If the Cityscape is only a Dream...

Book Review: The Alchemist

2012-02-06T14:51:00.000-08:00

Book Review: The Alchemist
Paulo Cohelo

"No heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."

"And when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to acheive it."

The alchemist is a book about, amongst many other things, listening to your heart and following your dreams. The story takes several twists, but in the grand scheme of things the book itself is a representation of the circle of life. And once you've read it, you will see why the saying 'its not the end results that matter, but the journey' holds true.

Although the book was first published in 1988, the story itself is set in a period much earlier in the history of spain and the middle-east. The book starts off with our young hero, Santagio, a poor shephard boy sleeping the night in a run down barn with his sheep, in Andalusia, southern Spain.

A recurring dream about gold and treasure takes the boy to a local gypsy who intrepretes the dream at the cost of a small share of the treasure, should the boy find it. There is a strong sense of belief in omens and 'the language of the universe' - the ability for all things to communicate via signs, symbols and timely actions. This intrepetation takes the boy on a journey to the Egyptian pyramids, along which he meets many new and interesting people, some of which are helpful on his quest - and a few who turn out to have a shady disposition.

Towards the end of the book, the boy meeets the alchemist who teaches him the final lessons Santiago needs on his journey to find his own destiny. The boy's understanding of the universe around him and the ability to speak the language of the universe and to communicate to the soul of the world, really brings home the message, that when the boy really desires his treasure, all the forces of the universe conspire to help him achieve it. I shant spoil the ending for you, as things do not always have a happy ending with Paulo Cohelo's writing.

This can easily be described as my favourite book and with good reason too, the book reads almost like an inspirational parable or a self help book. There were some recent speculation about the book being turned into a film, but I find it hard to see how any amount of direction can best such a masterpiece in the transition from the written word to on screen visuals.

I give this book a 5/5, it is definitely worth a read.

Installing Custom Android ROMs

2012-02-05T18:03:00.000-08:00

My previous post discussed why and how to root your android phone.

An even older post looked at a test run of Android Ice Cream Sandwich

Do you want a more feature-rich, customisable, faster, better Android? Read on...

Android phones are designed so that the Android system resides on what is called Read Only Memory (ROM), however once you have rooted your phone, (links to instructions can be found at the top of the article), you now have permission to overwrite the ROM on your phone. You will have to check online to see what ROM images are available for particular make and model of phone. There are hundreds of different ROM's floating around the Internet providing many different features.

I have an 18 month old HTC desire and recently found an Android 4.0 ROM for it, with a few features cut back, which made my phone a lot faster and aesthetic, so I put that on just to give it a quick test run. But alas it is not stable and until it is, I am going to go for perhaps the most recommended and best supported custom ROM available, Cyanogenmod.

As always, take precaution and back up your data. Upgrading the the ROM on your device will void your warranty and may cause hardware issues. Please research your specific make and model carefully to see if anyone else has had problems rooting and installing a ROM, as I cannot be held liable should anything go wrong.

1. Research and get your ROM

The very first thing I would suggest you do is to research a little about your device, see how well it is supported and if anyone has run into any issues whilst upgrading it. Cyanogenmod supports a huge number of phones and has an excellent wiki and forum.

Next your phone needs to be rooted, so go and make sure you do that. A great resource for researching phone and ROM issues is the XDA developers forum.

Go to the homepage for your ROM of choice and download the .zip file for the ROM for your phone and read any instructions/warnings provided.

2. Install ROM Manager

You will need to install ROM Manager from the android market, this is an app that lets you make backups of your ROM image and install new ROMs. Once installed, you will want to select the option to ‘Flash ClockworkMod Recovery’ - this is a lifesaver if the ROM does not install properly as it provides an interface to install ROMs and so on, before booting into the ROM (for my phone, I power down the phone and power back up whilst holding the volume-down button to access the hidden console, it should be the same for you but may vary depending on make and model). Google up on Clockworkmod recovery should you need to use it (hopefully you wont).

3. Backup

Backup!

At this point, and I cannot emphasise this enough, you need to backup your personal data - Flashing a ROM on your phone wipes out everything! Photo’s, videos, music, notes, contacts and any other files you put on your phone. This was quite easy for me, since most of my data (calendar/docs/contacts) is synced automatically to my google account and my multimedia synced with my dropbox. No cables needed :)

It is also a good idea to backup a snapshot of your phones state (called a Nand backup) from within ROM manager; select ‘Backup Current ROM’ - this will make a byte for byte copy of your current ROM image from which you can restore your phone should things not go to plan. You will at this point want to connect your phone to your computer via USB cable and copy that backup folder to somewhere safe on your computer.

4. Install the new ROM

I wont cover formatting your SD card here, as Cyanogenmod doesn't require any complex partitioning to install, even for its apps2sd feature - but should you decide to install another ROM that does, use the ROM Managers partitioning feature - this will erase all data on the SD card.

With your phone connected to your computer, copy the ROM zip file to the top level folder on your SD card. Finally using the ROM Manager, select ‘install ROM from SD card’ and choose your ROM, and let it do its thing. This may take a few minutes and then the first boot will take a few more minutes - but the wait will be worth it.

As always comments are welcome, let us know your thoughts on installing a custom ROM and about any problems, issues or successes you faced.

Viva la Android - or rather ‘viva la Cyanogenmod!’

