Tuesday, 13 September 2005

Installing Longhorn/Vista Beta 1 on VMWare

When VMWare says Longhorn support is "experimental" they're not kidding. Thankfully I found some tips (which I added to) that when followed, make for a painless install.

1. Create a new VM
2. Memory 512MB
3. Hard Disk (IED 0:0) 20GB
4. CD-ROM (IDE 1:0) Pointing to the ISO Image
5. Ethernet 1 "Bridged"


Start VM
1. Boots the DVD
2. When you get to the part where it ask to pick the disk, delete the existing partition. (now, this is only if there's an existing parition on the drive, if there's no partition on the drive such as if you created a blank VM to install Longhorn/Vista into - sometimes it can't install to a blank drive, so create a drive in an XP image, and copy it over)
3. Recreate the partition
4. Exit the install and reboot the VM
5. During the VM BIOS hit F2 then change the boot order to have the CD/DVD be the first boot device
6. Save and Exit the BIOS
7. When you get to the part where it ask to pick the disk again, highlight then choose format
8. Now select again then choose install
9. It will now start the installation process
10. After a couple of reboots and 45 minutes later (depending on your host machine), the install will be done.
11. You are now logged in but no network, video, and sound
12. Install the VMware tools to get the video going (sometimes the Install VMWare Tools menu item doesn't actually work, so you need to mount the "windows.iso" image from the VMWare directory as a CD-ROM device in VMware)
13. After VMWare Tools reboot and the video will be better
14. Still no network or sound, active the VMware tools so the VM can see the tools on drive D:
15. Goto Device manager, right click the ethernet controller, go to properties, then reinstall the driver.
16. During the reinstall it search the CD-ROM (vmware tools) for the right network driver.
17. You should now have network and able to surf the Internet with IE 7, but still no sound
18. Surf to www.soundblaster.com
19. select drivers from the right bottom panel
20. then North America/United States/English then Go
21 then choose Sound Blaster/Other/16PCI then click Next
22. Choose English/Windows XP/Drivers then Go
23. Download the "Driver release for SB PCI 128 Vibra / PCI 16"
24. Run the installer then reboot and viola you should have sound.


Now you've got Longhorn/Vista installed.. too bad it's not all that exciting.
Posted by dan at 8:33 PM in technology/administration/
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Thursday, 4 August 2005

Small Spaces Music & Art Show Aug 24th, Toronto

If you're in Toronto on Wed August 24th, check out Small Spaces. It's a music and art showing put on by some friends of mine. There is going to be some awsome stuff there. The website has snapshots of some of the artwork that will be for sale (all original Canadian art).
Posted by dan at 4:22 PM in culture/
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Monday, 11 July 2005

Rock Concerts Don't Change the World

Live8 was great. However, I'd say the only thing it accomplished that is really groundbreaking is actually convincing Pink Floyd to reunite in their mostly-original form. It's not going to change the world. The idea that doubling/tripling or otherwise increasing aid to Africa, and debt forgiveness will fix that continent's problems is silly. Silly enough to be the lyrics to a rock song. Africa has very deep sociological and governmental problems, especially warlording and massive corruption. It is foolish to suppose that the extra $, which would be available to the governments of Africa should their debts be reduced, would actually go to the people who need it. More likely it will continue to flow to the rich of the country who are in power. People will still starve, people will still die. Rock stars are not qualified to dictate foreign policy. The idea that Bono gets a private audience with the Prime Minister of Canada is ridiculous. The cost of governments forgiving debts, and increasing aid will be borne upon the tax-paying masses (the fans), not so much on the incorporated tax-avoidant rockers. Just remember, while these guys are preaching to the governments of the world to go easy on Africa, they're out charging $100+ for tickets to their concerts, except for once every few decades when they decide to be charitable and give one away for free.
Posted by dan at 12:55 PM in culture/
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More Apple/Intel Theorizing - Was it Price?

The theories continue to abound around why Apple chose to go with Intel. An interesting article was posted on ArsTechnica, proposing that price, not performance was the key driver in the decision. The article is great and thought provoking - but even more so are some of the reactions on Slashdot. It's an interesting premise / conspiricy theory; one of Apple's biggest disadvantages on the desktop/laptop front is their price premium over similiar Wintel boxes.
Posted by dan at 12:33 PM in technology/mac/
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Monday, 6 June 2005

It's Official, Apple is Really Switching to Intel!

