Adil Hindistan's Technology Blog

More funny comments...from Microsoft

2012-01-22T00:26:00.001-05:00

After discovering some funny comments from Dell folks (see previous post), I looked at some other folders in the CD and came across what seemed to be manifest files used possibly used by Microsoft upgrade scripts, User State Migration Tool (USMT) and Migration Wizard (MigWiz).

These files reside in the Dell's Windows 7 Pro CD that came with Dell Vostro CD. Specifically, under \sources\dlmanifests folder:

OK, that's a confession there! And why would not you uninstall reg keys cleanly?

I am just wondering who is (s)he talking to here...

Hmm, so who is this mollybro? I see a 'mollybro' profile in MSDN, with a reference to an SMB related resource. Same person?

OK, enough with this Saturday-Night Geek Entertainment. Here is the last one:

Nobody can say (s)he is not honest!

Funny Comments in Dell's IE Branding Script

2012-01-21T23:35:00.000-05:00

I was looking at the contents of a CD that came with a new Dell Vostro PC (oh, don't even ask why).
The following folder initially seemed interesting:

\sources\$OEM$\$$\system32\OEM

But there was not much in there other than what seemed like an Internet Explorer branding script:

I was about to check the other folders, but wanted to checkout TextAppend.vbs and then noticed some interesting comments:

I like the --fail comments. Blogging for entertainment value :)

PowerShell 3 Community Technology Preview 2

2011-12-03T00:20:00.001-05:00

PowerShell architect Jeffrey Snover (@jsnover) announced availability of PowerShell v3 CTP 2 today in a twitter post. I installed the 64bit version. It required a reboot.

I have not yet have a chance to look into the goodies but right out of the bat I noticed two changes.

1) While my profile was loading, I got an error message, where PowerShell 3 complained about a line in my profile which goes something like this:



write-host "$mounted_drive: could not be found"



At C:\Users\Adil\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1:56 char:15

+         write-host "$mounted_drive: could not be found."

+                     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Invalid variable reference. ':' was not followed by a valid variable name character. 
Consider using ${} to delimit the name.

    + CategoryInfo          : ParserError: (:) [], ParseException

    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : InvalidVariableReferenceWithDrive

PowerShell v2 never complained about that line but I like the fact that PowerShell message is clear and suggests a way to fix it. Both of the following works




write-host "$mounted_drive : could not be found"   ## add a space

write-host "${mounted_drive}: could not be found" ## avoid ambiguity

2) PowerShell now auto-completes function names in my $profile when I hit "tab". From release notes, I see that some work went into "tabbing" and if you tab in the middle of a line, it does not delete the rest of the line anymore. This is a welcome usability change.

Using your own domain name with blogger

2011-11-13T12:34:00.001-05:00

Using your own domain name instead of generic blahblah.blogspot.com is a pretty easy change.

Login to blogger.com and select the blog (in case you have more than one)
Click "Settings" > "Basic"
Scroll down a bit until you see "Publishing" section
Click "Add a custom domain"

If you already have a domain, you can use that:

Click "Switch to advanced settings"
Enter your domain name under Advanced settings
Click "Save"

If not, you can buy one through blogger as described here. Or the other option is to buy through Google Apps by following the wizard here. I chose to use Google Apps to buy the new domain. It takes about 10mins to get your new domain up and running. All DNS records are automatically pointed to Google's ghs.google.com name servers.

After this was done, I went back to Blogger and and wanted to use my new domain name. I got an error:
"Another blog or Google Site is already using this address".

Reason is pretty straightforward, but solution is a bit tricky. I was getting this message because Google Sites are part of Google Apps and when you type "www.yourdomainname.com", you are redirected to Google Sites. In other words, DNS record for "www" is mapped to Google Sites address.

Problem is that Blogger needs to use this address to be able to serve your blog when someone requests your site. Uninstalling Google Sites should have fixed this:

Logon to Google Apps (http://www.google.com/a/yourdomainname)
Click Settings on the top menu bar
Click Sites on the left
Click "Uninstall Sites" (Do not do this yet, keep on reading)

This, however, did NOT fix the problem because to my surprise it seems that this process does not remove 'www' record.

Following is the correct procedure:

Logon to Google Apps (http://www.google.com/a/yourdomainname)
Click "Settings" on the top menu bar
Click "Sites" on the left
Click "Web Address Mapping"
Delete "www" mapping
Click "General" > "Uninstall Sites" (Optional)

If you, have already uninstalled "Google Sites", you can add it back:

"Dashboard" > "Service Settings" near the bottom > "Add more services"

That way you can get access to the Sites menu to complete the procedure above. Once done, simply head over to blogger.com and add your domain. That's all there is to it.

Installing Android 4.0 on Nexus S

2011-11-08T16:25:00.003-05:00

The latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), is not officially available for Nexus S yet. However, there are some talented developers who managed to use available SDK and some dump data to port ICS to Nexus S. For this post, I used Drew Garen's Beta v10 port (no longer available - 11/30/2011. See updates at the bottom of the post).

As I explained in my "On Rooting Android" post, I spent the last few days to understand a bit more about inner-workings of Android and rooting landscape. As I now have a good backup of everything I have and I tested that I can restore everything back to that point, it is time to test ICS.

ICS Installation for Nexus S is quite simple but make sure you have read the previous article and have Pre-reqs as described there:

Android SDK
Root via DooMLoRD's Easy Rooting Toolkit v1.0
Install ROM Manager
Install "ClockworkMod Recovery" and make sure it will stick.
Take a full system backup

Now you are ready to install ICS:

Download the latest Beta from Drew's site.
Rename the downloaded zip file to update.zip (Optional)
Connect Your android via USB in USB Mass Storage Mode and copy update.zip to the root.
Disconnect USB Storage Mode
Launch ROM Manager
Boot into Recovery Mode
Wipe Dalvik Cache in Advanced Mode
Wipe Data/Factory Reset
Wipe Cache
Select Install from zip file and point to /sdcard/update.zip
Watch it do its magic.

If all goes well, you should have ICS up and running on your Nexus S in 5 mins!

This is the new boot screen. It takes about the same time it used to boot. If there is an improvement, I did not notice it. In fact, it's great that this 'beta' version is able to match Stock 2.3.6 speeds.

Once boot process finishes, you will see a welcome screen. Simply Tap "Start" to kick off Google initialization process.

Then, you can allow or disallow Google location services. Tap "Next" to continue.
At his point , you can either sign in with your Google account or create a new one.

Once the wizard is done, you are going to notice that your apps will start coming down from Android Market. As far as I can tell most of the apps came down just fine. I was however missing the apps that I had installed from Amazon Market. This of course makes sense.

The only surprise I had was about the Google Authenticator App. It did not come down and I had to download and log into it by generating an Application-Specific Password in Two-factor Authentication page.

If you are using two-factor authentication, you might want to make sure your recovery methods for two-factor authentication are still valid before diving into this process.

I've been using ICS Beta Port for a day now and apart from known issues like GPS, the only issue I noticed was the battery killing Google+ app. See the screenshot.

It basically drained the battery to half in only 5hrs. I have not yet looked into what exactly in Google+ is causing this and have not seen any other reports from testers in the related xda-developer forum.

Update: 11/30/2011

After Google released ICS source code, devs at XDA forums started working on it and porting it to different phones. Koushing Dutta, who also owns other popular apps like ClockworkMod Recovery and ROM Manager, was one of the first who came up with a build for Nexus S.

There are several ICS ports right now and many other tweaked the works of rom developers or came up with mixes of those. There are also several kernel releases at this point all available from Nexus S XDA forums here (usually under Development).

Drew Garen has also used Koushik and other's work adding his own stuff on top and his work is available from his new (blogger) site.

By the way, a few times I got "Random Offset {some number}" when flashing roms but apparently this is NOT an error but related to a new security feature "Address Space Layout Randomization" as mentioned here.

On Rooting Android

2011-11-06T00:39:00.002-04:00

When I got my iPod Touch, I immediately started looking for methods to root it, but never felt the need on my Android Nexus S, as I was already able to do pretty much anything including free-of-charge tethering (thank you T-mobile).

The newest Android version (v4 or Ice Cream Sandwich, a.k.a ICS), has been announced a few weeks back and smart folks at xda forums have already managed to port the SDK version for my phone. Of course, phone needs to be rooted to flash the new rom.

Although you probably have lots of your data like your contacts backed up to Google Cloud, there is no way you can keep 'all' your data backed up at this point and rooting wipes out your device.

A couple of funny thing happened when I looked at rooting instructions. All of them tell you to make a full back up of your system, but you will be lucky if you find any instructions on what exactly to back up and how? Most of the tools mentioned want you to be rooted to begin with. It maybe possible to use Astro File Manager or 'adb pull' commands from Android SDK but the things you can do are limited 'before' you root. In fact, this is one of the reasons people root their phones because they would like to keep their 'data' when they buy a new phone (e.g. high scores in a game, or play lists in a music app...).

At this point, applications may write their data anywhere as there is no 'designated' location to keep app data and therefore there is no easy way to back that data up even if it was possible for a user to access /data folder, which is 'usually' where apps write. There is a feature request on this but as of now, no solution.

Anyway, the other funny bit is about an SDK tool named 'fastboot'. There are tons of material on web that tell you how to use it, problem is that latest SDKs do not have this tool. If you head over to Android SDK download page, you will notice that there is only a link to android-sdk_r15-windows.zip (i.e. revision 15). The last revision that had the 'fastboot' was r13 and there is no link to it.

If you are a developer, you probably know how to get older versions of SDK using SDK manager but mere mortals do not need to despair either! Here is what you can do:

Hover over the r15 link, you will notice that it is pointing to http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r15-windows.zip So, to download r13, simply replace 'r15' with 'r13' in the link and you should be able to download the r13 version. Once you download it, you can extract the fastboot.exe from 'tools' folder. In the current revision, Google has moved adb.exe from 'tools' folder to 'platform-tools' folder. You might want to put this one there too.

One more thing. You need to install USB drivers on your machine. When you download SDK, you will be able to get the Google USB drivers for your device. The catch is that it won't work when you are in 'fastboot' mode (at least for Nexus S) if your windows is 64bit. You will then need to install PDANet drivers so that your Nexus S is detected. You can find those links here. Good luck!

Btw, what do you get out of all this hassle? Here is a pretty good video from NexusHacks.

Update: 2011-11-06 - Root-ed

I finally found an easy to use hack to root my Nexus S without destroying/wiping any data (i.e. without unlocking the bootloader). I would like to emphasize this again, because I have read tons of so called 'guides' which seems to use 'rooting' and 'bootloader unlocking' interchangeably.

If you are like me, you may want to understand why do you need to do these things mentioned in the 'guides' instead of blindly following them. There is a lot of mumbo-jumbo to confuse the hell out of a regular user like myself. So, I had to look deeper into whole Android boot process and architecture to make sense of it. Hope this helps others as well.

Root - Super User
As in any other unix/linux variant, your purpose is to become the most powerful user with no restrictions on your Android. I.e. you want to become 'root' or 'super user'. That way you can install any application or even a totally new Android system (e.g. CyanogenMod). It's your device, your do whatever you like with it.

Well, you wish! Android will not just allow a regular user to become root. From a security perspective, you really would not want that anyway. Imagine any software messing with your device? Yep, that would be malware.

But you own the device and "you" want to become root! Well, you have two options:

1) You will need to find an exploit, as malware does. A hack, that elevates your privileges to become root. This is exactly what the 'zergRush Exploit' mentioned below does.

2) If there is no known hack, the other option is to go through steps in those rooting guides. Most of them will tell you that you will need to "unlock your boot loader".

Why unlock your boot loader?
Well, you are trying to become root in the Android Operating System but it does not allow you and boot loader is the software that comes "before" the (Android) Operating System. In other words, it's the initialization code that loads the (Android) OS and if you can mess with it, you can hack into that Android OS or replace it all together with a modified version perhaps.

Bootloader has two stages. The first stage of the bootloader (also referred as 'IPL' or "Initial Program Load") provides support for loading recovery images to the flash memory of the device.

If boot loader detects certain keypress (in Nexus S this would be Power button + Volume up), it goes in to a special mode called 'fastboot mode' where you can use 'recovery' option to flash a new (or old) image. From this point on you are on the second phase of the boot process. You may see acronyms like 'SPL', which means 'Secondary Program Loader' and refers to this second phase.

This is also why you usually see instructions for manually installing OTA (Over The Air) update files where you are told to drop the update.zip file in the root of sdcard, and then turn your device on while pressing 'special keys' for your phone and choose 'recovery' option. Upgrading your firmware is basically flashing a new (firmware) image.

However, we have a problem there. Usually, the boot-loader is "locked" so that it will load only recovery images that are signed by a certain authority. This might be Google or your wireless carrier.

So, if we can unlock the boot loader, then we can use a 'custom recovery image' like ClockworkMod Recovery, which allows us to install a 'custom firmware' like CyanogenMod (a.k.a CyanogenMod ROM). As these ROMs may include not only Android OS but IPL/SPL as well, there is a risk of making your phone unusable, commonly referred as 'bricking' the phone in case there is a bug in the IPL/SPL code.

Phones like my Nexus S are pure Android Devices. Wireless carrier does not install any customized software on it, it does not cripple any of the abilities and Google allows us to 'unlock' the bootloader by running a simple command:

"fastboot oem unlock"

I explained above how to get fastboot.exe. So you get that and other pre-reqs and then issue the command to unlock your boot-loader, which apparently voids your warranty and "WIPES YOUR DEVICE" including your SDCard.

In my case, I did not want that to happen without taking a full back up of the system, which was not really possible because I did not have root access. A bit of a chicken and egg problem...

Solution: Exploit to become Root
This method depends on DooMLoRD's Easy Rooting Toolkit v1.0, which is using what's called "zergRush Exploit".

The whole process took me less than a minute:

---------------------------------------------------------------

              Easy rooting toolkit (v1.0)

                   created by DooMLoRD

        using exploit zergRush (Revolutionary Team)

   Credits go to all those involved in making this possible!

---------------------------------------------------------------

 [*] This script will:

     (1) root ur device using zergRush exploit
     (2) install Busybox (1.18.4)
     (3) install SU files (3.0.5)

 [*] Before u begin:

     (1) make sure u have installed adb drivers for ur device
     (2) enable "USB DEBUGGING"
           from (Menu\Settings\Applications\Development)
     (3) enable "UNKNOWN SOURCES"
           from (Menu\Settings\Applications)
     (4) [OPTIONAL] increase screen timeout to 10 minutes
     (5) connect USB cable to PHONE and then connect to PC
     (6) skip "PC Companion Software" prompt on device

---------------------------------------------------------------

 CONFIRM ALL THE ABOVE THEN

Press any key to continue . . .
--- STARTING ----
--- WAITING FOR DEVICE
adb server is out of date.  killing...
* daemon started successfully *
--- cleaning
--- pushing zergRush"
3215 KB/s (23052 bytes in 0.007s)
--- correcting permissions
--- executing zergRush

[**] Zerg rush - Android 2.2/2.3 local root
[**] (C) 2011 Revolutionary. All rights reserved.

[**] Parts of code from Gingerbreak, (C) 2010-2011 The Android Exploid Crew.

[+] Found a GingerBread ! 0x00015118
[*] Scooting ...
[*] Sending 149 zerglings ...
[+] Zerglings found a way to enter ! 0x10
[+] Overseer found a path ! 0x000151e0
[*] Sending 149 zerglings ...
[+] Zerglings caused crash (good news): 0x40119cd4 0x0054
[*] Researching Metabolic Boost ...
[+] Speedlings on the go ! 0xafd255dd 0xafd3908f
[*] Popping 24 more zerglings
[*] Sending 173 zerglings ...

[+] Rush did it ! It's a GG, man !
[+] Killing ADB and restarting as root... enjoy!
--- WAITING FOR DEVICE TO RECONNECT
if it gets stuck over here for a long time then try:
   disconnect usb cable and reconnect it
   toggle "USB DEBUGGING" (first disable it then enable it)
--- DEVICE FOUND
--- pushing busybox
4149 KB/s (1075144 bytes in 0.253s)
--- correcting permissions
--- remounting /system
--- copying busybox to /system/xbin/
2099+1 records in
2099+1 records out
1075144 bytes transferred in 0.097 secs (11083958 bytes/sec)
--- correcting ownership
--- correcting permissions
--- installing busybox
--- pushing SU binary
1276 KB/s (22228 bytes in 0.017s)
--- correcting ownership
--- correcting permissions
--- correcting symlinks
--- pushing Superuser app
4739 KB/s (762010 bytes in 0.157s)
--- cleaning
--- rebooting
ALL DONE!!!
Press any key to continue . . .

At the end of this, you get SuperUser v3.0.5(39) installed on your Nexus S. This exploit seems to be working with many other Android phones. There is a growing list in the forum linked above. It's also easy to go back if you want to unroot.

I launched SuperUser, clicked "Preferences" and tapped "Su binary v3.0" to update it to the latest version (3.0.3 as of now). I also set "Automatic Response" to "Allow". To test:

$ PS Z:\adil\scripts\powershell> adb shell

$ su

su

# whoami

whoami

whoami: unknown uid 0

This means I have root access on my Nexus S and my bootloader is still locked! What's next?

* Install Backup Software: Now that I have 'root' access, I can now install all these 'backup software' mentioned on all those rooting sites. I installed 'Titanium Backup'. Then I took a full back up of the system to my sdcard, and then mounted the phone via usb to take back up of everything on my sdcard to my hard drive.

* Install Rom Manager: This is to be able to 'flash custom ROMs (i.e. install customized Android versions). I installed 'Rom Manager' but have not done anything else yet.

One last thing tonight... Once I became root, I was able to get more information about my system and manually create backup images as shown below

$ adb shell
$ su
# cat /proc/mtd
dev:    size   erasesize  name
mtd0: 00200000 00040000 "bootloader"
mtd1: 00140000 00040000 "misc"
mtd2: 00800000 00040000 "boot"
mtd3: 00800000 00040000 "recovery"
mtd4: 1d580000 00040000 "cache"
mtd5: 00d80000 00040000 "radio"
mtd6: 006c0000 00040000 "efs"

# cat /dev/mtd/mtd2 > /sdcard/mtd2.img ## Boot image
# cat /dev/mtd/mtd3 > /sdcard/mtd3.img ## Recovery image

Then connected phone to my pc using 'USB mass storage' mode and backed up these two images to my hard drive:

robocopy /mir l:\ z:\adil\Backup\Android\sdcard\

where l: refers to sdcard drive
z: is where in hard drive I backed it up to
and /mir makes a mirror copy of everything in the sdcard (be careful with this option, if you use it incorrectly by specifying wrong target, you may wipe out the target).

I am, however, not sure if these will be enough to get things back. See the update below for proper Backup/Restore procedures.

Update 2011-11-07 More on Back up and Rom Management

Revenge of Stock ROM
Stock ROM is the original Android Image. Below, you will find how it tries to keep its integrity.

Today I wanted to use "ROM Manager" app to take a backup. To my surprise,
"ROM Manager" > "Backup Current ROM"
got me into a black screen with a yellow exclamation mark and an android icon underneath. Apparently, "ClockworkMode Recovery" (CWM) was overridden by Stock ROM after the reboot. Boot loader had detected that it was tempered with and had restored previous version.

Reinstalling ClockworkMod Recovery
This is pretty straight forward as I still have root access on my Nexus S.