Rooting Android

2012-01-31T16:25:00.000-08:00

My previous post on testing Android 4.0 generated a huge buzz (huge for this blog), so I thought I'd follow up on how to begin rooting and customising your phone

Warning: If you choose to root your phone, unlock the bootloader or install a custom ROM on it, be forewarned - there is a minute chance that something may go wrong. Backing up your data is not optional, it is mandatory. Do it now, then backup your backup, and make a backup of that too. Also, this WILL void your warranty.

What is rooting and why I should do it?

Rooting (Apple users read: Jailbreak) is a term used to denote taking administrative control of your phone. A smart phone is akin to a modern computer, in that it has an Operating System and user accounts and account permissions that stop you from reading certain files and writing certain files - just as Microsoft windows or any other operating system does. Typically when your phone is switched on your logged in automatically (very much like a computer, without a login screen) to a normal user account, with a fwe restrictions on what parts of the phone you can make changes to. So gaining Root is like logging in to your phone with the admin account, you have full control of it and you can read system files and overwrite them - which will let us do some cool things, as we will see soon enough.

How is it done?

Typically someone has written a program for you, which you will download and put on your PC or laptop, then you connect your phone to your computer and and run the downloaded program. What happens in the background is the PC will run a (kind of) malicious program on your phone, that exploits a bug or flaw on your phone (this varies according to make and model of phone). But the exploit essentially grants higher privileges to whatever account is using the phone.

How is it done (step-by-step)?

I have used a few rooting applications and have had great success with unrevoked and revolutionary. Other tools to consider are SuperOneClick and UnlockRoot. UnlockRoot seems to support the most number of phones, so you may just want to stick with that. But read the forums to see if your chosen application supports your phone

HTC Super Tool - a great tool, designed just for HTC phones

Now, you will need USB drivers for your phone from the manufacturers website. In most cases, your phone will come with a CD with the drivers on it. Just google for the drivers if you do not have the CD.

Next you will need to go to your phones settings menu and enable USB debugging, which for my phone is under Settings > Applications > Development

Enabling USB debugging mode

Connect the phone to your computer via the USB cable, run the program and your phone is now rooted.

So, what now?

Well with a rooted phone you have admin priveleges, so theres quite a bit you can do:

Install a custom ROM on there, to get additional features.

Overclock your phone to speed it up

Underclock the phone to conserve battery

Tether your data connection

Remove annoying pre-installed apps

Setup VPN and or TOR and other security features

plus loads more....

Next time I will walk you through downloading and installing a custom ROM for your phone. Ciao.

A taste of Ice Cream Sandwich

2012-01-29T13:49:00.000-08:00

Its no secret that I am a fan of Android, I like all things android. The open culture, the price, the apps, the ease of building for the system and the ability to mod the software and hardware to my hearts content. No other mobile platform provides any serious hacker with the ability to tinker with the system as much as Android does.

Sure, it has drawbacks too, and at some point in a future article, it would be good to compare the strengths and weaknesses of Android versus other mobile OS's.

Well anyhow, my HTC Desire GSM from mid 2010 was running the leedroid ROM for some time (I chose Leedroid after having experimented with both cyanogenmod and leedroid and decided I prefered the aesthetics of HTC sense). The stock ROM that came with my HTC desire didnt support moving apps to SD card, hence I decided to root the device and put a ROM on there that would allow me to install lots of apps without complaining about space. Leedroid had come to the end of its life, as there had been no update for a few months plus my phone was getting clogged up and needed some spring cleaning. So I thought I'd investigate what the Ice Cream Sandwich buzz was all about.

After a short google search, I found a beta version of ICS for the HTC desire. Stability was not promised, but I figured I would give it a go. Installation was easy as my phone was rooted, all I had to do was put the zip file on my SD card and boot into recovery and install it.

After a short while of playing around with it, I found that the new interface was a very welcome addition. The features that I liked best:

Lockscreen - can open up certain apps, like text messaging directly, so it saves a few taps on the screen, if u receive a message and want to check it.
Updated Marketplace - The new interface looks very nice, although the pricing for some of the content was disagreeable - classic books for example were pretty expensive, compared to what is available for free on project gutenberg.
Notification bar - This was pretty awesome. It lets you control many features of your phone directly, like sounds, music player, data connectivity as well as lets you see the notifications and clear them out with a very innovative slide (shame apple ripped this off completely for iOS5 and are now suing android for tonnes of other patent breaches)
Voice - The voice search is vastly improved and well integrated into the OS.
Interface lift - The interface was given a much needed uplift (so much that the default ICS interface pars well with HTC sense, my long time favourite look for android) - it has awesome animations, subtle interface tweaks and is so much smoother than before.
Settings - This part of the OS recieved a lot of love from the developers, and now includes a data monitoring section (I will be very sorry to see 3G watchdog go from my phone). Battery and memory information has nice graphical data to display usage, which is quite aesthtic.

Ive added a few screenshots of my experimentation below (click to enlarge thumbnails), for the full set of images, visit the album on my google+ account.

Overall, the new interface was much to my liking, the beta version meant that there were a few crashes, especially the camera app - which managed to take 2 pictures before crashing. I dont think this is ready for day to day usage, but its clearly on the way. Id be more than happy to put a more stable version on this and use it for a little longer, before making the jump to a newer handset.

