ask.com Blog Search

Recently I wrote about maps.ask.com. Today I'm going to talk about another piece of ask.com. ask.com acquired Bloglines a while back and leveraged them to enhance their blog search capability. The URL is not the friendliest - http://www.ask.com/?tool=bls so add it to your favorites. (Hint: http://blog.ask.com/ is easier to remember and does the same thing.)

How they use the Bloglines information is to "qualify" blogs for inclusion in their blog search. In other words, when you use ask.com's blog search, they only search blogs that are subscribed to using Bloglines. The idea is that this should raise the quality of the search results. Here's what they say about it:

Blogs and Feeds: Search the blogosphere using our unique algorithm that combines Ask.com search technology and Bloglines subscription data. We index the most popular blogs that people across the web subscribe to daily to ensure higher-quality results and minimizes blog spam.

To try this, I searched for "apple wifi driver vulnerabilities" using Google, Technorati, and ask.com. Here are the results:



Even without going further than the first screen, I think ask.com has better results. But wait, there's more.

Look at the ask.com results. Do you see the little binoculars beside one of the entries? Hover over them and voila!

Without even leaving the search results page!

maps.ask.com

Obviously I'm a fan of Google and therefore Google Maps. If you've seen my blog WhereIveBen you'll also see that I use Windows Live Local.

One mapping capability that I hadn't found was the ability to set specific waypoints along the way thereby sending the route along something other than the shortest/quickest route.

I had found Harley-Davidson's Ride Planner but that was really hard to use as you had to give it a specific street address for every waypoint (or at least that was the only way that I could find).

Then last week I came across a blog entry talking about ask.com's maps. The part talking about maps is some ways down in the entry.

I played with it yesterday and I like it! To set a waypoint, you just right click on the map and it locates the closest reference point. It could be a street address (like Harley's Ride Planner) or it could be an intersection (which is just what I wanted). You can also just drag a waypoint to wherever you want it.

I used it to lay out a motorcycle ride and here it is. Yeah, it's not a tinyurl but it works.ask.com's maps has satellite imagery and even a topological view but doesn't seem to have any maps outside North America.

Another time I'll tell you about ask.com's blog search and why it's different.

Damn Spam

Spam has taken a turn and not for the better. I've been using K9 for a couple of years and it's been doing great.

However, recently spammers begun putting their message in an embedded gif. Then they throw a lot of random text in the body to confuse the Bayesian filters. Unfortunately, it seems like they're being successful at it. Look at the following statistics report from K9:Since February 2005, K9 has only missed 2% of spam. However, looking at only August 2006, that has jumped to 5.5%.

This afternoon when I checked my e-mail, I had 5 messages. All of these were this type of spam. K9 correctly identified 2 of the 5 as spam but missed the other 3.

What's a body to do?

Inspiration

A friend's blog had a entry last week asking for ideas on:

I want to store contact information (email addresses and cell phone numbers) somewhere that is (1) secure (2) immune from losing the information (3) free. What are your suggestions?

He had lost his cell phone a while back and with it all his names and numbers.

I commented and mentioned my beloved Cardfile program but as I wrote the comment, thought of using KeePass.

I started it up and looked around. I realized that I could create a folder in KeePass (I called it "Names and Addresses"). I put the name in KeePass' "Title" field and the body of the entry in the "Notes" field. This gave me a view very much like Cardfile.
The entries look like this:
I went through pure Hell converting my Cardfile entries to CSV format to import but they eventually came in cleanly. Look at the screen shot above - I made the e-mail addresses mailtos and they even come through as hyperlinks.

Now all my names and addresses are strongly encrypted on my USB key and backed up to the hard drive each time they're changed (keeping 3 old copies). KeePass runs from the USB key without installation on any version of Windows.

winstart

Years ago, I was trying to create a CD for a customer to hand out as samples. She wanted it to automatically run when inserted. I had created her a lot of content as a web site so I wanted to reuse as much of that as possible. I decided to just load her web site onto the CD and make it autorun the index.htm page.

Wasn't as easy as it seemed. The situation is that the autorun.inf process will only "run" executables. One way to work around this is to use the "start" command.

open=start mydocument.ext

The downside of this is the DOS command window flashes by.

I finally found a program called winstart.exe from a guy in Australia. What this program does is launch whatever program is associated with the file you specify. This is confusing to explain but works very cleverly.

For instance, in my case I wanted to launch the user's browser and load index.htm. So my autorun.inf simply looked like this:

open=WINSTART.EXE index.htm

This causes the browser to open (without that unsightly command window flash) with the index.htm page.

I have squirreled away a copy of winstart.exe but when I sat down to write this, I went looking for a reference for it. When I Googled "winstart.exe" I got pages of hits talking about worms and viruses. The winstart.exe that I am talking about is NOT malicious.

The author (Jeff Turner) still hosts this on this page.

FolderShare

My wife has taken a new position in her job and has been working at home a lot of evenings. Her new work computer at first wouldn't acknowledge USB drives so we fell back to the old faithful floppy. We quickly filled up the first one and started on the second. Then we had to keep up with which was which. Shades of 1990!

I remembered that I had read about Microsoft buying FolderShare and making it available for free. I searched the blogosphere looking for negative comments on it. Surprisingly, I didn't find much negative chat. Most were glowing testimonials.

One theme that kept coming up was how easy it was to use UPnP to open the required ports on their firewalls. That was a red flag to me. I read the FolderShare FAQs carefully and they were full of weasel words, e.g. "To get the most out of FolderShare," and "The Satellite must be able to accept connections on at least one port to serve files via the web."

They had a place where you could submit a question to Support so I did. Suffice it to say that the same people who wrote the FAQs wrote the robotic e-mail responses, e.g. "it is important for you to enable the UPnP..."

By now, my patience was running thin. I found this blog entry that said "You don't have to open any ports on your firewall or do any special configuration; it takes care of everything for you."

What the hell. I just tried it. John Pattison hit the nail on the head. I just installed it on her work computer and played with it.

Oddly, before I could see all the options for sharing, I had to log into the same account from a second computer simultaneously. Then all the options were there. I shared her "My Documents" from her work computer and created a new synchronized folder on my home computer.

I could see her "My Documents" immediately on the second computer. Some of the blog entries I found suggested that sometimes it could take a minute or so to replicate. All I can say is that I haven't seen any delays.

