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Video and a mistake

I love being wrong. Scratch that: I love being wrong when being wrong is better than being right. Earlier this month, I had blamed a media converter that I had downloaded on infecting my laptop with a trojan. Blargh. I finally tested (no, I didn't have an OS image and I should have) and it installed and ran fine without issue. Not sure now who the culprit was, because I really hadn't done much else that could have infected me (that'swhattheyallsay).

Whilst researching, I found a good review of the software over at Gear Diary. I ended up purchasing the professional version with their "holiday discount" (hmm). I'm sure the 60-buck is just an idiot's fee, but after wrestling a little with free converters, I'll accept that moniker although I definitely wouldn't have gotten it for the msrp of 90-buck. The other option is to use multiple apps and much trial-and-error with configuration settings. Considering how slow video ripping is, the idiot's fee is more acceptable than the trial-and-error fee.

BlackBerry Storm (4/5), not deserving all the hate that it's getting

Got mine the Friday after Thanksgiving and have been slowly assimilating it. Transition from my nearly 3-year-old Treo 700w. Requirements were: good camera, sync, and fast internet. Competitors were iPhone, G1, and a handful of Verizon smart phones. Not wanting to switch carriers, I went with the Storm.

Overall, I like it and wouldn't chose another. Looks great, both hardware and software, I can use Opera (my browser-of-choice for years), great 3.2 megapixel camera, I can access my Mindspring email, GPS and navigation, and Bluetooth earpiece. Several of these features are de rigeur for cell phones, but coming from the Treo I get to enjoy them for the first time with the Storm. I love the clicking keypresses! Press your finger over a button and it glows-but-doesn't-click; this gives you some feedback before clicking. And the screen scrolling is iPhone-ish. Any quirks are acceptable for a v.1 (what the Treo was when I got it). To quote a Digg comment in response to a (biased) Wired blog entry: iPhone got a lot a hate when it came out too. Storm's getting a backlash it doesn't deserve.

That being said, here are the issues I've found along with their solution (I think in order of me encountering them):

• Can't hear callers but they can hear me - Remove battery. Experienced this only once and found the solution pretty easily on some website.
• How to get documents onto the phone:
  1. Open Desktop Manager
  2. Click Backup and Restore
  3. Click Advanced
  4. "Do you want to switch to Mass Storage Mode?" - Yes
  5. The BlackBerry will disappear from My Computer and a drive will be mapped. Copy!

  [ updated 5 Jan 2009 ]

  Alternately, try Options > Memory > Enable "Auto Enable Mass Storage Media When Connected".

• Try to open document and get error "Permission to your files was denied. Please configure your application permissions appropriately." - Using Mass Storage Mode (probably from the steps above). Change to normal mode by disconnecting from the computer.

Here are some quirks or issues I haven't yet resolved:

• Before putting it in my pocket, I have to go to the home screen and click the "lock" button. There's no hardware lock button.
• Browser links click when touching the screen, not when clicking the screen.
• Keyboard (sometimes) has a bug when typing in portrait mode. Key presses do not bring up the multi-key menu (ABC, DEF, ...) or allow you to cycle through available letters. Not sure how this happens or with what specific screens it succeeds/fails, but it makes the 3x4 keyboard useless in such a situation. Worst problem I've encountered. [ updated 10 Dec 2008 ] I just didn't understand the "predictive" typing that they were using. I was mistakenly trying to type multiple times to cycle through keys. Instead, just click the keys and the word options narrow to the most likely word(s). 95+% affective.
• Using voice dialing: I had two cards with the same name (one my dad, one my brother). Voice dialing brings up multiple home, work, and cell numbers, so I decide to delete the phone numbers from my dad's card (no offense!). After I did that, neither name came up for voice dialing. After several experiments, I had to add a number back to my dad's card (555-1212) to get both names' numbers to come up with voice dialing. A complete WTF situation, but the only problem I'd had with that feature.
• Contact birthdays and anniversaries don't show up in the calendar.
• [ updated 10 Dec 2008 ] Checkboxes in the Opera browser are unclickably small. I'm comfortable with links and buttons now, but it is basically impossible to check the checkboxes. Blargh.

