The Runner's Best Friend
October 5th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Any iPhone owner’s worst nightmare is forgetting his/her phone at home. It’s really amazing how that damned device manages to affirm itself as a necessity for everyday life, and how people freak out when they somehow forget it. I know for a fact that ever since I got mine about a year ago, the longest it’s been out of my reach can be calculated in hours, if not minutes. When it’s not feeding me some music through earphones, it’s in my pockets at all times, ready for duty.
That being said, it’s only natural of me to bring it along when I go running (and trust me I’ve been doing an aweful lot of that lately). It used to be only to play some music, but about a month ago I found an app that wonderfully compliments my jogs: Runkeeper. The concept is pretty simple, and it’s been done before numerous times: the app is basically a tracker that records your position at regular intervals using the iPhone’s built in GPS, then compiles your distance traveled, average speed, max speed, and a couple of other stats. What makes Runkeeper different is the really nice web-based backend that allows for much more thorough processing of your record runs to extract more significant data and giving you the option of posting your runs/hikes/rides onto Facebook or Twitter to inspire your friends to get running as well.
While other apps only calculate distance, time, and speed without giving you any additional info, Runkeeper actually takes that data and gives you all the web2.0 goodies, like embeddable maps, all sorts of crazy charts for stuff like vertical ascent/descent per km, a speed/time bar graph, and even a calorie counter, for whomever that may interest. It’s more than a dumb bike/run computer, it’s a complete fitness journal that acts as other training guidelines and motivator. Plus the best part is that it’s free, although there is a premium version that isn’t ad supposted, and has even more interesting features like audio cues as well as in-app training programs for those of you who are totally clueless about running. The premium version is only 10$, which is way less expensive than the Nike+iPod system (29$ + shoes), it’s primary competition. No need for special shoes, and you don’t need an iPhone 3G S, it’s compatible with either 3G iPhones or 3G S models.
All in all, I only have on complaint, and it’s that you cannot edit all the info available on the website directly from your mobile device without having to fire up Safari and navigating through a very phone-unfriendly site. Other than this minor issue which is most likely to get fixed via an update, you have no reason to not try Runkeeper out. The chances are that if you’re a regular runner/biker, you’ll be getting the Pro version in no time.
Just don’t forget about the iPhones moisture sensors, and always use and adequate holster or a ziploc bag while running!
Check out Runkeeper here, download the free version from the iTunes store!
Setting up AHCI Post-Installation for Vista and Windows 7
September 24th, 2009 § 1 Comment
I’ve got a confession to make. Throughout the 5 (or more?) systems that I have built throughout my relatively short period of interest in computers, there has been one thing that I have always omitted to enable, on every single system: AHCI. Advanced Host Controller Interface, as it is otherwise known, is one of the higher level layers of the SATA norm that enables better control over hard-drives connected to a SATA controller. Concretely, using AHCI enables features which are unavailable with standard IDE controllers: Native Command Queueing (NCQ), finer grained power management options, and hot-plugging.
Power management is something that is pretty self-explanatory, and NCQ and hot-plugging are terms well known by most computing enthousiasts, but just for the heck of it, here is a short reminder on what those things do: hot-plugging allows for the instant recognition of SATA drives plugged in a running system; it kind of makes your storage supports act like USB peripherals: you plug it in, the OS recognizes it instantly. This was previously impossible with normal IDE controllers, and although hot-plugging works on SATA in IDE mode, it isn’t totally automated: you still have to ask Windows (or whatever your OS) to look for it. As for Native Command Queueing, it is kind of like QoS filtering on a network, only it’s for your hard drives. The feature reads ahead on it’s tasks of commands, and prioritizes tasks as to minimized the distance traveled by the R/W head. It sounds kind of complicated when described with words… have a picture:
It might not seem like much… but in a mass-multi-tasking scenario with very full disks, you can obviously see the need for this kind of technology.
