Convert Windows 7 ISO/Disk to another version and/or OEM

You have a laptop that had Windows preinstalled and still has a sticker on it with the Product key for that OEM installation. You want to install it again on a new SSD (for example).

You need an OEM version of Windows 7 Home/Professional/Ultimate/... but you have only an ISO/Disk from other Windows 7 version and/or not OEM.

The following procedure can be used for any Windows 7 to Windows 7 conversion be it Ultimate,Professional,HomePremium,HomeBasic,Starter and Retail or OEM. I am not sure about the x86 vs x64, that's why I just took care that the Windows 7 kit I started from is for the same architecture as I needed.


On Ubuntu: (FAILED ! - just adapted ImgBurn's parameters given here: http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?/topic/11194-how-to-create-a-windows-vista-7-8-installation-disc-bootable-using-imgburn/, but DVD did not boot, so I expect it has to do with the hexadecimal notation needed in k3b. As the process of building a DVD is quite lengthy, I did not try tweaking the parameters and burn again.)

Windows 7 installation DVDs are UDF and the very intuitive ISO Master under Ubuntu (as per ver. 16.04) does not support it. Therefore we need to use more cumbersome (personal opinion, of course :-) k3b (install it from Ubuntu software).
Steps:
- extract the files out of the Windows 7 iso using archive manager. If you have the dvd, copy them from the Windows dvd to a directory.
- modify the sources/ei.cfg as needed. For example, for a Windows 7 Professional OEM retail, my ei.cfg looked like this:

[EditionID]
Professional
[Channel]
OEM
[VL]
0

Other options for your particular case can be seen here: http://www.askvg.com/how-to-choose-desired-windows-7-edition-version-during-setup/


- repack the file in a iso using k3b. Very important is to have the boot options right. Here is how mine looked:

- create the iso (or burn cd) and get to the Windows installation



On Windows:

- use 7zip to extract the files from the Windows iso
- modify the sources/ei.cfg as needed. For example, for a Windows 7 Professional OEM retail, my ei.cfg looked like this:

[EditionID]
Professional
[Channel]
OEM
[VL]
0

Other options for your particular case can be seen here: http://www.askvg.com/how-to-choose-desired-windows-7-edition-version-during-setup/

- repack the file as an iso (or directly burn it on disk) using ImgBurn (free!). As for the boot options, here they are, explained much better:
http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?/topic/11194-how-to-create-a-windows-vista-7-8-installation-disc-bootable-using-imgburn/
-  create the iso (or burn cd directly) and get to the Windows installation


Final notes:
- in my case, I had to do the Windows activation over the phone, no operator, just entering a lot of numbers and getting back a bunch. As the COE label on the laptop was genuine, everything went smooth.
I don't know however how many times one can do this reactivation... I suppose it is limited.

Installing megatools on CentOS 6

In case you wanted to install the megatools command line client for Mega.co.nz and you've run into this error:

checking for GLIB - version >= 2.32.0... no
*** Could not run GLIB test program, checking why...
*** The test program failed to compile or link. See the file config.log for the
*** exact error that occured. This usually means GLIB is incorrectly installed.
configure: error: Glib 2.32.0 or later is required to build megatools

this is what you need to do (kudos should go to: Mike Miao) :

1. Make sure you have all the dependencies needed for MegaTools installed:

yum install gcc make  libcurl-devel openssl-devel gmp-devel tar libffi-devel gettext-devel

2. Install the 2.32 version of the glib:

1:  mkdir glib-source  
2:  cd glib-source/  
3:  wget http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/glib/2.32/glib-2.32.4.tar.xz  
4:  tar zxf glib-2.32.4.tar.xz  
5:  cd glib-2.32.4/  
6:  ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/glib-2.32
8:  make  
9:  make install  

As you can see, I preferred to install Glib 2.32 all in one directory, to avoid any mixing with the main Glib version that is shipped with CentOS. So, all files belonging to this library were installed in /usr/local/glib-2.32

3. Then, retry configuring and installing megatools, as follows:

1:  cd megatools-source  
2:  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/glib-2.32/lib/  
3:  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/glib-2.32/lib/pkgconfig  
4:  ./configure  
5:  make  
6:  make check  
7:  make install  

You are all set !

More instructions in the help pages of the command tools or even on: Mike Miao's page that inspired this )

Ubuntu linux: how to restrict a graphic tablet to only one monitor (in a dual monitor setup ;)

I have 2 monitors that are placed on top of each other, like this:

My graphical tablet (Genius EasyPen i405X) is covering by default the entire (summed-up) area, which means that only about half of the tablet is usable for a MyPaint drawing that is opened only on the Benq monitor.


What I want to do is to restrict the tablet movement only to Benq, ie: tablet's physical margins should correspond to Benq ones.

Let's get the needed parameters. The monitors resolution and offset can be seen by launching xrandr in command line:

optimus:~$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current ...
LVDS connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
   1366x768      60.02 +
   1280x720      59.86 
   ... 
480 x 1142, maximum 16384 x 16384HDMI-0 connected primary 1920x1080+338+1080 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 598mm x 336mm
   1920x1080     60.00*+  50.00    59.94 
   1920x1080i    60.00    50.00    59.94 
   1680x1050     59.88 
   ...
VGA-0 connected 2560x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 673mm x 284mm
   2560x1080     59.98*+
   1920x1080     60.00 
   1680x1050     59.95 
   ... 

The first screen is laptop's one that is inactive. Then, each monitor can be found based on the cable/socket it's on. In my case Benq is on HDMI and AOC is on VGA.

Xrandr displays all possible resolutions for each monitor but we need only the one that is active, marked with * (btw, the "+" means it is the recommended resolution). I have trimmed many of those for brevity and in fact we need only the first line of each, the long one where we have the resolution and also the offset.
As you can see (see also the picture) AOC (on VGA) has a resolution of 2560x1080 and it has offset 0 and 0 (it's top left corner is in the zero of the axis system).
More interesting for me, BenQ has resolution of 1920x1080 and horizontal offset 338, while the vertical one is 1080, i.e. Benq is lower that the 0 axis point with exactly the height of AOC.
(There are some distances in reality between monitor margins, but obviously these are not taken into account.)

So, let's write all down:


TotalHsize: 2560 (i.e. the Horizontal resolution of AOC, that "includes" BenQ)
TotalVsize: 2160 (i.e. the summed up Vertical resolution of both, as they are stacked: 1080+1080)
BenqHsize: 1920
BenqVsize: 1080
BenqHoffset: 338
BenqVoffset: 1080

These are all the input data we need. Now, let's calculate the proportions (or relative values):

BenqRelHsize = BenqHsize / TotalHsize = 1920 / 2560 = 0.75
BenqRelVsize = BenqVsize / TotalVsize = 1080 / 2160 = 0.5
BenqRelHoffset = BenqHoffset / TotalHsize = 338 / 2560 = 0.13203125
BenqRelVoffset = BenqVoffset / TotalVsize = 1080 / 2160 = 0.5


So, finally, the command we should launch looks like this:

xinput set-prop "Tablet name as detected by xinput --list" --type=float "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" RelHsize 0 RelHoffset 0 RelVsize RelVoffset 0 0 1

which in my case, for Benq, is:

xinput set-prop "Genius EasyPen i405X" --type=float "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 0.75 0 0.13203125 0 0.5 0.5 0 0 1

Launch it and it's working!

