Little Star

I use to own an older PSP which I never played. After I got my 30GB iPod my PSP just collected dust. I decided to trade it to a friend for an old Dell Latitude CSx laptop which I dubbed, “Little Star”. It was old and small. It didn’t have a hard drive or CD-ROM drive and only one USB port which I found out much later doesn’t work. It did come with a large docking station which had a network port, 2 USB ports and a CD-ROM. All I needed was a decent hard drive and I’d be up and running, or so I thought.

My friend said he knew a guy who would give him a drive. The first one he brought me was a 60GB drive that was too thick to fit in the slide out hard drive sleeve. So he took it back to his friend and 4 days later he handed me a 40GB drive that he said was the same size as the broken drive he took out of the laptop. I installed it in my laptop and tried to boot from the dock CD-ROM. As you can guess it didn’t work either. After exhausting the dozen or so tricks I knew at the time (this is before I got my A+) I gave up and decided to take the whole laptop to visit my friend who is a very busy guy.

When he had a few minutes I gave him a brief overview of what I’d tried and the results. He was surprised that the CD-ROM didn’t work because he said he’d used it to upgrade the system from 2000 to XP before the other hard drive went bad.

We looked at it talked about options for a few minutes. He suggested we use an external USB case to format the drive and make it bootable using FDISK, then move the i386 folder over with the install files so I could simply install the hard drive and boot it from the files on the drive itself.

To summarize that was a long and drawn out adventure and it didn’t work. In fact it seems Windows is unable to read files from the same drive it is trying to install itself too. Hmm, at this point it looked like I would never get this laptop to run Windows. So I thought about trying to install some flavor of Ubuntu. Again, that is another long story that ended up not working. So I put the laptop into one of the nice bags my friend had given me and set it aside. I was really busy working as a sales person at a local computer store. While at the same time preparing to pass my A+ certification and move over into Network+. I was too busy to work on setting up the laptop properly. So it sat in its bag for over 4 months.

Three days ago I woke up and the idea of how to fix it just popped into my head. It was a strange kind of knowing. Like an old puzzle finally coming together.

I got online and looked up how to install Windows XP with PXE (pixie boot) which is a network protocol. I found a few ideas that seemed promising. Then I stumbled on to a simple three page tutorial that seemed possible. I downloaded all the related utilities and support files to my flash drive. I stopped on my way out to ask another friend of mine if he thought it would work. He’s done more network installs than I have and I was hoping I wasn’t missing any info. He mentioned a few things I needed to be aware of, which I was. He said if I do it right it should work.

When I got home I was in a strange state. I didn’t want to allow myself to hope it would work. I wanted to just try it and see what would happen. This laptop has been unusable for so long that I had almost totally given up on it.

Luckily I had printed the setup instructions so I could follow along step by step. The idea in a nutshell was to run a small TFTP server from my desktop. This was basically installing Windows over a network cable into the laptop. It was uncharted territory for me so I was a bit anxious. I followed the setup by setup instructions to the letter and only messed up once. A quick reboot and I was back where I left off. After that it was just a matter of waiting for the files to transfer over to the laptop. Installing Windows in general is a long tedious process that usually takes an hour or more. I found installing Windows over a network cable added another 30 minutes.

Finally after all this time it’s finally up and running. Of course it still doesn’t have a CD/DVD-ROM. As a work-around I installed Daemon tools lite. This little program creates a virtual CD/DVD drive. Now I can transfer .ISO images to the laptop and mount them with Daemon tools. The image files behave just like read-only CD or DVD’s. Of course I have to make sure I have enough room on the 40GB drive before I drop stuff on there.

Now I’ve got it setup with all my favorite development tools for web development. I’ve even installed StarCraft on it in case someone wants to play a game with me.

I’m relieved I finally got my little Star to work. The only thing left is to install some Antivirus software and make sure it’s clean. Otherwise it’s mainly going to be used for development.

I think I’ll celebrate my victory with food and herbal tea!

Floppies are Dead

At the moment I do not have internet access at my apartment. This is something that has slowed me down for the last 6 months. Every resource I need is online which means I have to go to my technical school or someplace else to access the internet. Lucky for me I have flash drives with portable applications.