Launch "ROM Manager"
Tap "Flash ClockworkMod Recovery"
Select "Google Nexus S"

Making ClockworkMod Recovery Stick
Once done, you get a message that says "Successfully flashed ClockworkMod Recovery". This solution is temporary. One suggested solution is to rename the file that's causing this as follows:

$ adb shell   ## Use adb Android SDK tool to open a shell (see above)
$ su          ## Become root
# mv /system/etc/install-recovery.sh /system/etc/donot_install-recovery.sh  ## rename the file

failed on '/system/etc/install-recovery.sh' - Read-only file system

Unfortunately, you get an error back. The reason is that /system partition is mounted as read-only (ro) and before you can make any changes to files under it, you will need to mount it as read-write (rw).

First, we have to find out where the /system is mounted:

# mount |grep system

/dev/block/platform/s3c-sdhci.0/by-name/system /system ext4 ro,relatime,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0

What does this mean:

First block is telling us about the actual directory under which /system partion will show its data
Second block is what we are mounting (/system)
Third block is the filesystem. This used to be yaffs2 but now we see it is 'ext4'
Fifth block are the options and what matters for us is the 'ro' parameter telling us mount is read-only

For further reading on Android partitions, take a look at this post.

With this knowledge we will use mount command to remount /system to the same location but this time with 'rw' parameter to be able to modify its content

# mount -o remount,rw -t ext4 /dev/block/platform/s3c-sdhci.0/by-name/system /system

Now we can go ahead and make the change.

# mv /system/etc/install-recovery.sh /system/etc/donot_install-recovery.sh

# ls -l /system/etc

-rw-r--r-- root     root        58357 2011-09-30 09:06 NOTICE.html.gz
-rw-r--r-- root     root       236823 2011-09-30 09:06 apns-conf.xml
drwxr-xr-x root     root              2010-11-24 16:42 bluetooth
-rw-r--r-- root     root          682 2010-11-24 16:42 contributors.css
-r--r----- bluetooth bluetooth      935 2010-11-24 16:42 dbus.conf
drwxr-xr-x root     root              2010-11-24 16:42 dhcpcd
-rw-r--r-- root     root        11865 2011-04-29 12:18 event-log-tags
-rw-r--r-- root     root          238 2010-11-24 16:42 gps.conf
-rw-r--r-- root     root           25 2010-11-24 16:42 hosts
-r-xr-x--- root     shell        1200 2010-11-24 16:42 init.goldfish.sh
-rw-r--r-- root     root         7696 2010-11-24 16:42 media_profiles.xml
drwxr-xr-x root     root              2011-09-30 09:06 permissions
drwxr-xr-x root     root              2010-11-24 16:42 ppp
-rw-r--r-- root     root          104 2010-11-24 16:42 secomxregistry
drwxr-xr-x root     root              2011-09-30 09:06 security
drwxr-xr-x root     root              2011-04-29 12:18 updatecmds
-rw-r--r-- root     root          531 2010-11-24 16:42 vold.fstab
drwxr-xr-x root     root              2010-11-24 16:42 wifi
-r-xr--r-- root     root          415 2008-08-01 08:00 donot_install-recovery.sh

Then, we should go back to Rom Manager and flash ClockworkMod Recovery one last time and it should stick around between reboots.

Using ClockworkMod Recovery for Backup

There is a long guide here explaining various options with screenshots but it's pretty basic.

1) Manual Backup

Select "ROM Manager" > "Reboot into Recovery" (for manual management). Phone will boot into ClockworkMod Recovery console.

Use "Volume down/up" buttons to move up or down and "Power" button to select an option.

As we wanted to take a full back up, we want to choose the option that says "backup and restore"

We then choose backup option and let the tool work its magic.

In my phone, the process took about 10 minutes. There is a progress bar that gives some visual feedback and when all is done you get "Backup complete!" message at the bottom.

2) Backup via ROM Manager

This is quite straightforward as it is an option in the "ROM Manager" application.

Select "ROM Manager" > "Backup Current ROM"

Enter a backup name, or tap "OK" to accept the suggested name.

Phone boots into recovery mode and starts the back up process.

After the backup is finished, phone boots back up.

Backed up files reside under /sdcard/clockworkmod/backup/{backup_name} folder. Below is the list of files after a backup

l:\clockworkmod\backup\2011-11-07-19.41.58\
 183.4 m        .android_secure.vfat.tar
   8.0 m        boot.img
   12672        cache.yaffs2.img
 478.3 m        data.ext4.tar
     298        nandroid.md5
   8.0 m        recovery.img
 174.8 m        system.ext4.tar

Testing Restore from Backup

At the end of the day, all this effort is to be able to restore from a backup to get Android back to the original (Stock) state.

So, I booted into ClockworkMod Recovery mode and
wiped cache,
wiped dalvik cache,
wiped data/factory-reset...

After the reboot, Nexus S came up and kicked off Google's Welcome Wizard. I skipped it and there it was. My Nexus S as if I just bought it. The only difference was that SuperUser app was still there.

To restore everything back:

I installed ROM Manager from Market
Flashed ClockworkMod Recovery
Tapped "Manage and Restore Backups"
Selected the latest backup (the one above)
Phone went into Recovery Mode and recovery started
After about 5 minutes, phone rebooted again
Android came up and everything was restored successfully as if I never wiped my phone!

It was perfect. Well, too perfect in fact because apparently I had not renamed "/system/etc/install-recovery.sh" before taking the latest backup. So, after the restore ClockworkMod Recovery was gone, but it only takes a minute to get it back there.

Update: - 12/02/2011

Here is a very detailed, thoughtful article from security researcher Dan Rosenberg on "Rooting and Plagiarism". It helps put things into context.

Android Market App Update

2011-11-05T21:38:00.001-04:00

The latest Android Market App v3.3.11 brings some nice features. The most important and contentious one is the 'auto-update' feature. It used to be that you could check the 'Auto Update' box for each application but with this new feature it is possible to set all apps to Auto Update.

Some people like it, others do not. Personally, I like to look at the feature set before updating apps, so I do not set any app to auto-update. That being said, if you are in the camp who likes to keep current no matter what choosing Wi-Fi only Auto Update seems like a no-brainer.

Right now, Market app is not showing up as an update but as noted by Android Police, it's possible to download the .apk (Android Application Package) and install it manually, if you have the right tools.

Even if you are not a developer you might want to install Android SDK and take a look at the command line tools like "adb" (Android Debug Bridge), which you can also use to generate bug reports (after installing SDK, simply go to "Android-SDK\Platform Tools" folder" under Android folder and type 'adb' to get full command line options).

There are several links to where you can download the new Market app .apk that you can find by googling. After you install SDK and download the new Market app package, you can use the 'adb' tool to install it as shown below:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools>adb install -r c:\users\adil\downloads\Market-3.3.11.apk
5428 KB/s (3296645 bytes in 0.593s)
pkg: /data/local/tmp/Market-3.3.11.apk
Success

Of course you will have to change C:\users\Adil\Downloads\Market-3.3.11.apk with the path to the .apk you downloaded.

It's important to use "-r" as you will already have Market app installed, and you would like to 'override' it. Help for the install command is as follows:

adb install [-l] [-r] [-s] <file> - push this package file to the device and install it
('-l' means forward-lock the app)
('-r' means reinstall the app, keeping its data)
('-s' means install on SD card instead of internal storage)

This update also makes switching google accounts easier, if you have several (as I do). It's built right into the tool. Enjoy!

Microsoft PowerShell Forums Wiki

2011-11-02T23:06:00.002-04:00

Over the last two years, I have collected a list of (rss) links to PowerShell related blogs in my Google Reader. These blogs and subscription to daily PowerShell tips from PowerShell.com are helpful. I also check PowerShell newsgroup time to time, which used to be a very active group with hundreds of messages each month.

When I wanted to check out what's been happening on the Usenetgroup today, I noticed that there was virtually no activity in the last few months. Looking at the messages from last busy month, I found out that Microsoft posted a notice telling people they were stopping NNTP support as they were seeing less usage of them and more activity in the (Microsoft) forums. Here is part of the explanation:

What is Happening?
This message is to inform you that Microsoft will soon begin discontinuing
newsgroups and transitioning users to Microsoft forums.

Why?
As you may know, newsgroups have existed for many years now; however, the
traffic in the Microsoft newsgroups has been steadily decreasing for the
past several years while customers and participants are increasingly finding
solutions in the forums on Microsoft properties and third party sites. This
move will unify the customer experience, centralize content, make it easier
for active contributors to retain their influence, mitigate redundancies and
make the content easier to find by customers and search engines through
improved indexing. Additionally, forums offer a better user and spam
management platform that will improve customer satisfaction by encouraging a
healthy discussion in a clean community space. To this end, Microsoft will
begin to progressively shift available resources to the forums technology
and discontinue support for newsgroups.

Most people today are not really using NNTP clients but access such Usenet groups via Google groups. MS Forums have 'social' features and I am guessing that's one of the reasons Microsoft actually want people to use them. Whatever the reason, forums are the way forward if you would like to post (PowerShell) questions, although there is some effort to continue NNTP via CommunityBridge.

Lastly, while checking the forums, I came across a great resource: [Ultimate] PowerShell Wiki, called PowerShell Survival Guide (name reminded me Addon Survival Guides WoWInterface used to publish after each Warcraft upgrades). It's a pretty comprehensive with tons of links to other sites, learning materials and resources. Check them out!

What a sad day, Jobs passed away!

2011-10-05T21:29:00.000-04:00

Dynamic views from Blogger

2011-09-28T18:42:00.000-04:00

Google's blogger team today announced a pretty cool feature that they call "Dynamic views". Announcement link is here. I am trying 'magazine' view right now. So far so good, none of the special formatting and template customizations I had done are broken. Way to go Blogger Team!

What's coming in Server 8

2011-09-14T15:19:00.001-04:00

In his latest newsletter, Mark Minasi has a wonderful summary of features coming in Windows Server 8 from BUILD event that took place this week.

Windows 8 Dynamic Access Control (DAC) seems quite interesting and is a clear indication that Microsoft is trying to respond to an every day problem of 'permissions and auditing' in large enterprises. To be honest, I am not sure tagging is the answer to it, mainly because it's an attempt to use some of the unused attributes in AD and in file tags in NTFS, which may prove to be limited once enterprises starts being creative in employing the technology. However, the simple fact that it will be possible to use Regular Expressions on file ACLs is a welcome news.

We will have to wait and see the implementation details. In the meantime here is an article published today at Windows IT Pro by Sean Deuby that explains the DAC in more details.

PowerShell is of course getting a bigger pie in server management (e.g. Active Directory Admin Center a.k.a. ADAC) with Version 3. Number of cmdlets are going from ~300 to 2300!

Speaking of AD, there does not seem to be much news other than making it Virtualization friendly. If you are still waiting for a SQL/Database driven directory, don't! It's not coming yet!

Writing Binary Data to Registry

2011-09-12T19:28:00.002-04:00

Uh, oh! I found yet another post in drafts from 2007. I do not recall the events but posting it for common good :)

**************************************************************

Yesterday, a friend from work showed me an interesting script he was working on. His script was reading a reg_binary type registry key, modifying its value and was 'attempting' to write it back to registry.

There was an issue with 'writing back to registry'. He was using SetBinaryValue method to write an array, which had modified values, back to registry but vbscript kept on complaining there was a "type mismatch" for this line:

Return = oReg.SetBinaryValue(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strKeyPath & "\" & subKey, strValueName, arrValues

if he set the arrValues to a static array like this

arrValues=Array(1,2,3,4,5,6)

script worked without any issues.

I took the code and tried to figure out what was wrong with it. I would like to write down a couple of key points for those people who are trying to do something similar.

* When we are talking about Binary data in Registry, we are actually referring to Hexadecimal values, because that's the Registry-speak (1984 anyone?). We can use GetBinaryValue Method of WMI's StdRegProv class. Output is "an array of binary bytes"

* However, binary bytes (hex values) are not meaningful to us, so if we are reading it to, let's say, modify a value, we will probably want to convert it to string using CHR function, which returns a character associated with the specified ANSI character code. I.e. a decimal value between 0..127 (see ascii table).

Also, although registry speaks in hex as far as binary data is concerned, "SetBinaryValue" method does not understand Hex

Consider the following Reg Key/Value (pasting from exported .reg):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\7.0\FeatureLockDown\cDefaultLaunchURLPerms]"

sSchemePerms2"=hex:76,65,72,73,69,6f,6e,3a,31,7c,73,68,65,6c,6c,3a,33,7c,68,\ 63,70,3a,33,7c,6d,73,2d,68,65,6c,70,3a,33,7c,6d,73,2d,69,74,73,3a,33,7c,6d,\ 73,2d,69,74,73,73,3a,33,7c,69,74,73,3a,33,7c,6d,6b,3a,33,7c,6d,68,74,6d,6c,\ 3a,33,7c,68,65,6c,70,3a,33,7c,64,69,73,6b,3a,33,7c,61,66,70,3a,33,7c,64,69,\ 73,6b,73,3a,33,7c,74,65,6c,6e,65,74,3a,33,7c,73,73,68,3a,33,7c,6a,61,76,61,\ 73,63,72,69,70,74,3a,31,7c,76,62,73,63,72,69,70,74,3a,31,7c,61,63,72,6f,62,\ 61,74,3a,32,7c,6d,61,69,6c,74,6f,3a,32,7c,66,69,6c,65,3a,32,00

If we convert it to string, we get something like

version:1shell:3hcp:3ms-help:3ms-its:3
ms-itss:3its:3mk:3mhtml:3help:3disk:3
afp:3disks:3telnet:3ssh:3javascript:1
vbscript:1acrobat:2mailto:2 file:2

Then, you will need to change

mailto:2

mailto:3

with vbscript's REPLACE funtion

sNewValue = replace(sOldValue,"mailto:2","mailto:3", 1, -1 , 1)

* SetBinaryValue method is used to write "an array of binary data values" to registry. What is misleading here, and this was the key to solving our issue, is that method actually needs a variant or you will get type mismatch.

So this code works :

'Assumes objRegistry is a valid StdRegProv object.On Error Resume Next
Const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE As Long = &H80000002
Dim lRC As Long
Dim sPath As String
Dim uBinary() As Variant
sPath = "SOFTWARE\MyKey"
uBinary = Array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

lRC = objRegistry.SetBinaryValue(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, sPath, "MyBinaryNamedValue", uBinaryData)

If (lRC = 0) And (Err.Number = 0)  Then   

  'Do something

Else    

  'An error occurred

End If

* Pay attention to Array function, which returns a Variant containing an array as mentioned in MS documentation:

"A variable that is not declared as an array can still contain an array. Although a Variant variable containing an array is conceptually different from an array variable containing Variant elements, the array elements are accessed in the same way."

Ubuntu Update Manager fails to download packages

2011-09-12T18:52:00.000-04:00

I am having an issue with my Ubuntu installation (11.04) where once laptop is suspended, it never wakes-up. I can repro this by simply putting it to sleep by hitting Fn+F4. The only solution I could find is pressing Power button for 5 secs to completely power it off.

I checked Bug reports at launchpad.net. Although I see several people reported it, they see it on different hardware. So, I will file a bug report but wanted to make sure I have all the updates.

When I brought up "Update Manager", it showed me a couple of updates but when I click to install them I got an error:

"failed to download packages, check you internet connection".

Message may be a bit misleading as it suggest connectivity is the issue but in fact solution was simply clicking "Check" button to refresh list of available updates.

Fraudulent Certificates...Again

2011-09-08T18:14:00.001-04:00

If you did not hear about the latest saga of "rogue certificates" out there because of a Dutch company called DigiNotar by now, well, you are not paying attention to the security news :)

Certificate Authorities are backbone of Trust system we use for "secure" online access. To see that "lock" icon in the browser when we visit a site with an SSL certificate, and even a green bar if the site has an Extended Validation SSL (EV SSL), may give us a sense of security, which unfortunately proving to be a "false sense of security" these days.

There are plenty of articles out there on what happened (even a Wiki), how it happened, who got involved and what Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, etc are doing to contain damage, even a Wiki about it but also what you should be aware of. Here is one from Windows Secrets that explains it in laymen terms. I personally liked the detailed account from Firefox folks.

If you are reading this blog, you are probably interested in an easier way to find whether you have a cert or not and PowerShell can come to the rescue:

PS C:\Users\Adil> gci certificate::LocalMachine\Root |?{$_.subject -match "DigiNotar"}

I do not have it on my machine, so I won't go further but you if you search only "Digi", you will see some results:

PS C:\Users\Adil> gci certificate::LocalMachine\Root |?{$_.subject -match "Digi"}

    Directory: Microsoft.PowerShell.Security\Certificate::LocalMachine\Root

Thumbprint                                Subject

----------                                -------

5557C0953FBD9F93745B214FB2483E9369B597F0  CN=DT Soft Ltd, OU=Digital ID Class 3 - Microsoft S
5FB7EE0633E259DBAD0C4C9AE6D38F1A61C7DC25  CN=DigiCert High Assurance EV Root CA, OU=www.digic
3E2BF7F2031B96F38CE6C4D8A85D3E2D58476A0F  CN=StartCom Certification Authority, OU=Secure Digi
0563B8630D62D75ABBC8AB1E4BDFB5A899B24D43  CN=DigiCert Assured ID Root CA, OU=www.digicert.com

Unfortunately, Safari / OS X does not have a mechanism to detect Revoke Lists (RL) but Apple should be releasing an update soon to fix the chain. In the mean time you can open up 'Keychain Access' tool and remove the DigiNotarRoot Certificate from GUI but where is the fun in that?

If you double click the certificate, you get detailed information as shown below.

And what if you had to do this on multiple Macs in an enterprise environment? You would want to use command line to do it. The command for all certificate related work is named 'security'.

You can dump a pretty list of all Root CAs in OS X using 'dump-keychain' parameter of 'security' command, which, as we mentioned above, is used to manipulate Keychains from command line.

If we only wanted to display the Friendly names of certificates, which would be equivalent of what we see in 'Keychain Access' GUI, we can filter by 'labl'

adil$ security dump-keychain "/System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain" |grep labl


    "labl"<blob>="Prefectural Association For JPKI"
    "labl"<blob>="Entrust.net Certification Authority (2048)"
    "labl"<blob>="A-Trust-Qual-01"
    "labl"<blob>="A-Trust-Qual-02"
    "labl"<blob>="A-Trust-nQual-01"
    "labl"<blob>="A-Trust-nQual-03"
    "labl"<blob>="AOL Time Warner Root Certification Authority 1"
    "labl"<blob>="AOL Time Warner Root Certification Authority 2"
...

We can filter the results that start with 'D' and while at it, beautify it by getting rid of '=' and everything before it:

adil$ security dump-keychain "/System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain" |grep labl |awk -F '=' '{print $2}' |grep ^\"D

"DST Root CA X4"
"Deutsche Telekom Root CA 2"
"DigiCert Assured ID Root CA"
"DigiCert Global Root CA"
"DigiCert High Assurance EV Root CA"
"DigiNotar Root CA"
"DoD CLASS 3 Root CA"
"DoD Root CA 2"
"DST Root CA X3"
"DST ACES CA X6"

We can use also use find-certificate parameter to find the certificate and print all info. (-a for all keychains, not actually necessary here as we know this is a Root Certificate but good to be safe. If you happen to know the e-mail you could also use -e parameter)

adil$ security find-certificate -a -c "DigiNotar"/System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain
keychain: "/System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain"
class: 0x80001000
attributes:
    "alis"<blob>="info@diginotar.nl"
    "cenc"<uint32>=0x00000003
    "ctyp"<uint32>=0x00000001
    "hpky"<blob>=0x8868BFE08E35C43B386B62F7283B8481C80CD74D  "\210h\277\340\2165\304;8kb\367(;\204\201\310\014\327M"
    "issu"<blob>=0x305F310B3009060355040613024E4C31123010060355040A1309444947494E4F544152311A301806035504031311444947494E4F54415220524F4F542043413120301E06092A864886F70D0109011611696E666F40646967696E6F7461722E6E6C  "0_1\0130\011\006\003U\004\006\023\002NL1\0220\020\006\003U\004\012\023\011DIGINOTAR1\0320\030\006\003U\004\003\023\021DIGINOTAR ROOT CA1 0\036\006\011*\206H\206\367\015\001\011\001\026\021info@diginotar.nl"
    "labl"<blob>="DigiNotar Root CA"
    "skid"<blob>=0x8868BFE08E35C43B386B62F7283B8481C80CD74D  "\210h\277\340\2165\304;8kb\367(;\204\201\310\014\327M"
    "snbr"<blob>=0x0C76DA9C910C4E2C9EFE15D058933C4C  "\014v\332\234\221\014N,\236\376\025\320X\223<L"
    "subj"<blob>=0x305F310B3009060355040613024E4C31123010060355040A1309444947494E4F544152311A301806035504031311444947494E4F54415220524F4F542043413120301E06092A864886F70D0109011611696E666F40646967696E6F7461722E6E6C  "0_1\0130\011\006\003U\004\006\023\002NL1\0220\020\006\003U\004\012\023\011DIGINOTAR1\0320\030\006\003U\004\003\023\021DIGINOTAR ROOT CA1 0\036\006\011*\206H\206\367\015\001\011\001\026\021info@diginotar.nl"

Well, enough playing. To delete the certificate, we will use 'delete-certificate' command. We have two choices:
1) Use -c parameter which is using 'common name'
2) Use SHA-1 fingerprint (safer).

