DOS USB boot drive – Vista Forums.
I keep losing this one, very useful if you need to boot to DOS to flash a BIOS, or do something else. Now with most PCs not having any sort of disc drive, it’s hard to do it, and Vista won’t allow you to make a bootable USB drive by default.
I bought some new hard disks and replaced all my originals. I went from a 500GB drive, two 300GB drives, and a 80GB I used for virtual machines and things. I now have two 500GB drives for boot and virtual machines, plus two terabyte drives for data. I’ve also defected to Western Digital after the Seagate debacle recently; I actually sent back a terabyte Seagate drive – unopened – because I didn’t trust it!
I have two 500GB Caviar Blue drives they are supposedly faster. I also have two Caviar Green drives for storage, as they are low power, and cooler running, but a bit slower. Well that’s fine, as they mainly stream data, so as long as it comes off quickly, it’s good enough.
I copied the data using – ironically enough – Seagate DiscWizard. Western Digital’s disk copying software doesn’t work if the SATA controllers are set to AHCI mode, which mine are. It just crashed and burned and decided it couldn’t see my CD drive. DiscWizard, however, saw all the discs, and copied everything over quite happily. It just has to see a Seagate drive, but doesn’t care which direction you go with the data. It’s based on Acronis TrueImage. It seems Ghost, formerly the darling of disk cloning, is now a weird attempt at backup. Then again, that’s just like most of Symantec’s software.
So far, things seem quicker, and I have a ton of space free now. We’ll see how it goes!
After many years, I’ve finally done it. I’ve gone to Cable internet. And it’s great! (so far).
I’ve had ADSL for quite a while. When I first joined, which I think was around 2000/2001, the only option was BTOpenworld (or Openwoe as they were more often known), as the market hadn’t yet been opened up to competitors. At that time, you had to have an engineer install it for you, and there were a multitude of tests including the ‘woosh’ test, and line length tests. The whole thing was actually quite an ordeal, and your line HAD to meet strict specifications. All this for a 512Kb connection! You also had a modem provided (no routers) which was owned by BT, and you technically weren’t allowed to use anything else. When BTO started out, hardly anybody was using it, so it was amazingly fast and reliable.
Over time, that changed. More people piled into the service, and it got slower and slower. BT started allowing other ISPs to re-sell the service, and in such a way that you used their network, instead of BT’s, so the performance was often better. BTO became BT Yahoo, and the service declined sharply, although I was paying a lower price for being a good customer. In mid-2004, I moved to Zen. They were always getting a good press for their excellent service. A few months after moving to them, the restrictions on line types changed, and I was able to upgrade to 1Mb. Later, the option of ADSL max became available, which meant a much faster service (potentially) albeit with a download cap. I was soon able to get 3.5Mb, and all was well.
Then the ‘issues’ began. The line would drop out now and then, and not come back for extended periods. I tried all sorts of things, and Zen’s support were excellent. My line speed fell bit-by-bit I bought a new router, ADSL splitters, and tested all sorts of things, but nothing worked. The line would be fine for a while, then every few months throw a wobbler and fall over. Not a lot of use if you’re trying to use VPNs and other stateful apps like I do. BT tested the line countless times, and found nothing.
Be* were suddenly the new kids on the block, but also using the newer ADSL2 standard. I moved to them in February of 2008, and then had a slightly faster connection, and no download cap. It all went well for a while, and then the connection issues came back. I tried yet more to resolve it, but still no improvement. I found myself getting a maximum of around 2.5Mbs, so was going backwards in terms of speed. Not good.
Others had been telling me for ages how great Cable was, but I always maintained that the support was great with Zen or Be*, and the performance was good, so I didn’t want cable. I’d scoff at the caps, and stay put. A few weeks ago, after the latest connectivity issues with ADSL, I decided enough was enough, and signed up to Virgin’s 10Mbs service. I had it installed today, and it’s been wonderful! It downloads at the advertised speed, as opposed to an ‘up to’ speed. OK, the caps are a little annoying, and very easy to blast through, but it’s certainly liveable. All in all, it’s much fairer. It remains to be seen how customer service is as NTL/Telewest were awful way back when. I hear it’s improved, so that’s something.
So time will tell how it goes, but so far it’s very promising.
YouTube – Classic Hits by Microsoft Songsmith: “Wonderwall” by Oasis.
OK, this is just insanely awesome. In a really bad way!
Being so inclined to care about such trivialities as the number of times I’ve played a certain song, I recently had cause to reset the play counts on a few songs. The reason was that I had replaced some tracks in iTunes with higher-quality re-rips, and in doing so iTunes flattened the number of times I’d played those tracks. I use the play counts in a couple of playlists, so I find them useful. Plus I’m a bit of a stats geek, so there we go.
I looked for methods to reset the play counts, but couldn’t find anything. Within iTunes it’s possible to edit pretty much every aspect of a track, except for how many times you played it, and when that last as.
I dug around and found one method which involved hacking about with iTunes library file, which is a gargantuan XML file. I had a go at substituting the play count from one song to another, to see if it’d work, but iTunes decided it would rather helpfully remove it. A bit more digging and I found some Applescript scripts to do it, but they are of little use to me, being on Windows.
