There was an incident at Brisbane customs where I was paged to find and disactivate a vibrating item in my luggage, an electric shaver. Naturally a certain Fight Club dialogue came to mind but unfortunately did not ensue.

After not getting shot by the Singaporean special forces, there were two more legs of the journey. All three legs (Brisbane to Singapore, to Dubai, to London) are the same duration—about seven hours—so they are well-placed hubs for the journey. The London leg should have been much shorter but we went around Iraqi airspace for some reason. With short stopovers such as the ones I had, with barely enough time to grab a coffee, scratch arse, and scan for publicly-accessible WiFi networks and put in my credit card details, I would make a suggestion to anyone with such short stopovers and such a long trip: consider packing changes of at least certain items of your clothing, as well as toothbrush and other items, on hand luggage. The smell of sweaty aeroplane seat arse could choke a donkey.

I’m impressed with Emirates airline, especially their comprehensive in-flight entertainment system including all kinds of audio and video on demand and a wide variety of PopCap-style games. Their fleet have the satellite phones and some planes even have WiFi, for when you just have to blog 34,000 feet above the Ukraine. I would fly Emirates again, but to be honest the farthest I have flown before this trip is Vanuatu, so I have nothing to reference to.

And then I got the tube to the suburb my hotel is in. As I wandered the streets, realising that I had not bothered to memorise the street names to get there (just the path) and I had misrotated the map in my mind, I got a newfound appreciation of why the graph isomorphism problem in computational complexity theory is so hard. But exams are over, and it is time to have fun and see the sights of London, or at least try—it is dark outside, and it is 4.30pm.

This kiosk’s keyboard is impossible to type on any faster than 10wpm.

Smo

So yeah.

Brief 45 minute stopover in Singabore.

It is true what they say, there are soldiers with automatic weapons just chilling out.

See you in 2 days at the next stopover.

King Smo

All work and no play makes Jack adult boy
All work and no play next decade old boy
All work and no play makes Jack and old boy
All work and no play and makes Jacksonville boy
All work and no play makes Jack and old boy
All work and no play makes jacket and ole boy
All work and no playmates jacket old boy
All work and no play makes Jack and ole boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

To keep things fresh I have nuked all old content (1999–2003). It seemed to be handy for hotlinking by various random Web forums and not much else.

One has recently reached the dreaded blog cringe: the moment in the life of every Web journaller [sic] when either he stops posting due to ‘real life’, or realises that perhaps past posts were too unpolished (i.e. crap) to ever have been put online.

As we all know, blogs are due to die a slow and painful death. Syndication allows you to subscribe to thousands of your favourite sites and to be informed whenever they have new content, without ever going to the sites again. This is pretty nifty, but as they say “where is the love?”. I’d conjecture that in fact the love is not there.

The author of a popular RSS-less site tells me it is nice that people have to actually visit the site to see if there is anything new.

Blogs that indulge the author’s need to write about news and current events without discussing his or her personal life will be the first to go. Yes, this means that most LiveJournals are safe for the time being, as people often have a need to transfer their emo feelings to a diary and LJ is simply another medium for that. Thanks, LiveJournal (thiveJournal).

Eventually, the blog cringe will end those ones as well, as more and more people take their blogs offline to stop family members or prospective employers reading them and finding out their secret desires and crazy revenge fantasies.

Indeed I started this journal to give myself an opportunity to write, because neither my study nor my job really required any real writing to be done. That has now changed due to this being my honours year, and thus there is much thesis (and other) writing to do and not quite enough time to do it.

A few people have asked me about honours and some of the questions are answered here, so some of this may be informative so anyone looking to follow the increasingly-seldom-beaten track to an honours year in CS or IT.

So how did you get into honours anyway?

This is a good question. I’m something of a reformed slacker and getting into an honours program generally requires some kind of sustained academic performance. However, IT at UQ only requires you to have an average grade of 4.5 across the final year project (CSSE3004) plus your four most recent ‘third year’ courses. I kicked all kinds of arse in third year so that allowed me to get in. Basically, as long as you got at least 4s and 5s across those five courses, you can get in—it’s as easy as that. Nonetheless there are still very few takers.

What’s your thesis on?

Video similarity search: using video to search for video, as opposed to using text to search for video. Just as one can gauge the similarity of two text documents, by counting the common words for instance, so too can one compare two videos using some measure, from a simple concept like colour or texture to a more abstract one like places or faces. I’m aiming to build a simple video similarity search engine predominantly using techniques that already exist.

