So yes this blog as been silent for some time. It’s not a secret that life gets in the way from time to time. I haven’t stopped my tinkering. In fact one of the projects I’ve been involved lately in will allow me to keep tinkering for a long time. So without further ado, I give you Arch Reactor.

Arch Reactor is the first hackerspace to be opened in the St. Louis area. What is a hackerspace? The Post-Dispatch did an article about us a couple months ago, and all of us in the group agree they said it best, “St. Louis’ first hackerspace, a co-op workshop for techies, tinkerers and free thinkers.” It’s partly a workshop where we can share tools and equipment that an individual normally wouldn’t have access too. The other part is the community. Every person there has their own specialty. Some of us are programmers. Some of us deal strictly with hardware. Some are artists. But everyone is there to share and learn from each other. With almost 30 people already, we’ve all been working hard to get this place off the ground. Our efforts have paid off and we are ready to open. If you have time, please stop by today on Saturday, Jan 30th at around 4:00pm. We are holding our grand opening and the more the merrier.

View Larger Map

Of course, I’ll be able to focus once again on my other projects. Which means there should be more updates here very soon.

Drive mappings. A frequent problem where I work. When a users machine fails completely, IT is pretty quick to replace it. But the user says they are still incapable of doing their job because he or she has lost all the file-shares they had mapped as drives. And these drive mappings were not part of the users group policy. And no, they don’t remember what shares were mapped because IT backs everything up, don’t they?
Ok, so I am being a bit snarky here. But there is a way to recover drive mappings in Windows XP without too much effort. Requirements are that the hard disk from the failed computer must be still readable, and another functional machine that you can put the drive in as a secondary disk.

First to recover the user’s registry file from the failed machine:

1. Mount the drive for the failed system on a bootable machine.
2. Under D:\Documents and Settings\username, where “username” is the user that had the drive mappings, backup the NTUSER.DAT file to another drive. Click Here for an Image Example.

Next, recover the needed Registry Keys:

3. Load Regedit on another XP machine or the rebuilt computer.
4. Select the HKEY_USERS branch. Click Here for an Image Example.
   Select File -> Load Hive… Click Here for an Image Example.
5. Browse to the backed up NTUSER.DAT file and open it.
6. Assign a name (i.e. foobar) for the loaded hive. Click Here for an Image Example.
7. Browse to HKEY_USER\foobar\Network in Regedit. (Click Here for an Image Example) Under \Network there is a key for every mapped drive letter the user had. The values in the key have the path location for the mapped drive.
8. Right click on HKEY_USER\foobar\Network and select Export to save the keys to a file. Click Here for an Image Example.

To import the drive mappings into the registry:

9. The file is in plain text. If you want to import the drive mappings you must do some editing to the file. Click Here for an Image Example.
10. Open the file in Notepad, and select Edit -> Replace… Click Here for an Image Example.
11. For the “Find what:” field, enter: HKEY_USER\foobar
12. For the “Replace with:” field, enter: HKEY_CURRENT_USER
13. Click “Replace All”. Click Here for an Image Example.
14. Save the file and Click “Yes” to save the changes

Now you can import these registry entries back:

15. Have the user log into his or her new machine.
16. Double click the modified registry file, or right click and select “Merge”. Click Here for an Image Example.
17. Click “Yes”. Click Here for an Image Example.
18. Reboot.

When the user logs back in, his or her drive mappings should be restored to the way they were before.

My sister asked to help her laptop this past weekend.  Its was a goofy little error and I didn’t want to forget about it in case I came across it again.

She had an issue where every time she opened Yahoo! Messenger on her fairly new Vista laptop, she would get an error stating the following:

This program requires flash.ocx, which is no longer included in this version of Windows.

If you click the “Cancel” button, the error goes away and Yahoo! Messenger runs fine for that session.  She had already reinstalled both Yahoo and Flash to their latest versions and neither stopped the error from popping up.

Well, OCX is the file extension for ActiveX controllers under Internet Explorer.  Since these are potentially very dangerous pieces of code, they aren’t installed automatically like in previous versions of Windows.  Between Vista’s User Access Control and IE 7, you must approve the action before installing an ActiveX plugin.

Appearantly Yahoo! Messenger has its hooks into IE in some way, most likely to display Flash based advertisements.  When initially setting up my sisters laptop I made Firefox the default browser, so the plugin wasn’t asked to be installed.  To get rid of the error for good, reinstall Flash from Adobe’s website using IE.  By allowing the ActiveX plugin to be installed it will create a flash.ocx file (possibly flash9.ocx, flash10.ocx, etc. depending on the version of flash being installed.) This corrected the matter immediately.

In my research I did find that this doesn’t always work for similair issues.  It was often suggested that you should make a copy of flash(insert_version_number).ocx to just flash.ocx.  For instance if you are using Flash version 10, then do a search for the file flash10.ocx, copy it, and place the copy in the same folder with the filename flash.ocx.