Looks good eh? I’ve got bad news though: enabling AHCI in your BIOS will results in a BSOD on boot. Since AHCI is something entirely different from IDE, Windows does not normally have the AHCI drivers loaded, hence why your disks are unreadable. Normally, under Windows XP, one would have to reinstall the OS in order to get AHCI working, however, Windows Vista and 7 have “native” support for AHCI and therefor can be set to use and AHCI storage system even after the OS has been installed. I myself have had difficulty finding out how to install the proper drivers, until I reinstalled Vista on my main box recently, where I realized that I was probably missing out on some pretty good stuff. Better late then never, I learnt how to do it, and thought I might share.
What needs to be done is that the AHCI driver has to be enabled at boot, as for the OS to load properly. This can be done by enabling the generic Microsoft provided AHCI driver. All this requires is a little one key registry tweak, as detail in this KB article. Simply changes this key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
So that it is equal to 0. Mine was equal to something like 4 originally. If I had to take a guess as to the nature of this number, I’d probably say that it has something to do with the driver load priority, where anything tagged 0 is loaded first, 3 last, and 4 disabled.
Anyways, once that’s done, you may reboot your computer, go into the BIOS and set SATA MODE to AHCI. Your computer SHOULD boot fine, it may take a while to startup though. Once you are booted to your desktop, the “Found new hardware” dialog will go tits up, and pop up 6+ new pieces of hardware: each one of the SATA ports, the AHCI controller, as well as all the devices that you have hooked up on SATA. In my case, recognizing all this hardware took about 5 minutes.
Once that’s done, you’ll have to install a driver more specific to your motherboard, as the vanilla driver is far from optimal. Get the driver from your manufacturer’s web site, install the sucker, then reboot.
Once that’s done, you’ll have to go through the process of waiting for the hardware detection wizard to do it’s thing. If all goes right, you’ll see all the stuff you saw last time it ran, plus your SATA controller listed under it’s proper name. Once that’s done, congrats! You’re running off AHCI!
Now you can sleep easy knowing that your box (or at least your hard disk) is running full throttle. Enjoy!
EnTiced
September 21st, 2009 § Leave a Comment
I’ve always considered myself as someone with reasonable goals, means and demands in everything that I do. For example, I’m into computers, yet I’ve NEVER had a flagship PCB product (graphics card or whatever) anywhere near my machine, because it’s just too god damned expensive. Same thing with photography: I consider myself an enthousiast, but I am very contempt with my entry level DSLR and the old hand-em-down all-manual 35mm SLR that used to belong to my dad.
When I bought my BMX bike, I did so in a perfectly reasonable and rational manner. I checkout out how much money I was making at the time, how much money I wanted to put into the sport, what kind of parts I wanted, and then set out to find the best possible bang for my buck, while respecting what I wanted out of my to-be kreigsmaschine.
Up to now, I’ve been pretty good at keeping my original plan as the only plan, and not changing parts for the sake of it. In fact, ever since I called it final, the only slip-up was a set of bars, but that was out of necessity really considering the ridiculous pair of recycled, inadequate grabbers I was using. But now that I have some income again (I had stopped working for a month before starting in the Canadian Forces), I am feeling the urge to spend more and more.
Today I stumbled upon something that REALLY didn’t help my case: ti-upgrade manufacturer BlueSix.
The concept behind the company is simple: it provides the mods that all riders want, but that none of the manufacturers want to give. Now, you don’t have to search these obscure motorcycle modification sites looking for a SINGLE 8×1.25mm Ti bolt that’s the right length for your stem: BlueSix stocks pretty much anything you need bolt-wise. They’ve even got more advanced mods, like female axle conversion kits for some KHE freecoasters and replacment axles that’ll fit just about any popular/standard crank out there. For the color kids: they even stock their products in many colors!
I also like the philosophy that the company has torwards standardization: according to this interview up on BMX Tec, Bluesix also wants to help instore the concept of using 6mm hex keys everywhere (hence it’s name), and converting all BMX hardware to the metric system. It’s about goddamned time that somebody outside of the Commonwealth comes to this brilliant conclusion.
