Diary of a Wolfeman

As a good many of you should already know, MekTek.net has been given the go-ahead to release Mechwarrior4: Mercenaries as a free game (!!) to go with the enhancements that they have cooked up over the years. All of this is in preparation for the upcoming reboot of the Mechwarrior franchise, which looks to be very awesome indeed.

This is great news, because I’ve missed playing Mechwarrior, but haven’t wanted to go through all the trouble to re-install the damn thing. It’s a 2-hour process, once you take into account the multiple patches for the original game, adding in the supplements that I’ve bought over the years, all of their patches, and then the MekTek stuff, which is just too cool to pass up. I honestly wasn’t sure it would even install onto a 64-bit Windows7 box, so I was reluctant to use the two hours I could maybe scrape together for playing a game trying to install it.

Luckily, though, MekTek has put together an installer that works and manages to shoehorn the whole thing together without much fuss and bother… unless you happen to be running Norton 360 antivirus.

Once again, Symantec proves how thoroughly they suck. While it only takes moments for someone to submit a false positive, and maybe another hour before Norton distributes an updated signature file that deletes the effing executable to the game, it will take them probably 2 weeks to clean things up and ‘certify’ the files in question.

Gee, Symantec. Thanks.

Luckily for us, Da Roomie and I have avoided Symantec products for years now, and had no problem at all getting it installed on just about every computer in the house. We are thoroughly prepared for LAN gaming possibilities, as this is old enough it will even run on our laptops without dragging the video settings down.

Tonight, we took some Assault-class ‘Mechs for a run around a couple of maps, and Greyduck has found his favorite weapon at long last: a Large Continuous-Beam Laser. Two of those paired with Gauss rifles, and he’s giggling like mad. Especially when we both manage to lock an Annihilator into our sights and knock it over with 2 Gauss hits and one round of my railgun all at once.

Good times :)

To the Jackass who keeps posting spam comments on both my blogs:

Knock it off. It’s getting annoying to have to delete your comments from moderation.

You’d think they would have learned, since none of the messages ever actually make it past moderation…

So, there you were, enjoying your SBS 2008 server and all the things it can do when ploooie! Something goes to hell and drags you in along with it. You spend the next 4 hours desperately searching the Internet for any sort of repair guide, only to discover that everything is written for Server 2008, and using those resources will severely screw up your SBS box.

At least, that’s what happened to me. Luckily, I work for a company that has a Gold Partner membership with Microsoft, and was able to call the support line. They guy on the phone said “haven’t you seen the SBS Repair Guide?”

Why no – because the damn thing doesn’t show up in a Google search until I specifically asked for it by name. (Two days later, the damn thing shows up under nearly every search I run. Maybe they rebuilt their metas?)

Anywho, here it is: The Windows SBS 2008 Repair Guide

May the Force be with you.

You know what surprises me nowadays? When other people tell me they haven’t checked their email in a couple of days.

O_o?

I don’t get this at all. Even before I had a smartphone, I was always in my email. I just don’t get it.

 

When someone else has said something, and said it well, by all means plagiarize!

Dive Into Mark has a great post up currently lamenting the way Apple has eliminated the ability to tinker with your own computer compared to how things were back in the day. It turns out Mark is the same age as me, with a lot of the same early computer experiences, so I can quite clearly sympathize. To quote:

As it happens, this computer came with the BASIC programming language pre-installed. You didn’t even need to boot a disk operating system. You could turn on the computer and press Ctrl-Reset and you’d get a prompt. And at this prompt, you could type in an entire program, and then type RUN, and it would motherfucking run.

I was 10. That was 27 years ago, but I still remember what it felt like when I realized that you — that I — could get this computer to do anything by typing the right words in the right order and telling it to RUN and it would motherfucking run.

That computer was an Apple ][e.

[snip]…Apple made the machines that made me who I am. I became who I am by tinkering.

The first computer I got the chance to dink around with was a Radio Shack TRS-80 back in the 3rd grade. It had a little spiral-bound instruction manual with the fundamentals of BASIC inscribed within, and it took me a solid 2 days to figure out that to get the double-quotes symbol, you had to press Function instead of Shift plus the appropriate key.

By the time I was in 5th grade, me and my buddy Richard were programming a character generator program for Dungeons & Dragons, complete with money tracking and the entire shopping section. And it motherfucking ran.

That computer was an Apple ][e.

Anyway, Mark’s post is about how hard it is with today’s Apple computers to break into being a developer – it costs real money to get started, and even then you are saddled with limitations, where back when Mark and I were scribbling out our first “Hello Worlds!” all it took was a willingness to try something new.