Steve Jobs' drops the bomb in his keynote speech (still ongoing at this moment) that Apple will move to Intel x86 based chips. In fact he's running the keynote off of a P4 3.6GHz.
Macrumors coverage having technical problems early on. Go with Engadget or Macworld
A new technology called Rosetta, will run existing PowerPC apps on Intel. A demo showed at the keynote had apps running at reasonable speed.
I guess the moral of the story is, if anyone can pull something like this off, it's Apple.
Posted by dan at 12:49 PM in technology/mac/
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All Eyes on Apple

Be it rumor, conjecture, inside information, or intentional leak there's no arguing that the biggest story in tech right now is the buzz surrounding a possible partnership between Apple and Intel. Personally I still don't quite believe Apple would move to an x86 architecture. In any case, I'll be following the Apple WWDC keynote closely. The major news sites will all eventually post some article on the keynote, however I prefer to get the info a little quicker (if only I could actually be there.. alas). Macrumors.com will have live updates in text format of pretty much every detail. Macosrumors.com will also be providing text based live coverage. The keynote starts at 1pm EST.
Posted by dan at 8:32 AM in technology/mac/
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Thursday, 26 May 2005

Prediction: No Way In Hell Is Apple Going With Intel

Recent articles have been speculating that Apple is considering moving processor architectures yet again, this time to land on Intel. Various versions have circulated, some saying x86 (referencing the existence of x86 builds of Darwin), and others saying Itanium. I say no way in hell is Apple going with Intel. Lets look at this logically: When Apple moved architecture last time there was a damn good reason for it. The PowerPC architecture represented a vast leap forward from the old Motorola 60x processors, and most importantly the PowerPC architecture had a future roadmap that would ensure increasing speed and capability. While clock-speed wise the PowerPC chips (G5) haven't kept quite up with Intel, there is still a lot of life left in the architecture. Reason being is that of late the processor chip makers (Intel, AMD, Sun, IBM) have moved from the clock-speed race to embrace multithreading capabilities and particularly dual-core (and in some cases multi-core). The Power5 chips from IBM which the G5 is based on have already moved to a multi-core design, and many speculate that it is only a matter of time (for not only speed, but cooling and power reasons too) before multi-core GX processors are available in the Apple products (including the potential that the Powerbook range would incorporate multi-core G4 processors due to cooling and power constraints on implementing a G5 powerbook). Intel has proven to be the last in line in this area, with their new dual-core chips performing less well than their AMD equivalents. IBM and Sun are already shipping excellent chips that are performing well. Apple having their chips made by IBM are already well positioned to take advantage of the multi-core trend. Add to this the fact that such a hardware shift would bring engineering nightmares and application recompilations, multiple OS versions etc. etc. No company in their right mind in the fantastic position that Apple is currently in, would make such a dumb move.
Posted by dan at 1:41 PM in technology/mac/
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The Netscape 8 Fiasco

For a browser that fewer and fewer people are using every day, Netscape has generated a lot of fuss lately. First off version 8 was released containing code from Firefox 1.03 which had a serious security vulnerability. If that wasn't bad enough, today there are headlines reporting that Netscape 8 actually screws up IE's XML rendering. Seems like it's finally time to give up on the Netscape suite. The momentum is clearly on the Firefox/Thunderbird side. The Mozilla Foundation is keeping up the "Communicator" suite as well, so the need for a commercial Netscape is gone.
Posted by dan at 1:41 PM in technology/
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Back To Blogging

After a bit of a hiatus, I'm returning some focus to this blog. The engine behind it, Blojsom has been updated to the latest available version. I can't say enough good things about this software. Both from an administrative and a user perspective the system is flexible and easy. Shameless plug perhaps, but using this has made things so much easier for me. Other alternative was to roll my own system (which I don't have the time for), or using one of the myriad of web based blogging cookie cutter systems (which I find distasteful). Now I just need to get around to customizing this template with some flare.
Posted by dan at 1:38 PM in /
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Thursday, 16 September 2004