Without ports open on my firewall, FolderShare has to be using a central server that each computer is keeping updated with the status. I presume that if you have ports opened, that the computers talk directly to each other without burdening the central server. This is probably why the FolderShare Support keeps pushing you to open ports.

The other neat thing I found is since FolderShare makes the files look like they're local on both computers, my Tivoli CDP thinks that they are local and includes them in its backup.

Where I've Ben

I've written about GoogleSightseeing a couple of times, here and here. I kept submitting sights but they only posted this one. I think mine are at least as interesting as the World's Largest 7 Up.

So I've created a new blog entitled "Where I've Ben" (pun intended). I hope you enjoy it.

ISO Recorder

I play with so much stuff that sometimes I forget what I've come across.

Tonight I was going to copy a CD. I stuck it in drive E: (dutifully holding down the Shift key) and a blank CD in drive D:. I opened Windows Explorer and right clicked on E: to explore it. I didn't want to double-click and run the risk of autorunning it. When I right clicked, in the context menu was "Copy CD to CD."

Where did that come from?

Well, that was what I wanted to do so I clicked on it.

So far so good.

There was no help so I clicked the icon in the top left and got an "About."

So off I went to the web site.

Welcome to the ISO Recorder download page. ISO Recorder is a tool (power toy) for Windows XP, 2003 and now Windows Vista, that allows (depending on the Windows version) to burn CD and DVD images, copy disks, make images of the existing data CDs and DVDs and create ISO images from a content of a disk folder.

ISO Recorder has been conceived during Windows XP beta program, when Microsoft for the first time started distributing new OS builds as ISO images. Even though the new OS had CD-burning support (by Roxio), it did not have an ability to record an image. ISO Recorder has filled this need and has been one of the poular Windows downloads ever since.

With an advent of Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003 the version 2 of ISO Recorder has been released, which intorduced some new new features including ISO creation and support for non-admin user.

Finally, in Windows Vista it became possible to address another long-standing request and provide DVD burning capability.

Since the very beginning ISO Recorder has been a free tool (for personal use). It is recommended by MSDN download site along with Easy CD and Nero and is used by a number of companies around the world.

Pretty neat. It worked great too.

Who's S.M.A.R.T and Who's Not?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the problems I was having with a Western Digital 250GB. These continued. I finally downloaded their Data Lifeguard utility and ran it. Interestingly, it will run against a USB-connected drive so I didn't have to move the drive over to an IDE connection.
So I ran its extended test. It took 16+ hours. Here's the result:

Notice in the background that the SMART (Western Digital uses it without the periods so I will too) status is X FAIL. It did say that there were some bad sectors that "may be repairable!" I clicked on "Repair" and it completed immediately. Seemed odd to me but what do I know?

So then I ran their SMART display again and it had a X next to Raw Read Error Rate and a 1 in "Warranty." Still, they said they repaired the bad sectors.

So I ran the extended test again. Again, it took hours, overnight actually. However, this time it didn't find any errors. Whew!

I went to Windows and reformatted the drive. Another run that took hours and hours but no errors.

So I ran their SMART display and more Xs and 1s under "Warranty."

I printed off these SMART reports and packed this drive up and sent it to Western Digital. The replacement should be here tomorrow.

So today I went to my desktop (SERVER) and began using VideoReDo to edit out the commercials in a bunch of programs I'd recorded. It seemed to me that the system was being sluggish but nothing else was running.

I downloaded HDTune and ran it against the 120GB Seagate.

Look at those HUGE numbers under things like "Raw Read Error Rate" and "Seek Error Rate." So I downloaded Seagate's SeaTools. It created a bootable diskette and I ran that. "No problems." Yeah, right.

I called Seagate yesterday and spoke to Mick. Mick was very knowledgeable on this drive and the error indicators. He said that Seagate doesn't use the SMART counters in the standard way so that the results of HDTune weren't accurate. I asked him how I could display the recoverable error counters. He said that they didn't make that available. The only diagnostics the customer can run are the SeaTools. Hmmm.

Just to make sure I wasn't nuts, I ran HDTune against my boot drive, the 60GB Western Digital that came in this HP system.

Can you say "Clean as a whistle?"

And to make my day a total mess, I ran HDTune against the 80GB Seagate on my SageTV box.

Now I think I understand why this box seems slow at times. With HDTune, I could actually sit and watch these counters increase. For you faithful readers, this 80GB Seagate is the same as the one mentioned here.

So, now what? Right now, I'm just wringing my hands. I have a couple of conclusions and still some questions.

Conclusions:

1. OEM drives are better than after-market drives. I can't explain this but all the drives I'm having problems with were bought in the after-market (from reputable businesses, e.g. CompUSA, CircuitCity, etc.).
   
2. I think that the PC malaise that some people report are actually hard-drive problems and not exclusively cooties.
   
3. Manufacturers' diagnostics are self-serving. Both vendors I used gave clean bills of health to drives that were eaten up with correctable but degrading errors.

Questions:

1. What to do?

Picasa Web

Have you tried Google's Picasa Web? It came out a couple of weeks ago. Initially it was by "invitation" only. Technically, it still is but it seems that you get your invitation immediately. You'll need a Gmail account and then go to http://picasaweb.google.com.

You'll get 250MB of storage for free. You can bump up to 6GB for $25 per year or use more than one Gmail account. Looks to me like 250MB will last a while. More on that later.

You can upload to Picasa Web two different ways. First, you can use the typical web upload for one file at a time. Ignore the #4 FAQ that says you can't. They just want you to download the Picasa desktop client. Which leads to the second method of uploading, using the Picasa desktop client.

If you already have the Picasa desktop client, you will still need to download the v2.5 beta. It has the feature you need to post to Picasa Web directly from the Picasa desktop client.

In a nutshell, all you have to do from the Picasa desktop client is to create an album and click on the "Web Album" button.You get a prompt about what size to upload. Just let that default. Picasa will resize the pictures and upload them to Picasa Web.

If you have the v2.5 beta Picasa desktop client and you visit a Picasa Web album that allows you to download, you'll have a link on that web page that allows you to download the entire album!

I have over 250 pictures on my Picasa Web and am using 25% of my 250MB.

You'll notice that the URL has my Gmail e-mail address so you may want to setup another Gmail address for photos (and darn, you'll get another 250MB for each one that you setup).

