Category: Links

Just What I Needed

This fall is going to be interesting…

The schedule for my job with UITS came out over the weekend, which has me working at Briscoe, McNutt, Foster and the Information Commons.  While this is great where my working life is concerned, it’s horrible for my academic life.  I have classes at Ballantine Hall and in Swain East.  They are on the opposite side of campus.  For those of you that don’t know,  the IU campus is quite large.

To make matters worse, on two of those days I will get out of work 15 minutes before my class starts.

To try to expedite my travel I’m currently working on solutions to get my bike on campus.  With my bike on campus, I think I can cut down the travel time significantly.  Since I live a good trek away, biking to campus isn’t really an option.  I’ve got some options to figure out.  I’m going to either leave my bike on campus during the week and take it home on the weekend, or take it with me each day.  I’m going to test whether my bike will fit in our car tonight, if not we’ll have to order $300 worth of gear ( a hitch and hitch mounted bike rack).

I haven’t seriously rode my bike in about 10 years, which invokes something else, a more active lifestyle.  I’m sure I’ll be really sore for the first couple of weeks, but after that I’ll in much better shape.  Something I need to do.

I also need these items:

I’ve got my eye on particular ones, but I’m still trying to find the best item for the price.

I had thought about these last minute things coming up, I just never realized it would be so exhaustive and expensive.

Editing Schedule

I am currently between semesters, my last one at Ivy Tech and my first one at IU. In this downtime, I’m working in some editing of the “good” episodes of ROX that I have, which are a majority of season one.

On a good night I can crank out 2 episodes. Last night I was only able to complete one.

Most of these episodes are in pretty good shape, they still need a look over to make sure they meet my high standards before I’ll allow people to pay money for them.  The biggest issue seems to be with transitions between shots and the beginning and end of the show.  Luckily I have a ton of “stock” clips to use if one is bad.

If you look at all of my blog posts regarding ROX, you’ll see many ramblings about technical difficulties or just not having time.  I’m finished with giving excuses.  I’d like to get season one ready and launch it with my new LML Video Services website.

Once this “easy” process is over, I will start the tedious heavy editing process.  Dissecting each episode ensuring the audio and video tracks are synchronized and making sure there are no other transitional issues.

After the editing process is complete, DVD authoring and design begin.  This is where I actually create the look and feel of the DVD.  Then I design the case and labels.  Once the producers give their words of approval, it will be released.

The biggest difference between this time, and the last time is I have an active backup solution.  My computer is backed up every night, and those backups are backed up weekly.  If my hard drive fails, I haven’t lost any work.  That is what put me over a year behind.  I had to recapture everything and start from day one.

Wish me luck.

Out of Shape

Since I’ve gotten married my weight has risen to a plateau of 275 pounds.  It’s amazing how you don’t notice these things until they creep up on you.
Lately my back has been hurting when I do anything but sit.  I’m also sure one of the reasons why I’m tired all the time is primarily due to the extra weight I’m carrying around.  I know I don’t have anyone to blame but myself, but the last several months have been exhausting due to our ever growing child.

I believe my “six pack protector” is mainly to blame for my back problems.  This time I’m not going to complain, I’m going to do something about it!  Last winter we bought a Nintendo Wii and Wii Active, a workout program.  While it’s not as effective as a real workout at a gym, I believe it will get me on the right track.

I started working out last night, and from that I can tell you for sure that I’m out of shape.  I tried the “easy 30 minute” routine, and my body gave out after half of the workout.  I’m still sore this morning.

I plan on giving my body a day of rest between workouts to help facilitate getting back to a healthy weight.  I hope this can be an inspiration to my wife as well.

For the last year or so, my oldest daughter has become somewhat of a couch potato (much like her father).  I want her and Amelia to know that when you do that there are consequences.  Had I kept a normal workout routine, or a more physical lifestyle I wouldn’t be in so much pain.

I hope this shows them that it pays to be active now instead of later.

Without Context

Over the weekend, I tested the capabilities of my newly operating LAN.  I read an article on lifehacker about a program designed to test the speed of your home network.  This article basically shouted “try me.”  And so I did.

While my LAN should theoretically be gigabit in speed, it has been almost impossible for me to find what exactly gigabit is.  The only absolute I can find is that the term gigabit means 1 billion bits.  The problem is finding the context of that.  What is truly considered a gigabit network?

This program creates a file on another computer on your network and calculates the data for you.  I sent 1 gigabyte files to my server and HTPC.  By sending this large of a file, it tests more than speed, but throughput of the network.  Every computer on my network has a gigabit network card except for my server, which has a 10/100 network card.  This is where I’m somewhat confused, as the results were somewhat similar for both machines.

