Brian Jepson’s Weblog

WTF Adwords?!

Remember the classic rainbow effect in so many Atari games and demos? I dug around for some information on how to do it, and distilled it into a mini howto on the recently launched Hackszine Blog. So break out your favorite 8-bit Atari computer or emulator, and get ready for some type-in fun!

Several years ago, I wrote this tutorial and presented it a conference (The Bazaar) in New York. I had a lot of fun with it, and I think the students did, too. I posted the booklet and some cards that are used in some exercises associated with the tutorial. If anyone uses this in their own tutorial or studies, I’d be delighted to hear how it worked out.

ButtUgly:
“just before we arrive at the metro station, she asks me: ‘How do you
know so much about this shit?’”

Larry
Osterman: “This was as a part of a company-wide initiative to remove
all home-brewed HTTP servers (and there were several) and replace them
with a single server. The thinking was that having a half dozen HTTP
servers in the system was a bad idea, because each of them was a
potential attack vector. Now with a single server, we have the
ability to roll out fixes in a single common location.”

This tip came in handy–I was repaving a machine and didn’t want to have to re-activate office. (For Office XP and 2003, backup the data.dat or opa11.dat files in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\OFFICE\DATA, for Office 2000, use telephone activation and write down the code they give you–it’s reusable).

I’ve been a happy Norton
Ghost user for a while, but I never knew how it worked. I found out
the hard way, after I upgraded to a new SATA-based system that Ghost
didn’t like. As soon as my clone operations started, it got some kind
of protection error and just crapped out. What’s worse, I got into a
couple of situations where Ghost wouldn’t put my system back the way
it was before dropping into PC-DOS. This was pretty bad, since here’s what Ghost does:

• Creates a virtual partition in the middle of my hard drive
  somewhere, grabbing a couple of megabytes that overlap with another
  partition, and setting up a PC-DOS partition that contains all the Ghost
  utilities.

• Marks that partition as bootable.

So when Ghost crapped out partway through, all I could get was the
PC-DOS boot menu. I was able to fix it by booting Linux (I
chose the Fedora Core boot CD-ROM and went far enough into the install
to get a shell prompt) and using fdisk to delete the bogus virtual
partition and mark the primary partition as bootable.

So I figured I’d run Ghost on a different machine. Problem is, that
machine had 3 primary and one extended partition, so Ghost couldn’t
create its virtual partition. I really don’t like this whole booting
into PC-DOS thing, anyhow, so I looked around and found Drive Image (formerly
PowerQuest, now Symantec), which will perform imaging operations without
leaving Windows. Since both Ghost and Drive Image come from the same
company, I tried using my Ghost serial # to get upgrade pricing for
Drive Image, and that worked, so I saved a few bucks. I was able to
backup and restore an NTFS partition with no major problems. (However, I
made an initial attempt with my Actius’ drive mounted on my desktop
computer; when I restored the NTFS drive, Drive Image somehow hardcoded
the drive letter that my desktop computer was using, which totally threw
off the Windows 2000 install that was living in that partition. It
worked fine when I ran Drive Image from the Actius itself.)

There are some good Linux alternatives, too:

• Partition Image
• g4u
• dd

I’ve moved tinySQL to SourceForge. Thanks to the SourceForge folks for creating a and providing such a great resource.

Sam Gentile:
“The biggest gaping hole in using Groove in geographically dispersed
project teams is this lack of check-in and check-out of project
documents. Now it’s there. It’s downright Groovy-)”