Yahoo Search Engine Penalty and Poor Service

I have several domain names that don't even appear on the first few pages of the Yahoo.com search engine results despite search for the name (minus the tld). I'm not going to divulge any of the domain names, but let's just say one of them is a fairly popular sports site that has plenty of incoming links. It definitely has a penalty imposed on it. On my sites there are no black-hat SEO, hidden text/links, or anything that I'm aware off that is anything close to violating Yahoo's webmaster guidelines.

In late April I sent in a re-review request via this page:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/search_rereview_feedback.html

I got an "Auto Confirmation - Your Yahoo! Search support request was received" email almost right away, saying "Your message was received, and you will hear back from us within the next 48 hours with an answer." But to this date still haven't received a response. I recently replied again to that computer generated response and still no reply.

I'm actually beginning to suspect that, for one particular domain name in which I have several subdomains, Yahoo penalized those sites under that domain name to prevent association with their new "Buzz" marketing campaign. I can't think of any other reason why they won't respond to me. Search Engine discrimination- that's pretty ugly. In fact, one of those sites used to be in the Yahoo Directory for years- it is now GONE. I am not about to pay Yahoo hundreds of dollar as a bribe to be included in their directory.

In contrast, I find the communications from Google to be excellent and very professional. The few times I've contacted them they've been very responsive and HELPFUL. The Google Webmaster Tools page is just impeccable with great information. I think Google definitely takes to heart its mantra of "doing good". They even post invaluable guidelines and videos (thank you Matt Cutts!) in helping your site rank better in the search results. Google has a great product in their search engine, and it's obvious that they believe that by working with webmasters to create better quality websites and content it creates a win-win situation for everyone.

One thing Matt Cutts mentioned in a video was that the Yahoo Directory is considered by Google as a "quality" directory. Despite the human editorial, it's possible that the same humans can be discriminating against certain sites and provide favoritism towards others. How can that be detected? It's very difficult, but I wouldn't be surprised that such bias exists. IMHO I think Google should disregard ranking passed on by web directories, period.

Sendmail and "SMTP; 550 REQUESTED ACTION NOT TAKEN: DNS FAILURE" Error Involving "apache at localhost.localdomain"

I run a web forum, and for some of the user registration/notification emails I was getting email bounced back sent from my server being bounced back, notably from AOL.com. The "Returned mail: see transcript for details" emails always have the info:

----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to mailin-04.mx.aol.com.:
>>> >>> MAIL From:
<<<>
Received-From-MTA: DNS; localhost.localdomain

Final-Recipient: RFC822; ************@aol.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 550 REQUESTED ACTION NOT TAKEN: DNS FAILURE

I thought I had configured sendmail on my Linux server hosting the web forum correctly, but apparently after some research I needed to do more.

I needed to create a file called "genericstable" under "/etc/mail", and place the following line in it:

apache user@my_domain.com

You would substitute "user@my_domain.com" with the user you want to show as the sender from your web forum script to show up as.

Then edit "/etc/mail/sendmail.mc" and add the following lines (before the MAILER lines):

FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl
FEATURE(`genericstable')dnl
GENERICS_DOMAIN(`localhost.localdomain')dnl

Then do a:

m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

to compile the sendmail configuration file, restart sendmail (I do a /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail restart), and voila- there shouldn't be any more rejected mail from your server with the "550 DNS Failure apache@localhost.localdomain" sort. Hope this helps!

Configuring Sendmail with Relay Server on Godaddy

I got a new Linux dedicated server (running CentOS 5.2) with Godaddy.com a few weeks ago and was started to wonder why email wasn't being sent out. I had configured the server to send out notification emails via sendmail triggered by certain events. So I took at /var/log/maillog and saw a ton of these messages:

"stat=Deferred: d.mx.mail.yahoo.com.: No route to host"
"stat=Deferred: g.mx.mail.yahoo.com.: No route to host
"stat=Deferred: a.mx.mail.yahoo.com.: No route to host
"stat=Deferred: c.mx.mail.yahoo.com.: No route to host

So I thought maybe I had misconfigured DNS, but the I was able to ping for instance, "d.mx.mail.yahoo.com" from the server. Then I remember reading something about have to use a relay server with Godaddy, and it turns out that they block all outgoing port 25 requests. To confirm, I did a:

"telnet d.mx.mail.yahoo.com 25"

and got:

Trying 66.196.82.7...
telnet: connect to address 66.196.82.7: No route to host
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: No route to host

Apparently you're supposed to use "k2smtpout.secureserver.net" as the relay mail server. How annoying- none of the other dedicated server hosts I'm using require this. In the Godaddy documentation there's no mention on how to setup sendmail to use the "k2smtpout.secureserver.net" relay server. After some research, I figured out that you have to add the following to "/etc/mail/sendmail.mc":

define(`SMART_HOST',`k2smtpout.secureserver.net')dnl

Then do the command:

" m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf"

to rebuild your sendmail configuration, restart sendmail, and voila- you can send mail again. There is a limit of 1000 per day. Since I've had the server online for a couple of weeks, I had a ton of email going out, including a sh*tload of error messages on how sendmail wasn't able to connect, etc. So I asked Godaddy to please temporarily increase my mail limit for a day or two and they refused. Thanks for the great support guys.

Anyways I hope this helps any of you using sendmail and Godaddy (or any other ISP/hosting provider that blocks outgoing port 25) and need to use a special mail relay server.

Tar Skip Certain Files Such as Log Files

I was moving to a different web hosting Linux dedicated server, and I needed to move all my files over. I first tried to copy via "scp" all the website folders and files, but ran into a problem where scp was not copying symbolic links but instead was following the links and copying the same files repeatedly. I figured that I better use tar to create a tarball of my directories and files. I ran it with gzip compression and it really slowed down my server. No biggie but what I really wanted was to have tar skip huge files such as "access_log" and "error_log" created by apache. After doing some research here are the steps I went about doing this:

1)run "screen" (screen allows you to open up a connected instance of your shell, and in case you get disconnected by your ssh client, the command you ran after running screen still keeps running, and you can "re-attach" to the screen later).

2)make a text file called tar_skip_files.txt, and add file names line-by-line that you want tar to skip; wildcards are allowed. In this case my file looked like this:

[root@myserver]# cat tar_skip_files.txt
access_log
error_log

3)Run tar with the "eXclude" switch. The "z" invokes gzip compression. Here is an example:

tar cvfz websites.tgz /home/websites -X tar_skip_files.txt

Then scp the tarball over to your new server and you're in business!

Prevent Website Javascript from Disabling/Hiding Browser Menu and Address Bar in Firefox

Using Firefox, I was trying to print a transaction list from my bank's website. Once I selected the date range for the transactions to be printed, I'd hit a button on the report web page that says "Continue". After hitting that button, a new window appeared with an icon and a link that says "Print this page". When I clicked on it, the Windows print dialog box popped up. But I wanted to print preview first. The problem was that the new window listing the transactions was missing the menu bar. Normally I'd go to File, and then select Print Preview before I print in Firefox, but without the menu bar I was lost. So I looked for a hotkey for Firefox to do the print preview, and apparently it's Alt-F, then V. It didn't work in this menu-less window- I guess that since the menu bar was gone, the hotkey(s) to access it were of no use.

The bank website obviously was using javascript to disable the menu bar- why- I don't really know- to annoy customers like me perhaps. I couldn't disable javascript because then I couldn't even log into the site. I then went to Tools, Options, and unchecked the box that says Scripts will be allowed to do the following for "Disable or replace context menus". No go. I then went on the Firefox Addons site and found an addon called "Javascript Options", version 1.2.6.