Results:

Server

—Writing— —Reading—
Packet length : 1,048,576,000 1,048,576,000
Time to complete: 98.0580000 148.7040000
Bytes per second: 10,693,426 7,051,431
Bits per second : 85,547,408 56,411,448
————- ————-
Mbps: 81.5843658 53.7981491

HTPC

—Writing— —Reading—
Packet length : 1,048,576,000 1,048,576,000
Time to complete: 92.2800000 92.9600000
Bytes per second: 11,362,982 11,279,862
Bits per second : 90,903,856 90,238,896
————- ————-
Mbps: 86.6926727 86.0585175

What I’d really like to find out is if these numbers are “in line” with what a cat5e LAN with a gigabit router and gigabit switch should be.

While I’ve done a fair amount of “googling” this, I haven’t found any information that hits a home run.  Most of what I’ve found is out of date, or goes off on a tangent in a completely different direction.

If you happen upon this blog and are a network engineer, or knowledgeable on this subject, please let me know!

Goodbye Yahoo!, Hello Google

I’ve been subscribing to Yahoo! Mail Plus since 2006, and while I enjoy it, I don’t enjoy the fact that I have to pay $19.95 a year to POP my mail to my various e-mail clients.  I knew I needed to make a switch somewhere, but didn’t know where to go.  I know there are many e-mail services out there such as hotmail, juno and gmail.

I’m kinda finicky about my e-mail provider, as I’m not a fan of web mail (I only use it when I have to).  That’s why I’ve been paying for Yahoo’s Plus service.  I used to be a big proponent of Juno.  If you don’t know the history of it, it’s quite fascinating.  It started as a e-mail only program.  You could write emails and send them, that’s it.  It would connect when you wanted to send or receive and then disconnect.  In the age of dial-up access, this was an efficient use of the phone line.  I used Juno from 1996 until about 2004, that’s when my inbox began to be clogged with so much spam that I spent more time cleaning the spam out than simply reading the e-mail that was intended for me.  That’s when I gave up my original internet handle, Cowboyman.
Starting August 1st, I will no longer be with yahoo.  I’ve had a gmail account for quite some time, I just haven’t used it much.  I will be full-on switching over to google for my email needs.  To keep the spam bots away, I won’t be divulging my entire email address for the world.  But for those of you that know my email address, it will be changing ever so slightly.

Instead of firstname_lastname@yahoo.com it will be firstname.lastname@gmail.com

If you’re my friend on facebook, you can see all of my info on my profile page as well.

Hacking Apple’s Time Machine

On my quest to learn everything I can about the “locked down” world I like to call OSX, I tried to setup Time Machine.  For those of you that don’t know, that’s Apple’s built-in backup utility.

My situation is somewhat unique, but I found many others on the interwebs trying to solve the same issue.  How to backup over wireless, and how to backup to a NTFS formatted drive or a network drive.  So I scoured the web and found many potential solutions, most of them contained incomplete information however.

The guide that finally pointed me in the right direction is located here.  It’s a surprisingly easy process and should be supported by Apple.  Why should you have to physically connect a drive to a laptop to back it up?  That just seems counterproductive to me.  Isn’t the whole point of having a laptop for mobility?

I’ll outline the steps below for those of you who are weary of clicking on links.

Step 1:

  • Open up Terminal (Applications, Utilities)
  • Enable unsupported volumes by entering the following code:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences
TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Step 2:

  • Mount your network drive (Finder, Go, Connect to Server)
  • On your Mac, open Disk Utility. Click “New Image.” Use the following settings:
  • Save As ComputerName_MACAddress (Must be Ethernet MAC Address and not Airport MAC Address)
  • Volume name can be whatever you want.  I named mine “Time Machine Backups”.
  • Change partition to “No Partition Map”
  • Change Image Format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image”
  • Custom Volume size. Set the maximum you want to use on your remote location.  Don’t worry if you don’t have the room on your Mac.  I set mine to 200gb, the size of the hard drive on my Mac.  The empty file was a little over 300mb.
  • Save and then move this file to your network drive.

Open time machine and select the network drive you moved the sparsebundle file to.  Time Machine should now backup without any issues.

When you perform the first backup, have a wired connection and turn off your wireless.  My first backup was 50 gigs and took over 3 hours with a gigabit LAN.  I can only imagine how much longer it would take over a wireless connection.

This has been the first of what I’m sure will be many achievements in my learning and (in some cases) working around Apple’s master plan.