For more details on how to install and run this yourself, use the comments below to direct specific questions at me.

I'll try and get a video of this up and running soon.

CLKF: Splitting files in linux

2012-01-20T05:14:00.000-08:00

Command Line Kung Fu: Splitting files in linux

So I have a flash drive thats pretty irrevocably damaged, and for some reason or another it wont format into NTFS, but happily formats into FAT32 (exFAT is an option that I chose to ignore). And I have a 4.4GB file to transfer.

We all know that storing a file larger than 4GB is not possible on a partition formatted in FAT32 (which is a pretty old Microsoft file system type, when no-one actually had files larger than a few megabytes, now superseded by NTFS in an age when video files, Operating System images and games come at several Gigabytes in size, and a Terabyte is becoming the norm for any PC sold); In any case the solution to this problem was to split the large file into several smaller chunks that would fit on the drive or several drives.

There is a whole heap of tools available to this end, both freeware and commercial. A quick search on google reveals that the choices available are numerous. Any compression program (7Zip ftw!) does file splitting too. What I want is a command line tool, that will do the task as minimalistically as possible.

One of the original linux tools created for this purpose was 'tar', which stands for Tape ARchive, which is able to bundle a file or a collection of files into one (or several) file (essentially a precursor for ZIP without compression) ready to be stored on what was the best form of backup medium in those days, magnetic tape.

So using tar on the command line, heres how to split a file up:

$ tar -cvM --tape-length=1024000 --file=OUTPUT_FILE1.tar ORIGINAL_FILE

The --tape-length parameter accepts data in kilobytes, so 1024000 = 1GB. Just keep entering sequential filenames when it asks for another filename for each part it creates.
And to join files back up:

$ tar -xvM --file=INPUT_FILE1.tar ORIGINAL_FILE

So that works, but it isn't the most simplistic solution; there is also the much more simpler, split and cat commands:

$ split -b 1024m debian.iso debiansplit

and then when I had to join the files back:

$ cat debiansplit* > debian.iso

split command (click to enlarge)

Some more awesome Command Line Kung Fu to the rescue!

On the Wikipedia Blackout, SOPA, PIPA and Firebug

2012-01-18T08:27:00.000-08:00

So this SOPA and PIPA thing is threatening the Freedom of people across the globe and people are making their voices heard. I'm one of the ones that believe that the internet should remain free, and I think its important for awareness of this evil vile act to be propagated. GoDaddy got slated a few weeks back as thousands of customers left and changed domain providers (I didnt change my domains held by them, but im just going to let them expire since I no longer need them), and now Wikipedia is making a stand, great.

However during the course of the day I came to realise how much Wikipedia really means to me. I've never contributed a single article to the site but I use it on a frequent basis. So frequent that I panicked at the loss of Wikipedia for 24 hours.

With a heavy heart and the pain and loss of Wikipedia urging me to do something, I decided to investigate how the blackout was created. Assuming its for 24 hours only, it would make sense for the designers to add some sort of CSS trick to overlay the blackout image over the normal content. So that come tomorrow morning they could remove the said CSS code and have the site return to normal.

I investigated this angle using the good old 'firebug' add-on for firefox. This is an invaluable tool for any person interested in web development or design, and I have been a faithful user since 2007. Lo and behold, the code showed the addition of some 'display: none' css styles for the content and the addition of a new Div element that overlays the entire page with the SOPA message. The solution for quick access? Change the content div style to 'display:block' and the sopaOverlay div to 'display:none'. (Click on images to enlarge)

Although this gave me access to a single wikipedia page, the larger issue at hand regarding SOPA and any similar law's still remains unresolved. Here's hoping that freedom is handed back to the people. Happy CSS Hacking!

Command Line Kung Fu

2011-12-30T19:40:00.000-08:00

Recently I had to migrate hard drives, due to a disappointing Samsung Spinfoint F3 hard drive failure (this is the second Samsung F3 1TB hard drive that I've had, thats gone on to meet its maker). This drive wasn't fully dead, and I figured I'd take what I could whilst it was on its last leg. Thanks in part due to Amazons speedy delivery of a 2TB Seagate Barracuda Eco-Green Sata 3 (6Gb/s) drive.

Now in my opinion, windows copy and paste, just doesn't cut it for copying large files. It may say it has copied the files but I have had MD5 hashes fail before, and given that this hard drive wasn't performing optimally I just didnt want to risk copying and then pasting corrupt data. I usually prefer copying from the command line as I find it a bit more effective.

There are win32 versions of md5 hash checking programs available, but doing singular hash checks sucks when you have multiple files in multiple folders, hidden in multiple depths. I needed a recursive program to check md5 sums for files with certain extensions only... hmmmn.

Batch file with some sort of for loop? Nah, since every windows box I have has a copy of the excellent cygwin program installed, why not go all out and do it the linux way? I mean I have the Bash shell, with a whole load of unix utilies installed on the computer, including md5sum; So ladies and gentlemen, I now produce below, for your perusal, the extravagant single liner I used to alleviate my problems (not all of them, mind you, I still have to claim on my Samsung's warranty, but this command solved one of my many problems):

#find ./ -maxdepth 5 -type f -name "*.iso" -exec md5sum {} \;

This should ideally be piped into some sort of text file for comparision to the source, to ensure that the files were copied exactly bit-for-bit as opposed to a logical copy. Cygwins 'cp' command outdid windows default file copy routines, since all of the md5 hashes checked out. Attached is a screenshot of the sort of output this command produces. (Click to see enlarged version)

Once again, some awesome Command Line Kung Fu saves the day. Happy new year!

