Corsair Vengeance 6GB

The Cyberpower System from November 2010, was ordered with 6GB of memory. An additional 6GB of memory is down to $39 with free shipping, so I went for it. Looks like I got the last one. They are out of stock and don’t expect any more. But I’m sure that other similar memory packages are available for similar prices.

The memory arrived and installed with no problems, but then the system would not boot. Turns out that the RAID system had a problem on system restart. The RAID controller did not wait for drive spin up, so the BIOs reordered the drives in the boot menu, and after that the system would not boot automatically. I was able to boot it by selecting the RAID array from the BIOS boot menu.

Stopping in the BIOS and reordering the boot menu fixed the problem. The system  has an ASUS Sabertooth X58 Motherboard.

Another tip, you might want to consider whether DHL should be your shipper of choice. The memory was left in my mailbox out on the road, rather then at my door. For a couple of dollars, I could have had UPS deliver the memory, and it would have been dropped at my door, which I’ll do in the future.

Enjoy,

ww

VirtualBox

Virtual Machine systems have been popular for servers for a few years now. They save big time $$ when setting up server rooms since most of the server systems in an IT shop aren’t that busy. But recently VM has become popular for desktop users. Many of the reasons we used to use “Dual-Boot” systems are much better served using VM. There are several reasons why you might want to run VM on your system:

• You have a windows system and want to run Ubuntu.
• You have a Mac and want to run Windows occasionally.
• You have Windows, or a Mac, and want to have a system where you can surf safely, for example to do your online banking.
• You are doing development and want to have a “clean” system for testing.

One of the most functional, and easiest to deploy, VM systems is VirtualBox. Now inside Oracle, this system was originally developed at Sun and is Open Source, and free. Microsoft has Windows Virtual PC,  and you can run Windows XP or Ubuntu on your Vista or Windows 7 system. But of course, it has no support for Ubuntu or OS/X as a host, so why learn more than one system? I’m going to use Windows and Ubuntu systems as hosts, so I’ve chosen VirtualBox.

Hosts and Guests

The terms are Host and Guest. Host is the system that is running directly on the hardware. The Guest is the system that is running in a “virtual machine”.

As a user, you probably have a Windows Host – your usual reasonably modern Windows system. It should be a hardware box purchased in the last three or four years. Systems older than that may not have the virtual machine processor extensions that make things a lot faster. While VM may work on older processors, it is probably worth while.

As a Mac user, you may want to run Windows in a VM on your Mac. I’m not an expert here, but you are going to find lots of material on the web to solve your problem, and don’t forget to check out the dozens of  YouTube videos that show how to install Windows in your Mac in a VM.

Safe Banking

Increasingly, there are viruses out there that target users that do online banking. These viruses get into your system and hide, using root-kits, so that not even your anti-virus software can see them. Then when you log into your bank, they watch your connection and transfer all your money off-shore while you are online. Before you know it, your bank account is empty.

One way to thwart these viruses is to do all your banking from a system that the virus cannot attack. I’ve not heard of any of these attacks being done on Linux systems, so that doing all your banking from Ubuntu may be a safer bet.

VMs like VirtualBox make running an Ubuntu system much easier. There are quite a few YouTube videos and other web pages out there showing you how to install an Ubuntu system in a VM on your Windows Laptop or Desktop machine.

Using VMs for Development

I am recently writing programs, most of which are portable on both Windows and Linux. I have some Linux hardware systems, but it is more convenient to do my code writing on my laptop, so I wanted a VM running an Ubuntu system. VirtualBox is just the ticket.

When I was studying the problem, the searches came up with Xen first. When there are lots of gray boxes in the documentation containing command line scripts that must be run to install a product, it is a bad sign. Xen requires recompiling the Linux Kernel. There must be a better way.

And there is. VirtualBox hosts on Windows, Ubuntu [and other Linux flavors] and OS/X. And it guests those systems too.

Windows Host, Ubuntu Guest

I started with a Windows Vista host and Ubuntu 11.04 Guest. VirtualBox installation is quite simple, and configuration is completely GUI driven. I’m not going to cover it in detail, there are dozens of YouTube videos and web pages out there. I’m just going to mention the stumbling blocks that I ran into.

Here is the VirtualBox user interface:

VirtualBox Control Panel

I’ve created one Ubuntu virtual machine and configured it with a 20GB HD, 20MB of video memory with 3D acceleration [2D not supported except for Windows] and a CD/ROM. Beware. My first mistake was to configure a Sata-CD/Rom. After the system would not boot, I went back and tried an IDE CD-ROM and it came right up. So Sata CD/ROMs aren’t supported for booting. Strange.

To get Ubuntu going, an ISO file is “mounted” into a virtual CD-ROM and the guest system is booted. Then you install Ubuntu as you would from the “live” CD. The installation is very quick since the CD/ROM is running at hard drive speeds rather than at CD/ROM speeds. Ubuntu 11.04 installs very quickly.

Once you have done this, you can install the Guest enhancements. These are available in the Ubuntu package manager, but probably the best way to do this is to use the Device menu of the VirtualBox interface. When the documentation mentioned this, it didn’t make sense. Look at the top of the screen for the Device menu and pull it down:

Devices Menu

At the bottom of the left menu you can see the “Install Guest Additions…”. This causes a virtual CD/ROM, which is not a separate download but which comes with VirtualBox, to be mounted on your Ubuntu system. It should show up on the top left of your desktop. An AutoRun prompt like this should appear:

Installing Guest Enhancements

Just choose the default of “Open Autorun Prompt” and follow the instructions to get the latest guest additions. You will need to “reboot” your guest when you are done.

At this point, Shared Folders, Copy/Paste between Host and Guest and other features should work properly. In System >> Preferences >> Monitors you can set the monitor size now:

Monitor Panel

And you can also drag the window to resize it.

