Yearly Archives: 2009

Computers

Outlook 2007 – ctrl+enter to send mail warning box

Leave a comment

The debate on having this shortcut is long on going so I’m not going to get into that. But I use it and it saves me loads of time. When it gets disabled it is a right pain. Personally I like the warning box to pop up too which is not possible to restore unless you edit the registry.

It took some diff’ing of the registry but the key you want to undo either clicking never show the box again, or changing the settings in the Advanced E-Mail Options, is under

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Preferences]
Delete the CtrlEnterSends key and it’ll bring back the warning box when you restart outlook.

Uncategorized

Windows Hyper-V VM Failed To Start

Leave a comment

So today while trying to reboot a server in Hyper-V I came across a lovely little problem. The machine shut down fine. I changed the network settings to give it a static mac address. Hit start and wam. VM failed to start.

A quick check showed that there was enough memory available. There should have been since I just shut down the machine anyway. The event log gave nothing useful. An error code of 0xC0000142 got nothing useful in Google (at time of writing). and the error in Hyper-V gave a more details of Vm failed to start then the machine ID. Way to go Microsoft on that error message.

Anyway after getting nowhere on google for about 10 minutes, I tried to restart the machine and it just started. Nothing changed either. Since this VM isn’t in production yet, the outage didn’t really matter, but 10 minutes is a hell of a long time for “something” to happen in the background so you can restart a VM. Hopefully R2 will fix these issues.

Computers

Dell overheating problems, Windows Search and Acronis restore

Leave a comment

So it seems that Dell or more so nVidea have some over heating problems with some of the gpus. My D630c had been running really hot for quite a while and the fan was going a bit nuts during windows startup until last weekend… when the system decided to put random characters onscreen and die. As with all things, the laptop booted up fine on the Tuesday when I called Dell however running the system diags did reproduce the problem. While testing further, a hard drive problem popped up so they agreed to change the disk. When I mentioned about the heat problem, I was quickly put on hold for a few minutes, then they came back and said they were replacing the motherboard and fans. A quick Google did show up a few things about the failling GPUs.

Anyway, Dell did replace everything and things are working fine since. The replacement harddisk is a bit louder than the last one but it works so I’m finally getting back to normal. It has taken nearly a week to get everything restored, mostly due to Acronis being unable to restore large files individually. It kept getting stuck about 1.8G into the large files in my laptop. Doing a full disk restore worked fine.

The other annoying issue is Windows search stops working in Outlook after installing Exchange Administrator. Easy fix however. Close Outlook, Run System32\fixmapi.exe. Open Outlook. Let the search reindex everything. You may have to open the Windows Search options, select Outlook, then hit rebuild on the index.

Cycling

Giant SCR 1

1 Comment

Firstly I will say that this is my first road bike. My last bike was a GT aggressor which is a hard-tail mountain bike. It has road mtb tyres so not too bad to ride long distances although hell on a hill. So all that means I’ll probably be talking about different things than your average roadie person.

Anyway the bike came from wiggle and arrived in a huge box (ToDo: picture). I will give it to wiggle, they are great. I did order some shoes which took a while to get processed but some of that was my fault in ordering something out of stock. That topped with the sterling rate when I ordered meant I got the bike for less than half of what it costs locally. The bike also came with a Giant bottle and bottle cage however the cage is nearly useless in holding a bottle in place. It also came with reflectors for the wheels as well as front and back ones. Wiggle kindly safed me the hassle and just left them in the box. (Disclaimer: I don’t recommend riding without reflectors.) Surprisingly the bike came with toe clip pedals as well. Definitely a nice touch although I’ll be fitting my shimano clipless pedals shortly.

First thing I noticed is the gearing is nice and tight. Moving between gears doesn’t give the usual jump that I was used to on the top gears on my old mountain bike. Next would be the speed. I’m sure everyone already knew road bikes were quicker but I was quite surprised at the difference.  Even the commute into work had higher speeds with the full pannier rack on the back of the bike. The weekend training run should show just how much of a difference.

The bike itself is quite responsive. A little more than I’d like but I’m sure I’ll adapt. Even with the pannier rack the bike isn’t as stable as my old hard tail. I guess stable is the wrong word. It can be a bit wobbly but nothing that you wouldn’t expect too much.

Broken Wheels?

The few months of riding have resulted in a number of problems with the back wheel. I will say that most if not all is down to me being over 100Kg when I started cycling and also the pannier bags on the back. Oh and in no small part, the huge pot holes that developed on my commute home. Hitting a half a foot deep one one evening popped a nipple of a spoke. Since then, there was no end of problems with loose spokes (I did reconnect and retrue the wheel after). It all culminated in another spoke spanning while out last weekend.

I ended up dropping the wheel in to Duffy Cyclines in Omni Park Santy. Honestly I wasn’t super keen about going here as I’ve had a bad experience last year with them but they are a Giant reseller shop. The guy had the wheel for a few hours, replaced the spoke, and then retrued it and I have to say I’m quite happy. There is a small radial alignment problem but only noticeable if you watch the wheel spin quickly and closely, nothing while cycling.