I should point out a few things here:

Cygwin is a great tool, built upon greater tools with some excellent (and ancient) Unix heritage.

Windows 'just works' most of the time, perhaps the file copy errors were hardware faults (i.e. temperature, seek speeds, time of day) - so this is by no means a comprehensive or fair experiment.

I'm aware there is a utility (with a cygwin port) called md5deep, but it wouldn't search recursively for .iso files. Their 'man' page states 'Please note that recursive mode cannot be used to examine all files of a given file extension'.

And finally Samsungs spinpoint drives have recieved some excellent reviews, I was perhaps unlucky with 2 faulty drives (bought at different times), dont let this put you off Samsungs hard drives, they are an awesome company coming up with some awesome products (foreshame on Apple for trying to stall competition in court by some very underhanded techniques against Samsung).

Your Browser Really Does Matter!

2011-12-09T07:21:00.001-08:00

Yourbrowsermatters.org fail?
So Microsoft recently launched a new website, yourbrowsermatters.org to make users aware of the need for browser security; This happened some time ago, I just didn't think to publish a blog post about it. But whilst at work today, as part of my organisations state of security, I investigated into the site a little to see how it worked and what it showed.

I have to admit I found the website a little preposterous (a little, really? ha! infact it was very preposterous). First off, the website only rates the most popular web browsers that run on the Windows platform. Visiting the site in Apples Safari browser gave me an apologetic message indicating that the site didn't support that browser.

However visiting the site on a browser within the Windows platform, gives your current browser a rating out of 4, based on various factors, such as whether the browser prevents phishing attacks, provides a sandboxed environment for your tabs, whether the browser prevents malicious file downloads and finally it covers security issues like whether the browser alleviates cross-site scripting and prevent non-secure content viewing on secure HTTPS pages.

Opera: small fish

Whilst testing it appears that microsoft doesn't provide ratings for the Opera web browser either, this is most likely due to its small market share and Microsoft has no reason to pursue Opera's userbase.

The ratings for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 9 are shown below:

Firefox: Noob!

Chrome: L00ser!

Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome both scored a measly 2.5 out of 4, according to Microsoft, and users interested in seeing why can click through the site on various links to compare the browsers results compared. (Edit: This link should take you directly to the page.)

Microsofts own browser Internet Explorer blows the competition out of the water with an amazing 4 out of 4 (pfft...)!

The points it heralds itself with are best avoided with safe browsing and smart thinking, no need for bloated browsers slowing my life down.

I do, remain a little sceptical about microsofts research and reasoning. True, I dont have a research and development department with millions of dollars of funding, but a quick look at wikipedia (not the most reliable, but fairly accurate in this case) and then following the links from there to securityfocus, show Internet Explorer 9 infested with 24 security flaws, Firefox with 2 vulnerabilities and Chrome with none!
Just out of interest Opera had 1 vulnerability, and Safari had an astonishing 0. These statistics are accurate as of today (09/12/2011).

As a sidenote, November 2011 saw Chrome overtake Firefox's userbase for the first time.

It should be clear that the yourbrowsermatters.org site is nothing more than a marketing gimmick devised to conceal the truth from non tech-savy users, as has been the tradition in business practice from the big boys. US users can also get vouchers and various other rewards from microsoft just by downloading and using IE9 (I wont point out how desperate this seems to be coming from the browser that once occupied 80% market share).

I shall bid you farewell, with this closing thought, its just a matter of time before someone uses some Javascript or server side code to exploit any number of these 24 exploits on IE9 (as they have been doing for years) and install some malware or adware on your computer, so I will take my chances with Firefox or Chrome (as I have been doing for years, without any incidents).

The Great Trans-Siberian PC Build - part 6

2011-11-22T14:10:00.001-08:00

This is part of a series on a computer that I am building. For links to all of the articles in the series, click here.

AMD Phenom II x6 1100T Black Edition

The Great Trans-Siberian PC Build - part 5

2011-11-16T06:45:00.001-08:00

This is part of a series on a computer that I am building. For links to all of the articles in the series, click here.

NZXT Phantom (White).

The first thing I noticed when I got home was the particularly large box awaiting in the corner of my living room. Although I failed to measure it with any sort of scientific rigour, off the top of my head, the box easily came to my waist or perhaps even higher.

That by my standards is quite large for a box containing a computer case. Despite the reviews, I failed to take into account the physical measurements of the case. Once unpacked, it is huge!

On the plus side though, the case is very beautifully crafted. It may not be to everyone's liking, but it reminds me of a clone storm trooper from the Star Wars franchise. It is a full tower, made of sturdy steel, and has been designed with the aid of a professional case modder. The size of the case easily lends itself to a computer builder, as it gives plenty of room for maneuverability and placing system components.

Here are some basic specifications:
Type: Full ATX tower
Material: Steel/plastic
Dimensions: 22.2cm depth, 62.3cm high and 54cm wide
Cooling: 7 fans (4 included)
Expansion slots: 7
Drive bays: 5 CD/DVD drive bays, 7 internal bays

The Phantom comes in 3 colours, but other tweaked versions are available online

As per mentioned above, it is a remarkably large case, with plenty of slots for anything and everything you might want to add to it. I cannot see a scenario whereby my computer would need 7 hard drive bays or 5 DVD Rom drives. Perhaps a CD/DVD writer combo and a bluray drive, but 5 drives?