This will not survive a reboot so you should do something about it if you care. Personally, I have just added the above line in a script that I run each time I use the tablet (which is quite rare in my case).

For more info see the sources I used:


http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1656089&s=ca2da10a736e5ce13dcd20da11fdd854&p=10330180#post10330180

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1571365.html 

Micro$oft's contribution to the world (the pictures are taken by me, the films are on youtube)

Everything started here:

... then, it spread throughout the world, because "Nobody was fired for buying Microsoft".

So now it is in tram stations (Bucharest, Romania)...




... ATMs (ING, Bucharest, Romania)...

 ... Ikea (Palo Alto, California) ...

... elevators (Palo Alto, California)....

... restaurants (Budapest, Hungary)...

... airports (Budapest, Hungary) ...

Then, another memorable moment when they launched their tablet:

But the marketing and brainwashing machine is working:

... so, happy windows-ing!

MAC based licensing in VMWare and cloud

The problem:

The requirement: To move a linux software product licensed by MAC, from the physical machine into the virtualized environment or the cloud and to have it still running.

Solutions:

1. Contact the software vendor and get a new license based on the new MAC address in the virtualized environment. 

That's the perfect solution in case the software vendor is NOT a mother-fu***r, as hungry for money as a fat kid for chocolate (this is not mine, it is from a song :)

In my case, I wasn't lucky and they asked for money for this operation "not covered by the license".
Just a small piece of info: the software I talk about costs ~20,000 euro and the support for it is "just" 16% from the cost, per year. Define greediness...

2. Change the MAC address of your main network card in VMWare

This can be done in Linux by adding (or modifying) the HWADDR=aa:bb:cc:... / MACADDR=aa:bb:cc:.. configuration options in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 as to indicate the new MAC address.

I added them both but in my VMWare Workstation 10 environment, this didn't work until I modified the advanced parameters of the network interface and put there the new MAC too.

On my Ubuntu host having VMWare 10 and CentOS as guest VM, this is done in:
VM Settings->Hardware->Network Adapter->Advanced->MAC Address

Then it worked perfect.

3. Create a dummy interface with the needed MAC address

Then I moved to the cloud, where things were not totally in my control. The cloud guys didn't know how (or didn't bother) to set the MAC for me, saying that OnApp virtualization doesn't accept this. Maybe they are actually right, but wat to do wat to do...

I followed this tutorial: http://www.question-defense.com/2012/11/26/linux-create-fake-ethernet-interface but it doesn't work because it has some typos and wrong indications, so I thought I should re-publish it here, edited. So: how to create a dummy interface on your CentOS machine, just to use its MAC address for licensing purposes:

Assumptions:

- you will create a new fake / dummy interface, named eth1 with MAC address: aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff . If you need another interface number, please modify in the code below. Also replace aa:bb:cc.... with your own MAC address you need to clone.

Step 1

Add the following lines to /etc/rc.d/init.d/network , on top if the file.
/sbin/modprobe dummy
/sbin/ip link set name eth1 dev dummy0
/sbin/ifconfig eth1 hw ether AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF

Notes:

• the tutorial linked above, indicates you should put this in /etc/rc.local to work, which is WRONG. /etc/rc.local is executed after /etc/rc.d/init.d/network, and so, you'll get an error at boot time, saying: device eth1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization
• I know that altering /etc/rc.d/init.d/network it is not ok in case of upgrades, etc. In my case it is ok because I have no intention to upgrade it ever (the software works anyway only on CentOS 5 so I need to keep it 5 and not upgraded it to the latest 7). Still, if you know about a script similar to /etc/rc.local that executes before the others in /etc/rc.d/init.d/, I'd like to hear from you!

Step 2

Add to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts a new file named ifcfg-eht1. Actually, just copy ifcfg-eth0 with the new name, then edit the ifcfg-eth1:
cp /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1

After editing it, my ifcfg-eth1 looks like:
DEVICE="eth1"
ONBOOT="yes"

So only a couple of things were mentioned: that is named eth1 and that it should be brought up when system starts. Nothing else, since it will be unused for networking; just to have it in the system with a MAC. The tutorial linked above, misses this step.

Step 3

Reboot the system or reload networking. Then, issue a ifconfig at command prompt and admire your new MAC faked interface.

Notes:

• If you follow the boot messages you'll see that there is a warning though when it tries to bring up eth1: RTNETLINK answers: no such device
  Fortunately, it is just a warning and the eth1 is present in ifconfig afterwards. Still, if anyone knows how to get rid of this warning too, I'd be happy to update this post.

4. Fake your MAC dynamically, per request

Instead of doing something definitive like creating a new network interface or so, what about reporting a fake MAC to those apps that are known to ask for it?

This most elegant approach can be done using https://blog.kumina.nl/2011/12/spoofing-mac-addresses-using-fakemac/ or http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~peterb/linux/fakeif/ or ftp://mirror.inode.at/slackwarearm/slackwarearm-devtools/slackkit/fakeuname.c or others.

All are some type of wrappers that launch the executable and intercepts any calls to the SIOCGIFHWADDR (the low level C function returning the real MAC Address), replacing it with the one we want.

It happens that I've liked fakeuname that allows for faking also hostname, so that's the one I tried (not that the others are not ok!). To make it work you need to:

Step 1

Download the fakeuname.c file and save it somewhere.

Step 2

Compile the fakeuname.c program into a dynamic libfakeuname.so library, as instructed in the .c file itself:

gcc -o fakeuname.o -c -fPIC -Wall fakeuname.c

gcc -o libfakeuname.so -shared -W1,export-dynamic fakeuname.o -ldl

Step 3

Prepare the environment a bit, before launching your command that takes into account the MAC address, like this:

export LD_PRELOAD=/tmp/libfakeuname.so

export FAKEMACADDR=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF

Step 4

Launch your command and you'll see that magically it takes the new MAC address from the FAKEMACADDR environment variable.

Step 5

Make the exports of the above variable part of your bashrc, profile,... whatever init script you use for launching your server (automatically or manually). Maybe even the /etc/rc.local is now very good to be used for this.

Why elance sucks (and others too)

After two month of working with elance, one month as a "free", one month as a paid one, here are some of my thoughts:

- Their commission fee is indecently high.
They do nothing for the bidder or for the client, except to provide a meeting point for those clients that didn't think about searching google for technology specific meeting points (e.g. a PHP specialized forum or a Linux job list) where they could find someone knowledgeable on the subject.

So, why have elance (guru, odesk, others) take about 8.75% - 10% of your money when any other company that allows you, e.g., to buy goods over the net using your credit card, have a comission of just about 2%-4%? What is their added value?

Nothing I'd say, just tools that you'll never need. Milestones for example, can be easily replaced by a common sense email exchange between client and freelancer. They offer an "escrow" payment to make sure the money exists but this is only for some jobs and not for all (besides, if the client is really looking for a freebie, he can refuse payments anyway, escrow or not, invoking that the freelancer didn't do it in due time or not up to client's standards). So none of these justify the high commission rate or the crazy 10$ per month paid subscription (add 5$ more for any other field of activity).