Let's do both.

1) We need to use common name. This is the name you see in the GUI and we seem to get it from 'labl' line above. Command becomes

adil$ sudo security delete-certificate -c "DigiNotar Root CA" /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain

2) As mentioned above, using SHA-1 fingerprint is less error-prone than relying on common names. To do that, we have to first locate the fingerprint. Noticed that it was not showing above when we displayed the certificate?

OK, so how do we get the fingerprint? Simple: we add -Z to the 'find-certificate' command which returns SHA-1 in the first line and then prints what we have seen above. So we will simply 'grep' the fingerprint:

adil$ security find-certificate -a -c "DigiNotar" -Z /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain |grep SHA-1

SHA-1 hash: C060ED44CBD881BD0EF86C0BA287DDCF8167478C

And now we can get rid of the certificate:

adil$ sudo security delete-certificate -Z  C060ED44CBD881BD0EF86C0BA287DDCF8167478C /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain

Well that's all. Now, all you would need is to put these two lines in a shell script (find fingerprint if certificate exists & delete it), then run it against all your Macs.

Note that in general Safari and Chrome honor system-wide certificates, however, some versions of Firefox is not using the Keychain to store/retrieve certificates. It has its own database and you might need to manipulate that as well. Also note that browsers have their own list of trusted CAs so updating Chrome and Firefox would solve the problem as of today.

Update: There are several articles about why revoking this certificate may not be enough because of the way EV SSL treated in Safari. If you delete the certificate, this should not be a concern. However, there seems to be additional certificates that needs to be revoked to be safer.

In any case, I visited DigiNotar web site on Safari and found a page with "Order" button that takes you to another page with SSL. As soon as I clicked the "Order" link, Safari warned me that the certificate on the site was invalid (expired).

As far as I can tell chain goes like this:
DigiNotar Root CA -> DigiNotar Services 1024 CA -> *.diginotar.nl

So this seems to be good sign. I tried some other sites but I am yet to find a site that was issued and SSL from the the Root CA I deleted.

Update2: I saw https://www.maestre.com mentioned as a test site here. This is what I got on Safari:

It's good that I am getting a notification. Unfortunately, it is not because DigiNotar Root CA is missing from my Root keychain but because certificate has expired.

Update3: Apple today released a security patch to put the issue at rest. In their terms, here is what they did:
Description: Fraudulent certificates were issued by multiple certificate authorities operated by DigiNotar. This issue is addressed by removing DigiNotar from the list of trusted root certificates, from the list of Extended Validation (EV) certificate authorities, and by configuring default system trust settings so that DigiNotar's certificates, including those issued by other authorities, are not trusted.

Of course, they would not tell exactly what they did. I had a pretty good idea which file they were talking about. Let's look at the last one "configuring default system trust settings":

adil$ pwd
/System/Library/Keychains

adil$ ls -l
total 1048
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    5353 Sep  9 17:53 EVRoots.plist
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  167848 Jul  9 23:39 SystemCACertificates.keychain
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  395312 Sep  9 17:53 SystemRootCertificates.keychain
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   86380 Sep  9 17:53 SystemTrustSettings.plist
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  282984 Jul 28  2008 X509Anchors

So backed up these files before applying the patch and ran a diff. First let's look at a record in the last one.

The bottom is the original, and above you see the updated file. Basically they updated the date and added a new array with a dictionary which set kSecTrustSettingsResult to 3.

Notice that I am looking at the Key that starts with C060E... which is the SHA-1 fingerprint we got above.

Also notice that IssuerName, we know that's DigiNotar. As noted in some of the links above, there were several certs by DigiNotar published by others. I can tell from the diff which are the ones that were affected but I cannot tell a way of figuring them out only by looking at the original as Issuer Names would be different and don't have a list of chains where DigiNotar exists.

Find your Video Driver version with PowerShell

2011-09-02T19:58:00.003-04:00

Well, I wrote this quite sometime ago (Bonus for geeks! Can you tell from the driver version?) but apparently forgot to post it:

Here is one way you can use WMI and PowerShell to get the version of driver you have installed for your video card(s).

PS C:\> gwmi win32_VideoController |select DeviceID,Name,DriverVersion |ft -a

DeviceID         Name                      DriverVersion
--------         ----                      -------------
VideoController1 ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series 8.812.0.0
VideoController2 ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series 8.812.0.0

gwmi is shorthand for get-wmi.
I happen to have two ATI cards. It's not really necessary to select Device ID and name. You can simplify it as follows:

PS C:\> (gwmi win32_VideoController)[0].DriverVersion
8.812.0.0

Why parentheses? Because that way you can access the properties of an object.

Why [0]? Well, b/c it's an array and you know you have the same card. So, it's enough to get driver version of the first card.

How did I know that I have to use Win32_VideoController WMI class? Well, I did not but there is no black magic here, just a bit of guess work and good ol' trial & error:

PS C:\> gwmi -list |?{$_ -match "video"}


   NameSpace: ROOT\cimv2

Name                                Methods              Properties
----                                -------              ----------
CIM_VideoBIOSElement                {}                   {BuildNumber, Caption, CodeSet, Description...}
CIM_VideoController                 {SetPowerState, R... {AcceleratorCapabilities, Availability, CapabilityDescripti...
CIM_PCVideoController               {SetPowerState, R... {AcceleratorCapabilities, Availability, CapabilityDescripti...
Win32_VideoController               {SetPowerState, R... {AcceleratorCapabilities, AdapterCompatibility, AdapterDACT...
CIM_VideoBIOSFeature                {}                   {Caption, CharacteristicDescriptions, Characteristics, Desc...
CIM_VideoBIOSFeatureVideoBIOSEle... {}                   {GroupComponent, PartComponent}
CIM_VideoSetting                    {}                   {Element, Setting}
Win32_VideoSettings                 {}                   {Element, Setting}
CIM_VideoControllerResolution       {}                   {Caption, Description, HorizontalResolution, MaxRefreshRate...
Win32_VideoConfiguration            {}                   {ActualColorResolution, AdapterChipType, AdapterCompatibili...

Guess which Python string find method is faster?

2011-09-02T19:43:00.001-04:00

I came across a question on finding which of the two simple string find methods was faster. So, let's play a game. All we are trying to determine is whether a single character ('ch') passed to our function is lowercase or not. Can you guess which method will be fastest out of these four?

# check result of string find function

def is_lower1(ch):

    return (string.find(string.lowercase, ch) !=-1)

## compare the string char to lower case version of it

def is_lower2(ch):   

    return (ch.lower() == ch)

# check string char against all lowercase chars

def is_lower3(ch):

    return (ch in string.lowercase)

# check the char against the lowercase boundries

def is_lower4(ch):

    return 'a' <= ch <= 'z'

Clearly, you can guess the first one will be the sore loser. It is using a string function (string.find) on all the possible lowercase characters (string.lowercase) to check if the passed character matches one. 'Find' Function will return -1, if it cannot find the passed character, that's why result is compared against '-1'. OK, but how about the rest?

is_lower2 function is also using a string function (lower) to lower only the passed character and is then comparing it against its original value. So, basically there are two operations here, but no iteration as in find.

is_lower3 is using 'in' operator against all possible lower case values. So, our string operation here is to list all possible values with (string.lowercase). Is this faster than is_lower2?

is_lower4 is comparing the passed character against the boundaries of lower case letters. There are no iterations or string operations as before but two comparison operations. That should be fast, right? Note that we are using Ascii characters here for comparison. If you print string.lowercase, 'z' is not the last character, it's '\xff' which looks like 'y' with two dots over it on my PC, but be assured that results are not affected any noticeable way.

So, let's timeit :

if __name__ == '__main__':

    import string

    from timeit import Timer

    t = Timer("is_lower1('A')", "from __main__ import is_lower1")

    print "is_lower1 result: %f" % t.timeit()

    t = Timer("is_lower2('A')", "from __main__ import is_lower2")

    print "is_lower2 result: %f" % t.timeit()

    t = Timer("is_lower3('A')", "from __main__ import is_lower3")

    print "is_lower3 result: %f" % t.timeit()

    t = Timer("is_lower4('A')", "from __main__ import is_lower4")

    print "is_lower4 result: %f" % t.timeit()

You probably guessed it but here are results to prove our hunch on which string search method is faster:

is_lower1 result: 0.957694

is_lower2 result: 0.322355

is_lower3 result: 0.256491

is_lower4 result: 0.201267

Did you guess it right?

Fedora 15

2011-08-26T00:25:00.002-04:00

It's been five years since I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu. I wanted to see where Fedora is these days, so downloaded and run Fedora 15 (F15) Live CD. A couple of first impression notes below...

Installation:
I let the live CD boot and run F15. It comes with Gnome 3.0 and here is a link to Gnome 3.0 cheat sheet. I then chose to install it on disk using the link in "Activities" > "Applications".

I chose to partition manually, allowed 500MB for /Boot and 30GB for / as I wanted to use the rest for Ubuntu.

Installation was quick. Wizard is designed to warn on things like missing /swap partition, weak passwords etc. I also liked the fact that it was able to detect Time Zone correctly (in contrast to Macs usually defaulting to West Coast and requiring me to choose East Coast). Good job overall.

Software Update:
ISOs are not frequently updated but when I install Ubuntu it checks with its repos as soon as internet connectivity is established and almost immediately Software Update icon is displayed. I waited a bit expecting the same thing to happen with Fedora, it did not. So I ran "Software Update" and of course there were tons of updates available. Lo and behold, I got a cryptic "Transaction error" message as soon as I clicked update:

"Transaction error could not add package update for fedora-release-rawhide-15-3(noarch)updates: fedora-release-rawhide-15-3.noarch"

I looked through the list of updates, found the one that read "Fedora release files | fedora-release-15-3 (noarch)" and unchecked it. That did the trick and all other updates installed without any issues. However, error was still there when I tried to update after a reboot!

So, I looked it up on Fedora forums and apparently there is a thread here. First message is from June, so this is issue has been around for at least two months but not yet fixed. As a workaround, you can drop to a terminal window and type the following:

sudo yum update

Sounds easy enough, but as some people pointed out, this is a terrible welcome message for a newcomer to the platform. People expect things to "just work" these days and are less likely to cut Fedora a slack.

Network:
Although, there was no network connectivity until I selected my wireless, Fedora had no issues remembering and connecting to my wifi network afterwards (see this Apple thread if you are wondering where that comment come from). Yet, I think from a usability perspective, I would want OS to ask me to choose a connection upon first login if it detects a wifi connection.

Speaking of network, "Nautilus" > "Browse Network" failed to detect my QNAP samba shares but I was able to click "Go" > "Location" and access public shares by typing:

smb://myqnap/public

Power Management:
It looks like Power Management is a bit aggressive Out of Box as in OS X. If you do not use your machine for about 20secs, screen becomes darker. Fully charged laptop claimed it would drain in about 2hrs but I am yet to test how fast it discharges under my normal usage.

GUI/General:

Ubuntu has live, warm colors (I like "Orange") out of box (OOB), Fedora has "grey" as its primary color. I think it's a bad choice as it fails to give a polished look when you log in for the first time. Yes, it's of course easy to change this and some Linux-fans loath eye-candy but first-impression matters.

Gnome 3.0 is a radical change from past. It's annoying for to save something into ~/Desktop folder only to find that it does not show up on the Desktop. I know the arguments against it but we will see if this heavy-handed approach will work (I am betting it will not as it creates confusion).

Also, there is just "Log Out" option when you click your name on top right (I can follow the logic), but that means you have to log-out first and then reboot/shut-down. Well, the option to power off is actually there but hidden, so you need to use "Alt" key. Alternatively, you can hit Alt+F2 and type
reboot

Simply typing the following would not work as you must be root.

shutdown

You can hit Windows key to bring up OS X's spotlight-like search tool where you can type

terminal

and then

sudo shutdown

Tiring? Yeah! It does not really matter that much on a mobile platform as people would usually prefer to put the machine to sleep anyway, which may be one of the reasons why shutdown is not there, but seems counter-intuitive on a desktop platform.

One last 'annoyance' was the absence of 'minimize window' button. Well, to be clear, I am not even talking about what happens when you happen to click "Help > About" in Firefox, where you end up with a modal window which you can only get rid of by hitting 'escape' on keyboard, as there is no button to click but windows that have a button are missing minimize and maximize buttons.

By default, Windows only have "close" (X) button.

It's not that difficult to add them using "gconf-editor", which you must install via add/remove programs or simply by typing the following in terminal window:

sudo yum install gconf-editor

See the screenshot on the line you need to edit. Log out, log back in and you have the minimize, maximize buttons. You can even shift them from right to the left like Ubuntu by changing the location of ":" like the following:

close,minimize,maximize:

Well, these are just a couple of my first-impression notes. Ars Technica also has two good articles to read "Fedora - first Look" and "Gnome review". There is a lot of talk about the new systemd, and I am looking forward to checking it out.

Your personal domain with Google Apps

2011-08-20T22:42:00.001-04:00

So, you finally decided to own your domain name. Who can blame you for that? john@locke.com sounds way cooler than a generic john.locke@hotmail.com, right? ;-)

So, what are the options?

Well, I guess the answer depends on what you want to do with it. There are many services out there that let you register your domain. GoDaddy.com is probably one of the most famous one. I used their service and it got better over the time. If, for example, all you want is that people reach to your blog when they type your new domain name, almost all registrars do that free of charge.

But, then what? I will tell you what I like to do with the domain names I register for personal use. Well, first thing first, I love Google services.

I would like to have an e-mail service for my new domain, that's managed like gmail.
I would like to create accounts for my family and sometimes friends as well and I would like them to have a common set of services (like calendar, storage area, contacts etc.)

Enter "Google Apps". Google is not a domain registrar per se but they have a partnership with one and you can easily get your domain name registered and Google Apps domain created for $10/yr. Once you do that, Google automatically adjusts all the necessary DNS settings for you and if you would like to manually edit anything, you can easily do that from within Google Apps dashboard. Simple!

One added benefit is that, your personal information is hidden from WHOIS directory. Normally, you get charged extra for that. This is especially useful, if you would like to have a private domain that you only use for certain (private) activities.

For example, you could buy something like "mysecretdomain.com" and configure an e-mail like "me@mysecretdomain.com". Then, use only that e-mail when your finances are involved (bank accounts, e-bay, amazon etc.).

You might also use Google docs from that domain only to keep private stuff and use your, say, gmail account for everything else. This might also help reduce the attack surface if someone is trying to steal your known account.

If you, for example, had a weak password recovery option with your gmail and someone guessed it, they still would not know about your secret domain where you keep the important stuff, which might reduce the damage... It's a wild world out there, you can never be careful enough!

Update: Added the pic on top (originally posted by Tom Anderson)

Should you change your DNS?

2011-08-16T11:45:00.001-04:00

A couple of days ago, I was talking to a friend who is running a small office in NY. He complained about how they were frequently having issues accessing web sites, the sluggishness and the inconsistencies they were experiencing.

The more we talked, the more it sounded like taking a look at their DNS servers was in order. They did not, however, have a dedicated DNS, and were using whatever DNS servers their ISP was assigning to them.

People do not need to use DNS servers their ISPs assigned to them. There are many public name servers that can be used instead. Google's Public DNS is probably the most famous one and I fully recommend it. Open DNS is another one that has been out there for a while.

Not only using public DNS may improve the speed of your browsing but it may also help you get a little extra security.

I recently came across a little (literally - just 163KB) utility called DNS Benchmark by Steve Gibson which can tell you which name servers would be the fastest for you.

As I guessed, Google's Name Servers, which I have been using for quite some time now were the fastest for me. In my case, it was not the name resolution speed that pushed me to switch to Public DNS. I hated it when my ISP intercepted mistyped domain names. If you do that, you should normally get a "404 - Page not found" error. Instead, you notice that the url you typed is put into a search web site branded by your ISP and results are shown to you.

ISPs are not really doing this out of goodwill to help you, they get money out of it. They get paid for the keywords and appropriate results show up near the top. You can read about that whole story and how that is being used for Phishing attacks here.

Once you decide to use a public DNS, I guess the easiest way to implement this would be to enter the IP addresses of the Public DNS in your Router and let it distribute them via DHCP. It's pretty easy to do.

Here is the screenshot from my LinkSys (Cisco) E3000 router.

In most cases, you can reach your router's set up by typing 192.168.1.1 into your browser and logging into it. The settings you see above are located under "Setup" > "Basic Setup".

By the way, if you are using Google Chrome, it is up to you to choose whether Google should display you some suggestions when you mistype a url or a domain name. Here are instructions to turn on or off this option. Good luck!

Ubuntu Unity

2011-07-28T18:59:00.001-04:00

I love Ubuntu but I had a hard time selling Ubuntu Unity today...

I've installed every version of Ubuntu released in the last four years and enjoyed it getting more and more user-friendly. I was so comfortable with it that I removed windows XP from my father-in-law's laptop and replaced it with Ubuntu about a year ago. I had to spent a couple of hours with him to set him up but that was all to it. He has been using it happily since then.. And I have the piece of mind as I am no longer worried he will be getting malware / viruses on his laptop which is connected to my home network.

At the end of April, Ubuntu released 11.04. I upgraded my laptop but left his laptop alone. Ubuntu 11.04 release brought a radical GUI change named Ubuntu-Unity. Personally, I did not find it too difficult to use although it did not seem to me that it made things any easier than they used to be.

Today, we upgraded my father-in-law's laptop to Ubuntu 11.04 as well. I let him use it for a while and it's been absolute nightmare for him. He hated the new interface, it was way too confusing for him. One of the reason for the new interface was to simplify the interface and make it easy to find things. Unfortunately, his experience was exact opposite. So, I rolled him back to Classic Ubuntu (Gnome) interface. You can find detailed instructions here to roll back.

"The new, highly simplified desktop interface “borrowed consciously” from “other successful platforms,” including Windows and Mac OS X, Shuttleworth said." according to eweek.com.

So, I will have him try OS X to see if he is going to have the same challenges. If he can use OS X just fine, then maybe these borrowed ideas were not implemented well enough in Unity.

Update [08/01/2011]: He found OS X easier to use than Unity.

Simplee

2011-07-21T13:16:00.003-04:00

Simplee is a new service that is worth checking out. If you are using Mint.com for your finances, you can think of Simplee as the Mint of your healthcare spending.

