How S.M.A.R.T. Are You?

I went off on a wild goose chase the other day (so what's new?) thinking I had a hard drive problem. It wasn't a hard drive problem but I learned something along the way.

I remembered once I did have a hard drive problem and I ran IBM's Drive Fitness Test (DFT). It showed you not only the hard errors but soft errors as well. That program was a DOS program that you had to make a special boot disk to run. It seemed to me that there should be something you could run under Windows to get at this data.

I Google'd DFT and ran across "S.M.A.R.T." S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology.

I found 2 programs that report S.M.A.R.T. data for Windows. The first is Active SMART. This is shareware that costs $25. There are details below. The second program I found is smartmontools. smartmontools is FREE from SourceForge.

I couldn't figure out how to install smartmontools. I downloaded and installed Active SMART (beware that it sets itself to start when you boot and doesn't ask).

Anyway, here are screen shots from Ariolic's web site.







There's a lot of detail on S.M.A.R.T. here. Let me know if you figure out how to install smartmontools.

Vivisimo

Make sure you're sitting down. I'm going to talk about a search engine that isn't Google!

Have you ever seen Vivisimo? It's a meta search engine but it has a twist. Vivisimo is the parent company of Clusty. Vivisimo is the more up-scale of the two. What they both do is query a number of search engines (by default MSN, Lycos, Looksmart, Wisenut, Open Directory, and Ask Jeeves) and then cluster the results into groups. It really makes more sense when you look at it.

Here's a screen shot:


Over at the left are the "Clustered Results." You can see that I searched for "trackpoint keyboard usb" and got 155 hits. These occur in the following "clusters:" UltraNav (40), Reviews (27), Space Saver (21), etc.

Even neater is the "preview" feature. Each result has a list of options following it. One of these is "preview." What this does is bring up a portion of the web page that is referenced by the result URL. I've done this on the second result. Those of you with good memories will recall that Google had a Google Labs tool that did this also.

You can click on the clusters at the left to narrow the search. Often these clusters are nested with narrower clusters. It's like you kept adding keywords to refine your search.

I tend to use Vivisimo when I'm hunting for a needle in a haystack. It helps you quickly identify ever smaller result sets to crawl through.

Google Sightseeing

You know what a sucker I am for Google. I ran across Google Sightseeing on Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics newsletter.

So I tried it myself. Here's the Grove at Ole Miss. Too bad it wasn't taken on a game day!

RSS and XML

I like to think that I'm always learning about something. Recently, I have been trying to learn about RSS and XML. A while back I switched my favorites over to FavoriteSync. That give me an XML file of my favorites. I haven't figured out how to edit the XSL file that renders it for browsing. You can't browse to this file. You have to "Save as..."

Recently, I've been playing with using RSS to add local news to my DeSotoNet home page. I used Yahoo's news search (and clicked on Advanced Search). I structured the query to give me the results I wanted. I actually found I had to go hack the URL that generated the results to take out the dates. Then on the results page, I saved the link on the "View as RSS" button. You can browse to this and see the raw XML.

Obviously that's not how I wanted that to present. Just as obviously, I don't have a clue (yet) as to how to make it render better. So, as usual, I went looking for someone who had already done it.

I subscribe to Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics newsletter. An article in July 2004 described how to "RSS-ize my web site." Ever the link pack-rat, I saved that away for future reference.

One of the links on that page was to RSS-to-JavaScript.com. They have a free service that will take RSS and format it into JavaScript that can be embedded in html!

Here's the result. Looks pretty good if I do say so myself.

NirCmd

A while back, I wrote about MyWebExPC. It's worked real well for me. I use it primarily to remotely access my parents' PC.

But (isn't there always a "but?"), now and then my parents' DSL connection drops. Even thought the DSL connection comes back up, the MyWebExPC connection won't reconnect. I entered a ticket to WebEx. Their response was:

I understand your concern and apologize for your inconvenience.

