This is too cool. A USB powered & controlled missile launcher with PC control. Call me a cynic, but I bet that you manually position and aim these and the PC only control's launching them. But it's still too cool.
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=USB-782&cat=GDT
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
XP can't keep files from corrupting.
This has occurred on a work PC after uninstalling Symantec PCAnywhere, and on a Windows 2000 server for an unknown reason. Now, after uninstalling Weather Channel weather app, my wife's XP HOME SP2 can not boot due to corrupt \windows\system32\config\system file. This is the system portion of the registry.
Of course, the only manufacture option is to nuke the hard drive, loose all data, and be back to oem. I have Mozy, sure, but after a month only 1GB of the 1.6GB of data has uploaded.
So I use BART PE to get into the NTFS file system and restore an old SYSTEM file to replace the corrupt one. This is the original SYSTEM file, so it's back to the initial install of XP HOME. But at least I keep my data.
After an hour, bootup ends up going into a resolution that the Laptop's LCD doesn't support. Boot into VGA mode and re-install the drivers. Set the resolution to a proper one. Reboot.
Ok, so re-install the antivirus and reboot is the next step.
Then activation. But what is this? Activation tries to launch IE via an HTA, and fails. This is because the re-install of XP replaced part of IE with 6.0, even though I have 7.0 installed. IE is fried. So I went into the firefox directory and launched it. God, I love programs that don't require the registry. From firefox, I re-downloaded firefox and properly installed it. The I downloaded IE7 from Google (Microsoft wouldn't let me from Mozilla) and tried to launch it. But it fails because it gets confused about having some IE6 files and some IE7 files & patches.
So, Remove IE7 and reboot. C:\WINDOWS\ie7\spuninst\spuninst.exe uninstalls IE7. I am in the process of downloading SP2, which will take hours, so I won't know if IE6 works or not until the morning. But I was able to activate now. And apparently that is the problem with the IE7 reinstall, as it will get past the initial error. Though I don't plan on re-installing until I reboot.
Automatic Updates service is no longer listed. I did the re-register to get it to appear, but it will not function because it's still not installed right. I guess that's because I have the 1.0 version from the reinstall mixed in with the 3.0 version released not long ago.
Thanks, Microsoft, for a fun evening. Why can't a system restore point create alternate system.sav files and if system is corrupt, give me the option to use a previous system file?
Of course, the only manufacture option is to nuke the hard drive, loose all data, and be back to oem. I have Mozy, sure, but after a month only 1GB of the 1.6GB of data has uploaded.
So I use BART PE to get into the NTFS file system and restore an old SYSTEM file to replace the corrupt one. This is the original SYSTEM file, so it's back to the initial install of XP HOME. But at least I keep my data.
After an hour, bootup ends up going into a resolution that the Laptop's LCD doesn't support. Boot into VGA mode and re-install the drivers. Set the resolution to a proper one. Reboot.
Ok, so re-install the antivirus and reboot is the next step.
Then activation. But what is this? Activation tries to launch IE via an HTA, and fails. This is because the re-install of XP replaced part of IE with 6.0, even though I have 7.0 installed. IE is fried. So I went into the firefox directory and launched it. God, I love programs that don't require the registry. From firefox, I re-downloaded firefox and properly installed it. The I downloaded IE7 from Google (Microsoft wouldn't let me from Mozilla) and tried to launch it. But it fails because it gets confused about having some IE6 files and some IE7 files & patches.
So, Remove IE7 and reboot. C:\WINDOWS\ie7\spuninst\spuninst.exe uninstalls IE7. I am in the process of downloading SP2, which will take hours, so I won't know if IE6 works or not until the morning. But I was able to activate now. And apparently that is the problem with the IE7 reinstall, as it will get past the initial error. Though I don't plan on re-installing until I reboot.
Automatic Updates service is no longer listed. I did the re-register to get it to appear, but it will not function because it's still not installed right. I guess that's because I have the 1.0 version from the reinstall mixed in with the 3.0 version released not long ago.
Thanks, Microsoft, for a fun evening. Why can't a system restore point create alternate system.sav files and if system is corrupt, give me the option to use a previous system file?
Monday, June 25, 2007
OpenSUSE 10.2 day 5
The video lockups in SUSE at the startup are normal. It's not really locked up. It is just so slow that it stays on that screen for a while.
I ended up booting up into failsafe, running YAST, and then installing the 1.2GB of updates it desired. I installed 5 optional add ons.
After this, the video lock up still occurs, but I do get logged in and KDE is so much faster. At least for the moment. No lockups ever few seconds like with 10.0.
Now that the OS is usable, it is time to play around with server type services. BIND and DHCP are next.
I ended up booting up into failsafe, running YAST, and then installing the 1.2GB of updates it desired. I installed 5 optional add ons.
