I just had my first Skype conversation in Marratech Pro! No, Marratech is not
compatible with Skype (closed protocols you know) but Marratech is compatible with the phone network and SkypeIn. I.e. I used a SIP provider to call my Skype number (16144419560). Feel free to call me from a Marratech Portal if you want to hear Skype audio in a Marratech Pro session or just Skype audio period. I am Peter Parnes on Skype by the way.
Category Archives: Techstuff
ASR restore on Dell Dimension 8400
This is mostly written for my own future reference.
After much experimenting, I have come to the following conclusions regarding restoring a full system from a Windows ASR backup. The following applies for a non-raid system.
1: Make sure the hard drive you want to restore to is the first hard drive the system will find. I.e. If you have several SATA disks then rearrange them so the system disk is the SATA-0 disk. Note that if you have USB drives then they might show up later during the install. E.g. my iPod showed up as a valid XP install disk alternative. To minimize potential errors I removed all USB cables (keyboard was on PS2).
2: Boot from the XP install CD and press F6 to install additional drivers (note, nothing will happen) and then press F2 to ASR.
3: Install the additional drivers and select the AHCI choice.
4: Select the correct disk to restore to and wait for ever for it to format. You do not get any choice to select partitions to restore to so the whole disk will be wiped clean. The format runs in full mode meaning that it takes ages to complete. In my case it was a 400GB (381552MB effective) disk and it takes about 3 hours to complete the format. I didn’t find any options to tell it to do a quick format.
5: The restore started automatically and I got to choose where to restore from. I think I would have gotten into trouble if the backup was on the network as I didn’t have any network drivers installed yet after the restore. Note that the ASR restore seems to create a full clean windows installation.
6: Now I got into some trouble though. After rebooting I could log in but explorer couldn’t start. The problem was Daemon Tools that failed to operate. Reboot into safe mode (via F8) and during the boot it asked me if I wanted to load the daemon tools driver and without it loaded windows booted fine. BUT as I didn’t have it installed I couldn’t remove it either. This was solved via finding all two files with 347 in the name in c:\windows and removing them. Windows booted fine and I reinstalled Daemon Tools again.
7: The restore created on big C: (400GB) so I used Partition Magic 7 to reduce that into a 64GB for windows and the rest for my old D: (work).
8: Do all the other restores and move back all the files.
9: Done !
Sun Java Desktop System
I installed Suns Java Desktop System yesterday and took it out for a spinn. Here are my reflections. Feel free to ask more questions!!
SUN Java Desktop System
Hardware: Dell Dimension 8300, 3.2GHz with 2GB RAM, Hyper threading enabled (virtual dual CPU), dual graphics card (NVidia Quadro4 dual DVI AGP and NVidia DVI PCI).
*** Installation
The installation was very smooth and extremely fast. Full installation occupied about 2.8GB disk.
* Problems
If serial ATA disk was enabled then the system (and installer) would not boot. Solution: disable SATA disk in BIOS.
Installation in graphics mode did NOT work. Just blank screen.
If Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 sound card was in the system, then once again the system wouldn’t boot.
Could not get dual display output from Quadro4 Nvidia card. It only saw one screen.
Could not get Dell 2001FP (newest 20″ TFT from Dell) to work. No matter what frequencies I tried, all I got was flicker.
Could not get higher resolution than 1600×1200 on a Apple 23″ TFT screen (1920×1200).
The only sound card I could get working was an Griffin iMic.
I have to manually enable USB mouse support every time I boot.
*** Usage
The system is very responsive and fast and most functionality needed for a basic system is there. EMail, Web, Staroffice 7 for word, excel, powerpoint.
The system crashed once (hanged hard really) when running the default screen saver (the flag which looked rather ugly on my system by the way).
* Annoyances
StarOffice couldn’t open files that were on SMB disks (i.e. on a disk server) which I found rather strange.
**************
But to summarize, the system is very nice. Simple install and easy to use. Might be enough for basic users but I think most users would want something with more applications but compared to a bare Windows XP installation it was ok.
Intel is pushing wireless USB as replacement for Bluetooth.
As we all know Bluetooth has proved not to be the best technology around and now Intel has lost confidence in UWB reaching the market soon the in the meantime they will focus on wireless UWB instead.
Want to know more: http://deviceforge.com/articles/AT9015145687.html
iPAQ H6300 Rumours ?!
More rumours are floating around on the net regarding the new iPAQ h6300 with bluetooth, gsm/gprs, and wlan for communication, camera, thumb keyboard, SDIO, as well as RIM Blueberry EMail support! Looks rather cool. It is supposed to arrive this summer in the states.
More info and picture…
Everywhere Displays
IBM Research has done some very nice research on Everywhere Displays. That is a small projector with a moveable mirror in front so the image can be presented on any surface within viewing range. The image is compensated for distortion and when you tie cameras and image recognition to this then it becomes really cool! Read more about it on Gopal Pingali’s project page!
San Francisco
On Tuesday I am leaving for San Francisco. I will be attending the Multimedia 2003 conference in San Francisco, or actually the conference is in Berkeley but the restaurants are better in San Francisco and it only takes 15 minutes to get there with the Bart. I will be gone until November 10.
Monday and Tuesday I will spend in Boden with the Systemteknik department. The main issue is obviously how to handle the problem of to few students.
November 18-21 I had planned to attend the Microsoft Research Academic Days: Security in Distributed Systems but I figured it will take to much time. Microsoft would actually pay for the trip and the housing. Quite generous of them, right? The topic wasn’t perfectly right for me though.
Tomorrow is the exam in SMD151. 110 students and the following exams I have to correct. Fun fun fun. That will have to wait until I get back from the States.