After installing the Firefox extension and restarting the browser, I noticed new options in the same Javascript options area of Firefox. In the "Windows" section of the options window, several boxes were checked including "Hide the menubar", "Hide the toobar", "Hide the location bar", and "Hide the scrollbars". I unchecked all of them, then tried again (no need to restart Firefox) and voila, the new transaction window I was trying to print now has the menu bar so I can do a print preview on it.

This is a great extension, and I recommend everyone to look at the print preview first before printing web pages and documents. You can find that something doesn't look right- text getting cut off, or see that you can actually fit that extra line in the second page onto the first page by playing with the scaling options. Save some paper here and there, save the planet ;-)

Scientific Atlanta 8300HD Harmony Remote Close Captioning Sequence

I programmed a closed captioning sequence for my Harmony remote control that will let me toggle the close captioning feature on the SA 8300HD set top PVR cable box on or off. The sequence is simple enough and is as follows:

1. Settings
2. DirectionUp
3. DirectionUP
4. DirectionRight

Then assign it to a button and you're done. Now at times (actually probably every other time) you will have to hit the button twice to get the desired effect because the closed captioning menu on the SA8300 has more than two options (one being On with Mute).

Hope this helps any of you out there looking to quickly switch closed captioning on and off, and have a Logitech Harmony remote!

Windows Vista 64 Freezes When Saving to Network Share Using Ralink RT61 Wireless PCI Adaptor

The new Athlon X2 BE-2400 computer (running Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit) I had built had a terrible problem- whenever I tried to save a document on a network share the whole computer would freeze. Seeing that I didn't have a spare wireless network adaptor available, I decided to tweak the settings of the one in the machine. It's a CompUSA brand MIMO internal PCI card with an external antenna stand having 3 antennas. Windows Vista shows it as a Ralink RT61 MIMO Wireless LAN Card.

From the Advanced tab of the properties for the card, I turned B/G Protection from On to Off, turned IEEE802.11h from Disabled to Enable, and set TX Burst from Disabled to Enabled. They didn't make any difference.

So I went ahead and bought another wireless card, the Rosewill RNX-G300EX, and little did I know that it was also Ralink, this time Windows Vista indicating it as a Ralink RT61 Turbo. And yep, the same freezing problem. I then booted into Safe Mode with Networking, just to eliminate the possibility of any apps being the culprit, and it still froze the computer when I did a cut and paste into a network share.

I used Vista and tried to do a "Update Driver" but it couldn't find a newer one on the net. I then navigated to the support section of the Ralink site over at:

http://www.ralinktech.com/ralink/Home/Support/Windows.html

and noticed that there were new driver updates as of December 11th, 2008. I downloaded the one that said "PCI/mPCI/CB (RT256x/RT266x)" because the Docs said the drivers were for RT61. The version was updated to 2.1.3. After installation, it still DID NOT WORK- the computer hangs after saving something to a network share. What a piece of junk. Hopefully Ralink will eventually fix this.

Free Partition Manager Tool for Windows Vista

I had installed Windows Vista on a new 500 GB hard drive on a new machine running an AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 w/ a Foxconn Foxconn A74MX-K AM2 motherboard. But then I regretted leaving the entire drive as a single partition (drive c:) because I want a partition to hold media files, while the c: drive would be backed up using a disk image tool. I didn't want the image tool build backup files containing these non-critical media files, so a new partition was the way to go.

So I tried to install Partition Magic to do the job, but got a warning message that Partition Magic 8 is not compatible with Windows Vista. Not wanting mess up the drive, I decided to look for other, preferably free solutions. I found a free tool called Partition Logic and burned it on an ISO, but unfortunately it could not recognize the AMD hard drive controller.

But it turned out that Windows Vista has the built-in capability to shrink partitions and also merge partitions. Click on the Windows button, right-click on Computer, select Manage, and then go to Disk Management. Right-click on the partition to shrink or extend, and you'll see the options "Shrink Volume..." and "Extend Volume...". Unfortunately for me, despite the system having 382 GB of 465GB free, it would only let me shrink the partition by a paltry 50 gigs- WTF??? I wanted to shrink it to about 100 gigs, which means a reduction of 282 gigs. I thought about tinkering with disabling swap file, etc, but then discovered that there was another tool to try- an open source program called GParted.

I went over to:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

And clicked on download and got the latest version of the GParted Live CD iso, which I then burned to a CD. Upon booting I got these "Buffer I/O" errors on device sr0" error messages but it still booted up fine. I had problem getting the video to intialize, so I used the command line mode, typed "exit" and it somehow went into the GUI no problem. This puppy then recognized my drive just fine and I was able to use it to resize the partition. It took like an hour and a half to do it, however.

After reboot, however, I got a "Windows failed to start" "File \Windows\system32\winload.exe" "Status: 0xc0000225" error. Apparently Windows lost track of where the boot partition is, so I poped in the Vista install CD and selected Repair which brought me to the System Recovery Options window. It showed that the partition size was 0 MB (yikes!) and the location was "Unknown". I clicked on "Next" and after about a minute a window popped up and said "Windows found problems with your computer's starup options. Do you want to apply repairs and restart your computer?" I clicked "Repair and Restart" and crossed my fingers. After doing a CHKDSK, windows booted up fine!

In the end, I recommend using GParted as the free solution for all your partition editing needs- just make sure you have your Vista DVD ready.

Archos AV700 Dark Screen Fix

I haven't used my Archos AV700 Media player in months, but now since going to be traveling I decided to use it. Upon powering it up it showed an extremely dim, dark screen. I tried to reset it by holding the Stop/ESC button for 15 seconds, but no go. I removed the battery and re-inserted but also no go. Finally I re-attached the TV pod connector to it, turned it back on, and voila! The screen is nice and bright again. This is a really weird bug, but at least there seems to be a workaround for it. I hope this helps any of you out there with the same problem.

iTunes "The song could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?" Fix

Because I wanted to upgrade to SP1 on my Vista x64 PC and was having problems doing the normal upgrade, I had to wipe out the drive and re-install from scratch. That was several months ago and since then I haven't sync'ed my iPod touch because I haven't installed iTunes. So finally today I decided to spend the time and do it. After I installed the newest version of iTunes and plugged in my iPod to the computer via USB, I got the message:

"The iPod is synced with another iTunes library. Do you want to erase this iPod and sync with this iTunes library?"

Now I had made a backup of my original user folder on my old Vista install. So I proceeded to shutdown iTunes, rename the folder:

C:\Users\MY_USER_NAME\Music\iTunes

to

C:\Users\MY_USER_NAME\Music\iTunes_bak
as backup.

Then I copied the backup iTunes folder with the xml file inside to C:\Users\MY_USER_NAME\Music\.

Upon launching iTunes again I was pleased to see the iPod being synced. But when I tried to click on a song to play it in iTunes I got the error message:

"The song could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?"

This is because I had moved the mp3 folder to another hard drive since my new Vista install. I didn't want to manually go through all the songs and re-locate them within iTunes. So I took a look at the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file under C:\Users\MY_USER_NAME\Music\iTunes and noticed that the drive letter for each song were coded inside the file.

So I made a backup of the xml file, then opened it under notepad, and did a search and replace for "OLD_DRIVE_LETTER:/" to "NEW_DRIVE_LETTER:/" and saved the file. I ran iTunes but it actually rebuilds the xml file, apparently from "iTunes Library.itl". So this time I renamed "iTunes Library.itl" to "iTunes Library.itl.bak" as backup, and then created a blank text file when I then renamed to "iTunes Library.itl". And then I did the search and replace again, this time saving the file as "iTunes Music Library.xml.good".

Upon launching iTunes it gave a message that the library file is damaged and renamed to "iTunes Library (Damaged).itl". The music libary is shown as blank. I then went to File, Library, Import Playlist, and selected the "iTunes Music Library.xml.good" file. And aftering importing, voila!, everything worked like a charm!

