BLOGical Thoughts

Programming, Dutch Oven Cooking, Teardrop Trailers and Life

Wednesday, 1 July, 2009

Filed under: Uncategorized — July 1, 2009 @ 5:04 am

This will be my last posting until Monday. I hope everyone enjoys their 4th of July as much as I probably will.

Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary did not suffer from bandwidth overload. I emailed him yesterday and he sent back a note indicating that his web host had suffered a massive SQL injection attack. All the accounts on the server that hosts Jeff’s diary, and that use a database, were taken down by the attack. Once his web host gets the damage fixed, Jeff will have to replace all his content from backups. I have been in his shoes, so I know what he has to do. My sympathies go out to him.

Silly sign of the day:

110% ?????? Aren’t computers wonderful?

Free/Open Source Software

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

Local and Other News

Tuesday, 30 June, 2009

Filed under: Uncategorized — June 30, 2009 @ 5:11 am

This is a short week, and I have been busy getting ready for the long weekend. Nothing interesting happening here.

I have been wondering what happened to Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary. I suspect he made a very poor choice of web host for that web site - a web host who put bandwidth caps on his site. Now no one is reading it, and the page put up makes it sound like he is a thief or something, someone who’s web site you should never visit again. Find a better web host, Jeff. Note that his other web site, duntemann.com, works perfectly. Two different web hosts, I am sure.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

Local and Other News

Monday, 29 June, 2009

Filed under: Uncategorized — June 29, 2009 @ 5:12 am

Thanks to members of the North Idaho Linux Users Group, on Saturday I installed Windows 2000 on the recently resurrected computer I’ve been working on. At that point, I put the driver disk in that came with the motherboard, and discovered that there are no drivers on it to support Windows 2000. So Windows is stuck in 640×480, 16-color mode. That is completely unacceptable.

When I got the machine home, I installed Ubuntu 9.04 over the Windows 2000 installation, as Ubuntu does support the new motherboard. I downloaded all the updates and also installed VirtualBox. In VirtualBox I created a new virtual machine and installed Windows 2000 in that. Since the virtual devices that VirtualBox presents to the VM have their own drivers, I now have a Windows 2000 installed for the machine with driver support. So it is running with 24-bit color and the display size is 1152 X 864, which fits quite well as a window in a 1280 x 1024 display.

Now that I have a working machine, I need to reinstall some of the software that was install in the original. I still have all the files that were on the original machine, so it shouldn’t be too hard to do that - just tedious.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

Local and Other News

Friday, 26 June, 2009

Filed under: Uncategorized — June 26, 2009 @ 4:58 am

The North Idaho Linux Users Group has a technical session tomorrow at F1 For Help in Rathdrum. I think I will take the now-undead computer there and see if anyone can help me with resurrecting the operating system. If not, I may try installing Ubuntu and then install Windows 2000 professional in a virtual machine on that O/S.

I need to do a lot of shopping this weekend for the weekend after this one. We are having a barbecue at work on Wednesday, where I will be doing Dutch oven potatoes and two desserts. Then the next day I will be going to a teardrop trailer gathering and I need food for the potlucks there. It’s going to be a very busy couple of weeks.

I need to come up with a different way to download podcasts. Right now, I am downloading them in my Windows 2000 VM, then copying them to the actual workstation, then copying that to my thumb drive. Too many steps involved there. I guess I will have to ressurect that computer.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

Local and Other News

Thursday, 25 June, 2009

Filed under: Uncategorized — June 25, 2009 @ 5:33 am

Last night, I worked on the computer that had a problem booting after a lightning storm. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on the hard drive that was dedicated to Linux, and found there are more problems with this machine.

First up, the slowness of display refresh reminds me of under-powered machines running Windows 95. It isn’t just slow, it is painfully slow. So I tried to get the proprietary video driver for the display off of the Internet. That’s when I found out there is also a problem with the Internet connection. Anything I tried to download came up with a network error.

