TechZilla Said…

I'm gonna try my hand at smoking a turkey today. I'm having a little difficulty lighting it though.

It's good that Thanksgiving is on a Thursday. Gives us a chance to party like a Pilgrim. The very first Thanksgiving was actually a harvest festival. The true story unfortunately has not been told though....

The first year the Pilgrims landed they set up a govenment to manage the colony. The structure was similiar to socialism in the begining. Everybody worked for the common good of the colony. The first year, half of the colony died. The govenor of the colony realized this didn't work. I mean after all, why would someone want to work really hard to put food on other peoples tables.

Seeing the problems, the GOV immediatiatly changed things. This was necessary to guarantee the survival of the colony. What resulted is Democracy and Capitalism in it's earliest forms.

The indians, probably didn't like bodies littering thier hunting grounds so they taught the Pilgrims how to hunt, plant corn and generally survive through the harsh winters. They came together for the feast the next fall after harvest. Turkeys, Deer, corn, Fish, pumkin (maybe) and just about everything they could muster up for the 3 day party.

It's amazing to me how quickly they discovered socialism doesn't work. It's also amazing that people still think the government needs to control everything and be responsible for everything. Taking charge of your own life and taking the resonsibilty of the outcome is the only way to succeed.

And now for the entertainment portion of our show!

Anyway, special thanks today for those that gave thier lives, used thier ingenuity, had vision and forsight and made our country what it is today...thank God for all of you.

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_112107/content/01125113.guest.html

I just found this article at www.buffalotech.com. They make or made let me say the appliance attached to my TV and network allowing me to stream my videos. According to this...are in violation of a patent infringement. It sounds like someone is going to go after the entire industry! This could be very bad for the consumer.

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Dear Customer

As you may be aware, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation ("CSIRO") sued Buffalo, Inc. and Buffalo Technology (USA), Inc. ("Buffalo"), for alleged infringement of United States Patent No. 5,487,069 ("the '069 patent"). Subsequently, CSIRO also asserted its patent against the entire wireless LAN industry, including, Microsoft, Intel, Accton, SMC and Netgear.

In it's lawsuit against Buffalo, CSIRO claimed certain Buffalo wireless networking products compliant with IEEE standards 802.11a and 802.11g infringed upon the '069 patent. Buffalo believed at that time and continues to believe that there are no grounds for CSIRO's allegations of infringement. The United States district court, however, found Buffalo to infringe the '069 patent and enjoined the importation and sale of Buffalo's IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g compliant products.

CSIRO's lawsuits are against the entire wireless LAN industry and could affect the supply of wireless LAN products by any manufacturer, not just Buffalo. The entire industry is resisting CSIRO's attempts to enjoin the sale of wireless LAN products. Recently, Microsoft, 3COM Corporation, SMC Networks, Accton Technology Corporation, Intel, Atheros Communications, Belkin International, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel Networks, Nvidia Corporation, Oracle Corporation, SAP AG, Yahoo, Nokia, and the Consumer Electronics Association filed briefs in support of Buffalo's position that injunctive relief is inappropriate in this case.

During the period of time that the injunction is in effect (10/1/2007), Buffalo cannot offer for sale, sell, import, or use its IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g compliant products in the United States. A list of the products covered by the injunction is attached here. The injunction does not prohibit sales of pre-existing inventories of products by Buffalo's customers. In addition, Buffalo has secured CSIRO's agreement to permit the replacement of defective products under warranty. None of Buffalo's other products are currently affected by this injunction.

While Buffalo believes that it will be successful in reversing the district court's decision and will obtain a stay of the injunction pending a decision on the merits, the Court of Appeals has not yet issued a decision. Should the Court of Appeals issue a decision staying the injunction, you will be promptly notified. After the stay is issued or a favorable decision on the merits is obtained, Buffalo will be able to resume the supply of IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g products

Please rest assured that Buffalo continues to stand behind their products and will continue to support all of our loyal customers as it relates to product warranties, technical support and the like without interruption.

Converting Video's to other formats are definately a challenge. Over the last week or so I have been working on adding some of the videos I have previously committed to DVD to my media server.