Hope this help those of you out there running iTunes on Windows and have recently physically moved your music/mp3 folder. And be sure to backup your iTunes libary just in case- don't move your original iTunes libary folder but instead make a copy it.

Windows Media Player Skip to Next Song Hotkey

Occasionally when I've turned off my computer monitor I still have the Windows Media Player playing songs on a playlist and I want to skip to the next song. It's kind of annoying to have to turn on the monitor and mouse to the skip button to click it. I tired right-clicking on the skip button to see what the hotkey is, but it only shows "Fast Foward CTRL-SHIFT-F". Well CTRL-SHIFT-F does exactly that- fast forwards a song but not skip it. It turns out to skip a song, you have do a CTRL-F. Of course if you have one of those keyboards with the skip button then you don't have to deal with it, but CTRL-F is the way to go for the PCs without those multimedia keyboards. Oh and to pause a song you would hit CTRL-P, and the same to resume playing. To go back to the last song, do a CTRL-B.

To make sure all these hotkeys work you have to have WMP selected as the foreground window. Then turn off the monitor, save some electricity, and party away!

D-Link QoS Engine Sample Rule to Speed Up SSH

I own a D-Link DIR-625 Router, which features a QoS Engine powered by StreamEngine Technology. I do a lot of work over SSH, and noticed that after I enabled the QoS Engine feature I got some stutter and hiccups in my SSH terminal program (I use PuTTy) while connected to a server. Apparently the "Automatic Classification" feature of the QoS engine doesn't give high priority for SSH traffic. Thankfully the setup page allows me to put in custom QoS rules. For the name field I entered in ssh, for priority I put in "2" (1 is the highest and 255 is the lowest), and the Destination Port Range I set to 22 to 22 (the port for SSH). I also did the same for web page traffic to higher prioritize it. See the image below- I hope this helps if you need to manually prioritize certain traffic with your QoS enabled router!

Prevent Comment Spam in Gallery 2

Even though I've enabled CAPTCHA I'm still seeing a ton of comment spam inserted by spambots on my Menalto Gallery 2 site. I've looked around and there are SQL queries that will rid your Gallery2 site of spam, but it doesn't prevent new ones from being saved. I've finally got sick of it and decided to stop the problem by adding a snippet of code in AddComment.inc (under the gallery/modules/comment directory). Be sure to backup your existing AddComment.inc file first before applying this mod.

Right below this section:

      $comment->setCommenterId($gallery->getActiveUserId());
      $comment->setHost(GalleryUtilities::getRemoteHostAddress());
      $comment->setSubject($form['subject']);
      $comment->setComment($form['comment']);
      $comment->setAuthor($form['author']);
      $comment->setDate(time());

Add the following code:

  ##BEGIN Gallery Spam Prevention Mod by TechBlogByDave (http://www.techblogbydave.blogspot.com)
      $disallowed = array('http', 'url=');
      $checks = array($form['author'], $form['subject'], $form['comment']);
      foreach ($checks as $check){
          foreach ($disallowed as $dis){
              if (stristr($check, $dis)){
                  die("In order to combat spam, $check has been tagged as a disallowed keyword.  Your comment has not been saved.");
              }
          }
      }
  ##END Gallery Spam Prevention Mod

Save the file and voila- any comment with the text "http" or "url=" will be met with an error message and not even be saved to the datbase. You can even add additional keywords into the "disallowed" array that you don't want in comments such as cuss words. Keep in mind that when you upgrade your Gallery 2 to a newer version you will have to re-apply the mod. Hope this helps!

MySQL CC Window Maximize Problem

I use MySQL Control Center (Mysql CC) pretty frequently, and I was happy to find that it was updated to version 0.9.8-beta last year in 2007. Before that version, the Mysql AB, the company behind MySQL, had stopped work on the project, and the program had become incapable of editing MySQL 5.x data (maybe even MySQL 4.x data, in fact- I forget). The newest verion of MysqlCC works great, except sometimes I have trouble restoring the window to a non-maximized form. When I run it it would appear minimized at the taskbar (I'm running Windows Vista, BTW), and in order for it to re-appear I had to right-click on it and pick "Maximize". I had problems with older Mysql CC versions as well.

I'm not sure what graphics library it uses, but I think it's QT/Windows. It could be that other programs that uses the same library (probably mostly open source programs) may have the same problem.

Determined to find a way around this annoyance, I started playing around with the window INSIDE the main MysqlCC window. I discovered that if you MINIMIZE that inside window, close MysqlCC, then run it again, you can restore it non-maximized again. Just wanted to share this workaround to anyone else using this excellent tool and having the same problem- hope it works for you too!

Phone Telemarketing Spam after Applying for Tax Permit

Okay this is not exactly 100% tech-related, but I feel the need to rant. I applied for a tax permit a couple weeks ago and received the official permit last week. Today I received several telemarketer calls wanting to sell their credit card processing services despite my phone being in the National Do Not Call Registry. So far this morning:

2 calls from 8174663329 Michael Kurecka (trying to sell credit card processing)
1 call from 8009186409 Global Payment Systems
1 call from 8772322370 Another CC Processor
1 call from 3122220131 Yet another....

I didn't think it's coincidence. So I called the state controllers office and they told me that sales permits are public records, and on the state website there's even a section where anyone (including telemarketers) can download information on NEW permits issued. Wow- how convenient!

I've reported the telemarketers' info to the to the DNC site- you should too if you get an unsolicited telemarketing call. The URL is:

https://www.donotcall.gov/complaint/complaintcheck.aspx

Firefox 3 Content-Type Header Conflict with mod security

I installed an AJAX chat/shoutbox application on a web server and was wondering why it wasn't working under Firefox 3. Using the excellent Mozilla Firefox addon Firebug, I noticed that the request POST to the target PHP script was getting a 403 Forbidden error. I have mod security installed on the server, so I took a look at the audit_log and noticed the following (excerpt) for the particular request that was being denied:

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8

mod_security-action: 403
mod_security-message: Access denied with code 403. Pattern match "!(^$|^application/x-www-form-urlencoded$|^multipart/form-data)" at HEADER("Content-Type") [severity "EMERGENCY"]

Apparently Firefox 3 adds "charset=UTF-8" to the Content-Type header. So in summary:

Firefox 2/Internet Explorer sends: "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
Firefox 3 sends: "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8"

So I changed the following in mod_security.conf:

SecFilterSelective HTTP_Content-Type "!(^$|^application/x-www-form-urlencoded$|^multipart/form-data)"

to:

SecFilterSelective HTTP_Content-Type "!(^$|^application/x-www-form-urlencoded*|^multipart/form-data)"

And it worked. But now I'm having some oddball caching issue with Firefox 3 where it doesn't want to refresh the AJAX chat application right after a new message has been posted....

How to Check System Temperature Under Linux

One of my Linux web servers (running Fedora) starting coming up with these messages:

Message from syslogd:

kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold

CPU0: Running in modulated clock mode

I couldn't tell how slowly the CPU was running, but it was dog slow, and the server load was outrageously high.

I was curious as to what temperature the CPU was running at, so I took a look at the pseudo file:

/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature

using cat and the ACPI sensor showed a whopping 83 degrees Celsius. I called the hosting company and they found a faulty CPU fan and replaced it.

Just thought I share this in case you didn't know how to check the temperature of Linux boxes and want to find out.

Tivo HD Hard Drive Upgrade - The Best Way

I got my new Tivo HD (model # TCD652160) today, and before even turning it on I wanted to upgrade its built-in 160GB SATA hard drive (Western Digital WD1600AVBS). I had a spare 320GB WDC SATA HDD laying around so I wanted to use it as my new Tivo HD hard drive, which would effectively double the recording space from 20 HD hours to 40. Anyways I Googled around and found this guide:

bumwine.com/tivo.html

I used Knoppix and did the dd command and everything, and it took like 40 minutes to copy over from the 160 gig to the 320. Then came the command to expand the drive to full capacity:

/home/knoppix/Desktop/mfstool add -x /dev/sdb -r 4

It failed miserably with the messages:

Primary volume header corrupt, trying backup.
Secondary volume header corrupt, giving up.
mfs_load_volume_header: Bad checksum.
Unable to open MFS drives.