After this, the video lock up still occurs, but I do get logged in and KDE is so much faster. At least for the moment. No lockups ever few seconds like with 10.0.
Now that the OS is usable, it is time to play around with server type services. BIND and DHCP are next.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Fighting the Linux upgrades. Suse 10.0 to OpenSuse 10.2
Today I set out to upgrade SUSE 10.0 to OpenSuse 10.2. I began the DVD download from the WIKI link, and then proceeded to update 10.0 with the latest patches. It always seems an upgrade works best if one is fully patched.
The DVD downloaded rather quickly for a *nix ISO. I left the computer on over night and it was downloaded the next day as I returned to the computer. Mandriva 2007 spring took a week VIA bitorrent, for comparison.
So I began by creating a VMware snapshot of 10.0, mounted the DVD ISO as a CDRom in VMware, and rebooted. The DVD didn't boot, so I rebooted and set the BIOS to boot to CDROM. Another reboot, and the DVD ISO booted off the virtual CDROM.
The upgrade was horribly slow. After many hours, X locked up and the PC had to be rebooted. I believe it was auto detecting my video card. Much to my surprise, the install picked up where it had left off. Many hours later, and the upgrade was complete. It asked me to subscribe to some sort of Zen service, but wouldn't let me. So I canceled out of that.
After rebooting, Grub launched. Then it tried to start X. Lockup & odd graphics. The day was over so I turned off the VM.
A few days later I booted this back up and went into failsafe. Logged in as root and mounted the VMware tools. cd /tmp then mount /dev/cdrom /mnt (it wouldn't mount into /mnt/cdrom for some odd reason.) Then I did an rpm -Uhv /mnt/VMwareTools-5.5.4-44386.i386.rpm. That took a while & then came back with an error about waiting for the database to unlock. Another run at this told me the RPM was already isntalled. Reboot.
This time KDE started right up and I was able to log in. YaST was nice enough to tell me that after never running any updates, I was fully patched. Typical. So many distro's tell me that I am fully patched when I have absolutely no patches at all. Why can't they get this straight? I right clicked on the YaST updater and did "refresh" and added myself as a privileged user.
Anyway, OpenSUSE is running in VMware workstation 5.5 with VMware tools. It doesn't lock up every 5 seconds for 1/2 a second like it was doing in 10.0. It is still the slowest of all distro's that I've installed onto VMware. FreeBSD being the fastest and Mandriva being in the middle. But it is the nicest build I've worked on. I love YaST. Everything in one place. I don't have to go to console nearly as much as with other distro's.
Now to install Webmin, DHCPD, and NAMED and have a test at this handling some basic server services.
The DVD downloaded rather quickly for a *nix ISO. I left the computer on over night and it was downloaded the next day as I returned to the computer. Mandriva 2007 spring took a week VIA bitorrent, for comparison.
So I began by creating a VMware snapshot of 10.0, mounted the DVD ISO as a CDRom in VMware, and rebooted. The DVD didn't boot, so I rebooted and set the BIOS to boot to CDROM. Another reboot, and the DVD ISO booted off the virtual CDROM.
The upgrade was horribly slow. After many hours, X locked up and the PC had to be rebooted. I believe it was auto detecting my video card. Much to my surprise, the install picked up where it had left off. Many hours later, and the upgrade was complete. It asked me to subscribe to some sort of Zen service, but wouldn't let me. So I canceled out of that.
After rebooting, Grub launched. Then it tried to start X. Lockup & odd graphics. The day was over so I turned off the VM.
A few days later I booted this back up and went into failsafe. Logged in as root and mounted the VMware tools. cd /tmp then mount /dev/cdrom /mnt (it wouldn't mount into /mnt/cdrom for some odd reason.) Then I did an rpm -Uhv /mnt/VMwareTools-5.5.4-44386.i386.rpm. That took a while & then came back with an error about waiting for the database to unlock. Another run at this told me the RPM was already isntalled. Reboot.
This time KDE started right up and I was able to log in. YaST was nice enough to tell me that after never running any updates, I was fully patched. Typical. So many distro's tell me that I am fully patched when I have absolutely no patches at all. Why can't they get this straight? I right clicked on the YaST updater and did "refresh" and added myself as a privileged user.
Anyway, OpenSUSE is running in VMware workstation 5.5 with VMware tools. It doesn't lock up every 5 seconds for 1/2 a second like it was doing in 10.0. It is still the slowest of all distro's that I've installed onto VMware. FreeBSD being the fastest and Mandriva being in the middle. But it is the nicest build I've worked on. I love YaST. Everything in one place. I don't have to go to console nearly as much as with other distro's.
Now to install Webmin, DHCPD, and NAMED and have a test at this handling some basic server services.
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