My Latest Work

So it’s been a day shy of a month since my last post. That’s a long time by internet standards… Unfortunately for all my fans, I’ve been exceedingly busy. Friends and family over Christmas (regardless of what I may have posted before about Sinterklaas, we did a mini-celebration on December 25th, as well), a whole bunch of coding, playing World of Warcraft while I took some time off, helping out around the house (least I can do since my mother was nice enough to allow me to move home when my ex-wife kicked me out), etcetera, etcetera.

Most recently, I’ve been working on some graphic design work. More specifically, I’ve been working on designing a new logo for my website/business… which brings me to today’s post. I need the help of all you wonderful people out there. I’ve got six designs listed in the image at the end of this post, and while there’s a couple that I favor above and beyond the others, I figured I’d see what the public liked the best. For those that don’t know, the business itself is a web development company, specializing in PHP/MySQL backend solutions (I make webpages do fancy things). Now armed with that knowledge, I present to you the logos. Please either comment on this with the number, or check the poll that will appear immediately below the image. Take care and keep ’em burnin’, folks.

Gawyn Pendragon

Video Transcoding

The holidays, for me (and some of our European friends), is now over. Today marks Sinterklaas on the Dutch calendar, which is the Dutch version of Christmas (meaning Saint Nicholas day). While I got some really kick-ass stuff that I could easily rant and rave about for hours on end (including a World of Warcraft Cataclysm preorder – I’ll blog about the expansion once I actually play it), today’s post has to do with computing. More specifically, today’s post has to do with Video Transcoding (that is, taking a video that’s in one file format, and re-encoding it into a different file format) and my gripes therewith.

I downloaded a couple videos recently that were in the m2ts file format. Now, before anybody yells at me, yes. I know downloading videos is wrong, however I download them for one reason, and one reason only – to find out if I like them. If I do, they get deleted from my hard drive and go on my “buy this movie” list… unfortunately, having been out of work for three years, that list is getting very long indeed. But I digress.

So these movies I downloaded were m2ts, 1080p, blu-ray rips. I figured “hey, my XBox is allegedly high-def, and I plan on getting an HDTV as soon as I can afford one, so why not get the good ones”. So as soon as they finished downloading, I copied them over into my shared media folder, opened up Windows Media Center, fired up the XBox (and Media Center on there), and tried streaming them across. For those of you that have tried this in the past, you’ll know that my XBox immediately started yelling at me, saying it couldn’t play the file. Now, one step further, I found out that night that not only could it not play those files, but if you tried playing a file it COULD read after attempting an m2ts file, it wouldn’t be able to read it either. Not cool.

So I had a friend over for Sinterklaas (he’s pretty much family anyhow), and him and I were dicking around on my laptop, working on ripping some of his CDs to MP3 so that he could use them on his MP3 player. We finished that, and I thought “Hey! I betcha Adobe’s got something in it’s wonderful CS5 Masters Collection that could convert these files!” So I opened my start menu, and lo and behold, there was Adobe Media Encoder CS5. Perfect. So roughly 24 hours ago as of when I’m typing this line, I loaded up said program, and loaded the first of the few movies into it that I wanted to convert.

It automatically read some of the settings, such as it’s aspect ratio, dimensions, bitrate, and audio settings. Beauty. So I went to change it to an AVI file. Thankfully I was watching the dimensions of the video when I did. 1920px width down to 720px width? Something was wrong here. Turns out, I couldn’t change that setting with the AVI bits!!! Ok, I know the XBox can read Windows Media Video files (wmv), let’s try that. So I changed to “Windows Media”. Output changed back up to 1920×1080, progressive, with 440kbps, 44kHz, 2 channel audio. Loaded up trusty old Google to double check, and yep, that’s what the XBox is looking for. Start transcoding queue.

