I can tell you one thing that I’ve learned about the great fire-wall of China…. it’s most certainly outwardly open to a large number of select people in the PR army for the purpose of flooding the internet with badgering arguments where-ever an opinion is expressed that goes contra to Chinese governmental lines. Here’s a free lesson for them… it will not work. All you are going to achieve is to cement the attitudes you’re trying to quash. So don’t bother.

Dell’s Malaysian team take all the sales and support calls for New Zealand. Why? I don’t know, because God hates the southern hemisphere maybe? The sales and support team are TERRIBLE. Their English language skills are shocking, I am regularly transferred about dozens of time while seeking help, they keep emailing asking for information that they already have, their idea of 24 hour support stretches out to SIX days ….. I could go on and on, but let’s skip to the part where they still have my money, and are still yet to get my order right.

GRRRRRR, Dell NZ ….

Here’s why…

The Drake Equation is a mathematical principal that allows us to reasonably deduce just how many space-faring alien civilizations are actually out there in the Milky Way galaxy… it works like this ….

Take the number of stars in the galaxy, and divide that by the chance that any given star is likely to have a planetary system (best scientific guess). Divide this by the chance that planets in those systems are ecologically suitable for life forms to evolve. Divide this by the chance that life actually does evolve on these planets…. and so on, you get the idea. If you want to look at the actual equation, go here…. http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/drake_equation.html

Anyway, the equation shows us that there are almost certainly thousands of civilizations in the galaxy looking up at the stars just like us, wondering if we really are out there somewhere.

Taking this in to account, also remembering that our own star system is only a baby, it’s quite likely that our civilization has already been discovered by another. The next question is “why aren’t they walking among us?” Think about it – if we where the ones who discovered another civilization, would we just land in the middle of their towns and cities and start walking around? NO! We would study them, investigate them, and very likely leave them alone to develop on their own without bothering them too much.

So I think it’s very likely that we are visited regularly by scientists, xeno-biologists and the like, and yes, they most likely often take people against their will to be analyzed and experimented on just as we often abduct animals from their natural habitat. Remember, if they are capable of traveling the distances between the stars, they are most definitely going to be intelligent and advanced enough to avoid detection.

…but why, in all good reason, would they fly billions of miles across the cold gulf of space just to shove a probe up someone’s ass? The advent of the anal probe ethos disturbs me – why probe when you could use your advanced technology to scan? Either someone out there has got some deep seated secret desire to be probed (by aliens or otherwise) and made the whole thing up, or the aliens actually enjoy doing it.

I find the latter to be a disturbing thought – is the Earth nothing more that an interplanetary bitch for bands of marauding alien gang-bangers?

You decide.

(This is a re-post of an article I wrote some time ago for another blog)

Windows Could Not Update The Computer’s Boot Configuration. Installation Cannot Proceed

Great. This is just what I needed. God himself is punishing me for buying a Dell. Anyhoo, Googling the problem was a waste of time, as nearly all the results referred to an issue with the registry. I knew that this was not where my problem was as I’d already tried a clean install, no joy. Then my brain finally kicked in … “could not modify the boot config? You mean the boot sequence in the BIOS? Duh!”

Here’s your line of thought…. Vista requires several restarts during the install process. It achieves this by changing the boot sequence in the BIOS during install, then changing it back to the hard disk when the install is done. If the BIOS has some fancy-pants security feature preventing changes, the install can not take place.

The fix; I started up the Vostro laptop and accessed the BIOS (F12 – enter setup) and made my way to the boot menu. I made the optical drive the first boot option (careful here, Dell don’t make this easy for novices), disabled the “no-execute memory protection” option, restarted the computer, and performed the upgrade without issue. The same fix would clear the way for a clean install. BE WARNED however, that it important to leave the computer alone and not give in to the temptation to fiddle with it until after you are taken to a user-input screen – if you fiddle with it before then, you’ll interrupt the process. Only change your boot sequence back AFTER you have been delivered to a Vista sign in page or the desktop.

Did you find this helpful? Let me know, twitter me… @robert_nz

Now THAT’S how you deal with piracy, folks! Smack down hard on the people profiting from selling stolen goods, and steer the individual users back to the light without victimising your client base. Somebody from Microsoft ought to go have a chat with the RIAA, and show ‘em how it’s done… eh?

“The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more details.”

The platform: Vista Home Premium 32bit (SP2) on an Intel dual-celeron rig.

Here’s what I tried, things that I might want to mention did absolutely no good what-so-ever;

• I uninstalled and reinstalled OpenOffice
• I reinstalled MS Visual C++ 2005 redistributable
• I reinstalled MS Visual C++ 2008SP1 redistributable

Here’s what I discovered via research;

The actual issue does not lie with oOo itself, rather it’s an issue rooted in the registry. In my own case, I had installed a copy of Wide Angle Touch Copy 09 to run along side iTunes, and it was this that changed the registry values relating to microsoft.vc90.crt, which I believe is a dependent library of the Visual C++ runtime.