- elance has become an IT moral sewer.
If you analyse the daily IT jobs coming from elance, you'll notice that more than half of it pertain to create sites similar to competition's, spamming others or collecting email addresses from certain sources and feed them back the lists with poor guys that'll be spammed subsequently. Sometimes the freelancer is required to break captchas, use anonymous proxies or ignore the site's terms of use that specifies clearly that any site scrapper activity is not allowed. This is a method for western clients to pass the responsibility to countries that are known for illicit activities.

It's also "interesting" to point out that these type of spam / spam support jobs, get the highest number of bids from the freelancers. 

So how can you urge me sign the childish "elance pledge" that stipulates "freelancer integrity", when you allow job posting that are clearly requesting illegal activities and would worsen the world's (already bad) spam situation?

- There is unfair competition.
This problem is caused by the costs of living in various countries versus the rates you can afford to ask in those countries, but this was largely discussed on other blogs & sites unhappy about these freelancing websites, so I don't insist on it. I completely agree that globalization is not good in these cases and, as long as the Asian guys can also provide quality work, the European and American freelancers are doomed.
It is still highly debatable if the quality is indeed the same, and both parties have their best interest to pretend differently. The moral answer will be probably that it cannot be judged globally, based on race and location, only on case by case basis.

- Many requests for bidding are racist.
I can accept that some guys had multiple bad experiences with certain races (Indians fill elance preponderantly indeed because they are so many in the world, anyway) and don't want to work with them anymore.
Still, elance is allowing racism and do not moderate the job posting in any way (for those money they take) and I find it unfair, despite the fact that my chances get better in these cases (cause I am white, by the way).
The system is wrong and I don't want to give them free solutions (but there are some I could think of ;)

- Many requests for quotations are badly formulated.

This is another subject present on many of elance's detractors blogs / websites and unfortunately is true. Non technical guys try to say what they want and how they want it and it takes hours and many emails exchanged that will clarify the things up, and finally the job could be got by someone else, indirectly benefiting on your work.
In conjunction with the badly formulated RFQs, it formed a special breed of freelancers that bid no matter if they understand what's requested or not, just to win it and probably pretending more money afterwards.

- Many requests for quotations are for non-existent jobs.

As some other sites pointed out, there are some freelancers that use elance to get an idea about their their market value, by posting a fake job that would need their own skills and then analysing the received bids' money.
The job will never happen and the bidding freelancers will suffer a time waste, whilst the faker will eventually come to the conclusion that the results are not relevant: The guys from Asia will always have prices much less than Europe and US, and placing yourself in these ranges might not work because you cannot afford it, or because you don't know the client's preferences in terms of money/quality and if he thinks that everything that's american is better than everything else. So... it's a lottery.

So, all in all, I decided to give up this system in which a freelancer might earn some money, a client might get happy, but in which, clearly, elance is a winner the more people try their "services". 

The only question remaining is: can I do it better? Or, better, can we? 

What about a similar website that could be launched to put together the clients with freelancers that will intervene less (if at all) in the circulated money but more in the quality of jobs and the freelancer's moral virtues? What about a website that could request just a bit of money (eg: a 5$ yearly subscription or even donations from freelancers/clients) to finance its hosting and to give complete liberty to freelancers and users to connect, discuss, negotiate and pay/getting paid directly?

Think about it as an opensource platform that could be a benefit for those that can further find jobs through it. 

Ok, I don't know all details now, but still, anyone interested in starting such a thing? If so, let me know.

How to continue living with the XP zombie

In a previous post I tried to demystify the need to upgrade from the freshly retired Windows XP to a newer version, now that Micro$oft's support has been finally stopped.

But what can I do to protect myself, the "small office, home office" user, from the evil hacker that will attack XP computers, like a maniac, from now on?

First, you need to relax and to understand that you have never been completely protected anyway, unless your computer is not connected to the internet and you don't bring any files from the outside world, which is quite unlikely these days.

At most, you have been as protected as possible in a particular moment of time (and few minutes later you could have been exposed again by a new threat that no antivirus could catch for few days, before the next update).

So, we can continue to do our "best effort" in protecting our XP computer, as follows:

• Install an antivirus and keep it updated.
  (In fact, if you had no Windows antivirus installed until now, please ignore this whole writing and Micro$oft's urge to switch to a newer operating system. It either means that you're an incredibly careful user, or that your don't care if you computer is already infected and you find "normal" the way it behaves.)
  
  When choosing an antivirus, ignore the marketing crap they throw at you and pre-installed trial versions that came with Windows, and ask yourself relevant questions like: what antivirus has the best detection rate? (i.e. which one finds the most of the viruses in the wild)
  You can search the net for this and you'll find out there are some independent testing bodies that test periodically the detection rate of all antiviruses on the market. Here is one but do your own homework. Then choose an antivirus that is in top 3 each month.
  . 
• Sometimes, antiviruses cannot detect annoying malware (like that one that hijacks your home page in your browser). For this, there is a different category of programs, named anti-malware.
  Malwarebites anti-malware has (also) a free version for home use, that had great results for disinfecting already infected Windows, but I'm sure there are some others with good results out there. Beware though that some anti-malware programs are in fact malware themselves... so research a bit to see if it is legit or not, before installing.
  .
• Backup your files now and then (or even regularly)
  
  Don't overwrite the last backup with the current one, better keep 2-3 backups on your backup disk or usb stick; if the last backup is compromised by viruses, at least you'll have the one before that's clean.
  
  Simply copying the files onto a stick from time to time is the basic form of backup but you can also use free tools like Micro$oft's SyncToy. Also, keep in mind to backup your emails and your browser history, bookmarks and saved passwords. Do a bit of research to learn out how for your specific set of programs.
  .
• Have a firewall installed.
  
  If you're at home and using a router given by your ISP, then probably you already have a firewall on that router and you're protected, since they come preconfigured this way.
  .

• If on the road and connecting to various hotel/airport/public networks, then you should install your own firewall product or, at least, activate the one that comes with Windows.
  
  Test your firewall by searching for "online firewall test" on the web. My choice is the one at Gibson Research Corporation (choose "Shields Up!" service, then click "Proceed" button and test your "Common ports" or "All service ports") but you can use others too.
  .
• Use anything but Internet Explorer, use anything but Outlook.
  
  Firefox and Thunderbird to name two, are as intuitive to use as their Micro$oft counterparts (if not more), and inherently more secure.
  
  Maybe even use OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) instead of Microsoft Office? I'll write more about this and Linux in another post.
  .
• Finally, educate yourself NOT to:
• enter websites that are not well known (unless your XP installation is not so important for you and you keep it mainly for these purposes)
• click "yes" or "OK" or "Download" buttons in any popup window offering to install search bars, emoticons etc. You can surely live without any of those.
• double click any files received by email or any messenger, if you don't expect them, even if they come from a known friend. If your friend's computer is virused, it might be that the virus sent himself to you by email, without the human suspecting anything.
  So, save the attachment somewhere first and then right click on it and scan it with your antivirus. If ok, you can open it.
• double click any executable file received by email or any messenger. I'd suggest you simply delete that email; almost nobody should send you executable files these days.