Ouch. Then someone mentioned on the net that using MFSLive would work, but the funny thing was that when BOTH the original Tivo 160 gig HDD and the newly dd'ed 320 gig HDD were in the system, Knoppix/MFSLive/Windows would refuse to see the second drive despite the drive appearing in the BIOS fine.

Someone also said that the new Windows-based too called WinMFS has excellent support for Tivo HD. The latest version is WinMFS beta 8. After downloading it (I had to register in their forum before I could find the link to download), I had it make a BACKUP of the original Tivo drive. Then I shut off the computer, disconnected the orig. drive, attached the 320 gig, and then had WinMFS RESTORE to the drive. When it was done it asked me a beautiful question- do I want to fully utilize extra space on the new drive. Yes- of course- and everything worked like a charm after that. I suppose that if I had avoided the instructions from "bumwine.com/tivo.html" in the first place I wouldn't have had this problem. But no where on that guide did it say that it wouldn't work for Tivo HD- it fact the author claims that it will work. Well it doesn't- trust me! In theory you could just use WinMFS to directly copy the source Tivo HD drive to the target. But since I did the "dd" both drives refused to show up at the same time so I had to do the backup and restore (B&R) method (which went really fast BTW). You might actually want to go for the B&R on a brand new Tivo HD because it should be much faster than the direct copy. The direct copy will work to preserve your settings and shows, however.

So to those of you wanting to upgrade the hard drive on your Tivo HD/Series 3- do it the WinMFS way and NOT the dd/mfstool method. You will save yourself time and headache which unfortunately I experienced....

Google Desktop no longer supporting Vista 64?

I had a bunch of oddball error messages and a horrific time trying to upgrade my desktop to Vista SP1. Finally I decided to just backup my files and re-install Vista from scratch, and then install SP1. That was time-consuming but it worked perfectly.

Now this was a nice opportunity for me to go and get all the latest and greatest versions of the drivers for my hardware and the software I use. One of them is Google Desktop. I downloaded the latest version and was surprised to see the error message when I double-clicked on the .exe:

"Google Desktop is not currently compatible with your operating system. It requires a 32-bit version of Windows Vista, Windows XP or Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or above."

What??? I had no problem in the past running Google Desktop with Windows Vista 64 bit. I did some research and found what Google said about this:

"Installation: Not compatible - Windows 64-bit

We don't currently offer compatibility with the 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Vista. We realize that a lot of our users would like us to offer a 64-bit compatible version, and we may consider this option in the future."

Wow- so for some reason Google has withdrew GD support for 64 bit Vista/Windows XP users. The newest version that is showing the error message is 5.7.805.16405. I looked in my archive and the version I downloaded from about a month ago (which WILL install under Vista x64) is 5.7.802.22438. The only reason I can think of is maybe somehow Google Desktop is not working properly with 64bit Windows and for now Google has decided to not support it while they find a fix.

I hope it's soon because I use Google Desktop and the sidebar regularly. I'm a little afraid now to install the old version, but I don't think I can wait until Google fixes this problem!

Linux df command doesn't show newly freed space

Recently I noticed that my web server (running Linux) was running out of disk space. So I proceeded to delete log files that were hundreds of megabytes big, but then executing the "df" (diskfree) command didn't show any change in available disk space. After some research it turned out that files currently open and are deleted will not release the free space until the process using it was stopped. I use the Apache web server so restarting httpd, and then doing a "df" showed the updated disk space data. In the future I will probably stop the web server first, delete the log file, and then start it up.

Right-clicking problem on Microsoft Habu Mouse & Bitching about Terrible Logitech Tech Support

So I've had this Microsoft Habu gaming mouse for a while now sitting in a box. I hadn't used it in a long time because it had some problem that I couldn't remember. But now I needed a mouse because my Microsoft Trackball Explorer was giving me problems not being responsive. So I plugged in the Habu and starting working with it. No problem until I needed to do a copy-and-paste within a Putty ssh window. Bascially a single-right click would paste text into the window, but clicking on the right button once on the mouse resulted in two or three pastings of the same text. Ah- so that was the problem I had before with it.

I looked online and noticed that it has a 3 year warranty, and the mouse was manufactured in December of 2006. So I called up Microsoft Support at (800) 642-7676 and will be getting a replacement shipped to me in 7 to 10 business days.

This experience was certainly better than the one I had with Logitech tech support recently. I have the Logitech Z-5450 speakers, and the rear left for some reason doesn't power up any more. It's only been a year and three months (the speaker set has a two year warranty) so I called up Logitech. The lady I spoke to told me to fax my receipt in, so I did. About 10 days later I called back and they said I needed to send in the control module of the Z-5450, and that upon receiving it they would send me the Z-5500. I was not happy because firstly the lady never told me to ship in the control module or else I would've done it right away. And even more aggrevating was that they insisted on sending me the Z-5500 because they said they no longer had the Z-5450. "Johnny" try to put one over me on how the Z-5500 retails at $499 and way more expensive than the $209 I paid for the Z-5450. He also said that the Z-5500 was an "upgrade" to the Z-5450. I told him that the Z-5450 was always more expensive because of the wireless rear speakers but he pretty much told me I'm a liar/idiot. So I asked for his manager and all of a sudden his tone became less belligerent. The manager then came on and told me that he would look around and see if he could find a rear wireless speaker for me and let me know the same day or the next day at the latest. And well, that was almost a week ago. I think I'm going to have to file a Better Business Bureau (BBB) complaint. Definitely really bad customer service by Logitech. I'm going to have to think twice about purchasing their products in the future.

Oddball Vista windows 0x0000007b stop error at crcdisk.sys

I plugged in a cheapo USB hub into my Windows Vista Ultimate desktop and everything froze. I waited for 5 minutes and the screen was still frozen, and there was no disk activity. So I proceeded to reboot the machine via the reset button, and boom I got a blue screen of death (BSOD):

0x0000007b stop error

I then tried Safe Mode and got the same BSOD it seemed like when it was loading or right after it loaded:

crcdisk.sys

So I thought perhaps my BIOS setting got messed up but they looked fine. I had switched from IDE mode to AHCI in the last few months, and so I theorized that perhaps Windows got messed up and thought I was still running IDE. So I went into the BIOS and disabled native SATA and switched to legacy IDE mode, but still no go, so I switched back to SATA. Frustrated I had to take a phone call so I turned off the machine. And wouldn't you know it when I turned it back on Windows Vista booted back up fine again. WTF???

And here's a tip for you guys- before you plug in any USB device, make sure to save all your open files first! I have a bad habit of jotting down notes in Windows Notepad and then not saving until I needed to reboot. So I did lose some notes there which was annoying. Maybe I should just starting using Vim in Windows to replace Notepad....

Windows Vista SP1 Blue Screen Problems, Part Deux

I was way ahead of myself when I thought the "new" Vista SP1 from March 23rd didn't have any Blue Screen problems I had earlier with the SP1 from February. Here are some of the ones I've been getting. This first Blue Screen one was when Windows was coming up after a reboot, when SpeedFan (a utility I use to monitor system temperature) was loading:

page_fault_in_non_paged_area 0x00000050

I then upgraded SpeedFan to a newer version, 4.32 to 4.33. And then things seemed to run okay. But then I came home to another Blue Screen:

system_service_exception STOP 0x0000003B

dxgkrnl.sys

Oookay- I think that may have been trigger by a Media Center recording taking place because upon reboot it started to record a show in progress, but then I had error messages about Windows Update terminating and then the Media Center terminating.