This issue is due to interruption in Internet connection on the remote computer. For MyWebEx PC Agent to run continuously, there should be an uninterrupted Internet connection on the remote computer.

If the Internet connection drops then you need to reconnect the MyWebEx PC Agent to MyWebEx PC server again on the remote computer by following these steps:

1. Click the remote access icon on your remote computer (located in on the bottom right hand of your screen down by the clock - the icon looks like two little balls connected by two lines).

2. Right click it, which will give you the option to "log in." Enter your user name and password and click Ok. If you then refresh the "my computers page" the machine will appear available and you should then be able to take control.

This will solve the issue.

If you need further assistance, please get back to us at your convenience.

Well, duh!

So off I went for my own solution. And I found one. NirSoft has a freeware program, nircmd.exe, that will let you stop and start a service with one command line. I used the following command to create a scheduled task:

at 04:00 /every:monday,tuesday,wednesday,thursday,friday,saturday,sunday nircmd.exe service restart atnthost

What this does is create a scheduled task that runs as the Administrator. It runs every day at 4:00 AM and stops and restarts the MyWebExPC service.

While the DSL connection hasn't failed since I set this up, this should fix it.

Free PDF Creator

Wait! Don't stop reading! This isn't the printer driver that makes you install all that software on your computer. This is a mail-away technique.

What I'm talking about is PDF Online. Here's a blurb from their web site:

Free PDF Conversion Services
Serving over 3,000,000 document conversions so far!

Since 2001, PDF Online (formerly goBCL / goHTM) has been providing quick and free document conversion into PDF and HTML formats.

No need to install anything. As a web-based server solution, PDF Online allows you to automatically convert documents from your PC or your Mac, from your home or your office or anywhere in the world!

You can send them a DOC, RTF, XLS, or TXT file up to 2 MB and they will convert it to a PDF document and e-mail it back to you.

Works great!

Photo Printers

I investigated photo printers a while back. What I found is that there's a BIG difference in consumer photo printers. There are 2 very different types: dye sublimation and inkjet. Inkjet prints in dots while the dye sublimation uses the same technique as commercial photo printers.

There's a good article on the differences here.

Here's a search on dye sublimation printers so you can see which models they are.

Sony's DPP-EX50 Picture Station is a dye sublimation printer. Steve's Digicams looks at the cost per page. He says:

The DPP-EX50 sells for about $180 and the ribbon and paper averages about $0.60 per print when making 4 x 6" postcard size prints.

That price per print seems high to me when I can get commercial digital prints at Walgreen's for $0.29. Better yet, I can use Picasa and upload them to Wal-Mart and have them waiting for me for $0.19 ($0.17 if you use Sam's Club). And remember, the pickup location can be at ANY Wal-Mart so you can send them to your mother's home town.

Google Suggest

Y'all know how big a Google fan I am. Remember my previous article on Google SMS. I ran across Google Suggest while crawling blogs tonight. There's background on it here.

Here's the article that led me to Google Suggest. It discusses the technology behind it.

I call myself watching what's going on at Google Labs but I missed this. I found Google Video the other day but it still seems pretty much crippled. Every link says "Video is currently not available." Stay tuned!

ThinkPads

I must confess. I'm a ThinkPad addict. They're all over my house.

At work, my first one was a 560. Then I moved up (so I thought) to a 240. That one had a weird keyboard and I gave it away as soon as I could to someone who was a hunt and peck typist. Next came the 600 series. The last pre-Dell system was an X20 (which I am still using to type this!).

I got my daughter a 760 for college and won a second one! Her 760 ran until the hard drive started making funny noises. I replaced it with a new-in-the-box 600. Soon after, my work's off lease ThinkPads started turning up on the recycler's list. I grabbed a couple of 600Es, one to replace her 600 and one for myself. If you max these out with memory and don't load up the hard drive (6 GB) with junk, they make a great Windows XP machine.