The 7 expansion slots on the back are a welcome addition though for people looking to do some SLI or crossfire configuration on their graphics cards. The large size and weight of the fully constructed case makes it discordant, if your objectives are to carry it around to LAN parties.

In terms of air-flow the case is brilliant as it comes with 4 fans and has space for 3 more, for a total of 7 fans. 2 large ones (192mm) on the top of the case, 2 small (120mm) at the side, and one on the front, back and bottom each. Once connected very fan also comes with a airflow speed control dial on the top of the case, which lights up in a lovely blue hue. However, I find that the hum of even the 4 default fans are quite loud even on the lowest speed. I cannot fathom what this would sound like with all 7 fans on at the highest setting.This is not a computer to leave running at night processing background tasks if you have trouble sleeping like I do.

The case also has a button on the back to control whether LED lights are enabled or disabled. This is handy at LAN party's when you want to show off your case a bit, or when you need to keep the PC running at night but don't want bright lights to distract your sleep. However, as mentioned before, the large size/weight and loud fans already hinder both of those situations.

The large size of the case lends itself to several nice features such as a very nice cable tidy system and the ability to add plenty of water cooling configurations to the system and lots of additional extra's like SSD's, hard drives and optical drives. Plus there is a large modding community ready to share and review lots of mods to keep the enthusiast happy.

Overall, the design of the case is absolutely stunning and the level of care taken in building the case is a showing of truly masterful craftsmanship. If there was a mid-sized case like this one, it would have been perfect for my needs.

Update: So after purchasing this and building my computer, it turns out that NZXT have just released a new Phantom Case, the Phantom 410 is a mid tower phantom lookalike! Why couldn't they release this 2 months ago? Isnt that always the way?

The Great Trans-Siberian PC Build - part 4

2011-11-14T09:31:00.001-08:00

This is a part of a series on a computer that I am building. For links to all of the articles in the series, click here.

ATI Radeon HD 6970

Sapphire Radeon HD 6970

This card comes in several versions, but after having read a few reviews it seems that the most overclockable aftermarket card was is the Sapphire Radeon HD 6970, as opposed to the version released by Gigabyte, MSI or even the Asus reference card. The XFX 6970 comes close, but performance wise I felt this was a slight bit better, though it cost a few £'s more.

The first thing anyone will notice about this graphics card is that it is big and heavy, and as such it has some hefty power requirements and takes a standard 6-pin and a 8-pin power connector. With all of that power, you do get some pretty hefty processing prowess. The card easily competes with its Nvidia rival, the GTX 570; Though both certainly have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Some specs about the card:

Power requirements: 1x6pin &1x8pin

Interface type: PCI express 2.1 x16

Clock speed: 880MHz

Video Memory: 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 SDRAM

Memory clockspeed: 5500 MHz = (5.5GHz)
API's supported: OpenGL 4.1, DirectX 11
Max. Resolution: 2560x1600

Output: 2x DVI, HDMI, 2x mini display ports

cutout of the internals of the card

With that out of the way, the card supports, what AMD refer to as AMD Eyefinity, which is another way of saying the graphics card supports up to 6 monitors. This particular model comes with 5 output ports, but I dont think I have the money to buy enough decent monitors to game with 5 active monitors.

I chose this card, due to some overclocking reviews stating that the sapphire 6970 was the most overclockable of the aftermarket cards (XFX 6970 being the second best for overclocking ability). And I may at some point try and up the clock rate to the fabled 950MHz and also attempt upping the voltage and other parameters as much as possible.

The card fared well in most technical reviews with very high frame rates in most games, however my purchase from dabs.com (this in no way reflects on the solid build quality from sapphire or brilliant customer services offered by dabs.com) was a dud card. After several attempts, where the card worked in some instances and failed after a few minutes of use - I tested all of the components belonging to my build one by one, and isolated the cause of the fault to the graphics card. I assume that some sort of static build-up or a heavy drop during delivery was the cause. The box certainly had a slightly dented corner upon delivery. Dabs instantly offered a refund, and even arranged for a free pickup of the dead card.

All in all, a faulty card (just my luck), but great customer service and a great graphics card. I plan on purchasing another one of these, perhaps after my I tug the reigns on my spending limits a bit.

Microsofts TechNet site

2011-11-12T18:29:00.001-08:00

Just a quick post regarding the TechNet site run by Microsoft. Although most of Microsofts time is spent trying to wring more money from its consumers, every now and again Microsoft releases some insanely good products and ideas, examples include 'windows xp and 7'*. TechNet is one of those amazingly good things Microsoft does (it now incorporates the tools from sysinternals - which too are amazing). I have read and made use of the many articles posted on the TechNet site.

The latest one that I've read, "Use a USB Key to Install Windows 7", shows the steps necessary to put a windows OS installation .iso file onto a USB flash drive for installation via USB. Which is pretty handy for installing on a netbook or a machine with no physical CD/DVD drive. Viva Microsoft!

