Absoblogginlutely

vncserver on ubuntu

Discovered that if you turn on vncserver in ubuntu it doesn't default to asking for a password and it also defaults to let everyone access it (or at least it did on my installation). This can be fixed by going to System/Preferences/Remote Desktop and checking the box to require a password

xcopy is not always my friend :-(

For some reason, one of my xcopy's did not copy the data but just the directory structure so I've lost 35gb worth of downloads and cd images. VERY annoying. I think i've got them on another hard disk somewhere but I'll have to find it. It also wiped out my music but I know I have that safe on my mp3 player - all 35 gb of that!

I'm really thinking that the moral of the story is not to be cheap when upgrading a hard disk and get a really big one so you don't have to keep shuffling data around when doing upgrades!

Upgrade time

I've been busy this morning. I re-ghosted my windows xp partition and then reloaded it back onto my secondary disk. The performance still stays about the same so I'll be wiping the secondary disk back to HP's recovery cd and reloading all of the applications again *shudder*. As this is a fairly long post there is more in the extended entry.

I thought I'd also try loading vista on the main pc (as it won't install on my spare pc) and the installation seemed to have worked great. There were 11 new downloads from windows updates after the installation including an Intel graphics driver (which reset my windows desktop back to 800*600 after reboot). I've yet to work out how to properly look at the vista equivalent of boot.ini. Apparently you now have to use bcdedit.exe found in the windows\system32 directory of the vista partition. This is a console program so open a dos prompt first. I then ran bcdedit /default {ntldr} to set my xp partition as the default loader.
It will be interesting to see what happens when I reinstall xp - hopefully I can just rerun bcdedit to reload the vista bootloader onto xp afterwards.

The one application that I've tried to run, DVD Profiler doesn't work under Vista with lots of "List index out of bounds" error messages whenever a menu or other item in the program is moved over. Intervocative say the program is not supported under beta operating systems and the fact that they are taking far too long to actually develop and release the pocketpc version of dvdprofiler means that I doubt I'll waste much more time on this application.

I'm not too keen on Vista's user interface at the moment - the Run command has vanished from the start menu - it's a good job I use the Windows-R key and other shortcut keys. There are other cryptic icons around too - the sidebar applets have an obvious x button to close them but the tick box actually opens up the preferences for the widget (which I didn't expect) and I have no idea what the thingy underneath the tick, with the row of buttonlike bits is for.

I do like the breadcrumb trail when using explorer - that really does make life easier to navigate. Although I had read about it, the description didn't really make much sense until I saw it in person for myself.

Oh - and whilst I was waiting for Vista to load I've been playing around with Ubuntu on the secondary pc. That had 150mb worth of patches to download but I had to go and start off the "automatic" updates process by hand. I did this by going to system, administration, Synaptic Package Manager, selecting Reload, Mark all upgrades and then start the download. After the downloads commenced the automatic updates flag appeared on the desktop - a bit too late!

The brief couple of hours I've spent with Ubuntu this morning adds more weight to my feeling that this is not ready for prime desktop usage just yet. For example, firefox can't check for updates - the menu option is greyed out, automatic updates were not automatic and then there are cryptic names in the application menu - how on earth is someone meant to know that krfb is actually the equivalent of Remote desktop Assistance - at least Microsofts menu option is obvious what the program is going to do.

New firefox with useful update notification!

There's a new version of firefox out now and the notification in the current version has actually been pretty useful. Rather than telling me there is a new version, I download it and *then* discover that most of the extensions I have won't work, this time the installation gives me the ability to find out which extensions are not set to work with the new version. The only downside is that most of the extensions that it wouldnt work with are currently disabled in the version that I am running at the moment.

Image ghosting woe's

I've been trying to backup the main pc at home as it's getting really really slow for a 1 year old pc. Kristen blames it on all the stuff I keep installing on it which is probably true. The weird thing is that I can't see anything in task manager or perfmon that shows why it is so slow. CPU and memory usage is low yet the machine sometimes takes ages to respond so it's a reinstall time.

However, before doing that I wanted to image the hard disk - I've been attempting to do this since Saturday now. MicroCenter were doing a 160gb hard disk for $40 after rebates so I thought I'd ghost the original disk to my external usb disk and then restore the image to the second disk. (No link as the rebate was only valid until Saturday)

I had several attempts of doing this, but found that the pc would freeze whilst in the middle of the image. Yesterday morning I started the image off and when I came home from work it was still going.... until I shredded something and it crashed ghost with an error back to dos.