Set up is easy. You have to provide your credentials to log into your healthcare provider's web, and then rest is a well designed page that you can see an overview of your healthcare situation and can drill down as necessary.

It was quite astonishing to see how high the charges are and how you are shielded (or not) from such costs.

There is some information that I am not able to explain as it claims that I owe some money because of some visits but in reality my healthcare provider covered those. Not sure if it is some kind of mistake or just a misunderstanding on my part. They have a Twitter account where you can post questions as well.

Oh, here is the LifeHacker article on it.

Passwords - 2

2011-07-03T14:52:00.001-04:00

It's been two years since I posted an entry about Passwords and highlighted an issue where even a highly respected company like Amex would only allow you to create weak passwords.

Chase too has some 'interesting' limitations on what I can use in passwords. The reason I am highlighting Amex is that their version is extreme + I love Amex! My experience with their customer service has always been quite positive. Anyway, back to subject...

Two years ago, below were the rules under which American Express 'allowed' you to create a password:

Your Password should:
* Contain 6 to 8 characters - at least one letter and one number (not case sensitive)
* Contain no spaces or special characters (e.g., &, >, *, $, @)
* Be different from your User ID and your last Password

Two years later rules have changed for better, but not by much:

Your Password:
* Must be different from your User ID
* Must contain 8 to 20 characters, including one letter and number
* May include the following characters: %,&, _, ?, #, =, -
* Your new password cannot have any spaces and will not be case sensitive.

Why on earth Amex would still insist that their customers cannot create CaSe SenSitiVe passwords is beyond me. It's a well known 'good-practice' to mix Upper and Lower case letters in passwords. There is no way security team in Amex does not know about this. So, why not allow it???

I asked them in Twitter to find out. Well, as you can see from exchange below. They won't say why..

While on subject, Steve Gibson has a fun page titled Password Haystack. Worth taking a look.

Google+

2011-06-28T21:06:00.003-04:00

Yay, I got invited to Google+ on day1. Great to have friends working at Google :p

Running PowerShell from NAS without Prompts

2011-06-22T15:00:00.001-04:00

It's been more than a year since I bought my QNAP TS-439 Pro NAS. Slowly I moved away from storing files locally and nowadays I store everything in there, backing up nightly to a Drobo box via front USB Interface.

Today, I wrote a powershell script that was only a couple of lines long to dump Docsis Diagnosis Info of my Modem (See DocsDiag). It simply prints verbose info on a file that has date + time stamp.

$cmd = "java -cp docsdiag.jar docsdiag -vv"
$zaman=get-date -uformat "%Y.%M.%d_%H.%M"
$dosya="modem.diags_" + $zaman + ".txt"
Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock { invoke-expression $cmd } |out-file $dosya

I stored the file in my "HomeShare" which I map from my NAS. When I ran the script I got the familiar Execution Policy warning that you would see if you download a script file from internet, "OR", if you run the script from a network location.

Security Warning
Run only scripts that you trust. While scripts from the Internet can be useful, this script can potentially harm your computer. Do you want to run Z:\scripts\powershell\cable\get-ModemInfo.ps1?
[D] Do not run [R] Run once [S] Suspend [?] Help (default is "D"):

If you're doing this at your office, and your devs need to run scripts from Network Location, then you would probably use GPO to set Execution Level for these scripts and use Internet Explorer GPO settings to define your network (possibly using your domain name as in *.foobar.com) as Local Intranet.

For a home user like me, however, without a domain but with network storage, solution is to make changes manually:

Set Execution Policy to either RemoteSigned (recommended) or Unrestricted. For this, launch PowerShell as admin (right click start as Admin) and type
```
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned or Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
```
I know some people may not feel easy about setting scripts to Unrestricted but I write my own scripts, do not download from Internet and run them. As long as I am on the terminal, I can bypass this check anyway.
I defined my NAS in "Local Intranet" in Internet Explorer Zone Settings. I have several mappings from my NAS, and use both IP address and an alias when mapping drives, so I added both:
In IE, Tools > Internet Options > Security > Local Intranet > Sites, Clicked Advanced and

added file ://qnap (qnap is an alias in my c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\Hosts file for my NAS IP)
added 192.168.1.10 (IP address of NAS)

This did the trick. I no longer get the prompt. Funny thing is that Cablevision came by today replacing my old Cable Modem which was running Docsis 1.1 with one that's running Docsis 3.0. An then I found out that I can no longer query my modem using DocsDiag utility because apparently ISPs are now blocking SNMP.

Update [07/02/2011]
What a difference switching to Docsis 3.0 modem did! Speed test is rarely reporting under 14Mbit/s even on busy evening hours.

On Hacking Windows with Scripting Tools

2011-05-15T21:42:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I installed my new PC and as I install more and more apps over time, the list of those that creep into system start-up increases. so, I ran ever-useful Autoruns and deleted the unnecessary ones.

It's not always easy to recognize what each executable is all about. E.g. "JMB36X IDE Setup" is the title of an app here: %windir%\RaidTool\xInsIDE.exe. At the end, it was harmless and I had it probably b/c I have a JMicron JMB36X chipset on the motherboard and vendor installed all the utils (Although I did not have a RAID config).

Anywho, sometime ago I had noticed that "gathernetworkinfo.vbs" was scheduled to run every week on my Win7 and tracked it down to a Microsoft script but while looking up its uses I found a good white-paper from Sans.org titled "Using Windows Script Host and COM to hack Windows". All that stuff is even more relevant as PowerShell is gaining in popularity and thanks to .NET PowerShell has even more power than WScript ever had.

Nexus S Battery Awesomeness!

2011-04-20T00:31:00.000-04:00

In my previous post, I mentioned how upset I was with Google Maps and specifically with Latitude as it was draining battery of my Nexus S. I was fully charging the phone over night and finding the battery hitting 10% in about 8 hours even if I did not use the phone at all.

OK, here is the awesome news. After 31 hours I still have 33% left on battery!!!! Just to get the screenshots of this, I installed the JDK and Android SDK (it's a shame I had to go through all that just to get a screenshot).

I updated many apps in the last couple of days so I am not really sure what exactly caused this incredible improvement but I am hoping it will stick around.

Sad State of Optimum Cable

2011-04-15T22:25:00.000-04:00

Typical night-time pain :( This has been going on for almost a year. Day time speeds approach 15Mbit/s but that does not help as most folks would really need it in the evening.

Using Latitude on Android? Bad move...

2011-04-08T22:31:00.000-04:00

Google's Latitude has been around for a while. It only made sense for me once both my wife and I started to use Android (Google Nexus S). With Google Latitude, it was possible to keep track of each other and coordinate life events better...

Unfortunately, I noticed that my battery was going down much quicker and "Battery Used" reports were pointing to "Maps". As I was not really using maps or gps, I suspected Latitude, which is part of Google Maps suite, was the cause.

I posted a question on Google Mobile forums asking if anyone else was seeing the same issue. Only one person reported the exact same issue and also suggested to log out of latitude. Tested it and confirmed that it worked well, which makes the latitude and possibly the history feature the culprit. Filed a defect here. Hopefully, they will fix it soon, I like to be able to use it again!

Never ending Flash Plugin Issues

2011-03-31T13:35:00.000-04:00

I've been using Google Chrome since the first day it was available for download and has made it my primary browser at home. It's been causing me some grief when I tried to upload files in gmail for sometime (nothing gets uploaded) and I have opened a case with Google.

My bug report was then merged into another one related to "Flash". Since then, I learned that it's the Adobe Flash Plug-in that's causing the problem. There are several threads, that are still going on for about a month now and it is not clear whether the issue is yet finally fixed.

In a similar case, after I upgraded several Macs to OS X 10.6.7 and installing Firefox 4, people started to complain. Upon investigation, we found out that Flash plug-in was the culprit and disabling it would fix freezes.

Here are the link on latest flash issues:

Chrome: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=75627
Firefox : http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/798754

Oh wiki, wiki!

2011-03-27T15:34:00.000-04:00

I was cleaning up some old bookmarks and came across "School of Athens" wiki link. The picture is a great piece of art.... and then I saw this!

I went ahead and fixed it. Here is my revision. What would Wiki do without me :p

Amazon App Stores

2011-03-22T20:58:00.000-04:00

As expected, Amazon announced their "App Store" today for Android, and Apple sued them for using "App Store". Meh, what's new?

Here is something I did not expect though... I visited Amazon's app store and installed a couple of apps like "Wifi Analyzer". I still use AppBrain.com to find out if there are newer versions of my apps. It always detects updates faster than Google's Android Market (i.e. Google's App Store).

AppBrain showed me that there was a newer version of "Wifi Analyzer". I clicked to install, AppBrain transferred request to Google's Android Market but installation failed. I checked the error, it was something like ~"bad signature". This is troubling because it means that if I want to have the latest version, I will either have to wait for Amazon App Store to have the updated version, or uninstall it and re-install from Google's App Store.

I guess it makes sense that if you buy an app from Amazon App Store, you cannot use Google's App Store to upgrade it. I wish this was not the case for free apps though. Maybe some day Amazon and Google will work out a deal so that user may use either App Store for upgrades.

Cypherpunks

2011-03-06T14:42:00.000-05:00

I came across an absolutely fascinating article on cryptome.org titled "The Cypherpunk Revolutionary". It's about now famous Wikileaks founder Julian Assange but also a bit about Cypherpunk community.

Wikipedia article on Cypherpunk mailing list Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP. I remember using it in early 90s. E-mail was uncommon in the country I was working in (and internet not existent), so many people were using a single e-mail address for both personal communication and to a lesser extend for business. I was using PGP to communicate with my wife (then girl-friend).

Bram Cohen is another familiar name from the mailing list. I remember reading in the 2005 Wired article titled "The Bittorrent effect": "Cohen in fact has Asperger's syndrome, a condition on the mild end of the autism spectrum that gives him almost superhuman powers of concentration but can make it difficult for him to relate to other people".

And, then there is John Gilmore, who has such a long list of activities like founding EFF, Cypherpunks, alt usenet groups, who also got involved in what later became DHCP. what a resume, eh?

Take a look, fun read!

What can Chase tell others about you?

2011-03-03T20:23:00.000-05:00

This post is not really about technology but something that may interest you if you are a JP Morgan Chase customer. I was looking at Privacy policy and noticed this table:

Reasons we can share your personal information	Does Chase Share?	Can you limit this sharing?
For our everyday business purposes – such as to process your transactions, maintain your account(s), respond to court orders and legal investigations, or report to credit bureaus	Yes	No
For our marketing purposes – to offer our products and services to you	Yes	No
For joint marketing with other financial companies	Yes	No
For our affiliates' everyday business purposes – information about your transactions and experiences	Yes	No
For our affiliates' everyday business purposes – information about your credit worthiness	Yes	Yes
For our affiliates to market to you	Yes	Yes
For nonaffiliates to market to you	Yes	Yes

Apparently, you can exercise your federal rights to limit what Chase may share with non-affiliates.

To limit our sharing

Call 1-888-868-8618 – our menu will prompt you through your choice(s) or
Visit us online

Please note:
If you are a new customer, we can begin sharing your information 30 days from the date we sent this notice. When you are no longer our customer, we continue to share your information as described in this notice.

However, you can contact us at any time to limit our sharing.

Links may not work properly, I would suggest to logon to Chase Web site and check for privacy and security section for more info.

WoW & Rift

2011-03-01T23:23:00.000-05:00

Many long-time World of Warcraft (WoW) players (blink*) are (gulp!) 'bored'. The latest expansion is already "old content" after three months. Many stopped doing heroics as there is nothing to buy with Justice or Valor points. Achievement freaks are still finding stuff to do of course but excitement is gone. The fact is, there is not much to do right now until 4.1 delivers new content.

There is that never-ending question whether there will be another MMO that can beat WoW? Many believe that it will not happen, WoW is an anomaly, it's unique. That may very well be the case but this is a lucrative business ( 12 month * $15/month * 10 million players = $1.8billion a year), and there will be new-comers!

Welcome Rift! It was launched today in US. Rift is yet another MMORPG which aims to combine successful components of all others that came before it. Trion, the company behind Rift, claims 1 million account sign-up. Actual numbers of sales are not known yet.

It's kinda funny to see discussions like this on whether damage meters are required or not but there was a post there that made my day. There is no question on my mind that WoW would not be so successful without thousands of add-ons. Anyone who spent some time in Elitist Jerks theory-crafting site knows that the mathematics behind WoW is mind-boggling.

I think performance-counters (be it damage meters in games) are necessary for people who would like to improve themselves. It may feel good to be in la la land for a while but most people would need to satisfy their hunger for achievement, for being a better person (at something). So why others do not want them? Check this out!

Win7 Hotfixes

2011-02-28T23:36:00.000-05:00

I came across a repository of Windows 7 hotfixes here. I do not recall exactly where I saw it but I also found a list of all Pre-SP2 (i.e. Post-SP1) hotfixes, that looked like this:

Windows6.1-KB2495523-x64
Windows6.1-KB2495655-x64
Windows6.1-KB2495786-x64
Windows6.1-KB2496290-x64
Windows6.1-KB2496820-x64
Windows6.1-KB2498993-x64
Windows6.1-KB2502789-x64

There was no description so, I created a simple Powershell script that attempts to scrape the title of relevant KB articles. It seems to work OK, so posting it here.

# Get-HotFixTitles
## I saved the file with a list of hotfixes in the current folder as hotfixes.txt
$no=gc .\hotfixes.txt |%{$null,$kbno,$null=$_ -split '-';$kbno} | %{$_ -replace 'KB',''}
$wc=New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$kb="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/"

$result = $no | % { 
            $url= $kb+$_
            $content=$wc.DownloadString($url)
            $regex=[RegEx]'<h1 class="title">(.*?)</h1>'
            $title=$regex.Matches($content) | % { $_.Groups[1].Value }            
            
            new-object PSObject -Property @{ 
                kb    = "KB"+$_
                url   = $url
                title = $title
            } 
            
        }
      $result |select kb,title| ft -a

###   or you may pipe the results to a csv if you prefer that
      $result |export-csv .\results.csv

I like dot sourcing when working with such stuff so I can slice and dice it further on the command line using the Custom Object I built:

. .\get-HotfixTitles

Then simply use $result. E.g.

$result | ?{$_ -match "GP"} |select kb,title | out-gridview

Windows 7 SP1 does not want to sleep

2011-02-27T15:11:00.001-05:00

I received my Systemax machine a couple of days ago. It came with Windows 7 x64 Home Premium Edition. I downloaded Windows 7 x64 SP1 from MSDN and installed it. Last night, I wanted to put it into sleep and suddenly got a BSOD "Internal_Power_Error"

I immediately suspected SP1 to be the cause b/c it had shutdown just fine the night before I installed SP1. There was not anything in the system logs to give me a clue. A bit of search on Microsoft sites shows that some people are seeing the exact same behavior after installing SP1 with similar specs[1]

At work, I use RSAT. So reading it in Directory Service blog that it was NOT possible to install RSAT after SP1 was already bad news for SP1, this just added to that bad taste.

There is documentation here to troubleshoot Internal_Power_Error. Interestingly, first param stops at x08 while in my case it was x09.

The other interesting bit was that crash dump file was not generated. This hotfix is supposed to fix that. I installed it and noticed that I could now put the machine into sleep. Problem was that it did not come back up from it.

Another suggested workaround was to disable "Allow Hybrid Sleep" in Power Options (see screenshot above). I tried that and and also changed the Bios Power setting so that 'hitting "space bar" would Power up the machine'. That seems to work for me. I can now put the machine to sleep and bring it back up by hitting space bar.

[1] Here are my specs:

Asus Sabertooth x58 Motherboard (common)
Intel core i7-950 3.06GHz 8M 1366 CPU
12GB DDR3 1600MHz PC3-12800 Memory
2 x 1GB Radeon 5770 Card in ATI Crossfire
24x DVD-RW w/ Lightscribe
1 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s Hitachi HD

Update (03/05/2011):
Microsoft now has a KB article titled 'Windows 7 does not go to Sleep'. It does not cover BSOD I had but has some good suggestions. I especially liked the Powercfg command line query and disable methods:

To see the list of all devices that can wake the computer, run the following command:
> Powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

HID-compliant mouse
HID Keyboard Device
HID Keyboard Device (003)
Realtek PCI GBE Family Controller

To disable a specific device from waking the computer, run the following command, or use Device Manager:

> Powercfg -devicedisablewake "devicename"

nVidia GTX 460, but which one?

2011-02-21T14:59:00.000-05:00

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that my eVGA GTS 8800 512 had gone corrupted. Falcon Northwest techs replied to my e-mail (I love how informative and friendly their responses are) and confirmed that eVGA tech recommendation on GTX 460 would be a great replacement, it would fit in just fine if I got with a <9" card and my Power Supply Unit (PSU) should be able to carry the load just fine (It's 500Watts).

So, I started reading reviews on these cards. This review from GuruD3.com is a bit dated but talks in great details about several GTX 460 cards and is a good read to understand the landscape.

Maybe conventional wisdom would dictate I go with a different brand than the one I had problem with. I did not. I loved how quite the card was. The fact that Falcon NW guys chose eVGA over others gave me more confidence. Plus, there is no such thing as never-failing-hardware-manufacturer.

For example, I liked the output options of PNY video cards and used several in the past but most of them developed fan-noise after a year or two. So, I gave up on them. If a company is using cheap mats and lowering the quality, they lose in the long run. PNY is still around, so maybe it was just that series, or it was my (lack of) luck. I am sure there are millions of PNY users out there with no issue whatsoever (and in full disclosure I still have a PNY card running on one of my much less used PCs after 9 years - oh yes sometimes I have to endure the fan-noise but it goes away after a while!).

Again, I wanted to go with a card, that is silent, performant and has good warranty. I learned that eVGA has lifetime warranty on some series (oh I am sure I will remember to register this time). Even these did not make the choice easy, as there are several eVGA cards that fit the bill.

Then I decided that I did not want an overclocked one, it's not need that for my use-case and I believe it taxes both the system (need more power / more heat) and the life of card. Finally, my choice is a non-overclocked eVGA GTX 460 1 GB card in the -AR series from buy.com which seems to have the best deal (hmm, it's really annoying me that they have a typo in the tile. It says "INVIDIA" instead of "NVIDIA". How could they miss that???).

I wish I had a BSOD

2011-02-19T22:23:00.002-05:00

I never thought I would say that but after my PC froze today, I found myself looking at a garbled boot screen and realized my video card had gone bad as well as bad sectors on the boot disk. If this was a BSOD, it would probably be a driver issue which would not be too hard to fix but now I have to replace the video card in the minimum. Bah!

I opened up my PC (Fragbox from Falcon Northwest I bought mid-2008) to see if anything got loose (I know... it's wishful thinking), but of everything was seated properly. Then checked out serial number of the video card (nVidia GTS 8800) and called EVGA. To my surprise, someone picked up the phone. I had already read on their web site that my card had a lifetime warranty. So, I asked about it and was told that I was out of luck b/c card had to be registered in the first 30 days of purchase. Apparently, Falcon Northwest had not done it of course, neither did I...

I sent an e-mail to Falcon Northwest support to ask what would be a good replacement card. Because of the shape of Fragbox, I want to make sure I buy a card that would fit in seamlessly.

Then, I started looking for a replacement PC (Cannot keep Cho'gall waiting :p). Ever since I had issues with my Fragbox last year, I had that on the back of my mind. I was thinking about new Talon from Falcon NW. It's pretty decent and had great reviews. This time though, I acted like an impulse buyer and did all my shopping in about two hours. Here is what I ordered: Systemax Sys CrossFire. Looking forward to it.