I can’t vouch for how secure this is from a system security standpoint.  ActiveX controllers are risky things and should be avoided whenever possible.  In this case I’m placing a bit of trust with Adobe.  I’m figuring that a such a widely distributed plugin would be repaired rather quickly if a devastating vulnerabilty, lest Adobe suffered serious embarassment. (Naive of me, I know.)

For some time now I’ve seen several videos around showing off what seemed like a miracle machine. The Looj from iRobot. iRobot, if you are unaware, are the same geniuses behind the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. It looks pretty spiffy, don’t you think?

Now I have never used a Roomba myself but they seem to be all the rage these days and I’ve gotten several positive reviews from close colleagues. Now every year around this time I venture into the scary outside world and clean out my parents gutters. I figured iRobot’s reputation was pretty sound and if it meant less time dangling from a roof in the hot sun, then it might be worth a shot. I went to Amazon, placed my order for the Looj 125, and two days later I was ready to give it a try. Hmm…So there seems to be a 15-hour charge time for the battery. Two days and 15 hours later I was ready to give it a try.

The basic premise seems simple enough. A small radio controlled treaded vehicle uses a bristled auger that spins and flips debris from the gutter onto the lawn. However iRobots implementation doesn’t quite work out in practice. Initial impressions is that the Looj feels more like a plastic toy than a tool. Despite being treaded it fails at getting past the most simple obstacles, obstacles its suppose to be able remove from its paths. All it did was splash around like a baby in a bathtub. It made more of a mess than anything else. Granted it was a bit wet up in the gutters, but the Looj is advertised as waterproof up to 1-foot of water. The website also claims that the “Looj blasts through debris, clogs and sludge.” It’s far too underpowered to accomplish this. My gutters weren’t too terribly clogged and this should have been a simple task. Had I have brought the garden hose up with me I would’ve cleared it out quite easily.

To sum it up, I basically found it useless. I was patient and gave it a fair shot because I really wanted this to work. It’s just too underpowered to get anything more than dry autumn leaves out of your gutter. I do think the idea has potential. If instead of the 7 volt battery we loaded in a 18 volt, and put in a stronger motor for the auger, we might have something.

Been using version 9.04 of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackelope, for a few weeks now. I have it running on 2 of my 3 personal machines and I get pretty regular use out of it for my daily computing. The first machine I installed it on was my Asus 901 EeePC. I did a fresh install on my netbook so I could see how smoothly the installation would go, and to judge how netbook ready the new OS was. Setup was a breeze. Not really a big surprise there. Since there was a lot of focus placed on making Jaunty Jackelope much more netbook friendly I was pleased to find all my hardware working immediately. That is something that took a new eeepc specific kernel in previous versions of Ubuntu. Some of the function key hardware controls, such as Fn+F2 to turn the wireless on and off, still do not work until you install the eee-control packages. That is really a minor nuisance. I’ll just have to add it to my list of post-ubuntu-setup packages I regularly install on a new system (currently being compiled for a future blog post).

Now since Jaunty is so netbook friendly now, they have issued the Ubuntu Netbook Remix as its own ISO. If you’ve already installed the standard version of Jaunty, you can add the additional functionality through a single package now at the command line, instead of half a dozen. Simply type: sudo apt-get install ubuntu-netbook-remix This does include a desktop switcher application to flip between the UNR interface as well as the classic desktop, though I still find it quite flaky when it comes to preserving my taskbar applets.

My second install was on my full sized laptop. This time I tried the upgrade solution. It worked well when moving from 8.04 to 8.10. I was expecting similarly positive result. Not so much this time. I got two status bars in before I gave up. After a couple of hours of the “Downloading the upgrade tool” dialog ended up hanging on the first step of “Upgrading Ubuntu to 9.04″. After going to bed and waking up while still at the same screen, I canceled the install. I tried to do the same upgrade on my desktop but encountered the same problem. At that point I decided to just wipe the laptop and start fresh. At least I knew that would work. Now its entirely possible that Canonical’s file servers were just under far too much strain to do an upgrade at that time. It was only days after the release. Perhaps this has been rectified.

Having finished the install on my laptop I was pleased to find a lot more hardware support than I previously had. I have a Gateway ML3109 laptop I picked up for around $300. It’s always given me trouble with the sound and wi-fi. They both worked fine without any modification this time around. There is a bit of a trade off though. My laptop has an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M chipset for graphics. My options use to be either the open source driver which wasn’t very useful for video playback and GL, or I could use the restricted fglrx driver. Seems though with an upgrade to both the fglrx driver and X server were upgraded and no longer support the chipset. I haven’t fully tested out video playback on my laptop yet so I’m not sure how much of a problem this is going to end up being for me.

Using Ubuntu 9.04 in day to day practice hasn’t really made any drastic changes to my life. It is a bit prettier, as each version seems to get. It is definitely faster on when it comes to booting, which is great for portables. But once you get past the improved hardware support at the initial setup, the excitement stops there. It’s more or less back to same old Ubuntu we know and love. It’s definitely a step in the right direction. No reason not to use it if you are setting up a new machine. But I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that you have to upgrade to keep on the cutting edge this time around.