The Prison of Gant Charts

Check out this link; an article on replacements for the bane of every developer and project manager's existence. My favorite part is how they refer to the grids of Gant Charts as a prison. Some days being on a tech project is a lot like being in prison (except for the comfy jump-suits of course). It's got all the same qualities; there's forced labor, poor working/living conditions, everything is date driven, negative impacts to one's social life, and of course the taking it up the ass part...
Posted by dan at 10:31 AM in technology/
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Monday, 13 September 2004

Drowning in SPAM? POPFile to the Rescue

I've got multiple e-mail accounts. Some I like to think of as "personal" accounts, some are "work" accounts, some are "junk" accounts (ahem, Hotmail). However, the lines inevitably get blurred, and you end up with email-soup. Some personal e-mail in one box, some work email in the other, and a whole bunch of crap ass spam everywhere!

Enter POPFile. POPFile takes an incredibly successful approach to the task of mail classification. It is both a bayesian filtering system, and a POP proxy. In other words, it doesn't limit you to one mail client or another. You can keep on using whatever mail client you prefer (as long as it supports POP3, and soon IMAP). All you do is change the server name on your client, to point to the localhost, and the user name to a delimited string that includes the server name, and mail account name. Please see Google for an explanation of what bayesian filtering is. Not only is POPFile agnostic in terms of mail clients, but is cross platform too. There's a slick windows installer for the masses, and a perl version for the l33t.

POPFile lets you arbitrarily create "buckets". These could be as simple as "junk" and "not-junk", or more complicated like "business" and "personal". Every time you receive a piece of mail POPFile gives its best guess as to which bucket it should go in. And every time it gets one wrong, you simply use it's built in web interface (which listens on a user-definable port) and correct it. Over time it becomes extremely accurate. I've been using it for at least a year now, and it has gotten to the point where a mistake is rare (around 99.7% accurate to be exact). And that says a lot, as I expect it to differentiate between, personal mail, business mail, joke forwards, mailing lists, spam/junk mail, and server system administration messages.

POPFile can mark messages in various ways. It can alter the subject line to include the bucket name. Or it can include it's own special header into the mail message. The latter is my favorite, as most mail clients allow some sort of filtering on message headers. I set up various sub-folders and have rules that drop messages tagged by POPFile into each of them as required. So all my mailboxes basically merge into one place and are then tagged and distributed according to content. Only thing I have to figure out is which e-mail address to give people now!
Posted by dan at 2:08 PM in technology/
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Thursday, 19 August 2004

Troubleshooting A Rogers EXTREMEly Slow Internet Connection Part 3

Could it actually be fixed???

It's 10pm, and usually that means lousy download speeds. However, tonight I noticed rather snappy web-browsing performance, so I thought I'd take a speed-test and see if perhaps things were working any better. Sure enough, the test results show the following:

Download speed: 4823kbps (602.9KB/sec) Upload speed: 744kbps (93KB/sec)

That sure feels better! I also did a ping test to see if the default gateway was still experiencing any packet loss, and it came back a clean 100%.

I'll be watching this much more closely over the next few days. For now it seems too good to be true, and I'm going to take advantage of it by grabbing as many fat torrents as I can find! See ya!
Posted by dan at 9:08 PM in technology/
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Tuesday, 3 August 2004

Bypassing Corporate Firewalls and Web-filtering

Do you work in an environment where certain internet activities like Instant Messanger connections, and some websites are blocked? Or perhaps your web browsing activity is being tracked? Well, don't put up with that crap. I consider that a violation of privacy. If you agree with me, here's what you need to do. Note, this isn't for everyone. It requires some technical resources. But once you set this up you can bypass every filtering attempt, AND browse or download or chat over an encrypted tunnel that nobody at your office is going to be able to breach. The server side configuration and setup is the hard part but once one server is setup, it can serve a large number of clients (depending on the bandwidth available).
  • A Unix/Linux server with that you can install software on (it should already have xinetd and SSH). This is the hardest part. There are a few options. Easiest is to get a cheap PC and run Linux on it, and expose it's port 80 (or 443) via your firewall. Most expensive but also most flexible would be to get yourself (or go together with a few co-workers) a dedicated server at a place like Server Matrix. That will give you a nice fast server on a fat pipe with root access.
  • A Socks5 server program, the one I use is available here
  • A good windows SSH client -- like PuTTY