I use this machine for archival purposes and for downloading podcasts. I got a copy of the podcast opml file and I installed Juice on my workstation VM, then copied the opml file over there. I am now downloading podcasts on my workstation in the Windows 2000 Professional virtual machine.

I will replace this machine with my test machine. Yet more technology goes in the trash.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

Local and Other News

Wednesday, 24 June, 2009

Filed under: Uncategorized — June 24, 2009 @ 5:28 am

I have a meeting with a friend on Sunday about the sports program I am working on. He was the original force behind the original version of the program, which was called SoccerCoach. I decided that he should see what I have so far, so the program should be put on my Compaq notebook.

I suppose I could have just copied the executable to the Windows portion of the dual-boot notebook, but instead of that, I decided to install the virtual machine I am using to develop the program onto the Ubuntu side of the notebook.

First, I installed VirtualBox onto the notebook. Then I looked to see how much room the virtual machine takes up on my workstation, so I could decide how to get it over to the notebook. It was 10.1GB, so using my 2GB USB key was out of the question. I have a 320GB external drive now, so I decided to copy the directory onto that, then plug it in to the notebook and copy it off.

That did not work. Apparently the FAT filesystem has a limit on the size of any one file. One of the files I was trying to copy exceeded that limit. So I decided to talk to the notebook over the network. This is something I rarely do, as I have found it isn’t very easy to do for some reason. I think I really need a domain controller for my network, but I don’t have one.

It appears that I also did not have a Samba client on either machine, so I couldn’t use SMB to have them talk. So I installed the client on each machine. The easiest way to do this is to use the file manager and right-click on a directory, then click on Share. When you try to share the directory, Ubuntu will see that you don’t have the software installed to do that, and will offer to install it.

After the install, it was fairly easy to connect the two machines and to copy the entire .VirtualBox (hidden) directory over to the notebook. Imagine my surprise when I finished and went over on the notebook, ran VirtualBox and the Windows 2000 VM I had developed the sports program in started right up. I guess I am ready for anything Ken throws my way on Sunday.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

Local and Other News

Tuesday, 23 June, 2009

Filed under: Uncategorized — June 23, 2009 @ 5:08 am

Programming Tip

Do It Yourself Progress Bar

You can do some interesting stuff in Delphi with images. This tip describes an animated progress bar, where the bar chases its own tail. It runs from left to right and then turns off from left to right. It then starts over.

The bar image the progress bar uses is

You need a TTimer component named timerProgress (set to 500 ms) and 8 TImage components, set to 10 width and 16 height. They are named Image1 through Image8 and they bump up next to each other. each one has the bar image loaded and the Visible property set to False. The code that follows is the OnTimer event, which is run when you set timerProgress.Enabled to True:


// global variables
var
  imgState: boolean = True;
  btnIdx: integer = 1;

procedure TFormMain.timerProgressTimer(Sender: TObject);
var
  allOn, allOff: boolean;
begin // update data
  allOn := Image1.Visible and Image2.Visible and
    Image3.Visible and Image4.Visible and
    Image5.Visible and Image6.Visible and
    Image7.Visible and Image8.Visible;
  allOff := not Image1.Visible and not Image2.Visible and
    not Image3.Visible and not Image4.Visible and
    not Image5.Visible and not Image6.Visible and
    not Image7.Visible and not Image8.Visible;
  // If all the images are on, then we must now turn them off.
  if allOn then
  begin
    imgState := False;
    btnIdx := 1;
  end;
  // If all the images are off, then we must now turn them on.
  if allOff then
  begin
    imgState := True;
    btnIdx := 1;
  end;
  case btnIdx of
    1: Image1.Visible := imgState;
    2: Image2.Visible := imgState;
    3: Image3.Visible := imgState;
    4: Image4.Visible := imgState;
    5: Image5.Visible := imgState;
    6: Image6.Visible := imgState;
    7: Image7.Visible := imgState;
    8: Image8.Visible := imgState;
  end;
end;

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

Local and Other News

Monday, 22 June, 2009

Filed under: Uncategorized — June 22, 2009 @ 5:25 am

I made some time over the weekend and set up a slideshow for the pictures I took at the Car d’Lane 2009 auto show. I was amazed to see so many cars I had not seen at the Lost in the 50’s show. Usually, the two shows share a lot of cars, since they are only 50 miles apart. Apparently, many of the owners decided to go to either one or the other, but not both shows.