A few T20s have turned up at the recycler. I grabbed one of them for my Ben in the Den system. When my personal X20 was just about out of warranty, I gave in and got a Dell C400. I sent the X20 off to IBM with a laundry list of "problems." They fixed each one and I got back a practically new X20! I played with Linux at work on this X20 for a while then turned it back to the recycler. I bought it back from them and have been treating it lovingly ever since.

It's amazing at the difference in a 4 year old X20 and the latest Dell D400. The X20 still blows it away. I can't imagine what a new X40 would be like.
You can see pictures of many of the ThinkPads here.

Maxthon

You've probably read what kind or problems I've had with Firefox. I had stumbled across MyIE2 some time back but since it used the IE engine, I fell into the rush to Firefox.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I ran across Maxthon (formerly known as MyIE2). This time I read it closer and then downloaded it (after all, it's free!).

Wow! It's got a lot of the Firefox capabilities (tabs, ad blockers, sidebars) but it renders like IE. I even like some of its features better than Firefox. For example, double clicking a tab closes it. Double clicking on the favicon in the address bar opens a new tab with the same URL. The Favorites sidebar has the ability to auto-hide. It has a super drag-and-drop where if you click and drag a link, that link opens in a new tab.

The number of Maxthon's options makes Firefox's look wimpy.

There are things I don't like. I miss my google tool bar. It doesn't have IE's popup blocker. The one built into Maxthon is more irritating than IE's. The help, well, there is NO help. It is slooooow rendering xsl pages.

My Favorites

I use lots of computers. Besides the work laptop, at home I have 2 desktops (sometimes 3) and around 4 laptops going. It would be a nightmare keeping up with favorites on all of them. For years, I have used BlinkPro. With the January IE patches, the drag-and-drop link to bookmark a page quit working. My second inquiry to them yielded the following:

It appears that this feature is not going to be solved. The drag-and-drop functionality was only ever available on IE. Since Service Pack 2, it has not been available for most users on IE and caused other problems for those users. As a result, we have discontinued this feature.

Drat.

That sent me out on a quest to find an alternative. I started at my favorite (pardon the pun) software source SourceForge.net. I found some interesting alternatives (BookmarkSync and LinkDistributor) but I kept running into references to SyncIt. When I went to www.syncit.com to see what that was all about, I was really confused. Then I ran across an explanation on www.webookmark.com. Interesting, but sad, story. Seems like lots of folks lost their bookmarks.

There are a couple of companies out there that have picked up SyncIt's code and are offering it for free or for a subscription. SyncIt's story and my experience with BlinkPro made me leery. I wanted something that I could control end-to-end.

I played with creating a web folder on my website, but couldn't get Windows to set My Favorites to a web folder. I even tried TweakUI.

In my searching, I finally came across FavoriteSync.com. They apparently are one of the organizations that picked up SyncIt's code but they have a twist. In addition to storing your favorites on their server (it's nagware), you can use any ftp site. It was a piece of cake to just point their application to my web site! Now, each computer has it's own copy of My Favorites synchronized with the others. Updates are pushed after 2 minutes (default but changeable) and pulled every 4 hours (ditto). The file on the server is even in xml. There's an xsl file that describes how to render it. I've got to learn about that.

When you install FavoriteSync, just ignore all the questions about setting up an account with them. Click on through and let it install. It'll show up in the system tray as a star. Right click on it and choose Options. Setup the Server tab to point to your ftp server.

I'm slowly weaning myself away from BlinkPro and onto FavoriteSync and am having NO trouble. You can see them here.

Sysinternals Junction

I've been working on a better method to manage my images. My technique is still emerging but is described here. What I got to thinking about was that programs like gaim want to write their data, e.g. logs, to their own directory and that wouldn't be on my data drive. I poked around on gaim's website to see if I could point their log directory to another location. All I could find was a lot of Linux references to symlinks. I could guess what these were and that they would do what I needed but didn't know how to do that on Windows.

google can find ANYTHING. I kept running into comments about Microsoft's fsutil. I'm convinced that this will do what I needed but I'll be damned if I can figure it out.