I was pumped on getting a Ti Ratchet axle and some assorted axle bolts, but then reality hit hard. I think this picture is pretty self explanatory:
For those of you who didn’t get it, that’s a 40$ set of Ti bolts mounted on an 80$ stem, which is in turned mounted to a fork steerer held in place by a 140$ headset. This reflects what kind of clientel these products are aimed at: the BMX elite, and weight weenies with lots of money. 40$ might not sound like alot for a cool set of blue bolts, but you know, the stock bolts came free with your stem.
And it gets worst: axles and axle bolts for my Ratchet would cost me a hefty 125$USD, not counting shipping or taxes. I’m really having a hard time convincing myself that this is a useful purchase; do I really want to replace the axle on an indestructible hub that already set me back by 300 loonies? How much sense does a 500$CAD BMX rear hub make? None.
I’m not saying don’t go Ti. Heck, if I were a millionaire, I’d sure as hell be the the first one to build an all Odyssey/G-Sport equipped whip with full Ti conversion and a sick color scheme, just for the kicks and the beauty of the thing. But for me, grams and anodization just aren’t worth the hard earned money that I could be spending on sex, drugs and rock’n'roll.
So anyways, for all you Ti fans out there, let it be known, there is a new sheriff in town, and he’s there to rape your wallet and lighten your bike.
Cogeco Pulls a Comcast
July 30th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
The internet has grown exponentially in the last decade, everybody knows that. The web has quickly grown from a collection of web pages and some mail/ftp/irc/whatever else servers sprinkled here in there, to a massive, multi-gazillion machine network, on which enormous amounts of data is exchange, and now not only in the form of static HTML pages and emails, but increasingly so in the form of high resolution images, high definition video,complex web applications, P2P traffic, and a myriad of other different protocols. People are now carrying the web in their pockets, their backpacks, and many households count more than one computer connected to the internet. Naturally, the growing number of users and uses of this great network exposed the drawbacks of yesterday’s internet, and it has now become apparent that bandwidth is an issue.
To counter-act, ISP have start putting in mesure that restrict abusive use of bandwidth. Imposing bandwidth caps, throttling connections relatively to the time of the day, and encouraging users to save bandwidth are all things that are known to be used by the general public to be used by ISPs worldwide in order to help them keep their margin of profit.
However, some bigger ISPs have taken drastic action, sometimes without notifying their customers, and have in general earned a bad reputation for it. Two of the biggest scandals I can recall are regarding Comcast, one story regarding how Comcast apparently discriminates against the Bittorrent by reset connections that use the latter, and another regarding a much dreaded 250 gig bandwidth cap, which went in effect in October of last year. Torrent Freak is a nice blog to check out if you want to be up to date on all the dirty ISP tricks going on.
I thought we Canadians were out of danger regarding all those nasty ISP practices… apparently not. A couple of months ago by the middle of June approximately, I recieved a cute little letter from Cogeco, one of the major Canadian ISPs and also MY ISP, telling me that the EULA had changed, and that I would be capped to not 250… but 60(!) gigs of monthly bandwith, counting both up and downloads. Angered out of my wits, I took a second to cool down with a cold beverage then started reading the new EULA (which they call a PUA) with haste.
We Control Your Interaction
First off, nothing irregular: you can’t use your connection for anything illegal, you are fully reponsible for whatever happens with your line, bla bla bla. Then things start being wierd. Page 1, last paragraph:
COGECO reserves the right to discontinue access to any Usenet newsgroup at any time for any reason.
Could this be censorship? Usenet is long gone… but newsgroup these days pretty much refers to any online community or forum. Normally, when you reserve yourself a right, you need to explain it. If the “for any reason” part had been replaced with a valid reason, say: “if the newsgroup contains content that violate prior points of the PUA”, then I would have been happy. But they gave themselves way too much latitude. Anyways, they aren’t blocking my boards, so I can live with that part for now.
No Sharing
Next up, page 2, paragraph 3:
The residential Customer may not run programs or servers which provide network service to others. Examples of prohibited programs include, but are not limited to mail, http, ftp, irc, dhcp servers, and multi-user interactive forums.