Tweak Your Ubuntu

One of the first things I always do to an Ubuntu system is Tweak it. It drives me nuts to have the window control buttons on the left. If you are a Mac user I’m sure that’s fine, but I keep reaching for the wrong side of the window. Install and run Tweak on your new Ubuntu system and then under the Window Manager settings, put the buttons on the right if you want to. With Ubuntu 11.04, this setting is saved as part of the Theme, and if you chose a new theme in System >> Preferences >> Appearance   a popup will ask you if you want to keep your button settings rather than resetting them to follow the theme.

To Unify or Not

Unify is the new user interface for Ubuntu 11.04. Well I’m sure some folks may like it, but I like the “Classic” look introduced in version 9.0x. To get back to an interface that looks more like Windows, you can log out and then choose the window manager style from the login menu. Click on your name and then choose the window manager style from the menu at the bottom of the login screen before you type your password.

Login Menu to set Desktop Manager

Trouble in Theme-dom

I had trouble with my theme showing up as flat rather than rounded. The Ambiance theme looked more like Windows XP or earlier. After a lot of messing around, I found that if you choose “Ubuntu Classic (No Effects)” you get a rounded theme. Now I’m using “Ubuntu Classic” apparently with effects, and it looks fine. Not sure what happened. But No Effects cleaned it up to look rounded and pretty.

Shared Folders

Shared Folders

Now that guest additions are installed on your Ubuntu guest, you can use Shared Folders. But they aren’t as “Automatic” as you might like. Find the shared folders dialog under the devices menu at the top or by right click on the “shared folders” icon at the bottom of the guest screen on the right. Auto-mount does work, but the mounted files don’t show up on your desktop as you expect. Instead, they show up under /media. I put a link on the guest desktop to /media so I can get to my shared folders easily. Use a file explorer to navigate to /media under File System, and then CTRL+LeftMouse drag the media folder to your desktop. That will create a lnk to /media.  You need to reboot the guest after any changes to shared folders so the changes show up on the Guest system. Shared folders don’t clean up. If you remove a shared folder from the shared folders dialog, it continues to show up as an empty folder under /media forever. The folders are mount points apparently and are owned by root so they can’t be deleted by you without doing something special. They shouldn’t cause any problems however, so just leave them alone.

By using a Full access [ uncheck read-only ] shared folder, you can get your work out of the guest machine and back into the host machine. Remember to reboot the guest after any changes to the shared folder list, and just dismiss all those pesky popups that talk about some error or other.

Beware of USB Devices

I tried to plug in a USB thumb drive and then make it available to the guest system using the USB menu of the interface. That hung both the guest VM and the VirtualBox control panel. I had to reboot the Windows host. So unless you are feeling brave, I’d avoid USB devices. Maybe they work, but a Thumb Drive hung my system. Maybe a thumb drive will work fine as a shared folder.

Networking

The virtual machine is given a unique MAC address and VirtualBox runs a NAT router in software to isolate the guest from the rest of your network. I imagine that the VM can be put on your windows network with Samba, but that’s a lot of trouble. I’m just going to stick with shared folders rather than going to the trouble of setting up windows file sharing.

Browsing, downloading and system updates work through the network with no configuration at all. VirtualBox NAT apparently has DHCP to give the guest an address so that it works with no configuration or trouble at all. The NAT is on a 10.x.x.x network. My home network is 192.168.x.x, as most are, so there are no address conflicts.

Development

I’m doing Qt development on my Guest system, so I’ve installed Qt Creator and the SeaPine SCM source control client. They both came up without any issues.

Ubuntu on Ubuntu

My next project will be to run Ubuntu on Ubuntu to provide an isolated testing system. I’ve decided to upgrade my host system to 11.04 first however.

VirtualBox is Great

I recommend VirtualBox as a VM solution for users – for safe banking or surfing – and for developers. Easy to install and trouble free. Sun / Oracle have a great product and the price can’t be beat.

- windy

New Fan Control / Media Slots

The recent Cyberpower PC had a broken Fan Control / Media card slot device. The Media Card slots didn’t work. I have arranged to return the device to Cyberpower and have purchased another one from Frozen CPU. The Frozen CPU folks have the option of dressing the cables for another $20.

For a complete album of photos of my installation of the new device.

It works great, has 4 rather than 2 fan controls and a bright LCD display. Took about 4 hours to install since prudence called for a careful test it before completing the installation. The only odd thing about the new device is that you insert the SD card upside down in the slot.

- Windy

Update: This program fails on Win XP Sp3. I’m investigating why this is, but it appears to be a bug in the QPixmap class of the Qt Library. I’ll fix the program as soon as possible. You can follow the discussion in this post.

Friends of mine have their digital cameras and need to resize their photos to send over email. All the programs I’ve found on the web are either too complicated with way too many options for a novice computer user or strange to use like the program that you rename to change the size of the photo and then drag and drop photos onto it to resize the photos. I have designed a very simple program to resize either one or several photos.

Resize a Photo

PhotoResizerQt is a simple program to resize one or several photos.
To resize a single photo, the program leads you through a set of steps
to open a photo, preview it, select a size from a list of typical sizes,
and then resize the photo. When a photo is resized a suffix is added
to the filename so that it is easy to find a file that has been
resized. A PhotoFile.jpg that has been resized to 800 pixels has the
filename of PhotoFilex800.jpg. The program is unwilling to resize any
photo with an xnnnn suffix.

Re-size a List

To resize a group of photos, choose all the photos from a folder.
The list of photos is displayed and they can each be previewed.
Photos that have already been resized are removed from the list and
a message in the status bar indicates that this has happened.

When previewing a photo, you may resize the window, or change the
setting of the Shrink to fit checkbox. When not shrinking the photo
the mouse will drag the photo around to easily examine it in the window.

When previewing a list of photos, click on a photo name in the list to
display that image. Drag the splitter between the list and the preview
to change the display.

You can find the program on Source Forge here:

PhotoResizerQt Project.

PhotoResizerQt Windows Installer.