Then I found this site:
Windows iTunes Scripts Downloads- liquid parallax’s Blog.
A script to set the play count! I tried it, and it worked. What’s more, it stays after you close and re-open iTunes, and it increments quite happily.
It does raise the fact that iTunes obviously has some sort of API for manipulating it from Javascript (and other things no doubt). I’ll probably look into that more and see what can be done. Still, my play counts are back where they were, so I’m happy for now!
Leamington man loses $150,000 in Nigerian scam.
How are people STILL falling for these scams? There’s plenty of publicity about it, in print and on the TV, yet people still fall prey to them. I suppose it’s simple greed kicking in and overriding the truth. It’s like compulsive gambling – keep going, and eventually there’ll be a payout.
I suppose anybody reading this (all two of you) already know better than to go sending some random stranger all your money, all your friend’s money, and any other cash you can scrape together. It’s just amazing that to get so far in debt, these people actually end up doing ALL the things you shouldn’t do online.
Amazing, and quite sad for these people.
Oh, sorry about one of the links being the Daily Wail.
UNetbootin – Homepage and Downloads.
How often have I tried to make a bootable USB thumb drive up for some odd purpose (usually flashing a BIOS), and kind find any decent way to do it.
Then I find this thing almost by accident. Useful to know about!
It’s always nice when you have a mission critical system like – oh I don’t know, say a phone system – to have a development environment to play with and not worry about if you break it catastrophically. It seems Cisco’s favoured method for you to achieve this would be to buy an entirely separate Cisco CallManager (CCM) setup, but that’s a rather costly proposition.
Instead there’s a far simpler solution, and that’s to install CCM into a VMware Virtual machine, and play about with it in there. In theory if you have a spare router capable of doing voice, you could also use that with it too (I’ve yet to try that though).
I’ve performed this installation with VMWare Workstation 6.5 on a dual core Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 with 4Gb RAM under Windows Vista, and had two servers running concurrently quite happily, so it’s actually quite a workable solution on modern hardware. Here’s the process:
When it starts the first time you’ll see a screen like the following:
Fair enough. It is for development and labs, not production anyway.
The thing to be aware of here is the 1Gb of RAM, and setting the hard disk to anything less than 40Gb. When CCM installs it makes multiple copies of the data, and expects to find space to basically install itself twice (into the active and inactive partitions). If it doesn’t have enough room, it’ll fail with a rather vague error.
It’s also possible to change the MAC address of the virtual server. VMWare workstation and VMware Player will both allow arbitrary MAC addresses to be set (providing they’re legal – you can’t have ZZ:YY:XX:WW:VV:UU for example). ESXi won’t allow this, however.
With the virtual machine powered off, use a text editor to open the .VMX file in the virtual server’s directory, and look for the following lines:
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:00:00:00" ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0" ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
You won’t necessarily find them together, but they’ll be in there. Deleted the ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset line, and change the other two to look like the following:
ethernet0.Address = "00:00:00:00:00:00" ethernet0.addressType = "static"
You’ll also need to move the ethernet0.Address line up above the uuid.location line. With that done, you can power on your VM, and the MAC should be changed. Probably best to do this before you install it.
Now you have a development environment. As I said at the beginning, I managed to create two VMs, one with a publisher, the other with a subscriber node, and it all worked quite happily from what I could see. I intend testing it in VirtualBox as well, but I have a feeling it actively looks for particular hardware (basically the Cisco Media servers) or VMware, and just fails to install on anything else. Otherwise, this method represents a good method for having a play with CCM without breaking your live system.
I’ve been using Windows Vista’s User Access Control (UAC) on my computers for some while. When I first started using Vista at home, I turned it off, but then turned it back on just to see how I’d get on with it.
Roll forward two years, and I’m now running Vista Ultimate 64-bit and 32-bit on my home desktop and laptop PCs respectively, plus Vista Business Edition on my work desktop and laptop PCs. I was seeing UAC prompts ALL DAY at work. Opening Active Directory Users and Computers would cause the prompt to appear. Going near any sort of management tool would cause it to appear. I was getting fed up with seeing it!
So I decided I’d had enough and turned it off on both my work PCs. I also switched it off on home laptop. In each case, it quietly went away, and that was that. My home PC wasn’t quite so straight-forward.
Vista has a rather nice new feature whereby it will re-direct any files and folders being dropped into Program Files or the Windows directory to a folder in the current user’s application data folder (C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore – it’s hidden, so you might not see it). This, however, only happens if you have UAC enabled. So having switched it off, I rebooted, and found some of my applications suddenly thought they weren’t registered or setup.
I went into the VirtualStore folder, and found this:
Oddly enough, Dream Aquarium, DMT and Objectdock were all the apps complaining at me about licences and lost configs. The fix was quite simple. I basically copied the contents of those directories into the corresponding directories in C:\Program Files (x86)\ (as it’s vista x64). Restarted the apps, et voila, they suddenly work.
It’s a shame turning off UAC doesn’t give you the option to merge the virtualstore back into Program Files, but then again it could make things even more confusing if you turned UAC back on, as suddenly applications wouldn’t be able to write to those files, so would fail miserably. I’ve had a few things do that randomly in the past.
So if you’re going to turn off UAC, it’s probably best to do it when you first install Windows.