Again, this is grossly outdated. The internet is all about sharing… why take away people’s rights to share content on their on machines. Not everybody can afford web hosting, and easily deployable FTP and HTTP servers are readily available, so why not? From what I understand, Cogeco understands this because they do not block incoming ports for these protocols, it might be that for them, this part of the PUA is just an additional security. Again, unless my personal web server is taken any time soon, I’m not going to bitch.
Throttling
Now for the troubling part, page 2, paragraph 6:
COGECO, in its sole discretion, may, at any time and without prior notice, take any actions deemed appropriate if the Customer exceeds the prescribed bandwidth limitations set out on the www.cogeco.ca/internetquebec, website for each Service plan, or to preserve the integrity of its network. Such actions include, but are not limited to, the imposition of the additional charges mentioned on the www.cogeco.ca/internetquebec website, temporary or permanent removal of content, cancellation of newsgroup posts, discontinuing access to any Usenet newsgroup, filtering of Internet transmissions, and the immediate suspension, discontinuance, limitation or termination of the Services.
Put simply, if you abuse of your bandwidth, they can find out why, and block what they don’t like, otherwise just dump you altogether. Thing is, Cogeco blocks the BitTorrent protocol, wether or not you have raped your bandwidth, something that they fail to mention in their PUA. Check out that torrent-relating study again; who’s the second worst ISP for blocking torrents? Yup, you guessed it. Not only is descrimination torwards traffic something that is totally anti-neutral and disrespectful of the customer’s rights, it’s also pretty darn unethical to not mention the limitations of your service before selling it. Not cool.
We Can Rat You Out
And finally, the final scare, the one that’ll leave your blood chilled.
COGECO may cooperate with law enforcement authorities in the investigation of suspected violations to any applicable laws, regulation, public AUP or order of a public authority having jurisdiction. Such cooperation may include COGECO providing the Customer’s username, IP address, or other information based on reasonable evidence and/or receipt of warrant. Upon termination of the Services, COGECO is authorized to delete any files, programs, data and E-mail messages associated with the Customer’s account. COGECO, in its sole discretion, will determine what action will be taken in response to a violation on a case-by-case basis. Violations of this AUP may also subject the account holder(s) to criminal or civil liability.
Username? Fine, a username can be perfectly anonymous. IP? Yeah, chances are the police already have it anyways. OTHER INFORMATION? What kind of OTHER INFORMATION may I ask? My name? The credit card number I pre-authorized my billing with, my civic address, any other information you are likely to have on me? Well so much for professional secrecy. With these rules down on paper, how easy would it be for Mr. Joe Average to call up the customer service pretending to be Sargent Average of the RCMP, and snatch pieces of my confidential information? While I agree that this mesure could be specially useful for catching the real vermine of the internet, those who run juvenile porn distribution networks and other users who share distasteful and illegal content, an ISP which has been trusted with the task of supplying a line shouldn’t be able to rat out a customer. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: may it be for telephone, internet or whatever else service, the service provider has the duty of remaining strictly a middleman. Not necessarily one without rules, but like any doctor or lawyer they should keep any info they have been trusted with between their own hands at all costs.
Bottom line: if you can go with any other ISP, do so. Sadly, funky zonage in Quebec gives Cogeco the monopoly over some areas, but don’t allow yourself to be played. Cogeco is downhill in my book… and you never know when it’s gonna snowball even more.
If it Ain't Broke, Make it Better: The Dream Azureus/Vuze Server Setup
July 29th, 2009 § 1 Comment
As you might know if you’ve been following my Twitter feed, your’s truly is departing Sunday of this week for a 13 year long military career. This is obviously a very big step in my life, in two ways: I’m going in the Army, which itself will surely affect my lifestyle, career and outlook on life forever. But, leaving for the military also invovles moving out of the family home, and into the RMC St. Jean. Knowing that free time is a very rare thing at St. Jean, I decided to clean up a couple of things I had laying around my room, and finalized some long overdue projects, such as my current case mod which is getting done at a snail’s pace, and a couple of routine maintenance operations on stuff on my home network.