Qt Toolkit – Development a Dream

The program took me less than two days to write. I used Qt Creator and the Qt Toolkit. The program is probably easily ported to Linux and I will be trying to do that soon. All the features that I need to build the easy to use Gui and the Image features including the bi-cubic resizer function are built into Qt. It was easy to build and integrate a custom Windows icon as well as other standard features that Windows expects. If you want to port the program to the mac, Qt is available there as well. The sources are provided on the Source Forge project site so I encourage you to port it to the mac and provide the changes back to the source forge project for all other users. The program is licensed under the GPL-3.

Enjoy,

Windy

The Website Building Problem

As a consultant, I am continually looking for modern tools to help my clients build websites. Recently several web site builders have appeared that combine Hosting and Website construction in a single place and for a single small fee.

In the past few years I have come across more and more clients who have been held hostage to the old way of doing websites. The old way uses off-line tools like FrontPage, DreamWeaver or other tools that run on a desktop computer and then upload the website pages to the hosting service. Clients run into several problems when these tools are used.

• These off-line site building tools are expensive [ several hundred dollars], require special training and must be upgraded over time.
• Often the clients can’t find the person who built their site, or it costs too much or that person has lost vita information about the site because it has been months or years since they made any changes.
• The hosting service may be going out of business or changing it’s terms and so the site expert needs to be contacted to move the site to a new hosting service. The client may not have the credentials or expertise to sign into the site to back it up to migrate to another hosting service.

Modern sites utilize a CMS or Content Management System. There are many out there, but only in the past couple of years have they started to appear that work for the novice user. A CMS separates the “content” of the site from its “Look”. The text and pictures are stored separately from the “Theme” which directs how the page is laid out on the browser page. Also sites using CMS’s are not built on your local computer and then uploaded. Rather they are built on the site itself, using the browser and software running on the site. So there are no expensive and separate tools to buy or learn to use.
The first CMS’s to appear were Forums like phpBB and SMF, and Blogging software like TypePad, and WordPress. These platforms provide simple interfaces to make entry of new content as easy as writing an email. But they are highly structured, fora and blogs in different ways, and so a small business site may not fit their defined structure.

There are more complicated CMS’s available like Joomla, Drupal and phpNuke which have a very flexible structure which would allow them to support a large business or a large community portal site. But these are truly daunting for a novice to administer. If a client requires a very flexible layout with many features and have more than a half dozen contributors to the site then one of these might make sense. They allow log-in and sign-up of members and allow multiple roles to be assigned to members to allow them to only read, or comment, or contribute whole articles and otherwise manage the site.

In the past I have built sites for clients using a free blogging platform called WordPress. While WordPress is a blogging platform, it can easily be adapted to provide a simple website for a small company.

WordPress

My goal for my clients has been to build a site and then leave it in their hands to make changes. WordPress does allow a client to make changes almost as easily as editing an email message. Additional complexity arises when dealing with:

1. Understanding the different types of content: Pages vs Posts.
2. Embedding images, videos, or music samples.
3. Advanced formatting such as multiple columns or tables of any kind.
4. Adding forms to collect information.
5. Doing any kind of e-commerce to sell items.
6. Updating the WordPress software, which is a frequent requirement to plug the all too frequent security issues that are found.

WordPress requires constant management to upgrade it and upgrade the several plugins that you will need to manage your site. Any site requires a few plugins since OOTB [out of the box] WordPress doesn’t do some of the things required to have a site. At a minimum about five or six plugins are required and they go through constant updates.

Future Site Building Requirements

While I still use WordPress for my own site. I will no longer be recommending it for clients. I want to find a single solution with the following qualities:

• Hosting and website building combined in one site.
• A simple robust and full featured browser interface to create all content and to change the theme of the site.
• Customizable themes to allow sites to be “Branded” by my clients for their businesses.
• Automatic updates and backups. This means that the client will never need to back up the site or perform updates to fix problems.
• Some knowledge of SEO [search engine options] to allow the clients to set up tags etc for the search engines. [ I use Google Site maps plugin for WordPress.]
• WYSIWYG editing of the content preferably with styles.

All the features to build a simple business site. These include:

• Individual pages like the home page, about, contacts etc.
• Knowledge of map pages and other such special pages is nice too.
• Blog management.
• Photo galleries, or the ability to make them. With pictures and text and the ability to adjust the layout.
• Forums for some of the clients, but not most of the clients.
• Integration with e-commerce so that clients can sell items from the site.
• Forms to take contact information and ask questions via email.

Some advanced features include:

• Import pages or information from other sites. SquareSpace can import some blogs for example. So far I have not seen a site builder that will import a normal website.
• Export pages to allow the content to be moved to another site. It would be good to not be trapped on a site builder with no easy way to take the site elsewhere should the company go out of business or their terms become unreasonable for a client.
• The ability to embed other more complex services in the site such as databases.

There is a list of many of the website hosting / building companies on this page. It looks like this fellow used Yola to build his site.

SquareSpace

I’ve heard much about SquareSpace and I took a look at it. But while they say that you can have a site for $12/mo, such a site only has 10 pages, which is too small for any of my clients. To have a reasonable site with Squarespace requires $20 / mo. This is pretty steep for many clients. As a comparison, the cost for a hosting site from many of the hosting suppliers is about $5 / mo and any of the various CMSs such as WordPress, Coppermine [photo gallery] and SMF [forum] are all free.

But SquareSpace has the right idea. The site is backed up, and updated automatically and they have all the features above. For clients that are not scared off by the $20/mo price, it looks like it will work for them. But their free trial is limited so it is harder to evaluate it in depth.

LunarPages Quicksite

LunarPages hosting, which I recommend as an excellent, high performance and affordable hosting service, has a service called QuickSite. At $12.95 / mo it is reasonable. There is a demo, but without a full trial time I was not really able to evaluate the service.

Using the demo I was able to see that the page builder is not fully WYSIWYG. Also Quicksite does not appear to have templates for blogs and photo-galleries, so all the pages will have to be built manually.

Virb
I’ll be taking a look at Virb too. They seem like they have the right idea, but they don’t make it that easy to get going because their free trial has a time limit.