I left the computer and then about a couple hours later I got the irq_not_less_or_equal Blue Screen. And I knew it was time to do a System Restore once again.... So no SP1 for me for now on this machine. If anyone with a similar hardware configuration is having a similar problem I'd like to hear about it. My machine is as follows:

-Windows Vista Premium 64bit
-Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R with Q6600
-4 gigs of RAM (2 x 2 gigs)
-Nvidia 8600 card

The tough part is that the blue screens are of various variety and seemed random, so it's hard to pinpoint the cause. Under regular Vista non SP1 the system is rock solid.

No sound in Windows Vista SP1

I just found out that for some reason I wasn't getting sound after installing Vista SP1. I am using the motherboard's built-in sound card (Realtek High Definition Audio). The odd thing is that all the drivers seemed to be work as there are no exclamation marks next to anything. Then I discoverd in the Mixer that it was set to a different audio device. I have a Linksys CIT300 VOIP phone which shows up as an audio device in Windows. So I went to the control panel, clicked on Sound, and set the default back to the Realtek sound chip and voila- all is well again.

Basically for some unknown reason Vista had switched the default sound device during the SP1 install- it's likely a bug that Microsoft needs to look into....

Vista SP1 Working - No Blue Screens - For Now

Several weeks ago I blogged about how an "inadvertent" release version of Windows Vista SP1 update gave my desktop computer (Q6600, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard, 64bit Vista Premium) all sorts of blue screens. I say "inadvertent" because it turned out that Microsoft said that they had released it "by accident" (errrrrr- sure). It sounded to me like a test-run to see how it will work for the guinea pigs like me who downloaded it. Anyways I noticed that it was once again available in Windows Update, so I decided to try it again. This time everything seems very stable thus far.

One thing I've noticed is that there is far less disk activity. Normally even if I'm not using the computer the hard drives would be churning often times. Also thumbnails for pictures and video seem to be loading much faster.

On my HP DV9000t laptop, which is running Windows Vista Ultimate 64, unfortunately the update is not available yet. I'd definitely want to install it on the notebook ASAP to boost its performance.

HP DV9000T 3GB RAM Limit

To improve the speed of my sluggish HP DV9000t under Windows Vista Ultimate, I decided to upgrade the RAM from 2 to 4 gigs via 2 x 2GB SODIMMs. Everything went smoothly and the BIOS detected 4 gigs. My first impression was that wow the extra 2 gigs did make a solid difference in Vista. When I went to System properties, however, I discovered that Windows was only showing 3070MB of memory. Huh? I thought the laptop wouldn't have the infamous 3GB maximum limit that 32 bit Windows have since I'm running Vista 64 bit Ultimate.

So I did some research and apparently there are DV9000t owners out there with the same problem. HP apparently blames it on the northbridge of the Intel 945M chipset. But oddly enough on the Intel website it says that the 945M chpset DOES support 4 Gigs of RAM max.

So I'm left here hoping that perhaps one day HP will release a BIOS that could eradicate this silly hardware-based 3GB memory addressing limit. I'm running the latest BIOS, version F.29, BTW....

Fedora Core 4 Daylight Savings Fix

I was wondering why my Fedora Core 4 server wasn't using the new daylight saving rules. Apparently it needed a patch for the tzdata (timezone data) file. You can download the newest version via this link. Afterwards make create a soft link to /etc/localtime from /usr/share/zoneinfo/, e.g.:

ln –fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime

And that'll fix it!

Vista SP1 Blue Screen Problems

On my server (a quad core Q6600, 4 gigs RAM, Vista Premium 64 bit) I noticed that SP1 was ready to be installed, so I happily obliged. I was pleasantly surprised because the word was that the Service Pack 1 wasn't going to be released until March. Apparently the install takes place in several stages, and on Stage 3 (after the computer had restarted), boom- I get a "Memory_Management" BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). After hitting the reset button, the computer booted into the Windows, but before all the startup programs had fully loaded, boom- another Blue Screen O' Death of a different variety. I did another reset, and same thing.

So I booted in Safe Mode (using F8) with Networking. That worked fine, and the computer background showed that my Windows was now Vista SP1. I tried to run Windows Update, but nothing came up after I clicked on it. Perhaps Windows Update doesn't work under safe mode, but you'd think that they'd at least give you an error message about it.

Anyways I had to get the computer back up, so I did a System Restore and everything is working normal again. Man you'd think that they'd test these things more thoroughly before doing a mass release....

My Laptop, the HP DV9000t, is running Vista Ultimate x64, but I've been unable to download SP1 so far- it keeps failing at 10%. Apparently there's an onslaught of Vista SP1 downloads. I'm eager to get SP1 on the notebook because boy does it need a performance boost. There are reports indicating that SP1 reduces the frequency of hard disk activity which slowed down the computer a lot. I'll provide another update once I'm able to install it.

Convert IDE to AHCI for Vista

I have a server with the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R. When I installed Vista on it I didn't realize that by default, the Gigabyte DS3R BIOS sets the SATA ports to IDE mode. A few weeks later I realized this, and, wanting to use the faster native SATA mode for my SATA drives (which includes my boot drive), switched the disk mode setting to ACHI from IDE in the BIOS. What I got was a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)- an inaccessible boot device error 0x0000007B, so I had to switch back to IDE mode. After doing some research online I found that you would have to re-install Vista in while the BIOS as the SATA ports set to ACHI mode in order to get it to work, so I said "Nah forget it." I was not going to spend the time reinstalling Windows Vista and all the apps.

Apparently now there is a new, quick and easy way to fix this. Basically you use REGEDIT, go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci, modify the key that says "Start" and change the value from "4" to "0". Reboot, then before Windows Vista starts up go to the BIOS and switch to ACHI, and Voila! I had to reboot one more time after time but it worked great afterwards.

The details are located here in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Windows Vista Speed Tip for Your Hard Drive

I found this by accident actually when I was trying to find out why the WDC 250 Gig HDD (WD2500JB-00GVA0) connected to my Sil0680 IDE card is so slooooooow. It turns out that it's running in Programmed I/O mode 0 (PIO mode 0). Oddly enough the other drive connected to the controller, a Samsung Spinpoint 160 gig HDD, is running in Ultra DMA mode. But once I hooked up the WDC drive to its own IDE channel (both were hooked up to the same cable w/ cable select setting), it's working like a charm in DMA 5 mode.

Anyways I noticed that if you go to the Properties window for a hard drive, and click on the Policies tab, there's a check box called "Enable advanced performance" which is not check by default. The text there says that you should enable use the feature if you have a backup power supply (UPS), which I do. This feature likely takes delayed write caching to a new level to further increase disk performance.

So if you have a UPS connected to your system, or you're running a laptop with a good battery, I recommend enabling this feature under Vista to help make your drive a little more speedy.

Restore a previous version of a document in Vista

I was working on an Excel spreadsheet when to my horror I had accidentally pasted new data OVER some existing data. I did the usual CTRL-Z to undo, but unfortunately I had worked on the spreadsheet too much already that the undo levels did not reach all the way back to before the destructive paste. I quickly looked for a backup copy in my backup, but without going to details, I couldn't retrieve the file from backup.

I then recalled something I've noticed in the past when I was looking at the Properties screen for a file. In Windows Vista there is a tab called "Previous Versions". And when I did it for this Excel file I was able to find a version that was saved 3 months ago and retrieve it. Amazing!

I did some research on this Windows Vista feature and apparently you must have "System Protection" turned on, which by default should be already be on. Windows will then make "shadow copies"/previous versions of your files that could be restored.