One of the first things on my list was changing my home server’s primary OS drive, which was previously a nearly 10 year old Western Digital Caviar 40 gig drive hooked up on IDE. It made sense to recycle the old drive way back when I was just starting to mess around with the idea of a home server, but now that the box hosts 5 other network share drives, I really don’t want to risk some downtime or data loss because of an old drive. So I bought a new SATA WD 160 gig drive, and initially set out to copy the old drive to the new one, using Acronis TrueImage.
During the copy, all went OK, but back in the system, the bootloader acted up, and with reason, because I was changing the OS from a drive recognized as /dev/hda to something more amongst the lines of /dev/sda. After numerous attempts at fixing the MBR/GRUB, I gave up, and downloaded the latest Fedora for a fresh install.
Turns out, I really should have thought of doing that beforing even considering a full migration to a new disk. Armed with the determination to get my shit working well once and for all before I head out to St. Jean, I started installing the new OS on the fresh drive. All went well during the installation, which was pretty fast (good job working on Anaconda, Fedora people), and apart from the fact that Palimpsest detected that three of my HDs were crippled with bad sectors, including both drives in my RAID-1 array dedicated to important stuff. Woo.
All hard drive failure aside, it really payed off to restore a fresh OS. For one, Fedora 11 seems WAY snappier. OK, it could be due to the fact that I’m on a much faster boot disk. REgardless, with a newer version OS also comes lots of updated software goodies, including a fresh new kernel (I hadn’t updated mine since F9, I’m a lazy ass). When the fresh install up and running, I set out to get my network shares going. Nothing complicated there, as my RAID1 array was automatically detected, so all there was to do was to create my mountpoints (I used /storage/whatever for all drives meant to be shared on network), edit fstab, get the SMB config running, and I was ready to go.
Next up, Azureus Vuze was the tricky part. I download lots of torrents… enough to have my ISP calling me on a regular basis to remind me that they have a cap thing going on (which I’ll discuss in a later article). So obviously, in order to download my stuff easily and efficiently, I have a pretty complex setup when it comes to Vuze.
My old setup, while more complex than necessary, was pretty ghetto. I basically consisted of an installation of Vuze that was called on by rc.local on startup, that ran in command line and shot all of it’s output to null. To control it, I had to used the Swing Web UI, a plugin which gives the user a complete yet simple Java powered web UI. The ports for this UI were onlocked on my router, giving me the ability to upload and manage my torrents from any computer rocking Java and an internet connection. This feature in itself was pretty nice. Downloading, completed, and .torrent files were all stored on my torrent drive, a SATA 320 gigger which I had scored for free at work, given to me by a customer who’s external drive had failed and who didn’t want the internal drive back. Having a dedicated torrent drive helped reduce the load on the already pretty slow OS drive which I was previously using… at some points I had so many simultaneous read/writes going on that I started getting IO errors in Vuze which automatically stopped some of my downloads… not a good thing. Anyways, the torrent drive was then shared via Samba, and mounted on my computer(s), so I could manage, relocation and view/open files. I also had this thing going on where a folder on my network share was monitored by Vuze for any new torrent files to be added… nice for batch uploading.
The setup worked fine, but it really wasn’t ideal. The startup script was a huge fail, because it would run Vuze in root, which apart from the obvious security concerns was pretty lame because any files created/manipulated would be marked as owned by root. This meant that anything on my torrent drive, regardless of if all the folders had been chmoded to 777 beforehand, was listed as read only to the user that Samba used. Removing old files was therefor a pain in the ass, as I had to SSH into the server to change the permissions to whatever files I had to manipulated. In the end, I had a script called 777torrents which I ran whenever I needed to manipulated, that did a recursive chmod of all the torrent files. While all of these quicky fixes worked without a hitch, it isn’t something I wanted to do again on the new install.
So I set out to install Vuze. On Fedora, this was pretty easy.
yum install azureus
Yup, the Fedora repo still lists Vuze as Azureus… I’m not fond of the new name anyways. Once that’s done, there is some slight modification to some core Azureus files that need to get done in order to be able to run the application in text mode. Snatch the latest .jar file as well as complimentary modules from this page, dump them in your Azureus install directory, and you should be good to go. In my case, the directory in question was /usr/share/azureus/.
