Author: Maxsons Import_User

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Communication Update

In an update to this post where I talk about ways to contact us, I mention that I’m not using the Gizmo client.  Well, after ditching pidgin and skype and gizmo (the client not the service) for Wengo Phone , I decided to switch back.  Why?  Well, I had forgotten that I was using the pidgin encryption plugin and I started having issues receiving calls with Wengo.  So, I’m back to using the Gaim software and Pidgin now.

But, yesterday, I downloaded and tried the new version of Unbutu (the 64 bit edition).  I think this winter, I’m going to try to get it on my laptop and working.  When that happens, I’ll find a free SIP Phone to use.  Any suggestions? 

[Update 2012-12-26 06:52:08] Wengo Phone is now QuoteCom.  I updated the links.

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Photos

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“ludi” Americans

05092008(011)

Lydia is growing so fast, but she had a rough couple of weeks.  We were in Greece for a week the end of June and had a great time.  But Lydia definitely had a hard time getting back into a good eating/sleeping routine.  A couple of weeks after we got home, she started with the up and down cycle of good and bad days (diarrhea, not eating, whiny) that would eventually lead us to the dr.  Thankfully, our friend and tutor, Marijana, went with us and everything turned out fine.  Lydia just finished 10 days of a probiotic to get her little digestive system back on track and this week she has been so much better…happier, eating like her old self (oink, oink), and no more tummy issues!  She’s certainly starting to gain back some of the weight she lost.  Thank You, God!!  Even though it was a tough time, it is so neat to see how He takes care of us:) 

Now for the “ludi” part…which translates to CRAZY!  We have 3 friends, college students from the US who came for 2 months to work with a summer English program, who left for Belgrade at 2 AM to catch an early AM flight back to the States.  One of their favorite places to eat is this fast food stand in the centar that has chicken sandwiches and french fries and happens to be open 24/7.  They were planning to meet some friends at the “chicken stand” at 1 for one last meal in Serbia.  So Matt and I thought it would be cool to go see them off.  He went to a concert in the park and hung out with friends by the river drinking coffee for hours and I was home with Lydia.  Around 12:30, she started fussing so I went ahead and got her out of bed to get ready.  I really thought I could slip on long pants, socks, shoes, and her jacket over her PJ’s and she’d go back to sleep as soon as I put her in the stroller and we started walking.  Was I ever wrong!!  We got down there and she was ready to mingle…especially when she saw the french fries!  Jelena (our friend who watches her when we go to language class) was there and held her and fed her french fries the whole time :^)  Poor Lydia, at first the french fries were really hot and she scared herself with one, but then she got so mad when we made her wait for them to cool off more.  And by the time we walked with our friends back to their apt. (which is only a block from ours), she was positively punchy.  She kept squinting her eyes and giggling randomly as we walked down the street!

We had a great time giving our friends a proper send off and Lydia doesn’t seem to be feeling any ill effects today, but I sure am tired.  I must be getting old…maybe I’ll join Lydia for naptime today:^)

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You won’t find us on Skype Any More

I just want to let everyone know that you won’t find us on Skype any more. Why? Well, it isn’t free software (as in freedom) for one. There is also no way to ensure that it has no back doors. It also doesn’t use open standards for communication. How can you contact us? Well, we have a Gizmo accout. But, I don’t use the Gizmo client (it isn’t free either). I downloaded Wengo Phone (it is GPLd) and use it to use Gizmo VoIP service. If you were using a real VoIP solution, you could call us directly by simply knowing our SIP URI. However, Skype doesn’t allow that.

  • You could talk to Skype about entering into a Voip Peering arrangement and allow you to call SIP numbers.
  • If you want to call via telephone, call one of these numbers then dial *747 + our Gizmo number.
  • Go to the gizmo homepage and sign up for an account. Also download zphone from Phil Zimmerman. It will encrypt your voice over the internet.
  • If you care about using free software (instead of closed software that can contain who knows what), download one of many applications that support SIP. I’m using WengoPhone right now. Don’t like the interface? Choose another. See why open standards are important?!

[Update 08-15-2008 09:09:41]  I discuss changes to my communication apps here .  I started having problems using Wengo Phone so I switched back to the Gizmo Client and Pidgin.  I also wanted to continue using the Pidgin Encryption plugin.