So, my proposal to all of you having Windows XP is: respect the above and resist the emotional pressure induced by the media to upgrade XP. Just out of curiosity (and for the sake of "science"), let's see how much time can we resist spending additional money if we're happy with what we have now. 

Think about it this way: If you switch now to Windows 8, it means you have to reinstall your computer and change your habits. Postpone this operation until something starts to go wrong indeed, if ever.

Need more incentives? For those more frugal, like me (and I know there are some out there), here are some direct costs for switching to newer Windows:

• An upgrade from XP to Windows 8 costs 120$ but your computer might not support it or can become be very slow after, that means they push you implicitly to buy a new computer.
• A new laptop that has the hardware for windows 8 (and windows 8 pre-installed) starts at of 446$ on Amazon.
• A full Windows 8 license (no upgrade) costs around 120$.
• Office 2013 Home and Business costs 279 $ whilst professional (with Access) is an incredible 500$ !!!

Depending on community response, I intend to build a small website where XP users can record their achieved XP afterlife duration, i.e. how many days/weeks/month/years their XP computers worked ok even if updates were no more provided by Micro$oft.

Myths about Windows XP's death

There is a lot of fuss these days about the end of XP's support on 8th of April, 2014. An almost apocalyptic image is created by many content writers and lots of specialists around the world have been invited in Micro$oft's flashmob, to scare the hell out of people and make them pay their dues to the software giant.

Fabulous amounts of money started to reveal, to give more weight to the whole problem:

"The UK government announced last week that it had negotiated a special deal with Microsoft to provide Windows XP support and security updates across the whole UK public sector for the next 12 months, at a cost of £5.548 million."
(I wonder if an investigation will follow and some important persons will be beheaded, since this 5.5 million transferred to Micro$oft are paid from the UK's budget due to someone's negligence and incapacity to migrate the public sector's computers to something else, in due time) 

"Microsoft has offered to provide special custom support for Windows XP after 8 April at a cost of $200 per device, which doubles to $400 per device after 12 months, and then doubles again to $800 the following year."
(Whoooa...)

Seeing all these, I have researched the web on this major piece of news in a try to understand if getting rid of Windows XP is indeed "a must" in the coming days or months, and what are the real risks of keeping Windows XP still running. 

Here is a list of the most frequent and major "Boo-hoou-hoous" I could find in a couple of hours (and some personal comments on each):

• "As late as June 2013, Windows XP still held onto more than 30% of the world’s computers. It’s on 95% of American ATMs"
  
  Anyone knowing a bit about ATMs and banking knows that they're not exposed to the internet at all, and have dedicated lines (or VPNs) to connect to their bank. So, susceptibility to attacks is really low not to mention that the XP present on ATMs is a trimmed down version of the regular one.
  Still, bad choice of operating system, banks! Not paying licences to M$ would've lower your fees and could have attract more clients!
  .
• "Estimates vary but it’s thought that as many as a third of the world’s computers are still running the operating system and Microsoft themselves have said that infections for XP will rise 66 per cent after 8 April."
  
  This sounds bullshitting to me. It's either that M$ put some time bomb in the latest XP update to affect exactly 66% and exactly after 8th of April, or they simply try to seed panic in the XP users. In both scenarios they want the users flocking-in, in an orderly fashion to the new Windows 8.
  .
• "There's certainly a possibility of some vulnerabilities that were already known that haven't been exploited yet. From 8 April or 9 April you could see a number of attacks that people have been holding back"
  
  Judging the response time Microsoft historically had to vulnerabilities, I'd say this is a fake problem too. Besides, any evil attacker would launch his exploits as soon as possible, before someone else would do it instead of them, or the users would upgrade to the latest Windows.
  .
• "Internet Explorer 8 is also no longer supported, so if your Windows XP PC is connected to the Internet and you use Internet Explorer 8 to surf the web, you might be exposing your PC to additional threats."
  
  Let's face it: this was the situation with the Internet Explorer since version 3 (that notably allowed hackers to take full control of your Windows computer). The problem is not only that Internet Explorer was historically badly designed and allowed attacks, but also that Micro$oft tried to give unfair competitive advantage to it over any other browser running on their operating system, by integrating it in the Windows itself (maybe you know that actually Windows Explorer IS Internet Explorer in fact). Through this "nice" move, the M$ specialists exposed the whole Windows system to attacks.
  So, whoever is seriously concerned about security, is not using Internet Explorer for ages anyway. I mean, I know there is a lot of marketing about how good and fast the new versions of IE are (but still...), but due to the horrible errors in its past, I prefer to use anything else: Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, Opera etc. Not that the others are completely protected but at least I believe that a big community of developers can react faster to a new bug than a bureaucratic corporation.
  .
• "The antivirus is not enough to protect your unsupported XP"
  
  Actually the antivirus was never enough, never mind if Windows is supported or not.
  I wonder if Windows would be so popular these days if no antivirus exists. Think about it: Windows survived mainly thanks to the antiviruses on the market; antiviruses sprung into life and proliferated due to bad design of Micro$oft Windows, Micro$oft Internet Explorer and Micro$oft Office. Another factor is that people are too obedient and don't ask why they need to pay additional money on a 3-rd party program to protect Windows if they already paid for Windows.
  (Micro$oft had a fake attempt to integrate their own antivirus in Windows when acquiring RAV antivirus in 2004, but over a decade now, it's proved it was just a "kill the competition" move: RAV was the only antivirus on the market that ran on most popular Linux email servers. No RAV meant big punch to the penguin world.)
  Nevertheless, a good antivirus coupled with a firewall and some user education should be enough for any old and unsupported operating system. See the next post.
  .
• "The new hardware (printers, scanners, etc) will not have have drivers for your old XP"
  
  This is unfortunately already true and the ones to blame are the hardware manufacturers that play along with Micro$oft to squeeze money out of people as much and as often as possible.
  Still, if your office setup (laptop, printer, scanner, webcam etc) functions perfectly right now and you have your hardware for years working ok, you might ignore for a while more these calls for spending money. Think about it when your printers break down for natural causes or due to planned obsolescence.
  .
• "[...] technical assistance for Windows XP is no longer available"
  
  Hmm... that's a tough one. I'm sure I'll miss it...
  Have you ever been in contact with Micro$oft directly in a try to fix an issue with your computer? If so, maybe for one time only, and then you got the idea that it's a waste of time 'cause the technical support is inept and they just serve you boilerplate answers from their scripts.
  The best & more efficient way to fix anything with your Windows computer was always to search the internet because the power of people in need is always greater than of those call center scripts readers.

So... vat to do, vat to do?

email smtp/pop proxy solution

I need to have access to my email account when travelling and, surprise, my domain hosting company doesn't allow access to the pop/smtp servers from outside the country. Here is the result of a lot of research generated by their stupid setup:

1. Need to have a server allowed to connect to their pop/smtp servers. This will be an email proxy server. I have a Debian that is always online and has also a fixed internet IP address.

2. Sending emails:
For this I have installed emailrelay and configured it to my needs. The only problem I faced was to set it to run at startup, since it doesn't come with a /etc/rc.d/ startup script.

3. Receiving emails:
This is done on POP3 in my case and I found perdition that does POP/IMAP with loads of other options.