*(There is the whole other side to products that are either ripped off or just plain bad, and things like the kinect and vista fall into those categories respectively, then theres the whole IE6/7/8 fiasco and the closed source culture they embrace - but thats a huge flame war awaiting to happen, so I will refrain from discussing it any further)

The Great Trans-Siberian PC Build - part 3

2011-11-08T18:39:00.001-08:00

This is a part of a series on a computer that I am building. For links to all of the articles in the series, click here.

Asus Crosshair V Formula 990FX

The Asus Crosshar V Formula is the latest incarnation of the popular enthusiasts board from Asus' Republic of Gamers department. It is designed with the serious overclocker in mind and it comes with a whole heap of features to help those in pursuit of faster clock speeds. In fact, whilst researching and writing this piece, it has come to my attention that the current world record for an overclocked personal computer runs on this board at a whopping 8.4GHz across all 8 cores on an AMD FX octa-core processor!

The motherboard taken out of its packaging.

First off, let me run over some of the specification of the motherboard:

CPU: The motherboard claims to be AM3+ meaning that it supports Athlon II, Sempron, Phenom II and the newest FX series of processors. Which means it has support for up to 8 core processors with up to a 140W of power drawn through it safely.

Chipset: The chipset on the motherboard is the AMD 990FX/SB950, which I apologise doesn't hold much meaning to me, except that it is a newer design and is faster and better than the older chipsets.

Memory: The motherboard has a total of 4 DIMM slots that accept DDR3 RAM, up to 8GB each for a total of 32GB. Which is plenty of upgrade-ability, should future versions of windows or firefox start hogging up huge amounts of RAM. (In their defence, the newer versions of Firefox, 7 and 8 that is, have focused on speeding up Firefox and fixing memory leaks; Mozilla have done a great job so far and I am now slowly shifting back to Firefox from Chrome). The RAM slots support a variety of default speeds and overclocked speeds and voltages, which is great for people wanting to overclock their RAM modules to get their system a few nanoseconds faster.

Expansion cards/GPU: The board supports a variety of PCIe type expansion cards. And also allows for up to 3 graphics cards to work in tandem. The terminology for this is SLI (for Nvidia cards) and CrossfireX (for ATI based cards).

Storage: For those of us who have a lot of files and require large amounts of storage, this motherboard provides ample storage ports in the form of 6GB SATA and 2 eSATA ports (one external on the back). The 6 SATA ports could effectively be hooked up to 2TB hard drives for a massive 12TB of storage :O otherwise, they could also be used for a RAID setup of your choosing. Being price conscious, I don't intend to fill up my case with lots of hard drives and I may make do with 2 hard drives and possibly one SSD for the OS installation.

This also gives me an idea to run a test to see if I can beat the 14 second Debian boot time that some people claim to be able to do. An operating system booting in less than 14 seconds, now that is true art.

USB: The motherboard has 6 USB 3.0 ports (4 at the back, and 2 on the motherboard, which require additional cables to reroute to the front of the case). USB 3.0 is a massive increase on USB 2.0 speeds and devices touting the USB 3.0 labels are springing up on websites that sell these products. The high price point and low availability is probably holding back these products and as prices become lower, we should see sale figures go up as well as general usage of USB 3.0. As I dont have any USB 3.0 compatible hardware yet (yes I know, shame on me), this is a great addition for future-proofing my PC.

The amount of effort put into the motherboard shows

Audio: Asus have built into the motherboard, what they call the SupremeFX X-Fi 2 audio controller. It features improved sound quality over default on-board sound chipsets, but the labelling and marketing strategy hides away the fact that most of the complex audio encoding/decoding is done with an audio codec via the device driver. This may cause issues for people considering running Linux or Hackintosh projects - as I'm unsure about driver availability for this motherboard for other platforms. The sound is indeed brilliant compared to a default sound card on my old motherboard. And for audiophiles and people craving better sound for their games this will suffice. For the more serious music makers, perhaps you should consider purchasing a high end discrete sound card - this is not a replacement.

The thunderbolt add-on card (if you purchase that with the motherboard (I don't think it is sold separately)) provides better sound quality and also bundles a dedicated networking card, that supposedly performs some sort of magic to enable faster and better gaming in a LAN environment. This may be due to throttling bandwidth or performing hardware based packet QOS in realtime. Eitherway if sound and LAN are an absolute necessity, this is a great add-on to purchase. For me, I didnt bother with it, as the motherboard already performs great out of the box.

Overclocking: The motherboard has a tonne of overclocking features built in, such as an advanced UEFI BIOS that allows saving multiple profiles and an automatic recovery mode should your last overclock shut the PC down. Since I've never used the board before I wont comment on these features here, but as I do build my PC, I will comment on what overclocking features are included and how effective they are.

The motherboard comes with enough basic support for the BIOS and OS install, the DVD that comes along with the PC includes windows drivers (and a nice Asus InstALL feature - that installs all the required drivers for the chipset). The DVD also seems to include linux drivers (yay - for dual booters), but as of yet, I haven't tested them and cannot comment further.

This really is just the tip of the iceberg. The motherboard comes with plenty more features and I suggest you go over to the Asus site or the ROG site to check out all of the features.

The Great Trans-Siberian PC Build - part 2

2011-11-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

This is a part of a series on a computer that I am building. For part 1, and links to all of the articles in the series, click here.