I got up at roughly 1000 hours this morning, and first thing I did was check the status of this conversion. Told me 7 hours left… weird, since it’d been 11 hours, and the damned program told me the night before that it was only going to take 12. Ok, whatever. Went downstairs, had a couple cups of coffee with my brother who was home for the holidays, did some chatting, had a few smokes, made some breakfast (you know, all that good morning stuff), and finally at roughly 1600 hours (that’s 4pm for all you that can’t minus 12 from 16), I came back up to check this thing. Figured it couldn’t be much longer, right? Told me it had 7 hours to go. What the hell?!? Ok, so I play some XBox…. then go get some food… then watch a bunch of Mr. Bean episodes (which I got for Sinterklaas)… then check the file… 6.5 hours left. Ok, something’s getting really messed up here. I’m getting pissed.

So I check the furnace, have a few more smokes, grab the leftover turkey from the fridge and eat a metric shit-ton of it, have another smoke, read some of my book, check the furnace again, talk to my brother, welcome my mother and other brother (which apparently is going to be home for a while) back from dropping off other family members, eat some more turkey, one more smoke, check the file.

At this point it’s telling me six hours left to go… um… huh? I know I was downstairs for more then a half hour. Now, two hours later, it’s telling me that there’s 24 hours, 41 minutes, and some odd seconds elapsed thus far in the conversion, with another 5 hours, 20 minutes, and 48 seconds left to go. Roughly 3 and a half hours ago when I checked it, I noticed that my progress bar says “Pass 2 of 2”. I’m not sure if this multi-pass thing is what’s causing the length of time on this sonuvabitch, or what’s going on. The next one I try I’m going to try as WMV single-pass, and see if it works (and if it takes less time). If that’s a no go, then screw this, I’m going to switch things around and just go with AVI. Yeah, I’m gonna loose some quality. Yeah, I’m going to loose physical size of the video. Yes, I’ll probably loose file size (which is a good thing). I’ve decided however, that if I can shave 12 or so hours off this process (that’s 12 or so hours that I’d be able to do something besides write email and check Facebook), then it’s well worth the little bits I’ll end up loosing.

That’s today’s little gripe. No lesson, no moral to the story, just plain old Pendragon pissed-off-ish-ness (in unrelated news, pissed-off-ish-ness is now a word). See ya next time kiddies, hopefully with better news.

 

Gawyn Pendragon

Short Post

Well folks, it’s been a while since my last update and for that I apologize. The day after my last post was spent working my bollucks off trying to get things ready for the concerts, and then I had 4 days of concerts (which went really well, incidentally). And I’ve been sick the whole damned time, as well. Not cool, all in all, though I’m starting to get better now.

Anyhow, I just wanted to toss up a quick update and let ya’ll know I’m still alive, I’ve just been sick and busy with real life (and World of Warcraft when time permits, which isn’t quite so much). I’ll hopefully get back to a semi-regular updating schedule after this coming Sunday (in other words, don’t expect any more posts until after December 5th). Being of Dutch decent (on my father’s side), my family decided we’re going to be celebrating Sinterklaas this year – that’s the Dutch Christmas… Which happens to be held on December 5th.

So there you have a short update, folks. Until next time, keep ‘em burnin’ and don’t do anything I would do!

 

Gawyn Pendragon

The Shattering

I found out just moments ago, that the Shattering of Azeroth is happening today… or I should say, has happened! Now, when I first got this bit of news, I damned near cried. Not for the Azeroth as I know it, but because I haven’t had WoW time for a few months now. Lots of people are probably thinking right about now “Big deal! Who the hell cares about such a stupid video game anyway”. Well let me tell you my friends, I care. I’ve been playing WoW for about four years now, and I love it. It’s my escape from reality (and second reality when even SL gets too much for me – believe it or not, that does happen), and it’s kept me sane through some times when I’d like nothing more then to pick up my sword and hack somebody’s head off (in completely unrelated news – I have a sword. Yes, in real life.  Yes, it’s sharp).