4. The final setup is like this:

5. Details:
- thunderbird is configured to connect to smtp/pop3 servers using non-standard ports: smtp on 60,0001 and pop3 on 60,002.
- My own debian server has installed emailrelay that listens on 60,001 and connects on 25 to the official email server. It also has perdition that listens on 60,002 and connects on 110 on the official email server.
- In case you don't have a fixed IP, you can use dyndns or similar service and use the chosen domain name in thunderbird.

There are loads of config possibilities but that's the way to go if you need email proxy. Both emailrelay and perdition have quite ok docs and senisble defaults so it should be no problem to set it up in 1 hr or less.

Can not find any update image - android tablet upgrade alldro 2 coby MID 8024

This is about updating the Allview Alldro 2 (not Speed!) unsupported by Allview, piece of crap tablet. It is also known as Coby/Kyros MID8024 in US.

A bit about the tablet
- the resistive touch display is really... resistive to touch.
- the wireless connection is a massive piece of crap! What's the point having a tablet if, after you unlock the screen, it takes one minute until it gets connected to the wifi network? My current computer with SSD is booting and connecting much faster, so I'd say it's a major design fault and such product shouldn't be launched on the market.
- the pre-installed applications are crap and the promised access to the application store of Allview turned into bollocks as there is no such store.
- it connects to Google Play but Google doesn't know what the heck it is (!), therefore anything you try to install is "unsupported for your device". The solution is to find .apks for everything you need (e.g. skype, ym, players, etc). The elegant solution is to use Aptoide.
- the battery worn out in about 3 weeks and didn't hold for web browsing more than 10 minutes.
- the charging process was dubious from the very first beginning (e.g. the blue led is showing is 100% charged but when turned on it is only 60%; and other inconsistencies like this)
- The user support is non-existent. I tried to contact them about the charging issue and they didn't bother.
- The android updates were only one (ver 2.3 from ver 2.2). Then the product was considered completely unimportant and couldn't be found anymore on allview's website.

In a word, it's an emblematic Chinese product sold by a Romanian company that manages to add software issues to the built-in hardware issues. Besides, it is not cheap for this quality at all (about 200USD).
Nowadays, sure there are other better tablets on the market since the release of this old monster, and I can see allview selling about a dozen!
However I'll stay away from allview due to the fact they put on the market such a faulty product in the first place, they didn't have the common sense to answer their support request emails and then tried to erase any history of this tablet like it never existed.

This doesn't mean that I'd go for iPAD either, the highly overpriced snob choice.
I just keep hoping that one day, some company, will fill the midrange gap with a Linux tablet that would allow you access to the really free applications market and not the google regulated one.

Now about updating it
I found two update alternatives, one coming from Coby, one from a guy named Steev that apparently started from Coby's rom (despite the fact Steev says that rom is for MID7024 it worked well on Alldro2 i.e. MID8024).
I have tried them both to replace the Android 2.3 that allview provided for us a while ago.

My main objective was to get rid of "Films" stock application unexpectedly stopping (and returning no error whatsoever) when watching some online television streams.

The Coby's official ROM didn't impress me. Instead of quitting to the browser it the stream got stalled every 10 seconds for about 10 seconds, so not much of an improvement.

Steev's ROM is ok, and I got rid of interruption after installing Wondershare media application that can play various stream types and is more stable than anything stock.

It is very possible that Wondershare application solved my problem and not the ROM update but what's done is done. Besides Steev's ROM looks cooler and is rooted which is better anyway.

Can not find any update image - error message
During the process I have encountered several times "Can not find any update image" after restarting the tablet in update mode (Round metal button + Power button).
Nobody on the internet seemed to have a clue and all indicated that the SD card should be reformatted FAT32, replaced I or suggested that the users are stupid enough not to understand that they should unzip the files in SD's root.
I tried all these and various ROMs, same situation.

The solution was to use a SD card of 1 GB (I tried before with 4GB and another one of 16GB). This is the only good thing that came from allview on an old webpage with update instructions for upgrading to android 2.3. They said there: SD card should be of 1GB or less capacity. And they were right for once!

JVC Everio review and how to move Media Browser on new computer

Few months ago I got a really nice JVC Everio HD (GZ-HM50) camera that is perfect for my purposes in the right budget (~120$).

From the physical point of view I can only complain about the fact it is too small and light weight and this makes it quite unstable in the hand that results in shaken image. In the same idea, it is quite impossible to use the zoom in/out switch without giving the camera small shocks that become big image shakes in the footage. But maybe it's just me and in time I'll learn to move smoother :)
Then, the battery life is not very generous, everybody complains about this but for me it was enough until now.

From the software point of view, it comes with Pixela's Everio MediaBrowser CD that is ok as layout and options, and serves my purposes.

To my surprise though, the camera stores the movies in a strange format (.mts) and even you can see them in VLC media player at almost perfect quality, if you use the Everio Media Browser to make a DVD out of those .mts files, you'll see a really noticeable decrease in image quality. Actually, the most annoying thing is that the movies appear to have missing frames and any motion in the movie appears quite fragmented (jerky). This is because apparently the .mts files are recorded at 60 frames per second and the DVD output in NTSC allows only 25 f/sec So probably the rest of them are lost. Anyway, unpleasant no matter the technical reason behind: add the jerks to the shakes and you can get sick and dizzy when watching the "productions".

It is true that there are 2 more options in the output format from Everio MediaBrowser, one being AVCHD (which appears to be camera's native format) and another one being blu-ray; but I have neither the hardware to play AVCHD nor the hardware to record blu-ray to see if the quality is indeed better.


Actually, the only real perfect HD quality I can get out of this camera is when I play it through the HDMI cable directly on TV. Even playing the .mts in VLC and connecting the laptop to the TV through HDMI cable results in a bit lower quality. Finally, the lowest quality is the DVD created with the Everio software. But maybe this is how it is suppose to happen and regular DVDs cannot do HD.

Now, to the actual reason that brought this post into existence:
After installing the EverioMedia Browser 3 on the laptop I lost the installing CD; not a big deal I thought, for sure I'll be able to find it on JVC / Pixela website in the support section. WRONG!

These days, I switched to a new and much more powerful laptop and I wanted to reinstall the camera software. Surprise! The software cannot be found on JVCs / Pixela sites; you can find there only some upgrades to it that I tried and they don't install unless you have the software on CD previously installed.
(Not to mention that there is a mess on Pixela's site concerning the software version you need for a certain model; for example what in the world is Media Browser BE versus MediaBrowser? No indication on the website on why you should get one or the other.)
Anyway, I tried various variants of upgrades from Pixela's site; they didn't work. Then I tried some full versions from torrents; none of them worked for my camera model.

Then I said I'll try the last resort and find a program that is able to move an installed application (with all it's registry settings and everything) to a new computer. This was possible because I still had the original Everio MediaBrowser 3 installed on the other computer.

Obviously I looked for freeware and found PickMeApp that claimed to do this installed on a stick. PickMeApp scanned all the installed programs but, to my dismay, it found every other installed application on the old laptop BUT the one I needed. I double checked in window$' add/remove programs and Everio was there, so it is unexplainable why PickMeUp didn't get it... I uninstalled PickMeUp as it wasn't useful in my case.