The other reference I kept turning up was Sysinternal.com's Junction utility.

Here's their description:

Win2K's version of NTFS supports directory symbolic links, where a directory serves as a symbolic link to another directory on the computer. For example, if the directory D:\SYMLINK specified C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32 as its target, then an application accessing D:\SYMLINK\DRIVERS would in reality be accessing C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS. Directory symbolic links are known as NTFS junctions in Win2K. Unfortunately, Win2K comes with no tools for creating junctions - you have to purchase the Win2K Resource Kit, which comes the linkd program for creating junctions. I therefore decided to write my own junction-creating tool: Junction. Junction not only allows you to create NTFS junctions, it allows you to see if files or directories are actually reparse points. Reparse points are the mechanism on which NTFS junctions are based, and they are used by Win2K's Remote Storage Service (RSS), as well as volume mount points.

It is only 16KB. Download it and put it in c:\windows\system32.

The command to redirect a folder is so simple.

junction "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\Application Data\.gaim\logs" "E:\gaim logs"

Simply, this will make anything that references "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\Application Data\.gaim\logs" end up in "E:\gaim logs".

I even made me a .bat file to execute this when I need it. That should only be when I build a system from scratch.

Linksys Network Storage Link

CompUSA had an item in this week's flyer that amazed me. It was a Linksys Network Storage Link device.

This tiny network appliance connects USB 2.0 hard drives directly to your Ethernet network. You can connect up to two stand-alone USB disk drives of any size, and access them from anywhere on your network. You can even plug a USB flash disk into the Network Storage Link, for a convenient way of accessing your portable data files. The Network Storage Link can also be set up so that your storage devices are accessible from the Internet -- files can be easily downloaded via your web browser. Your files can be available publicly, or create password-protected accounts for authorized users.

Think about that for a second. Not only is it a clever device but it's advertised in the Sunday newspaper. That kind of device was a niche solution even to data centers just 5 years ago.

Here's what it looks like:

The Network Storage Link features built-in disk utilities, accessible through your web browser. ... It will even send you an email message when a hard drive gets nearly full, completely full, or has an error.

Here's a link to the user guide. It just blows me away that this stuff is in the consumer realm.

PS. I had a similar entry here.

MyWebExPC

I recently built a new PC for my parents. They live about 30 miles away. The first weekend after I moved them to it, I went over to setup the imaging software. While there, I discovered they had a worm. That's a whole article to itself. Anyway, I realized after I left that I hadn't done the removal properly so I had to go back the next day.

There had to be a better way. I searched for how to use RealVNC that I had used on my SageTV system but to do this across the Internet required setting up SSH that was way over my head. pcAnywhere seemed like a good idea but their web site talked mostly about a corporate implementation behind a firewall. GoToMyPC looked like it would do it but costs $19.95 per month.

Then I ran across an article that said that WebEx was introducing a remote control service. My company uses WebEx for intercompany conferencing so I was familiar with their other services. The best part was that you get unlimited access for up to 5 PCs. Here's what you get for free.

Here're some excerpts from their FAQ:

How hard is it to set up and use?
It is really simple:

• Download and install a small MyWebEx PC agent on the remote computer you want to access
• Make sure the remote computer has an always-on connection to the Internet and the MyWebEx PC agent is running
• At the remote location bring up the browser, login, and setup your remote computer
• A small browser plug-in will download automatically and within seconds you will be set up and ready to access your remote computer, virtually, from anywhere

You do not have to:

• Open any ports or configure your firewall in anyway
• Know any IP addresses or other technical networking details
• Install any software or drivers on the computer to view

Is it secure?
MyWebEx PC is extremely secure:

• No need to open any ports in your firewall
• End to end SSL encrypted.
• Two levels of authentication.
• Unique phone authentication for very high security.
• You can protect your privacy
• Blank the screen of the remote computer so no one can see what you are doing
• Lock the keyboard and mouse of the remote computer so no one else can interrupt it
• Logout or screen-lock the remote computer after your session is complete- MyWebEx PC will let you log back in

You do have to use IE to access the remote PC as MyWebExPC uses an ActiveX control.

