original developer, and if you’re smart you’ll even be suspicious of that. Even WordPress’s official source code has been infiltrated in the recent past. The onus is on YOU to read over this source code before implementing it.

NEITHER MYSELF NOR THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR ARE ACCOUNTABLE FOR DAMAGE CAUSED BY THIS SOURCE CODE!!!

Since installing Snap Preview my web logs have been going haywire. I appears that my blog is visited every time someone hovers over a hyperlink. As you can see below, this creates tons of “direct” (non-referred) hits from Los Angeles which messes with my logs.

I’ve tried asking Snap support for help but they don’t seem to understand my problem. The feature is superfluous enough that I think my readers can live without it.

Arivaderci, Snap!

As you can probably tell from my relatively graphic-free page layout I’m a proponent of minimalist, utilitarian web design. Those who visited my blog in the early days of my dedicated domain name know that I was quick to delete an attractive but superfluous flash animation from the gorgeous base theme. Toys for the sake of toys is hardly a sake at all.

On the other hand, I’ve broken down and included a couple of value-adds while attempting to maintain look and feel as well as, especially, fast load times. Here’s a summary of the features I’ve added, starting with the newest one about which I’m the most excited.

Snap Preview

I’m as guilty as the next blogger of haphazardly and excessively hyperlinking to numerous web sites within a paragraph or even a single sentence. I do my best to back up my claims with references, but indeed it appears rather selfish to presume that my readers are interested enough in my point of view that they will research every one of my sources. Maddox, the blogger that proved to me the validity of blogging, says it best:

The problem with this layout is that there’s too much shit to click on. Seriously, who’s ever going to click on all those links? The worst blogs are the ones that make every other word a hyperlink to another website so by the time you finish reading this sentence, you’ve forgotten what you were reading, or why you were reading it in the first place. Hey, this article is great but you know what would make it better? If I could read another article in the middle of it. Great design, morons.

You may have inadvertently discovered the feature I’m about to discuss! If not, hover your mouse cursor over any hyperlink in the body of this post. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. (if you use the NoScript extension for Firefox, and you really ought to, you’ll have to permit scripts from snap.com)
…

Done yet?

Just this morning by chance I was reading a website featuring Snap Preview and instantly knew that this would add value to my blog for the aforementioned reason. Installation took only 5 minutes and everything seems to work out of the box. The very intelligently crafted Snap Preview WordPress Plugin automatically injected the requisite code and even let me toggle off previews for internal links, so you won’t see graphical previews of demodulated.com hyperlinks.

Do you like this feature or is it one toke over the line? Please leave me a comment and let me know. Personally, I find this feature revolutionary and infinitely helpful - particularly for my format.

–edit–

It looks like secure links prefixed with “https”, such as the NoScript extension link above, are not thumbnailed. Smart!

Also, please note that anonymous info will be tracked by snap.com for distribution to advertisers. This happens every time you view a hyperlink preview. I read the EULA before adding this feature and it seems to protect you, my readers, and myself from being individually identified. Let me know if you don’t like this, or use NoScript with Firefox to selectively enable only trusted script hosts on all the web pages you view.

–edit 2–

I’ve since uninstalled Snap Preview. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

Cloudy

At the bottom of my right-hand sidebar can be found my word cloud - a list of my fifty most-used words, sans the “the”s and “and”s, etc., with the most frequent words appearing proportionately larger than the others. I dabbled with this concept last year but discarded it as a one-off sideshow. Cloudy does a rather nice job of displaying this information as it updates in real time and considers my entire prolific blog history while ignoring the headers and footers.

Okay, so this feature doesn’t really add a heck of a lot of value. I still like it. It’s simple, immediately recognizable, and doesn’t detract from the load times or compromise the layout. I’m looking forward to the plugin being updated so that the words hyperlink to search. Maybe I can figure it out myself.

Search Meter

When I started working for my current employer my job description was Technical Writer. I was asked to create a report about our website’s search engine visibility one day, yadda yadda yadda, now I’m the company’s enterprise search specialist. I’m obsessed with search now, as a recent post suggests, and am enthusiastic about making it as easy and intuitive as possible on this blog. It’s unfortunate that Google Free Site Search is so cripplingly ad-laden as Google is certainly more effective than WordPress’ built-in search capabilities. However, WordPress’ search is rather mod-friendly.

Enter Search Meter. Simple and obvious, it displays the five most frequently user-searched terms. Period. I like this feature so much that I’ve given it prime real estate at the top of my sidebar. Too bad nobody searches my blog but me, but at least you can see *MY* top 5 searches.

I’m very picky about the toys I add to websites, but the WordPress hacker community is strong and dedicated so I’m always on the lookout.