The world needs places where kids can try something new, and it is no longer the Apple computer.

 

The number 1 search on this blog still points back to the Exchange queue post I put up a couple years back, so here’s another bit of advice.

One of my clients recently bought a Dell storage server – the NX3000. It comes with 6 internal drive bays and a 15-drive storage bay. Not bad, really – kind of a pocket SAN.

Well, those 6 internal bays are filled with 1TB drives. Two of them are in a mirror with the OS on it.

That’s right – a 1TB mirror for the OS.

If you think this is a bad design, you’re right. If you want to do something about it, pay careful attention.

If you harrass them enough, they will tell you how you can download an install image that will allow you to install the system from scratch with your own settings – perhaps, say,  a 6-drive RAID5. Well, to get that large an array, you have to break the 2TB partition barrier by installing in EFI (GPT) mode instead of BIOS mode. The instructions for this are on Microsoft’s website somewhere. (I didn’t find them, the other guy did.)

Well, when I got there today, the “temporary, transitional IT guy” was about to bash his head on the wall trying to figure out what was not working. He spent a half-hour or so explaining the situation, then wandered off while I read his documentation.

Everything seemed to make sense, but a thought struck me while I tried to make it work: I was reading MS documentation and working on a Dell. The smart money said Dell had screwed with something somewhere and I should look for that first.

I went into the BIOS settings, into the Boot menu, and toggled the Boot Mode from BIOS to EFI. After that, the solution was to let it fail to find installation media and then go into the EFI settings. Select “Boot from file” and browse through the DVD to the <efi> folder, then run <boot.efi>. The system will bounce out of BIOS and immediately tell you to “hit any key to boot from CD / DVD…” and your Windows installation will start.

When you get to the part about selecting drive partitions, it should warn you that it can’t use the current partitions because they are the wrong type. Go to Advanced mode and delete all partitions, then create a new one. It should call it Partition 3 – this is correct, because it should have automatically created the two hidden partitions EFI requires. At this point, Windows should install correctly.

To all you Apple fanboys out there: shut it already, would you?

Here’s a little wake-up call for you. 90% of the world won’t touch an Apple computer because they can’t run their business on it. Yes, there are certain things that Apple has made sure “just work”, like cameras and music players. On the flipside of that, there are many things that just will not work, no matter what you do to them – and if you finally manage to get it working somehow, Apple will release an update that breaks it and kindly tell you to bugger off.

Take VPNs for instance. Mac OSX used to work with a SonicWALL SSL-VPN NetExtender. Snow Leopard broke it. There’s a work-around that’ll work if you’re lucky, but it requires changing permissions on a core service through the command line – something your average sales lizard should never go anywhere near.

The biggest problem that I have with Apple products is that everything works exactly like Steve Jobs wants it to – and I don’t particularly care for having Steve tell me how to run my computer.

I first started out in computers to figure out how to make them do things the way I wanted them to. Sure I was just poking around in BASIC (yuk yuk) but I was programming.

Later, when I managed to get a PC running Windows 98, I couldn’t stand the look of the GUI – so I learned how to bash it into something I liked. Wallpaper. Startup screens. Shell replacement. Then I got into Linux and got really nuts.

All this time, however, Steve has been forcing his opinions of how computers should work down his client’s throats. Yes, they’re pretty. They have an excellent eye for design down in Cupertino. But the bloody thing has no way to centrally-manage security and it will barely talk to a Windows network at all, and it’s even worse trying to make a Windows machine integrate with a Mac server.

We had a client once that decided they wanted to be a Mac house. We advised them against it, but they went ahead anyway and brought in a Mac “expert” to make all their Macbooks and PowerMacs talk to their Windows domain. What was his solution? He uninstalled Active Directory from the server, which broke the security on all the file shares and suddenly the owner couldn’t use his accounting data.

The thing I really can’t get, however, is how Steve managed to convince all of you to pay twice what a machine is worth in order to have a shiny widget with crippled software and limited choices.

So yeah – Apple tablet. Woooo. A niche product for a niche that doesn’t exist.

Currently building a server with 20GB of RAM. My first personal computer didn’t have 20GB of hard drive space.

Son. Of. A. Bitch. That was a close one.

For those of you who have not seen the problems of the past few days, here’s the short summary:

Logged in to make (gasp!) a post. Got nagged to upgrade.

Started auto-upgrade plugin, everything goes fine until I hit the “upgrade database” bit. Turns out the original blog was built on an older MySQL version and can’t be updated. This essentially breaks the update and the blog is now broken.

