Fighting with computers

I was recently approached by a company willing to give new life to old security equipment. The system had a proprietary serial bus, but the manufacturer refused to disclose any information about it. Provided it was more than twenty years old it should not be a big challenge. However, figuring out the details of a serial communication you know nothing about will require some nice tools. This time I bought a nice USB oscilloscope . It's only 1 Mhz bandwith but fast enough for my needs in this case. With it I was able to capture bidirectional communication (as it is dual channel) and start the process of figuring it out. Just looking at the scope signals will tell you the encoding and bitrate (look for the shortest pulses, they are likely single bits and its time-length will tell you the bitrate). Serial communication used to be mostly asyncrhonous, and this was also the case. Once the time duration of a bit known you can figure out the data length and wether parity is being used or ...

I've just installed in a couple of systems I use. I decided not to do an upgrade from previous versions. It's nice you can use /home partition from a previous install so you can keep all your bookmarks and email and documents without too much trouble. A bit disappointing is that, still, java applets look bad (due to huge fonts) and that it cannot play almost any media file out of the box. But here is the cure . As for the rest, the system seems to be quite fast and stable. However, it will not be until some weeks have passed that we may have an informed opinion about this release stability.

Every time I build a new computer or I rebuild and old one I run into trouble. This time I transfer my old computer to one of my children and I bought a new ASUS Pundit-R with the cheapest Celeron I could find (a 2.4GHz one). Because my kid wanted to play games I replaced the ATI Rage 128 16MB RAM with a NVIDIA 440MX 64MB RAM I had lying on the drawer. However, I needed to get a new fan before as the old one on the card was making a lot of noise. Once the installation blues was over and the kid started playing he came back telling me that the system was freezing. A quick check-up showed the new fan was not properly fitted, so I removed the card and I re-attached the new fan (with funny LED's by the way). Minutes later, same problem. Ok, over time I've developed the attitude that the best brand of hardware is "brand-new". I was not 100% sure the card was ok so I went to the shop and I bought a non-NVIDIA graphics card. This time it was an ATI Radeon 9250 128MB RAM and ...

I've been using MPlayer quite extensively since I built my digital satellite receiver two years ago. I use MPlayer to play AVI/MPEG/MPEG2/OGM video files and I use MEncoder to actually create such files from MPEG2 broadcasted shows. These command-line tools that are both great and free software. Tools are based on standard video codecs and there is even support for commercial codecs (provided you get their dll files). I've used MPlayer on Windows, Linux and OSX without any problem. If you are a perfectionist a great deal of fine tuning of codecs parameters is possible. If you are "good enough" guy (as I am) you'll be pleased with default behavior most of the time (both in terms of computing speed and output quality). MPlayer is a program to play video/audio files that can also dump audio to a file. MEncoder allows you almost any transformation of your multimedia files (video+audio) plus different filtering options and limited stream cutting. My main use is to rec...

This distribution is available on ftp.suse.com for a month or so. You can dowload the installation DVD or you can do an FTP-based install by booting your computer with a small (60MB) ISO image. I've been using SuSE for three years now and I am, most of the time, quite pleased with it. It is my main distro and I like to have DVD full of software I can install without having an Internet connection. I do like the online update feature too. I have been upgrading my systems every now and then, mostly because newer KDE versions use to inlcude lots of fixes and new cool features. But when I tried 9.2 to install in my trusty but old Toshiba Satellite (128MB RAM only) it took around 6 hours. Afterwards the system took, everytime, a lot of time to boot because it froze for a long while on udev. And when it booted KDE was almost useless as it was slow to a crawl. The system was still acceptable, but slow, on SuSE 9.1. Because I had an Ubuntu install CD around I used this instead and now my ol...