Is that a one person project?

Yes; it started with two, but the other guy seems to have cracked the shits with honours after just six weeks and didn’t return to uni after the mid-semester break. I haven’t heard from him since.

Was that a pain?

You bet. It wasn’t a show-stopping problem, but it did scale back the scope of the project to (in my opinion) little more than a glorified assignment with the time I am able to dedicate to it.

Not to give the guy a hard time, I wish him well. But if you are thinking about doing a shared project, choose somebody who you are positive is focused on honours and hasn’t got huge work burdens competing for his time. Ideally this will be somebody you knew and worked well with in previous years.

Would you recommend it?

I’ll just say “know why you are doing it”. I’m doing honours partly to set myself apart from the crowd, and partly to set right my appalling academic record from when I was fresh out of school and didn’t really want to be there. That’s probably good advice for school leavers actually—if you aren’t positive you want to go to uni or are not sure what kind of career you want, it’s better to leave it for a couple of years and go travelling or something, rather than to plunge into it anyway. It’s always important to start with the end in mind. Of course some people do honours as a gateway to a PhD or an academic career, which is not altogether bad if the university atmosphere agrees with you and you’d like to keep working there. At this point, I’d rather get pushed in front of a train.

See you in another six months.

Love,

King Smo

I’ve always been suspicious of digital rights management technology—copy protection on DVDs and CDs, for instance—as something which unnecessarily hampers progress whilst offering no economic benefit. Whenever I want to articulate this position to someone, I just point them toward a talk given by Cory Doctorow on the subject of DRM to Microsoft researchers in 2004. A highlight from the speech:

When MP3 rolled around [...] instead of making a high-capacity MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music Clips, low-capacity devices that played brain-damaged DRM formats like Real and OpenMG.

Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. That’s because Sony shipped a product that there was no market demand for. No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, “Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music.” Presented with an alternative, Sony’s customers enthusiastically jumped ship.

He characterises DRM as a matter of market choice, and there’s never been a more important time for consumers to vote with their dollars. If you enjoy your multimedia tech treating you like a potential criminal, then by all means shell out for new computers with stupid garbage like the Trusted Computing Platform.

Doctorow will be speaking in Brisbane on March 31st as part of The Ideas Festival. Tix are $25.00.

EDIT: updated with the results for each song — January 27. Boy do I know how to pick them!

Voting for the Triple J Hottest 100 is on again. As we all know, radio is due to die a slow and painful death. Nova will surely be the first to go, as I suspect that marketing practices like distributing Nova-branded frangers on university campuses have accrued some kind of bad karma for them. Every station without ‘triple’ in their name will be next, yes this means Triple M is safe—they’re cool because they realise that Supertramp is great and they don’t give a crap what you think.

Eventually the Web will put every last FM station out of business.

So, from the list of songs that Richard Kingsmill has tried to sell me this year, this year I decided to pick at least a couple of songs that stood a chance of making it into the 100, guess which ones they are?

1. The Butterfly Effect — Phoenix (33^rd)
2. Tom Vek — C-C (You Set The Fire In Me) (did not place)
3. System of a Down — BYOB (27^th)
4. Maximo Park — Graffiti (did not place)
5. Iron On — Learn Today Earn Tomorrow (did not place)
6. The Grates — Message (did not place)
7. Edan — Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme (did not place)
8. Death Cab for Cutie — Soul Meets Body (did not place)
9. Cog — My Enemy (32^nd)
10. Babyshambles — F—k Forever (79^th)

Honourable mentions for weird and/or cool stuff:

1. MIA — Pull Up the People (did not place)
2. Hanne Hukkelberg — Little Girl (did not place)
3. Kate Miller-Heidke — Space They Cannot Touch (did not place)
4. Pegz — Back Then (did not place)
5. System of a Down — This Cocaine Makes Me Feel Like I’m On This Song (did not place)

Run along to the voting site and see if you can pick ten songs out of the list, and you might win a truckload of music for your trouble.

If Chinese New Year is on January 29, then logically Chinese Christmas falls on January 22. So, my sincerest season’s greetings to all.

Yes, this is my half-arsed way of acknowledging that my site (or at least its predecessor insom.cx) is, or at least was at some time, banned in the People’s Republic of China, recalling the much-superior Communist Party makeover of Kewn’s World that I can’t seem to find the URL of anymore.

Well may I snicker now, but I have no desire to visit China yet. Someday I might, though, and the idea that I’ve said stuff on my humble Web abode that would get me thrown in the slammer with a guy named Wang is cause for concern. There is a site with more information on Internet filtering in China, including a lot more examples of blocked sites.