So yeah, my wonderful friend Borrith (WoW name, and co-leader/officer of my guild) told me about this via Facebook chat. And as I mentioned, I damned near cried. I decided at this point, I needed another coffee and a cigarette to distract me from my WoW-induced depression (or rather, lack of WoW and inability to see Deathwing winging overhead). As I poured my coffee, my mother noticed my pouting, and asked me what was wrong. So I naturally informed her “The Shattering is happening today”. To which she naturally replied “Huh?” “The Shattering of Azeroth, mum…” and I quickly and efficiently launched into an explanation of what the hell I was talking about.

Mum, after my explanation, asked why they’d release this Shattering thing if the expansion doesn’t come out to until the 7th. Why, marketing, of course! Hype every player in the game up, let them see the changes to the face of the planet, and make them want to use the new shit! Makes perfect sense to me, and makes good business sense to Blizzard. So anywho, after my excited description, and explanation of the whole marketing scheme (it also made sense to mum), my depression came back in full. I haven’t had a WoW fix in far too long, after all. So she looked at me, and bless her memory, reminded me that I didn’t have game time. Thanks, mother. Way to make a body feel good… But then, she made my day (yes, this is essentially an extremely long and disjointed thank you letter to my mother, in case you’re wondering)! She said “well, would you like your birthday present early?” Holy shit on a stick, you got me WoW time for my birthday?!?! Hell yes!!!

Well, she hasn’t picked it up YET, but it looks like either before or after choir practice tonight (not sure which yet), I’ll be the proud owner of a brand new 60-day time card! Hell yes!!! Only downside is I only have one day this week I can play – tomorrow. The choir has concerts Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. At least I can play next week, whenever I’m not tossing wood into the basement, finishing getting my computer back to final operational level, or cleaning up around the house in preparation for Sinterklauss on December 5th.

Speaking of things to do around the house, I need to go and fix my mother’s display stand for her Christmas village. I’ll see ya next time, kiddies! Keep ‘em burnin’

 

Gawyn Pendragon

Hit by Lightening

I was hit by lightening last night. Or rather, my phone lines were. Not just the phone lines, really, since apparently one of my little brother’s TV’s fried, and the power flickered enough to knock out my external hard drive (just the power to it – it didn’t kill the drive thankfully!) and set our wonderful HP 4550 printer cycling into active mode… And of course, when this happened I was sitting in Second Life, waiting for a couple friends to get back from some Real Life stuff that had pulled them away for a few.

Now, all in all it’s not THAT big a deal. I mean, I’ve lived in places where I’ve SEEN the lines take a direct hit (trust me, you don’t want to see that – it’s blinding), without a single damned thing in the household being effected by it. In this particular case though, we lost our internet. After getting into a yelling match with my mother about the way this technology is supposed to work (Sorry ma!), I stormed out for a smoke, and then sat in my room for a while stewing… Then I thought, why the hell am I in here? Let’s trace the damned phone lines back to source, and see if I can’t figure out what the hell is going on here. So I spent a couple hours and found the jack where the lines come into the place, and found a portable phone that I could charge  up to start my testing… And the phone had no juice. So after ANOTHER couple hours of eating and smoking, I finally decided to leave it to morning.

Got up this morning, and found my mum at the end of the hall, with the phone that didn’t work when I went to bed last night, talking to someone that she claimed was tech support. Great! Means I had less to do. Turns out she’d been up for God only knows how long, traced the lines, used a non-powered phone (why I didn’t I think of that the night before?), and figured out where the problem was. Turns out that our DSL filter splitter on the line was blown – we had a spare, thankfully. Also, apparently our ISP gave us this absolutely beautiful Tripplite powerbar when we rented the modem from them, that all the phone lines went through (allegedly it has a DSL filter built into it as well – pretty cool, though I’ve never heard of that before)… That beautiful Tripplite powerbar, was fried. Dead. Kaput. Tech support had mum take the lines out of the bar, and plug them direct into modem, and whatdya know, we have internet again.