Yola
Now I’m looking at Yola and it appears to have all the features above as well with only a few little glitches so far. I’ll post my detailed thoughts about Yola in another post. This unlimited trial site is just what I need to make sure that it will work for my clients. You can find my test site at Yola here.

After an afternoon building a site, Yola to be a robust and functional service. At $49.95 / year it is very affordable.

The Yola builder is almost completely WYSIWYG, so building pages is much more intuitive. There is a blog template which makes it easy to have a blog on the site along with the other pages. Since the Publish function is controlled by the user, a number of pages can be changed before any of them are published. When linking to pages in the site, you select the pages by page name rather than using http style addresses. I’ll do a more in depth report of Yola in a separate post.

I will be studying how to build themes for Yola to customize sites for my clients.

Other Types of Sites

There are two other types of site organizations that we have not discussed. These site formats are not suitable for a general small business site, but they may have their uses for some clients.

Forum

A forum is a discussion site which work well for discussions where an archive of previous discussions and organization. There are several different sites out there that allow you to build fora. One that I have looked at is Lefora.

Wikis

A wiki is a community site similar to a forum, but rather than discussions, a wiki is designed to capture information created by a community of users. The best example of a wiki is the wikipedia that we all use almost every day.

Wikis are easy to manage, but their community contributor nature makes them unsuitable for a personal or business website, unless you want everyone who stops by to potentially make changes to your site.

Recently I built a simple wiki here to understand how wikis operate and the content creation process to build and maintain a wiki.

Summary

There are a few new companies that are combining website building and hosting into a single service. These services are not yet mature, but a few of them are useful enough to work for some clients. I will continue to evaluate new sites to suggest to my clients.

- windy

I recently wrote a program to test my new computer. I wanted to test the wattage range and cooling of the new processor so needed a program that would keep all the cores of the processor busy. The Core i7-950 is a 4 core processor with Hyper-Threading which means that there are a max of 8 threads. Since AMD provides server processors with up to 12 threads so the program has a maximum number threads of 32. I use the HWMonitor program to monitor temperatures and wattage if your processor supports it.

The program is written using the Qt toolkit, which allows it to be easily ported to Windows and Linux.

Program Dialog

To use the program:

• Select the computation type: Integer, Real, Both.
• Select the number of threads.
• Select the array size. The arrays will be this size x 1024 x 1024.
• Use Start to start the threads.
• Use Stop to stop the threads.
• Use Task Manager to see the size of the process grow when the threads are started.
• Use Task Manager to see how many cores / threads are busy on your processor when the program is running.
• Use the HWMonitor program to check the case, processor temperatures and wattages [if supported] as the program runs.

The program is licensed under GPL 3.

Downloads are on Source Forge.

We can discuss any issues you have with the program in the Source Forge Project Forums.

The link might change. If that does not work, try this: CoreHeaterQt project

MFC Version

An MFC version, with sources, also available under GPL 3 is here:

CoreHeater_MFC_V1

CoreHeater_MFC_V1_Src

- Windy

I’ve been looking for a source control solution for some time. I used to use QVCS, but it costs money and you have to get the Enterprise version to get client/ server. At this point I have three, or four, development systems and they include both Windows and Linux.

I considered Bazaar, but after a couple of days I came up with more questions than I had answers. My reasons for not using Bazaar are here.

While there were a few glitches I was able to get going with Surround SCM in a single day. Surround SCM is easy to use, and supports client / server across Windows, Mac and Linux.

Surround SCM provides support for all the common systems.

• Server packages for Windows x86 and 64bit as well as Mac and Linux.
• Clients for Windows, Mac, and some Linux distros.

Here is the time-line for my testing over the course of a single day.

• Installed the Win x64 Server on a Windows 7 system.
• Configured the license manager with a single user license, but there is a known problem and after a helpful and short support call I was able to get going with an eval license until the maintenance release comes out to allow my single user license to work correctly. Of course a License Manager would not be present in an Open Source system, but Surround SCM license manager is clearly laid out and easy to use.
• Installed the Win client without the JRE, since there is a JRE on the system that comes with Open Office. That worked just fine.
• There was some initial confusion about users. It turns out that you need to create users, or import them from the license manager, before you can log in. It was not initially clear that the License manager users are administrators and not coders, although they can be both. The administrator logs into the GUI client to create users with access to the code repositories.
• A Win client installed on another system could not connect to the server. This was tracked down to a Windows Firewall configuration problem on the server system. After the installation the local client worked fine, but remote clients could not connect. There were incorrect entries in the server Windows firewall. The ports were wrong. Adding the SCM server as a permitted application allowed the system to work correctly.
• The client is easy to understand and use. I have used GUI interfaces for Source Control since 1994 including PVCS, Source Safe, QVCS and others. The overall presentation and GUI model of Surround SCM is familiar after having used these other tools. Finding the answers to all my requirements were easy to find in the interface with no reference to the documentation. But if I come up with problems, there is a 200+ user manual to refer to as well as an installation guide and other documentation.
• I have been able to use Surround SCM to check in both a Visual Studio C++ project as well as a Open Office calc script project. As I originally developed that project I did not have an SCM solution and so needed to name the files with incrementing file names.
• I was able to check in text files and JPG images. Viewing a JPG image showed the file in a viewer.
• Surround SCM holds its repositories in a database, by default Postgres, but other systems are supported including Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. This should allow me to control web projects such as WordPress or Joomla themes as well as code projects. In the past I have done theme projects and had no SCM solution for these projects.
• One problem that I have yet to work out is the problem of backing up the Surround SCM database. I will be investigating that in the next few days. I use Carbonite as a backup solution so if I can cause Surround to emit a backup data file – possibly in SQL – then I can have carbonite save those backups.

Here are some screen shots from my short work with Surround SCM.

Main Window

Client Window with modified files

The main window is familiar and easy to use.

Revision Differences

Difference between revisions

There is a nice java based difference program. You can launch this from the main window or from the history window.