I made one more trip to my parents' and installed MyWebExPC. It works like a charm. I used it to install the February Windows Updates and reboot their PC. Hooray!

gmail Invites

You can get a gmail invite here. You can read about gmail here.

Super Bowl Ads

The best part of the Super Bowl is always the ads. If you missed some of them while you were taking a bathroom break, now you can catch up. IFILM has them online.

Backup Image

I've been building several XP systems recently. One for my mother and one on a ThinkPad X20 I'm putting together. With lots of practice, I'm pretty good at it but it does get tedious. What I started looking for is a low cost (free) imaging tool.

I subscribe to Fred Langa's newsletter and he talks about this topic from time to time. This issue is dedicated to backup images.

I searched for imaging tools and finally turned up Partition Saving.

Here's a brief description:

Partition Saving is a DOS program that is used to save, restore and copy hard-drive, partitions, floppy disk and DOS devices.

With this program you could save all data on a partition to a file (such as you could save this file on a CD for example). Then if something goes wrong, you can completely restore the partition from the backup file. You no longer have to reinstall every piece of software from scratch. All you have to do is restore the partition from the backup file and then update any software that was modified since the backup was created.

While this isn't as sophisticated as some of the software in Langa's newsletter, it works fine.

I partition my drive into 3 partitions: C: the boot partition, D: the data partition, and E: the backup partition. For example, on a 20 GB drive, I make C: 10 GB, D: 4 GB, and E: 6 GB. I make C: and D: NTFS and E: FAT32. I don't have a lot of experience to validate these sizes but they seem like a good starting point.

I took my trusty Windows 98 rescue disk and used Roxio to create a bootable CD with the Partition Saving program on it. The CD is just such a nicer package than 2 floppies.

Partition Saving supports an options file that looks like it will let you specify all the parameters and run your backup or restore without intervention. I haven't tried this yet though.

Read through all the documentation. It has a compression algorithm but you seem to get most of the benefit with the first level of compression. Also, watch the DOS drive letters carefully as DOS won't see the NTFS partitions. Partition Saving will show them by volume name so remember that when you set them up. Make the volume names meaningful. You can also specify that the output be segmented into sizes that will fit on CD-Rs.

My plan is to put all the non-volatile data (e.g. My Documents) on D:. Then after I do all my tweaking on the C: partition, I'll back it up to E:. I can burn those files to CD-Rs if I want to. When the system gets toasted, I will just restore from E: and I'm right back where I started. Cross your fingers.

I'll post more after I play with it some.

Acrobat Allow Fast Web View

Remember in my last post I asked how to "make that AcroRd32.exe go away when I am no longer using it in a browser?" Well, nobody came forward so I figured it out for myself.

Open Acrobat, go to Edit then Preferences. Uncheck the box "Allow Fast Web View" and click Ok.


That's it! Try it.

I know I'm supposed to be using Firefox but...

...I keep running into little things. Individually, they aren't a big deal but in aggregation (aggravation?), they really are a pain. I wrote about this previously here.

I've been trying to plan a trip for this summer. So I go to travelocity.com. I put in my city pair, select "Flexible Dates," select the months I want to travel, and click on "Search Flights." Then I get this dialog box that says "Please check trip dates for the proper date format." Gimme a break! The dates are in drop-down lists.


The same steps in IE work fine.

Then I went to look at the post I made to my blog this morning. Firefox rendered it with different spacing around the title and the long hyperlink was overlaying the CSS column to the right.


Needless to say, IE rendered it as expected.