How can I run a scheduled task without a password?

This is v2 of this post. I wrote this a couple of nights ago and waited to post it until I had tested it. See, I can't be wrong all the time.

What I was trying to do was to setup a scheduled task on my SageTV box to defrag. I set it up and kept getting "Could not start" errors. I googled it and ... Well, here's the v1 of this post.

---

I just love Google. Maybe that is just the Internet and the wealth of information on it.

I'm still working on getting my SageTV box up to "unlimited" storage. Until then, I'm stuck with only 80GB and with the World Cup games on, that's kinda tight.

While I know that defragmentation doesn't give me any more space, being tight on space creates more fragmentation.

I Googled "how can i run a scheduled task without a password"and found this link as the second entry:

Scheduled Tasks - Running Tasks Without A Password
For XP Pro: Go to Start/Administrative Tools/Local Security Policy/Security Settings/Local Policies/Security OptionsAccounts: Limit local account use of blank passwords to console logon only. This is enabled by default, disable it.
For XP Home: (Keith Miller) Go to Start/Run/Regedit and navigate to this key:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
Value name: limitblankpassworduse, Type: REG_DWORD, Data: 0 (disabled) 1 (enabled)

So chalk up another problem solved to Google.

Oh, I didn't see the "Adminstrative Tools" on my Start menu so I just right-clicked on Start and chose "Explore all users". The link I needed was "Local Security Policy" in "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Administrative Tools". The target is "%SystemRoot%\system32\secpol.msc /s".

---

As Paul Harvey says, "Now for the rest of the story."

That didn't fix it.

What I didn't mention in v1 was how I setup the scheduled task. I went to Start/Run and entered "cmd" to get a command prompt. Then I entered the following:

at 02:00 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su "defrag c:"

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

When the above machinations didn't fix this, I started to dig deeper. What I found is a file in c:\Windows named SchedLgU.Txt. This is the log of all the executions (or attempts in my case) of scheduled tasks.

Here's what mine said:

"Defrag.job" () 7/3/2006 5:24:01 PM ** ERROR ** Unable to start
task. The specific error is: 0x80070002: The system cannot find the
file specified. Try using the Task page Browse button to locate the
application.

Duh. I had the command in quotes and it didn't need to be. This is what it should have been:

at 02:00 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su defrag c:

Then I remembered WHY I had been doing this at the command prompt. If you use the "at" command at a command prompt to establish a scheduled task, it runs with Administrator authority and not your user account!

The fiddling with the security policy was completely unnecessary.

More Wal-Mart Technology

Remember my post a while back on technology available at Wal-Mart? And my recent post of the flat cat 5e cable from Wal-Mart?

Well, they've done it again. My son-in-law just bought a second monitor for his system at home and wanted a monitor "splitter."

What he really needed is a DVI to DB15 adapter. I found one at CompUSA for $29.99.
Then I went to walmart.com looking. Amazingly, Wal-Mart had this for $14.97.
Since the pictures are slightly different, I went to belkin.com and searched to see the difference. I searched first for "F2E4162A" (CompUSA's reference) and then "HDDB15F" (Wal-Mart's reference). The results pointed to the same page!

So which would you buy?

Flat Cat 5e

With my SageTV system, I've always wrestled with network connectivity. With the original box (Dell Dimension GX150), I used a 802.11b USB 1.1 adapter. When I bumped it to 802.11g 108 Mbps, I had to get a gaming adapter since the USB 1.1 port wouldn't run that fast. Frankly, I was probably optimistic to think that the USB 1.1 port would be the limiting factor.

When I upgraded to the GX270, it had USB 2.0 but I kept the gaming adapter. I have always had questions about the speed of the 108 Mbps network. It seemed that the gaming adapter kept slowing down and then speeding up. You can't really tell much about the gaming adapter since it just looks like an Ethernet port to the PC.

I had a guy come out and look at running me Cat 5 between the SageTV box and the router but he couldn't get to the top of the wall with the router.

This week we had some tile laid and I realized that the guys that do that also lay carpet. I remembered something that I had seen at Wal-Mart. It was FLAT Cat 5e cable. It came in 3 lengths, 15 ft., 25 ft., and 50 ft. I measured and the 25 ft. would reach from the SageTV box to my closet where my networking stuff is.

The floor guy lifted up the carpet and slipped the cable under it. He had to take a coat hanger and work it under a door threshold but it worked fine. It's so FLAT.

As I thought about blogging on this, I went to the APC site looking for pictures and specifications. I didn't find anything so I just scanned some of the packaging.

SageTV PlaceShifter

One of the guys at work is a BIG soccer fan. Last week while the first round of the World Cup games were on, he was out of town and was worried that his TiVo might fill up. I told him I was recording several of the games for my son-in-law and that I'd be glad to record some for him using my SageTV system. As we talked, I remembered that Sage introduced a new feature in v5 called PlaceShifter.

PlaceShifter gives you the capability to remotely access your SageTV system. He downloaded the client and I began trying to set it up on my SageTV server. I followed all the directions carefully but it wouldn't work. You have to open a port in your router. I tried it with manual port forwarding and then with UPnP. Neither worked. I opened a support incident with Sage and sent them lots of screen captures. I exchanged e-mails with them for several days.

I finally noticed a thread on their forum on PlaceShifter and described my problem there. I got an answer back from a support person at Sage in 7 minutes! The key was "Oh -- have you restarted SageTV?" The Sage manual kinda talks about this but it's in a different section than where you have to go to setup PlaceShifter.

Anyway, that fixed it and now it works great! I found that you can buy the license for PlaceShifter for $25 from pcalchemy.com. To install the license, there is a link in the SageTV Start menu. You need to have the SageTV server stopped when you do this. You can create as many users as you want but each license gives you 1 concurrent user.

Sage has a server where your SageTV server registers its key and IP address. Then you give the PlaceShifter client that key and it uses the server to get the address of your server. From that point, you pretty much get the same experience as being in your easy chair.

Browser Share

Remember back in January when I wrote an entry on SiteMeter Statistics on this blog?

I looked again this week at the browser share numbers. Here are the 2 charts side by side:












Firefox has grown about 10% from 29% to 33%. Surprise! Surprise! IE has dropped almost the same amount that Firefox has grown. One interesting thing is that IE 7 is starting to show up.