Couple of morals to this here story, kiddos.
1) Don’t get in shouting matches with your mother, regardless of how frustrated you are with current situations. You’re not REALLY frustrated at your mother, and it all ends up badly in the end.
2) If you’ve been hit by lightening (your phone or power lines – not you personally… can’t give advice if you’re outside holding up a metal pole in a lightening storm, though I CAN laugh at you and call you an idiot), first thing you need to check is your power bars (or strips, or whatever the hell you call the thing that you plug into the wall and that has multiple outlets you can then plug multiple devices into – sometimes they have surge protectors built in, such as my Tripplite). You just might save yourself a few hours of sleeplessness, and a fight with your mother.

That’s it for now! Until next time, kiddies, keep ‘em burnin’.

 

Gawyn Pendragon

WAMP on Windows 7

Along with everything I had to do today in preparation for the upcoming choir concerts, I finally got around to installing my server software under Windows 7 today. Unfortunately when I went to my download directory that contained my previous setup, I was flabbergasted. I had way too many files in there, and I hadn’t named them sequentially, so I had no idea which set of software I used, or even what was current at the time of downloading! Simple solution to that – download it all again.

So of course I loaded up www.apache.org, www.php.net, and www.mysql.com to download the appropriate servers. Side note, I notice that Apache Foundation finally changed their website. About time that happened – it’s been the exact same for as long as I’ve known about the Apache web server. Anywho, I downloaded all the latest files and in the process noticed that Apache 2.3 is currently in beta mode. The change log on it looks promising, but there’s no way I’m tossing beta software onto my development machine, especially when I know that my server isn’t using it. Still, I look forward to it becoming a production model – but I digress.

Ran the install files sequentially, and added the GUI tools for MySQL as well, as I make frequent use of those while I’m working on my databases, and to my surprise, the installs went without a hitch! I mean, I’m used to them being FAIRLY smooth, but usually I need to do a fair amount of configuration file customization after I’m finished – not so much this evening, which is definitely a boon to my thrice shattered nerves. The closest I had to do to customization, was bring over my old Virtual Host configuration files – thankfully I had enough sense to copy those out before my Windows reinstall – and uncomment the Virtual Host include line inside httpd.conf. Tested it all, and it works even better then it did before. Even more pleasing to my poor little brain, is a prior issue I was having with the code on one of my sites (for whatever reason it seemed the AJAX requests I was using, was crashing my server – couldn’t throw it on my production server like that, since mine aren’t the only sites there; can’t imagine my host would have been very happy if he had to set a cron job up to reset the server every 3 minutes) seems to be gone now!!! That’s right, testing the site, and it didn’t crash out Apache! This is GOOD news, in case anybody’s wondering. Still need to do a fair amount more testing before I can be sure on that, but my hopes are high.

One of the other things I had to do to get the server all set up (which is a matter of course, and I really don’t consider it to be “customization” at all) was add all my users back into my local database, as well as the databases themselves – unfortunately I’d forgotten to back up immediately before reinstall. Thankfully though, I DID have a database backup set on a schedule, so it’s only reverting to earlier this month – pretty sure I haven’t made any structure changes since that time… Again, I digress.

So I loaded up this wonderful “MySQL Workbench (since it’s apparently replaced the old SQL Query Browser and Table Browser that you used to be able to download) with some severe trepidation. I’m as much for change as the next guy, but when tried and tested tools that I’ve been using for the last 7 years are shelved, and new versions rolled into another piece of software, I’m just a tad leery about it… On one hand, I was right to be a bit leery – looking at the new user interface presented to me was somewhat daunting. Worse still was the fact that I couldn’t figure out how to even connect to the server initially, never mind add in my users or schemas. But I played with it, and I found in very short order that the interface was actually quite intuitive! All in all, I spent maybe 15 minutes playing with the Workbench and figuring it out, and once that was done, I was 2 minutes in adding my users and importing the schemas! Only reason it took a full 2 minutes was because I had to look up the passwords for the users I needed to add (I could have changed them, but I’d rather take the extra time and NOT change my code out). All in all, I was incredibly pleased by the experience.