Then I realised I could go even lower and decided to copy the full PIXELA folder from the old computer (Program Files) to the new one (Program Files (x86)) then try to run the executables directly to see what's happening.
I was prepared to see the program failing to launch for not found dll's or registry settings and I thought I'll bring from the old laptop whatever is missing, on demand (as it complains), in a long and painful trial-and-error process. Besides, the old laptop was Window$ XP whilst the new one Window$ 7 64 bits, so I really expected to have problems.

So, in doubt, I double clicked the MediaBrowser.exe on the new laptop and surprise: It worked without any other intervention!!! I authored few DVDs since then and the software worked without a hitch. Just make a shortcut to it wherever you wish.

I tried also  MBCameraMonitor.exe that loads in the tray, detects the camera once it is plugged in on USB and takes the appropriate action as you select on Camera screen (create disc, direct disc, upload etc). This one works too very well and could be probably automated to load at windows start-up; I don't bother as I prefer to launch it only when needed.

I didn't try the MBCheckVersion.exe (the 3rd and last executable in the application) though; I assume it is the software updater and there is no point to try it as the application is not really installed in the registry and any update would fail anyway.

So, all in all, this is a possible solution to move your Pixela MediaBrowser original instalation from one computer to another if you lost the original CD (as I have seen tons of people complaining on the internet about loosing their Everio software CD).
It is true that you still should have the software on the old laptop to have where to get it from, so it is not an universal solution, but still...

And, the final moralizing phrase is:
Thanks to the brainy managers form Pixela/JVC that decided that, instead of offering proper post sale support for a product that we paid for once, they should speculate and get money out of those that happen to loose the lousy CD. 

IT errors - the celebrities

Just another set of evidence that we didn't get to the moon...

 

Concrete5 - Adding editors and permissions

One of my websites needed a bilingual spell check and diacritics adding and I decided I should get some professional help on it :)

So, I encountered the task to add another user to the Concrete5 excellent CMS and give only restrictive rights to him.

The process was not that straightforward unfortunately but still, in the end it did a good job.

The main problem is that propagating the rights to the pages below the one you're setting the permissions to, it is at least cumbersome. I mean, the system works probably well in propagating the assigned rights to the newly created pages under the one you set the rights for. However, the behaviour for the existing pages seems to be unfortunately... undetermined.

I have a site using 2 languages so I have two branches under the Home page, one being En (for English).
My intent was to make only the files under the "En" branch editable by a certain user (that belongs to the En_Editors group).

I followed these steps:

- create En_Editors group.
- create editor1 user and assign him to En_Editors.
- add "define('PERMISSIONS_MODEL', 'advanced');" to config/site.php to enable advanced permissions.
- in full sitemap click on the "En" page and choose "set permissions"
- make it "set: manually", add the En_Editors group to the table and check the desired permissions for it.
- Verify that you have the "Sub-pages added beneath this page:" set to "Inherit the permissions on this page" then Save.

Until here everything as expected.

However, verifying the permissions of random pages in the hierarchy under the "En" page, I have noticed that permissions vary according to 3 cases:

1. Certain files had permissions inherited from the "En" page - OK! This is what I expected.
2. Certain files had permissions set on "manually", and different than what I set at the hierarchy top - not OK. (It could be the fact I tried to set those pages' permissions individually before activating the advanced permissions. Still, not OK, because I expected they should've been overwritten, i.e. inherited from the parent)
3. Certain files had permissions inherited but from the "Home" page instead of "En" - not OK!

For those pages having the permissions set to "manually" (case 2 above) I had to reset the permissions to "by Area of Site (hierarchy)".

For those set with "Home" as parent page (case 3 above), as the page it is inheriting from cannot be chosen (why?!), I had to set it first to "manually", then save, then in one more step set again to "by Area of Site (hierarchy)".
After this operation the "This page inherits its permissions from:" took the right value "En" instead of "Home".
Luckily, I have noticed that even if it says "This page inherits its permissions from: Home", if I simply click Save it actually sets it right, to the "En" page, so it kinds of overwrite/recomputes the parent value if just saved again! Few clicks saved.

But all in all too many clicks... I had to check and modify accordingly each and every file in the hierarchy.

Google privacy? Only if you're extremely careful

Some weeks ago I have noticed that the targeted advertising became more and more accurate in targeting me: few days after I researched the web for something, other pages I browsed started to display banners with ads for that something, "by happening".

Surely, they are not that intelligent to decide that sometimes they should simply stop, like: if I buy, let's say, a car over the net, then it's quite pointless to keep flooding me with car deals afterwards, because the probability to buy another one is quite small; I have no money left and I will be forced to live with my choice no matter what super deals they're presenting me now.

The climax was reached one day when on youtube logged in with a nickname I keep only for youtube. Suddenly a pop-up appeared on screen saying something like:

You're logged in using this nickname 'Xxx'. Wouldn't you like to use you real name 'Yyy Zzz' instead? 

And it was indeed my real name! Really scary.
So, I tried to find out to see where is the leak.

I am using Firefox and I have looked over the extensions and found a great one named Ghostery that eliminates all the trackers on the visited websites. I have also installed AdBlock Plus that does some advertising filtering. Nice start!

Then I have noticed (few good months maybe even years ago actually) that google is behaving differently when it returns the results of a search: if you think that clicking on one of the results will get you directly to the particular website, this is not true: it gets you back to google in the first instance and only from there you'll be redirected to the original website. Hover the mouse over the links and look in the status bar to see what I mean.
This crap was built to let Google know what page you chose from the list of possible search results it returned. Happily this behaviour is easily reduced to silence by installing the google-no-tracking-url extension in firefox.

Now to the real problem: I have noticed that each time I open Firefox I am already logged into google and, no matter what I tried, deleting cookies, configuring not to accept 3rd party cookies, logging-out, checking on google preferences that I don't want to be kept logged in, clearing the cache, etc, etc, etc, it still happen.

It was so annoying that I chose to do a manual log-out procedure (followed by changing https to http, see below) each time I opened Firefox, that you can imagine is time consuming and not completely safe as sometimes I simply forget and start searching things as soon as Firefox opens.
 
Then I found and install the Self Destructing Cookies add-on in Firefox that deletes the cookies few seconds (10 by default but configurable) after being created and tells you what it deleted.
With its help I have noticed that each time I start Firefox in few (10) seconds it says that it destroyed the cookies for gmail.com and google.com. But then if restarting the browser I am again already logged in google and the Self Destructing Cookies again it deletes the cookies.

So what created the initial cookies??

I found that the main culprit for this behaviour is another otherwise very useful extension I have installed in Firefox: X-notifier. I use it to get notified about new mails on my gmail, yahoo, etc accounts and it is configured that checks for new emails at each Firefox start-up.
What happens in a matter of 1-2 seconds when I start Firefox is:

• Firefox starts and launches the X-notifier add-on; nothing is loaded for the user to view on screen yet.
• Immediately X-notifier logs-in gmail and by doing so it accepts the cookies for the domain. Gmail, in its mean wisdom doesn't send you back only a cookie for gmail but for also for google.com (see Self Destructing Cookies documentation, about the 3rd party cookies, for more)
• Then, Firefox loads the default page I have configured (http://www.google.com not https!) and sends the cookie to google because it finds it already created.
• Google logs you in according to the cookie and also redirects from http to https.
• Self Destructing Cookies does its job 10 seconds later but a bit too late. You are already logged in. 

