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10/31/2007

Mcafee Corrupts Vista Registry - Will not Boot.
I recently got an unofficial tech support request from a girl living upstairs: she called me frustrated on her cell phone telling me that her computer wouldn't work. I put on my serious face and stopped by her room, taking with me my laptop and some rescue CDs. She has quite the problem. Upon booting, vista goes into repair mode, and after about 10 minutes of "Repairing the problem" Vista simply lets us no that it cant solve the problem and reboots the computer, starting the whole process.
The first thing I did was take a look at the debugging output of the repair tool, and discovered that the reason Vista would not boot was that the registry was corrupt. Interesting, rarely is a corrupt registry severe enough to stop the computer from booting altogether. I did some Google searching for corrupt vista registries and didn't come up with much, except for this interesting threadfrom NeoSmart Forums One post caught my attention in particular:

Well with Norton and McAfee making such a stink about not having Registry and Kernel access this is what happens. I have not seen that many of these. Maybe 2 out of all the systems i have worked on so far with Vista. But now that those 2 have Kernel access they have destroyed it. Hence the corrupt registry. Their trial software when it expires can really cause damage.

I asked the girl if her Anti Virus software had recently told her anything. She replied yes, that it had expired just the day before. Bingo!
I booted the Vista install cd to try to use the restore backup tool but her computer had no restore points, a big bummer. At this point I knew she had a lot of homework to do and this wasn't going to be an easy fix, so I gave her an Ubuntu live cd to use so she could at least surf the web and do some web processing while I investigated the problem further.
Since then, I haven't been able to find anything about this bug on the web, even though it seems like its a huge problem that Mcafee probably should fix. The fact that their trial version of their software can render a computer completely useless after it expires puts a bad taste in my mouth. This is a failure of technology on Mcafee's part. I will continue to research a fix for the problem, if anyone has any suggestions short of a reformat that would be awesome. I downloaded a bootable Cd with some repair tools on it I will give a shot later, but I have a feeling the registry is beyond help.

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CARNAGE!!!
Wow what a weekend! It started on Thursday, with my whole hall getting busted, and one of my friends, Mike, getting an MIP - from a real police officer! Turns out that on Monday our entire floor has a mandatory meeting with the head RA, most likely to discuss the fact that everyone is at risk of being evicted to other halls if we don't start behaving.
That behind, my buddy Berret and I had a killer weekend on the bikes. On Saturday my dad stopped by on his way to Canada, and we all drove to the top of Mt. A and went for a run. It took us almost 3 hours to ride the whole thing because we kept stopping to do different jumps and tricks that we came across. We discovered an AWESOME new single track mountain bike trail chalk full of man made stunts and drops. Check out the Mountain Bike Mt. Ashland page for some more pictures. The biggest moment by far was when I dropped a man made bridge, I stood at the bottom of it and it was up to my eyes, plus because of the bike trajectory down hill it must have added up to about 7 feet of awesomeness. Then came... Sunday Berret came over and we sat around for a few hours watching bike videos. Of course we got a little pumped up, and it was a nice day, so we hopped on our bikes and headed downtown. We ended up stopping at the skate park, where we had some fun, met a new riding buddy, and I fell riding in a bowl and fucked my ribs up. However, the show stopper, by far, was Berret. With the spirit of Brian Lopes pumping through his heart, he charged a quarter pipe at full speed and attempted a 180. Maybe it was the spirit of Bender instead, because Berret hit the pavement hard and broke his collar bone. He also got a nasty wound on his torso that looks like something entered and came out a little higher up by his ribs, where another red oozing wound is located.
I accompanied him to the hospital and he'll be okay, back riding in a few weeks I'm sure.

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A nice way to wake up
I had a pretty rough night, minus the details I went to sleep really early and woke up late. When I opened my eyes, this was the first thing I saw:

I have to say it gave me some hope for the weekend.

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Journal of New Zealand Uploaded
I recently pulled all my journal entries I wrote while in New Zealand off of Facebook and put them in PDF form. They are complete with pictures, stories of adventure, danger, love and heartbreak. Be warned the file size is fairly large. Soon I will try to convert everything to HTML and make a page out of it.
You can find the journal Here.

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Collective Knowledge
With the rise of technology, mankind has been able to communicate faster and more efficient than ever. With telecommunications, its possible to contact nearly anyone or anything, anytime, to get any kind of problem or question answered. This technology has given birth to a new phenomena, called collective knowledge, that allows anyone to get information about anything and use it as their own. This kind of power should be encouraged in our schools, not looked down upon. Schools need to change their view on what cheating is, in order to keep up with current trends in society.

It used to be that in order to research information, you usually had to go to a library and read text that was written, owned and copyrighted by an author or a group of authors. This means that if you were to copy any text you found exactly, it would be called plagiarism. The information was coming from a single source and could be traced back to its origins easily.