Then I went over and looked at one of my other sites, desotonet.com. It has a different mix of browsers. Here's a table of its statistics:

Firefox only has 10.6% while IE has 86%. IE 7 shows up here too but with only about half the usage.

Kinda interesting the difference between this blog with a techie audience and desotonet.com with a more mainstream audience.

BACKUP Rises Again

As you can see in my previous post, I have a box named BACKUP in my home network. Originally it was an old HP mini-tower. It was so old that it was a hand-me-down from my mother! I loaded Windows XP Pro on it and put a 250 GB Western Digital in it. I mounted it as \\BACKUP\FILES.

The problem was that \\BACKUP\FILES kept disappearing. When it did, even restarting the box didn't remedy it. I'd have to drag the box out of the closet (remember how I like to run systems headless) and open the case and wiggle all the cables. Then it'd go through this "No operating system found" routine until it'd all work again. I'd button it up and back to the closet it'd go.

This got old after the second time so I looked for alternatives. I figured it had something to do with the IDE controllers on the old HP. I had an old ThinkPad 600E and a USB/IDE enclosure but the ThinkPad didn't support USB 2.0. I found this on BuyExtras.com for $12.95 and I had a port replicator for the 600E that had an Ethernet port.

Now the 600E is BACKUP. Unfortunately, I'm still having problems with the Western Digital. I wonder if it is the way I have it jumpered. I hope that's it. It'll run for a day or two and then just disappear.

Home LAN

Here's a diagram of my home LAN:

How To Mount ISOs

The other day when I was working on UN-Authoring DVDs, I needed to see what files were in ISO images I had saved of video DVDs. I could have burned them to DVDs but I knew I really didn't want/need the DVD disks at that time, only the files within them.

So off I went Googling and came across Microsoft's Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel. Besides the unwieldy name, it's "unsupported" (more on that in a minute).

You can download it from Microsoft here. There's a good write-up on it here including the following readme file.

Readme for Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel v2.0.1.1

THIS TOOL IS UNSUPPORT BY MICROSOFT PRODUCT SUPPORT SERVICES


System Requirements
===================
- Windows XP Home or Windows XP Professional

Installation instructions
=========================
1. Copy VCdRom.sys to your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder.
2. Execute VCdControlTool.exe
3. Click "Driver control"
4. If the "Install Driver" button is available, click it. Navigate to the %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder, select VCdRom.sys, and click Open.
5. Click "Start"
6. Click OK
7. Click "Add Drive" to add a drive to the drive list. Ensure that the drive added is not a local drive. If it is, continue to click "Add Drive" until an unused drive letter is available.
8. Select an unused drive letter from the drive list and click "Mount".
9. Navigate to the image file, select it, and click "OK". UNC naming conventions should not be used, however mapped network drives should be OK.

You may now use the drive letter as if it were a local CD-ROM device. When you are finished you may unmount, stop, and remove the driver from memory using the driver control.

It may not be the friendliest thing I've found but it works great.

Regarding support, just to show you how deeply it's embedded in Microsoft, look at this Knowledge Base article.

PowerPod

While I learned a lot at ASUG, I didn't really get packed very well for that trip. As I sat in the Memphis airport leaving that Sunday, I realized that I didn't bring the charger for my Treo. When we landed in Orlando, I made a mad dash to a gadget store and picked up a PowerPod from EarHugger.

Here's what it looks like:
Interestingly, EarHugger doesn't say much about it. I found this description at 21st-century-goods.com:

The PowerPod features:

• Cord retracts into charger for easy storage
• LED shows connection made to phone
• Charge phone while talking
• Charges cell phones from 4 different power sources
• Standard wall plug, computer USB Port, 9-Volt battery and car cigarette lighter
• Comes with 5 adapters
• Most Nokia, Motorola, palmOne Treo, BlackBerry and Kyocera phones
• Folded size approximately 4" x 3" x 1"

You kinda have to know the code that the BlackBerry uses a mini-USB connection for charging (why doesn't everybody?). What that means to me is that I can use the PowerPod to charge my Plantronics Discovery 640 Bluetooth headset also. Pretty cool.

You can buy one here.

Father's Day Wish List 2006

Seidio Stereo Adapter

This will let me use iPod stereo headsets to listen to movies on my Treo.

You can order it here.

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Travel Sentry Certified Luggage Lock

This will let us lock our luggage and still let the TSA check it.

You can order it here or just drive to Target. We probably need 4 (2 sets of 2).

---

Kingston Technologies 512MB DDR SDRAM


(KVR400/512R)

Hopefully, this will speed up our desktop PC.

You can order it here or drive to CircuitCity. I need 2 of them!

I'm Just Not Sure

When I went to ASUG a couple of weeks ago, I took 2 SD cards - a 1GB in the Treo to use for audio recording and note taking and a 512MB full of movies and podcasts. I took a wired headset for the Treo to use to listen with but with my luck it was bad. So I wanted to use my laptop to watch the movies on the airplane. But I didn't take my USB SD reader!

When I got back, I got to looking for a USB SD reader to keep on my keyring. There were several choices that called themselves "keyrings" but they didn't have a loop on them or the loop was on the removable top (don't get me started on that!).

I finally found the I-Rock IR8200 at Newegg.com for $12.99 and $4.99 shipping. Here's what it looks like:

You can't tell from this picture but mentioned in one of the comments was that there was a loop on the swivel cover for the USB plug. I could use that to put it on my keyring.

So I ordered one and it came in today.

It's larger than I hoped (but honestly not larger than I expected). Here's how it compares to my Sandisk Micro USB drive and an SD card:

So now, what to do? It's really bigger than I will tolerate in my pocket. I could put it in my laptop case but that's where the regular USB SD reader was when I needed it. Maybe with the keyring loop I can attach it to something like the retractable keyring I keep my RSA token on.

90 Seconds

That's how long it took. To backup a week's work of changes with Tivoli Continuous Data Protection. In my last post on Tivoli CDP, I hadn't configured a remote backup.

I configured one using an old 30GB IDE hard drive with a USB 2.0 adapter. It took a couple of hours to synchronize the first time and then I removed it. I threw it in my trunk to keep it separate from the PC.