Graphical Revision Map

Graphical Revision Tree

There is a graphical revision tree. This will be very useful when there are many branches and many revisions.

Get a Previous Revision

Get a Previous Version

I will need to test removing a file in a revision, leaving it out of a revision and then get it back in a future revision.

Mainline Branches

There is a choice to be made about how many Mainline Branches to create. At first I thought perhaps I should make a Mainline Branch for all the programs that I want to control, but that didn’t seem right, because it is after all a Branch. I decided that each program should be a separate branch, except for programs which share common code. For example, most of my OpenGL programs share a common class to construct the OpenGL window. It seems best to have all the OpenGL programs share a Mainline Branch so that they can have the OpenGL shared class in the same Mainline Branch.

Select a MainBranch Repository

Conclusions

My experience so far with Surround SCM has been very positive. Not only does the software work well, and is easy to understand, but the sales and support staff are very helpful. While I will be using their free single user license, I’ll be encouraging my clients who need source control to consider Seapine’s fine product.

- Windy

I need a personal source control system for my development.

As a big believer in Open Source solutions I took a careful look at Bazaar. But alas, I could not get started with Bazaar.

My requirements are:

1. Client / Server with both Windows and Linux clients.
2. A GUI interface. I’m not interested in dealing with a command line interface. I want to look at a window and instantly know which files have been changed and need to be checked in.
3. Avoid IDE integration because I’ll be using several different IDEs.
4. Simple to add new projects. I don’t want to spend a lot of time dealing with Source Control.
5. Low – read zero – cost.
6. Open Source would be nice, but not required.

After looking around and doing a lot googling I found Bazaar.

Bazaar is an Open Source solution brought to us by the folks that built Ubuntu.

There is some documentation, but the walk-though to get started doesn’t really go far enough to get going.

I posted a couple of questions to the Launchpad forum.

• One on a creation bug that is known.
• One on questions for how to get going to just use Bazaar.

I still don’t know how to use Bazaar. Here are the issues that I have.

• While client/ server obviously works since lots of folks out there use it. It is complicated to set up a server. You apparently need a web server, and python and then you can install Bazaar.
• The GUI client is confusing to use. Even if you Collocate your repository, which is OK for a single system development, the GUI layout does not look like you might expect, so you have to figure out a new paradigm for using it. Instead of being designed based on the often used model of showing a tree of the checked in files, the dialogs waste a lot of space with lists that don’t help you get the job done.
• The GUI client apparently does not support all the functions that you need. If, for example, you want to get a file from a previous revision, the function is not easily found where you might expect. Perhaps the function is available, but it’s not easy to find.
• Bazaar looks as if the GUI is an after thought and the primary usage model is a command line interface.

If you can’t get going in a few hours, then, in my view, Bazaar fails as a viable SCM solution.

- windy

Microsoft has entered the business of AntiVirus software by simplifying and repackaging their Corporate Security suite for home users. The new program is called Microsoft Security Essentials. When this is released, it will be free for use by non-commercial users and will run on Windows XP, Vista and Version 7.

Currently the Beta is closed, but the program will be available later this year. Based on all the reviews I’ve seen – Security Now for example – this is a light weight, but very robust anti-virus.

When this comes out I will be installing it with an eye toward eliminating my use of Free AVG.

More news when it appears,

- windy

Fails in Firefox 3.0.12 and 3.5.2. Website reported as a failed site.

Using Max 2009 on Vista x86, SP1, I created and exported a simple scene with a knot, 3 lights and a camera.

Here is the scene on this website.

The model does not play in Firefox 3.0.13, either from the file system or from this website.

It does play in MS IE 8 both from the file system or from the website.

The samples on the hypercosm website play in both MSIE 8 and Firefox 3.

This is what the model should look like.

I’ve rebooted the system at least once after installing HyperCosm. It seems very odd that the plugin does not work in Firefox for my model, when it works perfectly well on the samples and works in MSIE 8.

- windy

Podcasts

I’m using Twonky Media’s media server to serve up mp3 podcasts, music and photos to my PS3. This works great, and Twonky version 5 is a great media server for a reasonable price. I used this a while ago and I got some errors on my PS3, but the latest version is great: Fewer errors and an easier install and setup.

However, Fast Forward in an MP3 is pretty messed up. As you can see from the following video, when you hold down fast foward, it skips and jumps and it keep stuttering and stopping so you can’t forward very fast. So, if for example, you play the first 40 minutes of of a 1:45 [one hour and 45 minute] podcast, then trying to get back to the place you were is a real pain. This feature probably works fine for a 4 minute song, but it’s not useful for a very long podcast.

Not sure if this is a problem with the PS3, or with the Twonky or the DLNA protocol.

I’ll try to contact the PS3 and Twonky support folks.

Video On Demand from Netflix

I’ve just discovered Play On which allows you to play videos from Netflix, YouTube and other places on your TV by using a PS3 or other DLNA Media Client. I’ve set up Play On on the same system where I installed Twonky and connected it to my NetFlix account. So now I can watch Instant movies from Netflix directly on my large screen TV and using my hi-fi system. My Media Server is a Win XP system running on a Compaq SR2020NX Athlon 64 3500+, 2.2GHz with 2GB memory. This is a $500 system that’s about 3 years old.

PlayOn is very easy to set up, although I had a glitch with the Media Player V11 that PlayOn required. The WMP11 installer kept reporting an error, but it turned out that it did install correctly. Once you install PlayOn, you configure it with your Netflix account, and then use a web browser to load up your Instant Queue in Netflix. To start with I loaded up a few movies, and TV series including Sanctuary, Ghost in the Shell, and a couple of other things. When you check the videos in the PS3 menu, you find the PlayOn server and the list of videos that are in the Netflix Instant list.

I’ve watched a couple of movies and the quality is very good with no noticeable sound or video artifacts. The video quality is not as good as a DVD, but it is at least as good as a SD quality Dishnet satellite broadcast. The PS3 display function reports about 4 mbps. The PlayOn software requires about 180MB of memory in two processes and takes about 50% of the CPU when the video is on pause. I’m guessing that the video is being downloaded and re-coded for the PS3.

