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12/14/2007

MultiVAX
Hey all, just wanted to share an awesome story written by one of my alltime favorite authors, Isaac Asimov. Its called
multiVAX
Here is was Mr. Asimov had to say about it:

"This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written. After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you. It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything -- and I'm satisfied that it should." --Isaac Asimov

Take the time to read it, you won't regret it.

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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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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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Comments
I got comments working last night. I stayed up until 2 a.m drinking AMP changing code and messing around to get it working. No to mentoin I was blasting music and I forgot to close my door, poor sister. They aren't what you expect from a typical blog system, but they work. Once again, just a small perl script, no MySql, databases, php, nothing. To me its impressive. To your average joe visiting this site, its probably just the opposite.

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