In Summary

Well I’m quite happy with the bike. Having done nearly 1000km in the two and half months I’ve had it, it has definitely helped things along.  For anyone needing a bike to take for weekend spins and also get them comformtably to work, I’d highly recommend this or well now one of the new range since this is all sold out. The new bikes are prettier too.

Computers

Dell Keyboard layouts – why do they change them

Leave a comment

It used to just be a case where certain models didn’t have a keyboard I liked but others would, but now looking at the Dell site, none of the laptops have a keyboard I like. And it isn’t like I’m after some crazy combination. All I want is a machine with the normal Irish keyboard. Even Wikipedia agrees with the format. Same as my D630c.

We currently order Vostro 1510 machines as standard and this problem might have started when they messed up the keyboard having the whole bottom line in the wrong place but the current keyboard model is closer than anything you see on the website. Only difference is the left shift key is bigger, the right on is smaller, oh and the backslash (\) key is on the far right instead of the left. A completely useless layout for anyone who uses the keyboard all the time for coding or working on linux.

Worse than all this is the trend to make the Enter / Return key smaller like the american keyboards. For US people, fine, keep it small since they are used to it, but don’t go trying to force random keyboard changes on us. Hell even the XPS that is on my desk has another layout.

Edit: So the new Vostro 1520 has normal keyboard, or so it looks until you start typing. The bottom line suffers from a smaller than normal ctrl key meaning the left hand side keys (ctrl, fn, windows, alt) are slightly to the left. Not a huge problem and I’d take it over the older problem, but still a problem. Also the keyboards on this model as bouncy. Yes bouncy. Whole keyboard moves when you press the keys in the center.

Computers

Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2 Differencing disk size

Leave a comment

I’ve been running Virtual Server 2005 R2 for a few months now stress testing it on a machine seeing where the limits were before real deployment. Machine is a P4 dual core with 4G of ram. It has 1 Windows 2003 server host and 6-8 XP hosts running at any one time. The main bottle neck seems to always be the harddisk. It just can’t keep up with things. When things are running the disk queue is a solid line across the top of perfmon. Before you say it, the VM’s aren’t running lots of disk actions and in fact if I reduced the number of VM’s and increased the ram, it’d probably drop the disk usage way down.

Anyway when setting up these VM’s for testing, differencing disks seemed to be the way to go. New VM’s took a matter of minutes to setup and getting running. Now that they are running for nearly three months, it is looking not so hot. Each VM has about 4G of space used inside their virtual disks but yet the master disk is around the 3G mark with the differencing disks being over 6G. Something really wasn’t adding up. Clearly a disk file should take up more space than the data on the disk.

Merging the differencing disk

First thing I tried was to merge the differencing disk. To do this, you inspect the disk, then under actions, merge the disk and choose a new file.

Compacting the disk

Once the disk was merged, it gave the option to compact the disk. Running this did nothing but waste time making the new disk no smaller than the original.`

The Solution

So after some googling and trial and error, the following steps seem to have worked and made the disks a lot smaller.

  1. Merge the differencing disk into a new disk.
  2. Mount the new disk to the VM.
  3. Boot the VM and defrag the disk using Windows Defrag.
  4. Mount the precompator vm tool in the VM. This tool is found in precompact.iso in the Virtual Machine Additions folder in your Virtual Server install directory. (Usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Server\Virtual Machine Additions\Precompact.iso)
  5. Run the precompactor in the VM. (This does take a while to run)
  6. Shutdown the VM and compact the hard disk image as above.

All in all, I got near a 50% reduction in real space usage which brought it closer to what the VM’s are actually using.

Computers

Magpie RSS

Leave a comment

So I’ve used MagpieRss for quite sometime. First used happened a few years back when I did a little work customising my own version of TorrentFlux. Someone back then introduced me to Magpie which proved much easier than using my own XML parser.

Anyway since then it has been used in quite a few places to auto update sections of sites. One of the recent “bugs” I’ve come across is where it displays the message below from time to time.

Notice:  Undefined property:  etag in rss_fetch.inc on line 156

Anyway from the usual googling, there is more than one place that this type of message shows up. Annoying though is that this bug is fixed in the development version of Magpie and was actually fixed over two years ago.

Basic fix is to swap line 156

if( $rss and $rss->etag and $rss->last_modified) {

to

if ( $rss and (isset($rss->etag) and $rss->etag)
 and (isset($rss->last_modified) and $rss->last_modified) ) {

On a side note, WordPress needs a nice way to handle code windows.