Summer Luxuries

This summer is wildly different than the last couple of summers.  I’m actually working a regular schedule!  That means we have the means to do more!

I’m also taking my last semester at Ivy Tech, the school I have learned to despise.  Since I am transferring to IU, I didn’t have many choices because there are a limited amount of classes that transfer.  So I am taking Econ-101 and Hist-125.  Economics is well, economics; there isn’t much I can really say about such a dull class.  History is a different story however, as the focus for this class is “The History of American Technology.”  There is nothing that gets me as excited as history and technology, well I can probably name a few things but I must digress.

I also made the deans list for the Spring 2010 semester!

My econ class is online, and my history class was originally a “hybrid” class, which is essentially online; with the option of coming in for lectures and discussion.  I guess not enough people registered for my section and it was canceled and moved to a online section.  So no rushing to class for me this summer!  Score!

Interestingly enough, one of the first classes I will be taking at IU is a similar class, but it is in relation to how the computer changed America.  It is through the American Studies program.

I have had an average of 100 pages of reading per week thus far, and I expect that pace to stay the same.  For someone who only reads something if it’s necessary, that’s a mountain of reading.  Luckily I’m able to read and do my homework while at work, which opens up my time away from work for activities I’d much rather be doing.

Speaking of work, it seems as of the last few months that more and more people on campus are moving to Apple computers; the pressure for us to offer support for them has grown exponentially.  I haven’t seriously used a mac since the original Macintosh.  So with some preparation, I will be purchasing a macbook sometime this summer.  I hope to learn the systems inside and out in the only way I know how; enveloping myself in it.  Some think that it’s a large expense for just a learning tool, but I think it’s a small investment in my learning.  Plus it will elminate our current battles over who can use the laptop.  Even Amelia wants to play on what we call “the magic box.”

We’re currently talking (and planning) on adding a HTPC (Home Theater PC) to our endless collection of technology at home.  The key issue is price at this point, neither of us want to spend too much money.  With the lack of abilities a DVD player provides, a HTPC can offer us endless opportunities for whatever we want to do.  I have many movies that we can simply watch over our home network, plus with things like Hulu, Boxee and my new fave, Netflix – we’ll never have the excuse that “nothing’s on.”  With that in mind, I’m currently working on getting our LAN up and running.  I just have to install the box, an outlet, and connect the wiring.

I’ve all but completed the new website for LML Video Services.  I just need to raise the $60 I need to re-up my hosting package.  I built this website from scratch through my Computer Information Systems class last semester, and then tweaked it for “commercial” use.  It’s simple, just my style.  I’m currently trying to make the decision to leave PayPal and use Google for checkout options, but that’s still on the drawing board.  I also have a “Latest Updates” section that is essentially a blog.  I would like to use Word Press or some other blogging type script to update this rather than hand code it.  Unfortunately I cannot work on this until it is actually up and running.

Goodbye Friends

Saturday I sold my mower and trailer.  I had listed them on craigslist.  They went to a really nice guy from the Cincinnati Ohio area.  I still can’t believe he drove that far to purchase such old equipment.

My mower was old and tired.  I had called it the “little mower that could.”  A reference to The Little Engine That Could.  It wouldn’t give up and was a very good mower, but time wasn’t on it’s side.  It was a mid 80’s model, and the almost 30 years of use was rearing it’s ugly head on the engine.  I had a oil leak that started to become something to watch last year.  It was the first time I had to add oil to it.  I had talked around to several people about repairing it, but nothing panned out.  In the end, we replaced it due to blue smoke billowing out of the top of the engine after mowing the front yard.

I purchased the trailer from a former boss of mine when I worked for Sternberg.  Part of my job description was to mow their frontage property on Dillman Road and Highway 37.  The trouble with this was the fact that it was about an acre of total land, and I was not provided with the proper equipment – just a run down push mower and weed eater.  As I wrote  previously I snagged a Independent Contractor gig out of them and made an extra $30 a week mowing this.

I only had one problem, and a serious one at that.  I had no way to get my mower to the job site!  When I mentioned this to my boss, he said he had a trailer that he’d sell to me with terms I couldn’t refuse.  I really wanted a trailer, so this made my month!

There was one caveat, my boss lived in Story, IN.  Which is in the middle of nowhere.  One Friday night Rachel and I drove out there to take a look at the trailer.  It was not in the shape you see it above.  The wheels were rusted, the tires were dry rotted.  There was no light kit, and the deck was barely there.