At this point, Azureus will be ready to run. Try it out, customize the options to your liking, check out the plugins for added functionalities. For what I needed, I downloaded the Swing Web UI, the HTML Web UI, mod for the latter plugin called iZureus as well as the P4P plugin (also something I’ll be discussing by next post). BE SURE YOU INSTALL THE PLUGINS WITH THE USER YOU WILL BE RUNNING AZUREUS WITH! Since configuration information and plugins are stored in the a .azureus folder in your home directory, not doing so will mean that none of your config will carry on to other users. I learned this the hard way the first time I ever messed around with Azureus. Keep in mind that to accomplish the “complete solution” kind of setup that I am sporting, the user using both Azureus and Samba will have to be the same.
Once Azureus is up and running like you want it to, close it, and go read this wiki page to get the instructions on how to start your fresh new torrent client on boot. Honestly, the instructions there are pretty concise, I don’t know what else to add. Just remember to edit the script to reflect your environment, user, installation directory and all.
When that’s done, the only thing left is to configure the shares for all of your files. Usually Samba comes with any installation of Fedora, but if something messes up or you’re using another distro, you know what to do:
yum install samba
<3 yum. As for the configuration of your new service, ReallyLinux has a nice tutorial (old a bit, but hey) on setting up the entire thing. Don’t forget to use the same user that’s running the Azureus screen daemon in the “Create Server Users & Directories” part of the process, unless you REALLY want to make setting permissions on your torrent files a pain in the ass. You might want to consider creating a hierarchised torrent folder like I did, with the following structure:
-torrents
—complete (completed files get moved here)
—downloading (incomplete files go here)
—.torrents (all .torrents files are stored here, even after the torrents are removed)
—.toadd (this is the infamous monitored directory in which azureus looks for new .torrent files)
Last step: change the ownership of all the shares you just created to reflect whatever user you took to run Azureus and Samba. This is usually a one command thing, it will look like this:
chown -R max302 /storage/torrents
Voila. The /storage/torrents/ folder and all of it’s content is now mine. I kept the default 775 permissions, but you can always enforce something more radical once the folder is your property, 770 or 700 would make sense.
There you have it, a super clean, automated bittorrent server. There is only ONE thing missing from this setup, and that is a method for automatically moving .torrents from my browser’s download folder directly to the .toadd folder… I’ve thought of a cron/at job that runs a batch script which checks the contents of the folder at regular intervals, but I just don’t like the idea of things running periodically. I’m dreaming up a little program that could do it, but I’d have to learn to code first >:\ .
Have fun, and remember, pratice safe torrenting!
Making Your Paypal Bank Transfers Instant!
June 22nd, 2009 § 4 Comments
Paypal is a blessing, because it allows anybody to send or receive money online, at no cost, and without the need of having a credit card. However, the painful part is seeing your money take DAYS to make the trip from your bank account to your Paypal recipient. Us Canucks have it extra hard: American bank account transfers take only 3 to 4 business days, which can easily translate to a full week if you don’t start your transfer on Monday, and the delay is 6-8 business days for Canadian bank accounts. Imagine a situation where I’m buying something online from some eBay store in the US. 10 days for Paypal to clear if you count a weekend in, and then at LEAST 4-5 days for shipping and processing and whatever else the stuff has to go through before getting slammed on my doorstep by an idiot dressed in brown. In my book, that’s 15 days before I get my stuff. 15 days is over 2 weeks, and two weeks is half a month. Half a month is a 24th of a year, and a 24th of a year is pretty darned long.
Of course, one can just add a credit card to his/her Paypal and benefit from instant payments, may they be from credit card or from your bank account. However, not everyone on Paypal is of legal age to own a credit card, and not everybody has a mom or dad willing to supply the plastic. Up to this day, we poor young customers of the internet were cursed with painful waiting times, and rejection from many e-stores and sellers who don’t like the concept of waiting for a payment to clear. Until now!