BTW, the fast forward situation is much better with video than with music. Using PlayOn and the PS3 with Netflix, fast forward gives 10, 30, 120x fast forward and it works just fine to go back to a point deep into a movie. The PlayOn server did get stuck about 45 minutes into a movie, but turning off the PS3 and then reopening the movie fixed it up. The PS3 was reporting network errors. Not sure why. The server was working fine and the network was not having any problems that I could detect.

I’m catching up on Sanctuary and watched “In the Electric Mist” with Tommy Lee Jones this evening. When I added Sancuary, it added a folder with all the episodes.

I’m not clear on why the PS3 doesn’t support Netflix and other video sources directly, but since it doesn’t at least an inexpensive software addon, which runs on any modern computer, will allow a true video on-demand experience. PlayOn costs about $40. Since Netflix doesn’t charge for “Watching Instantly” beyond my normal subscription, I’ve got a fixed cost subscription to video on demand.

- Windy

Starting with an Open Office 3.0 spreadsheet Import failed. Then after converting the sheet to XLS it failed. Finally converting to CSV worked.

Google_Spreadsheet_test

Notice that the Frozen Row 1 of the above sheet is not frozen.

I’ll try this again for publishing complex data to my websites. Since I can add formulae, it should be interesting.

- windy

Goldwave doesn’t cost much the first time, but it hasn’t really moved much over the past many years and the major updates cost.

Adobe Audition is very functional, but very expensive. and updates are costly as well.

My friend is converting some of her cassette tapes to CDs and MP3s and I’ve taught her to use  Goldwave. But with Goldwave you have to pre-create your audio file to record to. How long should you create your file? With Audacity you can just start recording. While the interface is different from Goldwave, she should have little problems in doing the transition to Audacity. I’ll see how she likes it.

Audacity also looks like it has some cool features for amateur musicians:

1. Lay down multiple tracks.
2. Label the parts of the tracks.
3. Slide the tracks in time to align with each other.
4. Set mono tracks to left or right channel.

If I knew more about the requirements of a home studio I would be more helpful in looking at these features. More later as we try it out.

- windy

Wakoopa is a free software service that keeps track of what software you have been using. I heard about it on the Windows Weekly podcast from back in January. I’m just now catching up on missed episodes.

To use Wakoopa, just sign up for a free account and install the little program on your system[s]. The little applet [ 3MB ] uploads the info to the website so you can review and share the statistics.

There’s even a way to publish the data to your blog or social networking site.

Here are recent programs that I’ve used:

I’m not sure how useful this will be, but Leo and Paul like it.

BTW, there are ways to eliminate programs from the list, either for privacy reasons, which is where you find the feature, or because “Presentation Settings” is not a very interesting to keep track of.

Wakoopa keeps track of both programs you run and websites you visit, at least some websites that are built in.

- windy

There are several devices on the market to allow backing up photos on a trip. Here is a partial list of devices. After reviewing the devices and checking prices, I found Digital Foci was selling a refurbished an 80GB unit for about $50 off. As you can see from the following pictures, the device is pretty hefty. It’s not a contender for an IPOD replacement, although it does almost all the functions of an IPOD. But it has CF and SD card slots built in and it has backup and compare [verify] functions built in. It backs up 233x CF cards at 4.88 MB/sec.

This device has all the functions of a modern multi-media kitchen sink. It also has a 12 hour battery life when playing MP3s. It remains to be seen how long it will last when backing up photos cards.

Features I liked

• The photo display and review features are very nice. The rotate and zoom features are well designed and even for large, 12MP, JPG images, the display time is very short. It takes 2 – 5 sec to display 16MB 12MP RAW images however. The photo album display features are best utilized if you reduce the images to 1.5MP or so [1280x1024 for example].
• Photo card backup is great. Inserting a card brings a popup to the screen asking how you would like to do the backup. Beware of the glitch though where the card is found but the hard drive is not found. Make sure you see the hard drive in the menu before inserting the card in the device. The work around is simple once you know the secret.
• The computer connection works quite well. The transfer is also very fast. I did have some intermittent connection problems with the USB cable, but seating the cable more firmly in the device fixed that.
• I have been using this device for hours and hours to listen to podcasts. The Photo Elite has a little speaker, which isn’t much good for music but is just fine for podcasts. No constraining earbuds to wear and you can carry it around with you while you work around the house. The only problem is that it doesn’t remember your place in the podcast when you shut the system down. But you can pause it for many minutes without noticeable drain on the battery.

What the device is not.

• This device is not a replacement for my Sansa MP3 player. The Sansa has longer battery life and is shirt pocket size. This device is large and cumbersome for an MP3 player.
• It’s not a game console, although it has a game built in called MATRIX which is suspiciously like Tetris. But the screen is larger than a PSP and there are card slots, so while your PSP or DS may have most of this device’s media features, the game consoles don’t provide the convenient photo backup feature and I’m not sure that any of them have 80 or 160GB of on-board storage.
• The Photo Elite has no WiFi capability. But you won’t miss that drain on your battery.

I’ll bet this device:

1. has a laptop drive hiding inside.
2. is based on some form of embedded Linux – good for them.
3. contains software written by software engineers living in California. The interface is well designed and performance is snappy.
4. will have future follow-on devices with more storage and more functions. These guys are on a roll.

Good luck to Digital Foci. This device gets my vote for coolest thing to solve my photo card backup problem at a very reasonable price. And listening to dozens of hours of podcasts is a real bonus. You go, Leo…

- windy

This tool records a number of kernel mode activities and then allows analysis in detail, esp of interrupts and Deferred Procedure Calls.

Using XPerf on the ailing laptop has shown that the culprit is acpi.sys.

The laptop is going back to the factory to figure it out.

- windy

Dynamic reports fail with the data not matching the column headers. Static reports work.