No moral for today’s story, kiddies, but if you run a server locally for testing purposes, I’d highly suggest you go out and update those GUI tools from mysql.com. Probably couldn’t hurt to update PHP as well, if your production server’s running PHP 5.3… I’m not sure what mine’s running, but I installed 5.3 locally anyway, just for SAGs. Keep ‘em burnin’ folks, and until next time, I’m signing off.

Gawyn Pendragon

New Problems Solved

So I spent the afternoon/evening after my last post yesterday, installing more of my software and getting things set up the way I wanted. After solving the Second Life problem, I was ecstatic, and figured all would be well. For those of you that don’t know, I belong to a group in SL called Justice League Unlimited. We’re a public service organization that helps out the grid as best we can (while abiding strictly by the ToS), and educates residents about griefers, security, and practical things they can do to secure themselves. We meet every week, and in preparation for this week’s meeting, last night at roughly 1200 hours Eastern Standard Time, I logged in to Second Life with my newly working Windows client, just to make sure it still worked. Otherwise I would have rebooted into Linux immediately, as I know Imprudence works without a hitch there (except for the damned kernel crashes, of course – still haven’t figured that out, but I’m working on it and will blog about it when I have it fixed). Anyhow, Phoenix started up perfectly, and I ran around the area I was in and chatted with people a little bit, before I finally logged off and tried to sleep… Of course, I know I’m feeling better by the fact that I COULDN’T sleep. Finally at 0600 I went downstairs for a smoke and to check the fire in the furnace, make sure it was still going well… that’s neither here nor there, but I dropped into dreamland soon after.

I’d left a wakeup call with my mum, just in case I slept in (I have a tendency to do that, ya know), and she woke me up at 1100 hours, EST, with coffee brewing already. Thanks ma! So I got dressed, went out for a smoke, grabbed my coffee, and headed back up to the computer, ready to log in for the meeting. And wouldn’t you know it, Phoenix would start up without an issue, but it wouldn’t log in at all! I tried numerous times, with no effect other then an AppHang (that’s the technical term that appears in the Windows log files, in case you were wondering). Damn it all! So I decided “let’s exit BitTorrent, log off, log back in and see if that fixes it – it was working 11 hours ago, after all”. So I go to exit BitTorrent, and all of the sudden THAT screams at me that it can’t write the damned resume file! What that means is that ALL the torrents I’d added before falling asleep, were no longer in my list. Not an overly big deal, since I could re-add them and continue either downloading or seeding as the case might be, but it was bloody annoying. Last thing I wanted was to have to re-add all my torrents every time I opened the damned program. By this time I was dangerously close to being late for the meeting, so I quickly rebooted into Linux, loaded up Imprudence, and sat at the table… five minutes later, my kernel dies on me – again. Damn it all. Got back in and managed to make it through the morning with no more mishaps.

After the meeting, I rebooted to Windows (again), and as it did it’s whole “shutdown Linux and restart” thing, I went out for a smoke and to grab another coffee. Come back upstairs, and bloody hell if chkdisk isn’t running! Not only is chkdisk running, but it’s fixing literally hundreds of “orphaned files”, including some that had to do with Second Life and BitTorrent! In case you’re not following here, suddenly my hopes soared sky high, though I still remained skeptical and more then a little worried that I’d have to reinstall Windows – again (I would have gone with 32-bit if I had to). Finally the fixing finishes, and it promptly dumps me at the Windows login screen… I log in and…. everything starts up quickly, efficiently, and most importantly, without screaming at me! My hopes are still up!

So I open BitTorrent first, figuring that “hey, I’ve got Linux for SL if I can’t get Phoenix working here”; re-add the torrents that had disappeared (after checking the file integrity, they were right where I’d left off downloading them), and with crossed fingers, I exit the client – and it doesn’t say anything about the “resume file”! it just cleanly and quietly shuts down! I was happy as a pig in shit, I’ll tell you what! Next step, Phoenix Viewer. Crossed fingers, I load up the viewer, click login, and wouldn’t you know it, I’m immediately deposited at my home location, without a hitch!