Each weekend, I bring it in the house and plug it in. This week (a typical week), it took 90 seconds after Windows recognized it to completely synchronize with Tivoli CDP.

Awesome.

Wedding Slide Show

My daughter got married in early May. In the tradition of Ole Miss sorority girls, they had to have a video at the rehearsal dinner. While a friend at work does this for weddings and church events, I figured that doing it myself would give me more time to get ready.

With all the video software that I have, I thought that I must have something that will do that. My first attempt was with Pinnacle Studio 10. It seemed easy to put together but when I rotated the pictures, the aspect ratio got all messed up. And Studio 10 is SO slow on my Athlon XP 2000. Studio 8 is faster but it wouldn't rotate the pictures.

So I went off to try other programs I had. I tried them all. Ulead DVD MovieFactory is my favorite DVD authoring program and it has a slide show feature. Most of them are more capable with photo management than Studio but they all seemed to have a problem when I played their discs in my DVD player.

The timing of the stills was inconsistent and the music would jump every now and then. I tried burning SVCDs and DVDs with the same results. Finally, I took one of the CDs and looked at the files. To my surprise, even with 15 minutes of slides and music, the CD was relatively empty.

What was happening was that DVDs and (S)VCDs have an alternative format for slide shows that has the DVD player play the still photos subject to the timing that is specified and, at the same time, play the music.

The closest thing I found to documentation of this is the VCD File/Folder Structure on VideoHelp.com. This shows that on (S)VCDs, the folder SEGMENT can contain up to 999 stills in resolution 704x576 or 352x288. Folder CDDA contains the CD audio files.

What I think was happening with the timing was that the DVD player isn't as consistent as I wanted it to be. So what to do?

I went BACK to Studio 8. But beforehand, I used Picasa to select the pictures and to do the necessary rotation and cropping. Then I exported them from Picasa to a folder on my desktop. Then I imported them into Studio. Worked like a charm except that I lost the sequence so I had to rejuggle them in Studio. Not a big deal.

To avoid the timing problems with the DVD player, I had Studio render the slide show as a video, not a collection of stills. This made the DVD player think that it was just playing a normal video. Of course, the files were much larger but that had never been a problem anyway. Also, as a work-in-progress, I had Studio render it as a Windows Media file that was 5-6MB and posted it on the web for the bride and groom to preview.

In the end, I created 2 SVCDs, one for the rehearsal dinner with about 15 minutes of slides and music and another for the reception with more than 30 minutes of slides and music. If I'd needed more time, I could have used Studio to create DVDs rather than SVCDs.

Oh, one other thing. I wanted the reception video to play continuously. Studio didn't do that. I un-authored the SVCD and used Ulead DVD MovieFactory to author another SVCD with the option to play continuously!

UN-Authoring DVDs

A friend of mine at work is going to Italy this summer. I have been squirreling away travelogue shows for the last couple of years. I have my SageTV box setup to record anything by Rick Steves, Rudy Maxa, Samantha Brown or several other travel shows.

I wait until I have enough shows in a series to fill up a DVD, generally 6 for a 1/2 hour show or 4 for a 1 hour show, and then burn a DVD for that series. In 2 years, I have more than a dozen DVDs full of travel shows.

As you'd expect, there were a lot of shows on Italy but scattered over 6-7 DVDs. I didn't want to copy all those DVDs so I went looking for a way to consolidate the shows on Italy onto a minimum number of DVDs.

I'd played with Ulead DVD MovieFactory 3.0 SE (DVD MF) and remembered that it has a feature that will allow you to import video from a DVD (unencrypted). I played with this some and found that it puts the video in ...\Ulead DVD MovieFactory\3.0\Import_DVD as plain MPEG2s.

This seemed like just what I wanted but... As you know, for me, nothing is simple. There were more files in this folder than segments I had imported!

It turns out that DVDs have a folder VIDEO_TS that contains the .VOB files. However, .VOB files don't exceed 1GB. When the segment that I had imported crossed into 2 of these .VOB files, DVD MF created 2 MPEG2 files.

How to get them back together? I remembered that VideoReDo has some kind of capability to consolidate files and went looking. It will join multiple video segments into a single file and does it quick! VideoReDo is still one of my favorite programs.

So with this, I combined the files as needed and used DVD MF to author DVDs with just the Italy shows on them.

Bon journo!

Treo 650 Recap - Part II

I remembered that I had omitted a couple of things in my Treo 650 Recap so here goes.

I searched high and low for a holster for the 650. I like simplicity so I was picky. Then I ran across a blog entry (which I can't find again) where the guy had used a iPod case! My daughter had an iPod and hadn't ever used the case. This was right before Christmas so I bought her a "cool" iPod case with a hole in it for the spin wheel and a transparent window for the display. She was thrilled and I took her Apple case.

The case has worked great. It probably isn't as sturdy as some made-for-phone cases but it has been fine. I broke off the belt clip when I got in the car with it on my left hip rather than my right hip. The Apple store was on my way back to work so I just replaced it. Of course, it was pricey there but convenient.

My other challenge has been a Bluetooth headset. Frugal that I am, I jumped on an IOGear headset from buy.com for $29.95 (no longer on sale). The first one I got rattled! There was something loose in it. I exchanged it but the second one sounded like crap. I bought a Motorola H500 from the local Cingular store. I never could get the volume to be loud enough. I'd have to actually press my hand against the headset to be able to hear. So back to Cingular it went. This time I got a Plantronics Discovery 640. It is the in-ear style and it works fine.

I read somewhere later that the Treo 650 doesn't have a strong outbound signal on the Bluetooth so you need a headset that has plenty of amplification. Seems that the Motorola H50 doesn't have much amplification. I'm sure the in-ear fitting of the Plantronics 640 helps as well.

GoogleSightseeing

I made it on GoogleSightseeing! My submission on Avebury is here. You can see my pictures starting here.

Tivoli Continuous Data Protection

I had lunch with Mark Lewis of EMC this week. Well, me and about 20 other people did. Over lunch, we talked about lots of things but especially backup.

Maybe you'll remember back in October when I whined about my backups. It hasn't gotten any better. I did find out what was wrong with my DVD burners. They had dropped out of DMA mode from getting so many errors on my cheap media. I guess you get what you pay for.

Anyway, I am still tired of backing up EVERYTHING each month. And then I don't have a backup in between.