There are so many sites I visit on a regular basis it’s hard to keep track of them all. So, yesterday I decided to make myself a list of my favorite web sites. At first I was just using a plain text file. Once I had a list I thought it would be much easier to use if I turned it into an HTML file and made my list into links. So, I spent about 3 minutes dropping in all the code and even adding some CSS to make it look a bit different. Once I was done I saved it to my 4GB flash drive without thinking.

I was planning on giving this HTML file to a friend of mine at school. While I was looking through one of my stacks of DVD-R backups a floppy disk fell from its hiding place on the shelf next to one of the spindle cases. I must have put it there when I moved in and forgotten all about it. I pick up this little 1.33MB relic and wondered what might be on it. I popped it into my ancient floppy drive which was originally in a very old Windows system. It made that old familiar grinding noise and then it spat out an error message saying it couldn’t read the disk. I removed the disk and replaced it in the drive. I double clicked the A drive and presto it opened up to showed me some old text files. Nothing worth keeping so I tried to format the floppy. All the while wondering what I might be able to use this thing for. Like rediscovering a tiny box and trying to think of what might fit inside it.

Another error message saying it couldn’t format the disk popped up. I closed it and tried again. This time it worked. “Hey, my Links HTML file is only 4KB I’m sure it will fit on this floppy. “ I said to myself with a bit of excitement. Maybe floppies might be useful for trading text and HTML files. Since I work with those kinds of files, using floppies would give me a quick way to hand my files to people.

Normally I have to plug in one of my flash drives and transfer the file to the desktop. The other person uses their flash drive to save it or I email it to them. It’s kind of a pain because of the way the some of the computers at my school are setup.

Now I had a 3.5 floppy disk with an HTML of all my favorite links. I took it to my school and handed it to my friend. He looked at me like I had just handed him a dead rodent of some kind. “What is this?” he eyed it warily. “It’s a list of my favorite links in HTML format. I think you’ll like it.” I said, proud of my work and the ingenious reuse of old technology. “Sounds cool”, he said with a strange tone in his voice. “However, I don’t have a floppy drive on my MacBook Pro or any of my home systems. I haven’t needed to use floppies for years.” In that moment it was clear that the floppy has become extinct. Like the dinosaurs before them the majestic floppies will be dropped in landfills to transform into oil millions of years from now. They were useful and necessary in their time but now they are little more than useless square bits of plastic.

Luck for me I did put a copy of my links HTML on my flash drive. I decided to log into my email to send my friend a copy of the file with a small note saying, “Floppies Are Dead”.

Serious Server

I have an old PC running Windows Server 2003. I’m using it as my file server. After moving my favorite files over to my server for redundant storage I had an idea to copy my WordPress blog over to it. My first thought was to install it normally and then import all my posts and settings. After thinking about how long that would take and how the export/import doesn’t really work that well I decided to try and move the whole XAMPP folder without changing anything.

At first I tried just copying the folder to the C drive and resetting it like I would the portable version. Since it stores the IP address of the URL in WordPress itself it wouldn’t load in Firefox. I got the XAMPP Admin screen but my blog couldn’t be found. I realized I had it pointing to a different IP address. So I changed the IP address of my server and presto my blog appeared.

It took me a few seconds to go into the WordPress setting page and change its URL to the static server IP address I had decided on. Once I save it I went back and changed the servers IP back to its standard configuration. Jumping back on my main system I typed in the servers IP followed by WordPress and it came right up. I was happy I didn’t have to mess with any of that export/import crap since it never seems to export all my posts. I’m sure if I export the MySQL database it would save everything. I’m not ready to jump into that right now.

Now I have a Windows Server 2003 file server with XAMPP running my WordPress blog. For those of you who don’t realize it I’m running a 3^rd party server software on a full server which seems a bit redundant until you realize I have no idea how to setup WordPress using IIS. Trying to do that would require exporting/importing or reposting which would be time consuming. This is why I chose to move a folder, change an IP address and be done with it. I am happy with my new server setup.

Now I have a development WordPress blog on my home network to play with. I love learning by reading books but this time it really helped me to jump in, make mistakes and then figure out how to fix them. So far I’m a big fan of XAMPP and WordPress.