I may not be all that impressed overall with Windows Vista, but this is just an awesome feature that I had to share with everyone. It really saved my day.

iPod Touch Love and Hate

Despite Apple not providing support for the iPod Touch for Windows 64 (including Windows Vista Premium/Ultimate 64), I must say that I am very impressed with the device (although I "hate" certain attributes). The iPod touch very sleek and UI is very intuitive. Listening to music is easy and a pleasure, but I am appalled that there is no button that let's you skip to the next song. You have to interact with the touch screen interface instead. Why is that Apple? I mean even the most rudimentary MP3 players out there today has some sort of button for that. And again, what's up with the lack of an AC charger???

Browsing the Internet on the built-in Safari browser is actually more intuitive and quicker experience than on my new Nokia N800 (using OS2007). The 800x480 screen on the N800 trumps the Touch, however. Also with the new OS2008 update, the N800 is pretty much on-par speed-wise with the Touch. I also like the N800 on-screen keyboard better- it's just more accurate. But still I'm very, very impressed with the Internet browsing capability of the Touch. The YouTube integration is also very well done- Apple couldn't have done a better job there.

As far as putting photos on the iPod Touch- I haven't had any success trying to a large # of pics on there. The friggin' thing would just "hang". I even left it syncing overnight but still no success. It would be just awesome if I could just drag and drop pictures into the iPod instead of having to go through iTunes. Grrrrrr!

There are little apps/tools such as a calculator & calendar on the Touch. But from what I've read, the collection pales in comparison to that of the iPhone. And you have to wonder why despite the fact you could connect the Touch to wifi wireless just like the iPhone. Also you can just imagine the possibilities if Apple lets you load in 3rd party apps/utilities....

I know it's a matter of time before Apple releases 64 bit iTunes, but it's just difficult to believe it's not out yet even though Vista is more than a year old now....

So in conclusion- the iPod Touch is bar none the best MP3 player I have purchased. But it's imperfect not because of any lack of design ingenuity of Apple. It is rather Apple's corporate/marketing decisions that has prevented the iPod Touch from achieving greatness.

iPod Touch Vista 64 Not Compatible Problems and Complaints

UPDATE: January 21, 2008
I updated iTunes to 7.6.0.29 a couple days ago on my Vista 64 bit system and it's working like a charm. Better late than never I suppose. Also Apple is offering some of those mini-apps such as Weather, Stocks, and Email for a price of $20 in what they call the "January Software Update". Tough luck for me or anyone else who got the Touch without those apps because the iPod Touch units now on sale comes with them for free. That definitely doesn't make me any more a fan of Apple....

---

I got my Apple iPod Touch today. I had never used an iPod, but recently received a $150 Apple Store gift certificate, so I used it to buy the Touch. The device is very sleek and slim. Upon powering it on it showed an icon asking me to connect it to my computer. In the box there wasn't even a charger, so presumably you're supposed to charge it by keeping it connected to your computer via USB. But what if you're out of town and don't have your computer with you? Or what if you turn off your computer? That's pretty cheap to not even include an AC charger for such an expensive product. WOW.

So I connect the iPod Touch to my computer, and Windows instantly found it as an "Apple iPod". I waited but nothing happened. I double-clicked the icon and nothing happened. I checked the instructions and apparently you're supposed to go online and download iTunes in order to sync media to the iPod. I proceeded to download the latest version, which was 7.5. The install went fine but towards the end it gave an odd ball error: "iTunes was not properly installed. If you wish to import or burn CDs, you need to reinstall iTunes." WTF? I clicked OK and it seemed to launch iTunes fine, but then I got this message:

"This iPod cannot be used because the required software is not installed. Run the iTunes installer to remove iTunes, then install the 64-bit version of iTunes."

WTF again. Now I am running Windows Vista Premium 64 bit (and another laptop running Vista Ultimate 64bit), and I wondered why the iTunes didn't spit out an error even before it started the install. So I went online, and was flabbergasted to discover that, guess what, THERE IS NO 64-bit version of iTunes, which meant I couldn't use the iPod with Vista 64!

After doing more research I saw people having the same plight from MONTHS ago. This is just totally unacceptable. This is ridiculous and frankly a slap in the face against all Windows power users. If I had known about this I would not have ordered the friggin thing- at least not until it's supported by Vista 64 (if ever?) No where did I see on the iPod Touch page was there a disclaimer that it wouldn't work with 64bit versions of Windows. In fact this is what it said on the product page regarding the PC OS requirement:

"Windows Vista or Windows XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 2 or later)"

Er- I'm using Windows Vista, and it's not working- false advertising!

I suppose there is little I can do in the for now other than to boot up my old Windows XP laptop, install iTunes on there, and copy the hundreds of songs I have from my main computer to it. Thanks for wasting my time Apple.... This is ridiculous- I wouldn't be surprised to see lawsuits pop up from some disappointed Windows 64 users after Christmas regarding this fiasco.

:end vent

"Upload Failed" Error in Gallery 2

I kept having these Upload Failed "" error when I was uploading pictures to my install of the excellent Menalto Gallery webapp software. I tried various ways of uploading- the upload applet & the form-based way but nothing worked. I wondered why certain images (the smaller sized ones) uploaded fine while the others failed. Well it turns out that it's a PHP issue- in php.ini you will see this line:

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files.
upload_max_filesize = 2M

The default is set to 2 megs, which means anything larger than 2 megs would not be allowed to be uploaded. So simply change it to something like 16M and the uploading will work. Remember to restart the webserver in order to have updated php settings take effect.

Making the Today At/Yesterday At mod work for PNphpBB2

I tried to add the popular Today At/Yesterday Mod to a site of mine running PNphpBB2 and all the posts dates became "Today at" with blank following those two words, even for posts that were not made today. After some troubleshooting I got it to work- basically instead of adding these lines to includes/page_header.php:

//
// MOD - TODAY AT - BEGIN
// PARSE DATEFORMAT TO GET TIME FORMAT
//
$time_reg = '([gh][[:punct:][:space:]]{1,2}[i][[:punct:][:space:]]{0,2}[a]?[[:punct:][:space:]]{0,2}[S]?)';
eregi($time_reg, $board_config['default_dateformat'], $regs);
$board_config['default_timeformat'] = $regs[1];
unset($time_reg);
unset($regs);

//
// GET THE TIME TODAY AND YESTERDAY
//
$today_ary = explode('|', create_date('m|d|Y', time(),$board_config['board_timezone']));
$board_config['time_today'] = gmmktime(0 - $board_config['board_timezone'] - $board_config['dstime'],0,0,$today_ary[0],$today_ary[1],$today_ary[2]);
$board_config['time_yesterday'] = $board_config['time_today'] - 86400;
unset($today_ary);
// MOD - TODAY AT - END

I changed them to:

//
// MOD - TODAY AT - BEGIN
// PARSE DATEFORMAT TO GET TIME FORMAT
//
$board_config['default_timeformat'] = '%I:%M %p';
//
// GET THE TIME TODAY AND YESTERDAY
//
$board_config['time_today'] = gmmktime(0 - $board_config['board_timezone'] - $board_config['dstime'],0,0,date('n'),date('j'),date('Y'));
$board_config['time_yesterday'] = $board_config['time_today'] - 86400;
// MOD - TODAY AT - END

I'm not sure if this fix only applies to PNphpBB2 or also newer versions of phpBB also, but hope it helps anyone else out there!


UPDATE: This "fix" doesn't exactly work all the time either. For now I don't have further time to spend on this issue so I've removed the mod altogether.