In the October post, I talked about IBM's VitalFile Backup. It has now come out of their skunkworks and is called Tivoli Continuous Data Protection - same function, just a new name.

I had some time this weekend so I installed it on my "server." So far it looks pretty good. It runs as a Java application and you interact with it through the browser.

When you start it up, it walks you through a wizard. I didn't screen shot that but here's a screen that shows you the choices you make about their "Continuous" backup:


I pointed it at my second internal hard drive and told it to use up to 50 GBs. It didn't use nearly that much (more later) but seemed to stop and start unless I gave it a really BIG number here.

Notice off to the right there's a list of inclusions. I generally took their defaults but probably should have thought more about all the Office extensions. I was amazed how much of those there were outside of My Documents that I didn't really care about. Oh, I deleted their "*.123" entry!

You go through pages setting up schedules (for remote backups) and exclusions. I left remote backups disabled for now and again pretty much took their defaults on exclusions.

Then you get the following "Backup everything now" screen. This takes a loooooong time. I ended up with about 12 GB backed up and it took 3-4 hours.


The remote backup they're talking about is a network or removable drive. Here's the configuration for it. As I mentioned, I have it disabled for now.


Finally, here's the startup screen when you hit it as http://localhost:9003/


You can see I have almost 29000 files protected by Tivoli CDP for almost 12 GB. My next challenge is to enable remote backup to a USB drive and keep it off site.

Treo 650 Recap

I just realized that I had never recapped what I did with my Treo 650 so here goes.

I got it just before Christmas. My objective was to consolidate my gadgets. My boss walked into a conference room where I had spread out in front of me my SonyEricsson T616, my Sony Clie NX50, and my BlackBerry 7290! He said he had never seen anyone with so many gadgets. The phone was on a personal account which is why I didn't use the phone on the BlackBerry. I used the BlackBerry for work e-mail and calendaring. I used the Clie as a PDA, note taking and audio recording. I had tried to use the BlackBerry for note taking but I couldn't get the data from the BlackBerry to my laptop. It doesn't support the file transfer protocol. I've been told that later models do support this.

One thing I loved on the BlackBerry was the way it capitalized letters. If you hold a key down for a little longer, it capitalizes the letter. The Treo didn't do that which made typing harder - 2 strokes for each capital letter. The Treo does some "smart" typing, e.g. it capitalizes the next letter after a period and a space and it inserts an apostrophe in contractions like "didnt." KeyCaps600 fixed this right away. Makes the Treo work just like the BlackBerry.

Next was a capability I loved on the Clie - Graffiti. Now the Treo as it comes from PalmOne inexplicably doesn't support Graffiti. Almost as easy as KeyCaps600 fixed the capitalization, GraffitiAnywhere gave me Graffiti. But, it was Graffiti 2. The Clie had Graffiti 1. Besides the couple of letters different between 1 and 2, some of the letters and control strokes seemed to be problematic, e.g. a "l" followed by a space would never come out right. The Graffiti 2 "i" is a downward stroke with a dot over it. Using GraffitiAnywhere, you had to use a upward right to left stroke to create a dot. I never could get it right.

I found a Graffiti 1 library for GraffitiAnywhere. That got back all the Graffiti 1 strokes but I can't make any punctuation work. So I compromised. For me, the speed and accuracy of Graffiti 1 was worth not being able to make punctuation. I just use the Treo keyboard for punctuation. When I'm taking notes in a hurry, I just skip punctuation and insert them afterwards.

One of the other things I used on the Clie was the Voice Recorder application. I played with a lot of applications and ended up with SoundRec. Here's the whole story.

The Treo doesn't have much memory but most programs will run off of an SD card and most will let you direct their output to an SD card, e.g. the camera. Not all SD cards are created equally and the story is here.

The Treo had a good File Manager application and I found FileZ with equivalent (and more) function. I don't think I could get along without it. Oh, so you don't find yourself in the same situation that I did, add a Favorites button that runs FileZ before you need it.

Life isn't all work so I added a Tetris knock-off blocks133.

My other entertainment is watching videos. The way to do this is described here.

Whew! That's enough for tonight. Leave me a comment if you have any questions.

Interesting Gadget

Mediagate Portable MPEG4 Player USB 2.0 External Drive Case Enclosure

• Portable MPEG4 Player is a perfect portable entertainment box with MPEG4 playback and comes with an internal 2.5" HDD (Optional)
• Download any music, movie or photo to Portable MPEG4 Player through the supplied USB cable from your computer and bring it over wherever
• Just connect by Audio-Video cable to a monitor in a car or a TV at home and operate it by the supplied remote control
• It is also an external USB HDD (2.5 inch) which is more durable compared to 3.5 inch and it looks very slim and compact with aluminum cover

SoundRec, Voice Recorder, Whatever

I still love my Treo 650 but my quest remains to get the capabilities that I had on my Sony Clie NX60 of Voice Recorder. The UI is much more complete than that of SoundRec.

I tried to move Voice Recorder to the Treo. I used FileZ and unlocked it on my Clie and beamed it off. Then beamed it to the Treo 650 and installed it. When I ran it, it just blinked the screen and went away.

I posted on TreoCentral and, as usual, got several "noise" responses but one person responded with a suggestion to look for "file(s) in your Clie label(ed) voice recorder en_us, or voice recorder." Why didn't I think of that?

So off I went back to the Clie and found 2 more files that began with "Voice Recorder..." When I went to transfer them to the Treo 650, I was lazy, so I just beamed them from the Clie to the Treo. Bad plan. The Treo immediately began rebooting over and over. A quick Google search turned up the technique of holding the Up button to get the Treo into the equivalent of Windows' Safe Mode. I thought I was home free.

This let me get to the phone screen but anytime I pressed Home, reboot. Finally, I added a Favorites button that would run FileZ and deleted the problem file. I think I'll leave well enough alone.

So I went back to SoundRec that I'd found before. SoundRec works fine but the files are much bigger than the Clie's Voice Recorder. I recorded a meeting with both SoundRec on my Treo 650 and with Voice Recorder on my Clie NX60. There was about a 4X difference in size with the SoundRec recording being larger. I moved both files to my Windows desktop and looked at them with Windows' Sound Recorder. Both were set to 8 KHz but the SoundRec file was 16 bits and the Voice Recorder file was 4 bits. Since I use the audio recording capability exclusively for voice, 4 bits is sufficient. However the difference in the size of resulting .wav makes moving them around much more difficult.