I spent a lot of time trying to get the computer I’ve been working on running again. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Microsoft? I bet I have. This exercise just confirms my hatred. At the end, I still have a computer that will not boot Windows.

At one point, I had the five internal hard drives, an external hard drive and a memory stick running on the machine. They all ran fine, with no interference from one another. Of course, I was using the Knoppix Live CD at the time. I’m completely convinced that Windows 2000 would not recognize at least half of those drives.

My main problem is getting Windows on the system and getting a working master boot record. I thought I had done that at one point, but the wonderful Microsoft setup program did not write the boot record for some reason. And now I can’t boot with the Windows install disk. I will keep trying.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

Local and Other News

Friday, 19 June, 2009

Filed under: Uncategorized — June 19, 2009 @ 5:26 am

I went to the North Idaho Mineral Club meeting last night. I took along a video slideshow of all the pictures I took at the gem show. It went over pretty well at the meeting.

I made the actual video VOB file using a Linux program called dvd-slideshow. It’s a command line program that requires you to create a text file to tell the program what to do. It works very well, but there is a learning curve associated with it. As I related before, I used a Windows program to create and populate the video folders and to burn the DVD (and lost the audio portion in the process).

I am going to do all this again, but this time I will also add the video clips I made at the gem show. I have found a Linux program which will replace dvd-slideshow, which will do all that. It’s called Q DVD-Author and it can handle both slideshows and videos. It can create menus and can convert video formats to the proper format for a DVD. The only thing it cannot do is actually burn the DVD, but I have that covered.

I went to dinner before I went to the mineral club meeting, and I want to recommend a restaurant. It’s called La Cabaña and it is on Seltice Way in Post Falls, just across from the Falls Club. The food is uniform in quality and the quality is excellent. They serve fresh, warm chips and two kinds of salsa before dinner. I haven’t had chips that fresh since the last time I made them myself. I ordered a smothered burrito - a burrito made with shredded beef, covered in enchilada sauce with rice and beans on the side. It was just terrific.

I have gone in there for lunch and their food at lunch is fairly good, but not like their dinner faire. They must change cooks for the two meals. A very good restaurant if you are a Mexican food junkie.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

Thursday, 18 June, 2009

Filed under: Uncategorized — June 18, 2009 @ 5:06 am

I stopped on the way home from work and got a DVD writer (SATA interface) for the computer I am trying to get working. I installed the drive and booted Knoppix with it. Using Knoppix to investigate, I figured out why Windows 2000 will no longer boot. It’s complex.

This machine has 5 hard disks; two are IDE and the other three are SCSI. The master boot record is on the first of the IDE drives, which Win2K considers to be drive D:. The actual operating system is on the second SCSI drive, which Win2K thinks is drive C:. The other drives are E: (IDE), G: (SCSI) and H: (SCSI). I discovered all this with Knoppix.

The original motherboard for the machine had a built-in SCSI controller which Win2K considered to be hard drive controller #0. The new motherboard has an external SCSI controller with a BIOS extension. I have not yet discovered what its number is. That is the important consideration. When I discover that, I can change the boot.ini file and the system will boot. I hope.

I used a popular hard disk data recovery program to check out the computer which was giving me the ‘NTLDR missing’ error. I could do this because the program runs from a floppy using FreeDOS. The program found no problems with the hard disk, so I tried to boot into Windows. I did not get that nasty error message this time. Instead, it boots part of the way into Windows and then just dies. I will try to boot into Linux (which is on an entirely different hard drive) when I get a chance. I can’t do that tonight, as I will be at the North Idaho Mineral Club meeting.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

Local and Other News

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