Update: This is a known problem. The problem is that the name TITLE doesn’t work as a report column. This means that no column of a database table can be named TITLE if dynamic tables are used.

Here is the table. This is an OO native database. The database is provide below.

Use the Report Wizard to generate a Dynamic Report with the following columns.

Note that the report is wrong. The AUTHOR appears under the title. It doesn’t matter whether we sort on the title, as intended or not. The bug still appears if the report is dynamic.

The data is correct if a static report is generated with the same fields.

This is a ZIP archive of the native database. 609KB.

windybooks_native ZIP

- windy

When building a database of my DVD collection which includes BLOB images of png images of the covers, the database can be backed up, but it cannot be restored. This of course makes the backups useless. The images are 475×475 pixel PNG images.

UPDATE: Problem solved. Parameter max_allowed_packet is the packet size for requests. This defaults to 1M and needs to be larger to allow this restore to work. Setting the max_allowed_packet parameter to 10M allowed the restore to complete successfully.

I’m using MySQL administrator 1.2.12, MySQL 5.0.51b-Community-nt, MySQL client version 5.1.11 running on Windows Vista Ultimate x86 SP1.

The database was built using OpenOffice 2.4.

Using the default backup settings, the error on restore was:

Error while executing this query:INSERT INTO `dvd-collection` (`dvd_ID`,`MovieTitle`,`Director`,`Producer`,`Actor`,`Genre`,
`Notes`,`Rating`,`Review`,`Subject`,`Writer`,`Format`,
`Source`,`DateAcquired`,`ReleaseYear`,`MPAARating`,
`Length`,`disk_image`) VALUES
(1,’Step Into Liquid.’,'Dana Brown’,NULL,’Robert August,
Rochelle Ballard, Shawn Barron, Dave Kalama, Gerry Lopez,
Robert \”Wingnut\” Weaver’,'Documentary’,
‘No stuntmen. No stereotypes. No other feeling comes close’,
5,NULL,’Surfing’,'Dana Brown’,'DVD’,'DishNetwork’,2006,2003,
‘PG’,88,0x89504E…44AE426082);
The server has returned this error message:MySQL server has gone away
MySQL Error.

Using these additional settings:

• InnoDB Online Backup
• No EXTENDED INSERTS
• Add DROP Statements
• Complete INSERTS
• Comment
• Compatibility Mode
• Disable Keys

The error was:

Unknown object in backup file

Download excerpts of the SQL files that fail to restore:

mysql_restore_bug 1.4MB

DVD_Backup_2_40_Rows 14MB

These excerpts fail as well. The complete SQL backup file is 270MB, so not only is it large but I don’t really want to share the entire file. By the way, “Analyze Backup File Content” works fine for all the files.

The mysql command fails as well:
C:\Darrell\Video_Database\backups>mysql --user=root --password=mysecret dvd_video < DVD_Backup_2_40_Rows.sql
ERROR 2006 (HY000) at line 89: MySQL server has gone away
C:\Darrell\Video_Database\backups>mysql --user=root --password=mysecret dvd_video < DVD_Video_Two_Rows_Second_Try.sql
C:\Darrell\Video_Database\backups>

It works for 2 rows, but not for the 40 row file.

Thanks,

Windy

I just got a new Alienware m15x. Great machine. Very nice design. But I’m running into a couple of problems.

Update: 8 June 2008 9pm- I spoke too soon. The problem is back in spades. See section later in this post regarding use of SysInternals Process Explorer with more data on the problem.

Update: 8 June 2008 - The CPU Busy problem is not occurring for about the past 2 hours. The system was idle – but with the CPU busy for several hours today. There appears to be no reason for this change. It bears watching.

Update: 7 June 2008 – New information added on CPU Busy.

The CPU becomes very busy almost all the time. The CPU is a dual core T9300. Alienware has lots of extra gizmos on this model. I have not yet installed any new drivers on the system. The Task Manager does not show any process on the system that is responsible for the CPU time. The Alienware Stealth Mode, Wireless, Bluetooth enabled or disabled are not effective in reducing the CPU busy state.

In the CPU busy state, one of the processor cores is maxed out and the other looks normal. Whatever is running runs exclusively in the left hand CPU – in task manager display – which tells me that whatever is running has affinity.

Example of CPU Busy

Notice the left CPU panel shows that the CPU has become 100% busy. During this time the Hard Drive is not busy and there are not Processes in the process list that show the required CPU time. Removing the Logitech wireless mouse does not affect the state. No new drivers were installed for the mouse, only the standard Vista drivers are used with the mouse.

CPU Busy State Returned to Normal

After some time the CPU busy state returned to normal.

CPU Returned to Busy

A little while later the CPU returned to Busy. This occurs every few minutes.

Diagnosis Steps Taken

1. Disable Alienware functions from the keyboard controls, as mentioned above. These include Blue-Tooth, Wireless, and Stealth Mode.
2. Diabled the Intel TurboBoost device to determine whether Vista Ready Boost was causing the problem. This made no change in the CPU activity.
3. Uninstalled and re-installed many layered products. Among these Virtual CD 9; Skype 3.5;
4. Run QuickSlice – a performanence analysis tool from Microsoft - to determine where CPU time is being spent. More on that later.
5. Disable almost every device possible to eliminate device interrupts as a possibility.

None of these steps has changed the problem.

QuickSlice

While I don’t have a detailed description of QuickSlice, it appears to be a program which ties into a high priority clock interrupt and then takes data about which processes are active when the clock interrupt occurs. For each process in the system it displays the process name, and a bar of Kernel Mode and User Mode time spent.

This shows QSlice with a busy process with mostly user mode and very little kernel mode using one processor. The bar only goes 1/2 way across the qslice panel which indicates that 1 out of 2 cores are active.

The following shows the CPU when it is not busy: Click for a larger view.

Note that the only active process is “System Process” and it is only running in Kernel Mode. This is the Idle Process. Note that it goes all the way across the panel indicating that both processors are Idle.

The following shows QSlice when the CPU is busy – the pathogical condition I’m trying to fix.