Here’s the easiest solution I could muster without taking you through editing the registry;

• Uninstall Touch Copy, iTunes and oOo
• Restart the computer
• Reinstall oOo

OpenOffice now runs perfectly

FileZilla and Putty.

Putty is GREAT for making SSH connections to control remote *nix servers, but SCP commands can be a pain in the rear for moving files back and forth, specially through complex connections. FileZilla is a perfect companion, shifting files about with no fuss. (For those who don’t already know, SSH = SFTP)

VirtualBox and CloneZilla

Virtual machines are super quick and easy to create / copy / experiment with, but then what can you do with them? Well, how about using CloneZilla to bring your virtual experiments out in to the real world? Here’s an example … enable CD-ROM pass-through on your virtual machine and a USB device filter to mount your external hard-drive. Boot your virtual machine while your CloneZilla bootable CD is in the tray… the VM will boot CloneZilla, and allow you to make an image of the virtual machine (saved on your external USB drive) as if it were a physical computer. You can then use the image and CloneZilla to create clones of your VM on actual physical computers . Yay! (I do this all the time, saves a TON of development work).

So, I left it where it was on the office desk, and went home for the weekend. When I came back in to the office this morning…. my good ol’ lappy was all ready and rearing to go. It functions perfectly, and if I hadn’t checked the version number I might not even have known that it was 10.6 and not 10.5.

So, for those folks at home hell bent on watching the whole process…. be patient! Go outside and play with the kids for a few hours

Problem; When installing OS X Server 10.5.8 update, the update fails. The error message reads;

“The installer encountered an unknown error that failed the install.  Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.”

I did a bit of Bing’ing for solutions (Ouch, that was horrible! Bing is such an ugly verb…) and most of the advice I gleaned from the webs advised me to reinstall the OS. On a corporate server, this was an ugly option, to say the very least. So, I delved in to the log files, and discovered the culprit …

The shares on the server were accessible to all the staff in one form or another. A staff member who’s workstation had already been updated to 10.5.8 decided in their infinite wisdom that they were going to install one of the 10.5 apps on to a workmates 10.4 workstation. (Yes, I know, eyes roll towards the ceiling) The  staff member copied the “.app” file to a public share to facilitate this. When the server 10.5.8 update attempted to install, it considered the “.app” file in the public share to be an installed application! The log files reflected the fact that the app was NOT considered a candidate for upgrade at this time, and this was suficcent to bring the entire bundled update to a halt.

Solution; I logged on to the server in person, and deleted the “.app” file from the public share. I then restarted the 10.5.8 update process, which completed sucessfully.

Remember; Always perform a permissions fix before installing a bundled update.

Thanks to the miracle of MSDN subscriptions, I’m privileged to be in the possession of a (legally licensed and perfectly legitimate) copy of the brand new release of Windows 7 …. not the RC, mind, the RTM made available so that manufacturers and the like can prepare computer for release on the 22nd and the like.

Seeing as I’ve spent a great deal of time getting my Windows Vista Ultimate machine tuned to perfection, I really wasn’t looking forward to starting from scratch, so I decided to try my luck with an upgrade…. The ISO was downloaded and burned to disk, and I was ready to go. With Windows Vista running, I inserted the DVD and began the upgrade process, only to come across…

Windows Setup experienced an unexpected error. To install Windows, restart the installation (…. along with the error code 0×0.)

Rummaging the web for advice proved quite fruitless, as the OS is brand new, and most of the comments in the Google search results related to Windows XP -> Vista upgrades.

To cut a long story short, I’ve discovered that the problem was two-fold … firstly, the presence fo a running copy of AVG managed to bring the process to a halt, though I suspect that this would have been the case had I any other third party AV running. So, using the process manager, I carefully bought all AV related process to a halt. Then I had to deal with the second issue, which was the fact that the install simply did not want to work from a DVD. The ISO itself was intact, and the disk was burned on quality media at a reasonable speed with reliable hardware and software.

The solution: Mount the ISO as a virtual drive using ISOmagic. The installation began without a hitch, and concluded seamlessly.

As a side note, here are some other things that I tried as a result of rooting about for solutions in forums, none of which made any difference.

**   Turning off the DMA feature for the IDE channel of the drive you wish to install the OS on
**   Burning the disk at stupidly slow speeds (this irks me – modern drives burn perfectly well at good speeds if you have half-decent media)
**   Changing the order of the drives as they are physically connected to the motherboad (sigh)

I’m happy to answer any questions with regards to the install, should you have any… feel free to leave comments attached to this post.

Happy days….

ADDITIONAL; August 20. Those people not wishing to perform an upgrade might try re-downloading the ISO, running am MD5/CRC check, and burning the ISO to different brand media. Despite what you read elsewhere, my experience leads me to believe that burn speed is pretty much NEVER the root of issues … not with a quality optical drive and decemt media, anyway.