I've about given up in matching the size of the Voice Recorder files. I am still looking for improvements in UI and integration. SoundRec's UI is pretty rudimentary and it doesn't run in the background. This means that when OneBridge fires up to pull my e-mail, the recording stops. CallRec SAYS that it runs in the background. We'll see. I e-mailed the CallRec support about 4-bit vs. 16-bit recording and they said they only did 16-bit. Not a huge deal as I have a 1GB SD card.

CallRec is $20 and you know how I feel about paying for software so I'll have to think about this for a while.

SD Card Speed

One of the things I miss going from my Clie to the Treo is the Voice Recorder application. Perusing the Treo web sites, I came across Sound Recorder from InfinityBall.com.

It did what it said but when I told it to record to the SD card, the recordings came out garbled. At first I attributed it to the program but then I realized that if I let it record to the Treo's memory, they sounded fine. The SD card was the culprit.

Another Google search ensued and found this thread that lists SD cards and their performance. I downloaded cardspeed.prc V1.2 and ran my own tests.

For my primary SD card, Toshiba 512MB

Finished in 7.45 seconds
Wrt32bit: 22 bytes/second
Wrt8KB: 409600 bytes/second
Read8KB: 2621440 bytes/second

Card speed is OK
Avoid > 11KHz PCM

For my secondary SD card, PNY 512MB:

Finished in 6.70 seconds
Wrt32bit: 24 bytes/second
Wrt8KB: 429744 bytes/second
Read8KB: 2621440 bytes/second

Card speed is OK
Avoid > 11KHz PCM

There is a little variation from run to run. Notice that the Read8KB is exactly the same on both cards. Perhaps that is the limitation on the Treo bus?

Anyway, looks like I need to look for faster (more expensive) SD cards.

Update:

On techbargains.com this week, I came across a PQI 1 GB 60X SD card for $19.99 after rebate from outpost.com and ordered it. When it came, I transfered my Treo files to it and tested it with CardSpeed. Here're the results:

Finished in 8.64 seconds
Wrt32bit: 40 bytes/second
Wrt8KB: 55188 bytes/second
Read8KB: 2383127 bytes/second

Card speed is OK
Avoid > 11KHz PCM

Now I'm confused. I guess I'll have to test it with Sound Recorder.

Where's My Boot Drive?

This is a sad story and I did it to myself. A couple of weeks ago, CompUSA had a 200 GB Maxtor hard drive for $50 after rebates and you know what a sucker I am for rebates. I wasn't sure where I was going to use it but I knew I'd find a good home for it.
Serendipitously, the next weekend CircuitCity had a USB2 to IDE hard drive enclosure for $15 after rebates so deja vu all over again.
Now, I had to do something with it. My SageTV box only had an 80 GB hard drive so that seemed like the logical place.

When I opened the Maxtor box, I found a MaxBlast CD. It has a capability of "Installing an Additional Storage Drive or Replacement Boot Drive" (emphasis mine). Well, duh, that's what I wanted to do.

There were a few more bumps along the way but in the end, off I went using MaxBlast to clone the boot drive on my SageTV box. I was using USB 1.1 so I knew it was going to be slow but I just hadn't imagined HOW slow. After 5-6 hours and the progress bar barely moving, I clicked on the Cancel button. Nothing. So I waited. And waited. And waited.

My patience wore out so I CTRL+ALT+DEL and terminated the application. I shut down the box and installed the USB 2.0 PCI card I had.

Button it all up and reboot. Remember that this is a headless box - no keyboard, no monitor, no mouse, no speakers. Just a network connection and TV wires.

It wouldn't boot.

I knew that was bad. I just had no idea how bad. I trucked it off upstairs and plugged it into a monitor and keyboard and rebooted. It hung at the Windows screen.

Ok. It could be worse (and in fact it was). I went and got the XP CD and did a Windows repair on it.

It wouldn't boot.

I told you it was worse. In the end, what had happened was that the MaxBlast program had changed the drive letter on the boot drive from C: to E: before it completed the copy. So when I terminated the copy, I was doomed. I no longer had a C: drive.

Rebooting like that got the Registry all twisted up in its shorts. I finally got it to boot by plugging in the USB drive.

To wrap up this story of woe, I finally just put the new 200 GB hard drive in the system unit and built it from scratch.

I used the USB 2.0 PCI card and the Mad Dog enclosure to copy the data from the 80 GB hard drive and reinstalled all the PVR software.

Now, what am I going to do with the left over 80 GB hard drive? Funny you should ask ...

How To Safely Store And Manage Passwords Part II

Sometimes I'm slow but I'll usually figure it out. Back in August 2004, I wrote about my search for a program to run from a USB key to store my passwords and automatically type them in. At that time, I looked at KeePass and KeyPass. KeePass is open source and KeyPass is free for up to 10 userid/password combinations.

I played with KeyPass some and it worked fine but I was still limited to 10 userid/password combinations and there was that problem with autorun on a USB key.

I had found the Hagiwara USB key that lies to Windows Plug-N-Play and presents 2 drives - a CD-ROM (there's the autorun) and a normal USB drive.

Since the autorun drive was a CD-ROM I couldn't just put the KeyPass program on that drive and it be able to write to it's database so the search continued.

In some of my surfing last week, I came across KeePass again. This time the authors had really improved it. Now it too, like KeyPass, will automatically type the userid/passwords and it supports way more than 10 userid/password combinations.

Now there was just that nagging problem of being able to write to the database. I posted my dilemma on the KeyPass forums and got a response back from one of the developers in less than 2 hours. Awesome! He wrote a small batch file that will run as part of the autorun.inf and search for the keepass.exe on other drives. When it is found, it starts it. Simple.

So, all that works great. I can just plug the Hagiwara USB drive into any Windows PC. It will autorun, start KeePass, ask me for my master password, and minimize to the system tray. Then when I need a userid/password entered, I just press CTRL and / and off it goes.

Unlike KeyPass, KeePass doesn't automatically backup the database but there's a plug-in available that does so I'm using that.

Now all that's left is to let KeePass start building me strong passwords and switch my habits to depending on KeePass. I'm still not that brave.