Syncing is an interesting issue; here's the situation: I have contacts in Outlook on my desktop, but I link the Storm to my laptop. Here was the solution:

Gotta use MAPI just to get contacts out of Outlook (fu), then Thunderbird can get it into a more standard LDAP format, and Outlook Express can import that (along with a few oddball MS formats, but oddly can't import Outlook's pst files?!?). I'd say 95% of the data got converted correctly. I'm trying to look forward to how my contact data will exist in a non-Windows world, and LDIF may be the key. Sadly Outlook Express doesn't export LDIF and the BlackBerry won't connect to Thunderbird, so this is a TBD. There're a host of BlackBerry users and web pages bemoaning this, so I don't expect it to be fixed anytime.

My complaints are more detailed than my praises, but that's how it goes (successful features are all alike; every unsuccessful feature is unsuccessful in its own way...). A week+ of use and I stand by my 4/5. We'll see in a month...

Server upgrades

Major upgrades on the home server this past week.

First, I upgraded MySQL from 3.23.53 to 5.0.67. Way overdue to get this done. My blog and wiki use it, so there were multi-honed dependencies that needed to be addressed at the same time. I installed it side-by-side on a different port and then copied the individual databases over (using SQLyog). That eliminated the recommended upgrade from 3.23 to 4.0 to 4.1 and then from 4.1 to 5.0.x. I don't have any stored procedures or fancy triggers, so that would have probably been unneccessary anyway.

Then, I worked on my MediaWiki installation and getting that from 1.3.7 to 1.13.2 (I hate lack of zero-padding in version numbers). Only issue was remembering where the database settings were. PHP sets the database URL in php.ini under [MySQL] mysql.default_port and mysql.default_host. MediaWiki set it in LocalSettings.php | $wgDBserver = "host:port";. Make sure you set both values and turn off your existing database service to test! Otherwise you'll look as dumb as I did when I couldn't figure out why it was complaining about and old database version. Idiot.

The Movabletype upgrade from 2.661 to 4.21 was more involved. Database URL and user set up in mt-db-pass.cgi and mt.cfg | Database and DBUser. Change the first line in all Perl scripts from "#!/usr/bin/perl -w" to the actual path (I still think that's an idiotic system). If you get the error Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client, run the following:

UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = OLD_PASSWORD('password') WHERE Host = '%' AND User = 'user'; 
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

I had to do this even though the user was created fresh in the new MySQL. Dunno why; just had to. If you have to add any Perl modules via CPAN and get the dreaded Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at -e line 1., remember that Windows expects double-quotes as delimiters, not single-quotes. Once past all of this, MT happily upgraded the database tables and started anew. The changes in this version are ... mind-boggling, but I guess it's to be expected going from 2.x to 4.x. Many new features to discover.

Expect weirdness for the next few weeks as I iron out things I'd forgotten (like my wiki becoming unauthenticated for the first day, oop). Next maybe I'll try one of those fancy new WEB 2.0 layouts I hear are all the rage.

Killing a trojan

My laptop got infected with something on Thursday (I think) and so Saturday morning was spent cleaning it and every other machine on the network. Symptoms: Google search results looked a little wonky, odd font?, and clicking any of the result links would pop open a new window with advertising crap. I should have save the page for reference. The HTML had a mishmash of odd links replacing what it said the URLs were. Fuckers.

A quick search came up with Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware utility. First run on my laptop found ~16 infected files and registry entries. Clean, reboot, and rerun. Second found four. Third and subsequent runs found one: Rootkit.Agent in a file under C:\System Volume Information\_restore*. Each pass, it would be a different .sys file. Cleaned up the two desktop machines; the web server was completely clean. Lisa's laptop had Rootkit.Agent also. :-(

I had accepted that I would have to scorched Earth both laptops, but then found a reference to FileASSASSIN (also from Malwarebytes) in a forum talking about that particular pest. I rebooted in safe mode, ran the malware scan (since the file changed after each cleaning), found the currently infected file, and used FileASSASSIN to delete it. Reboot back in normal mode and both laptops scanned clean.

According to ThreatExpert, it's a rootkit and a trojan. I have my doubts that it's gone so will be running more scans. Let's just say you shouldn't accept any emailed files from me for the foreseeable future...