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HP dv9500 (dv9535nr) Boot Problems

My friend was having problems with his HP dv9500 laptop last week and asked me for help.  At first, he just wanted to back everything up and redo it; however, by the time we got together, the computer wouldn’t even boot.  Of course, he didn’t have a good backup already, so we tried to make one.

 I also didn’t bring every single disc I own with me here, so I was missing some.  The only thing I had was a Ubuntu live cd.  Well, that didn’t really help (I couldn’t see the hard drive when I booted it).  I really needed a vista install cd (goofy HP doesn’t think you’ll ever need one) and was just stuck with the recovery partition.

 When I booted into recovery mode, I had an option to back the computer up, so I started it (while I was trying to download a vista cd from MSDN).  It was going to take all night so I let them both run.

The next morning, I woke up and the download failed, but the backup looked complete.  However, when I tried to verify the backup, I couldn’t see any of it.

Well, I had heard about bartpe so i decided to download it and see what would work there.  Well, the first disk I made was a frizbe.  The second didn’t have drivers for the HD controller on it.  It also didn’t have NIC drivers.  So, I ended up getting NIC drivers from here and HDD Controller drivers from here (yes, I just used the whole kit-n-kaboodle).  You also need this.  I found this out in this post.  And read this post to find out how to integrate the NIC drivers.  One wierd thing that happened to me was the filder driverpacks.net didn’t get put under my plugins directory like they claimed.  it was in my BARTPE directory.  All I did was jut copy it into the plugins folder where they said it should be.  Don’t ask me why BARTPE doesn’t include these drivers (or better yet, HP not design their systems to need a goofy driver to see the HDD.  That is nuts!)

Well, I tried using the graphical tool to copy files only to have the computer BSOD on me.  ARG.  I’m currently runnign XCOPY to copy the entire HDD to his external HDD.  it doesn’t provide a good logging mechanism so I’m logging everything using the following command:

xcopy <src> <dest> /evcifrhy > <logfile> 2>&1

if you want to find out the switches, just go read this page.  The 2>&1 redirects error output to the same file otherwise it will just display on the screen and not be useful at all (why is that MS?  Why not send the errors to std out do we don’t have to do anything special to get a list of errored files??)

Once that finsihes, my plan is to run the restore on the computer.  Then run this tool to take all of the junk off of it.  ARG!  Why do they do this!?!?!

I expect another 1-2 hrs for the copy to finish then about 1-2 hrs for the restore.  Hopefully I’ll be ready to let the app run over night to take all the junk off the computer and get him his computer back tomorrow.

[Update 07-27-2008 17:29:00] I forgot to mention that I had some issues making my BartPE disk.  When I copied my OEMXP disk to my computer, MFC42.dl_ wouldn’t copy over.  ARG!  i ended up and just snagged it out of the sp2 extraction I did.  Oh, that was another story.  I had to search where to find the xp sp.  I finally downloaded this one from MSFT.  Then, I had to look up how to slipstream sp2 into my cd (I got the ntdll wrong version error).  Only after that did Imake a CD and have to figure out I needed more drivers.

[Update 07-27-2008 18:02:50] xcopy crashed with an out of memory error.  I did some looking and decided I needed to add some excludes to my xcopy command.  I’m excluding the windows directory, the system volume directory, .sys files, the recycle bin ($RECYCLE.BIN), an avg folder ($AVG.VAULT$), and any temp folders.

[Update 07-27-2008 18:10:38] Don’t forget that the exclude flag for xcopy takes a filename.  ARG.  I also added some things to the list:  .exe, .dll (no need to copy those), and I excluded some more directories \boot\, \hp\, \intel\, \msocache\, \swsetup\, \mcpi\, and \opdi\

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This is why….

It is worthless to pull information off the internet once it is there. A much better idea is to prevent it in the first place:

http://justin.madirish.net/node/199

I’ve been following this story and went to the Matasano website shortly after the story was published. it wasn’t there for more than 30 min (perhaps a few hours) but the information was out. Even though they have removed it from their website, everyone knows. It is worthless to spend even 30 seconds searching your website(s) for information from the past to remove when something changes. Everyone already knows.