As someone who prides himself upon fitting in, I am delighted to say that I am now on the iPod bandwagon. This is one sweet product, Apple have really done a bang up job. With more storage than I know what to do with, here are some of the works currently on my iPod:

Regurgitator — Unit (1997)
I just hate that I like this album; after all, it is the one that took my favourite rock band at the time and turned it into some kind of synth pop project.

This was a significant event. I had Regurgitator before I even had friends. Long before Wolfmother, around about the same time as Silverchair, Regurgitator was Triple J’s band du jour, and those first two angry EPs were amongst the first twenty-odd CDs I ever owned, and for awhile there may as well have been glued into the CD player. I was a teenager and that was what I wanted, angry music! The debut long player was somewhat more sedate, but essentially more of the same.

Then, Unit hit stores with its garish silver packaging and classy song titles such as I Will Lick Your Arsehole, and it seems they lost a few fans in the process. One such fan, when it was pointed out that the opening track, I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff, seemed to pre-empt such complaints, remarked “yes well, I know it’s all ironic and whatever, but the music is still crap”.

And that’s certainly how I wanted to feel, but once I put it out of my mind that this was a Regurgitator album, I realised that this was one awesome product, just track after track of pure gold—this is how I have approached every Regurgitator album since.

Tom Vek — We Have Sound (2005)
Where the heck did this guy come from? The 24-year-old Briton calls himself a multi-instrumentalist, and asserts he literally made this album in his parents’ garage. I must say I have no problems believing this—certainly the playing is not perfect, the slap bass on If You Want is a tad out of time, and so on. Despite all this, the suspension of disbelief is still there and the songs are thoroughly enjoyable. Highlights are C-C (You Set The Fire In Me) and If I Had Changed My Mind.

Terence Trent d’Arby — Introducing The Hardline According To Terence Trent d’Arby (1987)
Yeah, the eighties are overdue for a comeback, and I’m not talking about stock market crashes and Communism. I’m talking about guys like Phil Collins, Huey Lewis, and Terence Trent d’Arby. Start emulating them now and get rich beyond your wildest dreams. Highlights are Wishing Well and Sign Your Name.

Nativity in Black: A Tribute To Black Sabbath (1994)
Nativity in Black II: A Tribute To Black Sabbath (2000)
Unlike everyone else, I never got into Black Sabbath themselves, but I can’t get enough of these two volumes of Sabbath covers by bands like Primus, Sepultura, System of a Down, White Zombie, and Faith No More.

Speaking in Tongues
This is a bit different: a video podcast of episodes of the SBS television series, Speaking in Tongues, starring John Safran and “Father Bob” McGuire. I can’t think of when I would watch video on the iPod—I don’t spend a great deal of time on public transport—but it’s still cool that I could if I wanted to. This is an awesome development and I hope SBS will podcast some of its future shows.

Dane Cook — Retaliation (2005)
A friend recently introduced me to Dane Cook, the American stand-up comedian. The style of comedy is observational, about his own funny life experiences, as opposed to jokes. As is often the case with stand-up comedians, Cook’s comedy is greatly enhanced by his stage act, he has quite a formidable stage presence, so obviously you don’t get to see that, but this double album seems to make do without it.

You better not breathe
You better not move
You’re better off dead
I’m telling you dude
Santa Claus is gunning you down!

In Japan they call him Annual Gift Man and he lives on the moon.

Christmas is a time when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ.

What gift do you get for the man who oversees everything?

We are on to you Santa! And we unmask you and heartily rebuke you! Get thee hence from our Christ’s birthday party!

Q: What did Santa say upon entering the house of ill repute?
A: Ho ho ho!

I have nothing substantial to add to the debate about racism or ethnic violence in Sydney. However, there seems to be a widespread belief that anti-Arab racism in Sydney is a result of September 11. Naturally, Australians feel affronted by that event, as we are also part of this kind of anglophone democratic Christendom thing which also comprises the country that was attacked. Subsequently, the Bali bombings happened—carried out by Malays, who are muslim too, and therefore leading us to hate Arabs more.

I believe this article should be compulsory reading for any journalism student before she runs her mouth and damages this country’s reputation any further.

It is a speech by a former detective of New South Wales Police, published in Quadrant last year; a refreshingly honest look at how the nation’s largest police force, castrated by unrealistic crime fighting philosophy and enslaved to gutless political correctness, has let the Lebanese gang problem get out of control, to the point where they are practically above the law, and go around assaulting white Australians for no reason.