Android Google Contacts: "Other Contacts"

2011-01-30T23:00:00.000-05:00

I bought a pair of Google Nexus S phones for my wife and myself. As I use Google for my pics, contacts, docs, e-mail etc, I love the device! Integration to all the Google services are done by simply entering your Google account the first time you power on your Android device.

I've been spending some time on Google App Market and other app sites like AppBrain.com and AndroidTapp.com to find out the apps that I need, as well as getting tips from friends who are either Android users or know about cross-platform (i.e. Blackberry - iPhone - Android) apps.

Today, while tinkering with a cross-platform messaging app named "WhatsApp", I noticed that some of my contacts were not showing up on the phone. That seemed weird. I checked Google.com/contacts and noticed that they were showing up under "Other Contacts" instead of "My Contacts". I have the option to move them but I do not know who else is in the "Other Contacts" category.

I wondered what caused this and upon a little google'ing, I found out that both Gmail and Picasa creates accounts under "Other Contacts". Picasa has always been problematic when it came to sync'ing with Google Contacts for me. Apparently, Picasa had a bug in v3.8 and that caused all this mess. Issue is fixed in Picasa so that it does not now keep on moving contacts to "other contacts" but the damage is done. Comparing the number of "All contacts" to "My Contacts", I figured out that I am missing about ~100 contacts. They have also been removed from the groups I had created.

If worse comes to worst, I will need to export both lists and write a PowerShell script to figure out the delta that I have to move back and regroup them. Publish Post

I love Picasa but always had two gripes with it:

Face Recognition is excruciatingly slow when # of pics are large(have more than 50K pics) and not so intelligent (hello, I just tagged the same person 10 times already for the pics that were taken minutes apart, do the rest please?)
Cannot write the tagged info into the pic (have to use a third party tool called AvPicFaceXMPTagger)

Adding to the list: I really do not need other apps to mess with my Google contacts!

Screenshot Capturing App

2010-12-24T12:05:00.000-05:00

Just wanted to drop a note about a nifty little app called "Greenshot"... Recently, I was writing an article and needed to take some screenshot and do minimal editing to make instructions clearer.
Of course, Snag-it, from TechSmith is the leader and hands down the best tool for such things but it's not free and I could not justify buying it to myself as I rarely need to use it at home.

Greenshot is a free, open-source alternative, that did the job well. When you launch it, you will notice a new tray icon ( menu is shows on the left). It then detects when you hit "Print Screen" key in Windows, and allows you to specify the area you would like to capture. Once done, you can put annotations like some text, arrows, and shapes (circle some text, etc.) and save it as .png or .jpg (is anything else being used these days?)

That's it. If you are looking for an alternative on Windows, give it a shot.

Windows 7 Tweaking: God - Mode

2010-11-27T18:43:00.001-05:00

This is from LifeHacker: Five Best Windows 7 Tweaking Applications

I loved the God-Mode tweak. You enable it by creating a folder on your desktop with a name like this:

God-Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

It renames itself and icon changes to "Control Panel" Icon.

You can rename it as you like afterwards. Once you open up, you see tons of settings that you can change (see a scample below)
.

SlimDrivers & Realtek Audio Issue

2010-09-13T20:22:00.000-04:00

I was looking for a tool to update drivers on my pc automatically as it's too much of a trouble for me to look up each and every device and search for updates on vendors' site. I used Device Doctor in the past and it was OK with XP but mostly screwed up on Windows 7. I saw an article @Lifehacker which mentioned a new beta software called SlimDrivers and decided to test it out.

It found my USB card reader, Intel USB host controller, network card, GEForce 8800 GT 500 had old drivers and updated each one of them without any issues. It nicely suggest to create a Restore Point, in case you forget. It also suggests (well kinda force you) to reboot. It was not really needed in case of Network Card so, I think they are not really checking if the reboot is required.

The problem started when it updated my Realtek Audio Drivers. I suddenly lost the Realtek Audio Manager after the upgrade, so when I connected my headphone, for example, it would not be detected. As mine came with the Intel DG43GT motherboard, I went to intel's site and downloaded the drivers instead of rolling them back. This worked fine except that in the front of the computer it would only recognize the recording input.

I found this thread @Tom's Hardware Forums where many people had the same issue. Solution was to "disable front panel jack detection".

While at it, I also updated BIOS using Intel's Windows based update tool. Worked like a charm.

Nigerian Scam

2010-08-05T19:42:00.000-04:00

Here is the new ~~Nigerian~~ Iraqi Scam I found in my e-mail box today. Wonder if they are still able to victimize people ith such stupidity.

Hi,
How are you?. My name is Sheila and I am working with a Humanitarian Aid Organization in Al-Anbar province of Iraq. Our main work is to establish adequate Educational institutions and health care centre for the internally displaced people in the rural areas.
I got your address from a universal contact directory hence I decided to write to you personal for an urgent discussion if you don`t mind.
My main reason for writing to you is that I need your help urgently. I am planning to resign from my job due to security risk in this area therefore I want to know if you would be interested to help me secure some funds which I want to move out of Iraq as quick as possible
The total amount is 2.7 million USD (TWO MILLION SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND US DOLLARS) and I need a reliable partner out side Iraq who can assist me in the process therefore I want to know if you can be able to help me secure this money in your country on my behalf until I come and collect it back with out having any problem with you.
Actually I do not know you in person to trust you enough but I hope you can prove to me that you are reliable, and can handle this transaction competently. There is no risk involved because I will arrange how to move the fund to your country through a very safe way but Can I trust you?. Are you going to keep this money intact for me until I come and get it back from you?.
I will offer you 15% of the total amount if you would accept to assist me in this process and also I would like you to suggest any profitable venture in which I can invest some part of the money so that I will have a source of income after my resignation.
Thanks and have a peaceful day. I am looking forward to hearing from you soon.

sincerely
Mrs Sheila

Raise The Dead...Fragbox

2010-04-07T22:41:00.000-04:00

I mentioned last week that Win7 on my My fragbox 2 came down with a BSOD and I could not boot from C: drive anymore. Then worse happened and my fragbox 2 stopped powering up all together.

I contacted Falcon Northwest Technical Support by sending them an e-mail and leaving a couple of Voice Mails. Falcon keep their support in US (a great plus!). They are in PST time zone which works out fine for me as I can work with them when I get home.

Anyway, a support engineer called me back and I described my problem. Then we scheduled a call when I get home. I had pretty tried everything other than resetting CMOs. So, he went over the steps he wanted to try:

Keep computer connected to power switch but turn off the switch so there is no power but machine is grounded
Remove Graphics Card, for which I had to remove the fan over it
Reseat RAM sticks
Reseat power switches for CPU etc.
Disconnect power cord
Clear CMOS, which means moving a jumper as per ASUS P5E-VM DO documentation
Wait for a couple of minutes
Put the jumper back
Connect Graphics Card
Put everything else back
Just connect Keyboard, Monitor Cable and Power
Power Up

Fragbox is a small box. Everything is neatly placed and as the support engineer put it, "they do not expect things to go wrong", so it is not build to be very easy to remove parts. I am used to taking machines apart so I was able to follow instructions.... and it powered up just fine.

We went into BIOS to set the correct settings for my set up. Falcon Northwest documentation is great. They had sent each and every change they had done to BIOS defaults. Plus, support engineer had the settings as well. So, we set them, saved them and rebooted.

I was pretty convinced my had HD gone bad and unfortunately I was right. We ended up where we started: BSOD with "Unmountable_boot_volume". We kept on troubleshooting... He sent me an e-mail with links to Seagate's SeaTools HD Diagnostic page and instructions on what he needed.

I ran them and SeaTools confirmed that my D: drive was healthy but my C: drive had Electical Issues. Log went like this:
Started Short DST 4/7/2010 @7:44.14

DST -- FAILED - Electrical Element

Short DST FAILED 4/7/2010 @7.44.21

I ran the long test as well but it simply confirmed the issue. I powered down the PC, sent an e-mail to Falcon Northwest support about results and left for work in the morning.

I got an e-mail back later in the day that confirmed drive was bad and mentioned that Seagate might still have my disk under warranty. It had links to check if I was covered. Good news was, yes I was covered. I started the RMA process but at some point realized that I did not have the 'CODE' they were asking. Apparently, there was a newer version of the tool (2.17) than I had downloaded (2.16) which was returning this code.

I downloaded the new software from Seagate; burn the image into a CD and booted from it. I got the code they needed and finished the RMA process. When I read their documentation, which is a subject of another blog post probably, I realized that they will not give me a new HD but replace it with a refurbished one :(

Anyway, there is more to story actually. When I came back, my power up issue was back as well. I had hoped that clearing CMOS would fix it but apparently it had not.

Here is how it goes:

I click power button
I hear fan noise 1 sec, it stops
2 secs of silence, fan noise again for power up for 1 sec and it stops
same as above...
15mins later...
fan does not stop this time and computer boots up

I felt like this was either a Mobo or PSU (possibly capacitor) issue and descibed this in an e-mail to Falcon Northwest support. I got a call back and we discussed what needs to be done and I tried to remove the Hard drive but as I mentioned above it's not really build so that you can easily remove parts. In fact, I realized that there is no way for me to remove the hard disk without 'breaking' something.

At this point, support engineer told me that he will talk to his supervisor to see if my machine would be covered, what will be the warranty situation and give me a call back tomorrow. I am kinda stuck because I cannot take out the HD anyway and I do not know at this point if the power up issues I have been having ever since I got the Mobo replaced last summer are at all relevant to this HD or not (my guess - NOT!).

I checked Falcon Northwest site and they have 3 years warranty on Fragboxes but it seems that mine had only a year :( My previous Mobo change was covered under warranty but I kept on having issues since then as well and it got worse and worse with power. So I do not know if they will stand behind their product or not at this point. We will find out tomorrow. Hopefully, I will post good news!

Shopping for a new (gaming) PC

2010-04-04T21:14:00.002-04:00

Now that my lovely fragbox is dead :( I wondered what's the latest out there in terms hardware. My Fragbox 2 cost me about $2K in Aug 2008 and came with

nVidia 8800 GTS 512MB PCIe
Intel Core 2 duo E8500 - 3.16 GHz 1333FSB
Crucial 2x2GB DDR2 PC2-6400 800MHz

So, 1.5 yrs later, my nVidia card is about 3-4 tiers down from today's top graphics cards as per this recent article from Tom's Hardware Guide - Graphics Hierarchy Chart.

Similarly, Tom's Hardware Guide - CPU Hierarchy Chart of March 2010, puts my then top of the line CPU as a third tier CPU now.

These are great articles to help understand where technology is now compared to my current gear. I will keep on adding links here while researching.

More Fragbox Issues

2010-04-04T16:51:00.002-04:00

My "fragbox" is causing me so much frustration these days. I feel like I am done with it and although I loved it when it's running , at this point I feel like a new (gaming) rig is in order. So, how did this happen? Unfortunately, it kept on going worse over time...

At some point in the last 6 months, when it went into sleep, it would not come back and I had to power off, power on again (here is one of my previous blog posts about this).. So, I disabled all sleep modes to keep it up and running. Then again, I did not want to waste so much energy, so I started powering my pc off at night. For the last couple of months, when I power it off, it would take me an hour to power it up. It's the most puzzling thing I have seen...

Phase 0) I connect the power cable, see the motherboard light up and nothing happens when power button is pressed...
Phase 1) At some it powers up, I see fans spinning but it only does that for a sec and then stop.
Phase 2) I keep on pressing power and reset buttons and disconnect/reconnect power cord, in that 1 sec period when fans are spinning and they keep on spinning, but when I take my fingers off of the buttons, the stop again.
Phase 3) Finally, when I take my fingers off, fans keep on spinning, HD spins up and pc starts running just fine.

I kinda got used to the frustrating routine. Power outages are not common so I kept my pc running. I still had to go thru this every other months for some brief power outage (winter has been harsher this year). Unfortunately, it got worse...

Yesterday, all of a sudden pc crashed. Windows 7 has been rock solid for me, so I was surprised and immediately started thinking about any recent updates I made to it... Could it be the nVidia driver update that was supposed to fix overheating issues?

My question was answered when I tried to recycle and see the ugly face of real problem:

0x000000DE Unmountable_Boot_Volume

I had noticed (especially when playing wow) that my computer would freeze for a sec, as if it's trying to read a sector but cannot do it immediately and I would hear ticking sound of my hard drive.

I also recalled seeing some Ubuntu event logs sometime ago that suggested something was not right with the hard drive.

I tried hitting F8 to bring up boot options to see if Safe mode would work but none of the options worked. Even trying to boot with Win7 CD failed (I ended up in a black screen with mouse only). So, I gave up on the hard drive, which really did not have anything other than OS and a couple of settings (Google Picasa, WoW addons etc) I would want to keep.

Enter Ubuntu Live CD (v8.04). I booted using the live CD to see if I could access my drives and move data to my Qnap NAS.

I was able to access Qnap, my D drive but C drive (boot drive) was not accessible. I started google'ing and saw a nice article that basically was suggesting the exact same steps. The step I had forgotten was to create a temp folder to mount C:

sudo su -
mkdir /media/disk
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/disk -o force

I got a warning but it worked, I was able to access C drive. Unfortunately, I could not copy everything I wanted off to NAS as it gave me 'read source' errors time to time but got most of it.

Then I used the following command to mark my C drive as 'dirty' for Windows to pick up and fix (at least that's the theory).

ntfsfix /media/disk

I wanted to give Win7 cd another try at this point. The good news was that it worked this time and brought me to the install screen. The bad news, however, was that it no longer detected my primary hard disk where previous installation was.

I went ahead and installed Windows 7. All went fine.... until I came back in the morning to notice that PC was somehow shutdown and I was back to Phase 0 of my power issue. All my searches for Asus P5E-VM DO returned nothing about why could this be happening and at this point it seems to I have to talk to Falcon Northwest support to get this shipped and fixed over there...again (see RIP - My Falcon Fragbox 2).

SIDs

2010-03-28T21:33:00.002-04:00

Mark Russinovich wrote about "The Machine SID Duplication Myth" on his blog last year where he explained why he had retired a utility called "NewSID" that he had written more than a decade ago.

Today, I saw an e-mail that referenced to this article. And while reading the discussion, I started to wonder if there was a way to list SIDs of users using PowerShell instead of other well-known tools like SysInternals utility PSGetSID.

I was almost sure that it would be somewhere in WMI but obvious first question with WMI is how to find it. I remembered seeing Jeff Snover's blog on 'Exploring WMI' which gave me an idea about how to look. I had to start somewhere to search for SIDs so I started searching for WMI classes that included keyword 'account':

PS C:\> gwmi -list *account* |ft -auto


NameSpace: ROOT\cimv2

Name                Methods  Properties
----                -------  ----------
MSFT_NetBadAccount  {}       {SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR, TIME_CREATED}
Win32_Account       {}       {Caption, Description, Domain, InstallDate...}
Win32_UserAccount   {Rename} {AccountType, Caption, Description, Disabled...}
Win32_SystemAccount {}       {Caption, Description, Domain, InstallDate...}
Win32_AccountSID    {}       {Element, Setting}

Win32_AccountSID seemed like the best match but it turned out a bit more difficult to read than I expected:

PS C:\> gwmi win32_accountsid |select element,setting |ft -auto

element                                                                                  setting
-------                                                                                  -------
\\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_Group.Domain="AHFB",Name="Administrators"                        \\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_SID.SID="S-1-5-32-544"
\\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_Group.Domain="AHFB",Name="Distributed COM Users"                 \\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_SID.SID="S-1-5-32-562"
\\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_Group.Domain="AHFB",Name="Event Log Readers"                     \\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_SID.SID="S-1-5-32-573"
\\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_Group.Domain="AHFB",Name="Guests"                                \\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_SID.SID="S-1-5-32-546"
\\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_Group.Domain="AHFB",Name="IIS_IUSRS"                             \\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_SID.SID="S-1-5-32-568"
...

Simply using Win32_UserAccount showed me the user accounts & their SIDS in a cleaner way:

PS C:\> gwmi win32_useraccount |select name,sid |ft -auto

name            sid
----            ---
Adil Hindistan  S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-1000
Administrator   S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-500
Bezen           S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-1002
Guest           S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-501
HomeGroupUser$  S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-1013
__vmware_user__ S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-1012

Similarly, Win32_SystemAccount can be used to display SIDs of System accounts or Win32_Account can display both user and system account info.

Popular Science Archive Available Online

2010-03-05T19:18:00.000-05:00

All 137 years of Popular Science magazine has been digitalized and is available here .... courtesy of Google Books!

Resolving Office 2010 Beta Activation Issues

2009-12-20T12:40:00.001-05:00

My Office 2010 Beta installation has been working fine for the most part but apparently activation kept failing. Here is the step by step fix posted at MSDN Social. If you are getting 0x8007232B or similar errors when trying to activate Office 2010 Beta, give it a try.

Yes, I want to empy deleted items folder

2009-11-20T14:07:00.002-05:00

It looks like I hit another annoying bug with Outlook 2010 Beta. Every time I exit outlook, I get the following prompt:

Do you want to permanently delete all the items and subfolders in the "deleted items" folder for all accounts.

Under Outlook Options > Advanced > Start and Exit, I have the following option checked off:
"Empty deleted items folders when exiting outlook"

Problem is that even if there is nothing in the deleted items, I still get the prompt. It is possible to stop this by unchecking the option above but that would mean deleted items will need to be purged manually.

In 2007, there was an option that read "do not prompt when emptying deleted items". This option is no longer available...

I found a discussion about this on MS social but no solution as of yet.

Outlook 2010 Beta - Issue with smtp

2009-11-19T11:47:00.000-05:00

I downloaded 2010 Beta bits from MSDN yesterday and installed over Office 2007. Upgrade was successful. The new Outlook interface is neat! I know there are several new features and by default it now sorts by Conversation & Date, which is how I prefer to read my e-mails, especially at work. It helps me to see the whole thread on a subject.

The only problem I have had was when receiving the e-mail. By default, Outlook 2007 used the following ports
POP3: 995 (SSL)
SMTP: 587 (TLS)
as per Gmail documentation

Outlook timed out sending e-mails with these settings. I tried a couple of times but I kept on getting time-out messages with an error:

Task 'smtp server name - Sending and Receiving' reported error (0x8004210): 'The operation timed out waiting for a response from the sending (SMTP) server. If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).'

Message seems a bit generic as Microsoft listed this as an issue message for Outlook 2002. Anywho, problem is solved now but I am not clear what did the trick. Here is what I did:

Changed SMTP to : 465 SSL
After e-mail was successfully sent, I changed SMTP back to 587 (TLS). It is still working. Go figure!

How should I solve 'backup' issue?

2009-10-21T22:57:00.000-04:00

My Western Digital MyBook Pro died a couple of months ago and when I took it apart (it was really painful) I realized that I did not have a TB drive in it. Instead, it was 2 x 500GB Western Digital HDs. Apparently, they were using JBOD technology to offer 1TB space.

So either I had to find a similar card or forget about recovering backup data on the HDs and think about getting a new external backup system. I have an 4 year old HP XW6000 sitting idle with 2x750Gig drives in it. So, I thought I could try freeNAS. I installed it on a 64KB usb stick. It was able to detect my drives but sharing them proved to be quite challenging for whatever reason.

I started looking at other alternatives and one of my friends suggested I take a look at Drobo. So I did. It's simply impressive although there are several horror stories about it. It's using a proprietary technology to mix and match different size hard drives and that was the biggest reason I was sold. I have several healthy HDs that I did not want throw away.

So, I ordered it ($350) from Amazon the other day with two 1.5 GB HDs (2 x $120). 1 from Seagate and 1 from Western Digital. A common mistake is that people just go and buy 2 (or 4 ) of the same make/model hard drive and they usually fail at times close to each other (yeah happened to me in an earlier life).