The moral of today’s story – Microsoft chkdisk is your friend. If your having some extremely weird problems, that don’t have information on them anywhere, and don’t seem to have any solution, run chkdisk. Hell, for all you know, maybe you’ve got some poor little orphan files that Windows wants to adpot. Worked like a charm for me!

Well, I’m off to get ready for choir practice (I’m the fully qualified sound technician, don’tcha know) – unfortunately, this is dress rehearsal night, which means they’re making me wear dress pants, dress shirt, and tie. I hate ties. Keep ‘em burnin’ ya’ll

 

Gawyn Pendragon

Second Life Alternate Viewers in Windows 7 x64

As I talked about in today’s earlier post, one of the things I’ve been doing with my time is trying to figure out why in the nine hells I can’t get a Second Life viewer to work under Windows 7 – when I haven’t been chucking wood into the basement, of course.

After four hours of tossing wood around (I got a helluva lot into the basement, just in case you were wondering), I came back in and  [after warming up] I sat back down at my computer to see if I couldn’t figure out this problem… I had to log in, because apparently windows updates had installed while I was outside, and first thing I noticed was that my Bluetooth drivers were screwed – reinstalled those, then reinstalled my favorite Alternate Viewer (from the Third Party Viewers directory on the Second Life wiki), Phoenix Viewer… I also installed Imprudence Viewer, Ascent Viewer, and downloaded a couple others, just in case. In this particular case, I chose the Phoenix Viewer with SEE2 support (taking into consideration that I’m running an Intel Core 2 Duo, and my chipset supports SEE2), and made sure I grabbed the Large Address Aware (LAA) version, since I’m running a 64-bit operating system, and plan on expanding over 2gb of RAM in the future.

Backtracking a little bit, the problem I was having with SL viewers (any SL viewer) is the program itself was slow – and by slow, I mean it took forever to load, and once it finally HAD loaded, it’s response time was almost zero. I could barely get into preferences to see if I could change anything in there to fix this problem. After a while of running, the program would crash, USUALLY bringing Windows (or at least Explorer) down with it. Over all, not a good experience.

So back to our little story here, I installed the Phoenix Viewer SEE2 LAA version, and just to be safe, I rebooted Windows. Logged back in, started the client, and…. it promptly did the same damned thing. I was stymied. Finally I went out on a limb and opened up the properties of the program. For those of you that may not be aware, Windows 7 (and Vista, for that matter, but Vista’s version was shite) has this wonderful little thing called “Compatibility Mode”. The way a person accesses this wonderful little invention, is by right clicking on your program’s shortcut (or directly on the program executable), choosing “Properties” from the context menu, and then clicking on the “Compatibility” tab.

There’s a ton of handy little features on this tab, mostly that deal with making older software work well under Windows 7. The “Run this program in compatibility mode for” option, gives you a fairly decent virtualization option, that tricks the running program into thinking it’s running on an earlier version of Windows. In my case, I chose “Windows XP (Service Pack 3)” from the drop down box. Below the virtualization, is a whole bunch of settings, that I really don’t understand, so I won’t attempt to explain them all to you. Some of them are self-explanatory, so I won’t explain those to you either.

The last option in the tab, is “Run this program as an administrator”. In case you don’t know, most applications that get installed on Windows 7, are prevented by default from performing actions that could harm your system (aka: administrative actions). For basic users that don’t do the level of things I do, usually when stuff like this happens you’ll see your UAC (User Access Control) box pop up, asking if you want to allow the application to perform whatever action it’s trying to perform… For people like me, the UAC just gets in the way – a lot – so I tend to disable it immediately after installing Windows (did it with Vista, and I do it with 7 – I’ll probably do it with the next version of Windows as well, if it has something similar). Anyhow, checking this “Run as administrator” box, allows you to bypass all that (to the best of my understanding – I’ve never actually tested it). I checked this too in my case, just to make sure.