Thankfully, I live in Brisbane, where I learned everything I know about Lebanese gangs from the television show Pizza. However, left unchecked, the problem of ethnic gangs could just as easily take root here in the Sunshine State, and I say that because political correctness is not the exclusive domain of our mexican cousins. There’s a sense that cops have to treat different races or religions gingerly, as if they didn’t know they were signing up for the rule of law when they or their parents came to this country, a land where crime is considered naughty, and assaulting the police is a rather stupid move if you want to keep your spleen.

Therefore, whilst I don’t particularly identify with the drunken yobbos of Sydney who are allegedly sticking up for my race, and descending to violence against cops and ambos is wrong and hypocritical, the idea that this racism just plopped fully formed out of a vacuum is a dangerous one.

Voluntary Student Unionism (VSU) will not be passed in time to be implemented in 2006. The legislation in its current form would not only make student union membership voluntary, but also prevent universities from imposing any kind of fee to support campus activities and services. The government would not compensate universities for this.

To this new development I must say, thank the good lord. As recent president of a student society, and current treasurer of one of the sporting clubs, the loss of funds would have been a huge pain in my backside.

Universities are more than qualification factories, they have a cultural character which costs real money to maintain, and an environment which nurtures critical and independent thinking. Opinions on VSU are not simply decided by people’s usual attitudes toward socialism vs. pay-for-it-yourself, but also other factors such as whether the current student union president’s political views accord with their own, or whether they happen to be on the executive of an organisation that gets some of the money.

Therefore, from my obviously biased position, I say to the government, throw all of VSU in the garbage bin, and stop filling people’s heads with misleading garbage about what student unions and sporting clubs do with the money.

There is a metric butt-ton of ‘alternative’ wikis, but occasionally one manages to gather a critical mass of interesting, amusing, or bizarre content, and hence to transcend simply being a refuge for those spurned by Wikipedia editors with the temerity to claim that the term ‘boring gay midget’ is unencyclopaedic.

As we all know, a wiki is a site which allows anyone to add articles, and also to edit articles, even those written by other people. This kind of power gives people a warm fuzzy community feel and can make a site very popular in no time at all.

Alas, popularity can be a curse, namely that of what I would call wiki entropy—a piece of writing edited by dozens is gonna lose pretty much all of the coherence of the original. In other words it turns to complete shit. See creationism, a prime example of why it is often better to link to a particular revision of a wiki article, so you know it won’t change.

It is pretty obvious which side of the creationism debate the author is on, but the subtlety, avoiding bitterness and abuse, makes for a far more acerbic and witty piece. Since it’s a wiki, people see an opportunity to contribute their own funnies, but the result only ends up introducing disorder, much like the retelling of a joke.

A lot of the time the enhancements are tasteless humour; sex, bodily functions, and all that. Being shocking is a lot more difficult when it’s written. Your audience probably isn’t going to read your poofter joke in the same hilarious cadence as you imagined it, and you’ll just end up looking like a homophobe.

Most times though, people simply mistake subtle humour for sarcasm. This is an easy mistake to make, but they simply aren’t the same thing.

Another article on Tom Cruise demonstrates how a deliciously absurd, thinly-veiled ridicule of Scientology turns into a confusing rant where you almost need a magnifying glass to find the laughs.

I’m positive that wikis (or some similar technology) are the future of collaborative Web-based e-parody. But subtlety, people, that is the key.

Simone and Shane Warne are to split, after a 25-year-old woman went to the press with allegations that he begged her for sex, and she begrudgingly complied. It’s all over the news.

A question for the ladies out there—what is it about a tubby, balding Australian cricketer ten years your senior dropping his pants in front of you that gets you percolating in the nether regions?

Is it the fame thing that does it for you? Perhaps the possibility of selling the story to an inquisitive English paper? The overall studliness of Aussie men?

Send me a text message with your thoughts. No, I’m not going to tell you my number.

There’s an article in the Sunday Mail, ‘Students quit over anti-US slurs’, that I found really annoying. And that was just from reading the headline.

American students have told The Sunday Mail the verbal attacks are unbearable and threatening to escalate into physical violence.

Griffith University student Ian Wanner, 19, from Oregon, said abusive Australian students had repeatedly called him a “sepo” — short for septic tank. “It is so disrespectful. It’s not exactly the most welcoming atmosphere here,” he said.