This time of waiting is over. There is a way to “trick” Paypal into fronting you the cash for your online purchase while all the processing is going on between Paypal and whatever financial institution you deal with. The basis of this little bypass is a new type of card released by Mastercard, the Vanilla. This card, which I see little use if you ignore this little hack, is basically a universal gift card. It carries a predetermined monetary value, however unlike your regular gift card, it’ll work wherever theres is a credit card terminal, which includes real brick and mortar stores, but also online stores. What’s special about it is that it has a card number, a security number, and an expiration date, and it’s treated like any other credit card. From there, I’m pretty sure that you can see where I’m going with this.
To activate immediate eCheck payments on your Paypal, all you have to do is get one of those nifty little cards at any good corner store (I got mine from Couche-Tard, the Canadian equivalent of Circle K, so they should stock them), and bind it to your Paypal account like you would with any other credit card. Paypal eats it right up, and within minutes you’re sending money in a matter of seconds, anywhere in the world. Amazed, you’ll most probably start bidding on hundreds of eBay items like I did.
Be warned though. How the system works is that your bank account is still considered the primary source of funding, and your credit card is added as a backup source, if the bank account transfer bounces back. Since your “credit card” has a prepaid limit, this means that if you “acidentally” spend for more than you have in your bank account, then both your prepay and bank account will bounce back. You’ll be fucked. And by fucked, I mean having your Paypal account suspended.
So be careful.
New Shirt: Éclaté
June 17th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Exam period… not much time to update these days. It’s gonna slow down though… hopefully enough so that I can manage to ride my bike and write stuff while working enough to afford a fixie.
Speaking of being able to afford a fixie: I have a new shirt up for sale!
Based off of the éclat logo and font face, this shirt is pretty self explanatory for anybody who speaks French. If not, then éclaté means high. There, you get it.
Get your own printed on demand from my Zazzle store! Just like my other shirt, this comes printed on an American Apparel body-hugging (yet not overly tight) tee. It comes in white for the base price, but add 2 bucks and you can choose from any light color Zazzle offers on this style of shirt! Light blue and pastel green look really nice!
Already ordered one for myself and one for a buddy. I’ll update once I get those. If you order, please do post a link to a photo of you in the shirt on either the comments to this entry, the Zazzle page, or email ‘em directly to me! max302@gmail.com!
Product page is here, base price is a meagre 18.95! You can even customize the shirt to your liking with additional graphics or text or whatever else you feel like!
[OCN] Windows 7, the Ambassador of x64?
June 13th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Most people who buy pre-built computers usually find comfort in XP’s user experience, and are ready to sacrifice some RAM to get that comfort. But as an enthusiast, it brings tears to my eyes. Why would anybody want to waste RAM? You payed for 4 gigs, why are you only using 3? The solution to this problems is obviously getting people to adopt and keep 64 bit operating systems, and there isn’t a million operating system vendors out there; the one company that can make things change is Microsoft. What MS doesn’t seem to realize, is that they have the tool to finalize that transition out in the hands of the public right now: Windows 7.
Norton Tech Support Gives Away Free Product Keys!
May 28th, 2009 § 1 Comment
I was at work the other day, a lady came up wanting a preventive checkup (included in her extended warranty) and AV reinstall on her Mac. As funny as I thought the idea of having an antivirus product on a Mac was, I sold the lady the latest Norton AV for Mac, and took her computer in for a parts check. Turns out PC-Check doesn’t have the right drivers to run on a Mac, as the keyboard stops working once it boots (tested with 6.05 and 6.21), but a custom launcher with command line arguments works flawlessly.
So yeah, in the end, all the parts were OK, I did some maintenance (which on a Mac can be resumed to updates, blowing some air in the cooling slots), and ran into some problems when re-activating the Norton product. Our tech-bench version of the software doesn’t have any activation keys printed on them! For those of you not familiar with Norton products, the product key stickers look like this:
In the two boxes that I have unwrapped, both of the product booklets came without the yellow sticker containing the key. Concerned, I fired up a livechat session with a Symantec rep. Here’s the integral transcript for your very own reading pleasure, I’ll be highlighting the important stuff.