Clicked “Apply” then “Ok” (just “Ok” would have worked, but I tend to take the extra step as a precautionary measure), tried to start Phoenix, and BOOM! It worked BEAUTIFULLY! Moral of the story? If you’re running Windows 7, and your SL client of choice is being extremely slow, make sure you turn on compatibility for at least Vista, if not XP. I’ll bet that will fix you problem right there.

 

Gawyn Pendragon

Computer Issues

I’ve been busting my balls the last couple of days doing a reinstall of Windows 7 on my laptop. Why, you might ask? Well, it was running bloody slowly, OpenGL applications tended not to work correctly anymore, and even my DirectX stuff was going rapidly downhill. Not to mention massive memory leaks, 70%+ CPU cyclic time when idle, constant HDD accessing… all in all, I couldn’t figure out what in the nine hells was going on.

So I spent my Thursday evening/night starting to copy all my files off my Windows drive, onto my external drive in preparation for a hard drive wipe an reinstall of the OS. While I was doing this, I started finding really oddly named folders, that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything. They also contained files that looked extremely suspicious to me… the part that really through me though, is these files & folders were not only hidden, but they were flagged as system files! For anybody that knows anything about this stuff, you’ll know that something’s really not right there. Even worse is when I tried to delete them, Windows told me the files were in use, and couldn’t be deleted. That by itself isn’t so odd for a virus, but the thing that killed me was that I could NOT find them running anywhere! For me, that’s a big thing, because I’m a programmer. I have a whole lot of little tools installed on my computer, that allow me to see what’s called “hidden processes” and “hidden services”. What that means is that I’m able to see (in theory) what memory addresses are being used by anything being executed by the Windows operating system… yet these files (and folders) didn’t appear ANYWHERE in any of my lists. Odd, to say the least.

I gave up on that part, and copied all (so I thought) my needed/wanted files from all the directories I could think of, rebooted into Linux (thank God for good ole Linux!) and proceeded to format my Windows drive. Just to make sure I’d killed whatever was there, I started with a couple simple little Linux command from the shell:

First, I unmounted the drive (umount /dev/sda1)
Secondly, I formatted it with the ext2 file system (mke2fs /dev/sda1)

That second command was the important one, because it turned the drive into a Linux file system. Modern Linux installs are able to read an NTFS formatted drive without a problem (NTFS stands for NT File System and has been Microsoft’s standard for Windows installs since Windows NT/2000/XP and beyond), however Windows (and any Windows program I know of, personally) is unable to read an ext2 drive. So it’s a safe bet that with that done, even if the virus avoided the format somehow, it’s no longer able to execute, which means no longer a threat. My second step I didn’t know how to do via the command line, so I went into the handy Drive Manager that I have installed in Ubuntu. I clicked the little button that said “format”, choose my FAT file system (FAT was the file system used for DOS and Windows 3.x – not sure if Win95 used it or FAT32), and voila, I had a drive ready to install on.

Then came the actual installing. That went off without a hitch, thanks to Microsoft’s new installer. I’m actually quite pleased with Windows 7, all in all. So much better than Vista, and I honestly don’t think I’d even go back to XP if given then chance, even though that would mean my older games would actually run (as it sits I need to either install DosBox to run them, or boot into Linux and use Wine). Then came the installing of drivers, and base software that I need. Mainly my hardware virtualization stuff that would allow me to mount disk images and install my development software.

So here I am, two days later, drivers all installed, all three web browsers installed (being a web-dev, I cross test on Internet Explorer 9, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome), Windows Live Essentials 2011 installed (bit of a fubar there – I missed copying my settings over for Live Mail. Not a big deal, except I can’t remember the password for my one email address, which means unless Microsoft can verify that I own the account, I loose it), all my main development software, Second Life, World of Warcraft, Microsoft Office, and the start of my 3D Animation stuff. All that’s left is my development server (Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows), and figuring out why Second Life won’t actually run…. that’s a post for another day though. For now, this old lizard needs to crawl out into the cold, and throw some wood into the basement so I can get warm again later.

 

Gawyn Pendragon