Data Deposit Box

While looking for software to help my brother set up a blog for his real estate business, I got lost in a cascade of tasks and never got back to address his request. First, I decided to try out Drupal for him by setting it up on my server. Ah, but to set that up, I want to first perform some database (MySQL) and scripting (PHP) upgrades that were long overdue. And before I do any upgrades, I need to fix the sorry state of backup that exists on the ether network. At this point, I've bottomed out in my spelunking adventure and can begin.

I was using Mozy for backup, but it wouldn't install on Windows server, wouldn't grab data from network shares, and would only allow backups from one machine. To get it to kindof work, I had a Windows backup scheduled and then had Mozy (attempt to) backup the bakup file. Being ~1.5 GIG, it usually failed to upload. Several coworkers use Carbonite and several others use DropBox. I'd heard Carbonite was like Mozy, but saw that it doesn't support my older Window machines (XP and Vista only). DropBox works with a specific folder structure and doesn't allow you to "assign" folders as DropBox folders. Their interface is beatiful and simple, but if they won't grab my pst files or my database files it's of little use.

I did a quick search and found Sanjay Parekh's article from two years ago comparing various services. He has different requirements than me, but provides a good overview. From those services reviewed, Data Deposit Box ended up working the best: any number of machines, network shares, and $2/GB/month. The only downside is that it's currently Windows-only. I've been using it for maybe two weeks and--although I haven't had a restore emergency--have been completely satisfied.

(three machines from the network show up in DDB's web browser admin interface, files are shareable and retrievable anywhere)

Creative ZEN 8 GB

Got my new MP3 player yesterday: the Creative ZEN 8 GB media player. I'd gotten it 'cause the prices dropped, probably in response to the new iPods. Spec-wise, it fares well in comparison with other players, nothing outstanding but adequate, but makes up for it in price ($100 for the 8 GB unit). What sold me was the physical size, the screen, FM radio, and price. Possibly most interesting was the ability to finally extract files from the device. I'm rarely an early adopter, and so this is replacing my 256 MB iRiver player (!). It's probably no longer the norm, but once you copy a file to the iRiver you can't copy it off. It's in effect write-only, probably because of some copyright bullshit. Beyond the move from 256 MB to 8 GB, it's nice to finally abandon that dead-end approach to the technology.

My (very) first impressions: solid feel, beautiful screen (still need to get the screen protector, but we'll see how it holds up to fingerprints), clear and intuitive interface. Had to purchase a separate package of accessories (car and wall chargers, armband, and rubber case) from a 3rd party. I'll be exercising with it this evening and either listening to mei or Performance Today on WABE. Have no idea when I bought the iRiver, it's been at least five years, but I hope this lasts at least a few years before I itch to upgrade.

Earthlink and dynamic IP addresses

So, over the past three days our home DSL account through Earthlink has been averaging 15 IP addresses a day. Considering that I've worked from home the past two days and have had, or rather should have had, a constant VPN connection to my office network, that's kinda shady. I called Earthlink support at 12:45 this afternoon and "asked" them about their policy of high-adrenaline IP assignment.

They wanted to verify how I could possibly know what my IP address was (?!?), and then tried to blame it on (a) my router (did you purchase that from Earthlink?), (b) the various what's-my-IP web sites (what URLs did you visit?), and (c) my company's VPN (contact your network administrator). They then tried to upsell me to a static IP. Dynamic IPs I understand are dynamic, but when I get cycled through up to three different addresses in a five-minute period ... fuck you Earthlink.

Well, since the call at 12:45, I've had ... three updates. At 10:49, 11:09, and 11:29 (my first activity in several hours). Weird that it was smoothe sailing after my disgruntled complaint about them trying to make me pay extra for a fixed IP address because of their shitty service. They can't be that responsive to angry calls. Going on vacation this weekend, so the question is on hold until next week. Atnex is the likely candidate with high ratings at DSL Reports.

Configuring ZoneAlarm and ShoutCAST

ZoneAlarm doesn't play well with SHOUTcast. The only way around getting these two to work together is to configure ZoneAlarm in "Program Control" > Main > "Program Control" and select Med[ium] (High is the default). This may not be the best security choice for your setup, but it will allow clients to get in to your SHOUTcast server.

