GNO Lab

There goes another drive, a Maxtor 6B200P0 (203 GB) ATA.

Just bought a new spare… a Samsung HD501LJ (500 GB). Too bad I never buy enough drives to set up a RAID-system

I used R-Studio NTFS to save a whole lot from the old disk. My apps folder (unzipped tools and programs), my Cygwin installation, and a number of media files. I unfortunately lost a number of good DVD concerts, there among Pink Floyd – Pulse

I actually was able to reinititate the faulty drive. A chkdsk may indicate the actual health.

Ok, a chkdsk and the disk is actually up…

This weekend I put myself into more work than desired. For a long time I’ve wanted to upgrade my existing 2.4 kernel to a more recent 2.6 ditto. So this weekend was set to to it

I started by downloading the sources, reading the “The Debian Way”, configured, configured, compiled. Run dpkg -i .... “This must work”, I said to myself. Rebooted…. Hm, where did the nice bootloader menu go? I only saw a simple MBR (Master Boot Record) stated in the upper left corner of the display. This is an old Compaq 450Mhz PC, and have parts of the BIOS stored on the first hard drive. OK, something didn’t go as expected. That’s for sure. The system does not even have a CD ROM reader. There is a Zip-drive, and a floppy. Ah, find a boot floppy, so I can boot into the system and make changes to the MBR.

To be noted is that this system is my gateway to Internet. Fortunately, by activating a second NIC on my other server, that machine can act as gateway in situations like this. So, Internet up and going, at least.

I found some files; the Debian floppy installation suite (boot.img, root.img, etc.). Digging in my old shelf I also found some diskettes. Probably nothing important on those . A rawwrite and then reboot into floppy land Error reading track x.… the screen instead stated. Old diskettes! Just rawwrite again, and throw the corrupted diskettes. Every second diskette or so worked. You can imagine the time it took to get a working boot suite!

Rescue boot. Finally I got a prompt and mounted my system partitions (/ and /boot from /dev/hda1 resp. /dev/hda2 under /mnt), and then issue a $ chroot /mnt/root sbin/lilo -P fix to fix the MBR.

Reboot, and I was i heaven! Actually I got back to my previous kernel. A working system! But… where is my network? While I was switching input computer via my keyboard/mouse/screen switcher, deep inside my “cabinet” I almost teared it all down… It all began to fall… (must set up some stopper there). Could my network switch have been broken in the fall? Well, test, test… For some reason I figured out that my NICs had swapped places, i.e. eth0 was now eth1 and vice verse. It only took me around two hours to figure that out! By digging into configuration files I could alter my NIC’s purpose and got it working.

I now had a system anyway. I decided to replace lilo with grub. Easy task; just aptitude etc… etc… and run install-grub. A modern bootloader. And it worked! Some reboots later and I’m confirmed it works.

In my system I could again go and compile the kernel. Configure, tweak, and actually be able to install, and reboot There are some tweaks yet to settle. Only one of the NIC’s is getting up during boot. Some module issue, I guess. I have an ancient serial board (with two extra RS232 ports) which I need to do setpci on to work. It must be included in the boot.

So, that was my weekend. Hope you had one more relaxed.

Or how to keep your start menu free of clutter. Do you like your Start Menu? After a while, after a number of software installations, the Start menu gets overfilled with items, organized sometimes after the vendor, sometimes after the application name. No one really knows! I would like to see a solution in the installer for this. In my opinion, the following guideline should help installers to actually put software into a somewhat more easily found location:

Every software must

• be categorized
• be said to belong to a vendor/group/organization/name.
• have a main shortcut.

With these premises, the explorer/installer would be able to put the intended shortcuts into a meaningful place. First there should be a branch of categorizes (in my likings the proffered branch), and one branch for vendors. In each branch the main shortcut should be put. Initially, only the main shortcut should be seen. hovering over, or using some kind of context menu, the “extra icons” would be shown. Clicking the shortcut opens the underlying application/document, as normal.

