Hey, it’s, uh, 2009!

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Maybe too late for Christmas, but still in time for New Year’s. Sorta. Hey, I’m a busy guy.
Pix in the Gallery, as per usual.
We are still finding places to stash the fresh load of kid stuff, but really, the kids seem not to mind having their new toys within easy reach of the dinner table. Since the arrival of Torterra in a pack of Leaf Pokémon, I have lost approximately all of my battles with Andrew. Clearly I’m going to have to start spending my allowance on Pokémon cards.
Maggie really likes her new kitchen set. I got a full ration of hassle about gender stereotyping from a colleague, and perhaps rightfully so. But seriously, the girl likes to play with kitchen stuff, and I’d much rather she have her own set than to have to retrieve my pots and spoons from under the couch so I can cook dinner. It’s a win-win, folks.
Optimism seems to be in short supply these days, so rather than wishing you the sun, moon and stars, I’ll just say this: here’s to a 2009 that doesn’t totally suck. For any of us.

Catalyst 8.11? On *my* Radeon HD 3850 AGP?

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It could happen to you!
The backstory is that my 3-year-old (which is about 923 in PC years) Radeon 9800 Pro quit on me a few weeks ago. Well, at least its cooling fan quit, leading to system lockups. I didn’t see an obvious way to replace the fan so I opted for replacing the card. PC is at least one generation behind in terms of graphics card interfaces, which limited my choices somewhat, but I settled rather quickly on the Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 in AGP flavor.
The card shipped with Catalyst 8.4 drivers, which are probably fine except for a known issue with Firefox displaying all default-styled hyperlinks as red. Sidebar: every time I think about how a video driver might have such a specific interaction with a single application, I get the cold sweats. Anyway, that sort of novelty doesn’t sit well with me. I like my hyperlinks blue and my gifs non-animated, please.
So, just update the drivers, right? Not so easy. The current version of Catalyst (8.11) failed to recognize my HD 3850 as compatible. A little bit of forums surfing turned up this thread on the Catalyst support forum, which provided some useful (if nearly incoherent) advice.
Translated a bit, here’s how to get Catalyst 8.11 to recognize your Sapphire HD 3850 AGP:
1. Download and unzip the Catalyst 8.11 package
2. Fire up regedt32 and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\PCI
3. Find the key that starts with VEN1002. Mine is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9596&SUBSYS_00281787&REV_00
4. Copy the key name to a text editor
5. In another text editor window, go to the directory where you unzipped the Catalyst package and open driver\install.ini. Search for 0x9505:0x25421002 and replace it with the numbers in the DEV and SUBSYS sections of the reg key. Following my example above, I use 0x9596:0x00281787
6. Open driver\CX_70266.ini and perform the same operation (find 0x9505:0x25421002 and replace it with 0x9596:0x00281787, or whatever values you found in your registry).
Save the config files and execute setup.exe. Now the driver install should recognize your card.
I suppose you can just download Catalyst 8.10 and the AGP Hotfix for that version. But clearly, that’s cheating, so it would make you a cheater. And you’re not a cheater, are ya?