Mozilla Thunderbird Slow/Bogged Down by Too Many Emails

Lately the speed of my laptop has gone down noticeably because of increased disk access by Mozilla Thunderbird, my primary email client app. I noticed that I had accumulated over 40,000 emails in the Trash folder and over 20,000 emails in the Junk folder. When I tried to empty the Trash folder it promptly disappeared. Yup- the trash folder disappeared! I looked around the Internet regarding this bug but couldn't find any solution. A restart of Thunderbird brought it back, but all the emails were still in the Trash folder. Then I tried deleting emails in the Trash in chunks of ~500 at a time, but it was just so darn sloooooooow. After several more weeks of dealing with this I figured that I had to do something else. I located the Thunderbird profile folder under a folder here:

C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\Profiles\

Note that I'm using Vista. In XP you should be able to find the folder under:

C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USER_NAME\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\

In the folder you will find a folder called "Mail", and that's where all the different email account folders are stored. I went into "Local Folders", renamed the files "Trash" and "Trash.msf" to "Trash.bak" and "Trash.msf.bak" just to be safe, then started up Thunderbird. Voila! The trash folder is now empty as Thunderbird couldn't find the old Trash folder file it created a new one. I proceeded to delete "Trash.bak" and "Trash.msf.bak" to save disk space. I then repeated the same procedure for the Junk folder.

Note that you must shutdown Thunderbird before renaming/deleting the folder files, and always make a backup first just in case you accidentally delete the wrong folder (!!).

VIA VT6421 SATA card does the job

So I had a nightmarish time getting the Silicon Image SIL3114 card to work with just one SATA drive. The opposite happened when I received the VIA VT6421 SATA card (2 SATA, 1 eSATA, & 1 IDE port), also purchased from eBay. After booting into XP and installing the latest drives from viaarena.com, the drive was immediately recognized and works. I guess the moral of the story is to avoid the SIL3114 and go with the VT6421 if you just want extra SATA ports and don't need RAID. The VT6421 card does RAID 0 and RAID 1, but I have absolutely no interest in testing those functionalities :-).

Problems with Sil3114 RAID Card

I bought a generic 4 port SATA card (WD-3114) from eBay for the Maxtor Maxline Pro 500GB (the 7H500F0) SATA drive. I had run out of SATA connections on my Windows XP PC so I thought this would solve my problem. First mistake- I forgot to get extra SATA power Y splitter cables. In the back of my mind I thought all I needed were SATA cables which I had, but I had totally forgotten about the SATA power cable. So I temporarily disconnected the power from another SATA drive so I could at least setup this drive. I proceeded to upgrade the BIOS (5.3.14) & the drivers (1.5.10.0) of the Sil 3114 card. The problem is that in Windows the drive cannot be seen. Then I thought I made a mistake by not jumpering the drive to be SATA I only (default was SATA II 3.0Gs). Then I realized that the drive was connected to the third SATA port so I proceeded to connect it to Port 0 (the first port). But it was all in vain.

Then I went back to the Sil3114 driver page and noticed that there is a specific driver for non-raid hard disks/optical drive setups, and the version is 1.3.10.0- still no luck. Then I tried the combination of "legacy" BIOS (5.0.73) and drivers (1.0.15) and still no luck. Then I tried the combination of BIOS version 5.4.03 with version 1.3.10 drivers and that didn't work either. Finally I tried the 5.2.16 BIOS ("IDE") with the 1.3.10 non-raid drivers and still no go. As far as JBOD goes I couldn't find the option with any of the BIOS versions. Oh well- time to go with a non-RAID add-in card. Sheesh.

Jittery Mouse, Keyboard types itself Problems for DV9000 under Vista

I had some problems with the keyboard somewhat randomly repeating keys and the mouse being jumpy under Vista with the HP dv9000. After some troubleshooting I figured it was probably the USB driver. The driver in question was for the Intel 82801GB USB Universal Host Controller. The driver installed was dated 6/21/2006 with the Driver Provider being Microsoft. The version was 6.0.6000.16386, with the date of 6/21/2006- that seemed pretty old for a Vista driver. So I looked around and voila found a newer version. The Driver Provider is now Intel and the date is 9/13/2006, version 8.2.0.1008. The link to download the Intel INF Update Utility (containing the newer drivers) is:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/scripts-df-external/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=N&DwnldId=12150&lang=eng

After installing the newer Intel driver the random key presses and jittery mouse problems disappeared. I'm using the xb3000 dock with an external usb keyboard and mouse. Hope this helps anyone out there having the same problem!

Fix 'Hacking attempt1' Error in PNphpBB2

I use PNphpBB2 1.2i and noticed a problem where if you click on the smilies button on Quick Reply a messages pops up saying:

'Hacking attempt1'

I had the same problem with PNphpBB2 1.2h. For some reason the qmode GET variable wasn't being properly passed in quick_reply.php. I fixed the problem by adding the following code to quick_reply.php:

if ($_GET['qmode'] == 'smilies'){
$mode = 'smilies';
}
if ($_GET['qmode'] == 'postimages'){
$mode = 'postimages';
}

below:

{
$mode = '';
}

I'm not sure if the same problem existed for phpBB, but PNphpBB2 1.2i is based on phpBB 2.0.21.

You don't have permission to save vista in this location; Notepad

On my Windows Vista system I have a batch file in the root folder of my C: drive. I discovered a neat trick where you can just type on the command prompt:

notepad name_of_the_file

and Windows will open the file in Notepad.

Anyways I wanted to create a new batch file (let's say b.bat) from the original one (a.bat). I opened a.bat w/ Notepad, made my changes, but when I went to save the file on C:\ I got the error message:

"You don't have permission to save in this location. Contact the administrator to obtain permission."

What in the world? I am the administrator. Oddly enough, however, if I saved the file somewhere else instead and then copy the file to C:\ it'd work. No doubt this is one of Vista's new security features- not allowing direct access to the root folder, and when you want to copy a file there you need to give explicit permission for the file operation.

ModSecurity install and setup on Fedora Core 2

Over on rpmfind.net I was able to find a Fedora Core 3 module for modsecurity that I was able to install on Fedora Core 2. I had tried the one for Fedora Core 5 but no go- too many dependency issues.

This was the one that worked:

ftp://194.199.20.114/linux/fedora/extras/3/i386/mod_security-1.9.4-1.fc3.i386.rpm

After downloading I did a:

rpm -Uvh mod_security-1.9.4-1.fc3.i386.rpm

warning: mod_security-1.9.4-1.fc3.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 1ac70ce6
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:mod_security ########################################### [100%]

Then it was time to checkout the mod_security.conf file located over at /etc/httpd/conf.d/.

I uncommented out these lines:

SecFilter "delete[[:space:]]+from"
SecFilter "insert[[:space:]]+into"
SecFilter "select.+from"

This line:

SecFilter "<(.|\n)+>"

generated false positives on some web post forms so I kept it uncommented.

yum [Errno 4] IOError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

After discovering that one of my sites had been attacked via SQL injection, I decided to look for some global solutions that would try to prevent those attacks. Obviously the best way would be to patch up problematic webapps, but a global first line of defense would be helpful.

So anyways after some research "mod_security" came up as a good way of preventing web attacks including SQL injection, so I tried to install it via:

yum install mod_security

But then I got the messages:

Gathering header information file(s) from server(s)
Server: Fedora Core 2 - i386 - Base
retrygrab() failed for:
http://download.fedoralegacy.org/fedora/2/os/i386/headers/header.info
Executing failover method
failover: out of servers to try
Error getting file http://download.fedoralegacy.org/fedora/2/os/i386/headers/header.info
[Errno 4] IOError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

I then edited /etc/yum.conf and replaced (under the [base] section):

baseurl=http://download.fedoralegacy.org/fedora/$releasever/os/$basearch

with:

baseurl=http://rh-mirror.linux.iastate.edu/fedoralegacy/fedora/$releasever/os/$basearch

then replaced (under the [fedoralegacy-updates] section):

baseurl=http://download.fedoralegacy.org/fedora/$releasever/updates/$basearch

with:

baseurl=http://rh-mirror.linux.iastate.edu/fedoralegacy/fedora/$releasever/updates/$basearch

Apparently the fedoralegacy.org site is no longer working to provide updates. Anyways those changes worked but unfortunately apparently mod_security wasn't available with Fedora Core 2. Oh well- time to try elsewhere.