I had recently had a couple of minor crashes and lost my ZoneAlarm settings, so I had to re-learn this configuration. All the while kicking myself for not having it stored in my brain from years ago. The following links made me realize that few others have solved (and published) this: RANDOM: Shoutcast and Zone Alarm, WINAMP.COM | Forums - cannot see your station (diffrent), IORSN - SHOUTcast Network Configuration - Test 1.

And yet more electronics

We're now the proud owners of an 80-hour TiVo Series 2 Dual Tuner DVR:

Good prices are to be had on Series 2 TiVos as they over-charge for the Series 3. I also upgraded our network with a Linksys WRT54GL 802.11g wireless router (to replace our prehistoric first generation router+access point) and so slapped on a TiVo USB network adapter.

Still waiting on the Philips DVP5140 Multiformat DVD Player with Divx, MP3, Windows Media Support to replace the somewhat less expensive Philips that died recently.

Oooh, sleek.

More electronics

Our TiVo may be dead.

I've been pining over the Monolith Media Center ever since it was announced. PVRs are appliances, so I don't give a shit about tinkering with Linux/hardware drivers/capture cards etc. It should just work, and Monolith may be the way to go: MythTV, Asus Pundit P1PH1, 200GB Hard Drive, TV Tuner, DVD-R Drive, P4 3.0GHz CPU, with a variety of hardware upgrades available.

See discussion at Engadget. Price is $700. Ouch. Oddly, I haven't found anyone actually reviewing it. Someone must have purchased one by now...

Electronics

Decided to use an Amazon gift certificate that's been burning a hole in my inbox and get a new coffee maker:

Sleek.

With a timer and grinder aaaaand since I don't have whole beans on hand I bought some from Amazon's new-ish grocery store. Price was almost exactly the same as if I would have gone to Publix or Kroger, so no big deal.

Then, tonight, we were about to watch a movie and our nearly new DVD player (purchased in April) that had been acting quirky finally decided to stop acting completely. The now-dead Philips DVP642 came recommended, but I guess something that inexpensive also has to be cheap. Risking a repeat, I just purchased the Philips DVP5140.

Ripping video from YouTube

Information taken shamelessly from Methodshop.com and VideoHelp.com. The process is a little slow but effective when you have a video that you would rather burn to CD to watch on the television. Like the unaired pilot for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

1. Load the page for the YouTube video you want to rip.
2. Allow it to buffer completely. The player bar fills with a darker gray as the video is downloaded.
3. The buffer will be a file with an FLV extension in your browser's cache directory. Probably somewhat large.
4. Download and install the Riva FLV Encoder.
5. Set the Input Video to the full path of the FLV file. Set the Output Directory and Ouput Video to the path and name of a new file with an AVI or MPG extension.
6. Click FLV Encode and wait...

Server update

Late Wednesday, I decided to do some end-of-year security checks on my Web server. I keep up with Windows updates, but I hadn't run Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer in a while so that was step one. It made a few good recommendations concerning default IIS Web sites that I'd never removed (just disabled) and the fact that I didn't disable the Guest user. The fatal recommendation was to run something called IIS Lockdown from Microsoft which further cleans up stray IIS settings that could cause problems.

I'm not sure exactly what happened when I ran it, but the result was the elimination of all of my Web sites from IIS (the settings, not the files). Yipes. My fault was two-fold: I should have had IIS backed up and I should have researched more closely what the lockdown app was going to do. Anyway, the past few days--late into the evening Wednesday, a good portion of last night when I got RadioWave (JSPs) and my blog (Perl) up, and today when I finally got my development wiki (PHP) back--were exhausting. Oddly, getting Tomcat working was the biggest headache, mostly because IIS seems to be erratic about refreshing with refresh (the Web site), restart (the server), or reboot (the machine). I need to write down all of the peculiarities as soon as possible before I forget, especially because I found others describing some of the symptoms but with no solutions. I've already updated my notes on configuring MediaWiki with some new links, but there's some more to add. Getting Perl working was effortless. Getting PHP was a little more difficult because it involved some rarely-documented stuff.