Now, I'm getting where I like Firefox. I'm almost used to the tabs. I keep wanting to do ALT+TAB rather than CTRL+TAB to move between windows. Even when I do remember, toggling CTRL+TAB won't flip back and forth between 2 tabs like toggling ALT+TAB will between 2 windows. And I lose screen space for the tabs. I know I can turn them off but everybody else raves about tabs. Must be just me.

Firefox has some really nice extensions. The one I use most often is Adblock. I wish I had something like that for IE. Oh, almost forgot. Firefox seems to be a memory hog. I've seen it take well over 50 MB of RAM. Here's what it looks like right now.


I'm hanging in there but it's not getting easier.

PS. Maybe somebody out there is smarter than me (for sure!). How can I make that AcroRd32.exe go away when I am no longer using it in a browser? I'd really like to have that 16 MB of RAM back.

Another Nice Thing from Microsoft

This is from Risks Digest 23.66:

Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 13:49:15 -0800
From: Rob Slade
Subject: Microsoft AntiSpyware beta - quick review

The beta version of Microsoft's Anti-Spyware program (purchased from Giant) is available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=321cd7a2-6a57-4c57-a8bd-dbf62eda9671&displaylang=en&Hash=5BMW635

The beta version is about a 6.4 meg download, and can be downloaded as a file in order to copy and install it onto other machines. That's very nice, and a departure from Microsoft's often heavy-handed approach.

Installing offers you a few options: do you want to set it to automatically update (I did), do you want it to install real-time protection (I did: so far it hasn't interfered with much, but I haven't used it much, either), and do you want to join Spynet. Spynet is not an invitation to join a kind of corporate CIA, but will report on "suspect" files. There is a fair amount of information on what it collects, if you ask for it. It seems to send information about file sizes and an MD5 hash back to HQ, but not, seemingly, the suspect file itself. In any case, there wasn't enough information on what it *doesn't* collect for me to feel comfortable, so I turned it off. (I hope.)

The installation seems to default to a reasonably protected mode: the defaults are for auto updating, real-time protection, and scheduled scans (although the schedule is for 2 am).

When you start up the program, it is initially set for a quick scan. I changed that to a full scan, which took about half an hour on my machine.

From a quick test, the MS antispyware, at least in beta, falls between Spybot S&D and Adaware in terms of detection. Spybot is fairly conservative, and only deals with stuff that is pretty certain to be spy/adware, whereas Adaware will detect a bunch of other stuff. The MS product detected one copy of BackWeb (inactive) that Spybot had not, and detected about 38 copies of 15 versions of other stuff from my samples directory. (Adaware quarantined about 60.) The items detected all seem to have a least some remote access component, even if it is rather limited (such as BadTrans.B, that drops a keylogger). Oddly, it only detected two of my extensive collection of Bagles.

You can ask the program to deal with individual threats in different ways, although seemingly not individual files. (As a researcher, I like that. In terms of protection, I'm not as sure.) The options are to remove, quarantine, ignore, or always ignore. The program usually defaults to quarantine, although some threats are considered more serious, and marked to remove. The explanation of "always ignore" is not detailed enough, as far as I am concerned: does this mean always ignore this particular file, or always ignore this threat?

You can also specify certain directories to scan, or to ignore. Again, as a researcher I really appreciate the ability to tell it so ignore my sample directory. Unfortunately, this option doesn't work properly: it scans directories you tell it to ignore, regardless. When I told it to scan *only* my sample directory, it seemed to scan a fair amount of other stuff as well. Again, from a protective standpoint, this is probably a good thing.

At the moment, after a very quick test, I'd provisionally recommend the use of the MS/Giant antispyware program, at least in fairly restricted and manual mode. I'd be interested in hearing from others who have tested the real-time operations more extensively, and particularly from anyone who has tested the Spynet capabilities, and what information is returned thereby.

http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev or http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade

I haven't tried it yet.