With 200MB/min HD video clips of my two year old and thousands of pics a month, soon the drives at my Fragbox2 will not be enough and I know I will have to move some stuff to Drobo. That defeats the purpose though. Using Drobo as storage would mean, I need to back up drobo somewhere else as one should NEVER have data in a single drive (or location or...)...

While doing the research though, I fell in love with real-deal NAS solutions. Especially QNAP & Synology have terrific feature-sets for such solutions. My friend gave me a great idea: Use one of these NAS solutions as your primary/secondary data storage area on network, then connect drobo to it and use the 1-button backup on these NAS solutions to back them up! I loved the idea.

Right now I am eyeing QNAP TS-410 Turbo (~$450). TS-439 Pro with its 1GB DDRII RAM and 1.6GHz Intel processor looks sexy but is double the price. 4x1.5TB HDs will cost around another $500. Such solutions are not cheap.

Cloud is another way to go for backup. Prices came down and $50 to $60 a year does not seem a bad price to pay for back-up. It has the advantage of reaching your data from anywhere as well.

By the way, while I was doing research, I re-discovered a neat feature of Google: www.google.com/Products. It's very useful to find all kinds of information, including price, about a product.

Also when using Google to search for recent reviews, you can simply put the product name and add +October +2009 then expand "Show Options" and choose reviews from left hand side menu.

Hippo File Update Checker

2009-10-20T23:08:00.000-04:00

I had mentioned FileHippo.com when I was posting about links to download offline install version of Google Chrome. LifeHacker mentioned their Hippo File Update Checker as a way to keep up with the latest updates to the software you have on your PC. I tried it and looks pretty decent!

Home (The Movie)

2009-10-17T15:52:00.000-04:00

This is a must-see documentary about Earth and how we change it.

What's new in PowerShell 2.0

2009-10-13T22:52:00.000-04:00

I find myself going back to to this great blog entry on Huddled Masses by Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett, so I am going to add an entry here for it.
Here is also a PowerShell blogs pipe that I shamelessly cloned from his original one and customized a bit.

Google Wave Invitation

2009-10-01T10:14:00.000-04:00

Yay! I got my Google Wave invitation and have 8 invites to send out *grin*. If you are reading this, chances are you are eager to get one... Hmm, read on.

When I started bloggin in 2004, my second post was about how I was trying to get a gmail invite and how someone sent me one. It made me happy then and I want to make a fellow netizen happy.

I need your e-mail address to send an invite but I would not want you to be an easy target for spammers so be creative when you are leaving it...

(For example: if your e-mail address is johnny_boy@hotmail.com, before@johnny_boy after@hotmail.com)

I will collect the requests tonight and send one to a random person.

Google Chrome Offline (Standalone) Installer

2009-09-30T10:42:00.006-04:00

I had a post on how to download full Google Chrome earlier this year. Ghacks has a recent post on how to download the offline version:

All that these users need to do is to append the parameter standalone=1 to the website where Google Chrome can be downloaded. Here are the two download links for the latest official and latest beta version of the Google browser:

Latest official: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?standalone=1
Latest beta: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?extra=betachannel&standalone=1
Latest Test: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?extra=devchannel&standalone=1

They warn that this version may not auto-update, but that may be exactly what you want in your environment if you would like to deliver versions in a controlled manner.

Unfortunately, when I tried this I kept on downloading the same version (172.28) as Prod only. According to Google Chrome Release Blog, QA is in v3 and Dev channel is in v4 right now.

I searched thru Google Chrome Forums and found a link to download full executable for every single release: http://www.filehippo.com/download_google_chrome/
and yet another one here:
http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Google-Chrome-Download-108166.html

Double-clicking Logitech

2009-09-28T21:12:00.000-04:00

As if I do not have enough issues with my computers these days, apparently my Logitech G7 mouse died. Yes, I said "apparently" because it works just fine except a little annoyance: 7 out of 10 times when I simply left click, it treats it as a double click.

I noticed this a couple of days ago and it got worse. I played with every mouse setting to no avail. Then, googled it to see if this was a reported Windows 7 issue and it turned out that this is a "common" case with mouse brands today that "microdrive" fails. From what I read, some people claim that Logitech mouses are especially notorious & exhibit this problem after a year or so. Although my case would certainly fall into that category, I doubt that there is a systematic problem with Logitech mouses.

A couple of months ago, this would be a perfect excuse to buy a Razer, who by the way created a new mouse - called "Naga" - that seems to be specifically targeting World of Warcraft players [17 buttons & custom interface for WoW = drool]. I still can't get myself pay $130 for a mouse though. So no "mamba" for me.

CPU Fan Error Thriller - The Saga Continues

2009-09-26T21:25:00.003-04:00

After my post about the error "CPU Fan Error!", I had two days without any issues but today error is back. I had left my computer on for a couple of hours and apparently it went into deep sleep mode (S3). I came back and moved the mouse - nothing happened! O_o
Then, I hit the keyboard, knowing it would not help... I had one option left, Power button to wake up the PC.

It did wake up but really like an annoyed person coming back from deep sleep. Fans roared full speed for 15 secs; then a brief silence as if power went off... Finally a blinking cursor on the screen and BIOS messages showing up. Unfortunately, BIOS messages stopped at some point as before and after 20 secs of silence I saw the familiar message printed on the screen:
"CPU Fan Error!
Press F1 to continue.

I hit F1 and loaded Win7 but I knew what was coming: 'computer freeze every other second'...

So, I rebooted and decided to disable Q-Fan again but I failed to hit "del" key to go into BIOS on time and noticed a new message:
Overclocking Failed! Please enter Setup to re-configure your system

In fact, these two messages seems to be related. My system has arrived overclocked from Falcon Northwest; I know that because they mentioned every single BIOS change they made in their documentation (kudos). When a system is overclocked, it may generate more heat; again referring to incapacity of the fan to do its job...

The reason I had bought the system was WoW but I quit WoW a couple of months ago. So I turned overclocking off as I do not need the every piece of cpu cycle these days.

Of course, it is still bothering me that this is happening; and I am not totally convinced that this is a hardware story. It could very well be that Win7 has something to do with this. I am, for example, noticing some other "System" errors in Event Log like
"The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has reported an invalid current state 32"
There was a report in nVidia forum today that problem was resolved after installing latest Win7 beta drivers. I have not however seen the same issues reported there.

At this point, I thought I should switch to something more productive and do some investigation with PowerShell, like when did these messages appear and how many of them were in system log:

get-eventlog system -entry error  |where {$_.message -match "nvidia"} |ft -auto
Index Time         EntryType Source                  InstanceID Message
----- ----         --------- ------                  ---------- -------
74903 Sep 26 19:04 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
74614 Sep 25 00:03 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
74456 Sep 24 23:07 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
74343 Sep 24 23:04 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
74198 Sep 24 22:57 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
74037 Sep 24 22:31 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
73887 Sep 24 22:02 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
73758 Sep 24 21:58 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
73399 Sep 22 00:06 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
73164 Sep 21 00:02 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...

So, apparently this nVidia problem is also a recent phenomenon. I checked Microsoft's documentation on event id and did not see anything to worry me. So, I went back to PowerShell and started playing with it a bit more...

How many errors did my system have in System Log?

(get-eventlog system -entry error).count
39

Some people actually doing that in a different way. First get the events from log & then count them:

$events=get-eventlog -logname system -entryType error # I used the long notation here
$events.count
39

I actually like that "(something).property" way of getting properties but assigning it to a variable first is much more useful if you will re-use the object. For example, if I wanted to find out what sources generated these errors (i.e. group them):

$events |group source |FT count,name -auto #It centered the output without -auto

Count Name
----- ----
   20 DCOM
   11 Service Control Manager
    3 HECI
    3 EventLog
    2 Serial

Or if I wanted to see only certain fields:

$events |ft TimeGenerated, Source, Message -Auto

TimeGenerated         Source                  Message
-------------         ------                  -------
9/26/2009 7:10:33 PM  DCOM                    The description for Event ID '-1073731808' in Source 'DCOM' cannot be ...
9/26/2009 7:04:13 PM  Service Control Manager The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has reported an invalid curr...
9/26/2009 7:03:31 PM  HECI                    HECI driver has failed to perform handshake with the Firmware.
9/26/2009 7:03:40 PM  EventLog                The previous system shutdown at 5:09:01 PM on ?9/?26/?2009 was unexpec...
9/26/2009 2:39:20 PM  DCOM                    The description for Event ID '-1073731808' in Source 'DCOM' cannot be ...
9/25/2009 12:03:26 AM Service Control Manager The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has reported an invalid curr...
...

Btw, did you also notice that in the first example I only typed "entry" instead of "entryType", that's because you can type the minimum number of chars sufficient enough for PowerShell to identify which parameter you meant.

I also tend to skip default parameter names. For example, default parameter for "get-eventlog" is of course EventLog name which is represented by "-logname string" parameter. You can skip -logname if nobody else will read your code:

get-eventlog system

As usual to get list of event logs simply type:

get-eventlog -list

  Max(K) Retain OverflowAction        Entries Log
  ------ ------ --------------        ------- ---
  20,480      0 OverwriteAsNeeded       1,142 Application
  15,168      0 OverwriteAsNeeded           0 DFS Replication
  20,480      0 OverwriteAsNeeded           0 HardwareEvents
     512      7 OverwriteOlder              0 Internet Explorer
  20,480      0 OverwriteAsNeeded           0 Key Management Service
   8,192      0 OverwriteAsNeeded         127 Media Center
  16,384      0 OverwriteAsNeeded           0 ODiag
  16,384      0 OverwriteAsNeeded         263 OSession
                                              Security
  20,480      0 OverwriteAsNeeded       4,321 System
     512      7 OverwriteOlder            415 Windows PowerShell

help get-eventlog -examples

has several examples for common scenarios.
Fin!

CPU Fan error thriller

2009-09-24T23:46:00.001-04:00

If you read my "RIP: My Falcon Fragbox2" story, you know that I own one of these beasts.. Since I got it back from Falcon, it was working fine all these months and I love it.

Recently though, I upgraded my Vista to Windows 7 Home Premium Edition from MSDN. I know, I know it is early and many vendors do not have drivers etc etc but I love Windows 7 and could not wait!

All went well and I have been running it fine for the last month or so. Recently though, I started to see some weird behaviour from “sleep mode” again. I dont remember what setting it had originally but at some point it would not go to sleep. I mentioned that story below and I thought it was a software issue. Unfortunately it came back and the final solution I found was to change BIOS setting for sleep from S1 to S3. That had put and end to it. So, I went back and checked the setting to see if it somehow got reset. It was still in S3.

It would go to “sleep” fine; then sometime later it, fan wakes up with full ferocity and does not stop running. This kept on happening so I started to shutdown the machine instead of putting it into Sleep. I started to notice another weird behaviour though. Windows would come up fine but after I logged in, it would suddenly start to act up. Basically it was running for 2secs and freezing for 2secs. I could see this behaviour clearly by simply moving the mouse around. It was quite weird and I had no idea what was causing it as I had not installed any software (I did inplace upgrade) recently. I was annoyed but figured out that rebooting system would clear this issue.

The worst happened today though. I cold booted the system and noticed an error:
CPU fan error!
Press F1 to continue.

I was freaking out at this point and immediately opened the case only to find out that all fans were plugged properly and firmly, and they were all running just fine. So, I started to research this and found out that other people with Asus Motherboard had seen this issue. They suggested to “disable” Q-fan, which was set to “silence” mode. I tested this and it did clear the error. However, I thought this would be a risky thing to do; so kept on checking Asus site. Apparently they have a BIOS update 0902 (mine was 0802) but instructions were not too clear to me. I downloaded a utility from their site, which is supposed to allow saving bios and updating it from Windows.

When I ran it; it displayed a message which told me to remove Memory from A* banks. I checked the motherboard documentation and found out which one was A1 (I have 2 Gig at A1 and 2 gig at B1). I powered down the pc, removed all the cables and removed A1 memory. After reboot, I saw a message which said something like “Because of AMT requirement A1 bank should be filled or you may experience system malfunction”. I went ahead anyway and launched Asus update utility after logging in. This time, it did not complain and gave me the option to save and update bios. I did that and chose to reset CMOS.

All went fine. I rebooted and of course got CMOS checksum errors. I hit F1 and continued to logon to Windows. All seemed fine. Then, I rebooted and went into BIOS. Took out the awesome documentation from Falcon and reset all the setting one by one to what was documented. Saved and rebooted again. I do not see the fan error and all seems to be OK right now.

Imported old blog here

2009-09-23T22:16:00.001-04:00

When I started blogging in 2004, I had a different address. When blogger was moving to a new format, I started this one. It was not possible to merge the two for quite sometime. Today, while looking around, I found out from Blogger Buzz that this feature has been implemented already and it's very simple to import/export blogger blogs.

So, I went to my old blog and from Settings > Basic page, chose "Export Blog". Then simply logged on to this one and clicked "Import Blog" from the same location. I have it all here now, yay!

If only now, I could find a nice template to make the posting space larger...

Code Syntax Highlighting for Blogger

2009-09-23T21:54:00.000-04:00

I was envious how nice my friend, Arnoud's PowerShell blog was showing up the code and decided to look for something similar in Blogger. After a bit of searching, I found a very nice open-source tool Called SyntaxHighlighter. There is a great instruction page here.

PowerTab for PowerShell

2009-09-20T23:34:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine had mentioned to me this cool free PowerShell addon, which takes tabbing into a whole new level. You can download "PowerTab" from ThePowerShellGuy.com

A bit of registry with PowerShell

2009-09-20T23:05:00.005-04:00

I was trying some PowerShell commands to see how it works with Registry. I liked of course how I can browse registry by simply typing:

Registry:

And the way I prefer it with Get-ChildItem (gci)

gci HKLM:\Software\microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

But of course when I type that it shows me the registry keys under that path

SKC VC Name ;
--- -- ---- -------- 
3 1 OptionalComponents {(default)}

If I actually wanted to see the content, the command to use is Get-ItemProperty (gp)

gp hklm:\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run\

Kernel and Hardware Abstraction Layer : KHALMNPR.EXE
Adobe Reader Speed Launcher : "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\Reader_sl.exe"
atchk : "C:\Program Files\Intel\AMT\atchk.exe"

I removed the PSxxx properties from the results above.

So, what if I wanted remove the registry entry for Adobe Reader Speed Launcher?

Remove-ItemProperty does that:
remove-itemproperty hklm:\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run -name "Adobe Reader Speed Launcher"

Is there an alias for that? We can use Get-Alias (gal) to find out

gal | where {$_.Definition -eq "Remove-ItemProperty"} |select name 


Name
------
rp

Note that, we removed something directly under Run key. If we wanted to create a key or delete it, we would not use "*-ItemProperty" but "new-item (ni)" and "remove-item (ri)" respectively:

ni hklm:\software\blahblah
ri hklm:\software\blahblah

Interestingly, if you wanted to search for "blahblah" with gci using a filter like this:

gci hklm:\Software -include "blah*"

it would not work as registry key is a 'path'. So you would use something like

gci hklm:\software | where {$_.name -match "blah"}

gci hklm:\software | where {$_.PsPath -match "blah"}

Notice that -match (regexp search) works but -like (pattern search... more like -eq) does not:

gci hklm:\software | where {$_.name -like "blah*"}

returns nothing.

I was curious to find out why; so I typed

gci hklm:\software\ |where {$_.name -match "blah*"} |fl *

and reason is clear:
Name: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\blahblah

So, changing above search pattern to "*blah*" works:

gci hklm:\software | where {$_.name -like "*blah*"}

PowerShell bits and pieces - Search for a file

2009-09-12T23:21:00.002-04:00

I am taking some notes while discovering how to do simple things in PowerShell. What better place to store these than this blog?

Searching for a file:

Assume, We are searching for Remote Desktop Client File. I know that it's called mstsc.exe (and in fact I have a pretty good idea where it is) but assuming we don't have a clue about it's location. We would want to go to root of the drive and start searching from there. In DOS, I would run the following from the root of the drive

dir /s mstsc.exe

In PowerShell:

gci -recurse -filter mstsc.exe -EA SilentlyContinue|ft directory,name -auto

If you are not at root, add c:\

gci c:\ -recurse -filter mstsc.exe -EA SilentlyContinue|ft directory,name -auto

gci is short for Get-ChildItem (or ls or dir)

-recurse is like /s in DOS; goes recursively into subdirectories

-filter is very efficient because provider filters the results before they are passed to powershell

-EA is short for ErrorAction, which tells PowerShell what to do when there is an error. You are likely to hit access denied errors when searching. Options include

SilentlyContinue. Suppresses the error message and continues executing the command.
Continue. Displays the error message and continues executing the command. "Continue" is the default value.
Inquire. Displays the error message and prompts you for confirmation before continuing execution. This value is rarely used.
Stop. Displays the error message and stops executing the command.

Then we are piping results to FormatTable using column names and telling it to Auto Size

A couple of notes on this...

1) If the file we are searching for may be hidden, then we would want to add -force parameter when searching.

2) ErrorAction is a common parameter to PowerShell commands; not specific to Get-ChildItem. If you would like to get the explanation for a parameter of Get-ChildItem; you could type

get-help gci -parameter force

If you wanted to find out which other commands have "force" parameter; you would omit the command name like this:

get-help * -parameter force

None of these would work for ErrorAction as it's a common parameter. So, you would simply type

get-help ErrorAction

and you will notice that one of the help files is about_CommonParameters

get-help about_CommonParameters -detailed

That prints the information about ErrorAction I copied above.

Time to give PowerShell another try

2009-08-23T21:14:00.004-04:00

Today, I transferred our pictures and videos from the weekend to my PC and then diligently started tagging them... I accumulated more than 10K pictures @year since my daughter was born. It's clear that I need a lot of Tagging to do. Then it occurred to me that I could possible use the folder structure I've been using to do some of the tagging.

I use the following structure for media files

Root |

|Audio

|Video

|Pics

| {Year}

|{Month}

|{Event}

So, I could probably tag all my pics with at least year and month information and possibly add event too... and I thought PowerShell should be perfect for such file manipulations. There is a slight problem though. I am not sure how to code it... Well that brings us to our subject matter.

I was very excited when MS announced MSH (Microsoft Shell), which later was renamed to PowerShell. The moment I heard that it did not have any remote capabilities, I thought it would not go far. I still wanted to give it a shot but syntax was terse; I did not like it.

Windows 7 is out with PowerShell 2 and I have changed my mind about it; I think it's time to give it another try. There are a couple of reasons I think it's valuable to learn it:

Resources are not scarce: There is now a large enough community coding in powershell; which means it's possible to find resources
.Net!: I've been reading 'learning C#' books, and understanding whole that .net world makes understand PowerShell easier. It works the other way too.
MS Emphasis on PowerShell: Microsoft seems to be going full speed in making Powershell the premium scripting language for all products as well as OS.
It really is powerful: The more I read about it, the more I understand how powerful it is. Well, I still do not like the syntax but I am used to Perl; I am sure I can get used to it too :p

No, I have not yet figured out the language fully, although I am more comfortable with it now that I read some material. I encountered Keith Hill's blog, there are tons of useful material there and even better, he has compiled his "Effective Windows Powershell" posts into a single pdf file. I just finished reading it and found it quite useful.

I will probably post the solution I come up with about the original tagging issue, but right now I am just trying to take in as much as I can before going all out scripting. Who would think PowerShell could be fun too? :p

Windows - First Report

2009-08-18T19:31:00.004-04:00

So far, I am loving it. It seems to be a rock solid build, at least as fast as Vista. New taskbar takes sometime to get used to but after that seems more intuitive. The only annoyance I noticed is when an application prompts user, it does not stick out and there is not an easy way for user to tell it is pending for action unless that user clicks that group.