O_o?    Sonovacrap.

Through some major back-pedaling and arcane incantations I can’t recall, I managed to get this rolled back to where they were before I started. A smarter me would have let things sit there.

Instead, I called my host, and they said they couldn’t upgrade the database, I would have to export from the old and create a new db at the correct version, which was available to me. This would have been fine, of course, if I knew the first bloody thing about manipulating a MySQL db through a phpMyAdmin interface. As it was, I found the Export button easily enough, and was able to create the new database.

The bad part came on the import – nothing I did worked at all. No clue why. The error messages would probably have been quite useful if I knew a fuckin’ thing about databases, but we both know I don’t.

In a fit of desperation, I make a clone of the existing blog in a second directory and use the WP export function to generate a save file, and then I import it into that clone. This, amazingly, seems to work…

…until I get a close look at the posts – they all date from February 2006 and back. Somehow, everything from Feb 2006 to present is gone.

I rip open all of my SQL dumps to verify, but I’m safe – I have backups. For whatever reason, the import process just bailed somehow and missed the last 3 years. I then spend a couple of hours over Friday night and Saturday morning trying to figure out enough SQL lingo to be able to import the relevant chunks of the dump files to the new database, but I am unsuccessful. Again, the error messages mean nothing to me.

Despairing greatly, and dreading trying to find someone with enough experience to assist me (the only real dbadmin I know is my boss, and there is no way I am ever showing him this blog) I decide that maybe I should try one last time from a clean database.

Click click click and a fresh db is born. I take my original SQL dump file and split it out into two files (it’s over the size limit for imports) and cut the new db user name info in. A few more clicks, and I’m ready to go. Deep breath, and click…

The spinny thing goes round and round, and then the page refreshes. What’s that on the left? No, it can’t be! It’s a list of tables it just created! And there are no error messages! Quickly, I load up the second half of the file – it loads too! I brwose through the contents quickly, and it looks to be all there! I tell Tolerant to cross her fingers as I bring up FileZilla, download, edit and re-upload the db config file in a flash. A few clicks later, and …

I see the Diary of a Wolfeman in all the original black-and-orange glory. It lives. I breathe. I throw both fists in the air and smile beatifically. The Universe still loves me.

And then, with my newfound SQL prowess and feelings of great heroism, I kill a spider for Tolerant. Life is good.

So the year has finally progressed enough that my previous T-Mo contract aged to the point where I was once again eligible for a new phone with discount.

W00t!

The contenders were the two “Google” phones (the G1 and the myTouch 3G) and the HTC Touch Pro2. The Pro2 is a truly cool phone, but it is $350 with the discount, so it is out of my budget.

That leaves me with the G phones. Hardware-wise, the two are basically the same, with the exception of the keyboard. They also run the same OS, so it really comes down to getting my hands on them and seeing which one is easier to use. 30 seconds of trying to type the word “this” (and failing miserably) told me that the myTouch was simply not for me. My thumbs are just not designed for these touchy keyboards.

The G1 has a physical keyboard and is $50 cheaper, so there really isn’t a contest here. I chose a black one, of course.

I’m diggin’ on it so far. One of my main complaints about my last phone (a Wing) was the lack of cool apps for it – sure, it ran Windows Mobile so there were a lot of apps out there, but nothing cool like you hear about for the iPhone and the Android phones, and hardly anything worth having was less than $20.

So, I spent a good chunk of the weekend browsing through the Android Market and trying stuff out – like the wpToGo app that I used to write most of this post. (Highly recommended for those of you wanting to update your WP blogs on the go. It even has picture uploading, as you can see below.) I think the most useful app I have found so far is a WiFi analyzer package that tells you everythnig there is to know about the wireless networks in your vicinity. VERY useful in my line of work!

The camera is an improvement over my last phone, but even with 3.2 MP it lacks some features – like a flash and image stabilization. You will need LOTS of ambient light to get any sort of decent picture quality, and you should really practice your Zen to get a stable pic. Here’s one of Trouble in his favorite box:

So, here’s the skinny after 3 days of using the phone:

Pros: It works well as a phone, with good call quality and volume. Lots of apps and more are added every day, with a large number of them being free. Decent resolution on the camera, and built-in GPS.

Cons: GPS will eat your batteries if you leave it running for too long, camera lacks a flash and stabilization. Web browser always returns to the last page visited, and not the home page.

Overall: Worth it, in either the G1 or myTouch 3G.