Today, information is available from many different sources. The libraries still exist, and copying from them is still plagiarism. But there is a new kind of resource emerging on the World Wide Web. Its called collective knowledge, shared information, or as some would put it, anonymous garbage put on the web by non credible sources. An example of a place to find such information would be Wikipedia, where anonymous users can upload and change “encyclopedia” entries that any other users can view. Information found on such site is not copyrighted nor does it come from a single source. Its called public domain and anyone, anywhere can access it and use it as their own.

In a way collective knowledge is its own entity, imagine a box in the middle of a school that both takes papers and prints them out. All the information that goes in is anonymous and can be edited by anyone else at the same time, all this information is free for anyone else to use. The information that comes out is the truth, but a different kind. The first person to write a paper about the T. Rex and put it in the box had the right idea, but he got a few dates wrong. The first person to edit the paper, changed some of the dates to be correct, making the whole paper more correct, however, he made some spelling errors. Eventually the third person comes along and fixes the spelling errors, and this keeps happening indefinitely over time. What happens is a truth emerges, but not one from a scholar or scientist, but as a kind of average truth of what most people say is true. Sometimes this can be better than an “official” truth , sometimes worse, but usually it is the same (because most people believe in people's opinions who are held to be highly educated or knowing in their field). Now imagine this box in the middle of the school is accessible to everyone in the world instantly.

Because this kind of information doesn't come from any single source, thus cant be owned by anybody, it really is owned everyone and thus anyone copying it and using it as their own is not plagiarizing. Schools need to realize this, and not punish for using information got in this way. In the future, tapping into the collective knowledge will most likely be the dominant way of accessing unknown information, like a second brain owned by everyone. The fact is schools cant stop people from using this knowledge, because its impossible to prove who created it.

Although we have a long time to see where this new technology takes us, one thing is for sure, schools need find a way to embrace it fully or risk becoming another casualty of the relentless march of time.

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Big News for a Big World
After just one glance at the cover of The New York Times front page from July 17th, 1922 put next to the front page of July 17th, 1988 one thing is certain: The world was once a smaller and simpler place. On the 1925 newspaper, I count a total of one international story, hidden in the top left corner in a small box. Its titled: "Rich Germans Burn Bonds To Get Them Reissued Abroad." Its barely four paragraphs long and it details how wealthy Germans circumvent a exporting securities law by burning the bonds and having them reissued overseas. The rest of the articles are of National relevance, with titles like "Debs calls Unions to 'Fight Together'", "Battle in West Virginia" and "Auto Bandit Dying Shot By Policeman; 2 Others Wounded."

However, the front page of New York Times July 17th 1988 reads the complete opposite. There is only one story of National relevance, its title "Key Issues Remain After Breakdown of Albany Section" is about frustrated lawmakers in upstate New York. The rest of the articles are about International issues, most notably uprisings in South America. The titles read "Contras' Military Leaders Poised to Take Dominant Political Role", "Peruvian Guerrillas Emerge As an Urban Political Force" and "Waste Dumpers Turning to West Africa."

Why did the public eye change its focus from inwards to outwards so radically? What effects does this have on our society today? Although there are many reasons that could explain this change, one stands out most significantly: the rise of telecommunications.

After several failed attempts, the first transatlantic cable was laid from Foilhommerum, Valentia Island, Irealand to Heart's Content, in eastern Newfoundland in July 1866. This bridged the gap between Europe and America and Information could now travel from one continent to the other in a matter of hours, instead of weeks. Of course this was considered a major achievement and the project's financier Cyrus F. Fields, became a hero. He was even given a print referring to the cable as the 8th wonder of the world.

Fifty Four years later in 1920 the submarine cable network looked a little different. There were now several cables spanning Europe and America and the technology had improved, ever so slightly. There were very few cables connecting to anywhere else in the world. This meant news coming from Europe that carried urgency could make it into the US newspapers, but not much else. Most of the articles that made it into the daily newspapers was still about national issues.

In the present day, there are thousands of submarine cables attaching every continent on the globe to anywhere else in the world, and transmissions are nearly instant. Anyone has access to telecommunication technology as opposed to just a select few in the 1920s. Comparing a submarine cable map from c. 1928 and one from 2007 shows why. Today, news agencies have access to stories around the world, and naturally they pick the ones of most significance, or shock value.

In 1925 a story about a maid killing the woman she worked for made the front page of the New York times. Today, a thousand maids would have to kill a thousand wives in order to make the front page. This is because out of so many events happening in the world at once, the news agencies only want to publish the biggest ones, and this reduces the chances of a national story making it into a newspaper.

I believe this filtering of information has effects on our society. Today many people feel that the world is out of control, horrible things are happening now that have never happened before, and that we are all in imminent danger. Individuals are becoming smaller and less significant. Our fears are becoming more large scale, wide spread and inescapable. Because we hear about mass murders and large scale wars every day, something as simple as an armed robbery which made it on the front page of the New York Times in 1925, would be lucky to make it to the last page today and thus it isn't important. People don't fear robbers as much as they do nuclear annihilation.

I feel that today people are more connected with a general view of the whole world, but they have less of a precise vision of the immediate reality around them. I believe this to be an inevitable and necessary result of progress, however, I think that it would be beneficial to our society if news agencies would put more importance on national stories. A balance needs to be achieved that allows us to be aware of global issues, while still remaining attached to our home.