After five years of trouble-free operation with my 11Mbps D-link DWL1000-AP 802.11b wireless access point I decided to upgrade my home wireless gear. The USRobotics USR-8000A router with print server and the access point were replaced by an SMC2804WBRP-G that contains a print server (for USB printers), 54Mbps 802.11g wireless access point, four ports FastEthernet switch and router, all in one nice box. My initial research on the net told me the product firmware was quite poor, with lots of users reporting different problems. However, because the retail price was under 100 Euros I decided to give it a try. The results: I configured the router off-line and then I just switched the old by the new gear on the fly. The p2p software I was running on a server continued running as happy as before. I was a bit dissapointed as the unit's current firmware does not provide fixed IP mapping, this can be a problem. After some hours of happy networking my son complained an streamed sh...

These holidays we've got some new stuff to play with. I'm very impressed with the new Creative Zen Micro , which is a harddisk based 5GB MP3 player plus FM radio plus voice recorder. It looks cool, it sounds superb and the software just works. Very nice too is the new Muvo (same capabilities but Flash-memory based, ours is only 256 MB). But the star has been the PB1600 video projector. It really delivers a great image for either DVD or VGA. It's 800x600 DLP-based but our 1024x768 iBook displays just fine. Now I need to get a projection screen to get the best result.

I live in a flat in a six storey building close to the campuses of two universities. As parking and traffic really suck around here I decided to get a bike. But lacking of parking place the obvious choice was to get the bike back home with me. You just cannot park it in the streets if you want to keep it for a long time. The problem was, then, to get the bike from the street to my flat. I've seen some people tilting bikes front-wheel upwards so they can fit it in the elevator but it didn't seem to me very convenient, and then you'll need some real estate inside your home anyway. I've learned about several brands making foldable bikes ( Dahon , R-M , Brompton ). Minutes later I've learned too that this stuff was expensive . I finally settled with a Dahon's Vitesse 3D for 425 Euros. It was a trade-off (and one of the less expensive alternatives) between folded volume, price and comfortable ride. I'm quite happy about the bike although I still think i...

January 2005 issue of Circuit Cellar Ink magazine contains my article titled "Build a Digital Video Recorder" with some clues about doing exactly this. Some days ago I was told some the systems that were cloned using G4U software seemed to have a lousy filesystem now. As the problem seems to be repeatable, it looks that the cloning process was not flawless for reasons yet to be determined (I'm in the process of finding out).

My kid's computer harddisk was dying last week. It booted up and it worked but sometimes after a clean shutdown CHKDSK was triggered on next boot (they use XP pro). The check was reporting some damaged sectors and I knew a replacement was due. I better do it now or I will have to reinstall everything from scratch. I went to the shop and I've got a new 160GB Maxtor drive. But, as usual, things were not exactly smooth: Old drive was a 40GB IBM drive with a single FAT32 partition. I wanted to get a bigger partition as the new drive was larger and I wanted to copy the old winxp system onto the new drive. Unfortunaltely, due to some defective clusters, G4U software stopped after copying only 6 GB and the result disk was unusable. G4L also failed because of the same reason. I borrow a copy of Ghost 2003 for DOS just to discover that I needed a boot floppy to run it and that my floppy drive was not working and full of dust. I got rid of the dust from the floppy and it eventuall...

My last project dealt wih the use of 1U rack-mounted PCs. Once the software was ready for deployment I needed to find an easy way to get the operating system and applications loaded onto the systems and I was looking for an easy and fast way of doing it. The units I am using are manufactured by Supermicro and they have no floppy or CD-ROM but are equipped with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and USB 2.0. While booting the system up from a USB CD-ROM was possible this was leaving me with the task of manually configuring each unit. I've used in the past Symantec's Ghost software for harddisk clonning and I've found it quite useful. But to be able to use it in this case I would need to boot these computers out of a floppy disk or specially crafted CD-ROM that I don't have ready. On the other hand, a Ghost license will need to be purchased. Browsing around I've found a couple of projects G4U (Ghost for Unix) and G4L (Ghost for Linux) that offer you a ready to b...