I then tried Acronis true image which said it would take 20 hours to ghost the image (of 40gb!) but again this morning it had frozen after running overnight.
By the end of last night I was really fed up with the thing as it shouldn't be this difficult so I went to sleep and decided to try again this evening.

I've a feeling that for some reason my external usb disk is being detected as a USB1 disk instead of USB2 which is why the original ghosting is taking forever.

I've now had the idea of ghosting the image direct to the new hard disk from the old one - if that works (which is giving me a realistic time of about an hour to ghost) I may be able to copy the ghost image back to the original disk and then restore it back over to the new disk.

Once I have a working ghost source I can scrub the new disk and reinstall from scratch and also see if I can get vista on the machine too......

Offer Remote Assistance

I was hoping that it would be easy to offer remote assistance from the command line - just type in something like remassistance.exe. Unfortunately the command line is so long I'm not posting it here as it will break the formatting. Instead, see JSI Tip 8047. How can I start Remote Assistance and Offer Remote Assistance from the command-line?

Geek Food?

You know your wife is a geek when she mentions that there are 10 kinds of geek food, French fries and Onion rings :-) Photo quickly mashed up from Judy Baxter after a search on flickr
This was after a discussion on the geek dinner that I hope to go to in August as part of the In The Trenches. However I'm not sure how long it would take to get to Cleveland - 2.5 hours according to google.

Voicemail working again.

If you've been trying to get hold of us, our incoming phone is now working properly again. I think my voice over ip number was finally cut off and as Vonage was simul-ringing that number, everyone was getting the busy signal. Not any more. I've also got the vtech phone (with answerphone) on beta test at the moment and it seems to work pretty well so far.

Emulator

I managed to get the pocket pc image to work properly over the emulator although the first time I set up the activesync on the client it worked ok but it didn't seem to work immediately, data would only get transferred when I hit sync. However after rebooting the pocketpc it started to sync immediately - it really was pretty cool to see it in action. It doesn't seem to synchronise sent or deleted items immediately though - thats pretty strange.
Unfortunately for some weird reason Microsoft have disabled the print screen button from working when the emulator is running so I can't show you any screen shots of it whilst running.

I can't get the smart phone working as for some reason it decides to bind the network card to my vpn connection (which isn't going anywhere) rather than my wifi card that is in the laptop. Using a parameter of /p 000102040d23 (substituting the mac address of the network card) should give you network connectivity but not on the smartphone. Instead I get a very annoying "Your Internet connection is not configured properly. Please verify your settings in Data Connections." This even occurs with using internet explorer so I know it's not an activesync issue.

PocketPC Emulator

Microsoft have released a Windows Mobile 5 emulator that you can run on your pc, normally for developing software for the windows mobile. However, you can also use this to test and debug the setup of Direct Push with Microsoft Exchange 2003 service pack2. This is great to try before you blow up a users phone as you test stuff out. Seeing as though Direct Push has only just started being available on the phones, it is unrealistic to know how to get it working out of the box.

Albert's scripting telnet tool

Ages ago, back in Sept 2003 I was looking for a scripting telnet program, something along the lines of expect. I was able to find some software from WorldsEnd, but at the time the one that kept coming up in google was by Albert Yale but his software wasn't actually available anywhere. However, yesterday I got a tipoff that you can download Albert's software from Gerald Bonne and this software was also mentioned in the latest In The Trenches - whilst listening I thought to myself - I've covered that before. I didn't realise how long ago it was.
On another ITT know - Microsoft have purchased Wininternals - the company that produces the excellent sysinternals "free" software and the no-so-free administrators pak.

Zooomr is back

Well Zooomr is back at last - It's been out of action since last Thursday as they prepared their upgrade and then got hit by a DOS attack. I was beginning to wonder if the whole thing was a hoax dreamed up by flickr so that anyone who was thinking of defecting would stay with flickr ;-) (thats a joke Mr Lawyer man). Anyway, they are now back online but the site must still be under stress as it is really really slow - must have taken about 45 seconds to load the front page for me.

Nmap scripting.

I've toyed with nmap tonight to try and speed up some scripting across the lan scripts - currently I have a script that copies files across the lan, by checking each ip in turn to see if the machine is there and then copies it across - it's very laborious and slow - I started it at 6pm tonight and it's still running now at 10.24pm (It copies 3*100mb files across the lan).
I think by using nmap to ping sweep the lan and feed the results to a loop batch file it'll be much quicker.
The nmap and dos script is this :-

nmap -sP 192.168.98.0/24 -oG pclist.txt

for /F "skip=2 tokens=2" %%i in ('find "Status: Up" pclist.txt') do echo %%i is alive!