Now I will admit that the title of the post is a little off-beat for a PC build; After all what has a PC build got to do with Siberia or a Siberian railway network? But... I did name it after investing some thought into it, and my reasoning is explained below.

The Trans-Siberian railway is the worlds longest railway network in existance today, connecting Russia with the far east, branching out to various countries and smaller lines en-route. It happens to be one of the longest running railway projects too with ongoing work and constant upgrades to the lines.

The great Trans-Siberian railway

Through its 9,289km length, it traverses both urban and rural areas, encompassing some of the most awe inspiring scenery in eastern europe and the orient.

The views along the railway!

The railway lines themselves are quite nicely lined with amenities and features oft found in higher rated hotel chains, making the ardous journey just that little more enjoyable. I s hould point out that I am in no way related to the company that runs these lines and am not advocating or advertising their services. In fact I have never travelled on the Trans-Siberian railway and hope that I do get a chance to make that journey some day; But thats another story, for another day. for more information onn the Trans-Siberian, see the external links here.

So why is the article named after a eastern european railway? Well, the computer build has been planned in my mind for a very long time, just as the railway probably initially was and it is (perhaps not in the grand scale of things, but in my mind) equally important (to me, both as a computer system and a learning experience). My plans are to build a reasonably powerful system, with good specs but above all it must be customisable and extendable, just as a railway. And finally, just as the railway, the system must be cost effective and as environmentally friendly as it is possible for a gaming computer.

That I feel is enough non-technical blurb. Lets move onto the more important aspects of the build. Shall we begin by examining the parts I would like to include on my computer?

Motherboard: Asus Crosshair Formula V 990FX. A slightly pricey but powerful motherboard with a huge selection of additional features from Asus. It supports AM3+ chips, so its good for future AMD chips as well as the current AM3 series of chips (I know the new Fx series 8-core processors were launched a few weeks ago). USB 3.0 for super fast USB speeds, up to 32GB of RAM, so its extendable for future-proofing. Another bonus is its support for 3-way SLI or Crossfire (so I can choose to use up to 3 NVidea or ATI graphics cards in tandem for raw processing speeds). It has enhanced audio processing built into the motherboard, which, if I am to believe the reviews, sounds good enough for gaming, so I wont bother purchasing a seperate sound card. Finally it has a whole slew of overclocking features built-in, which is my main attraction to this board. More on the motherboard on another day.

Processor: AMD Phenom II x6 1100T Black Edition. When I first decided on my build, this was AMD's top of the Range processor. Now superceded by the FX series' 8 core processors. Never the less with a base speed of 3.3GHz, this will be powerful and overclockable (I've seen 4.2GHz as a stable speed on these).

Memory: Corsair Vengeance 2x4GB. The motherboard allows overclocking RAM, and with a trusted manufacturer behind these, I trust that these units will serve me well. Since these are pluggable, I may replace them later with RAM with lower latency to see if I can garner a faster system overall. For now, these are cheap and cheerful.

GPU: ATI Radeon HD 6970. Super powerful GPU, with support for the latest and greatest direct X and OpenGL games. Good framerates in all of the new games and supports multiple monitors at HD resolutions. Overclockable too.

Hard Drive: I currently have an old 1TB SATA drive. Its a Samsung Spinpoint F3 drive with 3Gbps speeds. Not the best (or most reliable) drive, but I got it at a bargain price when 1TB used to cost an arm and a leg (I still have all my limbs intact, so it really was a bargain). The first drive did start making some funky clicking noises, which I returned to ebuyer for a second drive, which has been behaving for the last 12 months. I will reuse this drive for a while, since hard drive prices are at an all time high due to the unfortunate floodings in Thailand causing distrubution issues for UK retailers.

Perhaps in the future, I will purchase a few 2TB drives and configure them in a RAID setup. And use a SSD for the OS and gaming.

Cooling: Corsair H80 liquid CPU cooler. This really is my first venture into liquid cooling, so I'm just going out on a limb here. But there are plenty of good reviews for Corsairs H80, and one of the main deciding factors is that they finally included brackets for AM3 motherboards unlike the previous H60/70 releases where it was for just intel boards.

Power Supply: BeQuiet EP 600W 80 plus Gold PSU. Some computer system builders are particularly picky about having modular power supply units. For me its not such a big issue as I dont mind neatly packing away excess cables out of sight on a non-modular unit. A modular unit is ideal so that you can just plug in the cables you need. But this particular power supply unit won me over by both its £60 price tag and the 80 plus gold sticker on it. It is non-modular, but I guess you you really can't have it all. The 80 plus gold ensures 90% or more efficiency from the power supply so that only 10% or so is really wasted as heat during power conversion; Which is a big step up from my current 50~60% energy efficiency.

Case: NZXT phantom white. This looked absolutely stunning, so it went on my list straight away. It was designed by a professional case modder for NZXT, it has plenty of airflow, fan control, accessability, and a power cable routing system for my non-modular power supply. Also, did I mention that it looks awesome?

Well those are the only parts that I can think up of that are crucial to my build. Perhaps I'll add a few components in the near future. For now, as I order these products and they begin arriving, I'll try and review each one as best as possible. Till next time, ciao.

The Great Trans-Siberian PC Build - part 1

2011-11-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

So for the last few months (or years rather, since the inception of the idea) I have been working on building a computer all for myself. Admittedly I'm not a hardware person; I prefer being in the comfort of my seat and programming hardware to see it do some pretty amazing stuff, but when it comes to actually putting together hardware I'm about as good at it as an ogre is with china kitchenware.