Step 1 - Server SSH Setup
Ok, now that you've got a Linux server available (isn't it wonderful how I can just assume that... but I'm writing this, not you so I can) we need to get SSH available on port 80 or 443. Reason being, these two ports are almost never restricted by companies. If you're running a home LAN on a broadband connection you really need to be using a router and just about all of them allow port forwarding, so forward ports 80 and 443 into your new Linux server's port 22 (the SSH port). OR if you're using one of those routers which only allows port forwarding to the same port number on the internal computer, then you'll need to use your xinetd. See below:

If you're shelled out the $$ and got yourself a nice dedicated server congrats! The server better come with a few IP addresses or you just got ripped off. Pick one of the other IP addresses on the box and edit your /etc/xinetd.conf file as follows:
service http
{
        flags                   = REUSE
        socket_type             = stream
        protocol                = tcp
        wait                    = no
        user                    = root
        groups                  = yes
        bind                    = [other IP address]
        redirect                = [main IP address] 22
}

Of course, replace the "" with the actual IP addresses (no ['s or ]'s or "s). Then restart your xinetd process. You've now forwarded over port 80 on your other IP address to port 22 (the SSH port) on your main IP address. If you want to do the same for port 443, copy the above block below it and change "service http" to "service https" You should be able to telnet to that port 80 or 443 and get something like this: 
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_3.6.1p2

If you got that, you're all set up!

Step 2 - Sever Socks5 Setup
Follow the instructions at the Socks5 site here to get your server installed. That's it.

Step 3 - Making your first SSH Connection
Get the putty.exe file from PuTTY's site and run it. Open up a connection to the ip and port you've configured, and specify protocol as SSH. You should be prompted for a user name and password. If you can log in then you're one step closer.

Step 4 - Setting up Tunnels
Open up the PuTTY new session dialogue. In the tree, find /Connection/SSH/Tunnels. Now setup a tunnel like so:
  • Source Port: 1080
  • Destination: [your server's main IP address]:1080
  • Connection Type: Local (not Remote or Dynamic)

Now, next time you log in to your server via PuTTY/SSH there will be a tunnel open from your port 1080, to your server's port 1080. You can open up a command prompt and type "telnet localhost 1080" and you should get a connection open up. As soon as you type something though, it will be recognized as invalid input and the connection will be dropped. A major bonus feature is that tunnel is fully encrypted!

Step 5 - Reconfiguring your applications
Most internet apps like Web Browsers or Instant Messanger clients can use a Socks5 proxy to route their traffic. And now you technically have one available to them at port 1080 on your local computer. So reconfigure your apps to use localhost:1080 as the proxy server. If your web browser also needs to view internal pages, you can configure it to consider some addresses as local (such as ones on your subnet). Another way to do this is to install a 2nd browser. Most Corps put IE on everyone's desk. But this is a great reason to install FireFox on your PC. That way you can set it up to be very private i.e. by disabling browser cache or location bar history files etc. (all depending on your level of paranoia!)
Posted by dan at 10:04 AM in technology/
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Troubleshooting A Rogers EXTREMEly Slow Internet Connection Part 2

Thank God for long weekends. With all the weekend warriors out of Toronto and up at their cottages and being arrested for drunk or aggressive driving the networks were uncongested and the data was flowing well. I was getting speeds over 550Kb/sec downstream. Nevertheless I decided to give Rogers tech support a quick call to check on the status of my ticket. I found out that they've escalated the issue from being various user tickets, to a higher level system issue ticket. The tech support guy on the phone told me that there is an issue affecting anyone routing through the 333 Bloor St station, and that it is affecting my entire area. He said it was one of their system wide top 5 important issues. Some comfort, it's been a week and they haven't figured it out and fixed it yet. Unfortunately everyone will be back home tonight checking their e-mail and downloading porn so I can look forward to slow speeds yet again.
Posted by dan at 8:59 AM in technology/
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Friday, 30 July 2004

System Administrator Appreciation Day

Since there's a day for everyone now, except of course straight white middle class males. I guess this is as close as you can come to getting one: http://www.sysadminday.com/ Because really, us BOFH's don't get enough respect!
Posted by dan at 2:03 PM in technology/administration/
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