Angel Food Cake

I had my first ever portion of Angel Food Cake tonight - VERY nice. Unfortunately Kristen took some for herself and then left the cake bowl on the table next to me...it's now empty - how was I supposed to know that you are not meant to eat that much when it is so nice and very light that it doesn't feel like you've eaten too much?

Free Gaming mag.

This might be useful to someone - a years free subscription to Electronic Gaming Monthly, thanks to a googlead in my gmail page for this one.

Garmin find functions in City Select

Garmin really ought to put some more work into their search functions within City Select/Navigator. In order to find the address 123 N Main St, Marysville, Ohio you actually need to search for "Main" and then scroll down through the many choices until you get to N Main St. At that point it will then be able to find this particular address. However, if you try to search for N Main Street it will not find any results for 123 N Main St. How weird is that? The GPS works in a similar way but you can also include the city to search for if you use the menu option to include city filtering (well worth switching on as I later found out!)
Incidentally the address I just gave is not where I needed to be which is a music shop.
However, I do like the City Select better than the City Navigator as you have much smaller map segments - which now means I have loaded all the surrounding area of Columbus onto the 24mb memory instead of being limited to 25% of ohio, most of which I'd never go to.

free pro account at zooomr.

Zooomr are giving away free pro accounts to bloggers (like me) that sign up and post an image from their servers so the image below is my deer photo taken with the cameraphone last night whilst out to do a geocache - GCWFY1. Funny thing is that I can't see any information about what a pro account is on their site - a free account gives you 50mb storage (plus 1mb per user you refer).

Garmin support pt2.

I finally managed to get hold of Garmin on Friday afternoon and found out the reason I was having the problem is that the licence code for the software (and the outer packing) was for Garmin City Select. However the dvd was for Garmin City Navigator. Therefore the activation code did not match the software and that is why it didn't work - it would have been nice if it had told me that. I had to wait about 20 minutes on hold first thing Friday morning but apparently first thing is the best time to ring them. The annoying thing was that I didn't realise that it was first thing (8am) CENTRAL time - so I had to wait an extra hour before ringing them. Fortunately I had some work that I could do whilst hanging on the phone.

IE History viewer

IE HistoryView: Freeware Internet Explorer History Viewer (or iehv.exe) allows you to view the internet history usage. Great for checking out what sites someone has been to when they get a virus on the pc. I've used this before but can never remember the url for it, so I'm blogging it now. There are some other good utilities from this site too.

Garmin support =not good.

I posted this on my caching blog - Not very happy with Garmin at the moment....

The Legend GPS arrived last night and I eagerly tried to install the software - installing the software on the computer worked great - unfortunately the product activation does not work and I can't install the maps to the gps. The activation runs through the process, tells me there is an unlock code, but doesn't actually unlock it. Garmin's phone support is only open 8-5 - whilst I am working which is useless if they want me to try various things on the computer as I'm not going to be there. I managed to get lunch at home today so called them - there's currently a 30 minute wait. So I thought i'd email them - their autoreply on the website states that the response time is 5-7 business days! What sort of response is that to customers? I've purchased software that i want to use NOW - not next week. If you are going to do product activation like Microsoft does, then at least have the support to provide activation 24/7 so your customers can use something they have paid for. Grrrrrrrrr

Red, White & Boom

After surviving the tornado that wasn't (although it did chuck it down with rain) I went out with friends to Columbus's Red, White and Boom firework show. We had a great time, we spread the picnic blankets down on a nice little park (that google doesn't have on the map) and enjoyed the show. As Kristen has the camera there are no photos to upload though.

Tornado?

Huh - I go outside to get stuff into the car for a picnic tonight and all of a sudden the tornado sirens go off. Apparently Dublin is in the path of a severe storm that could develop into tornado's. I'm really not sure if a picnic is a good idea or not....

Powershell history

Start transcript within Powershell will capture data entered into a powershell prompt. Pretty handy for recording scripts / development work.

Ascii starwars

Someone has too much time on their hands. I'm not a fan of Starwars but this telnet of StarWars at towel.blinkenlights.nl is cool. (Say yes if you are asked to open an application and then hit enter a couple of times at the prompts. Thanks to In the Trenches