With all the other short trips planned for November, if I had attended the Microsoft Research thing then I would have had 6 working days in Luleå during November!
Finished reading Grisham’s latest, The King of Torts yesterday. A VERY good book which I recommend to everybody. I continued with Clancy’s latest, The Teeth of the Tiger. Not much happening yet but it is a Clancy.
The snow has hit Luleå. It is white outside. White is nice but unfortunately I cannot ride my bike during the winter đ I need my training or else I will get fat as a pig and totally restless. Today I went for a fast walk. It was only 35 minutes but when I got back I felt really pepped up. What a difference some exercise can do. I need more endorphins, what a great drug it is.
During last weekend I switched over to using my fiber instead of my ADSL and during the day it works splendidly but during the evening (between 16.00 and 24.00) and totally flakes out with high delay. It is still usable but rather bad. Throughput is OK but you get very high delay getting into Tele2’s core network. Support say that they have ordered new hardware but hasn’t given me any dates on when the problem will be fixed. When the network is not loaded I get over 10Mbps between my home and the university. Hmm, I just checked and tonight it seems OK. Might they have upgraded today or is it not used as heavily this evening? We will see… Besides the longer delay in the network it works very good. Stable and good. Hopefully the local peering will get set up during the winter and then we will get real banded out to the rest of the world by going via SUNET (what I cannot do that? đ I don’t know if I need that though. Tele2’s world Internet access seems rather good. Anyhow the whole deal is much cheaper than my Telia company ADSL.
No, now I have to get my attention back to the movie, Ghost of Mars.
iTunes
I have started using Apple iTunes for Windows (released last week) and I just added all of my music to its database. The program is quite nice. I can search my music, share it, share my playlists, and it keeps track of it all for me. Right now I have 15188 songs in my small library of music.
A long quiet week
It has been a long quiet week on this Blog. I haven’t been able to find myself in writing mood, it just hasn’t felt right.
Tomorrow I am meeting with Jerker to discuss what I hopefully will feel after the meeting is OUR joint plans for the Media Technology division. As I wrote before I have gotten the feeling that he has totally put me aside and he feels that it is his responsibility to solve this, not mine. Also, it is now clear that he is leaving as prefect as soon as possible to attack the next step on his ladder as dean of the technical faculty. One possible candidate is Thomas, the current pro-prefect for Systemteknik and head of the control group division. I am a bit divided in how I feel about if Thomas will be good on that position or not. He is a very listening person while at the same time he can be very black and white. He is unfortunately not very pragmatic, very much the same way as the previous prefect, Bengt. Anyhow, the meeting with Jerker has been on my mind all weekend unfortunately.
During the week I have had the honour of attending another part of my management course and I had a very good interview with Sören. One conclusion is (it comes back over and over again) that I shouldn’t be afraid of conflicts, both in positive and negative meaning.
Tuesday evening our 18-group (the management course participants) plus the PMI coaches were all invited to Britta’s huge house. It is an old transformer building build about 100 years ago. It is three stories high and the top floor is just one large room with over 5 meters in ceiling height and the room is over 100 m2. This was one of the most beautiful houses I have ever seen!! I have tons of photos but I haven’t had the will to put them online yet. The party was very nice indeed even if the not the whole group came. It was also Sören’s 41:st birthday. Congratulations my friend!! Freddie was there in spirit and I really missed him not being there. He had been part of all our earlier sessions and it felt wrong when he wasn’t there.
This Sunday I spent almost entirely with Tovah. We played two Mulle Meck games, building houses and cars and the latter was of the two my favorite. A bit to advanced for Tovah to play on her own but I enjoyed it and Tovah enjoyed being there with me đ We also went for a magic story time at the Norrbotten’s Museum. 45 minutes of interactive store telling and Tovah got to play one of the main leads. I think she thought it was a bit scary to be up there because she didn’t really understand what she was supposed to do. Bruno, the magician was very good and entertaining for both young and old.
By the way, we have cancelled our winter vacation to the Phi-Phi islands because we thought it was to expensive. We will take a cheaper trip during the winter instead. Perhaps Madeira again? I really enjoyed it there. Or perhaps just a cheap trip to the Canary islands?! We’ll see….
Yesterday I played with setting up a new router for my Tele2 connection with automatic Tele2 login, firewall, NAT gateway, dynamic DNS etc. etc. It took some time to learn everything but I now have a fully working gateway and during the week I will migrate some of the computers to test how it works “in production”. There is nothing wrong with the bandwidth (about 10Mbps down and 8-9 Mbps up towards LTU).
I also found a new great gadget blog, Gizmodo (yes I am a gadget maniac even though it is not as important to me anymore).
It feels good to write again, I don’t know why I stop when I feel down. It is just the same with my physical training. As soon as I feel infirm I stop training, but I know that if I train I will feel better. I just have to push myself harder. This weekend I have cycled about 20 Km in two days which at least something but way to little for me to get that good being feeling about myself.
I saw the Hulk earlier this week and it was very good actually, at least the second part. Also finished 24 season 2 last week and I am really looking forward to season 3 which starts in two weeks in the US. Haven’t decided yet if I want to wait until the whole series has been aired and then watch it in condensed form (as I did with series 2) or see each episode directly as they “leak” out on the net. The one that lives will see đ I highly recommend this to anybody that enjoys action movies. During the whole season 2 I only felt one episode being “series boring” and that is a very good grade coming from me regarding a TV series!!
Book wise I have finished the trilogy about Arn, the Temple Knight and I am now in the middle of the fourth book in that series, the Arn Heritage. I enjoyed the three first books very much but the fourth feels from time to time more like a history facts book than a novel.
Well, it is time for another night in bed with the lovely wife. Good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite!
The Science Blog
Found new great blog, The Science Blog.