SiteMeter Statistics

I use SiteMeter.com to get statistics on visits to this blog. I just use the free service. Every now and then, I go over there and look at the statistics. I'm almost always surprised by the results. Here're some of the charts from tonight:

Daily Visits
Operating System
Browser Share
Monitor Resolution

Look at the Operating System results. Where on earth are those Windows 2000 users coming from? There are more of them than all of the Macs!

And the Browser Share - Internet Explorer is getting killed.

On the Monitor Resolution, the 60% of 1024x768 isn't surprising but the 10% of 1280x1024 (19") surprised me and 800x600 being only 5% means you almost don't have to worry about that screen size any more.

Windows XP Installation Tasks

By request, here's my checklist for installing Windows XP on a clean system:

Install Windows XP
Apply Windows Updates
Install WinZip8 and then Winzip90 from c:\download
Restore My Documents
Fix Sounds
o Windows Explorer/Start Navigation = (None)
o Windows/Start Windows = Dixie.wav
o Windows/New Mail Notification = (None)
Restore
o ACDSee
o QuickenB
o Download
o The HTML Reference Library
o Games
o UFT
o Address book
o Outlook Express folders
Setup Outlook Express with address book and folders
Install gaim and configure http://gaim.sourceforge.net
Install NAV and run Live Update from system tray
Setup Internet Explorer
Install Google toolbar http://toolbar.google.com
Install Maxthon http://www.maxthon.com/download.htm
Install Quicken 2003 Deluxe
Install Office 2000 http://download.microsoft.com/download/Word2002/wp6rtf/1/W98NT42KMe/EN-US/wp6rtf.exe (support for Works 6)
Set folder options
Update Start Menu
Install 123 Free Solitaire
Install PaintShop Pro 7
Install Acrobat
Install Automachron from achron4.zip in c:\download
Install FavoriteSyncInstall.exe from c:\download
Install Sun J2RE http://www.java.com
Install patch26.exe from c:\download for UFT
Install Roxio Easy CD and DVD Creator 6
Run xp_hide_messenger.vbs from c:\download
Get rid of welcome screen with autologon
1. click on "Start" - then click on "Run" - and type "control userpasswords2"
2. click OK
3. On the Users tab, clear the "Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer" check box and click "Apply".
4. Select the user you want to log on & click OK. A dialog will appear that asks you what user name and password should be used to logon automatically, just click "OK".
5. Then go to Control Panel / User Accounts, and click "Change the way users log on or off", and untick both "Use the Welcome Screen" and "Use Fast User Switching"

Good luck.

Video on the Go

One of the things that have fascinated me about the iPAQ and the Treo is the ability to play video on them. I didn't play with the iPAQ long enough to get around to it but I've had time to play with the Treo.

I read a lot of forum entries and blogs on how to get video (particularly movies) to a PDA. The issues are the same regardless of iPAQ or Treo.

The tricky part of the process is getting the video file size down to where it'll fit on a memory card. There are a couple of programs I've played with that do that.

The first one I tried was PocketDivXEncoder. It's very simple to use. Here's a forum post on how to use it. The downside to PocketDivXEncoder is that you have to decrypt the DVD first. I happened to have a decrypted copy of National Treasure so I attacked it. I'm sorry I didn't keep up with how long it took. PocketDivXEncoder worked great and the output file was 185 MB when formatted at 320x240 for the Treo.

The second movie I tried with PocketDivXEncoder was Love Actually. I hadn't decrypted that one first so I had to jump through hoops to create VOB files. I did that and then ran PocketDivXEncoder against it. It churned for a while then gave an error message in French and pretty much quit.

I tried everything to work around the mysterious error.

I finally gave up and went back to the forum entries. This time I found a reference to the FairUseWizard. This is a more general utility than PocketDivXEncoder. It's main purpose is to "create movies that will play on your standalone player with the DivX and XviD codecs." A PDA is just another case of this.

The big plus for FairUseWizard is that it will decrypt the DVD for you. The downside is that you control the encoding parameters primarily by setting the target file size. For Love Actually, I set the target file size to 250 MB but I wasn't able to satisfactorily set the resolution to the Treo's 320x240 (it said it wasn't a recommended resolution). I played with it a couple of times but finally just let the "wizard" run things and it worked perfectly. The output file was right at 250 MB.

Incidentally, both PocketDivXEncoder and FairUseWizard support XviD which is what I used.

I popped my 512 MB SD card into a card reader and copied both files over along with The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP). With the card back in the Treo, I used FileZ to install TCPMP and the appropriate codecs.

Voila! They work like a charm. TCPMP has all kind of settings and tweaks but all you really need to do is click on Play. The Treo's 5-way left and right let you skip backward and forward and the center button is Pause/Play. Stick your headset into the jack on the bottom and you're off in your own world.

Oh, by the way. All of the above programs are FREE!

moblog.benmoore.biz

I'm having a blast with the Treo. One of the things I was interested in playing with was mobile blogging. I went to Blogger's mobile blog site and read up on it. It's simple to setup. Just e-mail a picture from your phone to go@blogger.com. Blogger sends you an e-mail reply with a URL and a claim code. You go to go.blogger.com, enter that claim code and "claim" that blog.

Then you can rename it to what you want and associate it with your Blogger account. After that, it just shows up in your list of blogs.

One little variant I ran into is that the first time I sent off a photo, I used MMS and the next time, I used e-mail. This turned out to actually be an advantage as I claimed both of those and pointed them to the same blog. That way, I can send photos either way and they end up at the same place.

There was one little bump in the way that Blogger builds the html for the posts. Blogger uses the following html:

<p class="mobile-photo">
<img width="320" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/ ... .jpg"/>
</p>

The problem with this is that the photos are constrained at 320 pixels. Now for most phones, this may be Ok but the Treo takes photos that are 640x480.

I searched Blogger's help for how to change this limitation to no avail. Finally, I sent them a question but they responded that they were too busy to answer.

So I fell back on my favorite problem solver: Google. The first hit from a search for "css width" turned up this page. I took the template from the new blog and pasted it into a real-time html editor so I could play with it. I stuck the following into the <style> section:

.Post img{width:640px}

CSS attributes over-ride html attributes so the result was that the html acted like it had 'width="640".' I wish there was a more direct relationship between CSS attributes and html attributes but ...

Here's the resulting moblog.