After getting it home (which I was surprised it made the journey).  I immediately put new wheels, lighting kit and deck on.  I got it inspected and applied for a title for it.  I also put a new coupler (what the trailer attaches with) on.  I also tried my hand at building some ramps with the materials I had left over (big mistake).  So I bought some ramp end caps and used some lumber for ramps.

I was very happy with the trailer!  It was very handy when we moved furniture or bought new furniture.  It was the perfect size for my mower as well!

Since we sold my truck last year, we haven’t had anything that is capable of towing (yet).  So the trailer has just sat.  I had tried to sell it previously, but wasn’t liking the offers I would get.

I would have kept the trailer, but the new mower we purchased is much larger than my little John Deere STX38.  With a 8 inch larger deck, and taller stance this thing makes my old mower look like a toy.  I figured it would be easier to sell them as a package – tow and go, then separate.

You both filled a need in my life, but your time has moved on.  I hope you make your new owner as happy as you made me over the years!

Solving Error 46 For Good

Ever since I started working with Editor B on the ROX 2 DVD project, I have been using Apple’s QuickTime almost exclusively.  When my daughter and I got an iPod,  I started using iTunes.

Since I am a Windows user, there are some complications with using this software that many people like myself have encountered over the years.  I’m going to outline those problems, and how I fixed them here.

Apple includes an “update utility” with all of their products which will auto install updates for you, while this may sound nice – it’s a devil in disguise.

For some strange reason, while this update utility is supposedly updating your software, the first thing it does is actually remove your old versions.  It then removes all authorized users from the registry keys the programs require to run.   When the installation commences, it tells you various messages saying it cannot access this or that.  It then rolls back it’s actions and you are left without your software.

I was receiving QuickTime Error: 46 – Could Not Load ActiveX Control.  If you google it, you will find hundreds of listings regarding this issue.  99% of them will tell you to install a old Windows NT utility and then download a file named reset.cmd, you run the reset file which resets the security profiles for a few registry keys.  This works for some, but not all – including me.

I spent about 2 hours last night manually resetting all of the keys required, and finally fixed the issue.  While my case may be extreme, the only other option was to format and completely wipe my machine.  Not something I really wanted to do, as I don’t have a lot of free time, and I’m re-doing a video transfer job that went wrong.  I won’t go into much detail, but it’s the reason why I quit using dual layer DVDs.

The other error I was getting was preventing installation of QuickTime and iTunes.  A dialog box would pop up and say:  could not open key:
UNKNOWN\Components\9C4307835821FFF47864EE6DABC09AA9\E603EB826AD5C9F4DB0BBD3A8C6CFFDF.  After doing some exhaustive searching, I found the location of UNKNOWN\Components\.  The location is explained here.  It is located at HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\
Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components.  The first string in your error is listed there, with the second string being a subkey of that.  Change your permissions and you’ll be able to install.  I have seen examples that have different key values, so please don’t use my particular example – yours could be different!

I have modified that reset.cmd file, and now it works for me.  The major flaw with the other version flying around the interwebs, is that it does not force a owner into the keys.  Without an owner, you cannot add users.

Here is that modified file in it’s entirety.  Please copy everything into a notepad and save it as *.cmd file.  It worked for me when nothing else out there would.  I hope this helps anyone out there who is fed up and frustrated, it will also give me a reference should I need to do this again.
Continue reading “Solving Error 46 For Good”

Draft Website

We are coming close to the end of the spring semester, and I have been working on my final project in CINS-102 at a fever pace.

As I noted in a previous post, I am rebuilding my web site via this class.  I lost the files from my original web site.  My old website was just a free template I had found and changed up a bit.  I must say it’s very fulfilling to say you created it yourself.

I have found through my studies thus far that I am really enjoying web design and programming.  They almost go hand in hand, as the skills I’ve learned in programming have transferred somewhat to web design.  Where that might take me I’m unsure of at this point.

The draft website is currently hosted at http://bob.ivytech.edu/~llawmaster/index.html please visit it!  Any suggestions you have, especially in the areas of CSS, would be greatly appreciated.  FYI, the “buy it now” buttons are only pictures – the site’s document type declaration is XHTML Strict, which doesn’t allow the syntax of the buttons to be used.

There are probably going to be some slight changes to it before the semester ends, but nothing dramatic.  I am having my co-worker Kasey utilize her skills with CSS to help transform this basic site into something professional and dramatic.  For her help, I’m going to give her credit for the styling of the website.  The version with her assistance will not appear on the Ivy Tech domain, as that is for academic purposes – and having someone else do the work would be wrong.

Hopefully by the end of the year, the final version of this website will be on it’s real domain again, and fully functional.  It’s exciting!