For example, if I am downloading, say Citrix ICA client and switch to another application, I would not know download finished and it's waiting for me to click "run" button unless I pay extra attention to it.

On my laptop, I also noticed an interesting situation which was not there until the final build. When I simply close the screen, I expect it to go to sleep mode. It seems to do that but every time I put the screen back up; it displays a dos window as if it is booting and even asks me if I would like to boot from the CD if I have one in the tray. If I click the "Suspend" button though, this does not happen.

Lastly, I did upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium from Vista Home edition, and noticed that a couple of application got broken. Newsleecher is one of them; I had to re-enter activation code. PowerDVD is another one; which simply launches and disappears immediately without any messages.

The new action center is a great way of finding out solutions to problems. I see some gusvc error as in the form

Log Name: Application

Source: gusvc

Date: 8/18/2009 4:22:10 PM

Event ID: 0

Task Category: None

Level: Information

Keywords: Classic

User: N/A

Computer: XXXX

Description:

The description for Event ID 0 from source gusvc cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

Service stopped

Event Xml:

0x80000000000000

18655

Application

XXXX

Service stopped

but not sure what's wrong with Google Updater. It did not seem to be affecting any functionality in Picasa or Chrome (from which I am typing this).

The other error, which again does not seem to be breaking anything I use is from Adobe (suprise?) Air

Log Name: Application

Source: SideBySide

Date: 8/15/2009 4:03:48 PM

Event ID: 63

Task Category: None

Level: Error

Keywords: Classic

User: N/A

Computer: XXXX

Description:

Activation context generation failed for "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe AIR\Versions\1.0\Adobe AIR.dll".Error in manifest or policy file "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe AIR\Versions\1.0\Adobe AIR.dll" on line 3. The value "MAJOR_VERSION.MINOR_VERSION.BUILD_NUMBER_MAJOR.BUILD_NUMBER_MINOR" of attribute "version" in element "assemblyIdentity" is invalid.

Other than these little annoyances, it's working like a champ!

Is this cool or what?

2009-08-16T15:09:00.001-04:00

Tony Darnell of www.deepastronomy.com has masterfully edited this and some more on his youtube page.

The 40 most popular SA tools

2009-08-07T21:50:00.000-04:00

Sunbelt's NTSYSADMIN was one of my favorite lists for years. These folks gathered a list of 40 most popular SA tools. Take a look.

Passwords

2009-07-08T17:26:00.005-04:00

Recently, I encountered a common issue in programming. My perl application needs to use a service account to pass some parameters to another application. One of these params is a password. So, question is how do I pass the password to the other application while securing it from people who can view the source code...

I will not go into details of the solution I came up with but discuss the "password issue" we face everyday. In today's world, almost every site requires username/pwd, give you the same simple password recovery options etc.

So, if someone is trying to hack into your account; the first thing they will try is the 'password recovery' option of the site. Some sites allow you to create your own question; but most don't. The answer to these common questions may not be that difficult to find out considering how much of our information is exposed.

What's worse? It's common knowledge that people use the same password most of the time on web sites. Assume you have a password and make it unique for each site. Much better safety but that approach is not fail-proof either if you think about the possibility that a couple of your passwords may be exposed and someone may figure out your system...

How about using a say MD5 (now broken and not safe) or SHA1 hash instead of password? Well, good thing about hash is that it's one way function. So, if you are not using the same password; then the hashes you will use will be unique for each site.

Sounds great; right? Guess what? Most sites; even the very respectable financial ones have restrictions on your password that will make them quite unsecure.

Take a look at Microsoft's often cited "Strong Password: How to create and use them"

Following is from American Express Password Change Page:

Your Password should:

Contain 6 to 8 characters - at least one letter and one number (not case sensitive)
Contain no spaces or special characters (e.g., &, >, *, $, @)
Be different from your User ID and your last Password

Check any password you create with these rules against Microsoft's Password Checker

Not surprisingly; you cannot get a strong password with these restrictions.

Only 6-8 chars, and not even case sensitive?

You cannot use any special characters??

What were they thinking ???

How about storing passwords? Well, long story short; it seems that Passpack is leading the pack. Check that one out...

Bypassing Internet Censorship

2009-06-28T20:14:00.003-04:00

It was interesting to see how much content leaked out of Iran although government censorship. Today I saw an article about psiphon, a software (guide here) that helps circumvent censorship. More information is available at their site: psiphon.ca

There is also an informative guide there titled "Everyone's guide to bypassing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide".

Vista Sleep Problems

2009-05-16T21:28:00.004-04:00

Vista on my Fragbox2 PC has a problem with sleep mode. When I click the Start > "Power button", it works for a couple of seconds; then I hear a "click" and HD and most of the PC shutsdown but fan keeps on running.

I could not remember if I had updated the firmware on it since I bought it last year but I suspected my Asus P5E-VM DO had something to do with this. Unfortunately, I failed to find anything on Asus forums.

Today, I was trying to locate what key was causing PowerDVD registration reminder to pop-up via Sysinternal Procmon and noticed that my Philips camcorder was constantly querying registry. I decided to disable it.

So, I ran Start > msconfig and while there started to clean up other unnecessary stuff like pesky Adobe Acrobat's acrobat_sl.exe.

That's when I looked closer at two Logitech start-up processes:

SetPoint.exe
KHALMNPR.exe

I knew that they belong to my Logitech G7 software; the only reason I had installed them was to dynamically increase/decrease sensitivity while playing World of Warcraft. As I quit playing it; there was no reason to keep the software. I checked the forums anyway and found out that someone else was complaining about Vista not going to sleep mode with these running.

I disabled them and rebooted. It worked. Vista sleeps happily now :)

Update:

Well, it was not happily ever after :(

I did solve the problem for good though:

Apparently there are two Sleep levels in BIOS; S1 and S3 ( dont know what happened to S2). So, I had to go into BIOS and change sleep level to let it go to 'deep sleep'.

How fast is Google Alerts?

2009-05-11T00:06:00.004-04:00

I just got a google alert; which told me that I had blogged "XML++". I recalled that I had created a Google Alert when I heard about the service quite some time ago.

I checked the alert and I had set it to be "comprehensive" and send me alerts "as-it-happens". Hmm, 'as-it-happens'? Judging from the time passed between alert and my previous blog post; it took Google ~1hr to detect my blog entry. That does not sound like 'as-it-happens' to me.

Ps. Umm, and I wonder what's up with the timing? I posted this at 00:20am EDT but see the posted time as T23:06-5:00 ???

XML++

2009-05-10T20:54:00.006-04:00

Well I could not find a better title for this post as it touches several different but connected subjects as you will find out below...

I've been an Outlook user for over 10 years and I've used it as my contacts manager until recently. Although, I am guessing very few people use it, one of the features I like is the ability to add a picture.

Times have changed. Facebook has pictures, e-mail and other contact information that I would normally keep in Outlook. Still, I would want to have Outlook as my 'authorative source' as I control what information goes in there.

Grand Central (now known as Google Voice) and gmail also has contacts and now that Google separated Google Contacts as a stand alone product; I decided to take my contacts online.

Problem is importing from Outlook to Google Contacts strips many fields, pictures being one of them. Plus there is no product out there that would import updated Facebook information to Google Contacts.

I am quite surprised that it does not exist actually but understand that Facebook is using some measures (like e-mail address is displayed as a graphics file instead of text; so any software that needs to read it need some sort of ocr capability + it may violate Facebook's terms).

All hope is not lost. There are some applications that partially helps:

FoneBook is a Facebook application that lets you import some information:
[Fonebook does not, and will never export phone numbers or email addresses - Facebook does not allow this!! Feel free to join this group to petition for it to change http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47429104064]

[For a Mac version you might want to try AddressBookSync - http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=43678885451]

Fonebook is used to transfer contacts photos and infomation from Facebook™ to Outlook®. If your phone then supports Outlook® synchronization you should be able to have your contacts photos on your phone when they call you!

This application works with both Outlook® 2003 and 2007. It is also know to work with most modern Nokias and all Windows® Smartphones/PDAs.

The application currently copies a contacts photo, profile web address, about me details, status details and if you are using Outlook® 2007 their birthday

I also found out that apparently there was an application called Facebook Downloader which made it to LifeHacker but it has been taken down by Facebook for violating their terms.
OutSync lets you select Facebook contacts and select their pics with Outlook
Gupdate is another facebook application; that attempts to sync Facebook data to Google Contacts. It can also add new contacts if they do not exist. Well, I tried it but it did not seem to do anything for me.
There is a .NET application by Koushik Dutta, a software developer, that only attempts to import pictures from Facebook to Google Contacts. Source Code is available too.

On that last note, Koushik was referring to Google Data API & Facebook Toolkit which brings me to the real reason I am blogging this. While digging thru the Google Data API, I saw a link to "The Annotated XML Specification", written by one of the XML co-authors, Tim Bray in 1998.

I was reading thru it, and found the annotations extremely helpful. So, I googled to find more on Tim Bray and found his blog "ongoing"; It's quite entertaining and enlightening.

One of his recent blog entries titled "Nastiness"; his observations and recommendation are simply awesome. He is thinking very clearly and communicating well. I am adding his blog to my Google Reader (so should you :p )!

That article actually dragged me into the incident blog and I have read some extremely well written, thoughtful articles and comments.

For example:

Reaction from Sarah Allen, who was there.
Liz Keogh looks at how talks like this lead to cognitive associations that lead to problems.
I also loved this comment about "Respect" & it made me reconsider some of the things I do
Lastly, enjoyed Giles Bowkett's rants

Vista Post-SP2 Black Screen. Is Vista slower?

2009-05-03T20:23:00.007-04:00

There are tons of XP vs. Vista posts on web. To be honest, I have a pretty fast PC and never I could care less if Vista is a couple of seconds slower than XP; it's still fast. This post is not looking to make a comparison but it is more about a couple of useful things I discovered when I was looking around post-sp2 upgrade. Here is what happened...

Post-SP2 Black Screen

I've downloaded and installed Vista SP2 on one of my laptops and noticed that there was an extended period of "black" screen during boot time. I did not pay much attention to it but today I noticed the same thing on my desktop post SP2.

Vista Logs

It tickled my curiosity and I started looking around. Soon, I found out that Vista Logs are incredibly detailed and there is abundant information to diagnose such stuff. That is great news because I always hated XP's inability to tell me what was causing slowness during boot. I would sit there and watch for 4-5 mins painfully while my laptop crawls to a start. Of course I tried invaluable Sysinternal tools like Procmon to watch boot process and try to sift thru hundreds of thousands of records which was mostly useless...

So, first I headed to Control Panel to see what was Vista reporting recently:

Control Panel > Performance Information and Tools > Advanced Tools

I have not seen anything in the recent "Performance Issues" section that suggested that I was seeing a degradation of system boot but interestingly enough there was some clue to another issue I was seeing on my Pc recently; it just would not go to Sleep mode...

You will notice that at the bottom of the dialog box; there is a link to the Event Viewer; and that's the beauty of Vista. This basically means that Vista is in fact going thru performance logs and giving you a summary of recent events...

Diagnostics-Performance

To get to Diagnostics-Performance logs, you can click the link above or open up Event Viewer

Start > run > eventvwr.msc then browse to

Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Diagnostics-Performance > Operational

Under the Operational, you will see tons of events logged. There a couple of Task Categories.

Click on "Task Category" and
Select "Group Events by This Category"

From category names, it's clear that "Boot Performance Monitoring" is the one that should give us the information we are looking for.

In the screenshot above you will notice that; Vista is in fact telling us about the time it took to boot. There is more, if you click the details tab, there is actually a breakdown of boot time! I think this is a very neat feature b/c I still remember how painful it was for me to use a stopwatch to record each phase of XP boot visually and then try to match them to whatever was recorded by extended Group Policy logs and Event Logs... It's all there; in the event logs now.

When I looked at break-down of boot times, it was not easy to tell what some of them were; so I googled and in fact found an article titled "Microsoft's hidden diagnostic tool unlocks Vista startup secrets". Well, there is not much there other than what I had already found out but it mentioned two parts of boot time:

MainPathBootTime measures the time it takes for the system to load all drivers and services that are critical to user interaction and get to the Windows desktop where the user can begin doing things.

BootPostBootTime includes all the other drivers and processes that aren’t critical to user interaction and can be loaded with low-priority I/O that always gives preference to user-initiated actions that execute using Normal I/O priority.

I tried to find the follow up writing on ZD net but after spending 20mins to no avail; I gave up.

I filtered by Event ID 100-190:

On the left pane, right click on "Operational"
Click "Filter Current Log"
Replace "" with 100-190

And started to look at boot times. Apparently my boot up time was around 80000milliseconds (ie. 80 seconds) but the latest boot time was a whopping 262sec (4.3mins). Unfortunately, there was no smoking gun; and Windows did not report anything unusual in this case.

This may be OK though; because I remembered that I had also installed Office 2007 SP2 and had not rebooted yet; so this might have been the cause of delay. To be sure, I will need to reboot a couple of times and measure them to see if I was still getting 80secs.

During the investigation, I noticed that at times, some apps (McAfee Antivirus, Rawr etc) were causing delays and Windows were reporting such events. By the way, the same log is also used to determine what is blocking a machine from sleeping or causing delays during shutdown.

Conclusion

So, is Vista slower than XP? Maybe but I don't care. With XP, I could never tell what was causing slowness. Now, at least I have better visibility. Overall, I like Vista more.

Google Chrome Standalone Installer

2009-01-14T16:56:00.002-05:00

Google Chrome Standalone (aka offline) installer is available in a openly hidden :) link here:

http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?answer=126299

This version is probably more suitable for Enterprise environment as it does not attempt to auto-update itself. Auto-Updating / Home-Dialing software is usually a no-no as Enterprise IT would want to control the deployments and phase them in.

Amazing Wallpapers

2008-11-01T12:16:00.005-04:00

I just wanted to drop two wallpaper links here that I enjoyed browsing:

New URL for my tech blog

2008-09-04T14:22:00.000-04:00

Hi,

I stopped updating this blog sometime ago however I kept on blogging on the new address http://AdilHindistan.blogspot.com. I was hoping that Google will come up a with a tool to move the content from one blog to another but as of today I am not aware of any. I would like to do it once such a tool becomes available. In the meantime, I want to make it clear that this blog will continue to exist as a way to access older content but new content will be posted on http://AdilHindistan.blogspot.com.

Thanks,
Adil

RIP: My Falcon Fragbox 2

2008-09-02T18:57:00.008-04:00

I bought a Fragbox 2 gaming computer from Falcon Northwest last month. The first time I ran World of Warcraft on it, it felt awesome. Everything was incredibly smooth; I had all the settings in the game maxed up but I was never getting less than 60fps. I thought it was worth the ~$2000 and 2 weeks wait time!

Some specs:

MB: Asus P5E-VM Micro ATX Q35 Motherboard (AS-P5E-VM )

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 - 3.16 GHz 1333 FSB ( INTC2E8500 )

RAM: Crucial 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-6400 800MHz ( CR-4GBK2-6400 )

Video: NVidia 8800 GTS 512MB PCIE (NV8800GTS512 )

Storage: Seagate Sata 750GB HD 7200 RPM

ST50EFCS 500 watt power supply ( SS-ST50EFCS )

Two days ago, I was getting ready for Karazhan raid and suddenly my fragbox started to stutter. Everything became slow and at some point it became unresponsive, I was not able to restart it. So, I hard booted it by pressing the power button and all hell broke lose!

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:

1.Insert your installation disc and restart your computer

2. Choose your language settings, and then click "next"

3. Click "Repair your computer"

If you do not have this disc, contact your system administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance.

File:\Windows\System32\config\system

Status: 0xc00000e9

Info: Windows failed to load because the system registry file is missing, or corrupt.

I tried to reboot a couple of times hoping it would clear but it did not seem like the kind. So, after trying safe mode and every other option without moving an inch closer to booting into Windows, I gave up and attempted to reload Windows Vista...

Install seemed to go smoothly but after the reboot; same error showed up. As a last resort, I used the Recovery Disc that came with the Fragbox 2 package. Recovery stalled at 30% and I was prompted to either ignore the errors or abort recovery. I chose to ignore the errors but recovery did not go thru.

I attempted recovery again and to my surprise, it completed this time but no joy after reboot:

Windows has encountered a problem communicating with a device connected to your computer.

This error can be caused by unplugging a removable storage device such as an external usb drive while the drive is in use, or by faulty hardware such as a hard drive or CD-rom drive that is failing. Make sure any removable storage is properly connected and then restart your computer.

If you continue to receive this error message, contact the hardware manufacturer.

File: \Windows\System32\Winload.exe

Status: 0xc00000e9

Info: An unexpected I/O error has occured

At this point, I looked at the warranty document and was happy to see that this:

Falcon Overnight Service

Your Falcon Overnight Service Policy: How It Works

Summary: If your Falcon system should develop a serious hardware problem that we can't solve via telephone technical support, we will pick it up via overnight courier, correct any problem, and overnight it back to you, The Falcon Overnight Service covers any applicable instance within one year of the date of purchase.

So, I sent an e-mail to support@falcon-nw.com with all the details of the issue and steps I have taken and asked them to call me back...

That brings us to today. I called them to follow up and talked to a technician who suggested that I should open up the box and re-seat cables... OK, unscrewing a couple of screws and opening up a box is no big deal but I am sure many people may feel uneasy about doing this. They do not need to know how to do this...

Anyway, I went ahead and re-seat the cables which seemed firmly in place anyway and of course nothing is fixed. Falcon support also told me that I should run some hard drive diagnostics. So, I asked where I would get the diagnostic application and he said he will send me instructions.

It's been a couple of hours since the conversation but they have not yet replied to my e-mail with instructions. I called them up a couple of times already but keep on getting Voice mail. So, I left VMs...and waiting.... Arrrgh!

[ Update - 09/04/2008]

Apparently, Falcon Support team was calling me back...but they were not calling my work number instead of the number I left with them. Anyway, person I talked to was a soft spoken, very kind person. After sorting out the miscommunication, I agreed to follow the instructions to download a Seagate tool and use it to test the drive.

I reseated the cables on the motherboard side and re-ran recovery disc as they suggested; which resulted in the same error. Then I downloaded the Seagate Diagnostic tool from http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/SeaToolsDOS207EURO.iso . 20mins after starting the diagnostic in "Long Test" mode, it stopped at 17% done. Waited for another hour but it was clearly not moving. So, I aborted the process and checked the logs which did not have anything useful about test.

I sent another e-mail to support detailing what I have done and the results. They called me back and and I said "I think at this point, I'd better ship it to you guys'. The sense I get from talking to these guys is that they sure would like to avoid shipping it if possible and work with you to fix it if you are willing to work with them, but they are not 'forcing' you to do that.

I was willing to work with them but I don't think anyone reading this should be worried if they are planning to buy a Fragbox from Falcon and would not be willing to do troubleshooting in case they hit a similar issue.

On the plus side, when I was purchasing the system, they refused to add a second hard drive as the configuration was fixed and they were not willing to modify it. Now that I encountered this issue, I asked the support person if it would be possible to buy a second 750GB Seagate drive from them and would they install it for me. He said yes and told me they could even install a drive that I would ship them if I had any extra. I am waiting for them to confirm the price. I hope it is not too much above market price.

[Update - 09/24/2008]

So, it took Falcon a week to fix issue(s) on my Fragbox 2...

First they replaced the Seagate 750gig hard drive and added the second 750gig I bought from them.... During testing, they found out that issue did not disappear.
Then, they replaced motherboard. During test, they realized that one of the RAM chips were defective although it had passed RAM test.
After replacing RAM, all went well and they installed Windows, updates drivers etc. Falcon creates a Recovery disk. So, that disc did not get created successfully at first but second attempt was successful. Oh, they also print a funny custom DVD cover with my name on it :)

They kept me informed via e-mail updates all along and I told them that although I could not wait to get back on my Fragbox, I would rather a bit and have it tested thoroughly, which they do and at the end they send a list of all checks they performed.