Are you shitting me? If every American student left the country for being called a seppo, the population of Brisbane would be about half of what it is. The fact is that when you are given an irreverent nickname it is often a sign that you’ve been accepted, and I don’t think this kind of humour is peculiar to Australia.

It’s also true that if you are a humourless douchebag and take offence at being called a name, then no matter whether you are in Brisbane, or Portland, people will keep doing it. Don’t you dare come over here and expect my country to tiptoe around your fragile ego.

Unless things have really changed since I was at University—which is still ongoing, but I’m referring more to my 2½ years at a residential college—people are not generally openly hostile toward Americans.

Since then, the war in Iraq has happened, and it was supported by our government just as much as theirs. So I’m going to assume the people abusing American students know why that’s stupid, and move on.

Queensland Anti-Discrimination deputy commissioner Neroli Holmes said the alleged labelling of students as “sepos” could be classed as racial vilification under anti-discrimination laws.

No, dickhead seppo would be vilification. Seppo is just cockney rhyming slang meaning an American person. As with most other ethnic soubriquets it really depends upon the intent of the speaker. I just hope this journalism student hasn’t done any real damage to our city’s reputation, because I happen to feel that American students are treated pretty well here.

Been having fun with this new Google Maps thing. It’s a service where you can look at satellite pictures of the entire world, and pan, zoom in, and zoom out. Some areas have higher quality pictures than others. Check out these classics:

Uluru — low res but still cool (now hi-res!)
Cameron Corner — state borders of South Australia, New South Wales, and Queensland meet
Cape Byron — easternmost point on Australian continent
St Lucia — suburb of Kings
Area 51 — nothing to see here
Abu Dhabi — big empty suburbs on the outskirts of the city just waiting for people to build
Chernobyl — deceptively lifelike
Adelaide — the most planned city in the Southern Hemisphere
Canberra — a close second
Superfluous traffic device — in Los Angeles
Almost-as-crazy traffic thing — in Bratislava, Slovakia
Pyramids and suburbia — Cairo, Egypt
Lake Baikal — a lake “bigger than Belgium and almost as dull” (© P.J. O’Rourke)
Lo-res Reykjavik — Iceland, with vast, nondescript plains to the north of the nation’s capital conveniently provided in high quality
Rock-like structure — Gibraltar

Although I’m not sure what the site itself has to offer, the very idea of Free Katie is enough to make me inclined to assist the cause in any way I can.

At first I thought Katie Holmes was just a bit naïve, and we all cringe whenever an old man takes a young, fertile woman out of the market, but that’s the dating game for you. So, I was happy enough for Tom Cruise and the 26-year-old star of such masterpieces as The Gift and Disturbing Behavior to be going out.

Cruise has been telling everyone who will listen what a wonderful woman Holmes is, as she has made it clear that they will not have sex. This is, again, sort of how relationships work.

Now, it is reported that Cruise has converted Holmes to his religion, Scientology. This filled me with a pure, wholesome rage—not the kind that makes you smash your mouse against the desk, or break light poles with your fists, a rage without any physical manifestations.

You miserable bastard. Putting that shit into her head.

So, Free Katie, and send a message to weirdos everywhere to stop propagating their weird brainwash cults.

Having upgraded WordPress, I thought I got rid of Bugs. This post is really just to test a theory that I have—that applying the patch I just downloaded, then posting an article, will fix the RSS problem. Currently, RSS is returning a blank document, which is not good.

So… what’s in the news today?

• Kylie’s cancerous can
• Schapelle Corby and the suspiciously benevolent random Gold Coast businessman
• I have a new iBook
• My favourite (probably) tooth got broken in half by an errant squash racquet. Goggles you would think of as typical squash safety wear, but dude, get a mouthguard if you play this game.
• I think there’s some sort of a row in the gov’t about how a woman was detained for awhile because she wouldn’t give her real name and no one knew who she was

Okay, that’s enough random shit. Hope this works.

Edit: success!

insom.com is back. Please insert liquor.

WordPress 1.5.1 fixes the problems I was having with permalinks—such as the link above this article that says “insom.com — Large and in charge”—as well as the monthly links. They all now work as they should. The other stuff was working anyways and is as such unaffected.

So if your site was shafted by WP 1.5.0, upgrade post haste, and feel the love. Also, enjoy the default Kubrick theme, as I accidentally deleted Old Red in the upgrade.