Restoration Nightmare / Back to Vista

Well I had a horrific time trying to restore my Acronis image. In turned out the Acronis True Image 8.0 rescue CD did not had the the serial ATA driver for my HP dv9000t notebook. Whoops. After finalling upgrading to True Image 10.0 home I was able to get the restore going. But after almost 2 hours and only 2% left to go, Acronis spit out got some message that said "Sectors copied was more than read" or something to that effect. I could mount the image fine on the Windows XP desktop that stored the image so apparently it's not corrupted. Perhaps HP's built-in Quickplay partitition had something to do with that (I had only backed up the Windows partition). Or perhaps it was because I wiped out the 10 gig HP Recovery Partition after creating 3 emergency restore DVDs and then combined that with C:. Little did I knew, however, those DVDs would help big time.

Anyways after hours and hours of futzing with the restore, I finally gave up and decided to go back to Vista Ultimate. I figured that eventually I would have to upgrade anyways so this would save the time I'd spend in the future. Then more road blocks. Because of the bad restore attempts there was no windows installed, and Vista Ultimate upgrade refused to continue setup. Apparently there's a loophole where you can install Vista by first not putting in the product key and then re-installing again. I thought I give it a shot but for some reason Vista kept complaining about not being able to assign a drive letter or whatever- even though I had it partition and format the drive. So then I tried installing via the Windows XP Media Center OEM CD that came with my Dell desktop, but apparently it, like Acronis 8, didn't have the SATA driver for my notebook. So finally I resorted to the HP rescue DVDs and a couple hours later I was back in business with XP Media Center installed. Then I was able to install Vista Ultimate successfully.

I was also happy to discover that now the Samsung SCX-4100 drivers for Vista were available. Although I'm still having the primary-monitor-going-blank problem- I've unplugged the 2ndary monitor from my notebook dock now as a temporary workaround. I went on the HP support site to look for some Vista drivers for the dv9000t- there's an update for the Intel Intel Wireless 3945 and a BIOS update. Unfortunately there seems to be an issue w/ the HP ftp server rejecting anonymous connections so I couldn't download them. Hopefully they'll have it resolved soon. As for my problem with Microsoft Small Business Accounting 2006- I'll have to install that on my desktop PC for now and use it there.

Upgrading to Windows Vista Ultimate

So I made way to Best Buy yesterday and bought a copy Windows Vista Ultimate. I asked for the Signature Edition and got it- good deal since it was the same price ($259). Freebies included in the deal were 512 Megs of Kingston DDR memory (I got the notebook one), Taxcut Premium, and LiveOne Care (they were out of stock so gave me a raincheck). I also bought the D-Link DIR-625 Rangebooster N Router for $30 (a $50 savings from the regular price)- haven't even opened it. My current plan is to use it as a router only and disable its wireless since I'm already using the Belkin Pre-N router as a wireless gateway. My current router is the Buffalo WHR-G54s flashed w/ DD-WRT. I'm actually pretty happy with it but figure I could move it to another room to work as a wireless bridge. We'll see. Anyways back to the upgrade.

First I needed to open the case. I must be an idiot because I thought it opens like a book, so I kept yanking until the bottom plastic peg became partly dislodged. Apparently the innards of the case rotates out to the right, with the bottom right corner as the spoke. Oops.

I have a HP Pavilion DV9000t notebook with the XB3000 dock. Windows XP Media Center was preinstalled. Before the upgrade I made sure to back up my drive via Acronis True Image to a desktop PC. Then I had to decide whether to install the 32 bit Vista Ultimate or the 64 bit. After some research I decided to go with the 64 bit since it apparently offered better performance & security. I was okay at that point with possibly not having the latest/greatest drivers and not being able to run 16-bit apps.

So I popped in the Vista Ultimate 64 bit upgrade DVD and an error message popped up saying I couldn't install while still in Windows- I image that's because my Windows XP is 32 bits. So I was like- okay let's do it- rebooted the computer and booted up the DVD. The installer grayed out the "upgrade" method, saying that I would have to run the installer within the existing version of Windows (which didn't work for me). So since I had my entire drive backed up I went ahead and pick the option where it would do a clean install and move my old Windows into another folder.

The install took well over an hour- perhaps a big reason was that my hard drive is only 5400 RPM. Once it was done I noticed the video was pretty low res (800x600), but admirably Vista went and automatically downloaded new 64 bit drivers for the built-in GeForce 7600 card. In fact it pretty much found all the drivers- the Conexant HD audio, the modem, the network card, the built-in wireless, etc. The audio mixer was spartan- it only had a single master volume control- no separate controls for wav, midi, etc. But that wasn't a big deal at all for me. It could not, however, find the drivers for my Samsung SCX4100 AIO printer, which was a bummer.

I have to admit I was a little lost with the new interface since I never played with any of the Vista betas. On the desktop there was only a single icon- the Recycle Bin. Gone were the familiar My Computer, Network Places, and My Documents. To navigate your hard drive you're now supposed to click on the new round Windows "start" button, then select "Computer". Interestingly the new "explorer" doesn't seem to have a name, and looks a little like the file browser my sister uses on her Mac OS X notebook.

There was a new bar with gadgets on the right side of the screen. To my dismay, however, you can't seem to resize the gadgets- or at least the two I was interested in- the stock gadget & the rss gadget. You have to hit a button to expand or scroll up the and down to view the list of data. I turned off the gadgets and installed Google Desktop w/ the sidebar instead.

I noticed a lot of cool new features- taskbar window previews, built-in ability to fix photos, a neat network mapper, and the performance gauge. Also I was eager to try some of the Ultimate Extras features. Going to Windows Update Vista fetched a Texas Hold'em Game- looked pretty decent but I didn't play around with it much. I wanted to try out Dreamscene (the feature in Ultimate where it lets you use a .mpg or a .wmv file as background), but didn't find it anywhere. Perhaps it'll be available later on Windows Update.

Now it came to upgrading/installing the apps. There was not 64 bit version of Firefox 2.0, but I installed the regular 32 bit version and it worked fine. 32 bit apps have a designated "*32" appened at the end of the app name when you view the task manager. The same was with Thunderbird (1.5.0.9), the email client I use. The one quirk I noticed with these Firefox & Thunderbird was that they can't be made the default browser and email client, respectively. Apparently Mozilla knows about the bug and is working on it.

Then came the show stopper for me- I could not get Microsoft (yes "Microsoft") Small Business Accounting 2006 to work. During the install Vista gave warnings that there are known issues w/ the app under the new OS, but I forced it to install anyways. Even though I had concerns about data import I thought maybe I'll try out the 2007 version so I downloaded the trial. version. Before installing I tried uninstall the "Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MICROSOFTSMLBIZ)" that was added by SBA 2006 but it just won't go away. It looks like it's removing it but in the end it stays on the list.

Another annoying problem was that after waking from sleep a lot of times my secondary monitor (connected to the xb3000 dock) became the primary monitor, and I would have to go in and manually change it back. What's even worse right now for some reason Vista can't even turn on my laptop LCD screen (the main monitor). It's most likely an Nvidia driver issue.

I am going to revert back to Windows XP for now. As a tech enthusiast I supposed I was overzealous in upgrading to Vista right away. At this point I do not recommend upgrading unless you are prepared to deal with driver issues and app issues. If you do you might want to go with the 32 bit version to avoid some of the driver problems. I will go back to Vista for sure, but probably not for another 6 months or so until more 64 bit drivers are available and some of the app issues are ironed out.

Unfortunately the Acronis True Image 8.0 rescue CD didn't come with the network drivers for the laptop/dock. So I am going to have to resort to copying the image to a USB HDD and then connecting it to the notebook to do the restore.

That is it for now- hasta la Vista ;-).