Space on my media server drive is definately a consideration. A lot of these videos were created by capturing TV programs and editing out the commercials and then burning the DVD. The size of these files typically consume up to 4.3GB of disk space. Many of my other movies under 800mb. So you see I need to compress the video or risk running out of space to store them too soon.

My initial trials were to edit out the menu's if any and export directly to mp4. This got the file size down to 1gb-1.5gb so I was moving in the right direction. Playback became another issue. Movies would look great until you get about haf way through then the audio and picture would get jumpy. So this wasn't going to work.

Next I hooked up my other DVD player to my video capture card and tried playing with the capture settings. I have been playing with various recording format settings including one I custom created. For several years I had been capturing to DVD compatible formats. This typically creates rather large capture files but can be varied by dvd standard play or extra long play etc.

Currently I'm playing with capturing in VCD formats. VCD allows entire movies to be played on a singe cd as opposed to a DVD disc. My test video, Godzilla 2000 recorded at 1gb instead of over 4gb. Again I edited out a couple things and exported to .AVI using XVid codec. The result was 350mb! Sofar it is looking good on the TV.

But time will tell if this solution is good. Nothing is ever simple

Just before I got home yesterday there was a major Internet outage. I'm not sure exactly what happened because "NoBody is Talking". When you call the support line the message was really vaugue and stated only that "Houston, We have a problem!"

Usually the service and tech support is great so I never actually spoke with anyone. They already had thier hands full I imagined.

I checked my cable modem and router and by all indications everything was ok by 5:30pm. But my computers wouldn't surf. So I figured it would take a while and all would be fixed. Decided it was best just to go watch the tube.

Just before midnight, I broke out my tools and did a little checking on the state of the Internet. I could ping anyone I could think of. Traceroute was also showing all the routers along the way to several destinations I chose. Pinging by using a website name was also returning ip addresses. One strange thing though is I did see the IP Address for Yahoo dramatically change.

So while DNS appeared to be working...it's possible the routing tables were corrupted.  But that doesn't explain why you couldn't surf to a website using the IP Address of the site. Yahoo's IP Address is the same this morning as it was when I last checked around midnight.

Charter maintains more than one DNS server. My guess is that one or more of them got attacked and bad table info may have propagated to several more of them. Just a guess though.

What concerns me most about this is that people who took the plunge and went for VOIP may also have not had phones during the outage. Fortunately though, cell phones don't need IP Addresses or require DNS unless you are surfing over the cell phone. Since I have poor cell service at the house, I'll keep the land line thank you very much!

Oh almost forgot...got up around 2:30 am to do my thing and noticed my Yahoo page finally loaded.

On some Dell laptops there is a button that launches Dell Media Direct when the computer is powered off and get's you right to a player for watching movies or listening to music etc.  Basically imbedded in the motherboard, is part of this software. When you push the button it changes the active partition on the hard drive so the computer boots to a partition that appearently is completely hidden to normal partition software.

While this in itself is not a problem if someone deletes any visible partition and re-installs the operating system under normal conditions, there shouldn't be a problem. After the Dell Media Direct "properly" exits it marks the primary partition active, the system boots to the operating system normally when you push the power button.

What I encountered yesterday, was a system that had Vista 32-bit Business Edition on it. The client had hired a tech to come in and install Windows again and get rid of all the bloatware, and spyware she had gotten. When I spoke with him he stated he had deleted all the partitions and installed it using an oem copy he had and used the licence on the bottom of the computer.

Now technically this again should not be a problem.

I was at the site to replace a keyboard which shouldn't take over 30 minutes arrival to departure. I had the hinge cover off and pressed the Dell Media Direct button by mistake. It launched the utility and basically realized it was a first time use and start to do it's initial setup. It got to the point of attempting to access the primary partiton and complained that it couldn't access the hard drive because the data was encrypted. This is a new feature introduced in Vista. To have gotten that far, the tech she had hired actually never deleted the partiton containing Dell's Media Direct. But he may have enabled the encryption.