Now, an introduction to the things that are occupying my time currently, when I’m not posting here:

• COMP3401: Compilers and Interpreters.
• CSSE4004: Distributed Computing.
• INFS3101: Ontology and the Semantic Web. Did you know that a brute fact counts as an institutional fact in a context?
• CSSE3004: Introduction to not committing to a software project that hasn’t been fully planned, scoped, and costed, and the resulting documents signed by all parties, lest the whole thing become a big money hole. I swear that’s its title.
• Incidentally, working on a software project part time. Behold, as this unplanned, ever-expanding money hole sucks time and money like some kind of productivity Hoover.

Stay tuned for partial excitement!!!

I feel compelled to journal a computer problem I had recently, and what I had to go through to fix it, so that it might be Googled and other people might be saved the days of frustration and loss of productivity that I went through whilst trying to figure it all out.

Warning, this is technical and will be exceedingly boring to you unless you are having the same problem.

How I buggered the BIOS up in the first place
My computer has an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard. Recently I noticed that a newer BIOS (version 1013) had been out for a few months, so I downloaded and installed it. Yeah yeah, don’t update your BIOS unless it is absolutely necessary, etc. Caution is for chumps.

I did some other things and then rebooted. Windows would not load, however, getting to a point in the loading process (MUP.SYS) at which point the computer would suddenly restart. I thought, “what have I installed recently that might affect Windows?” The only other thing I had done was to re-install Adaptec ASPI driver, as I’d accidentally inserted a copy-controlled audio CD which had quietly removed my computer’s ability to rip CDs.

Pretty cute, EMI, but I’m still going to rip your CDs, so cop it sweet.

I went with the BIOS theory, and long story short, I put the old BIOS file onto a diskette and rebooted. On post, you can press ALT-F2 and it will allow you to flash the BIOS from a file on A: drive. I’d suspected that my A: drive was unreliable, but I figured, if the file doesn’t read properly, the checksum won’t match and the flash program won’t let me proceed, at which point I can just try again until it does read properly.

The problem is, of course, that the flash program reads the file twice—once to check it, and if the check passes, it goes ahead and flashes your BIOS straight from disk. You guessed it, my floppy disk drive choked on the second one.

Back to Bootblock
Upon reboot, I was stuck with the Bootblock, the small bit at the very beginning of the BIOS that doesn’t generally get overwritten, that gives you one more chance: put in a floppy disk containing the flash program (AWDFLASH.EXE) and the BIOS file (something like C18E1013.BIN) and it will restore your BIOS back to its pristine condition.

So, after I installed a brand new floppy disk drive ($20.00), I used someone else’s computer to download the necessary files and put them onto disk. Sure enough, it went ahead and loaded the flash program, which led me to the next problem.

“Source File Not Found”
No matter what I called the BIOS file, awdflash kept saying “Source File Not Found”, and freezing up. I even tried something in the manual about calling it A7N8X-E.ROM, but no luck there.

But the error message is misleading. After much Googling, I discovered that it doesn’t matter what you call the BIOS file. The AWDFLASH.EXE on the diskette has to have come from the CD that came with the motherboard; versions available for download from the ASUS site are probably different and will not work. They were indeed different files, and using the correct one made the spurious error message go away, which led me to the next problem.

BIOS-Lock String…?
After analysing the BIOS file, the flash program declared that “The program file’s BIOS-Lock String does not match with your system!” I had no idea what on Earth that meant, so I repeated the process with several different older versions of the BIOS file only to get the exact same error message each time, then I gave up and set up my Linux router as a desktop machine so I could get things done.

The thing that saved me here was a technique I found on a bulletin board discussion, to make a DOS boot disk and add a fake Awdflash to it in order to “trick” the Bootblock loader into giving you a DOS command prompt for whatever you may need it for, such as running your own choice of flash utility. Uniflash seemed to be highly recommended, so I put that on the diskette, but it was useless to me as it reported my BIOS as being write protected, and at any rate is not recommended for nForce2 chipsets.

Anyway, the thing that finally got the BIOS back in tip top shape was to put the real AWDFLASH.EXE (the one from the mobo CD) onto the diskette under a different name, as that name is already taken by the fake program, and to run it with the /nbl option:

flash.exe /nbl C18E1013.BIN

This worked and the flash proceeded without a hitch, and now I am back to the problem of Windows not loading. But I am working on it, and I don’t have to send hardware and dollars to ASUS.

I am guessing that the /nbl option ensures the flash program doesn’t attempt to flash the Boot Block, or something like that. So is the BIOS-Lock String a mechanism that stops you from overwriting the Boot Block? I have nfi, but where was all this security when I nearly fried my PC in the first place?