Well after toying with the idea, I did a feasability analysis and a cost analysis (very formal and very SLC). I decided that my initial build would be to spend in the region of £750 to build a powerful AMD based system. But as with any project, deadlines and cost are two things that are hard to keep a reign on.

Next time, I'll show you what my parts list look like and how much I oversaw my budget by.

Part 1 - Introductions (this page)
Part 2 - Components list
Part 3 - Asus Crosshair V Formula
Part 4 - Sapphire Radeon HD 6970
Part 5 - NZXT Phantom
Part 6 - AMD Phenom II 1100T Black Edition
... This is a work in progress, so further parts will be added as I complete them

Work and other updates

2011-11-05T17:05:00.000-07:00

Work and other updates,

So its been almost virtually forever (yes, I deem a few months of inactivity as a virtual forever) since I've last posted on this blog. The blog is almost like any other diary project I've undertaken, they all start off with a flurry of activity and ideas and then a few weeks down the line the interest dies down only to be surpassed by whatever new project takes my fancy.

Well just an update, I've left one job, been out of work for 4 months and now I have been working at another job for just over 6 months. Time truly flies!

Starting off with MySQL

2010-09-17T07:07:00.000-07:00

Ive just had to install a MySQL server on one of our Debian machine and thought it would be great to add a short tutorial for people who would like to start installing and configuring their MySQL databases under linux. I'll assume that you are using a Debian based linux, but I cant imagine the commands being too different in any other linux.

So what is MySQL? It is a Relational Database Management System (RDMS), which runs on a server/client architecture and provides multi-user access to the data simultaneously. Did I also mention that its insanely fast, and a great place to learn about RDMS without having to pay $$$ for an enterprise database. (Quite recently they were acquired by oracle, but the development of the community edition is still ongoing).

MySQL is "the worlds most popular open source database" in their own words, and I have a feeling they are right about that, as it appears everyone who develops web application usually follows the PHP/MySQL or RoR/MySQL path to start off with.

Ok, heard enough? Lets get on with it already.

Installation:

Fire up a terminal window and give yourself superuser access, using the 'su' command. Ubuntu users, remember to 'sudo' your commands.

apt-get install mysql-server

That pulls up the latest version of the mysql server from the debian repository and installs it. Read the instructions while installation is ongoing, and if you are in a server environment you will need to allow the mysql database to start at boot up.

Usage:

To test your installation type:

mysql

If that lets you in to the database console, voila mysql has been successfully installed, although you dont really need to do this, as the installation should quit cleanly without errors. If it complains, ensure you have hall the needed packages and google your way out of the mess.

now 'quit' out of the mysql console, and set your root password as follows:

mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD

If you want more information on using the database, the MySQL site has some great webinars. Go check them out: http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/

Thats all I have for you for now, I dont really have time or space to describe mysql usage here, so we can leave that as a topic for a later date.

Locked out of Ubuntu?

2010-08-09T15:04:00.001-07:00

You may be faced with a situation similar to one in which I found myself, in which case here's the story of my escapade. I recently dug up an old laptop which had Ubuntu installed on it, and I had no idea what I set up as the password for my user account on the system. Before formatting the entire hard drive, I wanted to check if I had any valuable data on the hard drive, so my options were:

- Slave the IDE hard drive on a system that can read ext3
- Use a linux boot CD to see if I could mount the hard drive
- Attempt to boot into bash as root

I chose to go for the option as it was the easiest to do, without having to get up from my seat :)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note:

By default, Ubuntu installs a recovery mode in the GRUB menu, if thats there, then you can enter the recovery console (which puts you as the root user) and use the passwd command to change any users password.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Unfortunately I didnt have that option as I took it out as a security measure. Little know to some people is that the grub boot menu can be edited in most cases by pressing 'e' whilst the menu is showing. (You may need to press the escape key to enable this feature.

So highlight the kernal you want to edit, and press 'e', highlight the line that begins with the word kernal and press 'e' again.

Now you need to edit the end of this line and delete the 'ro quiet splash' part and replace it with 'rw init=/bin/bash'. This will boot the kernal straight into bash as root.

Save this by pressing escape and it should take you back to the previous screen. Press 'b' to boot into the kernal, for which you have just edited the settings for.

From here you should be logged into a shell with root access. To change any users password, simply use the passwd command.

passwd [username]

And you have regained control of your account again. Don't forget to change the boot settings back to what they were.

Happy hacking :)

Introductory post

2010-06-21T15:57:00.000-07:00

“I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.”

Welcome to my blog, this is currently a place for me to jot down any pressing ideas and for me to brainstorm anything and everything I can think up of.

To start off, I suppose a little bit of information about who I am is in order. Well here we are, meet me, my name is Husman, im a computer science graduate, I like tinkering with software and hardware. My current list of interests and projects involve playing with Linux and freeBSD, Ajax, OOP languages like Java, C/C++ and python, 3D graphics, web based programming, databases and astro physics. (Ok, the part about the astro physics isn't entirely true).

I'll be putting up some more information on any projects I take part in, and document what I did, in the hopes that you'll find it interesting or of some use. With that said, I think its enough for the first post.

This is me, signing off.