Luckily X-notifier has an on/off switch in 'about:config'option that makes it not to accept/store cookies anymore and the problem was solved. This should be a default option in this nice module and I have notified the add-on creator; maybe he wants to change the default behaviour.

Another word of warning: the https:// version of google is the default these days and it is promoted as it is safer and is done for your own good (!). Like somebody is eavesdropping and I need protection for my searches that are performed on an otherwise public search engine...

Anyway, as you may know SSL uses a unique id token for the whole session which means that actually they can link together all your searches performed in one session, without needing any cookie.
So assume the following scenario: You're not accepting cookies, you're not logged into your gmail/google account and you do 30 searches using the https google. In this moment, using SSL session id google knows that all 30 searches are from the same person, just don't know who this is. (The same scenario can obviously happen if you're using cookies, with or without https.)

Then, in the same browser you log on into gmail to check your emails. All your previous 30 searches are linked to your account now!
So it is not for us, the users, it is just for them again. That's why I prefer to use the http version of google and all cookies disabled by default (and enabled case by case if necessary).



Finally, a bit about the auto-completion feature of google, or the "display-the-results-before-I-even-asked" feature. Using Ajax has this advantage: things happen behind the scene and gives the overall impression that it looks better and it is faster. However, be aware that the downside of it is that, as soon as you type a letter, google already knows you have typed it and it is recorded into your account (assuming that you're logged in or using cookies, http, etc. see above), no matter if you clicked the "Search" button at all.
As an example, think about an embarrassing condition you might have and an attempt to find a cure for it. Let's say you start typing: "I have a nasty fungus on my pen...". Then you realize that you might be too exposed if you write this and delete everything and search instead for: "Dermatology practice in London".
Well... it is too late if you're logged in (or using cookies, https, see above).
Google knows already about your real problem and you might see banners about some special anti-fungal cream on your next visit to a bakery's website if they do advertising with google.

Pearson Vue - the monopol in the year 2013

In order to get Comptia Linux+ / LPIC and VMWare certified, unfortunately I had to get an account at Pearson Vue. During the process I have encountered such self sufficiency, rudeness and obtuseness that I decided I should bark a bit about.

Why companies like CompTia, Micro$oft and others prefer to outsource their certification exams, beats me. I mean obviously the companies themselves know best their own technology; so they can choose the best sets of questions & answers. Then, they sure have in-house skills to create a lousy form-based website that could present those questions and ask for the answers in check boxes or radio buttons format, and a database to store the certified people (in fact they have this one already; Pearson Vue send them the names and scores after the exam).

Why have an intermediary when you can do it yourself, better? But, as companies prefer to pass the certifications to Pearson Vue, it is understandable Pearson Vue have become these days a true monopole and nothing one says can shake their dominant position. However my frustration demands to let out some steam...

So here is the story, as concise as possible:

I tried to register with Pearson Vue the day before the exam. I have already talked to the training centre and I have reserved the place; I just needed to pay them money.

The website
It is quite incredible. Starting from the fact that there is no single login for their website; they ask you first to choose what certification exam you need to take in order to be able to create your account. So if you certify in 5 areas, it means you'll have 5 logins?

Then, let's say something about the usability of the site. Have you seen in the last decade or more such HTML lists?

Even a more complicated one (you really have to use your brain to remember the choice you need):

Yet another one: look at the possible years when one could have registered for a VMWare exam (I should have asked my grandpa, maybe he was VMWare certified and I didn't know...) :

So, are your Pearson Vue's programers incredible stupid? They didn't understand the concept behind a HTML list and also about the sensible values you can put in it.
Or maybe they just don't care about these details as they're having the monopole anyway...

The registration
After finishing up the registration process I got an email saying that I'll receive a user/pass in the next 24h! One day for an automatically generated user and pass !

I thought that maybe it's a generic message and that things will happen in a matter of minutes. Seeing that nothing happen after 3 hours (it was already the night before the exam) I created another account using another email address.  Same behaviour, no user/pass back.

The night passed and next morning at the training centre, I had no user/pass and no registration for the exam I intended to pass. Happily the guys there were very helpful and they connected me with Pearson Vue by phone.
The guy over the phone didn't see any accounts I created last night, however he saw an old account, more exactly 12 years old. He insisted to use that account and he started to ask me questions about my address back then, my telephone number, etc, all of them being changed several times since then. So, finally I cut the crap and asked him to create a new account and forget about the old one.
So he made yet another account over the phone, and he registered me for the exam and took the money from my credit card, so I was able to pass the exam that day.

The surprise came few days later, when I have received the registration successfully messages for the 2 accounts I have created myself but none for the one created over the phone. As it stands, I had a total of 4 accounts with them, from which 3 using the same email address (!!!).

So, next step was to write few emails to ask them to unify the accounts somehow and make the magic to see my latest results somewhere. All communication by email is taking few days, and then I received a paper form I need to fill in and sent to them scanned. Did it, then message came that they couldn't find my 4 accounts so they couldn't merge them!

The talk
Therefore I decided to talk to a human and after waiting in the queue about 45 minutes (by the clock!) in an international call, I got a lady that was not only not knowledgeable about their system but also extremely impertinent and not willing to actually do a thing. She said things like:

"Why did you create such a mess?"
I "created"? Because your system allowed me to...

"You should stop shouting and start to listen" - I was not shouting, I was calling using an internet phone that interrupts a lot and also speaking a foreign language; I was just trying to make sure she understands me. I told her that she probably has a volume up/down button somewhere.
Besides, for waiting 30 minutes to have my phone picked-up, I think I deserved to be listened not talked over.

When I asked her to pass me to her manager, she just laughed sarcastically and said there is no manager and she's the only one I can talk to.

In the end, she just sent me that paper form again and I was back to square one.

Very frustrating. (I actually sent an email to them to complain about her behaviour. Obviously no answer.)


How I solved it in the end? I didn't, I stepped back and rethought the "strategy". Then I have called them again and ask only to resend the user/pass for the newest account of mine, the one created over the phone, where actually my VCP results were.

As for the rest of the accounts, to hell with them! Let the great corporation live with the mess if they are unable to understand it, and have stupid people in their service that have no desire to clean it up.

Why didn't the site complain that the email address is in use when I tried to re-use it? How can it be that I have there 3 accounts, all of them created with the same email address and name? Mind numbing...

Update: These days I got the CompTIA Linux+ exam, again through Pearson Vue (I tried to use Prometric - you know why - but they stopped delivering CompTIA exams). The testing computer failed to start the exam (yes, it was Window$ on it) and the lady from the test centre spend 30 minutes on hold to get someone from Pearson Vue to get a needed authorization code.

So this is the level of service Pearson Vue offers, no matter if it's an end user or their own authorized testing centre.
I just hope we'll hear soon about their bankruptcy and the fact they massively laid off their incompetent and nincompoops employees. I'll have a glass of champagne for them by then :)

CompTIA Linux+ certification - annoyances

First problem was to find a preparation manual that is up to date, approved and custom tailored for the exam.
From both LPI and CompTIA it looked like the latest manual that had their approval was published in 2009, whilst the most recent was released in 2010 but without any endorsements from CompTIA or LPI.
So... I chose the 2009 one, thinking that maybe things didn't change that much and, at least it was approved once.