The computer just sat there and offered no option to properly exit...the only option available was to press and hold the power button until the system powered down. Upon restarting the computer using the actual power bitton this time, it would constantly boot to the Dell Media Direct and refused to boot the operating system. All it would do was boot to the Media Direct Partition and give me a BSOD Error.

Regardless of my level of knowledge about the intricities of actually The Dell Media Direct feature, I knew that  basically, the portion of it imbedded on the motherboard, must act like some of the boot managers I have used on mult-boot systems I have built in the past. They mark the partition active that you want to boot to.

At this point I called the Dell DSP Support since no matter what I did seemed to matter...I was in an endless loop of booting to Dell's Media Direct. Thier only offering was to replace the motherboard which I knew wasn't the problem. Litterally nobody I was able to talk too could recover the computer from this situation or had the knowledge to answer my questions.

Feeling obligated I reinstalled Vista but afterwards the client and I decided to see what pressing the media direct button would do. Actually I preferred not to do it since she likeley would never use that feature...but she was concerned someone else may press that button also. We were back in and endless loop again.

I had already discovered that either the primary partiton was missing and/or just not visible by either my partiton software or the Vista installation CD. there was no way to correct it with the tools at hand. While installing Vista for the second time, I called into the DSP  queue again thinking the most expedient solution was to request a pre-imaged hard drive.

While the tech I spoke to seemed a little more knowledgeable about Media Direct he was baically refusing to honor my request. He then asked to speak to the client. The client listened patiently to what ever he said and had become extremely aggitated and demanded that an imaged hard drive be sent so she could start over fresh again.

Fortunately the client knew this entire event was not caused by me even though I facilitated the start of it. So I left on good terms.

After getting back home I did a little googling....

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?docid=041031D196A7CAC0E0401E0A551752CE&c=us&l=en&s=gen

One of my problems on the road was connecting to my system remotely from a hotel. Once I knew the ip address of my router then it was no problem. I have it set to configure remotely and I can go in and open or close some of the ports in case I forget to set everything up before I leave.

Due to DHCP not only would my router ip address change, but my PC ip address would change. I just setup a static Ip adderss on the workstation and set the router to keep the port open on my router...that part done. No more DHCP for the workstation.

Again due to DHCP and my ISP, the routers internet ip address is constantly changing every time I reset it. So I re-activated my account at DYNDNS.com.

I have an updater on my pc that connects to DYNDNS.com and reports my routers ip address regularily. Now instead of calling home to find out what is going on when I'm out of town, I just have my remote software connect to my dynamic dns name of my account just like surfing to a website. It's so much easier to do this...especially since it's free.

An example of this would be to use "myaccountname.dynalias.org" as the address instead of using the ip address. My account has been inactive for quite a few months since I was no longer hosting my own website on my home machines.

Sofar what I have done sofar is working great! ok the next major problem is printing. Nobody on the planet has a way to print to my Okidata C5150n printer. I spent all morning yesrday tring to get Ghostscript workaround to work but it hangs loading fonts. haven't tried not using the included fonts with it yet.

I get it to communicate with my actual printer but never finishes spooling a test print.

My Okidata is really a nice printer for the bucks...but may not replace it with one in the future due to the lack of basic Linux support. It uses a proprietary emulation called Hiper-C. There ar no PostScript drivers available for it...so I can't even lie to the computer to use someone elses driver. I even called OKI Support and basically got the run around.

My resolution is to print to the PDF driver and save it as a file I can print across the network from my workstation...same effect just not as automatic. Also a good way to save documentation in general so it's not a total wash. The PDF driver that comes with Ubuntu is capable of creating PDF files...and works.

I need to get yet another KVM switch one of these days. I've eyeballed a D-Link model that supports high resolution video and keyboard, mouse, and sound. The cavet is I also need to get a USB mouse and keyboard to implement it. My Ubuntu server flat out refuses to use a KVM with PS/2 type connections for some reason. It's always been questionable anyway. I think there is a voltage issue on the port or something from the symptoms I've seen over time.

Not sure how much energy I want to keep putting into it just to serve as a file server...but basic functions like printing and having a keyboard and mouse that work with the scree resolution where I like it is kind of minimum requirements that aren't being met at this time.