Of course, it sucks that my Fragbox had all these issues only after 2 months but it's clear that they are using the best parts and testing it; so cannot blame them for that. Now that I have a second drive on it, I will be able to use it not just as a gaming (ie. World of Warcraft) computer but as my main workstation at home replacing HP workstation xw6000.

Vista Tweaks

2008-06-18T15:14:00.000-04:00

I just encountered a forum entry that talks about tweaking Vista and has an extensive list. Some of them really useless crap in my opinion but there are lots of interesting and useful tweaks also... Eg. Activate hidden admin account by typing
net user administrator activate:yes
or
net user administrator "your pwd" activate:yes
Take a look!

Search Commands from Microsoft Office

2008-05-05T10:47:00.002-04:00

Woot! I never liked the ribbons as it made it more difficult for me to find out when I was looking for a command. I found myself going to help and searching many times.

Well, help is here. Microsoft seems to listen! In their www.OfficeLabs.com site, they released a new toy called Search Commands, which makes finding command in office very convenient. Try it out, if you are one of those users annoyed by ribbons.

Best Programming Language To Learn

2008-04-04T17:58:00.003-04:00

I think it was 1988 when I learned my first programming language: Basic. I will never forget the first day when teacher wrote I = I +1 on the screen, and for a second it made no 'matheatical' sense at all :) I liked Basic!

Anyway, most Engineering applications were written in some variation of Fortran then, so that's what I learned in college. I never really liked Fortran. At the time, Computer Science students were learning Pascal, Turbo Pascal was very popular. One of the students who was very good at it gave a couple of us free lessons and that's how I learned it...

Then, when I started to work at 1993, I realized that 'Excel' (version 4, then) was 'the' application that was used for everything around me. Accounting was using it as well as Engineering teams. So, I learned about Macros and later VBA, which made life so much easier! At some point, I jumped from VBA to VisualBasic.

When 'Web Master' became a cool term, I learned about html and ASP. That was a nice combo and helped me do a lot of cool stuff around year 2000.

Later on, when I started to dig into Unix/Linux world, it became clear that Perl would help and together with shell scripting; it did in a big way when automatic tasks in Unix! Although I became proficient with VBScript/WMI scripting, ActivePerl is still my preferred choice in Windows b/c of it's spectacular power with regular expressions (Well VBScript became better with regular expressions and introduced "Dictionaries" (Hashes) yet I don't think it matches Perl).

So, I was thinking what to do next? Java has been out there for quite a while. I was interested in PowerShell but became disillusioned with version 1. AutoIt3 seems interesting but not super easy or intuitive. I keep on hearing about Python (check out this link for some resources) but I am not sure if it adds much on top of Perl...

That's why, I was quite interested when I saw the subject on LifeHacker. There is a lengthy discussion about it. Take a look if you are interested...

While waiting for GDrive

2008-03-29T12:47:00.001-04:00

Still waiting for highly speculated Google GDrive to become available... In the meantime, http://www.getdropbox.com/ seems like a nice try...

Have Phun!

2008-03-05T15:23:00.002-05:00

I just saw a cool science tool named Phun. Here is what it is 'about':

Phun is a Master of Science Theises by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt for supervisor Kenneth Bodin at VRLab, Umeå University. The solver is based on work by Claude Lacoursière
Phun is meant to be a playground where people can be creative. It can also be used as an educational tool to learn about physics concepts such as restitution and friction.

Watch out this pretty cool video and you will love it too...

Vista - Cannot Open Control Panel (Fixed)

2008-02-17T10:01:00.002-05:00

World of Warcraft was giving me headache yesterday. FPS near Ogri'la was only 4fps, although lag was not too bad (~150-200ms). So I decided to disable addons, defrag HD blah blah. I was also using procmon from sysinternals to see if there was anything hogging Vista...

I noticed SearchIndexer was a bit troublesome and stopped the service. While there, I went thru the list and disabled a couple of other that did not seem useful/applicable. One of them was "Software Licensing".

Software Licensing Service Description:
Enables the download, installation and enforcement of digital licenses for Windows and Windows applications. If the service is disabled, the operating system and licensed applications may run in a reduced function mode.

Apparently, if you disable this service you cannot open Control Panel. It looks like it's coming up but then disappears immediately. Enabling/starting service fixes the issue...

Vista - Still Bluescreens

2008-02-09T12:29:00.000-05:00

After installing Vista SP1 RC1 and moving Page file to a different hard drive, I was finally not able to get rid of BSODs when computer was idle...

After a coupel of weeks, unfortunately freezes and BSODs came back. The last one I had said something like:

Win32k.sys

Page_Fault_In_Nonpaged_Area
STOP 0x00000050 (0xFFC000000,all zeros,0x964E0FB3, All Zeros)...

Apparently, Microsoft has a hotfix for this. There is an article titled "Error message when you start a Windows Vista-based computer: "STOP: 0x00000050 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA" ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939720 )

However, this article mentioned issues during startup, which was not really my case. I kept on looking and found another KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939720 about STOP: 0x00000050.

From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617 I get the feeling that one of the drivers is not playing well with vista. I ran c:\windows\system32\verifier.exe to see if it will be able to help me pinpoint the issue.

SysPro Policy Reporter

2008-01-30T15:07:00.000-05:00

A colleague showed me this cool free tool called "Policy Reporter".

Policy Reporter makes it much easier to understand how Microsoft implements Policy Processing, which is not really transparent...

It reformats the log provided in %systemRoot%\Debug\UserMode to give a more meaningful display.

It provides a Tree structure on the left which shows major events reported in the Log. Selecting an entry in the tree structure displays that section of the log in the view window.

It also has a "Performance History" tab that loads Group Policy Performance information from the registry, including the time taken to apply the policies and what policies were applied.

It also has some other nice features such as 'Search' and 'Export to Excel'.

Note: You must activate Verbose logging to get detailed information. Policy Reporter assists in doing this.

Free Online Educational Courses

2008-01-29T12:43:00.001-05:00

Just came across two useful links:

Windows Vista SP1 RC1 Issues

2008-01-19T20:42:00.000-05:00

One of my computer is locking up almost every day. I leave it alone at night, when I come back in the morning I see it BlueScreened. I googled "Stop 0x00000077" or "KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR" and tried to find something that would explain my BSOD with Vista to no avail... and decided to try Vista SP1 RC1.

I downloaded the stand-alone version and tried to install it. It bluescreened half way there after half an hour or so (well, it said SP1 update can take hours in the screen so half an hour is great).

I tried on my other Vista machine and it even did not get that far. Then, Microsoft refreshed RC1 and I decided to try it again as my Vista keeps on locking up.

So, I browsed to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 page, and downloaded Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh (Build 17128) – released 01/11/08. When unpacked it has 3 files in it. I ran the cmd, which entered a registry key that enabled me to see an Update for Vista SP1 Control Panel > Windows Update > "Check for Updates".

Update actually installed 3 files, rebooted. Then I went back to Windows Update and clicked "Check for Updates" but it did not find anything. I waited and tried a couple of mins later. This time it finally found SP1 RC1. I clicked install and it froze on me after a few mins.

I tried a couple more times suspecting that whatever issue was causing my lock-up , it was preventing update from finishing. And Windows Update was able to finish the download but it failed to install it. Error code: 80070005. Unfortunately Vista help did not list this error code.

After some search, I realized that many other has seen the same issue and the only solution I saw was Aaron Stebner's blog entry. Apparently, MS messed up permissioning and Windows Update does not have enough permissions to write some reg keys/files.

I followed the instructions mentioned. I do not know if this will work for me yet. I will post a follow up later.

[Update - 01/21/2008]
I ran the script from Aaron's page. It did a lot of things but failed to reset permissions on 7 keys. I rebooted and tried again, it kept on failing. I also tried running SP1 update but it too failed...

I looked into the error Kernel_Data_InPage_Error, I was getting. I had the following error codes: 0000007A (0xC020BF84, 0xC00009C, 02a266860, 0x82FE130D)
ntfs.sys - Address 82FE130D base at 82EF8000 Datestamp 47214597

So, there are 4 block of error codes:
1st set is about Lock Type (0xC020BF84)
2nd set is the I/O status (0xC00009C)
3rd set tells us about Current Process when BSOD occured(02a266860)
and 4th set mentions the memory code where error occured.

As per this article at MSDN, my issue was 0xC000009C, or STATUS_DEVICE_DATA_ERROR, is typically due to bad blocks (sectors) on the hard disk.

As my Page File was in C drive, probably there was some bad blocks in the C drive. Unfortunately, chkdisk did not help. So, I moved the page file to my other drive.

No lockups since then. And to my surprise, Vista SP1 RC1 installed successfully today!

Bill Gates last day at Microsoft from CES 2008

2008-01-07T13:54:00.001-05:00

Earlier this evening Bill Gates gave his final Microsoft keynote at the 2008 CES show in Las Vegas. Throughout the keynote he made many references to what he will do with his free time once he retires from day to day operations at Microsoft. It turns out, Bill has big plans in addition to his foundation after all.

read more | digg story

Disposable Web Accounts

2008-01-02T14:13:00.000-05:00

So, we are in 2008 now. After taking the final two weeks of 2007 off, I am back to work and catching up with e-mails & diggs. As I was looking at the most popular technology content in the last month, I noticed the subject above.

5 “DISPOSABLE” Web Accounts to Keep Your Identity Safe is the actual title of a wonderful post from makeuseof.com.

BugMeNot was already one of my favorite firefox addons. I especially liked "file.io" service...

Path Maximum Transmission Unit (PMTU) Black Hole Routers

2007-10-26T14:14:00.000-04:00

Windows XP SP3 promises detection of Black Hole Routers, which is supposed to improve over all networking experience especially for laptops. While investigating the subject, I came across a good, comprehensive article about PMTU (Path Maximum Transmission Unit) at Microsoft site.

By default PMTU Black Hole Discovery for TCP/IP is disabled on Windows XP machines. It can be enabled though:

Setting: EnablePMTUBHDetect
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
Value Type: REG_DWORD Value: 1

"Changes in PMTU black hole router detection in Windows Server 2003 and in Windows Vista" is a good follow up article.

Enabling of PMTU Black Hole detection and changes are all result of Microsoft's "Next Generation TCP/IP Stack".

The Cable Guy from Microsoft has an article on enhancements that "Next Generation TCP/IP Stack" (terrible name IMHO) offers.

Vista BSOD

2007-10-22T22:47:00.000-04:00

My vista install started to crash when there is a lot of disk activity. It would crash every other day at first. Then, at some point it started to go down shortly after I initiate PowerUsenet downloads.

I looked at MS documentation for 0x0000007B and concluded that it had something to do with Sata controller. Article suggested to replace cables as it could be caused by a faulty cable but doing so did not help.

Then, I bought a HighPoint Tech TocketRaid 1742 PCI card. Documentation suggested to simply install the card and point to the driver location once Vista detected it. Unfortunately, Vista kept on blue screening once card was installed and I could not reach the logon page.

I installed the card on an empty PCI slot and connected back my Promise SATA controller. After the Vista came up I installed drivers, shutdown pc and removed the promise controller. Then, I reconnected my SATA HDs to the new controller and succesfully booted.

I hope this will end my BSOD issues....Time will show.

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) Test Drive

2007-10-19T09:53:00.000-04:00

Ubuntu 7.10 was released yesterday. Below is my first hand impression of new release. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, if you will...

Getting the image:
I tried all North America mirrors to find a fast image download site but I guess because of first day rush, all were slow, download speeds around 50 KB/s. After a couple of hours, I was able to access Georgia Tech mirror which let me download at speeds of 2MB/s, so I got the image in a matter of mins.

I usually use Lauchpad.net to order my free copies of Ubuntu, which is an awesome feature of Ubuntu Distro.

Because of firewall rules, I could not use torrents in my environment. Not sure how that would change my experience.

One thing I noticed was that Europe/Asia had a lot more mirrors and when I tried them I got almost the same download speeds: ~50KB/s. I hope more 'fast' mirrors are added for North America soon.

Installation:
Ubuntu installs were always good but not without hickups... When I was reading reviews, I had read something like 'Installation was even easier than Vista'. I attest to that now.

I decided to wipe out earlier version and install it on my IBM T40. I popped in the CD, live-cd install completed in a few mins. Then I clicked install shortcut on the desktop and installation started.

In all installs up to this version, time would always be incorrect, this worked fine. Install time was short and I had to click 'next' a couple of times to confirm keyboard, regions etc and enter username/pwd.

Devices:
When I say devices, I should confess that I don't really have a lot of devices to check the functionality. What has always been painful for me was Wireless Access. I have a netgear wireless card, which was automatically recognized, drivers were installed and was ready for me to use after reboot.

The only thing I noticed was, it was not available during install and at some point Ubuntu install warned me that I did not have internet connectivity, so Security Repositories/Updates would not be available at the time. No biggie.

Post-Install:
One of the exciting things I saw in 10 rocking features in 10 days series of articles was about Tight integration of Firefox with Ubuntu. So when I browsed to blogger site, firefox popped up a message for "missing plugin".

Unfortunately, things did not work as advertised after that. Flash Plugin was supposed to be installed seemlessly. Instead I got an error when I tried to install it.

In fact, once I clicked "close", it told me that plugin was installed and I needed to restart firefox. Of course, that was not true...

I also tried Firefox > Tool > Addons to install some plugins like GreaseMonkey but no luck there either. It kept on complaining about source not being available. If you look carefully, you will notice a type in "available".

I know some may think I am just being picky now, but I hate to see such typos as it gives you the impression of sloppiness. Ubuntu is a 'high-quality' distro, such small stuff does therefore matter (at least to me).

I am not sure if this is a bug or if there is some back-end issues here though. Because I also got a "Service Outage" page when I was trying to get some more explanation on what's going on.

Anyway, I am sure I can still download and install these stuff manually as I used to.

Screen Resolution: It always bothered me with Ubuntu/linux installs not to be able to easily increase screen resolution from current setting. Ok, "easily" is a relative term. Because normally, you would edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then logout / log back in to see changes. That's a "no no".

In fact, in Ubuntu preview, Lifehacker touched upon this point: "It might not seem like a revolutionary feature, but users can now change their screen resolutions and refresh rates without having to log out or hack around in terminal."

I think it should be like in Windows, where all resolutions are listed and when users chooses one, it's tested and user is asked to confirm if it was OK. This is still missing from "easy-to-use" Ubuntu and require a bit more tech skills.

OK, I guess I will post more when I have more time in my hands to play with it. This is it for the time being. Oh, before I forget, I loved the fact that Compiz is the default window manager in Ubuntu now:)

Edit 10/22/2007: I am having an issue with Ubuntu start up. It does not start properly and a black screen is displayed. I play with the mouse and touch a few keys, I see HD activity in the meantime and after a minute or so logon screen shows up. I have an ATI card on this IBM T40 laptop, not sure what exactly is causing this but no update has resolved the issue yet.

Enable / Disable Outlook 2007 Rules

2007-10-04T17:25:00.001-04:00

As a Blackberry user, one of my pain-points is with the pst files. Here is how it goes. Let's say Outlook is open and I get an e-mail, my rules process it and move it to one of the pst folders. Problem is that I don't get it in my BlackBerry.

Of course, if outlook was closed, or if the rules were not processed, that message would end up in my BlackBerry. As I want to keep outlook open, I have to disable the rules. There is no manual way of quickly doing this. If you look at Outlook Rules > Run Rules, you can not, for example, select all with Ctrl+a. You have to click and select each one of them. Painful!

So, I decided to create a macro, that would automatically disable the rules, or enable & run them. Idea is that in the morning, I will keep the rules disabled so that I will get them in my BB, and time to time I will run enable script to move them to psts.

Below is the code. In Outlook, you can
* press Alt+F11
* Expand Project1 (VbaProject.OTM)
* Expand Microsoft Office Outlook Objects
* double click ThisOutlookSession
and paste the code in there.

Then you can simply Press Alt+F8 and chose the action...

Sub DisableAllRules()
Dim colRules As Outlook.Rules
Dim oRule As Outlook.Rule
Dim count As Integer
Dim ruleList As String
'On Error Resume Next

'Get Rules from Session.DefaultStore object
Set colRules = Application.Session.DefaultStore.GetRules

' iterate all the rules
For Each oRule In colRules
oRule.Enabled = False
count = count + 1
ruleList = ruleList & vbCrLf & count & ". " & oRule.Name
Next

colRules.Save

' tell the user what you did
ruleList = "These rules were enabled: " & vbCrLf & ruleList
MsgBox ruleList, vbInformation, "Macro: DisableAllRules"

Set colRules = Nothing
Set oRule = Nothing
End Sub

Sub Enable_Run_AllRules()
Dim colRules As Outlook.Rules
Dim oRule As Outlook.Rule
Dim count As Integer
Dim ruleList As String
'On Error Resume Next

'Get Rules from Session.DefaultStore object
Set colRules = Application.Session.DefaultStore.GetRules

' iterate all the rules
For Each oRule In colRules
oRule.Enabled = True
oRule.Execute ShowProgress:=True
count = count + 1
ruleList = ruleList & vbCrLf & count & ". " & oRule.Name
Next

colRules.Save

' tell the user what you did
ruleList = "These rules were enabled: " & vbCrLf & ruleList
MsgBox ruleList, vbInformation, "Macro: EnableAllRules"

Set colRules = Nothing
Set oRule = Nothing
End Sub

Rounded Corners with CSS

2007-10-03T14:12:00.000-04:00

I was looking for a way to create rounded corners without using images. I came across "Nifty Corners Cube" which does exactly that and more.

Digg - The Pictures Section!

2007-09-03T13:26:00.001-04:00

I check Technology Section of Digg.com at least a couple of times daily. I am not sure exactly what purpose the new picture site will serve but it's another way of 'sharing', which is a good thing.

[UPDATE]
Heh, this site turned out to be a 'rogue' one :) Still... I like the idea.

read more | digg story

Install Ubuntu On Windows - WUBI

2007-08-28T13:11:00.000-04:00

I saw an article about installing Ubuntu on Windows at Ubuntu-Unleashed Blog. It talks about an open source project called "WUBI".

Premise is very simple: You install an application called Wubi on Windows XP/Vista which uses an "alternate" (text based) Ubuntu ISO file to install Ubuntu in the windows partition in a 'single file' and give you an option to boot into it.

What does that mean? You do not need to have separate partitions to install linux/windows. It installs necessary drivers to access NTFS share, and does pretty cool stuff like importing your favorites/booksmarks.

When I was testing the application, which you can download via this link, it could not connect to a download site for ubuntu alternate image. So, I checked c:\wubi\install\ubuntu-7.04-alternate-i386.iso.metalink and used one of the US sites to download it.

I copied both the alternate image and wubi executable to the same directory and then ran the executable. GUI part is quick, actual installation takes sometime. It's advised to defrag your machine prior to installing it.

This is a cool idea and I hope it gets official acceptance from Ubuntu! Check out Wubi Forums if you are interested.

Lifehacker's Top 10 Gnome Desktop Tweaks

2007-08-23T14:55:00.001-04:00

The default desktop environment for Linux users, Gnome, is fast, organized and very easy to learn. But Gnome is also very powerful and highly customizable. Today's top 10 lists the various ways you can tweak Nautilus and the Gnome desktop to turn Linux into a productivity powerhouse.

read more | digg story

Who owns what

2007-08-22T11:26:00.000-04:00

Above picture, which lists some of the companies bought a few Media conglamorate, was put together by Amy Webb and is getting circulated a lot these days. It gives an idea about how much of Internet these few companies own.