Note in this case, when one of the Cores is maxed out, that the Idle Process is only taking about 1 Core, and that there is another process showing some activity. This is System, so it’s not possible to figure out what is really active. Also note that nothing else is active, and that the total does not add up to 100%, or both Cores fully active. So there is missing time. Now let’s compare these two states in Task Manager.

When System running normally, Task Manager Looks like this:

Note that the bar at the top left shows very little CPU usage.

And here are some examples of the Task Manager when the CPU is very busy:

And here is the Task Manager process list when the CPU is busy, for all processes, sorted by CPU time utilized:

Click for the larger view.

Note the very strange conclusion. The System Idle process shows 74%. So the performance panel is showing that the CPU us busy, but the Process List shows that the CPU is idle. Very strange.

Disabling Devices to Find the Problem

Using Device Manager, almost all the unnecesary devices were disabled to attempt to identify the device driver that was causing interrupts. None of these made any change in the problem:

Note the very small indications on the icons that the devices have been disabled. This did not cause any change in the CPU activity.

I also Disabled the Windows Search service, and this made no difference. This posting in the Microsoft Tech Forum indicated that this has been the source of CPU Busy problems in the past.

Process Explorer from SysInternals – 8 June

Using Process Explorer from SysInternals, it shows that the time is being used in DPC [Deferred Procedure Calls] and Hardware Interrupts. This indicates to me that the problem must be an out of control hardware or hardware device driver. It seems odd that sometimes the interrupts stop for a while, perhaps many hours in the case of this afternoon. Here are some pictures with comparisons with my Area-51 7500 Desktop.

Area-51 7500 Desktop which never shows this problem.

A skype call was active at the time, but notice that the DPCs and HIs were very small percentage of the CPU.

Alienware m15x Notebook that is showing the problem.

Notice that the middle histogram across the top shows the history of CPU usage and that Red shows Kernel mode usage. Also note that the DPC time is 25% of the CPU and Hardware Interrupts are showing 12% of the CPU. Clearly pathological.

Conclusions So Far

At this point I conclude from these tests that:

1. The problem is occurring in kernel mode and is not measured by qslice, the Microsoft Tool designed to find these kinds of problems.
2. In order to avoid qslice, the problem is likely to be an interrupt or device related problem.
3. Disabling all the unnecessary devices has not found the problem, so if the problem is a device, the list of remaining devices is very short.
4. Since the problem comes and goes on a minute to minute basis, it’s not a broken piece of hardware, but more likely an unforeseen interaction between hardware and a driver.
5. but I’m just guessing. The Process Explorer data rules out a problem with Vista itself. It seems clear that this is something peculiar to the m15x.

While the system can be used with this problem, it needs to be fixed:

1. The CPU activity puts more load on the battery, and causes more heat than necessary. This is especially troublesome for a laptop.
2. This problem does not occur on an Alienware Area-51 Desktop system running VIsta x64, so there would seem to be no reason to put up with the problem on this Alienware m15x running Vista x86.

COM Surrogate Crashes

I don’t know if this is related or not, but occasionally the COM Surrogate crashes.

Update: This is apparently not related. This is no longer occurring. I don’t know what I was using that contributed to this problem.

The crash details are as follows:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: DllHost.exe
Application Version: 6.0.6000.16386
Application Timestamp: 4549b14e
Fault Module Name: StackHash_1703
Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 00000000
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0153b5ed
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 1703
Additional Information 2: 2264db07e74365624c50317d7b856ae9
Additional Information 3: 1344
Additional Information 4: 875fa2ef9d2bdca96466e8af55d1ae6e
Read our privacy statement:

Summary

1. The CPU occasionally gets very busy for no apparent reason.
2. The COM Surrogate – whatever that is – occasionally crashes.

- windy

After an hour or so of searching, I found 1And1.com and LunarPages. Both have

1. affordable plans
2. trial periods of at least 30 days.
3. Very reasonable Terms of Use and Terms of Service agreements. You should read these very carefully since I found that some hosting services, such as BlueHost.com, based in Utah, does not permit adult content of any kind. My artistic photos violate their terms of use.

I got a new domain and uploaded my site to 1AND1, however, 1And1.com had two problems:

1. I was not easily able to upload the 34MB Coppermine database. The site is 182K records, and 170K of those are hit statistics which may not seem very important, but looking ahead, it seemed unreasonable to have to break the SQL of the database into chunks smaller than 3MB to get it to upload. The limit was stated as 8MB, but 7MB files and even 4MB files usually failed to restore to the database even tho phpMyAdmin reported success.
2. The MySQL databases have a limit of 100MB, and while my databases do not exceed this presently, it seems more reasonable to limit the MySQL databases on the total space provided rather than a fixed limit.

Lunar Pages provides:

1. SSH [shell account] access so that I could upload the entire SQL for the Coppermine database and do a mysql command in the shell to restore the database. This process completed in a couple of minutes.
2. The MySQL databases come from the total quota for the site, which is a whopping 1.5 TB. My total site size is now a little over 3GB.
3. Blazing speed. Using Pingdom.com and Site24x7.com to time my site showed that Lunar Pages was about 30% faster than 1AND1.com.

I recommend Pingdom.com for testing website speeds. Pingdom provides a detailed breakdown of times for each file of the web page and stores the results from one day to the next so that you can compare speeds of various trials.

A New WordPress Theme

A couple of years ago I created my wordpress theme from a theme I found and a graphic I found on another site. As I was looking through the wordpress theme site this evening, I found a very nice theme that really grabbed my attention. As you can see it is similar to the one that we had here before.

Old WindyWeather Theme

The windyweather theme has the links on the left and calendar on the right. The articles are down the center.

Nebula Theme

A very striking theme by Gx3. I made some minor changes to the sidebars to change the order of items on the left side and remove the Google search and widget panel from the right side. It now has items in the same place as the Windy theme. I also added the page statistics to the bottom of the page.

Time for a face lift.

enjoy,

windy