At the first exam day (there are 2 exams required), I could divide the 60 questions in 4 categories:

1. The one I knew the answer for
2. The ones I thought I knew the answer for
3. The ones I knew the answer for but I forgot it
4. The ones I never knew the answer, nor that even there is a question :)

Surprisingly, quite a few were in the 4th category which was really annoying after knowing that I've read the book thoroughly.

Another unpleasant surprise was the fact that about one third of the questions needed free text input instead of just checking boxes or radio buttons! There are two cons here:

• Even in the real life, in Linux you have the "tab" key that helps you auto-complete a command that you might not remember entirely; so why would anyone make the exam more bitchy than the real life?
• And then: are the automatic scoring scripts 100% capable to decide the answer is good or bad, if your entry is free text?

I actually had questions in both exams that could have been answered in two ways, both ok. One example:

In some versions of the "route" command it is accepted "gateway" instead of "gw".
So, the following two lines should be both accepted:
route add default gw 192.168.1.1
route add default gateway 192.168.1.1

Do they take into consideration all good possible answers?

The answer is: nobody knows...

I wrote to them asking this question and giving them the examples I had encountered in my exam. They preferred to answer :
"Unfortunately we cannot disclose any particular aspect of specific exam questions as they are proprietary and confidential in nature. As a reminder, CompTIA’s candidate non-disclosure agreement which appears at the beginning of all exams, prohibits candidates from disclosing or discussing exam content."

Ok. Fuck you too. How can be MY results confidential toward ME? How can I not be able to discuss MY results with YOU?

Anyway, having this experience from the first exam, I have studied from the newest book for the second exam. Moreover, this time I have taken the exam objectives that were released by CompTIA in August 2012 and looked over the internet and man pages for info on all the topics listed in the exam objectives but not covered in the book(s) I have. This almost doubled my preparation work.
Even so, some of the questions from the second exam have fallen in the 4th category again. Fewer, but still...

I think it is inadmissible to have no book on the market that covers indeed the whole exam.

Speaking about the books, on a funny note let me show you an excerpt from the appendix of "LPIC-1 Linux Professional Institute Certification Study Guide, Second Edition, Wiley Publishing 2009", the part that indicates the system requirements for running the contents of the cd (i.e. the book's pdf, the "sybex test engine", etc):

"System Requirements
Make sure your computer meets the minimum system requirements shown in the following list [...]
- A PC running Microsoft Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows NT4 (with SP4 or later), Windows Me, Windows XP, or Windows Vista
[...] "

Hmm, Linux study guide you said?

CompTIA Linux+ certification - the after math...

So, I decided a while ago to get some official recognition for the Linux skills I used for years. I have researched the market and apparently it all boils down to only two choices:

• RedHat certification - powerful brandname but really expensive certification; about $7000.
• Linux Professional Institute (LPI) certification - vendor independent and about $400 per certification level, see below.

So, after I have consulted my budget, the decision was simple: I have chosen the LPI Certification. (To make it look more like an educated choice and not money based, I should reveal that I am a Debian/Ubuntu fan since Redhat decided to go commercial, about a decade ago. No, really!)

Now, there are 3 Linux certification levels available from LPI: Junior, Advanced and Senior (see here) and the first one was available also through CompTIA that is offering it under the name: "CompTIA Linux+ powered by LPI".

I have chosen the CompTIA one, but it seems it is completely equivalent to the LPI one (and even more; see Greg Porter's very instructive blog).

The overall impression is that this is not a Junior exam at all, in my view.
You can take probably any Senior Linux professional and test him (unprepared) for this exam and he'll probably fail.
Is not the depth of the exam but the diversity of topics and the fact that one can work 24x7 in Linux for 10 years in a row and never encounter some topics covered by this exam. Probably the most obvious one: why did they include SQL in a linux certification at all?

In the same idea, the exam covers the two main distributions on the market (Debian and RedHat and their derivatives) and if you're specialized for years on one side there is a slim chance you know or even care about the other side.

Finally, the exam takes into consideration different versions of the same applications (e.g. XFree86 3.3.6, XFree86 4.x and X.org-X11) and one should remember their quirks, and their similar & different options. In real life this not quite happening and is not very useful; the trend is to unify your systems as much as possible. Then, once upgraded, the system administrator embraces the new set of parameters and throws the old set into gradual oblivion. Some companies even have different admins for different Linux distros, if they were unable to migrate to one system or another.

Anyway, there was a lot of interesting information and enjoyed it a lot. However I have encountered some annoyances and they are all here. Also I have to bark about Pearson Vue mega-corporation. But this, in its own space, i.e. here. M-ha-ha. M-ha-ha-ha!

MS Office trouble

Problem
-------------

Users having:
- Office 2003 (sp3) with Office 2007 compatibility pack (sp1).
- Office 2007 (sp1)

work on the same document on a smb share.

From on point in time, the user using Office 2003 gets:

"Filename.ppt is currently in use. PowerPoint can't modify it at this time."

when he tries to save it (even if no modifications done).

Cause
---------
The user with Office 2003 has inserted some excel tables as embeded (instead of graphic). This article appears to apply: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/285517


Solution
-------------
Using Office 2003 , copy/paste all slides to a new powerpoint and save it as Office 2003. Then replace the pptx with this one and instruct the users to use this ppt instead (and save it as ppt no matter if they use 2007/2010).

The perfect laptop backpack...

... has not been created yet.

The "almost perfect" laptop backpack was my last Targus. But somehow they decided to discontinue it and trash its features instead of just adding some new ones on.

This is a list of features I would love to have at my laptop backpack and cannot find them all at any on the market, so far. Backpack manufacturers, erm... take notes?

• Secret pocket. My old Targus had one hiden in the lower back padding. Super super feature! Even I needed few month to find it :)
• Cell/Mobile pocket on one of the brackets. You need to visually check you mobile to decide if you answer/call back/etc, right? Then why putting the mobile somewhere inside, where you cannot reach it it unless you take off the backpack? Old Targus had it.
• Side pocket keychain. It's super to be able to reach the keys without taking off the backpack. Targus had it but I needed some practice to be able to reach and get the keys off the chain; still I managed to do it.
• Outside bottom made of special fabric / plastic / lether / rubber. Targus had it made of a kind of plastic fabric and I didn't care if I put it down in muddy or wet areas because it was easy to wipe afterwards and completely water proof.
• Laptop compartment access from the side. I would prefer to be able to take out/in the laptop without opening the round upper part zipper of the backpack. It would be much easier to be able to extract it through a side linear zipper (only the laptop not the charger, etc). This is the only feature missing from my old Targus but at the time I bought it was not "invented". Now I can see some models on the market having this nice feature.
• Some obvious and very common features: External side pocket for bottles (even one on each side). Padded back, straps, and laptop compartment. Diveded interiors with various mesh/non mesh pockets and zippers. Most of the backpacks have these anyway.

This is a message in a bottle. If you bump into this post and I am still alive, I would appreciate if you could send me the link to the backpack model that meets all of the above requirements.

God bless your back(pack)!