By using more than one path to find the application, I believe the user can reach the correct application easier then today, using its own preferred approach.

OK, you may argue that one can nowadays search the start menu, but searching requires knowledge of the application’s name or its vendor, and you never know which. If you don’t know the name, but are interested to find a graphic renderer, wouldn’t it be easier to browse in the Graphics Applications category?

Before the start menu gets intelligent, one can (kind of easily) organize it manually:

• Right Click, Open
• Create folders for your categories
• Move/copy the icons available today to its rightful category
• For each folder; Properties->Customize->Change Icon

My current (fist level) start menu:

As you see, there are still some software not categorized, for example PowerDVD. its icons seams to be created by the application itself, no matter if I delete them! We do not have such thing as a perfect world

I’ve had a number of issues playing WMA and WMV files the last couple of months. Both direct loading as well as streaming. It just loaded, then the status said ready! There was an error saying something like “protocol not supported” as well. Today I had it, when I missed the high jump final of the world championships in athletic in Osaka (instead I had to work)

So, with some trial and error I managed to correct it… it really took some hours ZzzzZzzz: This is what I did:

I logged in to the system as another (untouched) user. This user had no problem playing the files, meaning there is some user setting that have gone havoc. OK, back to my ordinary account.

Windows Media Player seams to store its settings in the following locations:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer, and in
• %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Media\11.0

To see where the corruption is, I renamed each of the folders in order. After each renaming I started WMP and tested its functionality. Don’t worry, these folders are recreated when the application runs. OK, WMP pops up its initialization dialog.

The fault seamed to be in the second location. I just removed the renamed folder, and now I’m happy

Yepp. There goes a disk again…. An Maxtor 200 GB. Just lost really old material, my SID (C64 music) collection. Just to download again

Got a new disk, a Samsung 400 GB. Will attach it tomorrow. Will take half the day, just to “break” into the cabinet. No fun!

I think there is a lot of confusion regarding where files, in a windows environment, should end up. A home directory, for each user, first appeared wind the NT-system. The location for this directory is %USERPROFILE%. The idea is to but all user related files inside of this area, in one of its subdirectories.

• Application Data (%APPDATA%)
• Local Settings
• My Documents

The user can decide to retarget a lot of these directories into other directories. This is good when roaming profiles are in use. Say that you have a lot of files inside your document folder (which you of course have ). Then, to ease the saving of the profile, you can retarget this folder to a common net folder. When you now logout, the My Document folder is not uploaded to your server, making the logout process quicker.

But, a lot of software, there among games, have an annoying idea of putting saved progress in the My Document folder. And in case when this folder is retargeted, one can notice delays when progress is saved by the games, due to the worse performance of networked folders.

Software must use the %USERPROFILE% folders wisely. My Documents are for the user’s own creations, and %APPDATA% for application’s creations. Progress of a game is nothing a user is supposed to edit, or open, himself. Only the application is supposed to touch these files. These kind of files should therefore be put in %APPDATA%.

Also, software, makes bad decisions weather to use %APPDATA% or Local Settings:

• %APPDATA% should only be used for settings which can be shared (without a huge amount of extra storage involved) from several machines, in a roaming environment. Caches should never go into %APPDATA%.
• Caches, and other non-settings data, is suitable for Local Settings.

As you see, %APPDATA% is the place to put application settings, which in the end will/should replace the registry, as described by Application Configuration and the Registry.

Microsoft is making bad judgments as well. For example, Outlook is using Local Settings for its *.pst files, giving the user problem to find his mail, when logging in from another machine. Well, one can say that Microsoft knows the *.pst files can grow big and therefore uses the Local Settings folder… and by the way Microsoft don’t actually support roaming *.pst files. They want us to use Exchange for this matter

Two small blogs regarding the differences can be found here

• Stop the madness: Subdirectories of My Documents
• What’s the difference between My Documents and Application Data?