Cycling

Garmin Edge 705

1 Comment

So being a long time Garmin fan (I’ve a Nuvi 670 in the car current, used to have a 350T before it got stolen, and have made numerous other people buy one, or two in the case of my parents), when it came time to get a new cycle computer and I found Garmin did them, it became an easy enough choice. Since I’ve a tendency to always buy the best one available, that only left the Edge 705 even though I know I’ll rarely use the maps on it. But maybe when the longer cycles start. The hardest thing to over come was the battery life. Honestly I don’t fancy having to take the computer off the bike and charge it but since it downloads to the pc, it’ll most likely get charged in work when it is downloading. I’ll report back on the battery life as I use it more but I can’t really see it matching my Cateye Tomo. Haven’t changed its batteries in years of use!

From a recommendation (and because they were loads cheaper than everywhere else), I’ve purchased from handtec.co.uk. I will say now that they were impossible to contact by anything but phone. The online support kept timing out after saying someone will be there soon. Leaving messages on it got no reply. Emailing through the site got no reply. And emailing through Google Checkout got no reply. When I talked to someone over the phone I was told they had actually changed their shipping company and that is why I couldn’t track the item. Actually it turned out it hadn’t even shipped although they told Google it had. So much for quick turnarounds. Even though they told me it wasn’t going to ship until the Monday and to ring back then for a tracking number, it showed up at my work on the Monday with the first half of my bike order.

So back to the topic at hand, the Garmin. I’ve chosen one with cadence and heart rate sensors since I do plan on doing some dedicated training with both cadence, and heart rate zones. Around where I live there is a lovely long flat section of road that is perfect for interval training.

Flaws

The first major flaw that exists on this device is that you can’t turn it on in doors. Well you can but it’ll sit searching for satellites forever. None of my other Garmin’s have done this. Big problem with this is you can’t start adding in way-points or browsing features on the device. Obviously the use on a bike is a bit different than in a car but it’d still be nice to be able to turn on the device in doors and configure things up the way you want. The second major flaw is when charging from a pc. You don’t get a power/battery indicator. Where this has never been an issue with the models in the car (they have a power source there), on a bike you need full power. That would be an easy fix.

Edit: Seems if you wait long enough, the Garmin does come up with a menu to allow you to use it with GPS turned off. It’d be nice to get this menu up without waiting. You can hit menu and get into the device menu itself so I guess that it enough for average things.

Annoyances

The biggest annoyance we’ll call it is the maps. My device only came with base maps which I promptly changed to proper ones. (Garmin, if you are listening, please try make maps cheaper). Even with the new maps, it is a much different experience than you’ll be used to if you are a Garmin user. The screen isn’t full colour which isn’t really an issue, but the non 3D view is like an older Garmin and I do foresee if being confusing if and when I use this for navigation on the bike. Looking at it on the bike is detail free which is how you’d want it on a bike. When in a car you have more time to concentrate on the device where as on the bike there are more pressing things at hand.

To the actual device. It does seem better built for outside use however I have my doubts as to how rain-proof it actually is. The side buttons are sealed but the joy stick and two top buttons aren’t. There are also two open holes on the back where the speaker is. Now I don’t expect the device to be usable underwater, but since everyone who cycles in the rain knows that it isn’t what comes down that makes you wet, it is what comes up, putting open holes on the back can’t be a good thing. Saying that there isn’t many reports of problems from my searches so time will tell how it works out.

Edit: Seems that the stem blocks most of the dirt being thrown up. I do have mud guards but some is still making it and device is all ok. Still have to see what real rain will do.

Software Usability

Some software usability issues. Setting the units to metric doesn’t take effect everywhere. Workouts for example will display in km if you choose it, but the drop down menus still show in miles and then convert back. Again, something easily fixed with a software update.

Viewing the device while on the bike is hard enough although admittedly that could be due to be getting used to the riding position on the road bike. Basically the device while sitting on the stem is a bit behind my head position and looking straight down is hard enough. When in a relaxed position on top of the drops, it is easy enough to read although having the back-light timeout adjustable would be nice. I’ve read in a few places that there is a way to make the back-light stay on all the time which is something I’ll be looking into. I’d also like the device to remember my back-light settings. Basically you hit the power button then use the joy stick to change the back-light intensity. Works but turning the device on and off means it defaults back to completely off.

The heart rate monitor works well too. Comfy enough to wear and stays put when riding. Strangely enough it doesn’t always kick in when I first put it on but soon as I jump in the saddle, it doesn’t miss a beat. Cadence picked up nicely as well and all of it logged to the device handy enough. Very useful to see how bad my technique actually is!

SportTracks

I’m using SportTracks to log the information. It was recommended on a forum somewhere and has been working well for more than just logging details on the bike. The graphs and odometer are all handy features too. It did point out a few areas where the Garmin had the usual inaccuracies with logging data. As you can see from the image, it saw me drop down a huge amount and then back up again. Since these only seem to happen when I stop at corners, traffic lights etc, I can only assume the barometer is somehow open to the wind.

Loading the data into SportTracks is simple too, hit import and in it goes. Attach my main bike to the ones I cycle and it’ll add the distance to it so I know when parts are due to reach the end of life.

Anyway more will follow about the Garmin as I get some more usage on it. The virtual training partner is the big one that I want to try so hopefully sometime over the next week or two I’ll be out to race myself.