As soon as I got a hold of somebody, I inquired on how I could find the customer’s product’s activation key elsewhere than it usually is. I had already tried entering other numbers I saw on the box as the activation key, with no avail. The only question that I got was for a billing address which the dude said was for quality assurance purposes only, and that I sadly couldn’t supply as to protect my customer’s identity. The dude’s response?
PrasadDuvvi(Sat May 23 12:42:42 EDT 2009)> No problem. PrasadDuvvi(Sat May 23 12:43:37 EDT 2009)> The activation code is (*********) PrasadDuvvi(Sat May 23 12:44:38 EDT 2009)> Please try to activate the program and let me know
It was that easy to get a key. I was totally puzzled. I actually asked the guy how come he gave me a key without asking for a proof of purchasing and without questionning me any more than he did. His response was that he simply carried out what I wanted and gave me a key.
What is to be learned from this? That the OS-X antivirus products are so unprofitable that you can give them away for free and not see a difference. I understand that they guy probably only wanted to get rid of a quick case by giving away something that wasn’t worth very much, but what kind of message this give to consumers like me?
Now this brings me to think that maybe I could do this with other Norton products. I haven’t tested it yet, but my main server OS disk is in dire need of changing and I would really like a free copy of Ghost. I’ll keep the post updated if there is any avail. Post in the comments if you try it out!
Google Mobile Sync
May 16th, 2009 § 2 Comments
I love Google. Ever since I’ve registered a Gmail account, I’ve given more of less every one of their services a shot, from the blog search engine to the now defunct Google Browser Sync. Overall, I have found their services reliable, practical, and just kick ass in general.
I have already been using IMAP Gmail on my iPhone, and like every proud iPhone owner I never miss a chance at anwsering/correcting people by whipping out Google from my pocket. I thought I was in the geek-nirvana… always connected to whatever I wanted to be. Right up until I stumbled upon Google Mobile Sync.
The concept is pretty simple: one phone, one Exchange server, and all your contacts and calendar entries are syncronized from whatever your smartphone is to the great big internetz. For the more visually inclined, have a video.
GOOGLE HAS FREED US OF CABLES, THE ARCHAIC MEDIUMS THAT USED TO UPDATE OUR ADDRESS BOOKS! Imagine you’re on the job, Mr. X sends you a very important business email telling you that he wants you to call back. No problem, you add the dude as a contact in your GMail account (because you are using your business POP3 on your GMail for superior organization of course). Then, two hours later on the train to whatever important place, you want to call up the dude, and his number has MAGICALLY been pushed to your address book. Badabing badaboom. No more messing around with awkward browsing in your Gmail contacts via 3G. You are free of wires, or typing in long names like Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Jr the Second or numerous phone numbers on your iPhone’s teeny tiny on-screen keyboard which makes typing a 9 instead of a 0 so easy. I think that’s pretty cool.
Or consider this: you’re a busy man, the manager of whatever facilities, let’s make it a hospital. Like any self-respecting busy man, you have a suave secretary who juggles with managing your schedules, returning your phone calls, and typing up your stuff. With Google calendar, you can share a calendar with Nancy, the said secretary, and have her manage all of your time, remotely, while not having to place a single phone call and being updated within literally SECONDS (I’ve tested this… push is that fast). Meeting with CEO of SOandSO Corp over, where to? Whips out iPhone. The press conference at the Imaginary Hotel isn’t on my calendar anymore… it’s been cancel. But hey, I’ve have a flight to Toronto to catch in an hour so I can help another hospital with their problems relative to whatever. Oh my, even the details relative to my flight are mentioned on my calendar. The obvious downside is that you don’t get to hear Nancy’s sensual voice every hour, but hey, it’s much better than to take quick, half-assed notes in a paper agenda, isn’t it?
I know, MS Exchange isn’t anything new. But having your very own little private slice of one of these for free certainly is. So for the love of god, just get your sync on. It takes about 5 minutes to configure, and the most difficult thing for me was to clear out my Gmail contacts.
I love centralizing. Long live Google.