All-in-all, it was a good re-learning experience and I was able to clean up many of the spurious settings from my Tomcat config files. The irony now is that my Web server is probably more insecure (I probably shouldn't advertise that, should I?) because of the gobal changes that were just made. I think I'll be locking down IIS on my own from now on, thank you.

(work here (or here (or here)))

Virtual machine reader on the cheap, yo. With a handful of virtual machines for download, including a browser appliance that can be used as the ultimate firewall. [ via /. and not yet tested ]

TiVo ToGo and version 7.1 of Tivo

PVRblog (a primary source on TiVo information) has an entry on the current state of affairs with the newest release of the OS. TiVo is really starting to open up to the fortuitous accidents of the hacker community by creating new features that are intentionally open to modification. That's a stunning embrace of customer creativity by a corporation. The usual response is to squelch interest in order to retain complete control. TiVo, Inc. perhaps realizes that the world is a self-directed R&D department ready to customize their company's product to be more useable. And a more useable product means more product shipped.

The article points to a thread concerning the legality of ripping or copying what TiVo stores (I'm not circumventing anything; I'm recording video playing back on my computer). This question came up recently when I was blabbing to someone about RadioWave. The radio stations provide the schedules and the streaming content. Is it illegal to rip the stream? Is it illegal to publicly share the ripped stream? Is it illegal to give others the ability to rip and copy the stream? If I sit up late at night and hit play/record on my tape deck to record a cool album, is that illegal?

TV and satellite recordings

Two relatively recent news stories from Wired regarding relatively recent news. First, TiVo is now offering the ability to copy and rip shows. The service is called TiVo ToGo (someone mentioned that it was Tom Wolfe in A Man in Full [Amazon] who pointed out the incipient trend in the 90s of companies with one word and two capital letters), and went into affect on Monday. I'd like to think it was caused by open-source PVRs, but I doubt it.

Next, satellite radio has been making in-roads into allowing you to record their streams. Back in October, I pointed out the XM recorder. Now a third party called timetrax (no upper-case) is providing the ability to rip either XM or Sirius.

Configuring MediaWiki on IIS

This entry is a repository of links and instructions covering how to install MediaWiki on a Windows 2000 IIS machine (ongoing).

TiVo lockdown!

There's been more hubbub surrounding TiVo concerning its recent update that will restrict how long you can keep PPV and video-on-demand recordings. First, from my recent, rare purchase of Wired, they had an interview with a TiVo rep providing a half-hearted defense of the changes. Then, from my recent subscription to the PVR Blog feed, they had several entries discussing it.

And today, who else but /. has a lengthy, and interesting, discussion on it. They reference both the Wired article and the PVR blog. Here's a quick breakdown of their collective assessment.

More freedom with XM

XM is selling hardware that combines their receiver plus a hard drive to cache stations for later listening. What a wonderful future we live in! I wrote previously about how XM was adding Internet streaming "simulcasts" for their stations. If they hadn't done this, it would only be a short time before someone created something genius for it like Radio TiVo.

The new receiver, dubbed MyFi, has a 3 gig hard drive and costs $350 dollars. Ouch. Although they say 3 gigs of audio is 5 hours.

[ via /. -> XM Radio - Delphi MyFi ]

More convergence: PVRs

Over at /., the geeks are duking it out over MythTV (a Linux-based, open source PVR) and Microsoft's Media Center Edition.

XM + Streaming = Big Fun

XM Radio is planning to provide a streaming service to complement its satellite radio service. Currently, XM Radio broadcasts special-interest stations (80s, symphonic, hip-hop etc.) to custom receivers available for your car and transferrable anywhere. The receivers are actually pretty sexy looking.

Where is all of this going?

TiVo + Netflix = Big Fun

TiVo and Netflix join forces for broadband movies. We may have to upgrade to the new TiVo if this happens.

[ via bump ]

WAP woes

We live in lofts that used to be state government offices. The walls have metal studs instead of wood ones (nudge nudge), so our condo has a couple of dead spots for the wireless network. Enter the wireless extension point!

Blast! LinkSys doesn't appear to have one. But wait!! D-link has one!

The path I must take is clear now. Still, it would be nice to pay only $40 instead of $70...