Sources: Wikipedia: Transatlantic Telegraph Cable
History of the Atlantic Cable and Submarine Telegraphy
Submarine Cable Map 2007

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Webcam recording script for Dell Latitude 1720
Since the Latitude 1720's webcam is only supported by a handful of applications (see the Linux UVC homepage) and none of them are for recording vidoes with sound, I decided to come up with a quick workaround. I wrote a tiny shell script called record.sh which just runs two commands at the same time, ffmpeg and sound-record so that they are synced up. It goes like this:

!#/bin/sh
ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s 320x240 -i /dev/video0 -f avi out.avi &
sound-recorder -c 2 -b 16 -P recording.wav

This should outpit out.avi and recording.wav in the current directory, and then you can put the two together using your viedo editor of choice. I use Pitivi and walla, you have a video ready for youtube or whatnot. Now my laptop is, I think, fully functional.

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Dell Inspiron 1720 with Ubuntu 7.04 fixes.
There are a few last things I wanted to get to work with my laptop, mainly the webcam and microphone. I would go into detail on how I got them to work with Ubuntu but I found this great page : To install Ubuntu-7.04 on Dell Inspiron 1520 Which is for the 1520, but should work for 1720 as well. Good luck everyone.

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TSSTcorp ts L632d ata linux problems.
My installation of Ubuntu went pretty smoothly besides the Nvidia drivers and one other problem: my TSSTcorp TS L632d ATA dvdr + rw drive was not recognized by linux. In fact it was straight invisible. Hwinfo showed nothing. Dmesg | grep cdrom showed even less. I started to think that I might have a serious bug to work out. However, the fix was simple.
I was doing some searches through google and linuxquestions.org when I cam across a post about the live cd not booting. It was for people who have SATA harddrives, which I thought had nothing to do with the dvd drive but the described effects were the same. The fix is to simply run "modprobe piix" in order to install the correct module. When I did, the audio cd popped up on my desktop immediately. Who would have thought? In order to make the fix permanent, I edited the "/etc/initramfs-tools/modules" file to include piix at the end. Then I ran "update-initramfs -u" to update the config, restarted and everything is working perfectly. I hope anyone who is having this same problem runs accross this post.
Cheers.

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Linux on my laptop
As if corrupting two of my boxes at home wasn't enough, today I installed Ubuntu linux on my Inspiron 1720. Its blindingly fast, I wouldn't hesitate to say 30-40% faster than vista. Even more important, I feel at home again :) There were very few hangups which surprised me because my hardware is all pretty new. Of course, the Nvidia 8600m GT wasnt yet supported by the official ubuntu nvidia drivers, but I found a cool script called Envy which automatically downloads and installs the latest drivers from Nvidia and installs them. A cakewalk really. A few packages later and I have a fully functional OS. Even more so than Vista, this app I'm using to type this blog, gnome-blosxom, has no equivalent in windows! Oh, how I love the penguin. More updates later.

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Cant stop the downloadin!
SOU, like all universities, trys to block file sharing by firewalling the entire network. This means its almost impossible to use p2p programs that connect to networks like Gnutella, Kazza or bittorrent as well as any other program that requires connections on specific ports. This particular network even blocks the downloading of .torrent files and blocks certain file sharing program websites! There are a few ways to get around this. Using proxys is usually pretty effective but very slow and a lot of (public) proxies will stop working without any warning, making them extremely unreliable. Another option, called network tunneling, is what I use to get my fix of blocked content.
Im fortunate enough to be a linux user, and I have Ubuntu linux installed on my computer at home, which I left on when I left for college. There are several services running on it including HTTP, FTP but most importantly, SSH. SSH bascially allows me to connect to my computer at home from anywhere and log in just as if I was sitting in front of it. So, from behind the firewalled university network, I have control of a fully functional linux computer outside the network, which has access to any of the file sharing networks I please.
Once I have a connection via SSH using PuTTY I have sever options for downloading files. For connecting to the Gnutella P2P network (Limwire) I use a command line program called Mutella. It has all the features of any other program but it can be run from the command line. For downloading torrents, I use the original Bittorrent client but I use the btdownloadheadless program so I can control the download process through ssh.
Those are the only two file sharing programs I use on a regualar basis, but linux has command line clients for most networks if I were to want to use others.
After the files have been downloaded throigh the file sharing programs and saved to the hard desk on my computer at home (horrorhotel) I then transfer them to my websever at www.fingel.com (this website) using FTP. Once the files have been saved to the FTP server, I can then connect to the site from my dorm room using WinSCP to download the files, also via FTP, which is not blocked by the university. Tada! The files are now on my desktop. So how about a quick runtrough:
I connect to horrorhotel from my dorm room and tell it to download files. I then tell it to send those files to my FTP server. I then download those files uninhibited. Easy eh?
This is just an example of what you can do with network tunelling, and proof of the power of linux.
Freedom!

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