Reconfigure

Ah the joys of building PC’s. Last night around 8:00 PM I had an idea how I could reduce the power draw on my desktop PC. So I turned it off and opened the case. If you don’t know I had 2 EIDE, 2 SATA drives and 2 DVD-RW drives in this system. Yeah I was trying to build myself a server workstation. So my idea was to remove my 200GB hard drive where I store my movies and my 2nd DVD-RW drive, which I hardly ever use.

I put the 200GB hard drive into external hard drive housing. That way I can still access my movies whenever I want. I put the DVD-RW drive into an external housing so I can connect it via USB 2.0 if I need another drive for some reason. Last on my list I had to take the 160GB hard drive that was originally in the external housing and put it into my home built network attached storage. It’s not connected yet because I need to flash the BIOS to detect this newer drive. But at least it’s safe inside the case.

Now all three remaining hard drives have more space to reduce heat. Less drives equals less power draw and my PC seems to run a bit better.

A Tale of Two Media Players

I have an iPod. It’s one of the 30GB 5.5 Video Generation. Not the fat remakes they re-branded “Classic”. I got mine from a guy for $40.00 used without any cables. I couldn’t charge it or sync music to it so after about an hour of playing with it the battery died. For a week or more it was an overpriced paperweight. I got on Amazon.com and found a cheap 3-in-1 travel kit: Sync cable, wall and car charger. Nice little set for $3.00. It took just 4 days to show up at my door.

After three hours of letting it charge with the AC adapter I connected it to my PC. Of course iTunes launched and complained, “This iPod is synced to another library. Do you want to sync it to this library and erase all information?” What other choices do I have? Oh yeah, this is an Apple device so none. I had spent the three hours waiting for it to charge by setting up my play lists. I’m a tech savvy guy but I hadn’t used iTunes like this before so it took me about 20 minutes to figure out how to get around. They say it’s an “Intuitive” interface, which means it’s simple to use and you don’t have to think about it. My idea of intuitive is much different then Apple’s.

It took a little over an hour to sync 20GB of music and a couple movies. After that I was hooked. Since then I’ve done away with trying to watch movies on the iPod. It takes way too long to convert them to the iPod format. It gives me neck cramps leaning over to watch that screen. There really is no comfortable way to watch video on it. Even propping it up against a book doesn’t help. I have good eyes and I still have to lean in to see the details. I use my iPod for music and podcasts. For which it does a great job. As long as the source files are in the right formats and decent quality, they play great.

That same friend of mine gave me a 20GB Creative Zen Sleek Photo, which I just call my Zen. At the time the firmware was messed up. His computer was down and he’s not a geek like me. I kept the thing on my desk for over 6 months hoping to find a cheap sync cable like I did for my iPod. No such luck. Eventually, I gave in a bought a cable for $24.00 so I could see if the thing actually worked.

It took 5 business days to get to my house. The Zen charged in about 2 hours. However, my Windows XP Pro system would not detect it as a media player. Google to my rescue! After trolling forums I discovered the device was bundled with Windows Media Player 10. This supports the MTU transfer protocol the device uses. After installing WMP 10 on my PC and rebooting the device popped up. Then I used the firmware update .exe from the Creative Labs web site to flash the firmware. The device was coming on but only in recovery mode. After the firmware installed the Zen rebooted and was fine. All the features worked great. I was surprised to find it has an FM radio and a Voice Recording function the recording format is low quality .wav files which is fine for voice memo’s or recording conversations with friends.

I use my Zen for audio books and training courses. For a while I was experimenting with the voice recording function. I found transferring and tracking the saved audio files annoying because the device names each track with a strange time and date format. I’ve since started keeping short notes in a small note book while using my USB Podcasting mic for higher quality recordings.

Overall, I like my iPod better for music and podcasts because it’s easier to setup and syncing with iTunes than creating play lists and syncing in Windows Media Player 10. I haven’t tried using WMP 11. I don’t want to risk losing connectivity to my Zen. It’s not really much of an issue since I don’t update my Zen as often. It’s nice having two mp3 players so I can dedicate each to a separate category of audio.